In the Balance

“Stuka!” Georg Schultz screamed in the voice of a man who knows himself reprieved.

“By God, it is,” Jager said. He, by contrast, spoke softly, for he could scarcely believe he might yet live a while longer. The Lizards had taken as dreadful a toll on the Luftwaffe as on the Wehrmacht. But this pilot, somehow, had still got his dive-bomber into the air and still had the nerve to fly it straight down the Lizards’ throats.

More bombs went off in quick succession-he’d loosed the whole stick. Only a direct hit would take out a panzer, but even experienced tankers had to hesitate before advancing through that sudden storm of explosives.

The Stuka pilot couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters off the ground when he pulled out of his dive. Two of the Lizard panzers fired their guided rockets at him but the missiles shot harmlessly past his plane. He skimmed away, his landing gear just above the waving grass of the steppe.

“Get us out of here,” Jager told Dieter Schmidt. The Panzer III’s engine roared as the driver obeyed. Jager felt an itch between his shoulder blades. He knew that was stupid. If one of the Lizards’ shells got him, he’d be dead too fast to know it.

He looked back toward the rise. If his tank could make it over the next one before the Lizards climbed this one and spotted him, he really did have a chance to get away. He wouldn’t have believed it when the engagement started, but it was true. He felt a surge of pride. His troops had hurt the Lizards, and not many units could boast of that. Gott mit uns, he thought, we might even do it again.

Two Lizard panzers came over the rise. His own tank was only halfway up the next slope. A turret swung his way. His eyes went up to the sky, seeking, praying for, another Stuka. But God lives in only so many machines. The Lizards didn’t even need to slow down to fire.

Less than a heartbeat after the big cannon spat smoke and flame, Jager felt the mother of all kicks in the arse. His trusty panzer, which had served so well for so long, died under him. Smoke poured up through the engine vents of the rear deck.

“Out, out, out!” he screamed. He had almost been thrown out, on his head. Only two armored walls and the full weight of the engine had kept the enemy shell out of the fighting compartment. Once the fire got going, nothing would hold, that at bay.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the air around him as he pulled himself out of the cupola and dove into the tall grass. Other hatches came open. His crew began bailing out with him. A bullet struck home with a noise like a slap on a bare, wet back. Somebody shrieked.

The clean green smell of the weeds through which Jager scrambled filled his nostrils. He had two somewhat contradictory goals. He wanted to put the hulk of the killed tank between himself and the oncoming Lizards, but he also wanted to get as far away from that hulk-and from the Lizards-as he could. The ammunition in the Panzer III was going to start cooking off any minute now, maybe any second, and the Lizards were not likely to be well-disposed toward German tankmen, especially a crew that had managed to destroy one of their fancy machines.

Another shell slammed into the Panzer III. It went up with a roar. Stupid, Jager thought, stupid and wasteful. That tank was already dead meat. Meanwhile, though, machine-gun bullets probed the grass. They made tiny, whispering tic-tic-tic sounds as they clipped the leaves. Jager wondered what kind of sounds he would make if they clipped him.

The Lizards’ tank rolled majestically past, fewer than fifty meters off. Jager lay facedown and unmoving. If the enemy saw him, maybe they’d think he was already dead. Not only was it faster than both his Panzer III and a T-34, it was ghost-quiet to boot.

Somewhere a few hundred meters away, an MG-34 began to bark. Bullets ricocheted off the armor of the Lizard panzer. Its machine gun returned fire. The panzer itself turned toward the German machine-gun position.

As he crawled in the opposite direction, Jager almost bumped into Georg Schultz. After an instant of fright, the two men grinned at each other. “Good to see you, sir,” the gunner said, grin broad and white in his dirty face.

“And you,” Jager answered. “Have you seen Fuchs?” Schqltz’s grin slipped. “He didn’t make it out.”

“That was the shriek, then,” Jager said. The gunner nodded. Jager went on, “What about the two up front?”

“Don’t know.”

They found Dieter Schmidt a few minutes later. Klaus Bauer, the hull gunner, remained missing. “We both got out,” Schmidt insisted. “I don’t know what happened to him afterward.” He didn’t say nothing good, but the words hung in the air.

“Lucky we didn’t blow up when we were hit,” Jager said.

Schmidt surprised him by laughing. “Luck, hell, sir. We were just about dry of petrol, that’s all. We had maybe enough for another kilometer or two, no more.”