The Sherman kept advancing toward the three panzers. To Cole’s way of thinking, it was nothing short of a suicide mission. Incredibly, the commander in the first German tank still stood in the hatch, almost resembling a soldier charging on horseback. He wasn’t sure whether the German was brave or foolhardy. Then the panzer skidded to a halt and lowered its barrel, taking aim at the Sherman.
It was practically point-blank range. There was no way that the panzer could miss, even if the gunner had been blind in one eye and couldn’t see straight in the other.
Cole made a split decision to do what he could to help the Sherman tank. He was well aware that a rifle was a puny weapon against a tank. Still, he had to try. He lined up the crosshairs on the commander standing in the hatch.
He felt Bauer jolt his shoulder, spoiling his aim.
“Do that again and I’ll shoot you,” Cole snarled.
“Wait,” the German said. “There is another way.”
To Cole’s astonishment, the German stood up and started waving to get the attention of the tank commander.
Cole reached up and tugged at Bauer with such force that the man’s officer’s hat fell off into the snow. “Get down, you stupid Kraut!”
But Bauer ignored him and kept waving to get the attention of the Germans on the road.
His tactics worked a bit too well. The tank commander shouted something and pointed. The panzer’s massive gun swiveled in their direction to face this new threat. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the soldiers on the road directed their fire at them, and bullets tore through the trees.
Now that the attention was momentarily off them, the Sherman tank crew seemed to realize that it might be better to live to fight another day. Like an indignant banty rooster, the Sherman reversed direction and retreated. It did still get off a couple of shots, one of which struck one of the panzers, enveloping it in a cloud of detonating high explosives. The tank survived, but certainly its crew would have been left with ringing ears and a headache.
Cole rolled out from his hiding place. Keeping low, he ran, yelling “Go! Go!” to the others.
He ran deeper into the snowy woods, aware of Vaccaro and Rupert crashing through the trees on his left. He wasn’t sure where Bauer had gone. Cole really didn’t give a damn about him anymore.
Back on the road, the panzer fired with a sound like the sky ripping open. The shell struck somewhere ahead of Cole, ripping open the ground and scattering clods of dark earth across the white snow. Cole ran through while some of the clods were still raining down.
Bullets still tore through the trees around them, but the firing was more sporadic and higher overhead. He was sure that the Germans had lost sight of them. It wasn’t long before the firing stopped altogether, and thankfully the panzer didn’t take another shot at them.
Cole kept running. He didn’t stop until he emerged on a snow-covered lane that cut through the forest. He looked in both directions, but there wasn’t so much as a footprint. The snow lay undisturbed.
No, that wasn’t quite true, he realized. He spotted the telltale triangular pattern of rabbit tracks and the single-file trail left by a fox that was going after that rabbit. These forest creatures were going about their business, following the endless cycle of hunter and hunted, oblivious to the fact that there was a war on.
But there was no sign of any two-legged critters. No Germans. No panzers. Even the trees around them were still and quiet except for the taller bare branches clacking together in the winter wind. Nobody had been this way in some time.
Away from the sound of the fighting on the road, the lane felt secluded and peaceful. The tree branches above the lane wove together overhead to form a sort of tunnel through the forest, inviting them to follow it.
Cole bent over and caught his breath, panting. Vaccaro and Rupert came up beside him, doing the same.
“Damn, that was close,” Vaccaro said. “Was that German trying to get us killed?”
“He didn’t want me shooting that panzer commander, that’s what.”
“You were going to shoot at them?” Vaccaro asked, sounding incredulous. “That might have been worse than waving at them. Still, I don’t know what the hell Herr Barnstormer was thinking.”
Rupert interrupted them. “Here’s our German, chaps. You can ask him yourself.”
Bauer emerged from the trees, his hands raised to indicate that he was still their prisoner. Like them, he was panting and badly winded. One coat sleeve was torn where he’d caught it on a branch.
Cole stepped forward and hit Bauer in the chest with the butt of his rifle, knocking him down. With the German sitting in the snow, breathing heavily, Cole pointed the rifle at him. “Try anything like that again and I’ll shoot you. Hell, I ought to just shoot you now.”
Cole let the muzzle linger no more than a couple of feet from the Kraut’s head, finger on the trigger. He narrowed his eyes.
