He woke in the wee small hours, needing to use the chamber pot. Regardless of how he and Barbara had kept apart from each other awake, they’d come together in sleep, maybe for warmth, maybe for no real reason at all. Her nightgown had ridden up a lot; her bare thigh sprawled across his legs.
He cherished the feeling, wondering if he’d ever know it again, wondering if he was just sticking pins in himself for staying with her now when he didn’t think she’d end up picking him. But what the hell? He’d played umpteen seasons of ball, stubbornly hoping he’d catch a break. Why be different here?
And he did have to use the pot. He slid away as gently as he could, hoping not to wake her. But he did; the mattress shifted as her head came off the pillow. “Sorry, hon,” he whispered. “I need to get up for a second.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered back. “I have to do the same thing. Go ahead and go first.” She rolled over to her own side, but not, this time, as If she thought she’d get leprosy from touching him. He groped around by the bed, found the chamber pot, did what he had to do, and handed the pot to her.
The flannel nightgown rustled again as she hiked it up. She used the pot, too, then slid it out of the way and got back into bed. Yeager did, too. “Good night again,” he said.
“Good night, Sam.” To his surprise and delight, Barbara slid across to his side of the bed and gave him a hug. His arms slid around her, squeezed her to him. She was good to hang on to in the middle of the night. Too soon, though, she slipped away, and he knew that if he tried to hold her there, he was liable to lose her forever.
He tossed and turned for another long while before he went back to sleep. He wondered what that hug meant for his future, trying to read it the same way he’d tried to gauge managers’ oracular pronouncements in years gone by to see whether he was liable to get promoted or shipped down.
As with a lot of those pronouncements, he couldn’t figure out exactly what the hug foretold. He just knew he was gladder with it than he would have been without it. He also knew this mess wouldn’t unravel quickly, no matter what. More than the other, that thought calmed him and helped him fall asleep at last.
Heinrich Jager set a hand on the stowage compartment that rode atop the track assembly of his Panther. The steel was warm against his palm-spring came to France more quickly than to Germany, and far more quickly than to the Soviet Union, where he’d waited out last winter.
The panzer crews stood by their machines, waiting for him to speak. Sunlight dappled down through trees in new leaf. With their black coveralls, the tankers looked like splotches of shadow. Their panzers were painted in what the camouflage experts called ambush pattern-red-brown and green splotches over ocher, and then smaller ocher patches over the red-brown and green. It was the best scheme the Wehrmacht had come up with for making its vehicles invisible from the air. Whether it was good enough-they were about to find out.
“Fuel pump aside,” Jager said, giving his Panther an affectionate thwack, “this is the best human-made panzer in the world.” The crewmen of the Tigers attached to his unit glared at him, as he’d known they would. They liked their massive beasts’ 88mm gun better than the Panther’s 75, even if the Panther was more maneuverable and had its armor properly sloped.
“But,” Jager went on, and let the word hang in the air, “if you try to fight the Lizards straight up with your machines, the only thing you’ll do is get yourselves killed. The Fatherland can’t afford that. Remember it. Think of yourselves as going up against T-34s in a Panzer II.”
That got their attention in the way he wanted. Next to one of the tough Soviet machines, a Panzer II, with its 20mm cannon and cardboard-thin protection, was a crew’s worth of “sad duty to inform you” letters waiting to happen. And yet, despite technical shortcomings, the Wehrmacht had advanced deep into Russia.
“We’ll try to hit them from ambush, then,” Jager said. “We’ll lure them, put some of our panzers where we can get a shot at them from flank or rear. You all know how to do that; you’ve most of you done it on the Eastern Front.” He was glad he had picked crews here. Sending new fish against the Lizards would have been an invitation to slaughter. Casualties would be bad enough as things were.
“Their equipment will be better than ours,” he emphasized. “Their tactics and doctrine won’t. From what I saw in the Ukraine last year, they’re even more stereotyped than the Bolsheviks, but their equipment is so good, they’ll hurt you if you make any mistakes at all. In fact, they’ll hurt you even if you don’t make any mistakes. As tankers they’re nothing much, but if I had a chance to capture one of their panzers, I’d give up a lot to do it. Questions?”
“Will we have any air support?” one of the Tiger crewmen asked.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Jager answered dryly. “Anything we put up, they knock down.” He thought about Ludmila Gorbunova in her little flying sewing machine. He hadn’t had any reply to the latest letter he’d posted. With the state of the mails these days, that meant nothing, but he worried all the same. Going into the air against the Lizards was more nearly suicidal than fighting them in panzers.
The same tanker asked, “We’ll see their helicopters, though, won’t we?”
“If you already know the answer, why ask the question?” Jager said. “Yes, we probably will. If you hear one and it hasn’t spied you, get under tree cover as fast as you can. If a panzer in your squad blows up and you don’t think you’re in contact with the enemy, you’d better do the same. Anything else? No? Let’s go, then. Heil Hitler!”
Heil Hitler! the panzer crews chorused. They piled into their machines. Jager tried to gauge their attitude. They weren’t confident of victory any more, the way they had been before the blows against the Poles or the French or the Russians. They all knew what the Lizards could do.
But no one hung hack or hesitated. Better to hold the Lizards as far from the Fatherland as possible: they all knew that. Without much hope and without fear, they’d try to accomplish it.
Jager climbed up onto the turret of his Panther, slid down inside through the open cupola. Beneath and behind him, the big Maybach engine thundered into life. He wished it were a diesel like the ones the Russians used; a petrol power plant didn’t just burn when it got hit-it exploded.
“Down the road southwest,” he told the driver over the intercom. “We’re looking for good defensive positions, remember. We want to be in ambush before we run into the Lizards nosing north from Besancon.”
As seemed their habit since the blitzkrieg that followed their arrival on Earth, the Lizards were moving on Belfort slowly and methodically-with luck, even more slowly than they’d planned, because they had a way of overreacting to harassment fire from German infantry and French guerrillas. With more luck, Jager’s panzer regiment-panzer combat group was a better name for it, given the mixed and mixed-up nature of his command-would slow them further. With a whole lot more luck, he might even stop them.
The Panther had a much smoother ride than the Panzer III in which he’d advanced into Russia. The interleaved road wheels had a lot to do with that. Not feeling as if his kidneys were shaking loose was a pleasant novelty. Now if the damned fuel pump wouldn’t keep breaking down…
In spite of the engine’s rumble and the rattle and squeak and grind of the treads, riding with his head and shoulders out of the cupola was pleasant on a bright spring day. New grass sprouted in meadows and in cracks in the macadam of the road. In a normal year, traffic would have smashed that latter hopeful growth flat, but the column of German panzers might have been the first motorized traffic the road had known in months. Here and there in the grass, wildflowers made bright splashes of red and yellow and blue. The air itself smelled green and growing.