His loader followed, helping the bleeding driver out the troop door. All three lay panting for a moment, surveying themselves and each other. Menendez scooted to the driver and checked him out.
“Where you hit, man?”
“I’m not, I just got banged up when the track got hit.”
“What about that?” Menendez pointed to the driver’s trousers, which were soaked from the waist down.
“What about it? Look at yourself.” Menendez looked down. The realization came quickly. He glanced at the loader. All three had lost control of their bladders when the ITV was hit.
It was the loader who noticed they were one short. “Where’s Sergeant Sutler?”
Menendez looked around, then stuck his head back in the troop door. Sutler lay curled up on the track’s floor, sobbing.
Menendez hoisted himself through the open door, pulling it shut behind him. He clambered over the heap of missiles and equipment that the concussion had spilled onto the vehicle’s floor. When he reached the driver’s compartment, he pulled the lever that would unlock the safety catches and lower the ramp of the ITV. There was a quick hiss as the hydraulics worked, then the ramp thudded to the ground. Menendez scooted back.
“You guys pull everything you can out of here — weapons, water, the tripod and the extra sight, everything. Get some rounds, too, if they’re not fucked up. We’ll ground-mount if we can. I’ll try and get Sergeant Sutler.”
As his buddies went to work off-loading the equipment, Menendez climbed out of their way and bent over Sutler.
“C’mon, Sarge, we gotta get outta here.”
Sutler balled himself up tighter and whimpered. Menendez first tried to pull the sergeant’s hands away from his face, then to straighten his curled-up legs, and finally to pull Sutler’s body out the back. He grabbed Sutler’s ankles and tugged, but the dead weight wouldn’t move. Twice Sutler, still sobbing, kicked to be left alone. The loader and driver had just about emptied the track when Menendez finally let go and tried to figure out a way to snap his NCO out of his shock. The crack of a tank round ripping overhead broke his train of thought.
“Menendez,” called the loader, “get outta there. We got tanks coming, and they got the track spotted.”
Menendez swore and bent over Sutler again, trying to slap some sense into him. “C’mon, Sarge, c’mon, they’re gonna hit the track again. Snap out of it, c’mon, Sergeant Sutler.”
The blast of the impacting tank round carried away the last of the ITV turret and threw Menendez out the back of the track.
“Menendez, get up here, man. We got the TOW set up, and we got targets.” He looked up to see the ground-mount launcher set up about fifty meters away, his buddies waving frantically for him to join them.
“Sergeant Sutler, I gotta go. We got targets.” He left Sutler where he lay and dashed up the hill, panting as the driver slid out of the way so he could assume the gunners’ position.
“You do it, man,” said the driver as he stood aside. “You’re better at it than me.”
Menendez wiped the sweat from his eyes and peered through the TOW sight. He gauged the distance at about eighteen hundred meters— that meant the tank could hit them as well as they could hit it. When the loader saw Menendez tighten into a firing position, he glanced over his shoulder, tapped on Menendez’s head, and announced “Backblast area clear.” Menendez tracked the target for a few seconds, then gently squeezed the TOW trigger. Rocket motors roared to life, sending the missile speeding toward the advancing tank.
Middletown couldn’t see his IT Vs on the flanks, but the black smoke rising from the three positions told him he had only six vehicles left. The Germans were massing fires, four or five tanks taking on a single ITV. Even at long range their rounds would eventually hit home. But the enemy had turned toward him, determined to eliminate the wasp that had stung and cost him thirty tanks — by Middletown’s count — in less than five minutes. Now the Germans were closing, a great gray wave bearing down on his position. The counterattacking battalions were moving to strike the flank, but it would take them a few minutes. And in a few minutes the Germans would overrun his ITVs.
“Gunner, laze to closest enemy tank.” Again the pause.
“Two-five-three-one meters.”
Long, but within range.
He slewed the turret until he acquired a clear target — a flank shot, too — in his commander’s sight. He’d been a staff officer for a long time, yet the fire commands came back to him as if he were in the Armor Officer Basic Course.
“Gunner-heat-tank. ”
“Identified!” shouted the gunner.
“Up!” came the loader’s cry.
Middletown thought he should set his jaw. Once they fired his tank would be a target. The Germans would shoot back and, as they closed the range, eventually their numbers would tell. He could, in all good conscience, sit back and try to control the battle. If he did nothing, he could increase his chances of surviving — even if all the ITVs bought it. His intervention, his firing, might only take the pressure off one or two who would die in the end anyway.
“Hey, Sir,” said his gunner, “you want me to nail this ’rad son of a bitch or not?”
“You know what we’re gonna get if you pull that trigger?” Middletown asked.
“We know,” said the driver. “But screw it, Sir. After all, who gets out of this life alive anyway?”
“After what they did to the ITVs,” growled the loader, “we oughta bust those bastards wide open.”
“Okay, gang,” Middletown replied, “you’re on.” He grinned. Let’s see how well we do, he thought. For a second he paused, his family’s faces clear in his mind’s eye. June, my wife; Josie, Joe, James — my children — I love you so. If I’ve hurt you, forgive me. Grow to be strong.
“Fire!”
“On the waaaay!”
Middletown’s tank rocked as the round left the tube. A Leopard disappeared in a flash and a cloud of black smoke. Other turrets among the German attackers turned to orient on the muzzle flash.
The forty-four tanks of the 4th Battalion, 23d Armor Firepower Forward battalion — swung out from behind the hill mass into battle formation. The thirty-nine tanks of their sister unit, the 1st Battalion, 12th Armor (the Black Bears), roared up alongside them no more than a minute later. Out of the 102 M1 and M60 tanks that had crushed the track-park fence at Baumflecken the day before, these eighty-three were just about all, save for the few assisting the infantry in the bowl, that Stern had to throw at the Germans.
Lawson checked the readout from the laser range finder. They had just under one thousand meters to cover before the enemy was in range. That should take, Lawson thought, about three minutes.
Two Leopards burned in front of Menendez’s position, his missiles having struck both of them in their thinner side armor. Yet even as the loader shoved one of their two remaining TOW missiles into the fiberglass launcher, One-Three’s turretless form bucked and exploded, two tank rounds penetrating the forward slope of the ITV and shattering the aluminum-alloy hull, splintering it like so much balsa wood. The trio picked themselves up from where they’d thrown themselves to the ground, Menendez gazing down at what was left of One-Three. The hull was gone, only the smoking chassis of the track remained. He slid behind the TOW sight.
“The tank that hit it will be in the clear in a minute.”
Menendez proved right. Thirty seconds later a Leopard tank came into his field of view, its turret traversing slowly back and forth, searching for targets. When the big gun was pointed directly away from him, Menendez squeezed the trigger. The missile left the launcher, aimed at the tank’s turret ring, the vulnerable space between the thickly armored Leopard’s turret and hull.