heard his own breathing, the occasional song of a bird, the drone of insects, a frog's croak from some near-by water, the minute clashing of the boughs in the light wind. But there was no sound of steps, no sound of equipment jangling, a rifle bolt being drawn.
He moved away from the road, deeper into the forest, away from where Noah was lying with the hole in his throat, his helmet tilted back away from his forehead on the bed of pink flowers. Michael hadn't thought out his manoeuvre reasonably. He had just felt, almost instinctively, that sticking close to the road would have been bad, would have meant being pinned against an open space, would have made him more visible, since the forest was less dense there.
His heavy boots made a crunching noise on the thick, crisp, dead leaves underfoot and on the hidden, dead twigs. He was annoyed with himself for his clumsiness. But no matter how slowly he went, through the thickening brush, it seemed impossible not to make a noise.
He stopped often, to listen, but there were only the normal late-afternoon woodland sounds.
He tried to concentrate on the Kraut. What would the Kraut be like?
Perhaps, after he'd fired, the Kraut had packed up and headed straight back towards the Austrian border. Two shots, one American, good enough for a day's work at the tail end of a lost war. Hitler could ask no more. Or maybe it wasn't a soldier at all, perhaps it was one of those insane ten-year-old boys, with a rifle from the last war dragged down out of the attic, and all hopped up with the Werewolf nonsense. Michael might come upon a boy with a mop of blond hair, bare feet, a frightened nursery-expression, a rifle three sizes too large… What would he do then? Shoot him? Spank him?
Michael hoped that it was a soldier he was going to find. As he advanced slowly through the shimmering brown and green forest-light, pushing the thick foliage aside so that he could pass through, Michael found himself praying under his breath, praying that it was not a child he was hunting, praying that it was a grown man, a grown man in uniform, a grown man who was searching for him, armed and anxious to fight…
He switched the rifle to his left hand and flexed the fingers of his numbed right hand. The feeling was coming back slowly, in tingling, aching waves, and he was afraid that his fingers would respond too slowly when the time came… In all his training, he had never been instructed how to handle anything like this. It was always how to work in squads, in platoons, the staggered theory of attack, how to make use of natural cover, how not to expose yourself against the skyline, how to infiltrate through wire… Objectively, always moving ahead, his eyes raking the suspicious little movements of bushes and clustered saplings, he wondered if he was going to come through. The inadequate American, trained for everything but this, trained to salute, trained for close-order drill, advancing in columns, trained in the most modern methods of the prophylactic control of venereal disease. Now, at the height and climax of his military career, blunderingly improvising, facing a problem the Army had not foreseen… How to discover and kill one German who has just shot your best friend. Perhaps there were more than one. There had been two shots. Perhaps there were two, six, a dozen, and they were waiting for him, smiling, in a nice orthodox line of rifle-pits, listening to his heavy footsteps coming nearer and nearer…
He stopped. For a moment he thought of turning back. Then he shook his head. He did not reason anything out. Nothing coherent went through his mind. He merely transferred the rifle to his tingling right hand, and kept on, in his thoughtful, rustling advance.
The log that had fallen across the narrow gully looked strong enough. It had rotted a little here and there, and the wood was soft, but it looked thick. And the gully was at least six feet across and quite deep, four or five feet deep, with mossy stones half buried in broken branches and dead leaves along the bottom. Before stepping out on to the log, Michael listened. The wind had died down and the forest was very still. He had a feeling that no human beings had been here for years. Human beings… No, that would be for later…
He stepped out on to the log. He was half-way across when it buckled, tearing, turning slipperily. Michael waved his hands violently, remembering to keep silent, then plunged down into the gully. He grunted as his hands slithered along the rocks and he felt his cheekbone begin to ache immediately where it had slammed against a sharp edge. The splintering log had made a sharp, cracking sound, and when he had hit the bottom it had been with a dull crash and a crackling of dried twigs, and his helmet had bounced off and rapped loudly against some stones. The rifle, he was thinking dully, what happened to the rifle?… He was groping for the rifle on his hands and knees, when he heard the swift rushing sound of footsteps running, running loudly and directly towards him.
