Kransky took a deep breath, held it halfway through release and gently squeezed the trigger. It broke cleanly, the weapon pushing firmly against his shoulder as a single brass shell case spiralled away into the air to his left. He didn’t stop to watch what happened next: he knew his shot had been true and that was all that mattered. Now was the time to make good his escape before the furore died down and logic took over. Slinging the rifle once more as he disappeared into the bushes, he again took the machine pistol in hand and loped off across the fields as indiscriminate firing broke out from the area of the farmhouse.
Wisch and Schmidt and the rest of his crew had dismounted their panzer the moment the area had been secured and they were no longer required. They stood about awaiting official dismissal, sharing a cigarette with a few of the 3rd SS frontschwein and talking shop. Only Schmidt even bothered to carry his machine pistol with him, the others leaving theirs clamped in the rack within the vehicle’s hull.
It was a few moments before the hushed whisper started spreading about what was going on inside the house: a rumour that spread faster as the shouting of Captain Stahl inside was suddenly joined by the cries of a woman and screams of a young girl. Wisch and Schmidt tried to reassure themselves that what the troopers were claiming — what the officer and NCO were doing in there — surely couldn’t be possible. They weren’t just talking about a woman, after all — there were young children in there as well — but the expressions on the faces of the troopers that’d stepped quickly from the house following screamed orders to “Get out!” were a tale in themselves, and not a pleasant one. The shots had caused them all to flinch; particularly the way the last two had silenced the woman’s final scream, although the terrible crying of the baby continued unabated.
Only the sudden appearance of the boy at the door roused them from their horror. He’d darted past a few of the men before a pair of riflemen standing beside the panzer crew caught him, holding firm against his unintelligible screams and cries. The boy was terrorised and distraught, no rationality showing in his face as he struggled. When they caught sight of Stahl leaving the front door of the house, still doing up his pants, Schmidt finally decided he’d had enough. As the only other officer present, even as one junior to Stahl in rank, it lay upon his shoulders to do something to put a stop to it all. With a reassuring nod to Wisch to stay where he was, the lieutenant took a step toward the other, approaching officer.
In that instant it seemed to Milo Wisch that the helmet of one of the men holding the boy suddenly flew off as if taken by a savage gust of wind. Only as the sound of the rifle shot followed it did anyone register that half the man’s head had been blown away inside. The offending slug, its course diverted in the impact with the man’s head and stahlhelm, still carried enough energy to strike Schmidt in the upper right arm and tear out a chunk of flesh the size of a golf ball. The panzer commander cried out in agony as he fell, clutching at the vicious wound while everyone else reacted in reflex to the shot and threw themselves to the ground around him, seeking cover. One of the men manning a heavy machine gun mounted at the rear of one of the APCs let fly into the darkness with a few bursts in panic before his NCO gathered himself together enough to bark a command to cease fire.
Ritter was a fit man and his breathing was barely laboured as his long strides took him at full speed across the open fields between the base and the farm buildings. As he ran, boots sinking a little into the soft grass of the fields, he saw everything in the lights of the vehicles. He saw the men fall and heard the shot as he was reaching the stone wall at the near boundary to the farm, hurdling it in his stride and drawing his own sidearm — an old Luger that had once been his father’s. He was very nearly shot down himself in the panic and confusion as a spotlight suddenly turned his way, finally bringing him to a halt as he was temporarily blinded. Once his eyes had adjusted, Ritter took in the scene before him. Men were regaining their feet while several were tending to the wounded junior SS officer lying near the centre of the yard area. Two more spent a few seconds confirming what was already obvious from a distance: that the first man hit was indeed dead with a dark and terrible crater over his lifeless left eye where his temple had once been.
As no further shots came out of the darkness and reason began to once more wrest control from shock and panic, the commanding SS officer reappeared from the door into the farmhouse where he’d sought cover. He began issuing orders and organising two squads to begin searching the general area where they believed the shot to have come while searchlights mounted on the APCs swept the road and bushes beyond it. Ritter went initially unnoticed by the SS officer in charge and he deliberately made no attempt at drawing attention to himself, striding purposefully across the yard out of the man’s field of vision. Luger still held tightly by his right hip, he steeled his mind against what unknown horrors he feared he might find and stepped inside.
The door led directly into the kitchen and in the far corner near a small, wood stove, a Frenchman lay in a crumpled heap on the stone floor in what seemed quite a large pool of his own blood, He was obviously dead, his ashen face contorted in a final rictus of agony as hands clutched futilely over a terrible wound in his stomach. The kitchen table was overturned beside him on the floor along with the shattered remains of a radio transmitter and Morse key set.
Ritter was momentarily shocked and sickened by the sight despite his military experience; as a pilot it wasn’t often the lieutenant-colonel encountered death at such close proximity. Yet still the sound of a screaming baby resonated through the house, galvanising him into action. Face grim and thin-lipped, he turned and pushed open a side door that he presumed lead to the rest of the house.
In the short hallway beyond he halted once more, again momentarily immobilised by what he found there. The body of the children’s mother lay on the floor against one wall. Tattered shreds of her flimsy summer dress hung moistly about her, stained darkly with fresh blood. One arm was outstretched and lay across the floor of the hallway. Her face was bruised and badly cut, her lip shattered and one eye so badly swollen it was entirely closed. The other eye stared skyward with a lifelessness only possible in death. From where Ritter stood he could see at least a dozen individual cuts on her body from some type of blade.
He dropped to one knee before her, not able to accept the unmistakeable. Reaching out with his free left hand, he shook her lightly in the vain hope of eliciting some kind of lifelike response. Instead, the body unbalanced and rolled onto its face with all the properties of a broken doll, causing him to rise to his feet once more and quickly take a step backward with a sharp intake of breath. Two large, ragged bullet holes showed in the middle of her back: bloody exit wounds.
Gagging but resisting the urge to vomit, Ritter felt a rage rising within him: it was obvious from the slightness of her figure that the woman would’ve been unable to provide any physical resistance whatsoever. His features hardened as he reached down with his left hand and worked the cocking piece of his Luger — a weapon his father had originally carried in the Great War. He felt the reassuringly solid click as a round slid into the chamber and the mechanism snapped shut behind it, and with a deep breath he moved on to the rooms at the other end of the hallway.