The Baker's Secret(71)
Eventually Thalheim reached a vantage he knew, stopping the motorcycle to crawl on his belly to the edge of the bluff. His shoulder ached, but he was safe behind barbed wire. The hill was heavily mined, too; he had overseen the work himself.
What he saw excited him: the beach was covered with wreckage, tanks and trucks and transport craft, all burning and bent. Bodies lay in the open, hundreds of men palsied atop their rifles or languishing in wavelets, halfway out of the sea. To his far right a big ship had run aground. It must have carried ammunition, since it produced nearly continuous explosions.
There was a smell to the air, metallic as though he had a coin in his mouth, with a whiff of gunpowder that vaguely resembled a campfire. It was not unpleasant, and Thalheim inhaled deeply: the scent of war.
As he observed, the battle scene made a visible sort of sense, a fine fury along the line of collision below, while a kilometer away the only danger came from sporadic air attacks.
As if to symbolize the invaders’ feckless ways, a pilotless landing craft careened across the water, nudging aside other boats, running over bodies in the surf, banging against the wooden obstacles, and impaling itself at last on a steel spike with a mine at the tip, whose detonation ripped away the bow and sent the landing craft down in a wake of bubbles and swirls.
Soon smoke from the ammunition ship had grown so heavy on the beach that shooting momentarily ceased. No one on either side could see to aim. The conflict acquired a strange calm.
Thalheim could hear big guns down the coast, however, the 88s and mortars with their satisfying throaty report. He could smell the acrid smoke that seemed to come from all directions.
This was the moment, the fulcrum of the battle, after which the invaders would lose their drive, and defenders of the coastal battlements would counterattack, turning the momentum and driving the Allies back into the sea like some creature not fully evolved, and therefore not equipped to live on this land. The moment of mighty transition was at hand, and if he was not to be a force in the victory, at least he was a loyal witness, for which Thalheim felt gratitude.
The wind gusted, the view cleared, an enemy destroyer fired from two hundred meters offshore, and the battle recommenced. Yet it seemed as though the next wave of landing craft was delaying, holding back while troops that had already landed fought their way up the sand a few dozen steps, before dying in a squall of gunfire. What kind of leadership would strand so many soldiers here to die? What kind of filth led this army?
Everything in Thalheim’s sight confirmed his conviction that he belonged to the strongest nation in history, the fiercest warriors, the greatest race. He felt his heart pounding against the ground beneath him.
From a gap between the landing crafts that held back, a strange floating machine emerged. It was sluggish, wallowing in the surf like a pig in mud. Yet somehow it proved impervious to the firing from the shore. He had never seen an object less seaworthy, but even the 88s could not stop its plodding progress.
Over a span of minutes, while men on the beaches and men on the bluffs exchanged fire, the casualties entirely on the invading side, this piggish behemoth rose up, taking ordnance from both flanks while water poured off of its sides. The onslaught punctured its inflated skirt until gradually the thing emerged as its true self: a tank. A floating tank.
While Thalheim marveled that such a device existed, the armored machine began turning its treads, throwing sand as it labored forward. He watched Allied soldiers scampering down the beach to cower behind the tank, hiding themselves as it muddled inland. Its turret was pointed at the nearest beach exit.
As the Field Marshal had predicted, the pre-aimed guns dropped those soldiers like so many flies, their weapons never fired. Also as planned, the armored machine soon encountered the antitank trench dug above the high-tide mark, a hole as wide as a man and as deep as three, and there it stopped.
“Now we’ve got you,” the captain said to himself.
But the tank carried some sort of contraption on its roof, a scaffold which now rose from hydraulic pumps with tedious slowness, unfolded in its middle due to gravity’s pull, and with a screech of metal fell open in front to make a rudimentary bridge.
The thought occurred to Thalheim for the first time that the enemy might not be completely weak after all, that the invaders might also have prepared. While he watched in horror, the tank set out across the bridge, which sank into the sand, but held.
Observers above the battle must have been paying attention as well. The nearest pillbox on the bluff unloaded its power downward, a bellow of shooting that pinned invading soldiers behind the tank—one who was foolish enough to poke a head up dropped instantly in the hail of gunfire.
By then the tank had reached the trench’s other side, where, as ponderous and wrathful as a bull, it at last seemed to take notice of the coastal defenses harassing it. With painstaking patience the turret turned, the long gun barrel lowered, and the bull’s charge took the form of a single shell, blasting into the bluff two meters below the pillbox. As dirt and rocks tumbled down, the fire from above redoubled, machine guns and rifles, a hand grenade thrown though it did not reach nearly far enough, detonating with a harmless geyser of sand, while with the same sluggish determination the turret adjusted slightly, the barrel rose a degree or two, and the tank fired again.
The shell pierced the pillbox opening, its explosion so powerful the resulting billow contained pieces of guns, helmets, what Thalheim could clearly see was a human leg. With the shot’s echo rattling down the coastline, one person spilled out the rear exit, writhing in the dirt and then still.