When Cerro spoke, there was no apology, no regret for his reprimand. He simply began issuing orders. 'You're to take your company across the Mittellandkanal, here.' With pencil in hand, Cerro pointed to a circle drawn on his map case. 'Once across, Gross and his platoon will occupy a blocking position here. His mission is to hold up the advance of the German units moving along the Kanal for as long as possible. You and the rest of your company will move west, along the main road here, as quickly as possible and secure the cross point here. There you'll remain in place to cover the crossing of the rest of this battalion and the 35th Armor. Hold there until a company from the 35th comes up and relieves you. Once the brigade's across, we go north as fast as we can.'
Kozak looked at the two points on the map that Cerro had marked and shown her. 'You realize, Major, we wouldn't be able to support Gross and his platoon at all.'
Cerro nodded. 'I know.'
'How long,' she continued, 'does Gross need to hold here?'
'Until he can't hold on any longer.' There was, Kozak noticed, no emotion in his voice.
'Will Gross be able to join me when the 35th Armor relieves me or is he expected to join the 35th?'
Locking his eyes on Kozak's, Cerro leaned forward. 'Let me make myself perfectly clear. Gross will hold that position until he is no longer able to hold it. I do not expect him to join us or the 35th. He digs in as best he can and he holds, period. If and when his position is overrun, the survivors will be free to make their way north as best they can, on their own.'
Slowly the look of surprise on Kozak's face was replaced with a mask of horror as she realized that she was expected to order one of her platoons to literally die in place. That was not, she thought, the way we did things. Last stands, she thought, had been dropped from American military doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century. Besides, she wondered, how could she be expected to order almost half her remaining company to stand fast, fight, and die while she fled north to safety?
Cerro saw the look on her face and knew what she was thinking, for he had considered the exact same thing when Colonel Dixon had issued him his orders little over an hour ago. Looking down at Kozak, Cerro was suddenly struck by how out of place Kozak looked at that moment. As hard as this was for him, Kozak's big brown eyes and smooth round face, looking more like a hurt child's than a combat commander's, made all of this harder. Even with her long auburn hair, except for a stray wisp that always seemed to fall across her face, wrapped and tucked-up into an olive drab wool watch cap, and layers and layers of bulky winter clothing that made Kozak look more like a stocking doll than a woman, Kozak was for an instant a female, someone he suddenly felt the need to protect, to comfort. Only with a great effort was Cerro able to pull his tired thoughts back onto track. She's an officer, damn it, a captain in the United States Army. A company commander. Nothing more, nothing less. Taking several deep breaths, Cerro continued.
'Look, Captain, the Germans are crashing down on the corps' flank with two panzer divisions. If we don't get out of the way, we'll be crushed. As it is, the units north of the Kanal are already giving way. Our only chance is to turn to the west and cross somewhere else, and then run north as fast as we can.
And we can make it in less than twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, so can the Germans. The Air Force can chew 'em up and delay them some. Unfortunately they can't stop them. Only ground forces can do that.'
'And Gross has been elected.' As soon as she said it, Kozak was sorry she had.
Angry, Cerro clenched his fists. He didn't like what he was doing any more than she did. But he had been convinced that it was necessary, had accepted the order, and now he expected Kozak to do likewise. He could have blamed Dixon, who had originated the order. That, Cerro knew, would have been easy and would have made Dixon the bad guy. To do so, however, would be wrong, for the order did make sense, and it was after all an order.
Barely holding back his anger, Cerro glared down at Kozak. 'Yes, goddamn it. Your Lieutenant Gross has been elected. He elected himself when he took his oath of office and put on the uniform. No officer who understands his or her responsibility to his profession and duty should ever imagine that there's always an easy or safe way out. It just doesn't work like that. Being a soldier means killing, and sometimes being killed. Well, I'm here telling you that I expect your Lieutenant Gross to take his men there, north of the Kanal, and kill Germans. And they will continue to kill Germans until they can't kill any more. This is no time to debate the wisdom or merit of orders regardless of who generated them. You have your orders, and I expect you to issue Gross his. Is that clear, Captain?'
Kozak sat there on the ramp of her Bradley and looked up at Cerro. There was a rage and anger in his eyes that she had never seen before in a human being. He was, she realized, a man beyond reasoning. What kindness or emotions this man had once possessed had been crushed by the weight of his responsibilities and the horrors of war, just as her own spirit and hope had been extinguished as she had watched the soldiers of her company drop or disappear one by one during the long march. That none of this made sense anymore seemed a moot point. All that seemed to matter anymore was to follow orders and keep going north, regardless of cost, regardless of consequence. To stop now was not possible. They had all gone too far and paid too much to stop or allow this enterprise, right or wrong, to fail.
Slowly, as if the weight of the entire world were on her shoulders, Kozak pushed herself up off the cold metal ramp and faced Cerro. Though in her heart she was dying, Kozak choked back her tears and saluted him. 'Yes, sir, your orders are clear.'
Unable to speak, and not knowing what to say anyway, Cerro reached down, grabbed his map, and fled across the road to his own Bradley, leaving Kozak to pass on the order.
CHAPTER 21
Despite the fact that she had been finished several hours ago, Jan Fields-Dixon couldn't bring herself to leave the World News Network studios. In Germany, where it was still mid-afternoon, the flow of Tenth Corps units into the perimeter held by the 17th Airborne Division, south of Bremerhaven, was beginning to turn into a flood. At checkpoints all along the southern tier of that perimeter, news teams stood by recording what some correspondents called completion of the greatest military march since Xenophon led his ten thousand Greek mercenaries out of Persia in the year 400 B.C. Like everyone else, the experts, real and imagined, sat by television monitors shaking their heads in disbelief and watching as the soldiers of the Tenth Corps finished what many had said could not be done. 'Every man and woman in the corps,' one retired colonel had told Jan during an interview earlier that day, 'should be proud of what they have accomplished.'
Jan, ever watchful for any sign of her husband, could see no hint of pride in the vacant eyes of the survivors as column after column of soldiers rolled past the electronic eye of the news media. Few in Germany seemed to share the wild joy most Americans back home felt now that the great march to the sea was coming to an end. Instead, when a correspondent managed to make his way to a group of survivors, his questions were often left unanswered as the soldier stammered or simply lapsed into a stunned silence. At one assembly area, where the remains of a tank battalion had been marshaled, a reporter found every man, officer and enlisted, spread out over the fenders and tops of their tank turrets asleep. It was, the reporter commented as his cameraman panned the slumbering crewmen, as if the only thing that had kept the men and women of the Tenth Corps moving, in spite of the terrible hardships and odds, was stubborn pride and fear of failure, and now that they were safe, they could go no further.
Having been long associated with the military, Jan knew better. Men like her husband, Scott Dixon, his operations officer, Harold Cerro, and the corps commander, Al Malin, went on doing things that often could not be explained and defying common sense because they couldn't do otherwise. There was a vague and indefinable force known as duty that drove her husband and those that followed him to keep putting themselves in harm's way. Jan, like others, knew that stubborn and mindless male pride, coupled with a childlike fascination with danger and the primeval animal-like drive to kill, played a part in the process. But these drives alone could not justify or explain what Scott did for a living. Neither could high-sounding words, such as duty, honor, country, justify the brutality that Scott and others like him meted out to others and suffered in return. That was something that defied explanation. Something kept Dixon in the Army and allowed the soldiers of the Tenth Corps to do what everyone in Washington had termed impossible.
While such thoughts were never far from her mind, there were other, more pressing concerns that Jan had
