Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Seventeen

December 21, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Thursday, 1630 Hours.

Darkness came early to the towns on the Salm and Amblève. By midafternoon gray stone bridges were merging with the heavy cover of snow and clouds. Docker turned on headlights when he and Trankic drove down the narrow road from Mont Reynard, twisting through stands of trees and underbrush, following the river into the village.

Stopping at the square in front of the church, chains noisy on the cobblestones, Trankic went into Jocko Berthier’s café and Docker got out of the jeep to check the darkness and listen to the wind in the trees. Blackout curtains of the houses on the square were drawn. Nothing moved in the narrow streets but occasional flurries of snow.

Docker had left Schmitzer in charge of the section, no longer feeling he could trust Larkin; something seemed to have gone dead inside the Irishman. It was more than the dark whiskey, it was some kind of insidious anger eating at his sense and energies. Larkin had, though, told him what he’d learned from Paul Bonnard. About the schoolteacher, a Jewish child and Berthier’s transmitter... he had a theory that people confided in Larkin because the pain in his eyes convinced them they had at least that in common...

After the gun section shot down the German plane, Docker had sent Trankic with a detail into the peaks above their position to find it. The men had climbed to a point where they could see the plane in a ravine packed with snow and ice. By then only a few streamers of black smoke drifted from the wreckage. The sides of the gorge had been too steep to risk a closer inspection, but even at that distance Trankic had seen that the aircraft was constructed without conventional motors and propellers, only long jets under each wing, rent and battered now by the crash.

Docker had sent out a signal on the X-42, with a description of the plane and the grid coordinates of the crash site, but after twenty-four hours without acknowledgment, he and Trankic had decided to check out the Lepont transmitter.

When the corporal returned from the café, his cheeks were flushed with something more than the cold wind and his breath smelled of brandy.

“She lives just a couple of hundred yards from here,” he said. “You make a left turn at the river, it’s the last house.”

“What about the radio?”

“They got one all right, but it’s dead as Kelsey’s nuts.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I don’t know. Jocko says the wires are broken on the lead to...” Trankic shrugged. “It’s the audio rectifier or the transformer, near as I can figure this Walloon talk.”

“Will he help you?”

“He’s crippled as hell, Bull. It happened when the Heinies were sending guys from here to Poland. Some drunken Krauts didn’t want to lose their bartender so they busted him up one night. He fought back, and they put the boots to him. So to answer your question, fucking-A he’ll help.”

At a junction of secondary roads between Trois-Ponts and Stavelot, Colonel Karl Jaeger braked his command car and signaled to Sergeant Trakl, who was traveling directly behind him, standing high in the turret of a Panzerkampfwagen Mark VI.

Jaeger turned his vehicle into a logging trail between a row of fir trees. Glancing at the map clipped to his dashboard, he saw that there were still three more hills between them and the valley leading to the slopes of Mont Reynard.

He had stopped because in the light of his blackout beams he had seen a small boy walking near the woods on the side of the trail, bundled up against the weather in a wool jacket and ragged leggings. Trailing from one of his hands was a pair of small-game snares made of polished sticks and thin leather straps. The boy, who was about ten or eleven, smiled tentatively, his teeth white in the subdued beams from Jaeger’s car, then scrambled over a ridge of snow and ran into the trees.

Jaeger signaled to Sergeant Trakl and pointed after the running boy, whose small figure was already indistinct in the snow-spin of the forests.

Followed by two corporals, Trakl ran into the woods after the boy, and within minutes they had collared and marched him back to Jaeger’s command car.

“We’re not going to hurt you, stop struggling,” Jaeger said.

“You’ll get me in trouble.” The youngster spoke in French. “My mother expects me home for supper.”

“Do you have a father or brothers?”

“No, sir, just my mother.”

The boy’s face was pinched with the cold, his cheeks chapped and raw, but he didn’t seem frightened; there was a lively curiosity in his bright eyes as he stared up at the huge tank.

“Do you know who we are?” Jaeger asked him.

“Yes. You’re Germans.”

“What’s your name?”

“It’s Simon Coutreau, sir.”

Jaeger wondered if it had been only his own nerves that had alerted him. No, there was the business of the snares and the darkness...

He took the briar pipe from his pocket and put it between his teeth. He smiled at the boy and said, “Are you afraid of us, Simon?”

The boy shook his head. “I’ve done nothing to be afraid of, sir.”

“Did someone tell you to watch for us? You might as well tell us the truth.”

“No, I came to the woods to set snares. I come every day. There are rabbits here.”

“You must be a fine hunter, Simon, to find their tracks in the dark.”

“But it was light when I started, sir. I’m on my way home now.”

“Yet you’ve set no snares.”

“Because I found no tracks, sir.”

Jaeger looked at the road ahead, the snow shining in the light of his blackout beams, and then studied the white fields and dark woods on either side of him.

“Let him go, Sergeant Trakl,” he said.

“Let him go, sir? He might be lying.”

“You heard me, sergeant. We’re not at war with children.”

The boy ran off toward the woods, and Jaeger turned his command car back onto the road to Lepont.