a small metal pin of a grinning skull on two bones. He had only ever seen that insignia once before—on the guards at Dachau.
He counted fifteen bodies, but he couldn’t be sure, since some of the bodies were clumped together and Carter didn’t care to look too closely. He never looked at the faces of the enemy dead, because all he saw was young men like his own soldiers.
“Half of you with me.” Carter pointed to the right. “Half of you with Finney.” He pointed to the left. “We’ll catch them in a pincer movement.”
With five Rangers following, Carter charged for the corner of the temple wall. He wanted to retain the initiative and knew from experience that keeping a step ahead of the enemy came from quick decisions and fast action.
He slowed to a stop, took his shaving mirror from his shirt pocket, checked to see that the sun wouldn’t broadcast his presence with a reflected beam of light, and used the mirror to peek around the corner. No one there. Around the corner, and running again, trying to not make a thundering noise with boots on dirt. He heard firing break out in front and discarded the notion of trying to be quiet.
A glance behind showed him that Ferro was with him. The little Italian was a crack shot, especially with the scope on his M1903 Springfield rifle, and left-handed. “Ferro, you get the corner.”
The Italian rushed ahead of the pack, reached the corner and swung his rifle around. Shooting with the rifle butt at his left shoulder allowed him to use the wall to cover most of his body. He fired, withdrew, worked the bolt, went back to the corner, aimed, fired again.
Carter leaned out for a moment to get a quick glance and stepped back. The Germans were crouched behind trees, returning fire at Finney’s group with their submachine guns. The heavier burp of the BAR men joined in. They must have moved up and were shooting out of the open gate. Carter felt a surge of pride at this display of Ranger aggressiveness, without needing commands from an officer. The two sections worked like a construction crew that had built the same building over and over and everyone knew their jobs.
Carter and the rest of the men with him ran out from behind the wall to the flat ground that surrounded the temple, dropped to the grass and added their fire. Caught in the crossfire, the Germans died quickly, and so the American fire slowed, then just a few pops, and silence.
Carter pulled himself up and looked at his men. “Anyone hit?”
No casualties among his group of soldiers. Carter trotted along the temple wall. Two BAR men emerged from the gate, followed by Peterson, who must have climbed down out of that tree pretty fast. Finney brought his men up. “Anyone hit?” Carter asked the corporal.
No casualties there.
The Rangers went through the dead, making sure that there was no one faking it, then fanned out to find their own dead from earlier in the battle. They found Private First Class Billy Joe Fernández, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, crumpled on the grass near a shrub. He had survived a leg wound at the Battle of the Bulge and returned to the unit only two weeks ago. Another few days and the war would not have claimed him.
The rest of Rangers caught outside by the attack emerged from the forest in ones and twos. Normally they would have had to suffer being the butt of jokes about surviving by running faster than German bullets could fly, but the death of Billy Joe had washed out any humor that the Rangers might have felt.
“Half of you follow me,” Carter said, starting up the road that they had come down. “We need to find Napier and the girl.”
Approaching the jeep cautiously, Carter found his friend curled up on his side near the jeep. There was no sign of the girl.
“Spread out, see what you can find,” Carter ordered. “Be careful, there might still be Krauts around.”
Setting down his carbine, he examined Napier. The tough soldier was still breathing, with a nasty mess of blood and matted hair on the back of his skull. Carter felt the wound gently, getting his fingers covered with blood. A good-sized lump, but no softness or give in the bone, so he assumed that the skull hadn’t been cracked.
A Ranger returned to report that he had come across a German truck on a nearby road, hood still warm, but no enemy soldiers around. From the looks of the tracks on the ground, there had been another truck there.
The obvious conclusion made Carter feel sick. “They must have taken the girl.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carter was torn. He wanted to accompany his friend back to the medical corps at the battalion bivouac, but what about Aoife? The image of the big tree, the rings, and dried blood, kept intruding in front of his eyes.
Rapid orders followed. Carter took two men in the jeep. One of the trucks was to be driven down to the temple, and the rest of the men took the other truck to transport Napier back to the bivouac.
Carter normally let Napier drive the jeep—an annoying consequence of rank, because Carter really enjoyed being at the steering wheel. As a child he had ridden horses competitively, continuing a family tradition, leaning into the horse as if they were one organism as they jumped over poles and water. The jeep consumed gasoline, not hay, but its four-wheel drive was as versatile as a horse. Carter had seen lots of horses during this war, many of them dead or dying. Many farms in Europe still used horses, not tractors, and he had been surprised to find that both the Italian army and the German army still used horses. He had not seen a horse in either the American or British armies, except for a few in England that senior officers used for recreation. Perhaps this one insight told much about the industrial struggle of factory output between the Allies and the Axis and why the Allies were on the verge of victory.
As Carter drove by the temple to get to the other road, he found his Rangers laying out the dead Germans in a row. Now that spring had arrived, burying the dead quickly was always a good idea, before putrefaction turned the bodies all gooey.
A quarter of a mile up the second road, they came across the German truck. Carter stopped for a moment and stood up to get the lay of the land. Putting the jeep into gear, he drove around the truck, bumping over the rough ground and over a half-buried log, and accelerated as he regained the road. The trees rushed by faster, forcing Carter to concentrated on staying in the two brown ruts among the blur of green.
Ferro sat in the rear, with Carter’s carbine in his hands and his own rifle jutting up between his knees, its scope resting against his thigh in order to keep it protected and aligned. “You think that maybe you are going a little fast, sir?” the Italian from Boston asked.
“We need to catch them before the road meets some other road and we lose them.”
“What about mines, sir?”
Carter slowed for a moment. The standard tactic was to drive slowly enough to be able to see if the ground had been disturbed, which only worked if the mines had been recently laid. He hated mines, with a passion born of raw fear; six of his men had been maimed by them, and two others had died. In one of those sick twists of logic that war thrived on, antipersonnel mines were designed to wound and cripple, not kill. A wounded man delayed a military unit, as his comrades stopped to care for him and get him to medical attention, while a dead man did not slow the unit down. Of course, an antipersonnel mine would probably not wound them in the jeep, but roads didn’t have the small AP mines, they had bigger mines to destroy vehicles. Outside Cherbourg, he had seen a jeep hit an antitank mine. Not pretty. The mine had ripped up like a molten geyser from hell and left only charred metal and men.
“They
