Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Everyone watched the lights, and when a series of thermals tore the fog apart, they saw an aircraft with a steel-ribbed bubble over the cockpit and a triangular tail with black swastikas painted above the tapered ailerons. Under the plane’s single wing a pair of slim nacelles were mounted tight against the fuselage, and from them flames streamed behind the tail assembly, crimson against the spuming snow. A low whine trembled through the air as the plane streaked by their position.

The barrel of the cannon swung so rapidly that Docker nearly lost his balance. Steadying himself against the curved columns of the loading chute, he slammed his foot down on the firing pedal. Three tracer shells exploded from the gun barrel, arching toward the plane and cutting parabolic slashes of white light in the sky.

The projectiles trailed far behind their target, curving futilely in the wake of the aircraft, which banked and disappeared into the mists. After the staccato firing, the silence was so complete they could hear the hiss of snow-flakes on the hot barrel of the gun.

“Ammo,” Docker said, and without turning reached behind and felt the cold shells against his bare hands. “And where the hell is Gelnick?”

“He ducked into the wretched cave,” Dormund said. “Can’t get on me for that, sarge.”

“Christ!” Docker said, realizing that the tarpaulin wouldn’t provide any protection against machine-gun fire or shrapnel, that the only safe place in a strafing attack was inside the revetment. “Go get the dumb bastard,” he told Solvis. “On the double.”

Solvis squeezed through the narrow opening in the revetment wall and ran for the cave, bending down into the winds.

Docker felt cold drops of sweat gathering on his ribs and running down his side. Their tracer fire had pinpointed the gun position; the German pilot could now choose the time and direction of the next attack.

Radar began to circle the floor of the revetment, whining with excitement. Stiff fur stood up on his neck as he began to bark in the direction of the castle.

Docker waved to Gelnick and Solvis, who were coming over the crest of the hill. “Move it, you guys!”

The men on the cannon heard humming tremors rising over the valley, but it was impossible to determine their exact source; the damp air was moving in gentle vibrations and the low, rhythmic sounds trembled all around them.

Docker hoped they’d get a few precious seconds to zero in on the German plane, time enough to establish the pattern of their tracers.

But they didn’t get those precious seconds, they got no warning at all. One instant they were straining to pick up the source of the singing vibrations, the next the plane was flashing at them from behind the castle, its ammo blazing and clawing at the slopes of the mountain.

The barrel of the cannon swung hard right, and Docker pounded his foot on the firing pedal.

The rockets from the attacking aircraft ripped open the frozen earth and sent splinters of rock over the revetment like grenade fragments.

Solvis ran clumsily through the slush and snow, arms and legs churning, throwing himself down against the wall of sandbags, but Gelnick, crying out in surprise, dropped to the open ground, jerking his knees up to his chin and covering his helmet with his arms.

Docker screamed at him to get up, a pointless warning because no voice could have made itself heard above the whistling boom of the plane’s passage and the explosion of its rockets against the frozen mountain.

The cannon was off target but so was the aircraft, its ammo gouging tracks twenty yards from the revetment before it vanished into the fogs.

The impact of the explosions had knocked Gelnick’s body a dozen feet down the slope of the mountain. His arms and legs were bent at distorted angles, his blood stained the snow, and he looked just like the other casualties Docker had seen in this war, suddenly and touchingly small in clothes that always seemed too large after the first bullets destroyed the quickness of life.

“He was running right beside me,” Solvis was chattering. “He could have made it. He was right with me. Why should he do a thing like that?” Solvis walked toward Gelnick’s body but continued to look over his shoulder at the men on the cannon. “Can you tell me why he did that?” he said, in a loud, oddly querulous voice. “I made it all right. Why didn’t he have the brains to follow me?”

“Solvis, get back in here!” Docker said.

Solvis made no move to return. His face was white, eyes out of focus. “I don’t understand.” He wasn’t shouting now, his voice was like a worried child’s, soft and anxious. “You guys understand it? Any of you guys?”

Jackson Baird squeezed through the narrow corridor of sandbags and ran through the snow. Taking Solvis by the arm, Baird led him back to the revetment, hurrying the stunned soldier along with awkward, stumbling strides.

Within minutes they heard again the delicate, trembling vibrations of the plane. When it emerged from the hills behind the castle it was aimed at their revetment like a powerfully thrown dart. They saw muzzle flashes from the rockets, then tracks of projectiles striking the mountain and climbing toward their position like a ladder pounded into the hillside by invisible hammers.

Docker hit the firing pedal and the cannon bucked beneath him, the massive breech slamming back under almost twenty tons of recoil, and he saw that their tracers were directly on target, flight patterns transformed into an optical illusion by the plane’s speed. From where Docker stood above the smoking breech, the line of glowing projectiles seemed to bend like a stream of water from a hose as it curved smoothly into the tapered nose of the aircraft.

There were two explosions then, flashes of searing light followed instantly by eruptions of black smoke, and the front of the plane’s fuselage was thrust up and back as if it had flown into a mountainside.

Docker realized the pilot was trying for altitude in the last seconds of his life. The aircraft soared up and over their revetment, twisting and buckling, and the men below ducked instinctively from the heat of the flames rushing down from the wings and cockpit.

But it was a directionless mass of iron by then, its graceful union with the air forever destroyed, hurtling into the mountains hundreds of yards above and behind them and taking down dozens of giant firs before it finally exploded in bursts of rupturing metals and leaping orange fires.

The echoes of the crash returned like distant thunder through the reaches of the valley, the reverberations replaced at last by the sounds of winds and the snap of delicate ice in the trees, and then there was nothing left of the plane and its passage but a black scar in the frozen mountainside and flames reflected in sullen colors against the stormbound skies.

December 21, 1944. Salmchâteau-sur-Amblève. Thursday, 1030 Hours.

They were traveling at a labored pace through columns of military traffic over roads churned into pools of mud and ice. Visibility was poor; their driver was leaning over the steering wheel, rubbing the windshield with a gloved hand and gesturing helplessly at the lines of stalled trucks that made the twisting roads of the Ardennes forests nearly impassable.

General Kroll swore softly, and as he did Karl Jaeger understood his impatience and anger. The 2nd SS Panzer Division was almost thirty-six hours behind the timetable assigned it by Operation Christrose. But of greater immediate significance was the fact that an ME-262 had been shot down by an American gun section and Kroll, whose units were closest to where the V-4 disappeared, had been ordered by OKW-Berlin to locate and destroy it.