Tilting the Balance

Bagnall could barely follow the partisan brigadier’s fast, guttural Yiddish. It was close enough to German for Chill to have no trouble understanding it, though. He snapped, “The man is a fool. He wants me to commit elements of the 122nd Antitank Battalion to an area where no panzer are opposing his forces. If I send the battalion piecemeal into fights which are not its proper province, none of it will be left when it is most desperately needed, as it will be.”

“You’ve got those damned 88s,” Aleksandr German said. “They aren’t just antitank guns, and we’re getting chewed up because we don’t have any artillery to answer the Lizards.”

“Let’s look at the situation map,” Bagnall said.

“We’ve had to fall back here and here,” Aleksandr German said, pointing. “If they force a crossing of this stream, we’re in trouble, because they can nip in toward the center and start rolling up the line. We’re holding there for now, but God knows how long we can keep doing it without some help-which Herr General Chill won’t give us.”

Chill pointed at the map, too. “You have Russian units here you can draw on for reinforcements.”

“I have bodies, God knows,” Aleksandr German said, and then was seized by a coughing fit as he realized he’d twice invoked a deity he wasn’t supposed to believe in. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve and went on, “Bodies won’t do the job by themselves, though. I need to break up the Lizards’ concentrations back of their lines.”

“It’s a wasteful use of antitank troops,” Chill said.

“I’ve been wasting Russians-why should your pampered pets be any different?” Aleksandr German retorted.

“They are specialists, and irreplaceable,” the Wehrmacht man replied. “If we expend them here, they will not be available when and where their unique training and equipment are truly essential.”

Aleksandr German slammed a fist against the map. “They are essential now, in the place where I requested them,” he shouted. “If we don’t use them there, we won’t have a later for you to trot them out with all your fancy talk about right timing and right equipment. Look at the mess my men are in.”

Chill looked, then shook his head with a disdainful expression on his face.

“Maybe you should reconsider,” Bagnall told him.

The German general fixed him with a baleful stare. “I knew this piece of dumbheadedness was doomed to fail the moment it was suggested,” he said. “It is nothing more than a smokescreen to get good German troops thrown into the fire to save the Anglo-Russian alliance.”

“Oh, balls,” Bagnall said in English. Chill understood him; his face got even chillier. Aleksandr German didn’t, but he got the tone. The RAF man went on, in German again, “Not half an hour ago, I sent a Russian off confirming your-or some German’s, anyhow-order to fall back. I’m trying to do the best job I can, given my look at the map.”

“Perhaps you left your spectacles behind when you left London,” Chill suggested acidly.

“Maybe I. did, but I don’t think so.” Bagnall turned to Aleksandr German. “Brigadier, I know there aren’t many tanks on your section of the front; if the Lizards had a lot of tanks, they’d be here by now, and we’d all be dead, not bickering. But are they using those troop carriers with the turret-mounted guns?”

“Yes, we have seen a good many of them,” the partisan leader answered at once.

“There!” Bagnall said to Kurt Chill. “Are those troop carriers a good enough target for your antitank lads? You’d have to be lucky to take out a Lizard tank with an 88, but you can do all sorts of lovely things to a troop carrier with one.”

“This is so.” Chill rounded on Aleksandr German. “Why did you not say light armor was part of the threat you were facing? Had I known, I would have released units from the battalion at once.”

“Who can tell what will make up a fascist’s mind?” Aleksandr German answered. “If you’re going to send men, you’d, better go and do it.” They left the map room together, arguing now about how many men and guns and where they needed to go rather than whether to send any at all.

Bagnall indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” Jerome Jones walked over and patted him on the back.

“Nicely done,” Ken Embry said. “We are earning our keep here after all, seems to me.” He got himself a glass of hot, brownish muck from the samovar, then let one eyelid droop in unmistakable wink. “D’you suppose Comrade Brigadier German has really seen a whole fleet of armored troop carriers, or even so many as one?”

Jones gaped; his head swung from Embry to Bagnall and back again. Bagnall said, “I haven’t the foggiest notion, truth to tell. But he picked up his cue in a hurry, didn’t he? If armor rumbles into the neighborhood, even a literal-minded Jerry can hardly quarrel with rolling out the antitank guns, now can he?”

“Doesn’t look as though he can, at any rate,” Embry said. “I would have to say that hand goes to the heroic partisan.” He raised his glass in salute.