Tadeusz’s eyes were slightly crossed. He’d taken a big dose on an empty stomach, and perhaps hadn’t realized how strong the stuff was till he’d got outside it. People who drank a lot were like that sometimes: they were used to strong, so they didn’t notice very strong till too late. The Pole’s eyebrows drew together as he tried to gather his wits. “What else did your Nazi chum say?” he wondered aloud.
“He’s no chum of mine,” Anielewicz said indignantly. But maybe that wasn’t true. If Jager hadn’t thought something lay between them, he wouldn’t have sent a message, even a garbled one, into Lodz. Anielewicz had to respect that, whatever he thought of the uniform Jager wore. He took another cautious sip of applejack and waited to see if Tadeusz’s brains would start working again.
After a while, they did. “Now I remember,” the Pole said, his face lighting up. “I don’t know how much to trust this, though-like I said, it came through a lot of mouths before it got to me.” What came through his mouth was a loud and unmistakable hiccup. “God and the Virgin and the saints only know if it came through the way it was supposed to.”
“Nu?”Mordechai said, trying to get Tadeusz moving forward once more instead of sideways.
“All right, all right.” The Pole made pushing motions, as if to fend off his impatience. “If it came to me straight, what he said was that, next time you saw him, you shouldn’t believe anything he told you, because he’d be lying through his teeth.”
“He sent a message to tell me he’d be lying?” Anielewicz scratched his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not my problem, God be praised,” Tadeusz answered. Mordechai glared at him, then turned, remounted his horse, and rode back toward Lodz without another word
VIII
Leslie Groves couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so far away from the Metallurgical Laboratory and its products. Now that he thought back on it, he hadn’t been away from the project since the day he’d taken that load of plutonium stolen first from the Lizards and then from the Germans off the HMSSeanymph. Ever since then, he’d lived, breathed, eaten, and slept atomic weapons.
And now here he was well east of Denver, miles and miles away from worrying about things like graphite purity and neutron absorption cross sections (when he’d taken college physics, nobody had ever heard of neutrons), and making sure you didn’t vent radioactive steam into the atmosphere. If you did, and if the Lizards noticed, you’d surely never get a second chance-and the United States would almost certainly lose the war.
But there were other ways to lose the war besides having a Lizard atomic bomb come down on his head. That was why he was out here: to help keep one of those other ways from happening. “Some vacation,” he muttered under his breath.
“If you wanted a vacation, General, I hate to tell you, but you signed up with the wrong outfit,” Lieutenant General Omar Bradley said. The grin on his long, horsey face took any sting from his words; he knew Groves did a platoon’s worth of work all by his lonesome.
“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. “What you’ve shown me impressed the living daylights out of me, I’ll tell you that. I just hope it looks as tough to the Lizards as it does to us.”
“You and me and the whole United States,” Bradley answered. “If the Lizards punch through these works and take Denver, we’re all in a lot of trouble. If they get close enough to put your facility under artillery fire, we’re in a lot of trouble. Our job is to make sure they don’t, and to spend the fewest possible lives making sure of that. The people of Denver have seen enough.”
“Yes, sir.” Groves said again. “Back in 1941, I saw newsreels of women and kids and old men marching out from Moscow with shovels on their shoulders to dig tank traps and trenches to hold off the Nazis. I never dreamt then that the same thing would happen here in the States one day.”
“Neither did I. Neither did anybody,” Bradley said. He looked tough and worn, an impression strengthened by his Missouri twang and by the M-1 he carried in place of the usual officer’s sidearm. He’d been a crack shot ever since the days when he went hunting with his father, and didn’t let anyone forget it. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d used the M-l to good effect, too, in the first counterattack against the Lizards in late 1942.
“We have more going for us than the Red Army did then,” Bradley said. “We weren’t just shoving dirt around.” He waved to show what he meant, continuing, “The Maginot Line isn’t a patch on these works. This is defense in depth, the way the Hindenburg Line was in the last war.” He paused again, this time to cough. “Not that I saw the Hindenburg Line, dammit, but I did study the reports on it most thoroughly.”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said for the third time. He’d heard that Bradley was sensitive about not having gone Over There during World War I, and evidently the rumor machine had that one straight. He took a step up onto the parapet and looked around. “The Lizards’ll stub their snouts if they run up against this, no doubt about it.”
Bradley’s voice went grim. “That’s not anif, worse luck; it’s awhen. We won’t stop ’em short of our works, not by the way they’ve broken out of Kansas and into Colorado. Lamar had to be evacuated the other day, you know.”
“Yes, I’d heard that,” Groves said. It had sent cold chills down his spine, too. “Looking at all this, though, I feel better than I did when the word came down.”
What man could do to turn gently rising prairie into real defensive terrain, man had done. Trenches and deep, broad antitank ditches ringed Denver to the east for miles around. Great belts of barbed wire would impede Lizard infantry. If not armor. Concrete pillboxes had been placed wherever the ground was suitable. Some of them held machine guns; others provided aiming points for bazooka men.
Along with the antitank ditches, tall concrete teeth and stout steel posts were intended to channel Lizard armor toward the men with the rockets that could destroy it. If a tank tried to go over those obstacles instead of around them, it would present its weaker belly armor to the antitank guns waiting for just that eventuality. Stretches of the prairie looked utterly innocent but were in fact sown with mines enough to make the Lizards pay a heavy price for crossing them.
“It all looks grand, that it does,” Bradley said. “I worry about three things, though. Do we have enough men to put into the works to make them as effective as they ought to be? Do we have enough munitions to make the Lizards say uncle if they strike us with everything they’ve got? And do we have enough food to keep our troops in the works day after day, week after week? The best answer I can up with for any of those isI hope so.”
“Considering that any or all of them might beno, that’s a damn sight better than it might be,” Groves said.
“So it is, but it’s not good enough.” Bradley scratched his chin, then turned to Groves. “Your facilities have taken proper precautions?”
“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. He was pretty sure Bradley already knew that, but even three-star generals sometimes needed reassuring. “As soon as the bombing in and around Denver picked up, we implemented our deception plan. We lit bonfires by our most important buildings, and under cover of the smoke we put up the painted canvas sheets that make them look like ruins from the air. We haven’t had any strikes close by since, so for now it looks like the plan has paid off.”
“Good,” Bradley said. “It had better pay off. Your facility is why we’ll fight to the last man to hold Denver, and you know it as well as I do. Oh, we’d fight for it anyway-God knows we don’t want the Lizards stretching their hold all the way across the Great Plains-but with the Met Lab here, it’s not a town we want to have, it’s a town we have to have.”