Tilting the Balance

He went up to the second floor after all. The helicopters still hung menacingly in the air, but they weren’t shooting. Men on the ground-Skorzeny’s forces and Petrovic’s foreignliterature.ru both-kept blazing away at them, though. Jager fired, too. This time the Lizards didn’t shoot back.

“Maybe you are out of ammo, ” he muttered to himself.

Even so, he didn’t hurry downstairs and rush out into the street. Maybe they weren’t out of ammo, too.

Drefsab turned to the weapons officer in anger and dismay when the machine gun stopped firing. “Is that all of it? ” he demanded.

“Not quite, superior sir, but almost all, ” the fellow answered. “I’ve reserved the last couple of hundred rounds. Whatever decision you make on how or if we use them, though, I suggest you make it quickly. We already have one male wounded back in the fighting compartment, and we can’t stay under such intense fire indefinitely. The odds of any one bullet doing us significant damage are low, but we are encountering a great many bullets. ”

That was an understatement. The patter and clatter of incoming rounds all but deafened Drefsab. He said, “The area close to the wall is too built up to let us land and take aboard those of our males who still live. ” He added the interrogative cough to that, though it looked pretty plain to him. Maybe the pilot would tell him he was wrong.

But the pilot didn’t “We could fit the fuselages of our marines down there, superior sir, but the rotors-” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Drefsab had no trouble finishing it for him. The pilot went on, “We do still have fuel enough to return to Italia, where the Race holds unchallenged control. ” He sounded hopeful.

“No, ” Drefsab said flatly. He reached into a pouch on his belt, took out a vial of ginger, and tasted. The pilot and weapons officer gaped at him. He didn’t care. Atvar the fleetlord knew he was addicted, so what these low-grade officers thought mattered not at all to him. He said, “We shall not flee. ”

“But, superior sir-” The pilot broke off, perhaps because of drilled subordination, perhaps because he couldn’t decide whether to protest Drefsab’s tactics or the vial of ginger he still held so blatantly in his left hand.

Ginger certainty and ginger cunning rushed through Drefsab. “The Big Uglies can’t have brought all that many males into the fortress, ” he said. “If we land behind them, where we took off, we can catch them between two fires, as they’ve done with our males down there. ”

Now the pilot had something concrete to which to object: “But, superior sir, we’ve twenty-three effectives at most; I don’t know if anyone aboard the other helicopters is wounded. ”

“Thirty, ” Drefsab corrected, his voice cold. “Pilots and weapons officers have their personal weapons, and I have mine. If we can drive the Big Uglies from the fortress, we may be able to hold on here long enough for reinforcements to arrive. ”

The pilot was still staring. Drefsab deliberately looked away from him, daring him to protest further. To underline his contempt, he tasted again. Ginger filled him with the burning urge to do something and with the confidence that if he just acted boldly, everything would turn out fine.

“Back to the landing area, ” he snapped.

“It shall be done, superior sir, ” the pilot said miserably. He relayed Drefsab’s command to the other two helicopters.

When the helicopters darted away, Jager hoped with all his heart they were fleeing. But, though the engine noise diminished, it didn’t vanish.

“Where are they going? ” he muttered suspiciously. He couldn’t believe they would just up and fly away, not when they’d done such a job of working over the humans’ positions moments before. He tried to think himself into the head of the Lizard commander-Drefsab, Skorzeny had said his name was. The exercise had proved useful over and over again in the Soviet Union. If you could figure out what the other fellow needed to do, you were halfway to keeping him from doing it.

All right, assume this Drefsab was no fool. He wouldn’t be, not if he’d made the Lizards shape up in Besancon (Jager wondered how his regiment was faring; the news out of France-and then out of Germany-hadn’t been good) and been entrusted with swinging the Croats away from Germany.

What to do, then? Those big Lizard helicopters carried soldiers as well as munitions. What would Skorzeny do if he had some men he could put anywhere he wanted? The answer to that formed of itself in Jager’s mind: he’d stick them up the enemy’s rear. He’d done just that, here in Split.

Next question was, would Skorzeny figure that out for himself? He’d better.

Jager couldn’t get in touch with him by radio or field telephone. But Skorzeny was no fool, either. He’d think of something like that… Jager told himself hopefully.

The panzer colonel wondered if he ought to head back toward the rear. Before he made up his mind, he decided to evaluate the position he already held. He moved toward the window, peered out from well back in the room so as not to make himself an obvious target for the Lizards by the wall.

He needed only a couple of seconds to realize he was in too good a place to abandon. He could see four or five Lizards no more than a hundred meters from him, and they didn’t know he was there. He switched the FG-42 from automatic to single shot, raised it, breathed out, and touched the trigger on the exhale. The automatic rifle bucked against his shoulder. One of the Lizards toppled over bonelessly.

Even single-shot, the weapon was a lot faster than a bolt-action rifle. All you had to do was pull the trigger again. He missed a shot at his second Lizard, but his next round was on the way before the creature could react to the one before. He didn’t think he made a clean kill on that Lizard, but he was sure he’d hit it. Getting it out of the fight would definitely do. Instinct made him move away from the window after that. Hardly had he done so when bullets came searching for him. He nodded to himself. If you pushed things too far, you paid for it.