To Jager’s right, Klaus Meinecke sneezed sharply, once, twice, three times. The gunner pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tunic, and let out a long, mournful honk. “I hate springtime,” he mumbled. His eyes were puffy and tracked with red. “Miserable hay fever kills me every year.”
Nothing makes everybody happy, Jager thought. They ran through Montbeliard, where the big Peugeot works stood idle for want of fuel and raw materials, then followed the road that paralleled the Doubs River southwest toward Besancon-and toward the Lizards surely on the way. up toward Belfort.
Jager’s head swiveled up and down, back and forth, watching every moment for the airplane or helicopter that could turn his panzer into a funeral pyre. Meinecke chuckled. “You’ve got the deutsche Blick all right, Colonel,” he said.
“The German glance?” Jager echoed, puzzled. “What’s that?”
“They recruited me for Panthers out of the Afrika Korps, not the Russian war,” the gunner explained. “It was a joke we made there, a takeoff on the deutsche Gruss, the German salute. We were always on the lookout for aircraft, first British, then from the Lizards. Spot one and it was time to find a hole in the ground.”
Before the Lizards came, Jager had envied the tankers who fought in North Africa. The war against the British there was clean, gentlemanly-war as it should be, he thought. Both sides in Russia had fought as viciously as they could. Jager thought of the massacres of Jews at Babi Yar and other places. A miracle the Polish Jews hadn’t killed him on his way back to Germany.
He didn’t care to brood on that too long; it made him wonder about what his country had been doing in the lands it had conquered. Instead he said, “So what was it like in the desert after the Lizards came?”
“Bad,” Meinecke answered. “We’d been beating the British, they were brave, but their panzers didn’t match up to ours, and their tactics were pretty bad. If we’d had proper supplies, we’d have mopped them up, but everything kept going to the Eastern Front.”
“We never had enough, either,” Jager put in.
“Maybe not, Colonel, but a lot even of what was supposed to go to us ended up on the bottom of the Mediterranean. But you asked about the Lizards. They mopped up the Tommies and us both. They liked the desert, and we couldn’t hide from their planes there. Talk about the deutsche Blick-Gott in Himmel! The Tommies had it, too.”
“Misery loves company,” Jager said. Then, still looking around,’ he suddenly called “Halt!” to the Panther’s driver.
The big battle tank slowed, stopped. Jager stood tall in the cupola, waving the column to a halt behind him. He studied the little ridge that rose off to one side of the road. It was covered with old brush and saplings, and its crest could have been more than four hundred meters from the roadway. He’d have to scout out what lay behind, check his line of retreat-the one thing you couldn’t do was stand toe-to-toe with the Lizards, or before long you wouldn’t have any toes left.
He ordered the Panther up the rise to the crest. The longer he looked at the setup, the better he liked it. He didn’t think he’d come across a better defensive position, anyhow.
At his command, most of the German panzers deployed hull down on the reverse slope of the ridge line. He sent three or four Panzer IVs and a Tiger forward to meet the Lizards ahead of his main position and, with luck, bring them back all unsuspecting into the ambush he’d set up.
That left nothing to do but wait and stay alert. In back of the ridge lay a pond fed by a small stream. A fish leaped out of the water after a fly, fell back with a splash. Somewhere in his gear, Jager had a couple of hooks and a length of light line. Pan-fried trout or pike sounded a lot better to him than the miserable rations he’d been eating.
A Frenchman in civilian clothes came out of the bushes on the far side of the pond. Jager wasn’t surprised to see he had a rifle on his back. He waved to the Frenchman, who returned the gesture before stepping back into the undergrowth. Before the Lizards came, the French underground had nipped at the Germans who occupied their country. Now they worked together against the new invaders: in French eyes, the Germans were the lesser of two evils.
That’s something, anyhow, Jager thought. In Poland, the Lizards had seemed the lesser of two evils to the Jews. From what he’d learned, he couldn’t blame them for feeling that way.
A couple of times, he’d tried talking with officers he trusted about what Germany had done in the east. It hadn’t worked: he’d been met by a refusal to listen that almost amounted to saying, I don’t want to know. He hadn’t brought up the subject now for some time.
Away in the distance, he heard the harsh, abrupt bark of a panzer cannon. At the same time, a shout sounded in his earphones: “Engaging lead element of enemy panzer column! Will attempt to carry out plan as outlined. Will-” The transmission cut off abruptly; Jager feared he knew why.
More booms: from the Panzer IV’s 75mm guns; heavier, deeper ones from the Tiger’s 88; and, sharp as thunderclaps, from the Lizards’ cannon. Then another sort of roar, lower and more diffuse, with smaller blasts and cheery pop-pops all mixed in with it. That was the sound of a panzer brewing up.
“Armor-piercing,” Jager said quietly. The loader slammed a black-nosed shell into the breech of the cannon. Out of sight down the road, another panzer exploded. Jager bit his lip; those were men, comrades-in-arms, dying nastily. And the officer part of him whispered, if all my panzers get killed before any make it back here, what good is my ambush? He was inured to sacrificing men; throwing them away was something else again.
He stood up in the cupola, made a hand sign: be ready. Panzer commanders passed it down the line. He didn’t want to use radio, not now. The Lizards were too good at picking up their foes signals. As if from very far away he felt his heart thudding in his chest, his bowels loosening. That was what fear did to your body. It didn’t have to rule you if you didn’t let it.
Up the road, motor going flat out, men inside probably shaken to blood pudding, raced a Panzer IV. It sounded like an explosion in a smithy, roaring and clattering and clanking as if it were about to fall to pieces.
Behind it, almost silent by comparison, glided a Lizard panzer, then another and another and another. Jager knew they were toying with the Panzer IV. They had a way of stabilizing their guns so they shot accurately even on the move, but they were enjoying the chase for a while before they ended it.
Let’s see how they enjoy this, he thought, and yelled, “Fire!”
Because his head was outside the cupola, the bellow of the cannon half stunned him. Flame and smoke spurted from the gun’s muzzle. “Hit!” he cried in delight. It was a solid hit, too, right at the join between the turret and body of the Lizard panzer. The turret tilted, almost torn out of its ring; Jager wouldn’t have wanted to be inside when that 6.8-kilo round came knocking.
But the Lizards made their panzers tough. That shell would have torn the turret right off a British tank or a Soviet T-34, and turned either of them into an inferno on the instant. Not only did this one not catch fire, its driver threw it into reverse and did his best to escape the trap in which he found himself. “Hit him again!” Jager shouted. His gunner required no urging-the second shot punctuated Jager’s sentence.
All the rest of the hull-down German panzers along the ridge line opened up, too. The Lizards offered them a target tankers dream about: the less heavily armored flanks and engine compartments of their vehicles. One of those vehicles brewed up in a flash of orange and blue flame-somebody’s round had penetrated to something vital. Jager wondered if that had been a Panther’s kill or a Tiger’s: the heavier panzer’s 88 fired a correspondingly more massive shell, but the Panther’s gun had a higher muzzle velocity and would pierce just as much armor, maybe more.