Tilting The Balance (86 page)

The tavern across the street from the south wall of Diocletian’s palace had seen better days. It had once had a window in front, but the square of plywood nailed where the window had been was weathered almost gray; it had been up there a long time.

Jager opened the door, slid inside, shut it behind him in a hurry. The fellow behind the bar was about fifty, going gray, with bushy eyebrows that grew together above his bony beak of a nose. Jager hadn’t learned much in the way of Serbo-Croatian, but he had a little Italian. In that language, he said, “Are you Barisha? I hear you’ve got some special brandy in stock.”

The bartender looked him over. “We keep the special stuff in the back room,” he said at last. “You want to come with me?”

“Si grazie,” Jager said. A couple of old men sat at a table in the corner, drinking beer. They didn’t look up when Jager accompanied Barisha into that back room.

The back room was considerably bigger than the one in front; it took up not only the rear of Barisha’s tavern but also the shuttered shops to either side. It needed to be large, for it was packed with poorly shaven men in a motley mixture of clothes. One of the tallest of them grinned at him, his teeth shining in the candlelight. “Thought you’d never get here,” the fellow said in German.

“I’m here, Skorzeny,” Jager answered. “You can take that makeup off your cheek now, if you care to.”

“I was just getting used to going without the scar, too,” the man said. “Come here – I’ve saved one of the Fallschirmjagerwehrs for you.” He held the weapon up over his head.

Jager pushed his way through the crowd. Some of the men carried infantry rifles, others submachine guns. A few, like Skorzeny himself, had paratroop rifles – automatic weapons that fired a full-sized cartridge from a twenty-round box magazine. Jager eagerly took the FG-42 and several full magazines on Skorzeny. “This is as good as anything the Lizards carry,” he said.

“Better than what the Lizards carry,” Skorzeny said. “More powerful cartridge.”

Not inclined to argue the point, Jager said, “When are we going to go down the hole?” He pointed to a black pit that, from the look of it, might have led straight down to hell. It didn’t; it led to the underground galleries inside the wall to Diocletian’s palace.

“Five minutes by my watch after Captain Petrovic and his merry boys start their attack on the palace,” Skorzeny answered. “Five minutes,” he repeated in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. Everybody nodded.

A couple of men came in after Jager. Skorzeny passed them submachine guns. Sneaking the weapons into Split had been harder than getting the men in, but Skorzeny and his local contacts, whoever they were, had managed the job.

A thuttering roar filled the back room, followed by another and another. In Italian, somebody yelled, “Start watching the time,” to Skorzeny.

He shook his big head. “That’s not fighting. That’s just some of the Lizards heading off in helicopters.” He grinned again. “So much the better. That leaves fewer of them for us deal with.”

Even up front with the pilot and weapons officer, the helicopter was noisy. Drefsab didn’t care to think about what it was like for the eight males back in the troop compartment. He waited until all three of his assault aircraft had taken off before he turned to the pilot and said, “On to the ruined castle at Klis. The Deutsche and the Croats there have been plotting against us long enough. This time we bag Skorzeny and all his henchmales.”

“To the castle at Klis,” the pilot repeated, as if he were hearing the order for the first time rather than something like the hundred and first. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

The town of Split shrank as the helicopter gained height. Drefsab found it remarkably ugly: bricks and stucco and red tile roofs were nothing like the concrete and glass and stone of Home. The ruined castle, already growing larger in the distance as the pilot shoved the collective forward, struck him as even uglier.

“Why are you so hot to be rid of this particular Big Ugly, superior sir?” the pilot asked.

“Because he is the biggest nuisance on this entire nuisance of a planet,” Drefsab answered. “He is responsible for more grief to the Race than any other three Big Ugly males I can think of.” He didn’t go into detail; the pilot had no need to know. But his sincerity was so obvious that the pilot turned one eye turret to look at him for a moment before returning full attention to the flight.

The ruined gray stone pile of Klis drew swiftly nearer. Drefsab waited for the Tosevites hiding within to open up with small-arms fire. Satellite and aerial reconnaissance both claimed they had no antiaircraft artillery in there. He hoped the males in recon knew whereof they spoke.

