The shadows across the woods and fields were growing longer. Messner did not relish the thought of trying to navigate the road in the dark. The sooner that they caught up with their quarry, the better.
Suddenly Dietzel called out a warning. “Tank!” he shouted, making the distinction that it was not one of their own.
Messner squinted down the shadowy road but couldn’t see a thing. He decided that the Jaeger must have the eyes of an eagle and the ears of a wolfhound.
No matter — if an American tank spotted them, the Kübelwagen might be reduced to a hunk of burning metal in an instant, and all three of them along with it.
He tapped Gettinger on the shoulder to get his attention, then pointed at a copse of trees at a bend in the road. “Quick, get into those woods!”
Gettinger did as he was told, steering the Kübelwagen off the road. There was just enough space between the trunks to get the vehicle between the trees. He started to come to a stop, but Messner swatted his shoulder and pointed deeper into the woods. “Hop, hop, hop!”
The side of the sturdy car was badly scraped and battered as Gettinger pushed deeper into the trees. Finally, the trees grew thicker and they could go no farther.
“Turn off the engine,” Messner ordered. “Get out and find some cover. If the Ami tank does see the Kübelwagen and opens fire, we will have a better chance on foot.”
Dietzel had already been getting out before the Kübelwagen even came to a complete stop. He hurried several yards away and got behind a fallen log, his rifle pointed toward the road. Messner and Gettinger got behind trees nearby.
Now they could hear the tank coming, its engine a steady roar, the tank treads clanking up the snowy road. A whiff of exhaust drifted their way. Gettinger raised his own submachine gun, but Messner pushed it back down.
“Hold your fire,” he said. “Let them go past us.”
Through the trees, they caught a glimpse of the tank moving along the road. Several logs had been lashed across the front and sides of the Sherman to thicken its armor. It almost looked as if the forest had come alive and was on the move. Some of the tree trunks were newly scarred and shattered, as if the tank had recently been in a fight for its life.
They all held their breath, not so much for fear that the tank crew could hear them, but to keep telltale clouds of their frozen breath from hanging in the air and giving them away.
Messner could see the tank commander standing in the hatch. Dietzel kept his rifle trained on the man but didn’t fire. If the tank commander had paid any attention at all to the tire tracks veering into the forest, he must have dismissed them as nothing more than a vehicle skidding off the snowy road. Besides, there was already a confusion of tire tracks and ruts. The tank did not slow down to investigate.
The main gun pointed up the road, but Messner knew well enough that the Sherman tank was also equipped with deadly machine guns. How much protection would the trees offer if those machine guns opened fire?
More worrisome for the Germans was the fact that the tank was being followed by a squad of infantry. They carried rifles, machine guns, and a couple of bazookas. Some of the men wore bloody bandages as if they had been wounded in a recent fight. Looking more closely, Messner spotted a GI with a heavily bandaged leg riding on the Sherman tank itself.
If any of the Ami soldiers had looked into the woods, they might have seen the Kübelwagen. That might have aroused their curiosity. But they plodded on, heads down, clearly exhausted, happy to let the tank lead the way.
“Keep going,” Messner urged under his breath.
Slowly, the sound of the tank engine faded. There had been no warning shouts from the infantry squad. They were in the clear.
At least for now.
However, they had lost precious daylight. Even in the last several minutes, the woods around them seemed to have grown darker.
Messner nodded at the two men. Gettinger wore a look of relief plain on his face, while Dietzel appeared disappointed that he hadn’t been able to shoot anyone.
Then Messner looked at the Kübelwagen. Gettinger had driven it until it was nearly wedged between the tree trunks. To the man’s credit, it was quite a feat of driving that he had navigated this far into the woods. However, there was no hope of turning it around. Messner was reluctant to give up their means of transportation, so they would have to back out.
“Dietzel, keep an eye on the road,” Messner ordered. “Gettinger, follow my directions. I will help you reverse the Kübelwagen.”
Painstakingly, that was just what they did. Once again, tree trunks scraped patches of paint off the Kübelwagen. By the time they reached the road again, they had lost even more daylight. The temperature had also dropped, which wasn’t such a bad thing, because the slushy spots in the road had begun to freeze over, giving them a more solid surface for driving.
“Get in,” he said to Dietzel.
The sniper shouldered his rifle and climbed into the back seat next to the Hauptmann. Soon they were on their way again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At the wheel of the Kübelwagen, Gettinger steered carefully, picking his path through the rutted road, which seemed to alternate between frozen ridges that jolted them down to their bones and slushy mud puddles that threatened to bog them down. He rarely shifted out of second gear, although on a few straightaways the engine revved high enough that he shifted into third gear. It wasn’t long before he downshifted again. At any rate, the Kübelwagen wasn’t exactly a vehicle built for speed.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” Messner complained. The shadows in the woods grew deeper by the minute. Messner had hoped that they might have come across their quarry by now.
“The road is a mess, Herr Hauptmann,” Gettinger responded.
“Here, trade places with me. I will show you how it is done.”
Messner took the wheel, but after a few satisfying bursts of speed, he realized that Gettinger was correct. From the passenger seat, the slippery nature of the slush and mud had been less obvious. In places, Messner swore as he fought to keep control of the Kübelwagen. The ruts threatened to wrench the wheel out of his grip. Some of the puddles were so deep that they would be hard to drive out of again.
He took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at Gettinger, but the man remained stone-faced. He knew better than to gloat over the fact that the Hauptmann wasn’t doing any better driving the vehicle.
As for Dietzel, all his attention was reserved for the shadowy woods on either side of the road. He kept his rifle at the ready.
Messner drove them around a bend in the road and came to a spot where there had clearly been a skirmish. The still-smoldering remains of an American tank partially blocked the road. A little farther on were the smashed remains of a Kübelwagen. A handful of dead bodies — some American, some German — were scattered alongside the road.
Messner couldn’t know for certain, but he suspected that this was where the American squad they had hidden from had likely fought. There was no sign of where the German forces had gone. They had either struck out cross-country to unite with the forces encircling Bastogne, or they had turned around and gone in the other direction.
He pulled the Kübelwagen to the side of the road and killed the engine.
“We must check the bodies and make certain that Bauer was not killed here,” he said. “We know that he is traveling this road.”
He and Gettinger did that while Dietzel kept watching, walking along the skirmish site in the process. A wooded hill came down sharply toward the road on one side, and on the other, an open space created a wide place in the road. A low stone wall that was little more than a long pile of snow-covered rocks bordered the open space and the woods. Dietzel seemed to be studying the space intently, then began crossing it, moving toward the woods on the other side.