In the Balance

“No doubt a run through the Panzer Lehr training division would improve their skill, Herr Major,” Schultz said dryly. “But if the tanks themselves are good enough, how good do the tankers have to be?”

Jager grunted. It was a cogent question. In Panzer IIIs, little Pimpfs from the Hitler Youth, boys too young to shave, could have taken out whole divisions of British tanks from the. Great War: the rhomboidal monsters were too slow to run and too lightly armed to fight. He’d thought the Panzer III a great tank until he ran up against his first Russian T-34, and a good tank even afterward. Now-now he might as well have been in one of those obsolete rhomboids himself.

“We do what we can, Georg,” he said. The gunner nodded.

Jager stuck his head out of the cupola again. The Lizards were trundling happily past his strongpoint, no more than five hundred meters away, without the slightest idea he was there. He glanced over to Ernst Riecke and Uwe Tannenwald, his other surviving tank commanders, and held up one finger. Both men waved to show they understood. Hanging around for more than one shot against the Lizards was an invitation to a funeral.

The company commander pointed to one of the troop carriers. “That one, Georg,” he said quietly.

“Ja,” the gunner said. He spoke to the loader. “Armor-piercing.”

“Armor-piercing,” Stefan Fuchs echoed. He pulled the black-tipped round out of the ammunition rack, loaded it into the five-centimeter gun, closed the breech.

The gunner traversed the turret a few degrees so it bore on the troop carrier. He took his eyes away from the gunsight for an instant to make sure Fuchs was clear of the recoil, then looked back and squeezed the trigger at almost the same time.

The cannon roared. Through his field glasses, Jager saw a hole appear in the troop carrier’s flank. “Hit!” he shrieked. The carrier slewed sideways, stopped. It was burning. A hatch came down in the rear. Lizards started bailing out. German foot soldiers opened up on them, picking them off as they emerged.

“Back!” Jager shouted. If he waited around to see how the foot soldiers did, one of those Lizard panzers would blow him to bits. Already, with terrifying speed, their turrets were traversing to bear on his position. Dieter Schmidt jammed the tank into reverse. It jounced down the low slope. So did Sergeant Tannenwald’s. Ernst Riecke was a split second too slow. Jager watched in dismay as the turret flew off his panzer and crushed an infantryman who was scrambling to get out of the way.

Later, Jager told himself, I’ll grieve. That assumed there would be a later for him. At the moment, the assumption looked bad. One of the things he’d learned fighting the Russians was to have more than one firing position available whenever he could. His second one was at the base of the rise.

“Maybe we’ll give ’em a surprise, Major,” Schultz said. He and Fuchs already had another AP round loaded and ready. The gun bore on the place where the Lizard panzers were likeliest to breast the rise.

A couple of foot soldiers dashed forward with satchel charges. That meant the tanks were close, then. Machine guns chattered furiously. An explosion sent up smoke and dirt, then another. Jager hoped the brave men hadn’t thrown away their lives for nothing.

Then he had no time for hope or fear, for a Lizard panzer nosed over the horizon right where he’d thought it would-the Lizards really were lousy tankmen. The Panzer III’s cannon roared as he drew in breath to yell, “Fire!”

Schultz was an artist with the long gun. He put the AP round right in the middle of the tiny bit of belly plate the enemy tank exposed as it came over the rise. The glacis plate laughed at even high-velocity five-centimeter shells. The belly plate, as on merely human panzers, was thinner. The shell pierced it. The tank stopped. They’ll have to take the driver out of there with a spoon, Jager thought.

Two Lizards popped out of the turret, one after the other. The hull machine gun from Jager’s tank cut them down.

Tannenwald’s tank had done almost as well as the company commander’s. Its first shot knocked the track off a Lizard panzer’s road wheels. The hit tank swerved, out of control. A foot soldier ran up to it, tossed a potato-masher grenade into the open cupola. Its small blast was followed an instant later by a big one as the panzer’s ammunition went off.

“Back again!” Jager told Schmidt. Already they’d hurt the Lizards worse in this engagement than ever before. That was important, but it would matter only so much if he wound up dead… as he probably would as soon as a Lizard panzer made it onto the reverse slope of that little rise.

A scream in the sky-Death would come even without the Lizards’ tanks, then. Their aircraft were just as deadly. Jager resigned himself. Bombs burst all around-the other side of the rise, the side the Lizards were still climbing.