gun clicked on an empty chamber and the forest grew calm, Ferro grabbed his sniper’s rifle and leaped from the jeep. Carter trusted that the veteran Ranger would take care of matters.
For Carter, the forest sounded eerily quiet because his ears were still ringing from being too close to the machine gun. He desperately did not want this greenhorn to die. Pulling the man forward so that he could reach the first-aid pouch on the greenhorn’s webbed belt, to get the field dressing there, Carter found the man’s back an even worse mess. Blood covered the back of the seat, and the twisted bullet, spent by its passage through the greenhorn’s body, lay on the seat.
Carter pulled out the field dressing and applied it to the back. Normally he would have scattered the sulfa powder in the pouch also, but there was no time for that.
“Captain, the Kraut cleared out. I found the shells at his ambush site. There’s a house over there.”
“What?” Carter could barely hear the words from Ferro.
The Italian repeated himself more loudly. Carter nodded. “Give me your dressing.”
The green bandage went into Carter’s hand and he applied it to the man’s back, struggling to get the tape to hold in the slippery blood. Normally there was a larger first-aid kit in the jeep, but the contents had been used up after a firefight two weeks earlier and not replaced.
Carter stood up, ripped open his shirt and quickly pulled it off, dumping out the paper and pencil in the front pocket, leaving the new major insignia on because it would take too long to pull off the pins. He wrapped the shirt around the greenhorn to hold the bandages on.
“Sir.”
Carter looked up and saw Ferro handing over his own shirt, masses of curly chest hair peeking out from his green t-shirt. Carter added the Italian’s shirt. Only then, having bound up the wounds, did he take the time to see if the greenhorn was breathing.
The shallow breaths came short and quick.
“He’s still alive.” Carter knew that he was shouting, though his words sounded normal to him. Excitement and deafness do that. “You take him back as quick as you can. I gotta find the girl.”
Ferro hurried to pick up the major’s carbine, handed it to the officer, placed his own rifle in the back of the jeep, and started the jeep up. Carter moved away and watched as the Italian turned around and drove back up the road even faster than Carter had been going when he complained earlier.
As soon as he emptied his magazine into the American car, Fritz was moving quickly, running back to the chalet, bent low as he heard return fire start. He reached the door to the colonel’s house and burst in. He paused long enough to look back out the doorway, put a fresh magazine into his Sturmgewehr, and shout, “Standartenführer, the Americans are here.”
The colonel came down the stairs in a loud clatter of boots on wood, displaying near-panic. When he saw the twin, he paused, and a measure of composure returned to his features. He spoke quickly, like a veteran officer on the field, not a man fresh from training camp who still made sure that his trousers were creased. “How many?”
“Just three in a small car. I think I got one.”
“Good. We will leave in my car.”
Carter put down the carbine and wiped his hands on his pants, trying to get the greenhorn’s blood off his palms and the back of his hands. Such a damned mess. Placing a fresh magazine in his carbine, Carter moved forward into the woods, crouching to make a smaller target, but not so far down that he couldn’t see.
A man relied as much on his hearing as his sight and Carter’s hearing was absent. He knew from experience that it would take hours for his hearing to completely recover and that he would have a ringing in his ears for at least a day.
Through the trees, Carter could make out the brown and red color of a building. He approached carefully, thinking how reckless he had become on this day, creeping around miles away from the support of his troops. The situation around Munich had become very fluid and he had no idea where other American troops might be found. He had assumed that there was only a few German soldiers here, but on what evidence? For all he knew, there might be dozens over there. His only consolation was that the ambusher had taken off—not the act of a man who had much in the way of help.
Hiding sideways behind the trunk of a tree, Carter took a long look. Just three buildings: a chalet, a storage shed, and what looked like a Viking longhouse. He recognized it from a picture of a reconstructed longhouse in Denmark that he had seen in a National Geographic magazine—a thatch roof, smoke holes, and walls made from rough-hewn wood, looking like shingles mounted vertically. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.
The sound of a car starting came clear. Acting on instinct and in retrospect, just damned foolishness, he burst from cover and bolted across the clearing towards the corner of the chalet. He held the carbine across his chest, swaying back and forth as his feet pounded across dirt and then mown grass.
He reached the corner of the chalet, pushing his back up against wood painted a deep red. Peeking around, he saw a black car, civilian, rolling down a driveway that merged with a road beyond. He saw a flash of red hair through the rear window.
He aimed his carbine, knowing that the act was futile because he wasn’t going to fire and risk hitting her. The car turned onto the road and disappeared.
Carter spit on the ground. “This damned day is just cursed!”
CHAPTER TEN
He smelled the smoke first. Coming around the chalet, he saw smoke trickling out of an open door. Looking inside, he saw broken glass on the floor and a merry fire licking along the floor and up the walls of a kitchen. The Germans must have thrown an oil lamp onto the floor before fleeing, intent on burning the home rather than let it fall to the Americans intact.
Carter ran around the house, tried another door and found it locked, pumped half a magazine of bullets into the door near the handle, spraying splinters, and kicked it open. He was in a parlor, with furniture made mostly of fine woods and not much padding. He could smell the smoke, but not see it in this room. He tried the first door. Bedroom. Not interested in that. The second door opened into a library. Sunlight streamed in from large windows, making the center of the room glow, but the bookcases on the walls remained in shadow.
It had been over two years since he had been around so many books and the scholar in him was intrigued. As he quickly walked around the room, the smell of smoke came to him at the same time that he noticed the open safe by the wall. The safe was half-full of papers and books, including some that had spilled onto the floor. Carter had obviously interrupted the occupant of the house in the process of grabbing his treasures.
Carter ran back into the parlor, threw his carbine out the front door, wincing at the disrespect that he was showing his weapon, went into the bedroom, ripped off the top blanket and rushed back into the library. The smoke was getting heavier now and he coughed as he scooped all of the contents of the safe onto the blanket. He folded the edges of the blanket over the top, wanting to tie it closed, but there was no time. He picked up the bundle into his arms and hurried over to the door to the parlor.
The fire had spread from the kitchen and was licking along the ceiling, tendrils of flame reaching out like a hungry monster. Holding his head low, Carter ran across the room and out the door that he had kicked in.
Waddling over to where the lawn reached the edge of the forest, he dropped
