Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [117]
For a hundred yards he followed the gravel road away from the motor pool, passing what had once been a gasoline and diesel dump, but which was now a hole in the earth. Here the blasts of exploding fuel had pushed trees back as with a giant hand. The concussions had stripped the trees of limbs and leaves and left them resembling a flight of arrows. Dawn filled the woods with fragile blue light.
Through the trees came a sharp yell, then another, followed by a volley of curses and then a shouted order. Cray recognized the voice. They were the same the world around. A drill instructor. Cray pushed aside laurel branches.
The parade ground was a flat expanse of gravel. On the western edge of the grounds had been rows of barracks, perhaps forty clapboard buildings, every one of them flattened by bombs. The recruits lived in tents concealed in nearby trees. Reveille had been sounded. Hundreds of recruits were forming up in lines and were being harangued by four instructors who ranged back and forth in front of them. The recruits were boys, maybe fourteen and fifteen years old. Their uniforms were odd-lot castoffs. Some pants trailed on the ground. The hands of many of the boys were hidden by overlength sleeves. Only a few wore caps. Some of the boys had red stripes down their seams—dress trousers reclaimed from some prior war. This was a new class, and the morning light was reflected by tears on some of the boys' cheeks.
Cray skirted the parade ground, staying in the forested area, stopping to study the map Colonel Becker had drawn for him. The base, near Schellenberg just north of Berlin, was the home of the Wehrmacht's Third Army. Through the bush Cray could see the camp hospital, its white wall painted with an enormous red cross. Ambulance trucks were parked to one side, each with a red cross on its roof. Beyond it were the ruins of an administration building. Planes had caught automobiles in front of the building, and their blackened hulks had been pushed onto a nearby field. A soldier was raising the national flag on a pole in front of the building,
Cray moved north through the brush and trees. Early in his commando training he learned that he was safer when traveling. At first he thought it was only because a moving target is harder to hit, but then he determined his reactions were better and his decisions more sound when he was moving. Cray was more comfortable and capable passing through the world than when anchored to one spot. Traveling seemed to give him an advantage, and he had never figured out precisely why. Maybe it was just momentum.
He jumped a creek, then the rotted remnants of a pole fence, indicating the land had been a farm before being appropriated by the army. Birch trees grew where wheat and oats once did. Though it looked deserted, Cray gave wide berth to a tumbledown farmhouse. He passed a one-blade plow, rusting away and sinking into the ground. High in the trees a flock of starlings clicked and trilled.
The forest opened to a long rectangle of pasture. Cray stayed inside the cover of the brush, but edged close to the field. The area was about a mile long and four hundred yards wide. Bombers had mistaken it for an airfield, and it was cratered from one end to the other. So many explosives had fallen on the field that the remaining grass was in narrow strips resembling walkways between the craters. The bomb pits had gathered the rain and were filled with mud. Trees lining the ruined field swayed slowly in a light wind. A footpath of beaten grass lined the field on Cray's side.
The sound might have been a hummingbird. Sailing overhead, a soft buzz, east to west, and gone quickly. Then, chasing the sound from the east, came a flat and muted clap, the echo rattling in the trees before fading away.
Cray settled to his haunches behind an oak tree, a few feet from the edge of the cratered field. And then he began to disappear. Jack Cray did not believe in the