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.
Thus far, they’d found precisely nothing. Drefsab was disappointed-he wanted Skorzeny dead and proved dead. But sealing off this place and taking possession of it for the Race wasn’t bad in and of itself, either. High time to expand the foothold in Croatia beyond the town of Split, he thought.
“They’ve been here,” a male said, pointing to the litter scattered wherever it wasn’t visible from Split. “Why aren’t they here now?” He sounded indignant; to the Race, the world by rights should have been a neatly predictable place.
“They may have timed their attack in town to match ours here,” Drefsab answered. “Their intelligence is revoltingly good.” That didn’t surprise him overmuch; only natural for beings of one kind to stick together against those of another, especially when the latter were trying to conquer them.
He badly wanted a taste of ginger. He’d all but promised the fleetlord that he’d bring back Skorzeny’s head in a clear block of acrylic resin. Would Atvar be content if presented with a mere strategic gain rather than said head? Unless Skorzeny got himself killed and identified back in Split, it looked as if Drefsab would have to find out. Ginger wouldn’t change that, but would keep him from having to think about it for a while.
Another male waved to him from a stone-lined hole in the ground. “Over here, superior sir,” he said. “Looks like the Big Uglies that haunted this place made their home underground.”
Drefsab shone an electric torch into the hole. Even without it, he would have been sure this was a Big Ugly den: the Tosevites’ rank, meaty smell filled the scent receptors on his tongue. He played the torch back and forth, then let out a low hiss. “This place will hold a lot of Big Uglies.”
“That’s true, superior sir,” the male agreed. “Where do you suppose they’ve all gone?”
“Some of them back to their villages, I suppose, and some into town to attack our walls,” Drefsab answered. He stuck out his tongue. The words did not taste right. From all he’d learned of Skorzeny, such a simpleminded frontal assault seemed out of character.
“If you want us to set up camp in this pile of stones, superior sir I hope you don’t expect us to use that place down there.” The soldier also stuck out his tongue, and waggled it in derision and disgust. “It stinks.”
“That it does,” Drefsab said. “And no, I promise you won’t have to set up your sleeping gear down there-not until we fumigate, anyhow.” His mouth and the other male’s dropped open in a laugh.
The speaker built into his helmet suddenly screamed at him: “Superior sir! Superior sir! We’re under attack not just from outside the wall but also from within! Somehow a large party of Big Uglies managed to get inside the walls without being noticed. We’re taking heavy casualties. Need for assistance urgent in the extreme!”
Drefsab made a noise like a pressure cooker forgotten on top of a hot stove. “None of them slipped away to their villages,” he said when coherent speech returned. The male beside him stared in confusion; he hadn’t heard the desperate call. Drefsab went on, “They all went down into Split.” No, Skorzeny wasn’t simpleminded at all.
“Who? The Big Uglies?” the male asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.
Drefsab ignored him. He waved to the soldiers scattered over the castle of Klis. “Back to the helicopters!” he shouted.
“Quick as you can!”
A virtue of the Race was obedience to superiors. The males neither hesitated nor asked questions. They ran toward the helicopters as fast as their legs would take them. Behind the armor-glass windscreens, the pilots waved frantically. They’d got, the message, too, then.
Drefsab dashed up to the cockpit. “To the fortress!” he snarled. “Skorzeny will pay for this. Oh, how he will pay.”
All the pilot said was, “It shall be done.” He pulled up on the collective. The helicopter sprang into the air. It wheeled within its own diameter and darted back toward Split. Only then did the pilot say, “May I ask your plan, superior sir?”
“Use our firepower to blast the Big Uglies out of the fortress,” Drefsab answered. “They may have smuggled in men and rifles; I refuse to believe they could carry antiaircraft weapons into Split without our noticing.”
“No doubt you are right about that, superior sir,” the weapons officer said with all proper deference. “But I see I must remind you that we expended most of our munitions in the bombardment of that empty castle. We have little left to use back at the city.”
Drefsab stared at him in blank dismay. After a moment, he said, “Keep going anyhow. I’ll think of something.” The ground blurred by under the helicopter. He didn’t have much time.
Jager had fought house to house, street to street, in towns and cities in the Ukraine. He’d hated it then. Even with a panzer wrapped around him, it was deadly dangerous work. Doing it in nothing but these ragged clothes struck him as clinically insane. “You’d never get me to join the infantry now,” he muttered, sheltered in the doorway of a building near the wall. “I did that the last war.”
Bullets sprayed past him, biting chips out of stone and brickwork. They stung when they hit; if you got one in the eye, it could blind you. The Lizards all had automatic weapons and, by the way they hosed fire around, they might have had all the ammunition in the world, too. Jager was too aware that he didn’t. The FG-42 was a wonderful weapon, but it went through magazines in a hurry.