When he was within a few feet of the boy, the officer drew back his arm and twisted his body as he slung the blade in his right hand in a viscous sweeping motion. The boy reacted, stepped back, and teetered on the edge of the ditch. His arms automatically came out to balance him as he fell, and the blade flashed brightly in and out of his line of sight while pain bloomed on his left cheek.
The officer watched as his knife missed its mark—the boy’s neck—and cut a deep line in his cheek and across the bridge of his nose instead. The boy tipped back, arms flailing, and fell onto the corpse of his mother in the trench behind him. He struggled there, on his mother’s still-warm body, as he tried to right himself. The officer watched with a degree of amusement while he tried to decide whether to venture in after his quarry or to pull his sidearm and dispatch the boy where he lay. He was still trying to choose when he realized that a high whining sound was invading the relative quiet of the camp around him.
A plane came in fast and low from the bleak western horizon. At first it could have been mistaken for a large black vulture or a bird of prey. But as it neared the camp, the white and black outline of a five-pointed star could be seen on its fuselage. Smoke billowed from both wings and from several places over the engine cowling. A clever artist had drawn a gaping mouth lined with teeth along the front of the aircraft behind the sputtering propeller. The P-40 dropped lower and lower, until the whine of the failing engine became a roar that overrode even the concussive pressure in the soldiers’ heads. A few tried to run, while others simply fell onto the freezing ground.
The officer watched the plane as it dove sharply, directly toward the spot where he stood. With only a split second to spare, he jumped to his left and rolled several times as the sound of the plane’s engine shrieked against altitude and ate up the air around him.
The plane smashed into the ground several feet beyond the edge of the ditch, inside the camp’s fences. Metal rent and chunks of the aircraft flew hundreds of yards in different directions. The heavy three-bladed prop tore free of its anchoring, and as it stuttered hastily across the wet ground, it cut through the Blockwart’s body, leaving the two gaping halves, once a man, to tip apart. Flying shrapnel wounded a number of other soldiers, and a fireball erupted as the remaining gas in the plane’s tanks caught fire.
The officer blinked his eyes into the cold mud below the layer of sleet that he was lying on. He pushed his gloved hands into the ground and sat up. His ears rang with the explosion, and his vision titled as he tried to regain his feet. His hat had been lost when he dove, and his light blond hair stuck up at odd angles above his pallid face. He looked around at the grounds and saw many of the soldiers that were assisting him earlier lying in pieces, their insides turned out in a shocking display. Smoking chunks of meat still clung to the burning bones of the plane fifty yards away, and he heard screaming from the injured.
He turned and looked down at the trench before him, at the bodies now covered with a slight layer of dirt and sleet from the impact of the plane.
The boy wasn’t there.
His eyes scanned up and down the tangled limbs in the depression, searching for movement among the dead. He even looked for a body with an unnatural arch to it, just in case the boy had burrowed beneath one of the corpses to hide as he had seen done several times.
When he concluded the boy wasn’t present in the ditch before him, he began to inspect the far bank and the fence beyond. A field merged into a rough forest of bramble and pine. Several yards from the edge of the barbed wire, the woods faded into an inky gloom, even in the full light of day. It was at the border of the trees that the boy stood looking at him.