They creaked but held firm, permitting him to gain the landing in good time.
He barely cast a glance at the door of the room where he had terminated two lives, intent on recovering his possessions as soon as possible.
His room was badly affected by the fire, and to his horror, part of the floor had burned through.
The wardrobe had come apart, and therefore the nail was lost.
Opening his penknife, he prised at the charred board, fearing the worst.
“Scheisse!”
The folder was there, but damaged, although not as much as it could have been, given the severity of the fire that had embraced it.
Edges were black and brown, pages were wrinkled and stained by the water that had saved its contents from fire. He slid it inside an innocuous paper bag and followed it with the rest of the contents of his cache.
The suddenly flickering of the torch encouraged his haste, and he was back in the jeep within three minutes, the warm interior in contrast to the gathering cold of yet another European winter night.
The sound of the jeep’s engine faded to nothing before the watcher allowed himself some small movement, his frozen and aching limbs reminding him of their disgust at over an hour and a half of immobility. Laid out on the floor above, and with a line of sight through a fire ravaged ceiling, De Walle’s man had seen all he needed to see.
They had found two more dead Soviet soldiers the previous evening, concealed by displaced earth and the constant stream of snow, until once again exposed to the air by the spades of a working party.
It had been too cold for either cadaver to decompose, so the torture of each man’s death was clear to see upon the corpses, the end clearly wrought by exposure to the high-explosives and shrapnel of grenades.
Both were buried in a shell hole and earth from the freshly dug foxholes used to cover them over, the frozen soil itself only loosened and shifted by yet more grenades, sunk in hard-worked holes in solid earth mass.
Pedro Oscales had been too young to march with the blue-shirted fascists of the Azul on their mission to rid the world of communism, but now he bore his country’s uniform proudly in what some in his homeland were calling the Second Crusade.
Ensign, or Alférez Oscales, akin to 2nd Lieutenant in rank, had overseen the final repositioning of his platoon, the order to adjust 3rd Company’s positions closer to the shattered village of la Petite Pierre universally greeted with anguish by the Spanish soldiery, who had reluctantly turned out of their comparatively warm positions into the freezing cold air.
The final works had only been completed two hours beforehand, but the men had made themselves at home in quick order, and stoves warmed the hastily constructed bunkers in which they sheltered.
Oscales moved through his lines seeking out the men of his command, laughing with them, sharing a coffee or a cigarette, the energy of youth and the enthusiasm of his cause keeping him going when other officers had already retreated to their own bunks for the night.
He took his leave of Sargento Velasquez and his section, receiving a grunt of satisfaction from the old veteran as he closed one eye to receive a light for his cigarette, maintaining his night vision.
Cupping the glowing end, Oscales drew the warm smoke into his lungs and felt the chill of his surroundings momentarily expelled, although, in truth, the knowledge of what had happened in this small Alsatian village meant that his god-fearing men believed that the chills would never go away, even in the height of summer.
A different chill visited itself upon him, one born of fear and sudden awareness, as the snow gently flowed across his vision and the weak waning moon provided a sudden and unexpected insight into the area that his platoon had vacated the day beforehand.
At first the words froze in his throat, the prospect of action taking his ability to speak as it knotted his throat.
He tried again.
Nothing but a meaningless squeak.
He fumbled for his sidearm and pointed the Astra 600 in the general direction of the white ants that were swarming in his direction.
Three shots loosened his nervous vocal chords.
“Alarma! Alarma Ombres!”
He fired off the remaining five 9mm parabellum bullets before moving to reload.
Around him, the Spanish positions came to life as his soldiers burst from their bunkers to repel the Soviet assault.
It was too late, and had been long before Oscales had spotted the swarms of white-clad Soviet soldiers.
The outlying posts were filled with blood already icing, spilt from throats slit from ear to ear.
Men rushing to their positions were cut down in the communications trenches; yet others perished as satchel charges were thrown inside their shelters.
One MG34 stuttered into life, putting four enemy soldiers down before a grenade took the life of the three men manning the weapon, and ended the sum total of the resistance offered by Oscales’ platoon.
Still fumbling with a new magazine, the young ensign found his voice at the last, if only to scream as an entrenching tool swept down from the snowy night, cleaving deep into the join between neck and shoulder.
And then he was silent once more.
Edwin Greiner was not a man given to either panic or exaggeration.
None the less, his arrival in Pierce’s quarters unannounced at stupid o’clock in the morning bore all the hallmarks of a man suffering from both, at least to the until recently fast-asleep commander of the 16th US Armored Brigade.
Still waking up, Pierce shook his head dramatically, interrupting the flow of words.
“Whoa Ed, for Christ’s sake, whoa there.”
Suffering from neither panic nor exaggeration, Greiner realised he had made a mistake trying to lay everything on his commander before he was suitably awake and got out of bed.
As ordered, coffee arrived and Pierce consumed the full measure before he focussed on his CoS.
Swinging his legs out and dropping his bare feet to the cold wooden floor, Pierce prepared himself.
Holding out his mug for a refill, the General snapped fully awake.
“Now, what about the Spanish?”
Four minutes before Greiner had burst in on Pierce, the duty officer had similarly roused the CoS, providing him with an urgent order, straight from De Lattre himself.
The contents of that order fell before Pierce’s gaze, causing him to splutter in alarm.
“What the goddamned hell? Intel said nothing was happening… going to happen either. Overrun he says,” he angled the paper towards Greiner by way of confirmation.
Then the mind of a General kicked in.
“Ok, get the people up. Get the staff in the office ten minutes ago. Get movement warning orders out to the commands. Have someone liaise with 2nd Infantry and Group Lorraine on anticipated operational boundaries.”
He finished up his second mug full.
“And make sure we got plenty of this to hand.”
“I’m on it,”
And Greiner was gone.
Pierce stared at the message again, almost hoping he had read it wrong.
‘Spanish 22nd Infantry Division overrun by Red Army units of unknown type and strength. 16th Armored is ordered to immediately advance and hold the Gungweiler – Siewiller – Vescheim line, maintaining the road communications to the north and south. US 2nd Infantry Division will be on northern flank, Group Lorraine on the southern flank. 16th now under command of Lorraine, effective immediately. De Lattre.’
He had read it correctly the first time.