He wished he’d tasted ginger before he got into the helicopter. His body craved it. But he’d restrained himself. Ginger would take away his doubts, and against a foe as wily as Skorzeny he wanted them all in place.

“Shouldn’t they be shooting at us by now?” the weapons officer asked. The castle of Klis seemed very quiet and peaceful, as if no raiders had lived in it for thousands of years. Drefsab hissed softly. Thousands of years ago, the castle probably hadn’t even been built. Tosev 3 was a new world.

He answered the male’s question: “You never can tell with Big Uglies. They may be lying low, hoping to make us think they aren’t really there. Or they may have some sort of ambush set.”

“I’d like to see them try, superior sir,” the weapons officer said. “It’d be a sorry-looking ambush after it bit down on us.”

Drefsab liked his confidence. “Let’s give the place a sandstorm of fire, to make sure we don’t have any trouble getting our males on the ground.”

“It shall be done.” The weapons officer and the pilot spoke together. The pilot called on the radio to his opposite numbers in the other two helicopters. One of them dropped to the ground to unload its soldiers. The other, along with the helicopter in which Drefsab flew, popped up into the air and started pasting the castle of Klis with rockets and machinegun bullets. No return fire came. As soon as the eight males had scuttled out of the landed helicopter, it rose into the air to join the barrage, while the second one descended to disgorge its soldiers.

Drefsab took a firm grip on his personal weapon. He intended to go down there with the fighting males, and to be certain Skorzeny was dead. There were whole little Tosevite empires that had caused the Race less trouble than that one Deutsch male. Stolen nuclear materials, Mussolini kidnapped to spew propaganda against the Race, a landcruiser lifted out from under everyone’s snout at Besangon, and who could guess how many other crimes lay at his feet.

Males scrambled away from the second helicopter, opening up with their personal weapons to add to the fire that made whatever defenders huddled in Klis keep their heads down. The pilot started to lower Drefsab’s helicopter to let off the males it carried, but before he could grab the collective, the radio speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm began to chatter.

“You’d better hear this, superior sir,” he said, and touched the control that fed the incoming signal to the main speaker in the flight cabin.

Through engine noise and ordnance, a male’s voice squawked, “Superior sir, the outwalls of our base are under attack by a motley crew of Big Uglies with rifles and other small arms. Their forcing a breach seems unlikely, but our defending males have taken some casualties.” Some of the noise of firing, Drefsab realized, was coming out of the speaker.

“If the situation is not urgent, I shall continue neutralizing this target before I return,” he answered. His mouth fell open in a laugh of amusement and relief. So Skorzeny had chosen this moment to attack, had he? Well, he would pay for it. The fighting males he’d left here would be destroyed. The Race would keep a garrison in Klis from now on. Control in this area would expand at the expense of the Deutsche, and one Drefsab, ginger-tasting addict though he was, would rise in prestige and importance to the leaders of the Race’s forces on Tosev 3.

“Shall I proceed as planned, superior sir?” the pilot asked. “Yes,” Drefsab said, and the helicopter lost altitude. Drefsab ran a battery check on the radio gear implanted in his helmet. If the main base needed to get in touch with him, he wanted to ensure that he wasn’t cut off. That was the only special precaution he took against Skorzeny’s attack.

Ever so gently, the helicopter’s wheels touched ground. Drefsab clapped the helmet onto his head and hurried back into the fighting compartment to exit with the rest of the males.

When Jager fought, he was usually closed up inside the thick steel shell of a panzer, which muffled the racket all around him. The tavern’s wall didn’t do nearly so good a job as that; the rifle and machinegun fire from and at the wall of Diocletian’s palace all sounded as if it were aimed right at him. The other soldiers and guerrillas in the back room of Barisha’s tavern took no special notice, so he assumed they were used to this kind of din.

Through it, Skorzeny said, “Two minutes!” in German, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. In German alone, he went on, “Do we have all the men with the automatic weapons closest to the hole?”

The question was rhetorical; he’d bullied people into place before the shooting outside started. With his FG-42, Jager was one of the lucky few who would lead the way through the tunnel. Around the troops with automatic rifles clustered those who carried submachine guns; the men who bore ordinary bolt-action rifles would bring up the rear.

