Tilting the Balance

“So the engineers and scientists have assured me, ” Stalin said with a slight purr in his voice that told what would happen if the engineers and scientists were wrong. Molotov would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the men who labored on that kolkhoz outside of Moscow.

He pushed forward between Zhukov and Koniev. Both officers looked at him in surprise; he was usually a good deal less assertive at military conferences, which he attended mostly so he would know how developments on the battlefield affected the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He studied the map. Red units represented Soviet forces, green the Lizards, and occasional pockets of blue German troops that still fought on in the land they had invaded almost two years before.

Even to his unsoldierly eye, the situation looked grim. The makeshift line patched together between Sukhinichi and Kaluga wasn’t going to hold. He could see that already; not enough Red Army forces were in place to hold back the advancing Lizard armor. And once the line was pierced, it was fall back or get cut off from your comrades and surrounded. Nazi panzers had done that to Soviet troops again and again in the desperate summer and fall of 1941.

Nonetheless, he stabbed a hesitant finger out toward Kaluga. “Cannot we stop them here? ” he asked. “Any effort, it seems to me, would be better than using the explosive metal bomb and facing whatever retaliation the Lizards may choose to inflict. ”

“Even Kaluga is too close to Moscow, far too close, ” Stalin said. “From airstrips behind the city, they can smash us to pieces. ” But he glanced at Zhukov before he went on, “If they don’t come past Kaluga, we shall not deploy the bomb. ”

“That is an excellent decision, Iosef Vissarionovich, ” Molotov said fulsomely. Zhukov and Koniev both nodded. Molotov felt sweat under the armpits of his white cotton shirt. He wondered if the Tsar’s courtiers had had to tread so carefully in guiding their sovereign toward a sensible course. He doubted it-not since the days of Peter the Great, anyhow, or maybe Ivan the Terrible.

When Stalin spoke again, his voice held some of the steel that had given Iosef Dzhugashvili his revolutionary sobriquet: “If the Lizards advance past Kaluga, however, the bomb will be used against them. ”

Molotov looked to Koniev and Zhukov for support. He found none. The marshal and the general were both nodding, perhaps without enthusiasm but. without hesitation, either. Molotov made his own head go up and down. Useless to argue with Stalin, he told himself Useless to antagonize him. He kept on nodding, though in his heart winter’s chill had returned to oust the bright spring day.

Heinrich Jager glanced up at the, sun before he raised the binoculars to his eyes. In the afternoon, the Lizards down in Split might have been able to spot reflections from the lenses. The hill-fortress of Klis in which he sheltered sat only a few kilometers inland from the city on the Adriatic coast.

The Zeiss optics brought Split leaping almost within arm’s length. Sixteen hundred years after it was built, Diocletian’s palace still dominated Jager’s view of the city. Fortress is a better word he thought. Actually, it was in essence a Roman legionary camp transformed into stone: a rough rectangle with sides of 150 to 200 meters, each one pierced by a single, central gate. Three of the four towers at the corners of the rectangle were still standing.

Jager lowered the binoculars. “Not a place I’d care to try attacking, even nowadays, without heavy artillery on my side, ” he said.

Beside him, Otto Skorzeny grunted. “I can see why you, went into armor, Jager: you have no head for the subtleties. ”

“What’s that Hungarian curse?  — a horse’s cock up your arse? ” Jager said. Both men laughed. Jager peered through the binoculars again. Even they couldn’t make the Lizard sentries on the walls of the palace and in positions around it seem much more than little moving antlike specks. They were well sited, no doubt about that; in set-piece situations, the Lizards were quite competent.

Skorzeny chuckled again. “I wonder if our scaly friends down there know that we have better plans of their strongpoint than they do. ”

“They wouldn’t have picked it if they did, ” Jager answered. The plans hadn’t come out of the archives of the German General Staff, but from the Zeitschrift fur sudosteuropaischen Archaologie. Skorzeny found that vastly amusing, and called Jager “Herr Doktor Professor” every chance he got. But even Skorzeny had to admit that the quality of the plans couldn’t have been better had military engineers drafted them.

“I think you’re right, ” the SS man said. “To them it’s just the strongest building in town, so naturally it’s where they moved in. ”

“Yes. ” Jager wondered if the Lizards had a concept of archaeology. Word filtering out of intelligence said they were conservative by nature (which he’d already discovered from fighting against them) and that they’d had their own culture as a going concern since the days when people were barbarians if not downright (and barely upright) savages. That made Jager think they wouldn’t reckon any building a mere millennium and a half old worth studying as a monument of antiquity.

“So, what are you, going to do about getting those cursed creatures out of there? ” Marko Petrovic asked in fluent if accented German. The Croatian captain’s khaki uniform contrasted with the field gray the Germans wore. Even though Petrovic wore a uniform, being around him made Jager nervous-he seemed more bandit chief than officer. His thick black beard only added to the effect. It did not, however, completely conceal facial scars that made the one seaming Skorzeny’s cheek a mere scratch by comparison.

Skorzeny turned to the Croat and said, “Patience, my friend. We want to do the job properly, not just quickly. ”