Tom Townsend

  PAGEANT BOOKS

  Prologue

  The last cow was still somewhere downrange when the old German decided that it was too dark to keep looking. Cold twilight hung over the valley like a damp sponge, and although the first snow had yet to fall, it could not be far away. Karl Leiter walked tiredly up the path toward home. He would miss this little valley where his cows had grazed since the last war. It was as if history had turned a full circle in the forty years since he had come home from the internment camps and begun to regather the remnants of his life.

  The panzers had fought in this forest at the war’s end; a horrible battle of which he knew little. He remembered the valley when it was littered with rusting, burned-out hulks; when broken, splintered trees had just begun to sprout new leaves, and the spring rains tried to erase the ruts of steel treads.

  The stale stench of death had faded then to a subtle, sickening sweet odor; an invisible fog in spring and summer.

  Four decades of changing seasons had reduced all but the deepest craters to shallow depressions. The tank tracks were gone and the odor of death was only an eternal memory. Once again, the pines had grown tall and strong. One by one, the wrecked panzers had been dragged away to be cut up for scrap or used as targets on the American Army’s firing ranges at nearby Grafenwohr.

  All except one.

  Now the U.S. Army had leased Karl Leiter’s land to extend their training area. Once again the forest would be shot to pieces, the fields bombarded and plowed with the tracks of armored vehicles. Again, it would look as it had when he came home from the war. He was glad that he would not be here to see it. But the price had been right and Karl was getting old, too old to chase wandering cows about the forest at twilight. He smiled. Some things are eternal. The panzers had fought here. Nature healed her wounds, and now new panzers would come. What, he wondered, would become of that last old tank?

  Around a bend in the trail, he paused and looked into the darkening woods for a long minute. Then he nodded and stepped into the trees.

  He would say good-bye.

  Reverently, he picked his way through the trees as if he were approaching the temple of some sleeping god of old. The forest had grown up around the tank, laying it to rest beneath a burial mound of dead limbs and pine needles. In the twilight, beneath the mantle of brush, it was a gray, vague shadow of what it had once been. Perhaps that was why the Americans had never found it.

  Karl thought this tank had been called a Jagdpanther, a tank built especially to hunt other tanks; sleek and turretless, heavily armored and fast. Like their namesake, the panthers had killed from ambush and faded into the forests to kill again and again.

  Its gun barrel drooped beneath the funeral shroud. Karl brushed away a few pine needles and patted one steel fender. Mustard-yellow battle paint had faded to a color of dirt. The hatches had always been closed and Karl had never tried to open them. He had seen enough death during the war. Whatever was inside, he did not want to explore. There could be few ways to die any worse than inside a tank. Searing flames would instantly consume the oxygen. Hydraulic oil would ignite. Then the ammunition, always stored with the warheads pointed menacingly at the crew, would explode. To see inside held no interest for him. Perhaps it was the grave of German soldiers; perhaps it had simply been abandoned. It mattered not.

  Karl stood in silence before the old hulk; then suddenly, he wanted to see the crest one last time. With nervous fingers, he pushed away some dirt from the sloping bow. His pulse quickened as the painted face on the red shield smiled wickedly up at him. He had never been sure whether it was a dwarf or an elf, or some other ancient forest spirit. The ears were pointed and its smile leered with sharp teeth and curling lips. The eyes were red and wolflike behind heavy brows, and below the face were the twin lightning bolts of the SS. It was odd that the paint had never faded.

  "W'ell, Old Panzer. Once again the Americans are coming,” Karl whispered. "I would guess you gave them hell the last time, but I think now there is not much fight left in you.” The painted face smiled back at him and for one millisecond seemed to sneer, "Wrong, old man, wrong.”

  He reburied the crest, patted the dented fender one last time, and turned aw'ay. "AufWiedersehen,” he said, and started for home. When he reached the trail, he looked back once. The darkness was complete now. In the trees he fancied there was a dim glow, bluish and barely discernible. He blinked once and it remained. "Witch lights,” he whispered to reassure himself; only the phosphorus glow of decaying wood and plants, nothing more. He turned away and started up the path for home. "Farewell,” he whispered and began to hum the drumming notes of “Panzer Lied,” a stirring old march of the German armored divisions that had not crossed his lips in forty years.

