Rage of Battle

terrifying flight with zero visibility in a storm sweeping in over the Ardennes. He had sat, white-knuckled, in the electronic systems operator’s tandem seat in a Luftwaffe Tornado out of Krefeld, eyes closed throughout the 530- mile flight, which the Tornado made in thirty-eight minutes, often flying less than five hundred feet above the ground, courtesy of its contour-scanning radar.

As Norton deplaned, his legs almost buckling under him, the Luftwaffe pilot apologized effusively, telling him, “I am sorry we took so long. But you see, Major, the STO”—by which the pilot meant the Smiths/Teldix/OMI head- up display—”is a little off, you understand, so it was necessary for us to go a little slow.” Adding insult to injury, when Norton arrived at NATO Brest HQ with Freeman’s threat, he discovered that there had been such an uproar from the French public about the dockside strike that the unions were back at work within the hour and the convoy’s supplies were already en route to NATO’s beleaguered Northern Army.

“You wish to go back now?” asked the tired but eager young Luftwaffe pilot.

“No,” said Norton. “I think I’ll sit a while.”

* * *

As he headed farther away from the trucks, following the line of the ditch parallel to the road, David Brentwood heard the swishing noise increasing, and now there seemed to be more than one source of the noise. Skis? He crawled up the sharp incline of the embankment but slid back, a hump under his foot giving way. Looking down, he saw it was a child’s body. He hesitated, held the child’s frozen hand, a little boy. Though not expecting a pulse, David checked anyway. There was none. Realizing he could do no more but unable to leave the tiny corpse, he turned the body facedown, the savagery of it all overwhelming him. Unmarried, no children of his own, he found it difficult to judge how old the little boy might have been, but he guessed no more than five or six.

The swishing noise was louder now, and he thought he saw a flashlight through the thick curtain of the blizzard. He touched the boy’s head, the hair frozen stiff, eyes closed, and was about to make his way up to the top of the embankment again when he noticed several more humps in the snow, scattered along the shoulder of the road. One body, a woman’s, was covered by that of a soldier who had obviously fallen on top of her, trying to protect her. The soldier’s uniform was that of the Bundeswehr. Why the advancing Soviet forces had perpetrated such a massacre, he had no idea. Perhaps it was nothing more than that civilians posed inconvenient delays.

Looking back down the road, he saw four figures with flashlights, the black barrel of their slung weapons in contrast to the falling snow. Sliding back down toward the ditch, he ran for another twenty yards or so, and when, glancing back, he could not see them, he quickly crossed the road, ready to slide down the ditch on the other side. There was none, and so he kept running into a snow-covered field. The unexpected, he told himself again. They would not think of looking for him on the dump side of the road.

He saw the dim shapes of trees about a hundred yards ahead of him, a wood, and at the edge he crawled beneath the snow-laden branches. Looking back across the field, he watched as the search party, four of them now, continued down the road. One of them stopped — looking down at what David guessed must be the child’s body. Damn! He shouldn’t have touched the body, disturbed its blanket of snow, because now they knew—

But then they began moving again, stopped, and turned back. Jesus Christ! he admonished himself. You dumb bastard! You stupid, dumb bastard—

They had seen his footprints, and given the heavy fell of snow, they would know he must have crossed the road shortly before. Heaving himself up under the weight of the coat, he began moving through the woods, then paused. Calm down, he told himself. So they were better-equipped, better-armed— and they were already starting to cross the field, following his footprints toward the wood. But he realized it would be much easier for them to pick up his footprints inside the wood where the snowfall was not nearly so windblown. He turned back toward the edge of the wood, unslung the AKM, thought about himself and Thelman on the range at Parris Island, and eased himself into the prone position, seeing the DI, not shouting for once but calmly telling them, “You’ve got time. Relax. Get your breathing under control. You’re going nowhere — and the enemy’s advancing. Don’t panic and start spraying everything in sight. Waste your ammo. Deep breaths! Stumble-Ass, I said deep breath. Exhale, not all of it. Hold — that’s it. Now squeeze the trigger — not your cock, Thelma. Fire, and don’t keep looking at the target. You’re not at the county fair. No dollies or box of chocolates. Move your aim straight to the next one or he’ll move you. You got that, Stumble-Ass?”

