“Day after tomorrow,” Skorzeny answered. “That’ll give ’em plenty of time to get the bomb back to Lodz. Poor stupid bastards.” He shook his head, perhaps even in genuine sympathy. “I wonder if anybody’s ever done such a good job of committing suicide before.”
“Masada,” Jager said, dredging the name up from the long-vanished days before the First World War, when he’d wanted to be a Biblical archaeologist. He saw it meant nothing to Skorzeny, and explained: “The whole garrison killed one another off instead of surrendering to the Romans.”
“There’ll be more of ’em done in now,” the SS man said. “A lot more.”
“Ja,”Jager answered absently. He still couldn’t tell whether Skorzeny hated Jews on his own hook or because he’d got orders to hate them. In the end, what did it matter? He’d go after them with the same genial ferocity either way.
Had the message got through to Anielewicz? Jager had been wondering about that ever since the meeting he, Skorzeny, and the Jewish fighting leader had had in the forest. Anielewicz hadn’t tipped his hand then. Had he got the message and then not believed it? Had he got it, believed it, and then been unable to convince his fellow Jews it was true?
No way to be sure, not from here. Jager shook his head. He’d have a way to tell, soon enough. If the Jews in Lodz were snuffed out like so many candles day after tomorrow, he could figure somebody down there had decided he was lying.
Skorzeny had an animal alertness to him. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing Jager’s head go back and forth.
“Nothing, really.” The panzer colonel hoped his voice sounded casual. “Thinking about the surprise they’ll have in Lodz-for a little while, anyhow.”
“For a little while is right,” Skorzeny said. “Stupid sheep. You’d think they’d know better than to trust a German, but no, they walked right into it.” He bleated sardonically. “And the lambs’ blood will go up on the doorposts of all the houses.” Jager stared; he hadn’t imagined Skorzeny as a man who knew his Scripture. The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled again. “TheFuhrer will have his revenge on the Jews, and who knows? We may even kill a few Lizards, too.”
“We’d better,” Jager answered. “You go and rip the heart out of the human sector of Lodz and there’s nothing to keep the scaly sons of bitches from staging out of it any more. They could hit the bases of our penetrations north and south of the city and cut us right off. That’s too steep a price for theFuhrer’s revenge, you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you, and theFuhrer doesn’t think so,” Skorzeny said. “He told me as much himself-he wants those Jews dead.”
“How am I supposed to argue with that?” Jager said. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. So he’d set himself up to circumvent a personal order from theFuhrer, had he? Well. If anyone ever found out what he’d done, he was a dead man anyhow. They couldn’t kill him any deader.No, but they can take longer getting you dead, he thought uneasily.
He threw himself flat on the ground almost before he consciously heard the shells whistling in from out of the east. Skorzeny sprawled there beside him, hands up to cover the back of his neck. Somewhere not far away, a wounded man was screaming. The bombardment went on for about fifteen minutes, then let up.
Jager scrambled to his feet “We’ve got to move camp now,” he shouted. “They know where we are. We were lucky that time-far as I could tell, that was all ordinary ammunition coming, none of their special delights that spit mines all over the place so people and panzers don’t dare go anywhere. They’re short of those little beauties, by all the signs, but they will use ’em if they think they can make a profit. We won’t let ’em.”
He’d hardly finished speaking before the first panzer engines rumbled into life. He was proud of his men. Most of them were veterans who’d been through everything the Russians and the British and the Lizards could throw at them. They understood what needed doing and took care of it with a minimum of fuss and bother. Skorzeny was a genius raider, but he couldn’t run a regiment like this. Jager had his own talents, and they were not to be sneezed at.
While the regiment was shifting its base, he didn’t have to think about the horror waiting to happen in Lodz, growing closer with every tick of a timer. Skorzeny was right: the Jews were fools to trust any German. Now the question was, which German had they been fools enough to trust?
The next day, he was too busy to worry about it. A Lizard counterattack drove the German forces west six or eight kilometers. Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by aWehrmacht private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards’ push all by itself. They didn’t like losing panzers these days.
“We have to do better,” he told his men as they ate black bread and sausage that night. “We got flank targets, but we weren’t hitting them. Can’t make many mistakes like that, not unless we want to get buried here.”
“But,Herr Oberst,” somebody said, “when they move, they can move so damned fast, they’re by us before we have a chance to react.”
“Good thing we had defense in depth, or they would have cracked us wide open,” somebody else said. Jager nodded, pleased at the way the troops were hashing things out for themselves. That was how German soldiers were supposed to operate. They weren’t just ignorant peasants who followed orders without thinking about them, as Red Army men did. They had brains and imaginations, and used them.
He was about to curl up in his bedroll under his Panther when Skorzeny showed up in camp. The SS man was toting a jug of vodka he’d found God only knew where, and passed it around so everybody got a nip. It wasn’t good vodka-the taste put Jager in mind of stale kerosene-but it was better than no vodka.
“Think they’re going to hit us again in the morning?” Skorzeny asked.
“Won’t know for certain till then,” Jager answered, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no. They’d have kept pressing harder after it got dark if that was what they had in mind. These days, they push when they think they’ve found a weakness, but they ease up when we show strength.”
“They can’t afford the kind of losses they get when they go up against a strongpoint,” Skorzeny said shrewdly.
“I think you’re right.” Jager glanced over at the SS man in the darkness. “We could have used that nerve gas here at the front.”
“Ahh, you’d say that even if things were quiet,” Skorzeny retorted. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, right where it is.” He grunted. “I want your wireless people to be alert for any intercepts they pick up about that, too. If the Lizards don’t burn up the airwaves, I’ll eat my hat.”
“That’s fine.” Jager yawned enormously. “Right now, I’m alert for sleep. You want to crawl in under here? Safest place you can be if they start shelling again. I know damn well you snore, but I suppose I can live with it.”
Skorzeny laughed. Gunther Grillparzer said, “He’s not the only one who snores-sir.” Betrayed by his own gunner, Jager settled in for the night.
Spatters of small-arms fire woke him a couple of times. They picked up at dawn, but, as he’d predicted, the Lizards were more interested in consolidating what they’d gained the day before than in pushing on against stiffening resistance.
Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jager, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.