Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Docker and Baird crouched a few feet apart outside the wall of the revetment, ducking instinctively when fragments from the second blast whined over their heads.

“You all right, sergeant?”

“I’m okay.”

“There’s some blood on your face.”

Raising his voice. Docker shouted, “Get back on the cannon, Baird. Move it now!”

When Baird had crawled over the sandbagged wall, Docker ran back to the edge of the cliff and saw through screens of smoke that the Tiger II was only a hundred yards below him on a course that would bring it to the top of the hill a dozen yards to the right of the revetment. One of the German tank crew was lying on the ground halfway down the hill, his face dark and wet in the frame of his helmet, but the officer was still on his feet, firing alternately with his machine pistol at the left and right flank of the hill.

The blood from the gash on Docker’s forehead streaked his eyes and vision, and in his distorted view the German tank looked like some huge animal trying to tear the mountain open. He shook his head, trying to focus better. Slabs of armor gleamed through smoke made red with his blood, like the scales of a great beast, the ranging cannon suggesting feelers or antennae directed by a frightening intelligence. Only the squared black cross on the steel plates above its treads defined the rampaging object as an engine of war and not, as it appeared in Docker’s bloodied vision, some vestigial monster out of memory and time.

He rubbed the haze from his eyes and ran back to the revetment, where, climbing onto the loading platform of the cannon, he gestured urgently to the right. Solvis, his face streaked with smoke, nodded and cranked the gun barrel to the point where the tank would breach the precipice.

Baird was trying to say something to Docker then, shouting to make himself heard, but the words were whipped away in the wind and gunfire. Docker had the impression, though, that there was a new confidence in the boy’s face, surely no sign of panic... He gripped Baird’s shoulder quickly, but there was no more time for talking, no time for deliberation or choice. The Tiger II was suddenly on them, the flaming muzzle of its cannon coming over the edge of the mountain only twenty yards from the front wall of their revetment.

Solvis and Baird made the last corrections in their sightings, and when the tank — its grinding tracks almost vertical, the cannon pointing straight up at the low skies — reached its full extension, its underbelly of thin armor most exposed and vulnerable. Docker slammed his boot down on the firing pedal and their own cannon came to life as it poured round after round of point-detonating ammunition directly into the bottom armor of the climbing tank.

The steel heads of the cartridges smashed into, pierced the Tiger II’s belly-plates; the payloads of trinitrocellulose exploded in a series of flashes that caused the tank to quiver for an instant like an animal in torment. When its center of gravity suddenly shifted, the left treads lost their traction and spun out of control, and the right tracks ground into the earth, twisting the tank sideways in erratic convulsions.

Black smoke now began to stream from the rim of the tank’s turret. Docker covered his bloody face with his arm and fired three more rounds, the explosions creating storm waves that knocked him from the loading platform back onto the rocky floor of the revetment.

Those final blasts tipped the Tiger II back over the edge of the hill, where its own ammunition began exploding, the interior eruptions causing it to slide down the slope, its descent stopped only by trees and boulders sundered by the blasts of dynamite. At last, when the tank crashed slowly and heavily onto its side, the roar of its cannon spent a final projectile harmlessly into the gray skies above the valley of the Salm.

Trankic took Docker’s hands and pressed them around his canteen. “Go ahead, take a drink.”

Docker tried to sit up but the effort was too much for him; his head rang and his eardrums throbbed with pain.

Trankic’s broad face was swollen, his eyes bloodshot and angry. “They didn’t give it to us on a fucking platter, Bull. The kid here and Sonny.”

Docker was sprawled on the rocky ground behind the cannon. He drank a mouthful of black whiskey and gave the canteen back to Trankic. The gash in his forehead ached, and the wind was like sandpaper against it. He put both hands under him and stood up, feeling groggy and sick. The big dog circled him, whining anxiously. On the wet cold wind was the stench of cordite.

Docker looked up at the cannon. “Oh, Jesus!”

Jackson Baird’s body hung in the metal seat beside the cannon’s breechblock, boots swinging slowly in the wind. The boots were caked with mud, shoelaces white with frost and snow. A piece of shrapnel had pierced the front of Baird’s helmet and had come out the back of it.

Docker walked stiffly from the revetment to the rim of the hill, where Solvis and Farrel stood together, dazed with shock.

Schmitzer knelt beside the body of Sonny Laurel, whose face looked clear and tranquil in the thin light. There seemed to be no mark on him, only dark patches of blood on the front of this fatigue jacket.

Docker felt drained. The wound in his forehead throbbed. He could hear it as well as feel it, but in the falling snow everything else was weirdly still... until from far below, he heard a distant motor. The pounding in his ears made it impossible to tell, though, whether it was traveling toward or away from them.

On the hillside a dozen yards from the wreckage of the tank, Docker now saw the sprawled body of the German commander, a sheen of snow already gathering on his greatcoat and black boots. And below him was another body in German uniform, a twisted heap on the mountainside.

Docker turned to Solvis. “Where’s Linari and Dormund?”

“They went to heat up some water.”

Farrel said, “At first Kohler thought Sonny didn’t look so bad. He said some sulfa and hot water was all—” He rubbed his lips. “Then we opened his jacket.”

Docker saw that the German officer had raised his head and was staring up at him. He told Farrel to watch for the vehicle he’d heard and started down the hill, arms raised against the backlash of thornbushes, climbing over the heaps of earth and rock churned up by the Tiger II and the dynamite charges.

He stopped near the tank and looked down at Karl Jaeger. A vivid burn was on the left side of the man’s face, his lips were flecked with blood.

“My soldiers...” He turned and pointed to the smoldering tank. “In God’s name, do what I can’t, sergeant... do you understand?”

There was no way to open the fused turret of the tank, no way to get the German crew out of it. And if they were still alive. Docker thought, they didn’t deserve that final ordeal. No one did. He unholstered his .45 and walked to the tank and fired four spaced rounds through a vision-slit into the interior of the Tiger II. And hearing the bullets ricocheting inside the metal walls of the tank, he remembered with the therapeutic irrelevance of shock a demonstration he had once witnessed at Fort Benning: one round from an M-1 rifle fired into a Sherman had made nine hundred and forty separate gashes against the white paint on the insides of the tank.

Smoke drifted from the tank’s turret and flames flickered on the heavy gray armor, the light glowing yellow in the snow. The echoing sound from the bullets had intensified the ache in Docker’s ears, but he could still hear a vehicle somewhere in the valley.

Jaeger told him, “You can shoot me if you like. But I’ll be dead soon enough.”

Docker put the .45 back in its holster.

“I can’t repay you.” The words were soft, blurred. “I have nothing left—”