He felt Bauer jolt his shoulder, spoiling his aim.
“Do that again and I’ll shoot you,” Cole snarled.
“Wait,” the German said. “There is another way.”
To Cole’s astonishment, the German stood up and started waving to get the attention of the tank commander.
Cole reached up and tugged at Bauer with such force that the man’s officer’s hat fell off into the snow. “Get down, you stupid Kraut!”
But Bauer ignored him and kept waving to get the attention of the Germans on the road.
His tactics worked a bit too well. The tank commander shouted something and pointed. The panzer’s massive gun swiveled in their direction to face this new threat. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the soldiers on the road directed their fire at them, and bullets tore through the trees.
Now that the attention was momentarily off them, the Sherman tank crew seemed to realize that it might be better to live to fight another day. Like an indignant banty rooster, the Sherman reversed direction and retreated. It did still get off a couple of shots, one of which struck one of the panzers, enveloping it in a cloud of detonating high explosives. The tank survived, but certainly its crew would have been left with ringing ears and a headache.
Cole rolled out from his hiding place. Keeping low, he ran, yelling “Go! Go!” to the others.
He ran deeper into the snowy woods, aware of Vaccaro and Rupert crashing through the trees on his left. He wasn’t sure where Bauer had gone. Cole really didn’t give a damn about him anymore.
Back on the road, the panzer fired with a sound like the sky ripping open. The shell struck somewhere ahead of Cole, ripping open the ground and scattering clods of dark earth across the white snow. Cole ran through while some of the clods were still raining down.
Bullets still tore through the trees around them, but the firing was more sporadic and higher overhead. He was sure that the Germans had lost sight of them. It wasn’t long before the firing stopped altogether, and thankfully the panzer didn’t take another shot at them.
Cole kept running. He didn’t stop until he emerged on a snow-covered lane that cut through the forest. He looked in both directions, but there wasn’t so much as a footprint. The snow lay undisturbed.
No, that wasn’t quite true, he realized. He spotted the telltale triangular pattern of rabbit tracks and the single-file trail left by a fox that was going after that rabbit. These forest creatures were going about their business, following the endless cycle of hunter and hunted, oblivious to the fact that there was a war on.
But there was no sign of any two-legged critters. No Germans. No panzers. Even the trees around them were still and quiet except for the taller bare branches clacking together in the winter wind. Nobody had been this way in some time.
Away from the sound of the fighting on the road, the lane felt secluded and peaceful. The tree branches above the lane wove together overhead to form a sort of tunnel through the forest, inviting them to follow it.
Cole bent over and caught his breath, panting. Vaccaro and Rupert came up beside him, doing the same.
“Damn, that was close,” Vaccaro said. “Was that German trying to get us killed?”
“He didn’t want me shooting that panzer commander, that’s what.”
“You were going to shoot at them?” Vaccaro asked, sounding incredulous. “That might have been worse than waving at them. Still, I don’t know what the hell Herr Barnstormer was thinking.”
Rupert interrupted them. “Here’s our German, chaps. You can ask him yourself.”
Bauer emerged from the trees, his hands raised to indicate that he was still their prisoner. Like them, he was panting and badly winded. One coat sleeve was torn where he’d caught it on a branch.
Cole stepped forward and hit Bauer in the chest with the butt of his rifle, knocking him down. With the German sitting in the snow, breathing heavily, Cole pointed the rifle at him. “Try anything like that again and I’ll shoot you. Hell, I ought to just shoot you now.”
Cole let the muzzle linger no more than a couple of feet from the Kraut’s head, finger on the trigger. He narrowed his eyes.
Their orders were to get the Kraut to HQ, but Cole felt like the incident on the road had left those orders null and void.
What was one more dead German?
Lieutenant Rupert cleared his throat, seemingly reluctant to speak up. “Erm, Private Cole, may I remind you of your duty?”
Cole’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Private Cole—”
Still, Cole ignored him.
“Hold on there, Cole,” Vaccaro said quietly. “Maybe you don’t have to shoot him. Not yet, anyhow.”
Cole kept the rifle pointed at the German for another half a minute. If the British officer hadn’t been present, he decided that maybe he would have pulled the trigger. He’d had enough of this Kraut, who had risked all their lives just to keep Cole from shooting that tank commander.
Also, the Kraut was supposed to be responsible for shooting those prisoners outside Bastogne. Maybe he deserved to die right here, right now, in these snowy woods.
But orders were orders. Lieutenant Rupert would have had no choice but to report that Cole had intentionally shot the prisoner. Rupert didn’t seem like the type who would make up a story about the prisoner trying to escape. Though young, he definitely had a stiff pole up his ass in addition to the famous British stiff upper lip.
“You don’t seem scared,” Cole said.
“I am fairly certain that I am already a dead man,” Bauer said, sounding resigned to his fate. “Die now, die later, what is the difference? Any soldier knows that.”
Cole lowered the rifle.
Bauer looked down at the snow, nodding as if in silent thanks, or possibly surprise.
“You lucky son of a bitch,” Vaccaro said, looking down at him. “You get to live another day. Well, maybe not a whole day. Another hour, anyhow. Possibly just on a minute-by-minute basis. We’ll see how it goes.”
Vaccaro turned away and lit a cigarette, the burst of smoke expanding in the cold, heavy air.
Cole didn’t smoke, but fumes seemed to be coming off him anyhow.
“Hold out your hands, please,” Rupert said to the German.
Bauer did as he was told, and the lieutenant bound his wrists together with a length of cord, though it wasn’t nearly as tight as Cole would have made it. Still, the rough cordage bit into his wrists. Then the lieutenant stepped away and lit his own cigarette. He was smoking a Craven A, a brand of cigarette issued to British troops and named after the late Earl of Craven. Generally speaking, the British cigarettes were considered inferior to Lucky Strikes, but Rupert was a loyal Brit and not one eager to admit that anything American was superior.
Nobody offered Bauer a cigarette. Having his hands tied again made it harder for Bauer to get up, but nobody moved to help the German. He struggled slowly to his feet, his movements stiff and heavy with exhaustion from the race through the trees, underlining the fact that he was a good dozen years older than the others. Not such a young man anymore. He had lost his officer’s hat somewhere and his face was crisscrossed with scratches from the tree branches he had run through escaping the hail of gunfire.
“This way,” Cole said, his voice brittle as an icicle.
He started up the lane, his footsteps carving a path through the untrammeled snow.
Silently, the others fell into step behind him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They followed the snowy lane for nearly a mile without encountering anything other than snowy trees, heckled all the way by curious, hardy birds such as grackles and cardinals. A few jays scolded them. Cole took it as a good sign that the birds seemed to be going about their business unperturbed except by the passage of their own party. They seemed to be alone, without any sign of the enemy, but Cole kept all his senses on high alert. He didn’t want any surprises. The lane was far too narrow to accommodate a tank, but that wasn’t to say there might not be an enemy patrol or scouting party to worry about.