Shmuel took a quick look around. He made out men scattered across the dark field, and, beyond, a looming bank of pines. All was silence under the towers of stars. It was so different now. He looked for landmarks, for clues, for help. He felt suddenly useless.
“This way, c’mon,” hissed Leets, unlimbering his automatic gun, trotting off. Shmuel ran after.
Yes, yes, it really was the firing range. The shed bobbed up ahead, and he reached the concrete walkway. Then he saw the lamps in the trees; he remembered: they’d almost killed him.
Leets joined a crowd of whispering men, while Shmuel stood off to one side. Other shapes rushed by. Groups were forming up, leaders gesturing to unattached people. Shmuel could hear guns being checked and cocked, equipment adjusted.
Then Leets returned.
“You feel okay?”
“It’s so strange,” Shmuel said. A half-smile creased his face.
“You stick with me. Don’t get separated. Don’t wander off or anything.”
“Of course not.”
“Any shooting, down you go, flat. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. Leets.”
“Okay, we’re moving out.”
The soldiers began to move down the road.
It looked familiar, like something luminous from childhood that, seen finally through an adult’s eyes, revealed itself tawdry, fraudulent. A spring camouflage pattern had been added to the buildings so that now they showed the shadowy patterns of the forest, but otherwise Anlage Elf looked unchanged.
He was amazed more at the stillness of the composition than the composition itself: hard to believe those dark trees that circled the place concealed hundreds of squirming men.
Leets, beside him, whispered, “Research? The big one in the middle?”
“Yes.”
“And SS to the left?”
“Yes.” Shmuel realized Leets knew all this, they’d gone over it a hundred times; Leets was talking out of his own nervous energy or excitement.
“Any second now,” Leets said, looking at his watch.
Shmuel guessed that meant any second till a circle was closed around the place, like a noose. All exits cut off, all guns in place.
Leets was rubbing his hands in excitement, peering into the dark. Shmuel could see the fellow fight hard to restrain himself.
The report of the first shot was so abrupt that it shocked Shmuel. He flinched at it. Or was it a shot? It sounded muffled and indistinct. Yes, shot, for Leets’s intake of breath was sudden and almost painful, pulled in, the air held. Then came a clatter of reports, more shots. They all seemed to come from inside Anlage and Shmuel did not see why. Glancing around at the others in the trees, he made out baffled faces, men searching each other’s eyes for answers. Curses rose, and someone whispered hoarsely, “Hold it, hold—!” cut by a loud krak! from nearby. “Goddamn it, hold your—” someone shouted, but the voice was lost in the tide of fire that rose.
All wrong. Even Shmuel, not by furthest reach of imagination a military man, could telclass="underline" volley all ragged and patchy, tentative. Bullets just streaking out into the dark, unaimed.
Yet it was beautiful. He was dazzled by the beauty in it. In the dark, the gunflashes unfolded like exotic orchids, more precious for their briefness at the moment of blossom. They danced and flickered in the trees and as they rose in intensity, pulling a roar from the ground itself, the air seemed to fill with a sleet of light, free-floating streaks of sheer color that wobbled and splashed through the night. He felt his mouth hang dumbly open in wonder.
Leets turned to him. “All fucked up,” he said darkly. “Some bastard let go too early.”
Nearby, an older man shouted into a telephone, “Crank ’em up, all sections, get those people in the assault teams in there!”
Shmuel understood that the battle had prematurely begun, and reached its moment of equipoise in the very first seconds.
Leets turned to him again.
“I’m going in there. Stay here. Wait for Tony.”
The American raced off, into the blizzard.
Leets rushed in, not out of courage so much as to escape the rage and frustration. He ran out of sheer physical need because in not running there was more pain, because the neat surgical operation that he had envisioned as the fitting end to this drama, to Anlage Elf, to Repp, to the Man of Oak, was now lost forever, dissolving into a pell-mell of indiscriminate fire. Susan had wished him dead; he’d risk it then, her curse echoing in his mind.
He entered a terrible world, its imagery made even keener by the gush of his own adrenaline. He ran into a riot of angry pulsing light and cruel sounds and hot gusts of air and needles of stirred dust. His lungs soon ached from the effort of breathing, he began to lose control of the visions that came his way: it was all pure sensation, overwhelming. It made no sense at all. Smoke billowed, tracers hopped insolently around, screams and thumps filled the air without revealing their sources. He felt as if he were in the middle of a panoramic vista of despair, a huge painting comprised of individual scenes each quite exact, yet overall meaningless in their pattern. He found himself hunching behind a coil of barbed wire, watching a German MG-42—that high, ripping sound as the double-feed pawls and rollers in the breech-lock mechanism really chewed through the belt — knock down Americans. They just fell, lazily, slumping sleepily to the ground; you had to concentrate to remember that death was at the end of the tumble. He became aware of the taste and texture of the dirt on his tongue and lips as he tried to press even closer into the loam, tracers pumping overhead. He saw running Germans flattened one-two-three by teen-agers with wild haircuts and tommy guns. Men in flames zigged in their own terrible light, frenzied, from a burning building. He crawled frantically over cratered terrain, sprawling comically in a pit for safety and there found another sanctum-seeker, half a grin spilling ludicrously across half a face. If this battle had a narrative, or a point of view, he was not a reader of it. In fact, he really didn’t take part in it. He hadn’t fired his weapon, the only Germans he saw close up were dead ones and nobody paid him any attention. Again, he was a visitor. For him it was mostly rolling around in the dirt, hoping he didn’t get killed. He did nothing especially brave, except not run.
At one point, after what seemed hours of aimless crawling, he found himself crouching with a group of shivering paratroopers in the shelter of a shot-out blockhouse. Fire clattered and jounced hotly off the wall, and from somewhere up ahead, an insane sergeant howled at them to come on up and do some shooting.
“You go,” a boy near him said.
“No, you go,” said his friend.
“Hey, lookit this neat German gun,” someone said.
“Hey, that’s worth some money.”
“Fuck, yes.”
Leets saw the man had an MG-42; he was crawling out of the blockhouse.
“Hey, it’s broke,” someone said.
“No,” Leets said. “That gun fires so fast they change barrels on it. They were in the middle of a change. That’s why it looks all fucked up.”
The barrel seemed to be hanging out of a vent in the side of the cooling sleeve.
“Go on back in. There ought to be a leather case around in there somewhere. About two feet long, with a big flap.”
The kid ducked in and came out again with it.
“Okay,” said Leets. He took the barrel pouch and drew a new barrel out.
“Gimme the gun,” he said. “I think I can fix it.”