the tank had managed to save one of the personnel carriers was both fortunate and, considering the intensity of the battle, lucky. Before turning back to the matter of finding out what was happening within his own battalion, Cerro looked back at the road north of the farm. He watched for a second as the tank came up and stopped on the road, shielding the two personnel carriers from any future attacks from the woods to the east. On the left side of the road, Cerro studied the two personnel carriers through his binoculars. He could see that they were now sitting side by side, with the crew of the undamaged personnel carrier working frantically to pull out the crew and passengers of the damaged personnel carrier before it was totally engulfed by flames. On the hard-surfaced road the tank stood motionless, guarding the carriers and their crews.
Though he knew who those personnel carriers belonged to, Cerro didn't pause to wonder whose had been hit. There was a battalion he needed to get in hand. If his performance and luck up to this point of the fight were any indication, it would be a while before he would be able to achieve that. For some reason nothing was working right that day for him. Nothing.
CHAPTER 23
There was a certain strangeness to everything. Somehow, when Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee was finally able to open his eyes and keep them open, he noticed that everything had changed. The early-morning light filled the room he was in and made everything seem so bright, so white. Looking straight ahead, he could see the ceiling, the light hanging from the ceiling, and the pole next to him. Still this didn't help him. With his head still clouded from drugs and painkillers, Ellerbee didn't have any idea where he was. He wasn't even sure, for that matter, if he was conscious or in the throes of a seriously weird dream. With an effort that required every bit of conscious thought he could muster, Ellerbee forced his head over to one side. Unfortunately, once it started moving, Ellerbee felt a momentary panic when he realized that he couldn't stop it. So his head rolled to the side until the side of his face flopped down on the thin pillow.
For a moment he rested from this exertion, gathering the strength and presence of mind he would need to continue his explorations. Ready, he pried his eyes open again, noting that everything was terribly blurry, making every object soft and ill defined. Eventually, after his cloudy brain was able to identify the objects he saw, Ellerbee realized that he was looking at a bed, a hospital bed, with someone in it. Taking this discovery into account, it wasn't long before Ellerbee was finally able to deduce that since he was looking at a hospital bed, this meant that this was a hospital. If this was true, his erratic logic ran, then he must also be in a hospital bed. If all of that proved true, he finally concluded, he was wounded and not quite dead yet. After working all of that out, Ellerbee allowed himself to relax and rest. There was, as he did so, a certain feeling of joy, but not for having survived, because it was way too soon to come to such sophisticated levels of self-awareness. Instead, his source of joy was having been able to figure out where he was.
When he was ready to continue, Ellerbee looked closer at the patient in the bed across from his. His fellow patient was sitting up busily writing away at something on the little hospital tray that sat suspended over his lap. Clearing his throat, Ellerbee attempted to speak but couldn't muster any coherent words on his first try. That effort, however, was not wasted, since the patient heard his croaking and turned his head toward Ellerbee. Having the other patient's attention encouraged Ellerbee to redouble his efforts. Ready, Ellerbee slowly forced the words out of his mouth, almost syllable by syllable. 'You Am-er-can, or Ger-man?'
The other patient, without any change of expression, responded, 'Russian. And you?'
Not sure if he heard right, Ellerbee had to think about what he had asked and what the response had been. Blinking, he decided to try something else. 'Tim Ell-er-bee, second lieu-ten-ant, U.-S.-Ar-my. You?'
'Nikolai Ilvanich, major, Russian Army. Welcome to Bremerhaven.'
At first Ellerbee couldn't understand what a Russian major was doing in Bremerhaven. Closing his eyes, Ellerbee tried to sort this out. If this major was a Russian, whose side had he been on? Only slowly was he able to recall that many Russian advisors had stayed with their American units after the Ukrainian operation. With that problem resolved, Ellerbee opened his eyes again.
When he did, the room was different. The overhead lights that had been on were now off. The major across from him was no longer writing. He wasn't even sitting up. Instead he was lying down. Ellerbee didn't realize that a couple of hours had passed. Anxious to find out more, Ellerbee called out as best he could. 'Ma-jor, you a- wake?'
As before, the head turned. 'Yes, Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee. And you?'
'Yes, I'm a-wake. What un-it?'
'Company A, 1st Ranger Battalion, 77th Infantry.'
Ellerbee sighed. Without thinking, he replied, 'Lucky.'
'Why do you say I am lucky, Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee?'
'No wom-en. My com-pany com-mander. A fe-male in-fan-try cap-tain.'
After pausing to think about what Ellerbee had said, Ilvanich responded, 'Oh, I see. She failed to get the company back.'
Ellerbee surprised himself when he shook his head. He was getting better, he thought. He could now move his head and control it at will. 'No. Com-pany made it. All the way.'
'Oh. Then she lost every battle you were in. Wasted a lot of lives.'
Again Ellerbee shook his head. When he answered, there was a hint of pride in his voice. 'No. We did good. Didn't fail any missions. Took all objectives.'
'Oh. Then she mistreated you and your men. Didn't get you food or supplies on time.'
'No. We ate what-ever was on hand. Never went hungry. She only yelled at me when I did some-thing?' He was about to say wrong, but changed the word. 'Something dumb.'
'Oh. Then her tactics caused unnecessary losses?'
This one didn't require any thinking. All their losses, Ellerbee had noted throughout the march to the sea, had seemed reasonable and unavoidable. And when compared to the damage they had done to the Germans, they had always been light. 'No. We lost, lost a lot. But really punished the Ger-mans. Kicked ass.'
'Then,' Ilvanich exclaimed, 'what's the problem with your company commander? I don't understand. You are here. Your company did the best it could. Succeeded in all of its missions. Won battles. Suffered losses but reasonable losses. And it finished the march. It sounds like this company commander, other than the fact that she's a woman and you don't like that for some reason, is good.'
This was almost too much for Ellerbee's mind to absorb as it floated about in a state of drug-induced bliss. While the Russian major's comments were good ones, each and every one, there was something that Ellerbee and the Russian were missing. Perhaps if he rested a little while, the missing element that would justify his dislike of Captain Nancy Kozak would come to mind. Closing his eyes, Ellerbee quickly drifted back to sleep.
Roused from a fitful sleep at 3:05 a.m., Jan Fields-Dixon was' not prepared to greet her unexpected visitor. Her mind was so clouded with sleep that she didn't even make any effort to consider who would be disturbing her at this hour. Not that this was an unusual occurrence. After working for an outfit like World News Network for as long as she had, Jan had learned that nothing, not even her home life, was ordinary. Just about everything that could have happened had happened to her, sometimes more than once, in her years as a correspondent. Still there were times when even a hardened news veteran like Jan could be caught by surprise. Reaching the doorknob, Jan stopped, swept back the stray hairs that had cascaded lazily across her eyes, and opened the door.
In her worst nightmare, Jan couldn't have imagined a sight more frightening, more terrible, than the image of the Army colonel standing before her in the open doorway. For a moment the two of them stood there staring at each other. Jan in an old white terry-cloth bathrobe faced the colonel, standing erect and alert in his overcoat topped with a green scarf that covered his neck and a hat pulled down so low that it hid his eyes in the shadow of its brim.
Slowly, ever so slowly, Jan could feel her knees begin to tremble. Grasping the doorknob with her left hand, Jan almost fell over as she reached out with her right to steady herself on the door frame. Though her mouth fell open and she wanted so to scream, she couldn't. Nothing, not even a wisp of air, came out. It was as if her entire being, everything that she was, had suddenly locked up and come to a sudden, terrible dead stop. Without having to
