Читать книгу Seeking Valhalla - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 13

CHAPTER NINE

Fritz Steinhauer stood near the trees at the edge of the clearing in front of the chalet, relieving himself. As he drew circles on the ground, he whistled softly to himself, a tune that he heard sung for the first time a couple of weeks earlier in a café in Munich. He and his brother had earned leave for one day. They walked the twenty kilometers into town, spent all their money, and managed to walk back, blurry-eyed from drink. Fritz couldn’t remember the lyrics—he always had difficulty getting words to stick in his brain—but he always remembered a tune.

There had been a prostitute in Munich, whom he shared with his brother. Pleasant memories there. And that girl, the one now in the chalet, the redheaded bride of Odin that the colonel had insisted that they take. Just thinking of her led to a frustrating erection.

Buttoning up his camouflage pants, Fritz picked up his Sturmgewehr. After so many years of carrying a bolt-action rifle, this new Storm Rifle gave him such visceral pleasure. He would love to have used it in the real battles that he had fought. The last enemy soldier that he had seen, the first in seven months, was that short American that the colonel had not allowed him to kill. Fritz was not a dumb man; he understood the need to be quiet, but why not use his knife on the man? As happened too often, that clever idea only occurred to him later.

The sound of a vehicle coming down road from the temple jerked up his head. He rushed over to a mound of dirt, pressed his body to the ground and laid his Sturmgewehr on top, sighting down the road.

Carter noticed a clearing ahead and instinctively eased the pressure of his foot on the accelerator. He noticed sparks flying off the hood of the jeep at the same time that he heard the rapid rattle of a machine gun. Part of him puzzled over why the fire sounded so odd; not from a light machine gun or from a submachine gun, something new that put too many bullets in the air too fast for his comfort.

Slamming on the brakes, Carter skewed to the left, placing the jeep to directly face the incoming fire. That positioned the engine block as a shield and made it easy to fire the .30-caliber machine gun directly back. As soon as they ground to a stop, dust and grass flying, Ferro stood and emptied Carter’s carbine towards the bad guy.

Where was their own machine gun? Carter looked to his right and saw the slack face of the greenhorn, pasty cheeks, mouth gaping open, his shirt soaked with blood. Tugging out the field dressing from his first aid pouch, Carter pressed on the man’s chest, desperate to stop the flowing blood.

Ferro finished with the carbine, stood up in the jeep, leaned over the two front men, worked the release on the .30-caliber, and let loose. Carter glanced up to see the signature of the bullets down the road—flying bark and clumps of dirt. Ferro hosed down the entire area that the enemy fire had come from. Carter raised his arm to shelter his face from the falling spent shells and links, and leaned over to use his body to shield the greenhorn. The noise reverberated through his skull.

Inexperienced in working the .30-caliber, it was not surprising that Ferro failed to conserve ammunition by making shorter bursts; after half a minute of steady work, he had used up the 250 rounds in the belt. As the machine 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!”