Trankic took Docker’s hands and pressed them around his canteen. “Go ahead, take a drink.”
Docker tried to sit up but the effort was too much for him; his head rang and his eardrums throbbed with pain.
Trankic’s broad face was swollen, his eyes bloodshot and angry. “They didn’t give it to us on a fucking platter, Bull. The kid here and Sonny.”
Docker was sprawled on the rocky ground behind the cannon. He drank a mouthful of black whiskey and gave the canteen back to Trankic. The gash in his forehead ached, and the wind was like sandpaper against it. He put both hands under him and stood up, feeling groggy and sick. The big dog circled him, whining anxiously. On the wet cold wind was the stench of cordite.
Docker looked up at the cannon. “Oh, Jesus!”
Jackson Baird’s body hung in the metal seat beside the cannon’s breechblock, boots swinging slowly in the wind. The boots were caked with mud, shoelaces white with frost and snow. A piece of shrapnel had pierced the front of Baird’s helmet and had come out the back of it.
Docker walked stiffly from the revetment to the rim of the hill, where Solvis and Farrel stood together, dazed with shock.
Schmitzer knelt beside the body of Sonny Laurel, whose face looked clear and tranquil in the thin light. There seemed to be no mark on him, only dark patches of blood on the front of this fatigue jacket.
Docker felt drained. The wound in his forehead throbbed. He could hear it as well as feel it, but in the falling snow everything else was weirdly still... until from far below, he heard a distant motor. The pounding in his ears made it impossible to tell, though, whether it was traveling toward or away from them.
On the hillside a dozen yards from the wreckage of the tank, Docker now saw the sprawled body of the German commander, a sheen of snow already gathering on his greatcoat and black boots. And below him was another body in German uniform, a twisted heap on the mountainside.
Docker turned to Solvis. “Where’s Linari and Dormund?”
“They went to heat up some water.”
Farrel said, “At first Kohler thought Sonny didn’t look so bad. He said some sulfa and hot water was all—” He rubbed his lips. “Then we opened his jacket.”
Docker saw that the German officer had raised his head and was staring up at him. He told Farrel to watch for the vehicle he’d heard and started down the hill, arms raised against the backlash of thornbushes, climbing over the heaps of earth and rock churned up by the Tiger II and the dynamite charges.
He stopped near the tank and looked down at Karl Jaeger. A vivid burn was on the left side of the man’s face, his lips were flecked with blood.
“My soldiers...” He turned and pointed to the smoldering tank. “In God’s name, do what I can’t, sergeant... do you understand?”
There was no way to open the fused turret of the tank, no way to get the German crew out of it. And if they were still alive. Docker thought, they didn’t deserve that final ordeal. No one did. He unholstered his .45 and walked to the tank and fired four spaced rounds through a vision-slit into the interior of the Tiger II. And hearing the bullets ricocheting inside the metal walls of the tank, he remembered with the therapeutic irrelevance of shock a demonstration he had once witnessed at Fort Benning: one round from an M-1 rifle fired into a Sherman had made nine hundred and forty separate gashes against the white paint on the insides of the tank.
Smoke drifted from the tank’s turret and flames flickered on the heavy gray armor, the light glowing yellow in the snow. The echoing sound from the bullets had intensified the ache in Docker’s ears, but he could still hear a vehicle somewhere in the valley.
Jaeger told him, “You can shoot me if you like. But I’ll be dead soon enough.”
Docker put the .45 back in its holster.
“I can’t repay you.” The words were soft, blurred. “I have nothing left—”
“For God’s sake, there’s nothing I want from you.”
Jaeger thought of his wife and daughters, grateful for this instant to think of them before he died. Then another thought forced him to raise himself on one elbow. “But there is something I can give you.”
“Look, colonel, just go ahead and die” — he thought of Laurel and Baird — “it’s what you wanted, goddamn it. You sent your tank straight up at our cannon...”
Staring up the hill, he listened to the approaching vehicle, louder as it turned off the road toward their gun position. It was an American jeep, and it stopped now near the revetment, and Docker saw an officer climb out and return Trankic’s salute—
“I give you righteousness,” Jaeger broke in. “It’s very useful. We have had it and I know.” His face tightened with pain. “But it is also a very great burden...”
The other members of Section Eight had joined the American officer and Trankic on the rock shelf in front of the revetment. The blackout headlights on the jeep cut pale tunnels through the falling snow and transformed the flakes into a froth of radiance.
The men of the section now stood facing an American officer who leaned against the hood of his jeep, a boot hooked on the bumper and a Browning automatic rifle slung over his shoulder...
“Sergeant, listen to me,” Karl Jaeger was saying.
Docker saw that the German officer’s expression had changed; the smile, fixed against what must have been awful pain, had gone, and as he listened to the voices floating on the winds from the revetment, a frown replaced it... “Since you are probably the last person I will ever talk to, I want you to know this. I am a husband, the father of two small girls. My home is in Dresden.” The words were slurred again but held a sudden intensity. “I haven’t lived what you would call a casual or flexible life. Condemn me if you wish, but at least I’ve lived by the rules.” Jaeger shifted his weight to one elbow and looked up the hill. “By my rules, I have been a good soldier. And for these reasons, I would like to make one last request of you.”
“What?” Docker said, still staring up at the officer and his men.
“I wish to surrender my sidearm to you. We cannot speak of mercy, we can leave that to diplomats. But it would be merciful of you to accept it.”
Docker held out his hand, at the same time trying to isolate and identify the source of his sudden anxiety.
Jaeger barely managed to unsnap the flap of his holster. Play-acting and charades, he thought bitterly; reducing it all to sham and masquerade, destroying whatever dignity battle might have with caperings more fit for a harlequinade than honest war, the trade of kings... And he thought of the bedroom in Dresden, not of the eiderdown on the bed or his love for Hedy, but of the trophies on the dresser that he had won in shooting contests as a cadet...
The officer on the hill was giving commands. “Okay, let’s line up there, men. Forget about Sally Rand freezing her tits out here...”
Jaeger drew his Luger from its holster and extended it butt-first to Docker, his eyes never moving from the officer in the American uniform who stood above them bracketed by the jeep’s headlights.
Something in the intensity of this dying German officer’s expression sounded another warning to Docker—
“That man is out of uniform, sergeant,” Jaeger said abruptly.
And as Waffen SS Captain Walter Brecht unslung his automatic rifle, Docker shouted a warning to his men. But before the first echoes of his voice sounded on the sleeting winds, Jaeger had reversed the Luger and fired three shots up the hill — shots, which struck “Der Henker” in the face and formed a pattern there so compact and tidy it could have been covered by the hand of a child.
The two of them died at almost the same instant — Brecht collapsing at Trankic’s feet, the BAR slipping from his arms... Karl Jaeger alone, finding a unity at last in the darkness that came to him on the slopes of Mont Reynard.