Twenty minutes later the two polizei cars linked up with Griffin’s Bradley, whose driver, although briefed on the plan, nonetheless raised his M16 as several team members in polizei uniforms piled out. Only the sight of American camouflage uniforms made him lower his weapon.
“You look pretty good in a polizei suit, Sep,” said Griffin.
“You don’t look half bad yourself, Sir. It’s a pity they only sent six men, and short guys at that.” The Sep rolled his shoulders and tugged at the shirt collar. “This outfit is too damn tight and half of us are still in battle dress.”
“No one will see them inside the Bradley. Besides, I like having them there to cover us with the firing port weapons. The driver did a good job with all that oiFand carbon black, it makes it look like the track got the hell shot out of it. I only wish we could have the gun pointing forward instead of over the back deck.”
“Having the gun point back completes the picture, Sir.” The Sep stared back down the road toward the house.
“Something on your mind, Sergeant?”
“Sir, I know you’re the officer, and you make the decisions, but…” “But we should have iced the polizei and the civilians, right?” “Yes, Sir. I mean, what kind of a war is this when you lock the enemy in a basement with food and water? Eventually they’ll figure out that we lied when we said we were leaving a guard. With the food and water there, they’ll figure out that we want ’em to get loose from their ropes. Then they’ll go tell somebody.”
“You barricaded the basement door, right?”
“With half the furniture in the house — the refrigerator.”
“And you made sure they overheard you telling Zawenul to booby-trap it?”
The Sep nodded. “They heard, and they saw him take out the grenades and wire, even if they were only smoke grenades.”
“They don’t know the difference, Sep. And if you supervised, I assume all the phone lines were cut, the family car disabled, and every set of shoes in the house trashed. You did supervise, didn’t you?”
The Sep snorted. “Always, Colonel.”
“Then our family and our polizei friends should take about forty-eight hours to work their way out. By that time we should have made all the use we’re going to of this stuff.” Griffin looked back toward the farmhouse. On any other operation he would have used The Sep’s methods without a second thought about civilian casualties. Such casualties would have been regrettable, but unavoidable, necessities of war. In this case, though, to kill them seemed — seemed what? Unthinkable? No, he’d have gunned them all down if they’d made a wrong move. But they didn’t make a wrong move. Griffin thought killing them just for the sake of expediency seemed, well, it was wrong. As he gave Sep final instructions and the entourage started off on its route to what Griffin guessed would be the general area of the German headquarters, he felt the first pains of understanding, of knowing the difference between simply fighting and fighting for something. He shook his head as the polizei car lights flashed and the three vehicles rolled down the road. For now, he thought, I’ve got to get back to the war.
They call it bounding overwatch. The idea is simple, much like when children play cowboys and Indians. When you get close to the enemy, one group covers while the other moves. Lieutenant Walker’s infantry platoon took its turn moving, bounding forward while — behind it, in the protection of the woods — two other platoons from his company covered Walker’s vehicles from overwatch positions. From one hill to the next stretched an open space almost half a mile across. Walker could only hope the covering platoons would watch over him well.
At Alex Stern’s disposal was an armored cavalry troop, which is what they call a company in the Cav. Each battalion also had a platoon of six Bradleys, the scout platoon. They operated much as the cavalry scouts in the Old West did, patrolling in front of the main body to find the enemy and sound an early warning.
The scouts in front of Walker’s platoon did well, and the message that the Germans were coming up fast caused Walker’s battalion commander to push his company commanders, especially Walker’s, who in turn pushed Walker. With the lead elements of the German main body identified and their own battalion closing up, the scouts pulled off to watch for any forces trying to blindside them from a flank. The companies now assumed responsibility for finding what and how much was out there — and for dealing with it.
That was how Walker found himself once again leading the company, pushing his platoon as fast as he could through the thin forest and narrow roads and trails covering the hills on the east side of the Burbenheim Bowl.
His company commander wanted to move fast, even at the risk of losing an entire platoon in the opening engagement. So despite the woods Walker’s platoon was still mounted. As his soldiers crouched behind the weapons sticking out of the Bradleys’ firing ports, the platoon broke into the open and dashed for the safety of the wood line to its front.
They were just past the halfway point when the headset crackled. “Tarantula, this is Spider.” The voice of the 3d Platoon leader came over the radio. “Vehicle movement on the hillside to your front. I count three Marders coming at you.” A second after the transmissions, he heard the overwatching platoons’ Bradley autocannon begin to bark.
“Spider, Tarantula. Roger.” The enemy, though not totally unexpected, came up quickly. Walker had only a few seconds in which to make a critical decision. His platoon was infantry. It fought best on the ground, and Walker’s first instinct was to order his men to dismount once they hit the edge of the wood line. But the forest was thin along the hill, his enemy not yet organized. If he stopped, his platoon would hit the ground in front of the Germans’ rifles. He flipped a switch to broadcast to his platoon. “Tarantula, this is Tarantula Zero-One. Enemy platoon on the hillside. We assault mounted, dismount only when we reach the top of the hill. Just like in the drill books. Let’s go.”
His Bradleys picked up speed. In the woods to his front, Walker could see orange flashes from the automatic cannons mounted in the Marders’ turrets and red-speckled tracers spitting from rifles and machine guns. The men of his platoon fired back, their lines of tracers joining those coming from the company behind them. Walker dropped a little lower in the cupola, hitting a button to switch from the 25mm chain gun to the 7.62mm machine gun mounted alongside it. The platoon closed to less than a football field’s length away from the woods. Walker could see figures in the brush, and he sprayed them with bullets. Then the Bradley was in the trees, the engine straining as it began to climb. Seconds later the vehicles were wading through the German platoon.
Inside the fighting vehicles, Walker’s soldiers peered out of narrow vision blocks. In front of them, the shortened barrels of what were essentially sawed-off Ml6s stuck out beneath each aperture. The weapons were not very accurate, especially when bouncing across rough terrain and dodging between trees. The firing-port weapons had only one setting — full automatic — but Walker’s men used them with telling effect. The woods swarmed with tracers; any German infantryman unlucky or foolish enough to be in the middle of the maelstrom was riddled from two sides. Bullets pinged off the Bradleys’ armor as they roared through the enemy, but the platoon hosed down the hillside with fire, washing away most of the unprotected Germans in the process.
Walker didn’t have time to gloat. About two hundred meters beyond the German positions, he stopped the platoon. Ramps dropped and his soldiers piled out of the tracks, hurriedly spreading out and seeking the protection of a thick tree or a fold in the ground. Walker strapped a radio on his back and jumped out of his Bradley, dropping to the ground as bullets cracked overhead. Evidently some of the Germans had survived. Lying prone, he couldn’t see his soldiers deployed around him, although he felt their presence as they returned the Germans’ fire.