Hsia looked disgusted. “We had a popular front with the Kuomintang against the Japanese. It was just noise and speeches. It didn’t mean much in the war, and it didn’t keep the counterrevolutionaries from harassing us, too.”
“Or we them,” Nieh said, remembering certain exploits of his own. “Maybe this popular front will be like that one. But maybe not, too. Can we truly afford the luxury of struggle among ourselves while we also combat the little scaly devils? I have my doubts.”
“Can we convince the Kuomintang clique and the Japanese to fight the common enemy instead of us and each other?” Hsia retorted. “I have my doubts of that.”
“So do I,” Nieh said worriedly. “But if we cannot, we will lose this war. Who will come to our rescue then? The Soviet Union? They share our ideology, but they have been badly mauled fighting first the Germans and then the scaly devils. No matter what we told Ppevel, I do not think the People’s Liberation Army will get an explosive-metal bomb from the USSR any time soon.”
“You’re right there,” Hsia said, spitting in the gutter. “Stalin kept the treaty he made with Hitler till Hitler attacked him. If he makes one with the little scaly devils, he will keep it, too. That leaves us fighting a long war all alone.”
“Then we need a popular front-a true popular front,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. Hsia Shou-Tao spat again, perhaps at the taste of the idea. But, in the end, he nodded.
XV
“Armor-piercing!” Jager barked as the Panther’s turret traversed-not so fast as he wished it would move-to bear on the Lizards’ mechanized infantry combat vehicle. He was hull-down behind a rise and well screened by bushes; the Lizards hadn’t a clue his panzer was there.
“Armor-piercing!” Gunther Grillparzer echoed, his face pressed up against the sight for the Panther’s long 75mm cannon.
Karl Mehler slapped the discarding-sabot round into the breech of the gun. “Nail ’em, Gunther,” the loader said.
Grillparzer fired the panzer’s main armament. To Jager, who stood head and shoulders out of the cupola, the roar was like the end of the world. He blinked at the glare of the meter-long tongue of flame that shot from the muzzle of the gun. Down inside the turret, the brass shell casing fell to the floor of the panzer with a clang.
“Hit!” Grillparzer shouted exultantly. “They’re burning.”
They’d better be burning,Jager thought. Those discarding-sabot rounds could punch through the side armor on a Lizard panzer. If they didn’t wreck the more lightly protected combat vehicles, they wouldn’t be worth using.
“Fall back,” he said over the intercom to Johannes Drucker. The driver already had the Panther in reverse. He backed down the rear slope of the rise and continued in reverse to the next pre-selected firing position, this one covering the crestline to attack any Lizard vehicles that pursued too aggressively.
Other panzers of the regiment were also blasting away at any Lizard targets they could find. Infantrymen lurked among trees and in ruined buildings, waiting with their rocket launchers to assail Lizard armor. Lizard foot soldiers had been doing that to German panzers since the invasion began. Having the wherewithal to return the compliment was enjoyable.
Overhead, artillery shells made freight-train noises as they came down on the Lizards. TheWehrmacht had pushed the line several kilometers eastward over the past couple of days. The Lizards didn’t seem to have been looking for an attack north of Lodz, and Jager’s losses, though still dreadful, were lighter than they might have been.
“I hope they’re good and bloody well diverted,” he muttered under his breath. He hadn’t been much better prepared to make the attack than the Lizards were to receive it. How well he succeeded was for all practical purposes irrelevant, anyhow. As long as the Lizards paid full attention to him, he was doing his job.
Very quietly, down to the south, Otto Skorzeny was smuggling an atomic bomb into Lodz. Jager didn’t know just how the SS man and his chums were doing it. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want them to do it, either, but he had no say about that.
He wondered if he’d managed to get word into the city. The fellow he’d contacted didn’t seem nearly so reliable as Karol: he was furtive and frightened, half rabbit, half weasel. He was also alive, however, a good reason to prefer him to the late farmer.
Gunther Grillparzer made a disgusted noise. “They aren’t rushing up to skewer themselves on our guns, the way they used to,” he said. “Took ’em long enough to learn, didn’t it? The British were quicker, down in North Africa. Hell, even the Russians were quicker, and that’s saying something.”
Off to the right, a Lizard antipanzer rocket got a Panzer IV between concealed firing positions. It brewed up, flame spurting from every hatch and a perfect black smoke ring shooting out through the open cupola. None of the five crewmen escaped.
Then Lizard artillery started landing around the German panzers. Jager considered that a signal to halt the attack for the day. The Lizards weren’t so prodigal in their use of the special shells that spat mines as they had been when the war was new, but they did still throw them about from time to time. He didn’t care to lose half a company’s worth of panzers to blown tracks.
The men were just as glad to bivouac. As Gunther Grillparzer got a little cookflre going, he turned to Johannes Drucker and asked, “Ever get the feeling you’ve lived too long already?”
“Don’t talk like a dumbhead,” the driver answered. “You just had a goose walk over your grave, that’s all.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Grillparzer said. “I hope so. Jesus, though, every time we fight the Lizards, I don’t believe I’m going to come through in one piece.”
Otto Skorzeny had a way of materializing out of thin air, like a genie from theArabian Nights. “You’re a young man yet,” he said. “One piece a day shouldn’t be enough to satisfy you.”
“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jager said as the panzer crewmen snickered.
“Hell, don’t give me that-you didn’t expect to see me at all,” Skorzeny said with a laugh. “But I needed to give you the news and I couldn’t very well put it on the wireless, sohier steh’ ich- here I stand.” He struck a pose perhaps meant to be clerical. Jager was hard-pressed to imagine anyone who seemed less like Martin Luther. The SS man nudged him. They walked away from the cookflre and the big, friendly bulk of the Panther. In a low voice, Skorzeny went on, “It’s in place.”
“I figured it had to be,” Jager answered. “Otherwise you’d still be down in Lodz. But how the devil did you manage it?”
“We have our methods,” Skorzeny said, not sounding much like Sherlock Holmes, either. “Enough ginger for the Lizards, enough gold pieces for the Poles.” He laughed. “Some of them may even live to spend their loot-but not many.” Merely being himself, he was as frightening a man as Jager had ever known.
“When does it go off?” he asked.
“When I get orders to touch it off,” Skorzeny said. “Now that it’s in place, all my chums in the fancy black uniforms will go on home. It’ll be my show. And do you know what?” He waited for Jager to shake his head before continuing, “I’m really looking forward to it, too.”
No, he was never more frightening than when he sounded like Skorzeny.
The rubble behind which Mutt Daniels sprawled had once been the chimney to a prosperous farmhouse about halfway between Marblehead and Fall Creek, Illinois. He glanced over to Herman Muldoon, who was sprawled behind some more of those red bricks. “We don’t go forward any way a-tall,” he said, “we don’t clear the Lizards off the Mississippi till the weekafter Judgment Day.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed mournfully. “They don’t much want to be moved, do they?”