“It worked once, or something like it,” Mordechai answered in German cleaner than theWehrmacht man’s. First names were plenty in the partisan band. His was false-anybody who figured out who he really was might be tempted to betray him to the Lizards-but had to be Jewish in spite of his unaccented German and Polish. Languages were all very well, but some things they couldn’t disguise.

“All right,” Friedrich said. “We see if it works again.” His voice carried an implied threat, but Anielewicz didn’t think that had anything to do with his own Judaism. Friedrich just didn’t want things to go wrong. That much he still kept from his army days. Otherwise he didn’t look much like the spit-and-polish soldiers who’d made life hell for the Jews in Warsaw and Lodz and everywhere in Poland. A floppy hat had replaced his coalscuttle helmet, he wore a fuzzy yellow beard, and the bandoliers crossed over the chest of his peasant blouse gave him a fine piratical air.

With a grunt of relief, Anielewicz unstrapped the crate he’d been carrying along with his knapsack. Some enterprising soul had stolen it from the Lizards’ base at Lublin. It wasn’t anything special, just an ordinary Lizard supply container. As he carried it toward the road, other partisans put in cans and jars of food, some from purloined Lizard stock, others of human make.

Up by the highway, Jerzy had thepiece de resistance: a jar full of ground ginger. “Stick it in my pocket,” Mordechai whispered to him. “I’m not going to put it in there yet.”

“This is your play,” the point man whispered back as he obeyed. He grinned, his teeth for a moment startlingly visible. “You sneaky Jew bastard.”

“Fuck you, Jerzy,” Anielewicz said, but he grinned, too. He stepped out onto the asphalt and tipped the supply crate over sideways. Cans and jars rolled out of it along the surface of the road. He decided that wasn’t good enough. He stomped on a couple of cans, smashed two or three jars.

He stepped back, considered the artistic effect, and found it good. The crate looked as if it had fallen off a supply lorry. He took the jar of ginger from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and spilled half the contents over the cans and jars still inside. Then he set the jar and the lid by the crate and retreated back into the woods.

“Now we set up the ambush and we wait,” he told Jerzy.

The point man nodded. “They’re fools for not cutting the brush farther back from the sides of the road,” he remarked.

“Fools?” Anielewicz said. “Well, maybe. You ask me, though, they just don’t have the manpower to do everything they need. Good thing, too. If they did, they’d beat us. But trying to take on the whole world spreads them thin.”

He found a good hidey-hole behind a shrub-as a city boy, he couldn’t identify it any more closely than that. He detached the bayonet from his Mauser and used it to dig himself a little deeper into the soft, rich-smelling dirt. He was too aware of how much better he could have done with a proper entrenching tool.

Then it was lie and wait. A mosquito bit him in the hand. He swatted at it. It or one just like it bit him on the ear. Somebody warned he was making too much noise. Another mosquito bit him. He lay still.

Lizard vehicles weren’t as noisy as the grunting, flatulent machines the Nazis used. Sometimes the racket from the German tanks and troop carriers was intimidating, but it always told you right where they were. The Lizards could sneak up on you if you weren’t careful.

Mordechai was careful. So were the rest of the partisans; the ones who hadn’t been careful-and some of the ones who had-were dead now. When the faint rumble of northbound vehicles came to his ears, he flattened himself against the earth, to be as nearly invisible as he could. The Lizards had gadgets that could see in the dark like cats.

A personnel carrier whizzed by the artistically arranged crate without stopping. So did three lorries in quick succession. Anielewicz’s heart sank. If his ambush went for nothing, he’d lose prestige in the band. He might have been the leader of Poland’s Jewish fighters, but the partisans here didn’t know that. As far as they were concerned, he was just a new fish showing what he could do.

The last lorry in the convoy pulled to a stop. So did the troop carrier riding shotgun for it. Mordechai didn’t raise his head. He strained to catch the noises from the highway. A door on the lorry slammed. His heart thumped. One of the Lizards was going over to investigate the crate.

His biggest worry was that the Lizards wouldn’t touch it because they were afraid it was rigged to a land mine or a grenade. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, but Mordechai was ambitious. He wanted to bag more Lizards than he could with such a ploy.

He knew the exact instant when the Lizard realized the ginger was there: the excited, disbelieving hiss needed no translation. He wanted to hiss himself, with relief. Not all Lizards were ginger tasters, by any means, but a lot of them were. He’d counted on there being at least one taster among those who investigated the spilled crate.

That hiss brought another male out of the lorry. Maybe the Lizard who’d made it had a radio with him, for a moment later hatches on the troop carrier came down, too. Anielewicz’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Just what he’d hoped for!

Easy, easy… patient.He willed his comrades to hold their fire until they could do the most damage. With a whole lot of luck, the fighting vehicle’s crew would get down along with the infantry they transported.If they were smart, they wouldn’t, but ginger tasters were more apt to be greedy than smart. Would they be foolish enough to forget about the heavy weapons the troop carrier bore?

One of the partisans couldn’t stand to wait any more. As soon as one man opened up, everybody started shooting, intent on doing the most damage to the Lizards in the shortest time possible.

Anielewicz threw his rifle to his shoulder and, still prone, started squeezing off shots in the direction of the crate. You couldn’t use aimed fire at night, not unless you had gadgets like those of the Lizards, but if you had put enough bullets in the air, that didn’t matter too much.

Hisses turned to screeches on the roadway. A couple of Lizards started firing back at the partisans. Their muzzle flashes gave the humans hidden in the woods better targets at which to aim. But then the turret-mounted machine gun and light cannon in the troop carrier opened up. Anielewicz swore, first in Polish, then in Yiddish. The Lizards hadn’t been altogether asleep at the switch after all.

With that kind of fire raking the trees and bushes, there was only one thing to do. “Let’s get out of here,” Mordechai yelled, and he rolled away from the road. The Lizards weren’t the only ones screeching now; screams from the darkness and Polish cries for the Virgin said some of those sprayed bullets and shells had found targets.

The advantage of opening fire from close to the highway was that you were right on top of the enemy. The disadvantage was that you took a long time to get away from his guns. Not until Anielewicz scrambled behind an oak tree whose trunk was thicker than his own did he begin to feel safe.

Firing from the road died away. Anielewicz didn’t think the partisans had hurt the Lizards so badly they’d call in air strikes. This sort of warfare walked a fine line, if you did too little, you didn’t harm the enemy. If you did too much, you were liable to provoke him into squashing you like a bug. The Lizards could do that almost anywhere in the world, if they wanted to badly enough. Keeping them too busy in a lot of places to concentrate on any one worked fairly well.

Mordechai was walking a line himself, but not a fine one. It involved fetching up against a tree with his nose, stepping into a hole and twisting his ankle (by luck alone, not too badly), and splashing through a tiny rill he discovered by the simple expedient of getting his feet wet. Some people moved through the woods at night silent as a lynx. He sounded more like a drunken wisent. He thanked God the Lizards were even less woodswise.