Page 63 of Striking the Balance (Worldwar 4)

By the way Atvar’s adjutant jerked at whatever the message was, he might have stuck his tongue into a live electrical socket. He turned one eye turret back toward Atvar and said, “Exalted Fleetlord!”

“Not now, Pshing,” Atvar replied with very human impatience.

But the adjutant-Pshing-kept talking. Atvar hissed something Russie didn’t understand and whirled away from him toward the screen. As he did so, the Lizard’s face disappeared from it, to be replaced by a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into the sky. Moishe gasped in horror. He’d seen one of those clouds on his way to Palestine, rising over what had been Rome.

The sound he made seemed to remind Atvar he was there. The fleetlord turned one eye turret toward Zolraag for a moment and snapped, “Get him out of here.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. He turned to Russie. “Go now. The exalted fleetlord has more important things with which to concern himself at the moment than one insignificant Big Ugly.”

Moishe went. He said nothing until the infantry combat vehicle that had brought him to Atvar’s headquarters started back toward the hotel in which he was imprisoned. Then he asked, “Where did that atomic bomb explode?”

Zolraag let out a hiss that made him sound like an unhappy samovar. “So you recognized it, did you? The place is part of this province of Egypt. I gather it has two names, in your sloppy Tosevite fashion. It is called both El Iskandariya and Alexandria. Do you know either of these names?”

“Someone bombed Alexandria?” Moishe exclaimed.“Vay iz mir! Who? How? You of the Race control all this country, don’t you?”

“I thought we did,” Zolraag answered. “Evidently not, yes? Who? We do not know. The British, taking revenge for what we did to Australia? We did not-do not-believe them to have weapons of this sort. Could they have borrowed one from the Americans?”

He sounded as if he meant the question seriously. Moishe made haste to reply: “I have no idea, superior sir.”

“No?” Zolraag said. “Yet you broadcast for the British. We must investigate further.” Ice ran up Russie’s back. The Lizard went on, “The Deutsche, fighting us as best they could? We do not know-but when we learn which Big Uglies did this, they will pay a great price.”

Something Zolraag had said got through to Moishe slower than it should have. “Australia, superior sir? What happened in Australia?”

“We destroyed two cities to secure our conquests there,” the former Polish provincelord answered with chilling indifference before returning to a previous question: “How? We do not know that, either. We detected no airplanes, no missiles, no boats moving over the water. We do not believe the bomb could have been smuggled in by land, either; we would have found it in our searches of cargo.”

“Not over water, not by air, not on land?” Moishe said. “That doesn’t leave much. Did someone dig a tunnel and set the bombunder Alexandria?”

Zolraag made more horrified-teakettle noises, then burst out, “You Tosevites have not the technology to accomplish this!” That was when he figured out Russie had been offering a jest, however feeble. “Not funny,Reb Moishe,” he said, and used an emphatic cough to show how unfunny it was.

Nobody had called MoisheReb since he’d left Warsaw. Then he’d thought the Lizards had come in answer to his prayer to make the Nazis leave off persecuting the Jews in the ghetto they’d established. People had gained hope from that. Now he saw that the Lizards, while they didn’t hate Jews in particular, were more dangerous for the rest of the world than the Nazis had dreamt of being. Two Australian cities, destroyed without provocation? No matter how sweltering the air inside the armored fighting vehicle, he shivered.

Heinrich Jager peered down into the Panther’s engine compartment. “Fuel-pump gasket again?” he growled. “God in heaven, how long does it take for them to get the fabrication right?”

Gunther Grillparzer pointed to the lot number stenciled in white paint on the black rubber gasket. “This is an old one, sir,” he said. “Probably dates back to the first couple of months’ production run.”

That did little to console Jager. “We’re damned lucky the engine didn’t catch fire when it failed. Whoever shipped it out to us ought to be horsewhipped.”

“Ahh, give the dumb bastard a noodle and put somebody else in his job,” Grillparzer said, using SS slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He’d probably picked that up from Otto Skorzeny. He probably wasn’t joking, either. Jager knew how things worked in German factories these days. With so many German men at the front, a lot of people doing production work were Jews, Russians, Frenchmen, and other slave laborers subject to just that kind of punishment if they made the slightest mistake.

“Is the replacement a new one?” Jager demanded.

Grillparzer checked the lot number. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “We slap that in there, it shouldn’t give us any trouble till-the next time, anyhow.” On that optimistic note, he grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the fuel pump.

Off in the distance, a flight of rockets screamed away toward the Lizard lines. Jager winced at the horrible noise. He’d been on the receiving end of Stalin-organ concertos when the Red Army lobbedKatyushas at theWehrmacht before the Lizards came. If you wanted to tear up a whole lot of ground in a hurry, rockets were the way to do it.

They didn’t bother Skorzeny at all. “Someone will be catching hell,” he said cheerfully. Then, lowering his voice so only Jager could hear, he went on, “Almost as good as the pasting we gave Alexandria.”

“Ah, that was us, was it?” Jager said, just as softly. Skorzeny-heard things. “The radio hasn’t claimed it for theReich.”

“The radio bloody well isn’t going to claim it for theReich, either,” the SS man answered. “If we take credit for it, one of our towns goes right off the map. Cologne, maybe, or Frankfurt, or Vienna. May happen anyway, but we’re not going to brag and help it along, not when we can keep quiet and smile mysteriously. If you know what I mean.” Maybe his smile was intended to be mysterious, but it ended up looking raffish.

Jager asked, “Do you know how we did it? That’s a mystery to me.”

“As a matter of fact, I do, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Skorzeny said. Jager picked a branch up off the ground and made as if to hit him with it. Skorzeny chuckled. “Shit, I never have been any good at doing what I’m supposed to.

You know you can’t fit one of those bombs on a plane or a rocket, right?”

“Oh, yes,” Jager said. “Remember, I got involved in that project deeper than I wanted to. You mad bastard, that was your fault, too. If I hadn’t been on that raid with you that snatched the explosive mend from the Lizards-”

“-You’d have stayed a Soviet puppet and you’d probably be dead by now,” Skorzeny broke in. “If the Lizards didn’t get you, the Bolsheviks would have. But that’s neither here nor there. We didn’t put it on a freighter, either, the way we did when we blasted Rome. Hard to fool the Lizards the same way twice.”

Jager walked along, thinking hard. He scratched the side of his jaw. He needed a shave. He had a straight razor, but scraping his face without shaving soap hurt more than it was worth. At length, he said, “We couldn’t have sent it in overland. Insane even to think about it. That leaves-nothing I can see.”

“Nothing the Lizards can see, either.” Skorzeny grinned an evil grin. “They’d be tearing their hair if they had any. But I know something they don’t know.” He almost chanted the words, as if he were a little boy taunting the other children on the schoolyard. He thumped his finger off Jager’s chest. “I know something you don’t know, too.”

“That’s all right,” Jager said. “I know I’m going to boot you in the arse if you don’t spill it. How did we burn the library at Alexandria?”

Like most classical allusions, that one sailed past Skorzeny. He answered the main question, though: “I know we have a new kind of U-boat, that’s what I know. Damned if I know how, but it can do 450 kilometers submerged every centimeter of the way.”

“God in heaven,” Jager said in genuine awe. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d have swept the Atlantic clean with boats like that.” He scratched his jaw again, visualizing a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It must have sailed from-Crete?”

Skorzeny’s blunt features registered a curious blend of respect and disappointment. “Aren’t you the clever chap?” he said. “Yes, from Crete to Alexandria you can sail underwater-as long as you understand you won’t sail back.”

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