Adams popped up beside him and lobbed an egg-shaped fragmentation grenade into their midst.
The grenade went off with an ear-splitting
Hit several times each, the panzergrenadiers stumbled backward and fell in a heap. Still holding his aim, Reynolds moved out from cover. One good look told him they were dead. He nodded his thanks to the tall, skinny corporal and then scanned the scarred woods around them, desperately trying to reorient himself. He still felt the urge to run, but just to 2nd Platoon. He had to regain control of this battle.
Sprinting, pausing, ducking occasionally, Reynolds and Adams worked their way toward 2nd Platoon’s fighting positions. At times the smoke and trees cut off all view, so that they were surrounded by a gray-green wall. The sounds of firing were no help, either, as omnipresent as the smoke.
They kept working their way east, meters seeming like miles and seconds like days. Finally Reynolds spotted Sergeant Robbins, crouched with two other soldiers. With Riley gone, the short, dark-featured sergeant was now in charge of 2nd Platoon.
Robbins spotted the captain and corporal as they ran up. “They’re past us, sir!” Frustration and fatigue filled his voice as well as his face. “We’ve knocked out ten tracks, maybe more, but they just keep coming.” The crack of cannon fire to the south announced the arrival of more enemy tanks.
“What are your casualties?” Reynolds demanded.
“Three dead I know of, probably more. Eight — no, nine wounded.”
Reynolds grimaced. Even out of a full-strength platoon of thirty-eight men, that would have been a heavy toll. But 2nd Platoon was badly understrength when the battle started, and the battle was far from over. On the other hand, his troops had already destroyed a lot of enemy armor. Was it worth the cost, though?
He couldn’t tell. From what little he could see, they’d blunted and disorganized the first wave of the German attack. The woods were full of burning vehicles and German stragglers, either tangled up with Alpha Company or pressing on to the northeast, and he was sure there were follow-on forces moving up. Alpha Company couldn’t stop them anymore. He needed more firepower.
Reynolds leaned over, speaking carefully to Adams. “Get Brigade. Tell them to shift the arty.” As the corporal picked up the handset, he pulled out the map he’d marked earlier. “New reference point is seven four, time on target, airburst. I want everything they’ve got for five minutes.”
Sergeant Robbins, standing next to him, looked at the marked spot and paled. He grabbed the two kneeling privates by the shoulders and spoke urgently. “Find the 1st and 3rd platoons. Tell them there’s incoming mail, airburst. Everyone go to ground. Move!”
The two soldiers disappeared, one to the east, one west. Robbins moved off himself, passing the word down his shattered line while Reynolds and his radioman took cover under a wrecked Leopard 2. Two privates also arrived to share the space, and all four of them kept scanning the woods.
The sounds of tank guns and light cannon mixed with machine-gun and rifle fire. They spotted men running to the southeast, but Reynolds stopped the others from firing. It was impossible to tell which side those shadowy forms belonged to.
The freight-train roar of heavy artillery suddenly drowned out the gunfire around them and the woods exploded in fire and smoke.
This was no ranging shot, no ragged one-battery barrage. The shells cascading into the narrow band of forest had been carefully timed to arrive on target almost simultaneously.
The air itself exploded, suddenly filled with millions of lethal fragments. Crouched beneath the tank, Reynolds was stunned by the ferocity he’d unleashed. This was more than the brigade artillery battalion firing. Guns from the division, maybe even the corps, must be in on the act.
Tree after tree went down with their tops blown off.
The American shells were detonating ten to twenty meters off the ground, sleeting the air with fragments and shredding anyone caught in their path. Pieces of leaves and pine needles poured down, thick enough to cover the ground like a rug.
As fragments
When the artillery stopped, the silence it left behind was almost absolute. In that silence, Reynolds could hear a new noise, the bass roar of dozens of diesel engines. He crawled out from under the wreck and moved toward the edge of the woods with Adams at his side. There, grabbing his binoculars, he peered through the clearing smoke and dust to the south.
A new formation of Leopard 2s swept across the open fields, headed straight for them. He stared in horror. Neatly grouped by platoons and companies, the panzer battalion moving up could almost have been on parade. A second rank of Marder APCs followed close on their treads, and Reynolds bet that behind them was a third. Probably with more tanks in reserve.
While the first German outfit had blown open the breach, weakening itself in the process, this new enemy brigade had run through the open. Fresh, unbloodied, and moving fast, it would slam into the woods in a few minutes, and they didn’t have a prayer of stopping it.
Sergeant Robbins ran over and dropped prone beside him. “My guys are scattered all over hell, Captain. We’ve got five more dead, another six or seven wounded. Both M60s are manned, but both Javelin crews are gone, wounded or missing. We only had two missiles left anyway. I’m rallying the men now.”
Rallying what? Reynolds wondered numbly. Second Platoon couldn’t have very many men left in fighting shape. Probably fewer than a dozen. Were the other platoons in any better shape? For the first time in minutes he wondered how Major Prazmo’s Poles had fared. He glanced off to the right, toward the sector the major’s men and tanks had been holding. Columns of black smoke spiraled upward from the tangle of splintered trees.
He grimaced. He had to regain control of his scattered company. They might have some fight left, but they had to recover. It took time to reorganize and treat the wounded — time the Germans were not going to let him have.
Even as he started to pass orders, the
From the direction the Leopards were pointing, it looked like 1st Platoon had fired. At least one of the two Javelin teams he’d assigned to Caruso’s men was still intact and had missiles to fire. He felt proud that his men still had fight left in them after all they’d been through. But stacking one or two antitank teams up against an intact enemy tank formation was asking too damned much. Even David had only had to fight
Another missile leapt out toward the Germans. Then another, and another, and another flashed out from under the tree — seeking targets. His pride turned to puzzlement. Altogether, almost a dozen missiles were fired, and half found marks, some far beyond Javelin range. Where the hell were those missiles coming from?
Boots crashed through the undergrowth and he heard Andy Ford’s voice calling. He answered the hail, and the noncom came running up with a stranger in tow — an American lieutenant colonel. The man wore armor insignia on his collar tab, and a 1st Armored Division patch on his shoulder. The pair stopped and dropped to one knee next to Reynolds.
“I’m Jim Kelly, 1st of the 37th, 3rd Brigade. I’ve got forty-two M-1s coming in on the highway. I need ground guides and places to put them, fast.”
Reynolds found himself staring at the colonel and closed his mouth with an effort. He pointed east and asked. “Then those missiles from the other side of the highway…?”
“Seventh Battalion of the 6th, mech infantry with Bradleys,” Kelly hurriedly explained. “My battalion will deploy west of the road.” He grabbed Reynolds’s shoulder. “If the Bradleys are already firing, we don’t have much time.”
“But how…?”
