Farrel told Baird to wait at the revetment and went out to the edge of the precipice, where Docker was studying the dark valley.
“Sarge, Baird wants to talk to you. You want to blame somebody, blame me. He asked me if it’d be okay and I said sure.”
“What made you so sure?”
“Because I know what he’s thinking and I figure you’d want to hear it.”
After another sweep of the slopes. Docker gave the binoculars to Farrel and walked to the revetment, where Baird was waiting for him.
He noticed that despite the raw weather and driving winds, Baird was pale, the bruises on his cheeks standing out darkly. The youngster handed him several sheets of ruled notepaper, an uneasy smile on his damaged lips.
“Will you just look at them, sergeant?”
“First, let me ask you something. Before Trank unloaded on you, you started to say something. What was it?”
“Well, I wanted to tell you I didn’t think the tank is after this gun position. There’s too much firepower and rank down there. So it has to be that experimental aircraft we shot down. That colonel is here to retrieve it or destroy it.”
“If that’s true, then why in hell doesn’t he get on with it? Why not just knock us off and complete his mission?”
“If you’ll look at those notes, sergeant, maybe you’ll see what I mean.”
Docker nodded and snapped on his pocket flashlight and in its slender column of illumination saw that the sheets were covered with diagrams and penciled notations in Baird’s cramped, precise handwriting. After reading them twice and studying them for another moment or so in silence, he looked at Baird. “Where’d you get the specifications on the Mark II?”
“Some I knew from before, some I remembered from ID manuals in basic training. They could be off a fraction of an inch, but not enough to make a real difference.”
Docker spread the pages on top of the revetment wall and secured them against the tugging winds with his helmet and leather gloves.
“It could work, sergeant. I know it.”
Docker rubbed a hand over his head and felt the snow-flakes melting in his hair.
“Maybe it could, Baird.” Still, Docker felt little conviction about making the decision facing him, and worse, he wasn’t sure he even had the right to make it. A battle plan that could cost them their lives and this hill, that’s what Baird was proposing — Private Jackson Baird, a distraught eighteen-year-old whose knowledge of warfare had come almost completely from books and pictures... With his plans they would be facing a Tiger Mark II commanded by a field-grade officer who had probably been leading tanks and men for a decade or more... Docker hadn’t been deceived by the German colonel’s talk of linguistic priorities and Goethe and Schiller. Another reality was represented in the gold clasp Jaeger wore on the left breast of his tunic, the Nahkampfspange with its oak leaves and swastikas, the close-combat decoration awarded only to soldiers who had survived fifty hand-to-hand encounters with the enemy. He had seen that clasp when Jaeger looped the silk scarf about his neck, and he had seen only one before — on the torn jacket of a dead commander in the Afrika Korps...
Docker now used a pencil to trace the diagrams on the pages, checking the distance Baird had estimated between various points to their position. And watching the sergeant, it seemed to Baird that the inside of his head was as white as the snow spinning around them, a billowing expanse streaked and colored with names and memories. It was a remembered childhood sensation, the springs inside his body coiling painfully with anxious thoughts of examinations and grades, muscles tightening at the prospect of not making the cut on athletic squads or failing to hold fire when hen birds were walked up in the meadow by his father’s gunning parties, dreading the fear of hearing his shotgun go off without a single cock bird in the sky above them, scarlet against the clouds. His constant effort to measure up to somebody’s else’s standards had always trapped him between what was expected of him and what he could accomplish on his own, suspending him between equally demanding, and impossible, alternatives... He recalled now regiments and flags and medals and battles he had studied as a child in his dormer room on the third floor of their home in Virginia, turning pages of spidery maps and brilliant pictures until he fell asleep, and always knowing that the morning would be gloomy or sunny depending on how accurately and rapidly he answered his father’s questions at breakfast about those yellowing manuscripts and engravings—
“Couple of things I’m not sure about,” Docker said, and Baird felt his heart pounding in tense anticipation, as it might have when Jonathan Baird turned from the sideboard, shoulders and silvery head silhouetted against the frosted windows to say, “What you seem to forget about Grant, son, is what he learned at...” or “The element of surprise on the battlefield means very little unless it creates chaos. Don’t confuse surprise with the merely unexpected...”
“There are just too damned many assumptions here,” Docker was saying.
“But they’re all logical, aren’t they?”
Baird’s theory was that the reluctance of the German commander to attack was based on two factors: One, by what he did know about the strength of their gun position. And two, by what he didn’t know. According to Baird, it had to be assumed that the German tank crew knew there was an antiaircraft cannon on the top of Mont Reynard. Nonetheless, they couldn’t risk a frontal attack because of a structural weakness in their tank’s armor, a weakness noted in specifications Baird had remembered from United States Army manuals.
He had written out these specs on one of Solvis’ ruled sheets of notepaper. They read: “Panzerkampfwagen VIB, Tiger Mark II with Porsche turret; Weight: 80 tons; Crew: 5. Height: 10 feet, 6 inches; Width: 12 feet, 5¾ inches (with wide tracks) and 10 feet, 8¾ inches (with narrow tracks). Length: 36 feet, 8 inches. Engine: one Maybach HL 230 P.30 inline, 600 hp; Speed: 30 mph on roads and 12 mph cross-country; Range: 106 miles on roads and 75 miles cross-country; Armament: one 8.8cm KWK43L/71 gun (88-mm cannon) with 80 rounds, and three 7.92-mm machine guns with 5,850 rounds; Armor: hull front 150-mm (6 inches), turret armor, 200-mm (8 inches), decking, sides and rear armor: 100-mm (4 inches).”
Baird had underlined the final specification with double pencil strokes.
“BELLY ARMOR: 40MM (1-¾ INCHES).”
“If he comes straight up the hill at us, he’s got to risk—”
“Yes, goddamn it, I can see that much.”
“Then the rest of it makes sense. The German officer doesn’t know what else we’ve got up here. Wellington said all warfare was just finding out what’s over the next hill. You can see his problem. He can’t attack our center, not with real confidence, and he won’t risk attacking our flanks because he doesn’t know what we’ve got in reserve. That’s why he’s trying to con us into surrendering. My father told me once—”
“Baird, will you forget about Wellington who’s been dead a few hundred years? And your father who’s a million miles away in the Pacific?” Docker tried to light a cigarette but the tobacco was soggy and wouldn’t burn. He threw it aside and said quietly, “Okay, what did your father tell you?”
“He said he could look at the order of battle on a map and guess the grade of the officers who’d planned it. The higher the rank, the stronger the reserve — that’s what my father told me. Generals, he said, always keep a lot of strength close to their headquarters. So if we show that German commander everything we’ve got, flank the cannon with our machine guns, he’ll think we’re committing all our resources to defend the edge of the precipice. That kind of recklessness is what a field-grade officer would expect from a gun section with noncoms in charge.”