Males scrambled away from the second helicopter, opening up with their personal weapons to add to the fire that made whatever defenders huddled in Klis keep their heads down. The pilot started to lower Drefsab’s helicopter to let off the males it carried, but before he could grab the collective, the radio speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm began to chatter.
“You’d better hear this, superior sir,” he said, and touched the control that fed the incoming signal to the main speaker in the flight cabin.
Through engine noise and ordnance, a male’s voice squawked, “Superior sir, the outwalls of our base are under attack by a motley crew of Big Uglies with rifles and other small arms. Their forcing a breach seems unlikely, but our defending males have taken some casualties.” Some of the noise of firing, Drefsab realized, was coming out of the speaker.
“If the situation is not urgent, I shall continue neutralizing this target before I return,” he answered. His mouth fell open in a laugh of amusement and relief. So Skorzeny had chosen this moment to attack, had he? Well, he would pay for it. The fighting males he’d left here would be destroyed. The Race would keep a garrison in Klis from now on. Control in this area would expand at the expense of the Deutsche, and one Drefsab, ginger-tasting addict though he was, would rise in prestige and importance to the leaders of the Race’s forces on Tosev 3.
“Shall I proceed as planned, superior sir?” the pilot asked. “Yes,” Drefsab said, and the helicopter lost altitude. Drefsab ran a battery check on the radio gear implanted in his helmet. If the main base needed to get in touch with him, he wanted to ensure that he wasn’t cut off. That was the only special precaution he took against Skorzeny’s attack.
Ever so gently, the helicopter’s wheels touched ground. Drefsab clapped the helmet onto his head and hurried back into the fighting compartment to exit with the rest of the males.
When Jager fought, he was usually closed up inside the thick steel shell of a panzer, which muffled the racket all around him. The tavern’s wall didn’t do nearly so good a job as that; the rifle and machine-gun fire from and at the wall of Diocletian’s palace all sounded as if it were aimed right at him. The other soldiers and guerrillas in the back room of Barisha’s tavern took no special notice, so he assumed they were used to this kind of din.
Through it, Skorzeny said, “Two minutes!” in German, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. In German alone, he went on, “Do we have all the men with the automatic weapons closest to the hole?”
The question was rhetorical; he’d bullied people into place before the shooting outside started. With his FG-42, Jager was one of the lucky few who would lead the way through the tunnel. Around the troops with automatic rifles clustered those who carried submachine guns; the men who bore ordinary bolt-action rifles would bring up the rear.
“One minute!” Skorzeny said, and then, what seemed to Jager a year or two later, “Now!” He was the first one to plunge into the tunnel.
Jager went in either fourth or fifth; in all the jostling, he wasn’t sure which. The dim light behind him vanished, leaving him surrounded by absolute black. The toe of his boot caught the heel of the man in front of him. He stumbled and almost fell. When he straightened up, his head bumped the low ceiling. Dirt showered down; some got inside his collar and slid down his back. He wished he had a helmet-for more reasons than keeping the dirt off. He also wondered how Skorzeny was faring in the tunnel-the SS man, who lacked only eight or ten centimeters of two meters, probably had to bend himself double to move at all.
Though the tunnel couldn’t have been more than fifteen meters long, it seemed to go on forever. It was narrow as well as low-ceilinged; whenever his elbow bumped a wall, Jager felt s if it were closing in on him. He was afraid someone would start screaming in the confining dark. Some people couldn’t even stand being shut up in a panzer with the hatches dogged. The tunnel was a hundred times worse.
He realized he could see the silhouette of the soldier in front of him. A couple of paces later, he emerged in a dusty storeroom illuminated only by lights from other rooms, none of them especially close. All the same, after the tunnel it seemed almost noonday bright.
“Spread out, spread out,” Skorzeny urged in a hissing whisper. “Give the men behind you room to get out.” When the whole force had emerged, Skorzeny thumped Jager on the back. “The colonel here, being an expert in archaeology, knows where the stairs are.”
By now, the SS man-and several others among the raiders-had studied the underground maze enough to know it as well as Jager, if not better. He appreciated the nod even so: reminded the men that his word counted next after Skorzeny’s. He said, “I just don’t want to find a lot of Lizards down here. If we have to fight underground, we won’t get up the surface and sweep them off the walls.”
“That’s what Petrovic’s diversion is for,” Skorzeny said: “to flush all of them up to the top so they won’t notice us till too late-for them.”
Jager knew that was what the diversion was for. He also knew diversions weren’t always diverting enough to do what they were supposed to do. He kept quiet. They’d find out soon enough how well this one had worked.
Skorzeny turned his attention to the group as a whole. “My advice is simple: shoot first.” He repeated the phrase in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. The men he led just grinned-they’d figured that one out for themselves. Skorzeny grinned, too. “Come on, you lugs.” As he’d been first into the tunnel, he was first out of the storeroom.
Jager had never seen the underground maze of hallways and chambers in Diocletian’s palace, not till now. But he moved through it confidently, counting off turns under his breath as he trotted along. A blast of heat came from one big room he passed: the Lizard barracks. If ever the raiders would be discovered down here, this was the place.
No shouts, no hisses, no gunfire. There ahead were the stone stairs. Skorzeny bounded up them three at a time. The rest of the men, Jager still near the front of the pack, ran at his heels. The panzer colonel’s stomach knotted. An eye turret turned at the wrong moment and the assault could still turn into a slaughter.
Trying to match the Lizards’ swiveling eyes, his head twisted every which way as he reached the top of the stairs. The aliens were still banging away from the wall, but the bulk of the baptistry hid them from him-and him from them.
Skorzeny used hand signals to divide the raiders into two groups and to show no one had better argue against Jager’s leading one of them. He pointed right and then forward to show Jager’s group was to go around the baptistry, then led his own group to the left.
“Come on,” Jager hissed to his men. He trotted at their fore: if you wanted to impress anybody who’d already seen Skorzeny in action, you’d better lead from the front. Otherwise, your men wouldn’t follow you for long.
He waved the group to a halt as they came to the corner of the baptistry. FG-42 at the ready, he stepped out into the narrow street that led north to the wall. As he did so, he heard Skorzeny’s group start firing.
A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jager. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. “Forward!” he shouted, and ran up the street. The pound of boots on cobblestones behind him said he’d brought his troops with him.
Personal weapon at the ready, Drefsab scrambled over a big gray stone and dropped down into the enclosed area of the castle of Klis. His feet scrunched on dry weeds. Several other males were already there, scurrying around and nervously checking anything that could hide a Big Ugly.