Next he took two small photographs from his wallet, pictures of Hannah and Rosa taken on the merry-go-round in the park at Dresden, and put them on the pillow beside the schoolteacher’s mass of tangled black hair. She would believe and understand what he said about children and soldiers when she saw the pictures of his daughters.
As he ran to his command car, he was thinking that it wasn’t so important what your country asked you to live for, but what it asked you to die for, and Colonel Karl Jaeger was determined to show the Americans on the hill, soldiers who had denied him the exercise of compassion, that he clearly understood this important distinction.
When he bent to pull open the door of his car, he realized with surprise that he still held the brilliant little angel’s head in the crook of his arm. Why hadn’t he left it in the cellar with the pictures and drawings? It didn’t matter, the angel’s head didn’t matter now. He dropped the ornament on the snowy cobblestones and swung himself behind the wheel of his command car.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
December 23, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Salm. Saturday, 0630 Hours.
The big dog began growling and barking. Docker swept the road and trails to Lepont with his glasses, checking the open stretches and trees wrapped like cotton candy with the swirling fogs, but nothing moved down there and the silence was broken only by the cries of birds and whining winds forcing a passage through the ice-laden trees.
Trankic joined him. “What’s spooking Radar?”
“Nothing that I can see.”
“Look, Bull, Kohler wants to see you.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know, he says it’s important.”
“Christ,” Docker said, and gave Trankic the glasses.
The dog bounded from the revetment and joined Docker as he walked through the snow toward the right flank of their line, where Linari, Kohler and Sonny Laurel manned the machine guns. Docker had posted Schmitzer, Tex Farrel and Dormund to the left flank, leaving Solvis and Jackson Baird at the cannon.
Kohler’s battered face was tense with exasperation. He nodded at Guido Linari. “Sarge, you better make this rupture-head tell you what’s bothering him.”
“Shit, I don’t need no kind of trouble like that,” Linari said.
“What trouble?” Kohler shouted. “That tank comes up here, blows a round up your ass while you’re worrying about some piece back home, that’s trouble.”
“She ain’t no piece. Shorty.”
Sonny Laurel said, “Could I explain it, Guido?” He was trying not to laugh. Docker realized. “That way you didn’t tell anybody, I did.”
A dim understanding glinted in Linari’s eyes. He shrugged. “You wanna tell Docker about it, that’s your business. It don’t matter to me.”
“Sarge, Guido got engaged on his last leave in New York. Now he’s worried because he never told Captain Grant or Lieutenant Whitter about it.”
“Why should he? It’s none of their business.”
Kohler punched Linari on the arm. “That’s what we been trying to tell this ginney bastard.”
Linari said, “Well, I thought... I mean, everything we do is supposed to be written down. Like fuckin’ short-arm inspection. Like you got to put your initial and serial number on your clothes, even a jockstrap if they gave you one. Insurance, your pay, your ma and pa’s names and where they live. It’s all written down, Korbick’s got it all somewhere — so I got worrying about it ’cause I never told anybody. With that tank down there, I figure somebody should know about it.”
“You have a picture of her?” Docker said.
The dog was circling them, whining and yelping, then standing still to bugle across the valley, the echoes coming back mournfully from distant fog-banked peaks. Docker looked over to the revetment where Trankic stood with the binoculars to his eyes.
“She’s in the middle, sarge. That’s her mother next to her.”
Docker took the wallet from Linariand glanced at the photograph tucked behind a celluloid shield, a festive group in tuxedos and long dresses and flowers, the smiles stiff but blurred because the camera was out of focus.
“Her name’s Josefina,Josie Carducci. I known her all my life.” Linari was so pleased to have Docker look at his girl, with Sonny smiling and Kohler pretending to be mad, that he thought of telling them about when he was little and his mother called him “pretty star-baby,” mixing up the words so they came out “Guido bambini, Linari stellini,” and how his father had once explained that he could never be in the second half of the class because their initial L was number twelve in the alphabet, so he would always be in the first half when the teacher called out names. But it was too late now, the sergeant wasn’t looking at Josie anymore, he was watching Trankic.
“I hope it works out great,” Docker said, and started for the revetment. Radar bounding ahead of him and Laurel following him for a few paces.
“You took a load off his mind.”
Docker stopped and looked at the young soldier. “You got any last requests?”
Laurel smiled and pushed his helmet back. The wind and sleet stirred his blond hair. “Sure, sarge. I’m the only guy in the section who’s never had a taste of our famous black whiskey.”
“Well, we can fix that.” Docker uncapped his canteen. “Good health.”
Sonny took a sip of whiskey and almost immediately began to cough. When he could speak, he said hoarsely, “Wow, it’s even worse than Baird said.”
Trankic suddenly waved to them and pointed into the valley, where they now heard a car, the laboring strokes of its motor muffled by the inversion of heavy fog.
Docker ran back to the rocky shelf in front of the revetment. Taking the glasses, he picked up the dark line of the logging road where it cut through the woods and across open fields, tracking it until he focused on the gray shape of the German command car driving at speed toward Mont Reynard. Without lowering his binoculars he said, “If the tank moves out, cover whichever flank it heads for. Make damn sure no one hits the plungers too soon.”
A rising wind swept down the valley, driving patches of fog ahead of it like huge tumbleweeds. Docker lowered his glasses and saw the German officer climbing from his command car and running the last dozen yards toward the great tank.
One of the Tiger II’s treads ground powerfully into the frozen ground, turning the tank and cannon to face the upper slopes of Mont Reynard.
“I say we open up now. Bull. I say it’s about fucking time.”
“Not quite,” Docker said.
Earlier he and Trankic had used local maps and the heights of trees to make rough, visual triangulations, from which they had estimated the distance from their positions down to the floor of the valley as approximately a quarter of a mile — somewhere between four hundred and five hundred yards.
Using Baird’s stats on the tank, they figured the tank’s uphill speed at between ten and fifteen miles an hour. They had calculated that — unless it were stopped by the charges of dynamite — the Tiger II would reach the machine guns on the left or right flank of their position in about sixty seconds. One minute.
The tank was moving forward now in low gear, its laboring engine shattering the silence and its tracks digging deep into the frozen rock, sending trails of sparks spinning through the early morning curtain of mist.
“Christ, don’t cut it too fucking fine. Bull!”