The advancing German panzers kept on spraying the Lizard infantry positions with machine-gun bullets. Covered by that, German infantrymen ran forward, too. The only opposing fire came from small arms. Jager’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, theWehrmacht really could make some gains. He hadn’t taken the brass seriously when they talked about getting Mulhouse back and cutting the Lizards off from the Rhine, but he was starting to think that just might happen.
Then three Lizard helicopters popped up from behind cover, two from out of clearings in the woods and the third from behind a barn. Jager’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched two rockets each. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished.
Then 20mm rapid-fire antiaircraft guns started hammering at the helicopters. On the raid that captured the plutonium from the Lizards, the Germans who’d joined with the Russian partisans had carried a mountain version of one of those guns, which broke down into man-portable loads. Now theWehrmacht made a habit of posting the light guns as far forward as possible, to hold helicopters at bay.
The tactic worked. The helicopters sheered away from the antiaircraft guns. One of them was trailing smoke, though it kept flying. Jager prayed for it to fall from the sky, but it refused.
The two lead panzer companies were already through what had been the Lizards’ front line. They hadn’t cleared up all the holdouts; a bullet cracked past Jager’s head and several more ricocheted off the Panther. Like any sensible soldiers, the Lizards were trying to pick off the panzer commanders. For the time being, Jager ducked down into the Panther turret.
“We’re driving them,” he said, fixing his eyes to the periscopes that gave him vision even when buttoned up. “With luck, maybe we can push far enough to get in among their artillery and do them some real harm.”
Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jager’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”
“Armor-piercing.” Wolfgang Eschenbach had a dispensation to exceed his daily word quota if in the line of duty. Grunting a little, he lifted a black-tipped shell and set it in the breech of the Panther’s cannon.
“Bearing three hundred degrees, range seven hundred meters, maybe a little less,” Jager said.
The turret slewed anticlockwise. “I see him, sir,” Klaus Meinecke said. “Behind those bushes,ja?”
“That’s the one,” Jager said. “Fire at-”
Before he could say “will,” Meinecke fired. With the turret closed, the noise was bearable, but recoil rocked the Panther. The shell casing leaped out of the breech; Eschenbach had to move smartly to keep it from mashing his toes. The acrid reek of burnt cordite filled the air.
“Hit!” Jager yelled. “Hit! Got him in one, Klaus. Forward!” That to the driver; stopped, the Panther was hideously vulnerable to enemy fire. The Maybach bellowed. The panzer leaped ahead. The advance went on.
2
Captain Rance Auerbach led his cavalry company out of Syracuse, Kansas, heading east along the north bank of the Arkansas River toward Garden City. Somewhere before he got there, he expected to run into the Lizards.
People in Syracuse waved to him and his command. Like him, they were up with the sun. Most of them were heading out to their farms. “God bless you, boys,” a man in overalls called. “Give ’em hell,” somebody else said. Two people said, “Be careful.”
“We’ll do our best,” Auerbach said, brushing the brim of his hat with the forefinger of his right hand. He was a big, rawboned man; years out in the open in all weather had tanned and lined his long face till he looked a good deal older than his actual thirty-two. That was true of most of the farmers, too, but amid their flat Kansas accents his Texas drawl stood out like a bobcat in a pack of coyotes.
His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, came out of Virginia and had a softer version of a Southern accent. “So’t of hate to leave a nice little town like this,” he remarked.
“It is pretty, isn’t it?” Auerbach said. Syracuse boasted a cool, green profusion of poplars, willows, and other trees. On this stretch of the Great Plains, there wasn’t much like it. Folks drove from miles around to relax under those trees. Or rather, folks had driven, in the days before the Lizards came.
“Your grandfather ride this way during the States War?” Magruder asked.
“Two of my great-grandfathers were Texas cavalrymen, sure enough,” Auerbach answered. “One of ’em did some fighting in the Indian Territory-what’s Oklahoma now-and up in Missouri, so I reckon he went through Kansas a time or two, but probably not this far west. Wasn’t anything here to speak of back then.”
“Mm, you’re likely right,” Magruder said.
They rode on a while in silence punctuated only by the occasional jingle of harness and the steady clopping of their horses’ hooves. A little to the north, US 50 paralleled the Arkansas, but bare ground was easier on the horses’ feet and legs than the asphalt would have been.
Every few hundred yards, a dead car or a clump of them sat on or alongside the highway. Some had just run out of gas with no hope for getting more. The Lizards had strafed others in the early days of their invasion, back when their fighter planes roamed everywhere and shot up everything. Farther east along the road, there would be dead tanks, too. The Great Plains were wonderful country for armor, too bad the Lizards had the wonderful armor to take advantage of the terrain.
“Or maybe it’s not too bad,” Auerbach murmured, leaning forward to pat the side of his gelding’s neck. “Otherwise you’d be out of a job and I’d be just another grease monkey.”
The horse snorted softly. Auerbach patted it again, if you sent cavalry charging tanks, the way the Poles had against the Nazis in 1939, you’d get yourself killed, but you wouldn’t accomplish anything else. But if you used your horses to take you to places farther and faster than infantry could go, and if you made sure the garrisons you raided weren’t big ones, you could still do some useful things.
“You know, we aren’t really cavalry, not the way Jeb Stuart would have used the word,” Auerbach said.
“I know. We’re dragoons,” Magruder answered calmly. If anything ever rattled him, he didn’t let it show on the outside. “We use the horses to get from here to there, then get down and fight on foot. Jeb Stuart might not have done things that way, but Bedford Forrest sure as hell did.”
“He’d have done better if he’d had our firepower, too,” Auerbach said. “Every trooper with an M-1 except for the boys with BARs, a couple of nice, light Browning 1919A2 machine guns and a mortar on our packhorses… give ’em to Forrest and we’d all be singin’ ‘Dixie’ instead of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”
“If Forrest had ’em, the damnyankees would’ve had ’em, too,” Magruder said. “It’d just ratchet the slaughter up a notch without doin’ anything else much, seems to me. Right now, I’m not much worried about what we sing for the national anthem, as long as it’s not the song the Lizards use.”
To that, Auerbach could only nod. The company rode past the ruins of Fort Aubrey, about four miles east of Syracuse. After the Civil War, the Army had used it as a base from which to fight Indians. There hadn’t been any fighting in these parts since. There was now.
High overhead, a westbound Lizard airplane scribed a white contrail, straight as if drawn by a draftsman, across the blue sky-a blueprint for somebody catching hell,Auerbach thought. The deadly roar of the plane’s jet engines came down to the ground as a thin, attenuated whisper.