“I’ll be damned,” Vaccaro said. He looked at Cole. “Who’s lucky now?”
“All right,” Cole agreed. “I guess we’ll have more than just Herr Barnstormer to drop off at headquarters. Maybe they’ll even give us a hot cup of coffee for that information.”
Vaccaro said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Bauer didn’t say anything, but for the first time he looked troubled to Cole’s eyes. It hadn’t seemed to bother him to shoot at Messner and the other Germans, but that was almost like a personal feud. These maps and documents were something else altogether. They were closer to what Bauer might think of as treason by allowing them to fall into American hands.
“All right, let’s keep going,” Cole said. “Lena, you’ve done a good job, but you’d best let me lead the way from here on out. We’ve seen way too many dead Krauts along this road, and I’m worried that we’re going to run into some live ones before long.”
Lena nodded and let Cole take point. He set a rapid pace, telling the others to follow behind him. If he went around a bend and walked into some Germans, at least the others might still have a chance.
They hadn’t gone far when he heard Lena cry out behind him. Cole stuffed the maps and documents into his haversack and looked back to see that Lena, clearly tired and exhausted, had stepped into a frozen rut and twisted her ankle. Lieutenant Rupert knelt, rubbing her ankle in concern.
“Damn it all,” said Cole. “Just figures.” He slipped off his haversack and leaned his rifle against it to look at Lena’s injured ankle. “Try to put some weight on it,” he said, tightening her boot laces as much as possible to give the ankle extra support.
Lena gamely straightened up but released a cry of pain when she put weight on her foot.
“Hold on,” said Cole. He slipped into the woods beside the road and spent a couple of minutes searching. Having found what he was looking for, he drew his bowie knife and cut a sapling with a Y fork at one end so that Lena could use it as a makeshift crutch. When he returned to the road, he noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Tired as he was, it took him half a beat to figure it out.
Somebody was missing.
“Where the hell is Bauer?” Cole wondered.
Vaccaro also looked around in surprise. “I’ll be damned. He was right here a second ago.”
Cole glanced at his haversack and rifle. His rifle was just where he’d left it, but the haversack had clearly been opened. When he went over to it, he saw that the captured documents were gone.
And Bauer was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cole scanned the area, but there was no sign of the German. Bauer had disappeared so quickly that Cole half expected him to suddenly materialize again out of thin air.
But no such luck — the German was truly gone.
“Son of a bitch,” Cole muttered.
“He took off, didn’t he?” Vaccaro wondered.
“Unless you’ve got him hidden in your pocket, then I’d say he made a run for it.”
Cole considered what to do next. Tracking Bauer down seemed straightforward. The snow would make locating his trail easy enough, and from there it was only a matter of heading into the forest after him. Yet, as Cole contemplated the inevitable chase and confrontation, a twinge of reluctance crept in. He wasn’t sure that Bauer would give up without a fight. Despite his initial willingness to shoot the German, the thought of potentially having to pull the trigger on Bauer was now less appealing. It was a hard truth to swallow, but Cole had grown to respect the man, even if he couldn’t bring himself to like him.
Cole had to admit that if the tables had been turned, he would have long since tried to escape. You couldn’t blame Bauer for finally making a run for it. Their discovering of the documents seemed to have pushed him over the edge, which made the value of what they had found only more apparent.
“We have to go after him,” Vaccaro declared, breaking into Cole’s thoughts. “He took those documents and maps, knowing full well that they were important.”
Lieutenant Rupert chimed in, “And don’t forget, he still has my revolver with him.”
“That’s why I’ll let Vaccaro go first,” Cole said.
Another choice would’ve simply been to let Bauer go, but for Cole, that was not an option. Considering that Bauer was the reason they were all out here in the first place, they really had no choice but to go after him.
As they readied themselves to head into the woods in pursuit of the German officer, a distant shout halted them. Turning toward the sound, they were taken aback to see a trio of American soldiers approaching.
“Look, it’s some of our guys,” Vaccaro observed, perplexed. “What the heck are they doing out here? They must be lost.”
Cole wished that was the case but decided that there was something familiar about the three figures. “Or maybe it’s the guys who attacked us back at the château,” he said.
Cole’s grip on his rifle tightened instinctively. His suspicions were soon confirmed as the soldiers drew near enough for their features to become discernible — it was Brock and his cronies.
They hadn’t yet aimed their weapons at Cole’s group, so Cole kept his own rifle pointed toward the ground — for now. He eyed Brock warily.
“Well, well, looks like we’ve caught up with you,” Brock announced, a smug smirk playing on his lips. “Seems you’re not as quick on your feet as you thought.”
Cole finally got a closer look at the man and realized he was imposing — a real brute. Taking him down in a fistfight would be a challenge, but that was where guns came into play; they leveled the playing field. “I reckon you did catch up to us,” Cole mused. “Not so bad.”
Brock’s gaze shifted from one face to the next, his confusion apparent as he noticed the German officer was no longer among them. “I hope you’ve done the smart thing,” he said. “Maybe you went ahead and shot that damn German.”
“We sure did,” Cole replied smoothly, the lie rolling off his tongue. “Got tired of dragging his carcass through these woods. Who’s going to know the difference, right?”
Brock stared at him, suddenly skeptical. “I’ve got to say, you don’t seem like the type,” he countered. “Back at the château, you were fighting tooth and nail to protect his sorry Kraut ass. What did you really do with him?”
Before Cole could respond, Lena blurted out, “What happened to my mother? Is she all right?”
Brock’s face was hard to read. “Tell you what, little girl. You tell us what you did with the German, and I’ll tell you about your mother.”
Rupert made a gesture to stop her, but it was too late — Lena was already spilling the beans. “The German ran into the woods,” she confessed. “We were just about to go after him.”
Brock smiled with satisfaction. “That sounds more like it,” he said. “He ought to be easy enough to find. Just follow the tracks. Why don’t you let us go ahead and follow him and finish him off? We’ll save everybody a lot of trouble.”
As Brock started toward the woods, Cole raised his rifle, holding it at hip level. At this distance, there was no way he could miss. Simultaneously, Vaccaro and Rupert raised their weapons, pointing them at Brock’s men.
Lena began darting toward the woods but was brought up short when Brock fired a burst into the ground ahead of her. “Not so fast, little girl.”
Lena froze.
Cole had held his fire, seeing that Brock was firing only a warning burst. Still, the man was only a finger flick away from getting a bullet.