He jumped up. Fifty feet away from him a man was crashing through the bushes, staring straight at him, with a gun at his hip, pointing towards him. The man was a dark, speeding blur against the pale green leaves. As Michael stared, motionless, the man fired from his hip. The burst was wild. Michael heard the shots thumping in, right in front of his face, throwing sharp, stinging pellets of dirt against his skin. The man kept running.
Michael ducked. Automatically, he tore at the grenade hanging on his belt. He pulled the pin and stood up. The man was much closer, very close. Michael counted three, then threw the grenade and ducked, slamming himself wildly against the side of the gully and burying his head. God, he thought, his face pressed against the soft damp earth, I remembered to count!
The explosion seemed to take a long time in coming. Michael could hear the bits of steel whining over his head and thumping into the trees around him. There was a fluttering sound in the air as the torn leaves twisted down over him.
Michael wasn't sure, but he thought, with the noise of the explosion still in his ears, he had heard a scream.
He waited five seconds and then looked over the edge of the gully. There was nobody there. A little smoke rose slowly under the overhanging branches and there was a torn patch of earth showing brown and wet where the leaves and mould had been torn away, but that was all. Then Michael saw, across the clearing, the top of a bush waving in an eccentric rhythm, slowly dying down. Michael watched the bush, realizing that the man had gone back through there. He bent down and picked up the rifle, which was lying cradled against two round stones. He looked at the muzzle. It hadn't been filled with dirt. He was surprised to see that his hands were covered with blood, and when he put up his hand to touch his aching cheekbone, it came away all smeared with dirt and blood.
He climbed slowly out of the gully. His right arm was giving him a considerable amount of pain, and the blood from his torn hand made the rifle slippery in his hand. He walked, without attempting to conceal himself, across the clearing, past the spot where the grenade had landed. Fifteen feet further on, he saw what looked like an old rag, hanging on to a sapling. It was a piece of uniform, and it was bloody and wet.
Michael walked slowly to the bush which he had seen waving. There was blood all over the leaves, a great deal of blood. He is not going far, Michael thought, not any more. It was easy, even for a city man, to follow the trail of the fleeing German through the woods now. Michael even recognized, by the crushed leaves and familiar stains, where the man had fallen once and had risen, uprooting a tiny sapling with his hands, to continue his flight. Slowly and steadily, Michael closed in on Christian Diestl.
Christian sat down deliberately, leaning against the trunk of the great tree, facing the direction from which he had come. It was shady under the tree, and cool, but shafts of sunlight struck down through the other foliage and lit, in oblique gold, the tops of the bushes through which Christian had pushed himself to reach this spot. The bark of the tree felt rough and solid behind his back. He tried to lift his hand, with the Schmeisser in it, but the hand wouldn't move the weight. He pushed annoyedly at the gun and it slithered away from him. He sat staring at the break in the bushes where, he knew, the American would appear.
A grenade, Christian thought, who would have thought of that? The clumsy American, crashing like a bull into the gully… And then, out of the gully, a grenade.
Then he saw the American. The American wasn't cautious any more. He walked directly up to him, through the thin, green sunlight. The American was no longer young, and he didn't look like a soldier. The American stood over him.
Christian grinned. 'Welcome to Germany,' he said, remembering his English. He watched the American lift his gun and press the trigger.
Michael walked back to where he had left Noah. The breathing had stopped. The boy lay quiet among the flowers. Michael stared dryly down at him for a moment. Then he picked Noah up, and, carrying him over his shoulder, walked through the growing dusk, without stopping, back to the camp. And he refused to allow any of the other men in the Company to help him carry the body, because he knew he had to deliver Noah Ackerman, personally, to Captain Green.
