Private Tubby Gruber saw them first as they came out of the woods and down a twisting lane that brought them to the road where they stopped and stared at the soldiers. “Hey, corporal!” Gruber swung his M-1 around to cover an old man in a black overcoat and a little girl whose face was almost completely concealed by a coarse red scarf. The man carried a burlap sack in one hand, and with his other had a firm grip on the child’s shoulder. As he stared and blinked at the Americans, standing now and silhouetted against the valley, his smile became uncertain.
“Yanks,” he said. “Yanks. Amis...”
“That’s right, Yanks.” Larkin’s eyes swept the woods behind the bearded man and the small girl. Nothing moved except the swaying crowns of the winter-black trees. The silence was broken only by a distant cry of birds.
“All right, get this the first time.” Larkin stared at the three private soldiers. “I don’t want any more fucking snowball fights and no more goddamn talk about who pounded John Doe’s ears down to his hips. Keep your mouths shut and your eyes open.”
In English and then halting French Larkin tried to find out where the pair had come from, but the old man only nodded at the questions, repeated the words “Yank” and “Amis,” and then held out the burlap bag.
Larkin took the sack and spilled its contents on the ground — potatoes, leeks, bunches of shriveled carrots and a half dozen large purple and white turnips. The old man studied him and made an age-old gesture with his thumb and forefinger.
“Maybe we can do some business later, pop,” Larkin said, and jerked a thumb at Gruber. “Go get Docker, he can talk to this guy.”
When Gruber started up the slopes, the man pulled a brown bottle from his coat pocket and offered it to Larkin with a tentative smile. Larkin nodded his thanks, but then noticed that the child was staring off across the valley, her dark eyes very round and intent.
Glancing in the same direction, Larkin saw — or believed he saw — a slim flash of light on the horizon, a fiery ball that disappeared almost instantly into a background of driving sleet and low black clouds.
“You see that, Kohler?” Larkin said.
“I see what?”
“Something funny across those fields. Some kind of light.”
But Kohler hadn’t seen anything strange in those shifting gray mists. Nor had Spinelli.
From where he stood on an adjacent flank of the hill. Corporal Schmitzer looked through his binoculars and watched Tubby Gruber hiking up to the ridge, where Dormund was building a fire and the sergeant was standing with Gelnick, whose nickname, Schmitzer thought, was pretty goddamn appropriate. The Hogman... Swinging his binoculars the other way, Schmitzer saw Larkin talking to some farmer and a kid wearing a bright scarf.
“Hey, corporal, what do you think that was?”
Schmitzer lowered the binoculars and looked at Sonny Laurel. “What do I think what was?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
Sonny Laurel pointed to a stand of trees on the horizon where the winds were rising and the snow and fogs were torn into shreds by the force of convulsively spinning thermals.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I’m not sure. It was like a flash of light behind those trees.”
Schmitzer looked at the black trees that were in shrouded relief against the white mountainside. “Could be you’re getting snow-blind. Happened to us in the desert in Tunisia from the heat on the sand. What they call an optical delusion.”
“No, I saw it, whatever it was.”
Schmitzer frowned and wondered what Laurel might have seen behind that stand of dark trees. He knew the Russians had developed multiple rocket launchers called “Katyushas” — recoilless weapons firing thirty-six to thirty-eight projectiles simultaneously. He had read they were called “Stalin’s organ music,” which was probably a lot of crap, a cozy nickname for the dumb peasants. But Schmitzer knew the nearest Russians were at least a thousand miles north and east of there, so it was damned unlikely there were any rocket launchers in the Ardennes.
“You sure you didn’t hear nothing. Sonny?”
“Not a sound. It went by so fast, it looked like a bolt of lightning on its side.” Laurel pushed his helmet back and absently rubbed his fair, curly hair, staring at the trees where he had seen the streaking lights. “I don’t know, corporal, I never saw anything moving that fast before.”
Corporal Schmitzer had been in the army almost five years. With a gut instinct for survival, he knew that staying alive now depended to a significant extent on how much their section could rely on these youngsters; but standing stiff and heavy in the spiraling snow, Schmitzer was betrayed by a distracting thought, a wish that his father and brother and Uncle Ernie could have had some of his guts and instincts.
Pushing those shadows from his mind, Schmitzer said, “Laurel, you damn sure you didn’t hear anything — no engines, no prop-vibes, no nothing?”
“I may be wrong but I don’t think so, corporal.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. You could be trying too hard.”
Goldilocks, that’s what the youngsters in the section called Sonny Laurel, Schmitzer knew... Goldilocks because of his blond hair and his slim, quick-moving body, and the blue eyes that got darker when he was serious or worried about something, working on the guns or writing letters home. Laurel always looked fresh and clean even with a fine beading of sweat on his forehead and throat.
Telling him to stay alert, Schmitzer walked abruptly off into the fogs, knowing that what he was feeling would embarrass or disturb the boy if it showed in his face or eyes.
Chapter Two
December 11, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Monday, 1700 Hours.
The sergeant climbed into the jeep and drove to the base of the ridge where Larkin was waiting with the old Belgian and the little girl.
The pair stood close together, watching Docker anxiously through a darkness relieved now by only a filigree of white snowflakes. The sergeant could see the girl’s intent eyes, round and polished like marbles, and the jagged black bangs on her forehead, but the lower half of her face was concealed by a red wool scarf. The old man looked to be in his sixties, short and stocky with ragged gray hair and chin whiskers. His dark overcoat was worn at the lapels and elbows, but his woolen cap struck an incongruous note of cheer, coarse and white with a blue tassel that hung down alongside his tobacco-stained whiskers. It was the only cheerful thing about them, Docker thought, because they were both obviously afraid, the old man like a dog at a strange campfire, eyes tense and wary, his old body coiled as if to dodge a blow.
“He wants a hundred francs for them,” Larkin said, nodding at the heap of vegetables. “The bottle of booze is on the house, I guess.”
“Fair enough.” Docker glanced at Spinelli and Kohler. “You guys got some chocolate for the kid?”
Shorty Kohler took half a D-bar from his field jacket and offered it to the girl, but she wouldn’t take it, hiding her hands in the scarf and pressing closer to the old man.
“Comment s’appelle?” Docker said.
The sergeant had learned French from his mother, who had grown up in Montreal, but she had died in an automobile accident when he was ten and so his knowledge of the language was limited to a simple vocabulary and a few songs and nursery rhymes.