David cupped the barrel in his hands, letting what warmth he had in them thaw the snow that now might be ice inside. He’d come too far to kill himself. If he was to die, they were going to have to do it for him. Far over on his right, down the road, he heard the trucks starting up, the convoy, he expected, warming up, getting ready to head back to the front as soon as loading was completed. He flipped up the rear tangent sight, set it for fifty meters, aligned it with the front protected-post sight, and moved the bayonet scabbard from where it was digging into his belly.

When the first man filled the sight, David squeezed off a burst. Snow fell from a branch overhead from the air vibration and he shifted the AKM to the right, firing again. The first man was already down, the second thrown back till the safety bindings gave on the skis and he toppled into the snow. The other two were down, returning fire, bullets thwacking into the timber above and around him, but so high and wide, he doubted they had any precise idea of his position. Getting up behind the cover of the branches, sticking a twist of handkerchief into the barrel, he headed through the wood toward the dump — if he was still within the dump’s precincts. He was making much better time now, the snow in the woods nowhere as deep as in the field behind him.

In a few more minutes, having left the sporadic fire well behind him, he saw the trees were thinning. He was out of the wood.

“Halt!”

The Stasi trooper had his rifle up. David dropped to the ground as he fired a wide, sweeping burst. The man’s legs buckled, snow flicking up around him, and David felt his left shoulder stinging like crazy. He heard a loud panting noise coming out from the wood — too close for the other two to have caught up with him.

Then he felt the hot rush of air, a flurry of snow. Instinctively his left hand flew up, but the Doberman had it between his teeth, fangs crushing through the thick coat, crunching to the bone. David reached for the AKM but couldn’t find it. He tried to roll the dog over, but the Doberman had him pinned. His left arm bleeding profusely, David shoved his right into the coat’s right hand pocket, felt the lighter, and grasping it with all his strength, flicked the flint. The blue-orange propane flame shot up, and David pushed it at the dog’s eyes. Astonishingly, the Doberman hung on, jaws still clamping down on David’s arm, trying to shake the life out of him. Then suddenly the dog jumped back, skittering a short distance away, his paws frantically wiping his eyes. David saw the stock of the AKM and pulled it toward him. Its barrel was jammed with icy snow. Getting up, he flipped the butt down, lifted the gun by the barrel, and felled the dog.

The voices in the wood behind him were getting closer now. Stumbling through the snow, David reached the dog’s handler, who was making a noise as if he were snoring, something wrong with his breathing. David, almost passing out from the pain in his arm, removed the two M42 screw-threaded stick grenades from the man’s belt, as well as two banana clips of 7.62 millimeter, stuffing them into his coat’s pocket, then headed toward what looked like a barn fifty yards away, a horse trough nearby congealed with ice.

Then, beyond the barn, he saw what he’d been after from the moment he’d seen the Englishman dead in the snow and had asked the oberst permission to bury him. For once the snow was helping, firm underfoot, packed down, presumably by the boots of prisoners as they’d marched in from the trucks. The huge, snow-laden, camouflaged canvas-and-netting roof formed a strikingly beautiful and symmetrically scalloped pattern like the awning of some vast, expensive garden party marquee. Behind him he could hear the two men crossing the field and was about to turn to see if he could spot them when, seventy yards in front of him, away to the left, he heard a truck slowly coming to a stop, and the sound of more dogs. Without hesitating, he fired the whole magazine at the truck, the barrel so hot, the steam rose all around him. The truck’s engine was now in the high whine of reverse. He knew that now was his only chance. The AKM slung over his right shoulder, he ran the fifty yards toward the black wall of fuel drums. Kneeling, unscrewing the stick handle from two grenades, screwing them together, forming a demolition charge, he pulled both pins and threw them as far as he could into the gap between the canvas roof and the stacked fuel drums.

Running fast through the blinding snow, he estimated he would have five seconds. He was wrong. On a three-second fuse, the grenades blew, and the next instant he was lifted off the ground, the force of the explosion throwing him forward at least twenty feet, behind him a mountain of orange fire and dense, black smoke, the air like a desert wind, fantastic shadows playing across the snow, men running farther down the road from rivers of