“All right, Chet, what did you see tonight?”
“Look, sarge, where’d you get hit in Sicily?”
“A place called Licata, the fourteenth of July, by a sniper I didn’t see. I’ve told you that. Now cut this fucking crap. Did you see the same thing Larkin and Sonny Laurel reported to me tonight?”
Docker was on to him now, Dormund knew, and that brought a guilty heat to his face. But he wasn’t going to tell him, not about a shape in the air that looked like it didn’t have propellers, because that was crazy and if he told Sarge they’d get on him about it with the jokes that really scared him, about Trankic making a new head for him...
It had started in basic training. Trankic got mad at him about something and threatened to make a new head for him out of a tin can. Dormund remembered watching with growing nervousness while Trankic, with a big metal shears, cut and fashioned a mouth and eyes in a number ten can he’d got from the mess sergeant. Dormund knew it wouldn’t work, it was crazy, but it scared him anyway when the other guys laughed and Trankic began welding nuts and bolts and cartridge casings inside the big can. One night, after some beers, Trankic, to Dormund’s great relief, dumped the tin can and its contents into the trash bins behind the mess halls. But the fear stayed with Dormund and he’d decided to be sure to keep out of trouble after that and try not to attract attention...
Avoiding Docker’s eyes now, he said, “I didn’t see any wretched thing, sarge. I was getting the wretched chow ready. That’s a fact.”
Footsteps sounded on the frozen ground as Trankic walked up toward them from the guns. “Laurel’s getting something on the radio,” he said. “You better check it out. Bull.”
Sonny Laurel and Kohler stood at the jeep listening to a mix of static and voices sounding from the X-42. When Trankic and Docker joined them, Laurel said, “I thought it was England, sarge, because it was a British voice. But that faded away to this.”
They heard a sibilant voice saying, “Amis, amis...” A brief tempest of static, then a new voice, a deeper voice saying, “Venez—” After another eruption, the French word for “come” was repeated several times.
Then they distinctly heard the words “La Chance, La Chance...”
“What’s it mean. Bull?”
“I don’t know. But La Chance means luck...”
After a stretch of whistling and windy silences, there was a German word, spoken by a voice they hadn’t heard before.
The word was “Vergeltung,” followed by the numeral four in French, repeated three times — “quatre... quatre... quatre...” Then came an initial and numeral — “V-quatre.” And again the word: “Venez...”
Docker knew the German word “Vergeltung” meant “vengeance,” and knew also that the Germans presently had two operational V-weapons, the pilotless V-1 buzz bombs and the V-2 rockets, which had been pounding Liège and Antwerp and most of England for months.
And the V-3, Docker knew, had been a quarter-mile system of cannons emplaced in massive concrete bunkers at Calais, designed to fire salvos into the heart of London at twelve-second intervals. Allied bombers had destroyed the V-3 emplacements before the systems were functional.
The next burst of words listed French and Belgian towns — Malmédy, Nancy, Lepont, Houffalize — and spaced emphatically between these place names were the repeated initials and numerals: V-4... V-4... V-4...
The broadcast was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Corporal Larkin, who swayed drunkenly around the side of a truck near the jeep, a canteen of whiskey in his hand and only one arm through a sleeve of his overcoat so that it trailed behind him on the ground like a long, muddy skirt.
“I’ll tell you assholes something,” he was shouting.
Docker cut him off with an angry gesture. “Goddamn it, shut up!”
“I’ll tell you fuckers why Gelnick burned his fancy uniform,” Larkin said, and in tipping his head back to drink from the canteen he lost his balance and fell in a tangle of arms and legs against the side of the truck, and from there in a heap to the ice-splintered ground.
Docker told Kohler and Sonny Laurel to take him back to the jeep and when they were gone, the sergeant and Trankic bent their heads again to the sputtering radio. They listened for another hour in the stinging winds until the set went dead, but in that time they heard only bursts of static and the word “luck” repeated over and over again in French, and Docker could only hope that this was an omen for all of them that night, the fifteen soldiers detached and isolated in the vast white storms over the Ardennes.
Chapter Three
December 12, 1944. Koblenz, Germany. Tuesday, 1900 Hours.
With an escort of flanking motorcycles, the convoy of military vehicles drove at speed through the blacked-out and empty streets of Koblenz, an industrial city fifty miles from the eastern borders of Belgium. In the first three cars with their drivers and aides were General Hasso Frieherr von Manteuffel (Fifth Panzer Army), General Erich Brandenberger (Seventh Army) and General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich (Sixth SS Panzer Army).
Trailing the tri-axled Mercedes-Benz command cars at orderly intervals were a dozen more staff vehicles carrying twenty-two generals of varying ranks who commanded the corps and divisions of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B.
Security was maximum. Each intersection was guarded by troops from Department Four of the Reich Security Division, the Geheime Staats Polizei (Gestapo). Batteries of Panzer-IV tanks stood at alert formations in the fields and squares along the convoy’s line of march. Antiaircraft cannons, 88-millimeter giants, had been em-placed at quarter-mile intervals along the route of the command cars.
The illumination was ghostly. Headlights tinted a deep night-blue made the curving roads barely visible in the diffused glow that glinted through spirals of heavy sleet and snow.
At a village the convoy was halted by details of Schutzstaffel (SS) troops standing guard near rows of parked trucks, swinging blackout lanterns.
There the generals and aides were escorted to trucks and when tailgates had been secured, the vans moved out on a circuitous route designed to bring them, after dozens of miles and many deliberately confusing stops and turns, to a courtyard facing a massive bunker built against the side of a mountain outside the city of Ziegenberg in Hesse — temporary headquarters of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the “headquarters” being defined by the presence of the Reichsführer of Germany, Adolf Hitler...
Colonel Karl Jaeger climbed across the tailgate of the truck that had brought him through the winter night from Koblenz. Dropping lightly onto the packed snow covering the courtyard, he gave an arm to his superior officer, Generalmajor Heinrich Kroll, a ranking commander of the Second SS Panzer Division (Das Reich) of General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army.
Karl Jaeger’s rank was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, but since Jaeger was a member of the SS Armed Forces, his title was that of an Obersturmbannführer, Waffen SS. (In the diaries of Edward G. Solvis, there is no mention of Jaeger’s Waffen SS rank; he is referred to as “the Lieutenant Colonel” and on some occasions simply as “the Colonel.”)
The convoy was quickly emptied of its high-ranking cargo.
Double ranks of SS troops were stationed at the entrance to the massive bunker, rifles at port arms, standards straining in high winds behind them. The Führer’s personal flag was prominent, a swastika circled in gold leaf with a golden eagle in each quadrant. Flanking these pennants were flags displaying single black swastikas against fields of white and scarlet, emblems of the First Company of the SS Leibstandarte, the Führer’s personal bodyguard.