Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “Remember, boys and girls, the Lizards have gadgets that let ’em see in the dark like cats wish they could. You want to keep under cover, use the fire from one group so they’ll reveal their position and another group can attack ’em from a different direction. They don’t play fair. They don’t come close to playing fair. If we’re going to beat ’em, we have to play dirty, too.”
The cavalry wasn’t going to beat ’em any which way. Auerbach knew that. Any of his troopers who didn’t know it were fools. As hit-and-run raiders, though, they still might accomplish something useful.
“Let’s mount up,” he said, and headed for his own horse.
The rest of the company was dim shadows, jangling harness, the occasional cough from a man or snort from an animal. He didn’t know this territory well, and worried about blundering into the Lizard pickets before he knew they were there. If that happened, he was liable to get his whole command chewed up without doing the cause a lick of good or the Lizards any harm.
But a couple of the men who rode along were farmers from these parts. They weren’t in uniform. Had they been going up against a human foe, that could have got them shot if they were captured. The Lizards didn’t draw those distinctions, though. And the farmers, in bib overalls, knew the country as intimately as they knew their wives’ bodies.
One of them, a fellow named Andy Osborne, said, “We split here.” Auerbach took it on faith that he knew wherehere was. Some of the company rode off under Magruder’s command. Auerbach-and Osborne-took the rest closer to Karval. After a while, Osborne said, “If we don’t dismount now, they’re liable to spot us.”
“Horseholders,” Auerbach said. He chose them by lot before every raid. Nobody admitted to wanting the job, which held you out of the fighting while your comrades were mixing it up with Lizards. But it kept you safe, too-well, safer, anyhow-so you might crave it without having the nerve to say so out loud. Picking holders at random seemed the only fair way.
“We got a couple o’ little ravines here,” Osborne said, “and if we’re lucky, we can sneak right on past the Lizards without them ever knowin’ we’re around till we open up. We manage that, we can hit Karval pretty damn hard.”
“Yeah,” somebody said, an eager whisper in the night. They had a mortar, a. 50 caliber machine gun, and a couple of bazooka launchers with plenty of the little rockets they shot. Trying to kill Lizard tanks in the darkness was a bad-odds game, but one of the things they’d found out was that bazookas did a hell of a job of smashing up buildings, which weren’t armored and didn’t travel over the landscape on their own. Get close enough to a Lizard bivouac and who could say what you might do?
The mortar crew slipped off on their own, a couple of troopers with tommy guns along to give them fire support. They didn’t have to get as close to Karval as the machine gunners and the bazooka boys did.
Auerbach slapped Osborne on the shoulder to signal him to guide them down the ravine that came closest to the little town. Along with the crews who served their fancy weapons, he and the rest of the men crouched low as they hustled along.
Off to the north somewhere, small-arms fire wentpop-pop-pop. It sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and the flares that lit up the night sky could have been fireworks, too. But fireworks commonly brought cheers, not the muffled curses that came from the troopers. “Spotted ’em too soon,” somebody said.
“And they’ll be lookin’ extra hard for us, too,” Rachel Hines added with gloomy certainty.
As if to underscore her words, a flare mounted skyward from the low hilltop where the Lizard pickets were posted. “That’s a good sign, not a bad one,” Auerbach said. “They can’t spy us with their funny gadgets, so they’re trying out the old Mark One eyeball.” He hoped he was right.
The troopers scuttled along down Osborne’s wash. The flare fell, faded, died. In the north, a mortar opened up. That half of the company wasn’t as close to Karval as it should have been, but it was doing what it could.Crump! Crump! If the bombs weren’t landing in the little flyspeck of a town, they weren’t missing by much, either.
Then Auerbach heard motor vehicles moving around inside Karval. His mouth went dry. Expecting to find the Lizards asleep at the switch didn’t always pay off.
“This here’s the end of the wash,” Andy Osborne announced in a tone like doom.
Now Auerbach wished he’d laid Penny Summers when he had the chance. All his scruples had done was to give him fewer happy memories to hold fear at bay. He didn’t even know what had happened to Penny. She’d been helping the wounded last he’d seen her, a day or so before a Lizard armored column smashed Lamar to bits. They’d evacuated the injured as best they could with horse-drawn ambulances-his States War ancestors would have sympathized with that ordeal. Penny was supposed to have gone out with them. He hoped she had, but he didn’t know for sure.
“Okay, boys,” he said out loud. “Mortar crew went off to the left. Machine gun to the right and forward. Bazookas straight ahead. Good luck to everybody.”
He went forward with the two bazooka crews. They’d need all the fire support they could get, and the M-l on his back had more range than a tommy gun.
The Lizard pickets behind them started firing. Troopers who’d stayed back with the mortar crew engaged the Lizards. Then another Lizard machine gun chattered, this one almost in Auerbach’s face. He hadn’t noticed the armored personnel carrier till it was nearly on top of him; Lizard engines were a lot quieter than the ones people built. He stretched himself flat in the dirt as bullets spattered dust and pebbles all around.
But that machine gun gave away the position of the vehicle on which it was mounted. One of the bazooka crew let fly at it. The rocket left the launcher with a roar like a lion. It trailed yellow fire as it shot toward the personnel carrier.
“Get the hell out of there!” Auerbach yelled at the two-man crew. If they missed, the enemy would just have to trace the bazooka’s line of flight to know where they were.
They didn’t miss. A Lizard tank’s frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches. A moment later, the deep stutter of the. 50 caliber machine gun added itself to the nighttime cacophony.
“Keep moving! Come on, forward!” Auerbach screamed. “We gotta hit ’em inside Karval!” Behind him, his mortar crew started lobbing bombs at the hamlet. He was rooting for one of them to start a fire to illuminate the area. Lots of the Lizards were shooting back now, and they had a much better idea where his men were than the other way around. A nice cheery blaze would help level the playing field.
As if it were Christmas, he got his wish. A clapboard false front in Karval went up in yellow flames. By the way it burned, it had been standing and curing for a long time. Flames leaped to other false fronts along what had probably been the pint-sized main drag. Their lurid, buttery light revealed skittering Lizards like demons in hell.
From more than a mile outside of town, the heavy machine gun started blazing away at the targets the light showed. You couldn’t count on any one bullet hitting any one target at a range like that, but when you threw a lot of bullets at a lot of targets, you had to score some hits. And, when a. 50 caliber armor-piercing bullet hit a target of mere flesh and blood, that target (a nice bloodless word for a creature that thought and hurt like you) went down and stayed down.
Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up. Then both bazooka crews started firing rockets almost at random into Karval. More fires sprouted. “Mission accomplished!” he shouted, though nobody could hear him, not even himself. The Lizards had to figure they were getting hit by something like an armored brigade, not a raggedy cavalry company.