He didn’t want to do that, in case he was wrong. Pulling in a raft of men would leave a hole in the screen the Army had set up to keep the fugitive from slipping east “Larssen!” Auerbach shouted. “Come out with your hands up and nobody’ll get hurt. Make it easy on yourself.”Make it easy on us, too.
Larssen didn’t come out. Auerbach hadn’t expected that he would. He took another couple of steps toward where Rachel and Smitty had seen whoever it was take cover. A bullet cracked past his ear. An instant later, he heard the sound of the gunshot. He was already throwing himself flat.
“Down!” he yelled from behind a tumbleweed. He looked around, but dead plants didn’t let him see far. He shouted orders: “Spread out to right and left and take him.” Now they knew where Larssen was. Getting him out wouldn’t be any fun, but it was something they knew how to do, tactics that came almost as automatically as breathing.
Larssen fired again, not at Auerbach this time. “You’re all against me,” he shouted, his voice thin in the distance. “I paid back two. I’ll pay back the rest of you sons of bitches if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
Out on either flank, a couple of Auerbach’s troopers started shooting at Larssen, not necessarily to hit him but to make him keep his head down while their buddies slid forward. Not far from Auerbach, Rachel Hines fired a couple of shots. That was his cue to dash ahead and then flop down in back of another bush. He squeezed off three rounds from his own M-l, and heard Rachel and a couple of other troopers advancing on either side of him.
If you were being moved in on from the front and both flanks the way Larssen was, you had only two choices, both bad. You could stay where you were-and get nailed-or you could try and run-and get nailed.
Larssen sat tight. A cry from off to Auerbach’s left said he’d hit somebody. Auerbach bit his lip. Casualties came with the job. He understood that. When you went up against the Lizards, you expected not to come back with a full complement, and hoped you’d do them enough damage to make up for your own losses. But having somebody wounded-Auerbach hoped the trooper was just wounded-hunting down one guy who’d gone off the deep end… that was a waste, nothing else but.
He was within a hundred yards of Larssen now, and could hear him even when he was talking to himself. Something about his wife and a ballplayer-Auerbach couldn’t quite make out what. He fired again. Rachel Hines scurried past him. Larssen rose up, shot, flopped back down. Rachel let out a short, sharp shriek.
Larssen bounced to his feet. “Barbara?” he shouted. “Honey?”
Auerbach fired at him. Several other shots rang out at the same instant Larssen reeled backwards, collapsed bonelessly. His rifle fell to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. Auerbach ran up to Rachel Hines. She already had a wound dressing out, and was wrapping it around her hand.
She looked up at Auerbach. “Clipped the last two joints right off my ring finger,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t know what I’ll do about a wedding band if I ever get married.”
“You’ll figure out something.” Auerbach bent down and kissed her on the cheek. He’d never done that for a wounded noncom before. Seeing that she wasn’t seriously injured, he said, “I’m going to make sure of the son of a gun now. I think maybe hearing you yell like that startled him into breaking cover.”
“It’s not like I done it on purpose,” she answered, but she was talking to his back.
Jens Larssen was still twitching when Auerbach got up to him, but he didn’t see any point in calling for a corpsman. Larssen had taken one in the chest, one in the belly, and one in the side of the face. He wasn’t pretty and he was dead, only his body didn’t quite know it yet. As Auerbach stood over him, he let out a bubbling sigh and quit breathing.
“Well, that’s that,” Auerbach said, bending to pick up Larssen’s Springfield-no point in leaving a good weapon out to rust. “Now we can get on with the important stuff, like fighting the war.”
TheNaxos chugged on toward Rome. It flew a large red-white-and-blue tricolor Captain Mavrogordato had hauled out of the flag locker. “I want the Lizards’ airplanes to think we are French,” he explained to Moishe. “We have friends on the ground in Rome who know we are bringing them good things, but the pilots-who can say what they know? Since the Lizards hold southern France, this will help them believe we are perfectly safe.”
“What happens when we leave Rome and head for Athens and Tarsus and Haifa?” Moishe asked. “Those places, they won’t be so happy to see a ship that might have come out of Lizard-held country.”
Mavrogordato shrugged. “We have plenty of flags in the locker. When the time comes, we will pick another one that better suits our business there.”
“All right,” Russie said. “Why not?” He’d never known such a blithe swashbuckler before. Mavrogordato was smuggling things to the Lizards, undoubtedly smuggling things away from them, and was smuggling him and his family right past their scaly snouts. For all the Greek captain worried about it-airplanes aside-he might have had the whole Mediterranean to himself.
“But what if something goes wrong?” Moishe had asked him, some hundreds of kilometers back toward the west. He himself was a chronic worrier, and was also of the opinion that, considering everything that had happened to him over the past few years, he’d earned the right.
But Mavrogordato had shrugged then, too. “If something goes wrong, I’ll deal with it,” he’d answered, and that was all he would say. Moishe reluctantly concluded he didn’t say any more because he didn’t know any more. Moishe would have had plans upon plans upon plans, each one ready in case the trouble that matched it arrived.
Whether the plans would have worked was another question. Given his track record, it wasn’t obvious. But he would have had them.
“How far from Rome are we now?” he asked as the Italian countryside crawled past beyond the starboard rail.
“Thirty-five kilometers, maybe a bit less,” Mavrogordato answered. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours-in time for lunch.” He laughed.
Moishe’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. Neither the British freighter that had brought him down near Spain nor theSeanymph had had a galley that could compare to theNaxos’. Mavrogordato’s crew might have been short on shaves and clean clothes and other evidence of spit and polish, but they lived better than British seamen imagined. Russie wondered if the English had some sort of requirement denying them as much pleasure as possible. Or maybe they were just a nation of bad cooks.
“I hate to say it, but I wish the Germans were in Italy instead of the Lizards,” Moishe said. “It gives them too good a base for pushing north or east.”
“They tried pushing east into Croatia last year, and got their snouts bloodied for them,” Mavrogordato said. “But you’re right. Anybody who looks at a map can tell you as much. Hold Italy down and you’re halfway toward holding down the whole Mediterranean.”
“Mussolini didn’t have much luck with the whole Mediterranean,” Moishe said, “but we can’t count on the Lizards’ being as incompetent as he was.”
Captain Mavrogordato slapped him on the back, hard enough to stagger him. He spoke a couple of sentences in Greek before he remembered Russie didn’t know what he was talking about and shifted back to German: “We kicked the Italians right out of our country when they invaded us. The Nazis beat us, yes, but not those clowns.”
The difference between the Italians and the Germans was that between inept tyrants and effective ones. Inept tyrants roused only contempt. No one was contemptuous of the Germans, the Russians, or the Lizards. You could hate them, but you had to fear them, too.
Moishe said, “Ginger is the worst weakness the Lizards have, I think. A Lizard who gets a taste for ginger will-”