with its headlights on. It had to be a friendly. Didn’t it? Reynolds snapped out an order. “Pass the word to all platoons: hold fire!”
He didn’t want to start his war by killing allied soldiers by mistake.
The vehicle slowed and stopped just outside Alpha Company’s perimeter. It was a Humvee. One man slid out from behind the wheel and came forward with his hands up to show he was unarmed. Guided by 1st Platoon soldiers who kept their guns on him just in case, Lt. Col. Ferdinand Irizarri made his way to the foxhole where Reynolds and the others were waiting.
“Those are Polish tracks out there, Colonel?” Reynolds asked.
“Yes.” Irizarri’s mouth tightened as he filled them in. Hit first by heavy artillery and then by at least a brigade-sized attack on a battalion-sized frontage, the Polish outfit he’d been attached to had never stood a chance. Some parts of their defensive line had simply disappeared — deluged by German armor. The rest had either fled or died in place.
Jesus, Reynolds realized, we’re next. He shivered, suddenly cold.
“Look, Mike. I’ve got wounded in the Humvee. And more coming. You can expect stragglers coming in across your whole line,” Irizarri said, grim-faced. “They’ll be showing green chem lights.”
Reynolds nodded, hearing Ford and Caruso already organizing ground guides and safe lanes through the company’s defenses. “We’ll bring your people through, Colonel.”
Within minutes, small clumps of armored fighting vehicles were crawling through Alpha Company’s fighting positions. Wounded men were piled on top of each tank and APC. The smell of diesel fuel hung in the air, along with the smell of burned metal and rubber.
The last Polish survivors were still coming in when the 3/187th’s battalion commander arrived. Colby looked worried.
Reynolds could understand that. Without the Polish armor as a mobile reserve, the battalion was going to be left dangling pretty much on its own. Colby didn’t waste any time before outlining Alpha Company’s new orders.
Along with an attached TOW platoon, he wanted Reynolds and his men to set up one thousand meters out in front of the rest of the line. They were expected to delay the next German attack for as long as possible, taking over the 314th’s job of bloodying and slowing the oncoming enemy.
Reynolds whistled softly in dismay. The mission was important, but it was also the kind of assignment that could go suddenly, disastrously wrong.
“One last thing, Mike,” Colby said. “What will your team’s call sign be?”
A company with attachments was called a team, and one centered on Alpha Company would normally be “Alpha Team,” but no self-respecting grunt would settle for something so tame-sounding. Reynolds knew that, considering where they were going, there was really only one choice. “How about ‘Hell Team,’ sir?”
Colby nodded. “Go brief your people, Captain.”
The short summer night was coming to an end as the cloud-covered darkness overhead slowly gave way to a gray, pink-tinged glow in the east.
Von Seelow sipped cautiously at the scalding-hot coffee in his mug, feeling the caffeine washing away fatigue and infusing new energy. Then he looked up from the mug, surveying the rutted field around him. The brigade’s forward command post — a small, battered collection of Marders, American-made M577 command tracks, trucks, and jeeps — occupied what had been the Polish main position. Shell craters and burning wreckage scattered all around testified to the power and stunning ferocity of the German attack.
“Herr Oberstleutnant!”
Von Seelow turned around. Major Thiessen’s head poked out of a roof hatch on the M577 serving as the brigade’s TOC, its tactical operations center.
“All battalions report they are ready to resume the advance, sir!”
Willi dumped his coffee out on the flattened grass and whirled toward his own APC’s open ramp, already snapping out new orders. “Radio all units to push forward up the highway. We’ll exploit this breach toward Swiecie. Our objective is Gdansk!”
Reynolds both hated and welcomed the first brightening of the eastern sky. On the one hand, the morning light gave him his first real chance to see the ground he would be defending. On the other, dawn meant that the Germans would be coming soon.
He yawned uncontrollably, hoping that the coming daylight would fool his body into wakefulness. So much for the battalion’s sleep plan, he thought. He had a sneaking suspicion that it was only the first of many that would go astray.
Nobody had slept last night, or wanted to — not knowing they were almost sure to be attacked the next morning. While he frantically set up artillery target points and designated fields of fire, his men dug in and camouflaged their new positions — doing everything they could to turn the ground they occupied into a small fortress.
Irizarri’s help had been invaluable. He had thrown himself into organizing Hell Team’s defense, almost adopting Reynolds and his company as his own. Reynolds remembered the colonel’s training background at Fort Irwin, and was grateful for his assistance on this “final exam.”
All of the setup had to be done in near-absolute dark, and with absolute security. If Alpha Company’s battle positions were discovered too soon, its mission would fail before it even began. Battalion’s scouts had been right about the woods being clear of Germans. He could only hope they had kept the enemy scouts at bay as well.
Hell Team held a thin line of woods on the edge of a dilapidated farm. The trees were old, well-established growth, originally planted next to a low stone wall that had fallen into disrepair. Brush had grown up along the treeline, and the three-hundred-meter-long grove had widened over the years until there was plenty of cover for a reinforced company. The woodland’s only flaw was the difficulty of digging in its root-tangled earth.
The trees also created a mix of problems and opportunities for the team’s antitank missile operators. To hide both themselves and the backblast when they fired their TOWs and Javelins, they wanted to be as far back inside the treeline as possible. Too far back, though, and they would risk tangling the TOW’s missile guidance wires on branches when they fired. It had taken them much of the night just to position all their weapons to Reynolds’ satisfaction.
A two-lane asphalt road ran through their front, angling in from the right and cutting through their line. About fifty meters back, it curved east and eventually joined with the motorway. To their front, rolling fields extended another two thousand meters up to a low wooded crest, the graveyard of the 314th and now held by the Germans.
Reynolds had spent part of the night studying the crest, looking for clues to the enemy’s deployment or strength, but even in the thermal sight, there was nothing for him to see. The Germans were staying well out of sight.
They were there, though.
Two early morning Polish air raids on the 314th Regiment’s old positions had drawn ground fire — a lot of ground fire. About midnight, and again at three, jets shrieked past overhead, darting south toward the German-held hill. Seconds later, bright explosions had billowed out from the trees. More significantly, sparkling tracers had climbed into the night from dozens of separate points — most spraying the sky at random, but a few converging on the fast-moving attack planes as they circled away.
Reynolds couldn’t tell if the Polish pilots had hit anything during their brief forays over the battlefield. The few hot spots he’d found using the thermal sights never moved. In the gray, predawn light they were also marked by columns of thin black smoke. Were there German tanks at the base of those flames, or just burning leaves?
He lowered the sight and turned his head toward Sergeant Andy Ford. “All right, Sergeant. Have the men stand to.” They were as ready as they’d ever be.
Most of Hell Team were already at their posts, with their weapons ready, so there was no noise, no bustle — just an increase in alertness, and tension.
Irizarri had left an hour ago with two more Polish stragglers who had wandered in. Both the Poles had insisted on staying and helping Hell Team until the last possible minute, and one, wounded in the leg, had to be near-dragged to Irizarri’s waiting Humvee. The man had wanted a weapon.
