The loader was pushing at the round. “Goddamn, stupid—”
Enemy machine gun fire pinged off the hull.
“He’s shooting at us!”
“I’m doing my best!” Swanson yelled.
“Don’t hit the fuze!”
“Shut up and let me do it!”
Smoke burst from the enemy’s 47mm gun. Wade cried out as the round glanced off his tank’s beveled armor and whirred away in red-hot pieces. The next shot splintered against Boomer’s glacis plate and rang the tank like a gong.
“Driver,” Austin said. “Get us moving! Balls to the wall!”
Wade joined the loader in swearing until they were howling at each other.
“I’ve got it!” Swanson told him. “You’re up, you’re up!”
Before he could fire, the Char D1 rocked as a round from another M4 passed clean through it. Smoke poured out of the hole in its plate. The tank caught fire.
Nobody bailed out. The poor bastards.
Wade swung the scope. “I need a target.”
“Cease fire,” the commander said.
“Cease fire?”
“It’s over. The French are pulling out.”
Russo belted out, “Allons enfants de la patrie!” The first line of the French national anthem. Clay was cackling.
“We’re alive,” Austin said. “So I guess we did good.”
Wade turned to take in a pale and gasping Swanson slouched behind the breech. Still absorbing what they’d experienced together, they stared at each other. That was one close shave.
Finally, he chuckled. “Yeah. We did all right.”
Swanson sneered back at him. “What? We’re friends now?”
The gunner turned away and clenched his eyes in frustration. Christ, I want to go home. Just get me home.
CHAPTER FIVE
GENERAL CHAOS
PFC Eugene Clay’s nervous laughter faded. “We kicked their ass.”
Nobody cheered. One by one, the stunned tankers opened their hatches and peered out to take in the battle’s aftermath. Clay counted fourteen knocked-out Char D1s scattered across the landscape and pouring smoke into the sky.
On his own side, he counted three losses: an M4, an M3 tank destroyer, and an M3 GMC. He wondered if the crews made it out or if they’d cooked in their armor.
The French survivors were a dust cloud in the distance, and good riddance.
“That was the scrub team,” Sergeant Austin said. “Light tanks, and antiques to boot. Wait until we meet the Germans.”
Victory turned out to be a lot more morose than Clay had pictured it.
He leaned to inspect the glacis plate where the second enemy round had struck. He found a deep pockmark at the center of black scoring. Amazing.
Amazing he was still alive.
He’d volunteered for this. For months, he’d trained with an artillery unit, learning how to shoot howitzers. That hadn’t been good enough for the would-be hero of Mapleton, Pennsylvania. He’d wanted to see action on the front line. He’d wanted to prove himself. He’d pictured homecoming parades in his honor.
And he’d gotten his wish, at least the part about seeing action in a front-line unit. His gung-ho nagging earned him a transfer to 1st Armored and an entry-level job as a bow gunner on an M4 medium tank, where he automatically received a series of colorful nicknames like New Guy, Shithead, and Eight Ball. Swanson showed him the ropes and gave him his first official duty, which was to run to the motor pool and to not come back without a can of squelch and a fallopian tube plug. The hazing eased up after a month, though it never really ended.
It hadn’t mattered. He was going to make a difference and help win the war. He’d thought of the tanks as mobile fortresses that delivered devastating firepower. They were the place to be.
It took only one brief battle to teach him a tank made a big target out in the open, one everybody was shooting at, and that he was about as useful as a fifth wheel on a motorcar. He hadn’t fought in the battle so much as come along as a tourist, his very existence in the hands of other men playing a game of life and death.
Clay shuddered. A wave of exhaustion overtook him. The day was just starting and he hadn’t actually done anything, but he was already spent.
“We did our jobs,” the commander’s voice rang in his headphone. “We gained some experience. And we’re alive. Now let’s get back to it. Driver, clock six left and steady on Boxer. We’re going to try to catch up with the battalion.”
“Roger that, Boss,” Russo said at his station beside Clay’s.
The bog pulled on his goggles and raised his bandana to cover his nose and mouth. “Hey, Shorty. Those rounds hitting us, huh? Crazy!” He patted the tank’s metal, which was already growing warm in the morning sun. “You were right about the armor. It’ll take more than that to hurt our gal.”
Talking tough calmed him, made him forget about how close it had been.
Smiling, he added, “I pity the panzer who wants to go head to head against us.”
The driver winced behind his goggles. “Shut up, Eugene.”
“I was just—”
“If we’d been hit by a panzer’s 75 at that range, we could have been killed.”
He quoted the driver back to him: “The armor is sloped—”
“Just shut up.”
Company B headed north in pursuit of the flying column on its way to assault La Sénia Airfield. Boomer might be in action again within hours. Until then, there was nothing to do except eat dust and think.
Clay sulked. “I’m just trying to stay positive here, man.”
When he was a kid, in the summers, he and his friends often went swimming in Mud Lake. While they splashed and dove, Ralph Wilson swam out toward the middle of the lake on some dumb dare and started floundering. Clay and Mike, his younger brother, stood on the shore watching the whole thing. As the older brother, Clay felt compelled to act first. He broke for the water but froze at the edge. Mike kept going, saved Ralph’s life, and became the gang’s hero, the kid everybody looked up to and followed. That one event marked Clay for life.
For the rest of his youth, he found himself taking bigger and bigger chances, doing crazier and crazier stunts. The other kids started admiring him far more than his kid brother. He didn’t care about that. To complete himself, Clay was looking to repeat the circumstances. He wanted a test where a crisis caught him flat-footed but he acted and did the right thing. The chance for his burgeoning manhood to prove itself in a trial by combat. Before the war, he’d planned to become a police officer, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
At seventeen, he’d lied about his age and enlisted. Instead of fighting the Japanese, he’d be fighting Germans.
“Hey, Shorty, next time we stop, can I drive for a while?” he said.
The driver didn’t answer.
“I said—”
“I heard you the first time. The answer is no.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m driving,” Russo said in his usual loud voice, as if he thought his words might be interesting to the whole platoon. “If we end up on a forced march and I get tired, that’s when you drive.”
“So—”
“Which will never happen. Because while I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how a couple inches of metal barely stopped a giant bullet from killing me. How I’m basically driving a really big magnet.”
“Come on. I have nothing to do here.”
“You can keep your eyes peeled.”
Clay looked around at the giant dust cloud. “Seriously?”