When Rourk responded, he betrayed no emotion. "Roger, Three One. We're ready."
Slowly, like an animal sticking its nose out to sniff for danger, Rourk saw the end of the German tank's long 120mm main gun appear from behind the cover of the last house in the village. Then the front fenders, followed by the massive body of the Leopard tank. Finally, when the entire tank was visible, Rourk called out to his gunner, who had been tracking the German. "Not yet, Chuckie, not yet." For a moment, Rourk's gunner wanted to protest, but then stopped when he saw the German tank slow down. "Hold your fire, Chuck. We'll wait until the guy in the ditch begins to climb on board."
The gunner didn't respond to Rourk, calling over to the loader instead. "Billy, you up?"
The loader, watching his commander and gunner, reached over, threw the spent cartridge guard that also served to arm the main gun over to the ready position. Flattening himself against the side of the turret wall, he yelled back. "Yeah, I'm up."
When the German tank came to a complete halt and the German who had been in the ditch began to climb onto the front slope of the tank, Rourk all but whispered his command. "Fire!"
With his sight laid dead on the black German cross that adorned the side of the Leopard's turret, Chuck hit the laser range finder button with his thumb, glanced down at the range readout that showed up at the bottom of his sight picture, and yelled out, "On the way," before he pulled the trigger.
With that, the main gun of Rourk's tank spit out an armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot round. When the depleted uranium penetrator left the muzzle, it was traveling at over a mile a second. Inside, Rourk and his crew felt their M-1A1 tank shrug and lurch as the main gun recoiled, automatically opening the massive breech block, kicking out the small base plate of the expended round. By the time this action was finished, the loader already had a new round in hand, Rourk was sticking his head up out of his open hatch, shouting to the driver to back up as he went, and Chuck, the gunner, was searching for a new target.
There was no need to fire a second round at the German tank. Smacked in the side of the turret with a dart measuring little more than one inch wide and a foot and a half long, made from the densest metal available to man, the German tank was consumed by a catastrophic explosion.
From his position, Ellerbee watched. Two and a half hours of patient waiting had resulted in the destruction of another German tank and the successful completion of his mission. When he was sure that Rourk was well on his way and he saw that there were no Germans in immediate pursuit, he ordered his own driver to slowly back away from their hidden position. They had done what he had been ordered to do, delay the Germans. It would be at least a half hour before the commander of the German unit in the town figured out that their attackers were long gone. By then, both he and Rourk would be in their next position, getting ready to play the deadly game of hide-and-seek with the same German advance guard unit.
In silence, both Colonel Scott Dixon and Colonel Anatol Vorishnov watched as a sergeant from the brigade's intelligence section plotted the latest location of the 1st Panzer Division. With maddening regularity, the sergeant moved the red stickers that represented German tank and infantry companies further and further to the west. With the same maddening regularity, a sergeant from the operations section, paper in hand listing the location of Scott Dixon's tank and infantry companies, would move the blue symbols that represented them on the map to the west and away from the advancing red symbols. Every now and then, a blue symbol would be removed, like a chess piece that had fallen to an opponent's attack.
But these were not chess pieces. Every blue symbol removed represented a unit of fifty to one hundred men and women that had ceased to exist as an effective organization. Without taking his eyes away from the map that the two sergeants were working on, though they now had less than one hundred miles of their long and painful odyssey to go, Vorishnov summed up what Dixon already knew. "We're in trouble."
At first Dixon said nothing. Instead he waited until the two sergeants had completed posting their respective updates and then moved forward to the map. Vorishnov followed. Coming up to Dixon's left, Vorishnov jabbed at the symbol that represented Company C, 1st Battalion, 37th Armor. "This company, because of the terrain, cannot move west. It will soon be forced to move to the south, away from the rest of its parent battalion, if the Germans continue to advance."
Putting his hands in his pockets, Dixon looked at the company symbol, at the German unit symbols closing on it, and then at the other unit symbols scattered about the map. Taking a deep breath, he paused a little longer before he spoke. When he did, his voice betrayed the despair he felt. "And if that happens, ping, the Germans have a free road to the northwest. If the company retreats, it must retreat to the northwest."
Moving his finger down, Vorishnov placed it on another symbol. "That means that this unit, Company C, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, must speed up, get north across the Mittellandkanal, and block the Germans here. Because once the Germans find their route to the northwest blocked, they will simply deflect off the 1st Battalion, 37th Armor, advance to the southwest, and…"
Dixon nodded his head and finished the sentence. "And cut this brigade in half, leaving two battalions north of the Kanal and two south of it."
"Do you think, Colonel, that Major Cerro will be able to get north, across the Kanal?"
Turning to Vorishnov, Dixon looked at him for a moment. "What do you think?"
Without a word Vorishnov looked back at the map, mentally measured the distance that the advancing German units had to cover, then the distance that Cerro's battalion had to cover, before answering Dixon. When he was ready, he looked Dixon in the eye and shook his head. "No. I do not think so."
Dixon looked down. "I agree. Even if they managed to shake that German unit that has been dogging them all the way from Kassel, they wouldn't be able to get everything across the Kanal. The question, then, is what do we do?"
Vorishnov placed one hand over the symbols that represented Dixon's two battalions that were north of the Mittellandkanal, and his other hand over the two that were south of the Kanal. Pulling them apart, he moved the hand over the northern units further north and those south of the Kanal first to the west, and then north to the Kanal. "As much as I hate to say this, you must split your brigade, leaving those who have crossed the Kanal to continue to the north and those south"
"To attempt to cross the Kanal further to the west and follow as best they can."
Dropping his hands to his sides, Vorishnov looked down at his boots, then back up at Dixon. "I am sorry, my friend. I understand what such an order means. But you must face facts." Vorishnov pointed at the map, moving his finger to indicate the units he was talking about. "If you order your 37th Armor to hold its ground, it will be overwhelmed, and you will still lose that company as well as the two battalions in the south. Better to save two battalions for sure than lose one trying to save two that are beyond help. Your four battalions, all of them approaching half strength and exhausted from the long march north, are no match for the full-strength well-rested battalions of the 1st Panzer Division. To make a stand would be to risk everything, even the uncommitted battalion in the north." Stepping back, Vorishnov allowed his observations to sink in.