Final impact

“Holy shit,” he muttered, barely able to hear himself over the rumble of the tank squadron’s idling engines. They’d pulled up at the edge of a clearing near the eastern border of the Ardennes. Nine tanks out of the twenty-two he’d started with, and a company-sized force of the Twenty-ninth Infantry, stitched together from the remains of a battalion that got chopped up crossing the Meuse River.

“They’re our guys all right!” a corporal yelled. “Come on.”

A couple of medics ran past Prather, hauling their kits, but he doubted they’d be of much use. This was the third execution site they’d come across, and the previous mass graves had been just that. They’d found no survivors.

Prather walked slowly, subdued and even indifferent to what he would find. From the line of bodies it looked like a platoon had bought it. The blue diamond patch, bordered in yellow, on their uniforms marked them as Rangers. He wondered if they’d been tricked by krauts dressed up as Americans. He’d heard rumors of that happening. Most likely, they’d been grabbed up by the SS. Wehrmacht units were beginning to surrender en masse, but as things fell apart Himmler’s storm troopers seemed to become even more inhuman in the face of their imminent defeat. The last time he’d had anything like an intelligence briefing, it had stressed the need to be aware of the possibility of poison gas, even germ attacks. Apparently something like that was happening already on the Eastern Front. Although what the hell they were supposed to do about it if the Germans started lobbing shit like that at them, he had no idea.

Neither had the briefers. When asked they’d simply repeated the mantra. Be Alert.

Prather plucked a long, clean stalk of grass and began to chew it as he walked. It was a bleak day, with low clouds glowering at him from over the treetops. The dark forest along which they had been skirting loomed to his right. It looked like the sort of place you’d expect to find gremlins and trolls. Ahead of him, the medics were at work, methodically checking each body for signs of life. He didn’t-

“Captain! Captain Prather. This one’s alive!”

He spat out the stalk and hurried over. He tried to ignore the extraneous details: the promiscuous way in which many of the bodies sprawled over one another, and the thick black knots of flies that seethed around the terrible wounds. One medic continued with the hopeless task of checking the dead, but he was hurrying now as his colleague worked frantically to strip away the webbing and jacket of the critically wounded soldier.

“Hey, shit! This is a woman!”

Prather almost tripped over a leg gone stiff with rigor mortis. His heart leapt into his mouth. He dropped to his knees beside the body. She was covered in mud and gore, almost unrecognizable really, but still he knew it was her. The reporter.

“What the fuck…?”

The medic was having trouble cutting through her battle dress.

“Don’t bother,” Prather said. “You’ve hit ballistic plate. There, under the jacket, see. You’ll just blunt your knife. Quickly, here, pull these tabs.”

The plastic material-he forgot the name-came apart with a ripping sound.

The second medic appeared, shook his head quickly to indicate that nobody else had made it, and kneeled down beside them. He joined in the effort, pouring water over her exposed chest to clean away some of the filth. No entry or exit wound, just massive bruising and a deep indentation below the heart. She was breathing, shallow and ragged.

“Quick, check her for bullet wounds,” Prather said. “She’s wearing twenty-first armor. She might be all right if-”

“Captain,” said one of the medics. “They got machine-gunned from fifty yards away. At this range the impact alone would kill-”

“No,” he insisted, shaking his head. “This is reactive matrix armor. Nanotube waffle. I’ve read about it. It can shed enormous loads of kinetic energy. If she hasn’t been punctured, she’ll need treatment for shock. It could still kill her.”

The corpsmen began rifling through the contents of their medical kits. Prather stood back to give them room. He wondered how Julia Duffy had gotten herself into this mess. Last he’d heard, she was supposed to be “embedded” with Patton. She must have struck out again on her own and walked into the shit with these poor bastards.

One of the medics elevated her feet by bundling up a couple of bloodied jackets and using them as pillows. The other checked her pulse and pupils.

A couple of scouts came trotting back from the forest to report. “We got nada, Cap’n. Krauts have gone for good. They left a few signs, though. SS by the looks of things.”

“No shit,” he said, not bothering to hide his bitterness. He’d liked Duffy. She was a good egg and, from what he’d heard, a hellcat in a fight. He’d read a couple of her pieces, here and there, when he’d found out she was coming to write about them, and he’d thought the style a bit overdone, but in herself she was a real gem. The enlisted men loved her.