“They’d have to be deaf not to have heard that Panzer,” Cole said, chancing a look back over his shoulder. So far, the road was empty, but they could hear the enemy tank approaching with its steady clank, clank and straining engine.
Around another bend in the road, they found the rest of the unit. The truck had been pulled out of the ditch, and already the convoy was rolling on. But they had left behind an insurance policy in the form of a Jeep with a recoilless rifle mounted on it. The Jeep sat in the middle of the road, its weapon pointing toward the oncoming Germans. The gun had been sighted in on a crest in the road. All they needed was a target. From the shouts of the approaching Germans and the sound of the Panzer echoing through the forest, they wouldn’t have to wait for long.
“You guys are a sight for sore eyes,” Vaccaro panted.
“You know how to sweet-talk a guy,” said the GI set up behind the recoilless rifle. The weapon fired a HEAT round that could spell trouble for a Panzer despite its thick armor — if it hit just the right spot. “Stick around and enjoy the show, why don’t you?”
Sure enough, the Germans were coming up the road. Cole got behind a tree and brought his rifle to his shoulder. He was just lining up the sights when the Panzer came over the crest in the road and the recoilless rifle fired.
Again, the orange muzzle flash lit up the tunnel-like canopy of forest hanging over the road. The sound was deafening, like somebody had just stabbed his eardrums.
There was a white-hot flash as the round hit the Panzer dead-on.
The tank lurched to a stop, smoke and flames pouring from the hatch.
There was no need for a second shot, and no time for that, anyhow. Undeterred by the destruction of the Panzer, German troops stormed up the road.
“Hop on, boys,” the gunner said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The squad didn’t need to be told twice. They scrambled onto the Jeep and hung on tight. The engine had already been running, and seconds later they were rolling. The Jeep wasn’t exactly fast, not on that treacherous road, and it was now overloaded with men clinging to any available surface, but it was going in the right direction at least — away from the Krauts.
Cole looked back and had one last glimpse of the burning Panzer and the white-smocked Germans dodging around it. The scene was marred somewhat by the appearance of a burning figure crawling from the wreckage of the tank. He looked like a sausage that had caught fire on a grill. The burning man tumbled down from the tank and stood in the middle of the road, doing a terrible dance. Maybe he only imagined it, but Cole thought that he could hear the man screaming.
Cole raised his rifle. It was a long shot, taken from the back of a bouncing vehicle, but he quickly pulled the trigger and put the enemy soldier out of his misery.
The gunner from the recoilless rifle turned to him and angrily snapped, “What the hell did you do that for? That’s a waste of ammo.”
“Shut up,” Vaccaro told him.
The gunner opened his mouth to say more, but Cole flicked his cut-glass eyes at him, and the man fell quiet.
Years later, it would seem like Cole could only recall bits and pieces of the war, like some half-remembered bad dream when you woke up the next morning. The older that he got, the more that the memories of the war became more like pictures in a scrapbook than a movie in his head. A movie that he had lived through.
He didn’t know it then, but this scene of the burning Panzer illuminating the forest gloom would be engraved forever in his mind’s eye. To him, it summed up the whole Battle of the Bulge.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” Vaccaro said, watching the scene fade into the distance.
Cole didn’t ask Vaccaro to explain. He knew exactly what he meant.
Chapter Two
Cole bent over the knife blade, honing it to perfection. He loved the warm, buttery feel of the steel under his fingertips as he coaxed it into shape.
This piece of metal had come from an old farm implement on an abandoned property he had found while roaming the mountains. Cole had knocked the rust off with a grinder, then hammered it flat to reveal the perfect, gleaming metal underneath. He liked metal with character and a story, not to mention the challenge of making something old useful again. This old metal had some life in it yet.
As he bent over the knife, the cheaters he wore to see the close work were one of his few concessions to age. That, and some gray hair, though his hair was still thick. He wore it long now like some old mountain man, the hair in back touching his shirt collar.
The process of transforming a cold, rectangular bar of metal into a useful object never ceased to enthrall him. Cole had spent much of his earlier life destroying things and it gave him pleasure to do the opposite now.
Each knife was a journey. He started with a blank piece of metal and a rough idea, but the true knife was hidden somewhere within the steel. When he thought about it, his whole life had been much the same, a journey and a transformation, just as any good life was when you looked back on it.
That fall morning, Cole reckoned that his own journey was winding down. He was becoming an old man. Seventy was on the horizon. Age often made him introspective these days. Back in WWII or Korea, there were times when he hadn’t expected to live until the next minute, let alone for several more decades. Many good men on both sides had not been nearly so fortunate. He had tried to live a good life for them.
Cole hoped now that when the end did come that it would be in his bed, or better yet, hunched over his workbench or hunting in the woods. You couldn’t always choose how you went, but he could hope.
Meanwhile, the world kept changing. Color television. Games that you played on TV, instead of with a ball. Frozen dinners that came in an aluminum foil tray, eaten by a lot of people even up here in the mountains, where folks ought to know better. Then there was the politics. Cole hadn’t bothered to vote for anyone until Eisenhower, who had been worth the effort of going into town and casting his ballot. An actor named Ronald Reagan had been president, then George H.W. Bush. Bush had been a pilot in the war, and he was from Texas, two things in his favor. There was talk of a young man from Arkansas running in the next election. Arkansas? The next thing you knew, there’d be a president from someplace like Delaware.
Cole turned back to his workbench and put all of the world’s nonsense out of his mind.
Then came the knock on the workshop door.
“Gran sent me up here,” announced his grandson, Danny, sticking his head cautiously through the door. He had learned the hard way that it was not in his best interest to startle his grandfather. Best to knock first. “She said a letter came special for you.”
“Put it over there,” Cole said, nodding toward the table.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” Danny asked.
Cole gave the boy one of his looks, but he couldn’t make it stick. He had too much fondness for the boy.
At sixteen, Danny looked startlingly like Cole had at that age, all arms and legs and sinew, but better fed. That wasn’t the only place where the similarity ended. Danny had soft brown eyes and was popular with the local girls at school. School. Cole had made damned sure that his grandson learned to read and write, getting a better start than he had himself.
Where Cole possessed a natural-born ornery streak, he recognized kindness in the boy. Cole considered that to be a good trait, but it surely hadn’t come from his side of the family.
Danny wouldn’t even go hunting with his grandfather because he didn’t like killing animals. Then again, Danny wouldn’t starve if he didn’t fill the stewpot as had been Cole’s case at the same age. Times had changed for the better.