Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Go ahead.”

“Last night on patrol, Steinberg got the heebie-jeebies when we ran into a listening post. He could have got us knocked off. It’s the second time it’s happened.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Sir, there’s something else I need to say.”

I waited.

“I can smell money. That’s the honest-to-God truth, sir. I can smell old coins buried in the ground. I can smell oil and gas before the drill punches into a pay sand. You ever see a well come in? The pipes sweat all over just before the drilling floor starts to vibrate.”

“I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”

“I got a second gift, Lieutenant. I sweat when a situation is about to hit the fan. Maybe Steinberg has a right to be worried. I think the Krauts might try to bust through right where we’re at. I’ve been sweating inside my shirt for two days, sir.”

His eyes were red along the rims, the bone structure of his face as lean and pointed as an ax. He was breathing through his nose, his nostrils white with cold, waiting for me to speak, clearly wondering if he had said too much. “Sir, I’m not crazy. I don’t go to fortune-tellers or anything like that. I just know things. A nigra midwife delivered me. She was a voodoo woman from New Orleans. She said I was touched. She meant I had a gift. Nigras got a sense sometimes.”

“Maybe you’re right and we’re going to have Krauts in our lap before dawn,” I said. “Whatever happens, we’ll do our job. I don’t want to hear any more about Steinberg or clairvoyance or somebody sweating inside his clothes. Now get back to your position.”

A HALF HOUR LATER, as the last gaseous, silvery remnant of sun died on the horizon, I heard the sound of small arms popping on our flank. From a great distance, the sound was like fat raindrops dropping on lily pads. It grew in intensity until the sporadic popping became an uninterrupted, self-sustaining roar, followed by the coughing of a fifty-caliber machine gun down the line, the tracers streaking like bits of neon into the winter darkness.

I climbed out of my foxhole just as I heard the creaking of tank treads, then tree trunks snapping, their snow-laden boughs slapping against the forest floor. The visual and auditory effect of a King Tiger tank’s intrusion into an area defended by light infantry is difficult to describe. Its weight was almost seventy tons. Its Porsche engine could generate speeds of over thirty miles an hour. Its 88mm cannon could hit and destroy a Sherman tank at twelve hundred yards. Bazooka rounds and even the French 75mm often ricocheted off its sloped sides. Forty yards out, beyond a knoll, I saw giant trees crashing to the ground. Then the King Tiger topped the knoll, its front end jutting into the air, not unlike a horse rearing in a corral. I could feel the earth shake under my feet when the full weight of the tank slammed down on the incline, grinding boulders into gravel. For a moment I saw the head and shoulders of the tank commander sticking out of the cupola, its sides painted with the Iron Cross. He was wearing a black cap and a black jacket and had a face that was as one-dimensional and expressionless as bread dough in a pie pan. He sank down into the turret and pulled the hatch shut as the two MG-34 machine guns mounted beneath the cupola began firing.

The Tiger in front of me was one of many. The forest was being denuded. The trees were dropping so fast they didn’t have adequate space to fall, colliding perpendicularly like kitchen matches tumbling out of a spilled box. I saw our BAR man firing at the viewing slit on a Tiger, then a spray of 7.92 rounds danced across his field jacket. He dropped his weapon and began walking into the trees, one hand pressed to his chest, as though he had heartburn. He fell to his hands and knees, his back shaking each time he coughed, chaining the snow with red flowers.

I cannot say with any degree of accuracy what occurred in the next few minutes. Someone was yelling for a medic. I saw Private First Class Jason Steinberg and three other men get hit by automatic weapons fire and run over by a Tiger. I remember picking up the BAR man and trying to pull him into a hole. I also remember shooting two Waffen SS at close range with my .45. I saw German infantry coming out of the fog behind the tanks, some of them wearing belted leather overcoats, small lightning bolts painted on the sides of their helmets. Then I was on one knee behind a boulder, firing a carbine that had a splintered stock and wasn’t mine. Half my face was printed with wood splinters, one ear wet with blood, though I had no memory of a bullet striking the stock.

The Tigers smashed over our foxholes, their cannon firing into a snowfield behind us, one as white and smooth and glazed under the moon as the top of a wedding cake. The eruption of flame and sound from the barrels of the 88s was surreal, so loud and powerful that I couldn’t hear the creaking of the treads ea

ting up anything in their path, the explosions literally shaking the senses, as though my eyes, my brain, my organs were being emptied one by one on the snow. Out in the field, I could see two Sherman tanks burning. Three of the crew members were trying to run across the field to a distant woods, their legs locked knee-deep in the snow, their shadows as liquid and dark as India ink, their arms flailing under the stars as rounds from a machine gun danced toward them.

Behind me I heard a fir tree that must have been sixty feet tall topple through the canopy. I stared at it, stupefied, perhaps a bit like a condemned wretch watching the blade of a guillotine fall on his neck. The fog inside the forest and the screams of the wounded being executed and the guttural commands of the SS noncommissioned officers all melded into the creaking sounds of the Tigers, clanking like a junkyard across the snowfield. The tree crashed with the weight of an anvil on my helmet, razoring the rim down on my nose, mashing me into the earth.

Hours later, I woke at the bottom of a shell hole, my body covered by the branches of the fir. The canopy of the forest was gone, and the sky was clear and black and patterned with constellations, the temperature close to zero. I thought I could hear a mewling sound, like a baby’s, coming from under the snow, not five feet away.

Chapter

3

I FOUND AN E-TOOL and started digging. The snow had been as tightly compacted as wet sand by tank treads. One foot down, the blade of the collapsible shovel struck a log, then another one, and I realized I was digging into someone’s reinforced foxhole. The opening had been squeezed shut, as though someone had drawn the string on a leather bag, sealing a trapped infantryman inside a frozen cocoon that was hardly bigger than an obese woman’s womb. I folded the shovel into the position of a garden hoe and began chopping at the rocks and snow and dirt and broken timber until I had created a hole large enough to stick my hand inside. My fingers touched an unshaved face that was as cold and rough as stone.

The trapped man’s knees had been pushed almost to his chin. He was trying to speak, but his teeth were chattering so violently he could not form individual words. I grabbed him by the wrists and dragged him over the cusp of the foxhole and wiped his face. Tears had frozen in his eyelashes. He raised his right hand and placed it against my chest, as though reassuring himself that I was real. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger.

“Are you hit?” I asked.

“Dunno, sir,” he replied.

“Where’s your Thompson?” I said.

“Dunno.” He looked around and shook his head. “Where’s everybody?”

“Dead,” I said. “They shot the wounded. Can you walk?”

He had lost his steel pot, and his hair was studded with chips of ice that resembled rock salt. He stared at the splintered trees on the ground and at the blackened areas where German infantry had thrown potato-mashers over the tops of their tanks into our midst. He looked at the Tiger tracks leading right across the hole I had pulled him from.

“Did you hear me, Sergeant? We’re behind enemy lines.”

He seemed unable to fathom my words. I pointed toward the west and the lights flickering at the bottom of the sky. The intermittent flashes looked like heat lightning, or electricity bursting silently inside a bank of thunderheads. “That’s our artillery. Neither of us is in good repair. We don’t want to be captured.”