“One minute!” Skorzeny said, and then, what seemed to Jager a year or two later, “Now!” He was the first one to plunge into the tunnel.

Jager went in either fourth or fifth; in all the jostling, he wasn’t sure which. The dim light behind him vanished, leaving him surrounded by absolute black. The toe of his boot caught the heel of the man in front of him. He stumbled and almost fell. When he straightened up, his head bumped the low ceiling. Dirt showered down; some got inside his collar and slid down his back. He wished he had a helmet – for more reasons than keeping the dirt off. He also wondered how Skorzeny was faring in the tunnel – the SS man, who lacked only eight or ten centimeters of two meters, probably had to bend himself double to move at all.

Though the tunnel couldn’t have been more than fifteen meters long, it seemed to go on forever. It was narrow as well as low-ceilinged; whenever his elbow bumped a wall, Jager felt s if it were closing in on him. He was afraid someone would start screaming in the confining dark. Some people couldn’t even stand being shut up in a panzer with the hatches dogged. The tunnel was a hundred times worse.

He realized he could see the silhouette of the soldier in front of him. A couple of paces later, he emerged in a dusty storeroom illuminated only by lights from other rooms, none of them especially close. All the same, after the tunnel it seemed almost noonday bright.

“Spread out, spread out,” Skorzeny urged in a hissing whisper. “Give the men behind you room to get out.” When the whole force had emerged, Skorzeny thumped Jager on the back. “The colonel here, being an expert in archaeology, knows where the stairs are.”

By now, the SS man – and several others among the raiders – had studied the underground maze enough to know it as well as Jager, if not better. He appreciated the nod even so: reminded the men that his word counted next after Skorzeny’s. He said, “I just don’t want to find a lot of Lizards down here. If we have to fight underground, we won’t get up the surface and sweep them off the walls.”

“That’s what Petrovic’s diversion is for,” Skorzeny said: “to flush all of them up to the top so they won’t notice us till too late – for them.”

Jager knew that was what the diversion was for. He also knew diversions weren’t always diverting enough to do what they were supposed to do. He kept quiet. They’d find out soon enough how well this one had worked.

Skorzeny turned his attention to the group as a whole. “My advice is simple: shoot first.” He repeated the phrase in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. The men he led just grinned – they’d figured that one out for themselves. Skorzeny grinned, too. “Come on, you lugs.” As he’d been first into the tunnel, he was first out of the storeroom.

Jager had never seen the underground maze of hallways and chambers in Diocletian’s palace, not till now. But he moved through it confidently, counting off turns under his breath as he trotted along. A blast of heat came from one big room he passed: the Lizard barracks. If ever the raiders would be discovered down here, this was the place.

No shouts, no hisses, no gunfire. There ahead were the stone stairs. Skorzeny bounded up them three at a time. The rest of the men, Jager still near the front of the pack, ran at his heels. The panzer colonel’s stomach knotted. An eye turret turned at the wrong moment and the assault could still turn into a slaughter.

Trying to match the Lizards’ swiveling eyes, his head twisted every which way as he reached the top of the stairs. The aliens were still banging away from the wall, but the bulk of the baptistry hid them from him – and him from them.

Skorzeny used hand signals to divide the raiders into two groups and to show no one had better argue against Jager’s leading one of them. He pointed right and then forward to show Jager’s group was to go around the baptistry, then led his own group to the left.

“Come on,” Jager hissed to his men. He trotted at their fore: if you wanted to impress anybody who’d already seen Skorzeny in action, you’d better lead from the front. Otherwise, your men wouldn’t follow you for long.

He waved the group to a halt as they came to the corner of the baptistry. FG-42 at the ready, he stepped out into the narrow street that led north to the wall. As he did so, he heard Skorzeny’s group start firing.

A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jager. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. “Forward!” he shouted, and ran up the street. The pound of boots on cobblestones behind him said he’d brought his troops with him.

Personal weapon at the ready, Drefsab scrambled over a big gray stone and dropped down into the enclosed area of the castle of Klis. His feet scrunched on dry weeds. Several other males were already there, scurrying around and nervously checking anything that could hide a Big Ugly.