The forest was absent of any human sounds. The artillery had fallen silent for the night, and it was hard to know that thousands of men were nearby, dug into foxholes, waiting for a German breakout attempt that would never happen. The pine trees whispered in the night breeze. He heard an owl, then the screech of some animal hunting.
Cole felt right at home. Where others would feel spooked in the woods at night, alone, he knew that running across an animal was the least of his worries. The two-legged kind were the ones to fear tonight.
Fortunately, anyone in the forest would have a hard time seeing him in the nearly pitch blackness. Cole's night vision was good enough for him to see the looming tree trunks against the snow for several feet ahead. He stopped periodically to check his compass, because it would be easy to get off course in the dark — the stars above were hard to see through the pine canopy. He had coated the inside of the compass lid with a dusting of powder made from ground-up fireflies. It was just enough light to make out the compass needle without affecting his night vision.
The ground grew steeper, forcing him to move more slowly. However, he stayed off the old sunken road through the woods and walked parallel to it instead, keeping to the trees. The last thing he wanted to do was leave footprints on that road. It took him a while in the dark, but he managed to cross two miles of woods and emerged in the clearing he had scouted yesterday. The Germans would walk right into it if they followed the sunken road through the woods, as they surely must.
He could still hear the whisper of pine trees overhead, but the other night sounds had fallen quiet. Not so much as a rabbit stirred. Was someone — or something — in the forest?
After the darkness among the trees, the open field was almost blinding, even at night. Surrounded by nothing but snow, he felt very exposed. He stepped back into the trees. Something did not feel right.
He waited, rifle at the ready, biding his time. A minute passed. And another.
Then he saw a flicker of flame in the trees to his right. Soon, the smell of the cigarette drifted toward him.
He was not alone.
Who else would be in the woods at this hour?
His plan depended on no one else seeing him, of course. He thought about what he needed to do.
He unslung his load of pickets and placed his rifle on top. This had to be done quietly. He didn't want to fire a shot and take a chance that there were other scouts nearby. He slipped off his mittens. Pulled his knife free of its sheath.
Silently, he moved through the trees toward where he had seen the flicker of flame. He took his time. He had all night. Now and then, he caught a whiff of cigarette smoke.
He covered the last few feet as cautiously as if he had been crossing a glass bridge over a chasm. He moved as silently as if his life depended on it — which it did.
He could see the man standing next to a tree, looking out over the field.
Not an American. A German. The square stahlhelm was the giveaway.
He realized he had been foolish to think that he would be the only one staking a claim to these woods. The Germans weren't fools — they had sent a scout to keep watch over the clearing.
He was now within twenty feet of the German, and he was totally undetected.
He tested his grip on the knife in his hands. How fast could he move? Not fast enough.
What he needed was a distraction. The snow covered anything useful, like a stick. He groped in his pockets, hoping for — he wasn't sure what.
His hand touched the compass. It was military issue, nothing fancy. He could get another one when the time came.
Even with its metal cover, the compass weighed only a few ounces, but it was enough. He brought his right hand back beside his ear, then with a single smooth motion flung the compass away into the trees.
He got lucky in that he missed hitting any trees close by and the compass made a noise when it finally smacked against a tree.
The soldier dropped his cigarette, grabbed his rifle and spun toward the noise — his back to Cole.
Cole crossed the distance between him and the soldier in three bounding steps. He grabbed the man's chin with his left hand, pulling it up and away, and then sank the point of the knife in his right hand into a spot just below the German's right ear.
Cole thrust upward and the man's body went limp — dead weight. He let it slump to the snowy ground.
He stood there a moment, trying to hear something besides his own heart hammering in his chest. He had killed his share of soldiers with a rifle, but never before with a knife. The brutality of what he had just done sickened him. He tried not to think too much about it.
He crouched down beside the dead German and waited several minutes. No shouts of alarm filled the night. If he was lucky, the scout was alone. He spent several minutes dragging the body deeper into the woods. It never failed to surprise him just how heavy a body could be — something that moved so gracefully on its own was just so much dead weight of lifeless bone and muscle. He stuffed the body as best he could under a windfall to hide it from view.
Back at the clearing, he retrieved his bundle of pickets and moved out into the open. He had already lashed the pickets together in pairs, so he now twisted the boards with the names on them to create a series of grave markers, which he thrust into the snow. He wasn't worried about footprints — in fact, he made an effort to make a confusion of them so that it would look as if a number of men had passed among the graves.
The last thing he did was to take off his helmet, tuck the folded note Vaccaro had written inside, and then put the helmet on top of the cross that read "Cole."
Anyone emerging from the trees on the sunken road couldn't miss it.
Then he returned to the forest and found a likely looking pine tree that overlooked the clearing. He climbed up, rested his rifle across a bough, and settled down to wait.
And just like that, the Germans abandoned La Gleize. They moved across the open field to the northwest of the town and entered the forest. The trees here were old and shadowed the forest floor so that little underbrush grew to impede their way. They moved more easily than they had across the field because the boughs of the fir trees caught much of the snow, leaving just a few inches of snow that filtered to the forest floor. A sunken road through the woods made the way easier for a few of the walking wounded who had managed to escape with them.
They were taking a huge risk because it would not take a genius to see that this corridor of trees was the only escape route from La Gleize. Escape was the last thing the Allies expected to be on Friel’s mind. Through his binoculars, he had seen that the main road leading out of La Gleize remained heavily fortified, as if the Amis expected a breakout attempt at any moment. Still, there was such danger — to be caught here in the forest could mean being cut to pieces.
His orders demanded strict silence. When a man stumbled over a tree root, he did not so much as swear. If a man had to cough, he put his arm across his mouth to muffle the sound. No lights were allowed.
Eight hundred men moved through the woods in almost total quiet. Shadows and silence — that was all that remained now of Kampfgruppe Friel.
Behind them, they could hear the sounds of their remaining panzers being destroyed by the team left behind. A few machine guns chattered to distract the Allied forces into thinking that La Gleize was still being defended.
If the thought of leaving the wounded had brought tears to Friel's eyes, the destruction of the tanks was just as emotional for the tank commanders. There was nothing that made a man feel so much like a god on a battlefield as commanding a King Tiger tank. Now they were setting their machines on fire, and they were mortal again. In the cold, tears froze on the cheeks of a handful of even the toughest tank commanders. The distant explosions as the panzers were destroyed sounded like the death cries of old friends.