  Chapter One

  "Driver, halt,” Sergeant Hank Murphy yelled into his tank’s intercom. Beneath him, 106,000 pounds of M-60A3 main battle tank rocked on its hydraulic suspension and came to a sudden stop.

  "Where the hell are we, Sarge?” Private Jackson, the driver, called back sarcastically over the earphones.

  "What do you think I’m tryin’ to figure out? This damned map was made in 1945,” Murphy answered as he banged open the cupola hatch. Snowflakes drifted onto his face and melted in little wet spots on the acetate cover of his old map. Ahead of him was a trail junction which did not show on the map. The right fork continued along the low ridge west of Tank Table Six on the Grafenwohr Range. The left fork dropped into a little wooded valley.

  "Lieutenant’s gonna be pissed as hell if we don’t catch up with the platoon pretty soon,” the driver said.

  "Fuck the chickenshit lieutenant and fuck you, too. If you’d checked the goddamned end connectors, we wouldn’t have spent half the morning freezing our asses off putting a tread back on this beast.”

  The loader’s hatch came open beside him and Private Sanchez appeared without his helmet on. "I think we go to the right, Sergeant.”

  "How would you know, greaseball?”

  Sanchez shrugged. "I don’t know. I jus’ think it’s right.”

  Murphy glared at the loader. It seemed like there was everything but real Americans in the U.S. Army now. If they weren't black, they were Mexican or Puerto Rican, and half of them couldn’t even speak English. They didn’t know shit, they didn’t want to know shit, and if you tried to pound some sense into them, they went running to the judge advocate screaming "racial discrimination,” which were the only English words that they all could pronounce without an accent. Fuck the army.

  "Move it out, Jackson, left turn,” he said.

  "It’s the other way, Sarge,” the driver argued in his ear.

  "Shut up and move out.” The tank lurched forward, dug in the left tread, and headed down into the valley.

  The forest was a black silhouette against a sky of slate gray. Snow covered a trail which showed no sign of use in many years. Secretly, Murphy had almost believed that the other trail was the correct way to go. But he chose the left by applying his own proven rule of military logic: "Anything a private says has to be wrong.”

  Towering pines rose higher above him and the trail narrowed. The sky dwindled to only a narrow strip of snowflake-dotted gray above the jagged, toothlike treetops. The M-60 ground slowly through the falling snow, leaving a pair of dark, ugly tracks in its wake.

  Sergeant Murphy had been in the army for seven years. Too late for Vietnam, he had never seen combat and sometimes it bothered him. Life was one training exercise after another, interrupted by the dull, endless routine of tank maintenance. He supposed he should be thankful that he was not getting shot at. Duty in West Germany might be dull and the pay terrible, but it was relatively safe.

  "Sarge?” the driver again. “Wouldn’t it have been the shits to hunt Kraut armor down a road like this back in World War II? Man, this is an ambush valley if I ever saw it.”

  "I imagine some GIs did just that. And in a goddamned old Sherman with beer-can armor and a BB gun.” The driver locked one tread and eased the M-60 around a narrow turn, plowing up a half-dozen small trees in the process. Murphy was bitching at him for scratching the paint when a glow in the woods caught his eye. "Hey, stop the tank,” he ordered.

  Within the black curtain of forest, there was a bluish glow, pulsating softly in the winter gloom. Murphy squinted his eyes and decided he was seeing things. There was something there, a mound, maybe a bunker, but whatever it was, it had to be old to be so overgrown. "Jackson, you see that?"

  "See what, Sarge?”

  “In the woods. Looks like a bunker or maybe an old tank.”

  "Great,” Jackson answered sarcastically. "If it’s an old tank, it’s probably a target and that means we’ve wandered off downrange and may be fixin’ to get our asses blown off.”

  "Naw, this ain’t no impact area. Shut it down. I want to have a look.” Murphy was already on the ground when the big diesel went silent. Jackson's head was out of the driver’s hatch. "You want to come?” Murphy asked.

  “Not me, Sarge, just wake me up when you get through,” Jackson replied, and his head disappeared into the tank’s hull.

  Murphy walked toward the trees. New snow had filtered down through the pines to cover the forest floor. His spit-polished boots crunched ominously, disturbing the heavy silence. Ahead was a strange mound, unnatural and speckled with white in the eternal twilight of the forest. A feeling of foreboding swept over him and suddenly he wanted to turn back. Unseen eyes seemed to watch his every step, coaxing him onward, closer and closer,