THE TEN THOUSAND

by Harold Coyle

  That the battle was over was not immediately evident to Cerro from where he sat. Looking out over the vast open field, he had watched with macabre fascination the duel between the personnel carriers, the German tank, and the American tank that had come charging down from the north in an effort to save the personnel carriers. That the tank had managed to save one of the personnel carriers was both fortunate and, considering the intensity of the battle, lucky. Before turning back to the matter of finding out what was happening within his own battalion, Cerro looked back at the road north of the farm. He watched for a second as the tank came up and stopped on the road, shielding the two personnel carriers from any future attacks from the woods to the east. On the left side of the road, Cerro studied the two personnel carriers through his binoculars. He could see that they were now sitting side by side, with the crew of the undamaged personnel carrier working frantically to pull out the crew and passengers of the damaged personnel carrier before it was totally engulfed by flames. On the hard-surfaced road the tank stood motionless, guarding the carriers and their crews.

  Though he knew who those personnel carriers belonged to, Cerro didn't pause to wonder whose had been hit. There was a battalion he needed to get in hand. If his performance and luck up to this point of the fight were any indication, it would be a while before he would be able to achieve that. For some reason nothing was working right that day for him. Nothing.

  CHAPTER 23

  26 JANUARY

  There was a certain strangeness to everything. Somehow, when Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee was finally able to open his eyes and keep them open, he noticed that everything had changed. The early-morning light filled the room he was in and made everything seem so bright, so white. Looking straight ahead, he could see the ceiling, the light hanging from the ceiling, and the pole next to him. Still this didn't help him. With his head still clouded from drugs and painkillers, Ellerbee didn't have any idea where he was. He wasn't even sure, for that matter, if he was conscious or in the throes of a seriously weird dream. With an effort that required every bit of conscious thought he could muster, Ellerbee forced his head over to one side. Unfortunately, once it started moving, Ellerbee felt a momentary panic when he realized that he couldn't stop it. So his head rolled to the side until the side of his face flopped down on the thin pillow.

  For a moment he rested from this exertion, gathering the strength and presence of mind he would need to continue his explorations. Ready, he pried his eyes open again, noting that everything was terribly blurry, making every object soft and ill defined. Eventually, after his cloudy brain was able to identify the objects he saw, Ellerbee realized that he was looking at a bed, a hospital bed, with someone in it. Taking this discovery into account, it wasn't long before Ellerbee was finally able to deduce that since he was looking at a hospital bed, this meant that this was a hospital. If this was true, his erratic logic ran, then he must also be in a hospital bed. If all of that proved true, he finally concluded, he was wounded and not quite dead yet. After working all of that out, Ellerbee allowed himself to relax and rest. There was, as he did so, a certain feeling of joy, but not for having survived, because it was way too soon to come to such sophisticated levels of self-awareness. Instead, his source of joy was having been able to figure out where he was.

  When he was ready to continue, Ellerbee looked closer at the patient in the bed across from his. His fellow patient was sitting up busily writing away at something on the little hospital tray that sat suspended over his lap. Clearing his throat, Ellerbee attempted to speak but couldn't muster any coherent words on his first try. That effort, however, was not wasted, since the patient heard his croaking and turned his head toward Ellerbee. Having the other patient's attention encouraged Ellerbee to redouble his efforts. Ready, Ellerbee slowly forced the words out of his mouth, almost syllable by syllable. "You Am-er-can, or Ger-man?"

  The other patient, without any change of expression, responded, "Russian. And you?"

  Not sure if he heard right, Ellerbee had to think about what he had asked and what the response had been. Blinking, he decided to try something else. "Tim Ell-er-bee, second lieu-ten-ant, U.-S.-Ar-my. You?"

  "Nikolai Ilvanich, major, Russian Army. Welcome to Bremerhaven."

  At first Ellerbee couldn't understand what a Russian major was doing in Bremerhaven. Closing his eyes, Ellerbee tried to sort this out. If this major was a Russian, whose side had he been on? Only slowly was he able to recall that many Russian advisors had stayed with their American units after the Ukrainian operation. With that problem resolved, Ellerbee opened his eyes again.

  When he did, the room was different. The overhead lights that had been on were now off. The major across from him was no longer writing. He wasn't even sitting up. Instead he was lying down. Ellerbee didn't realize that a couple of hours had passed. Anxious to find out more, Ellerbee called out as best he could. "Ma-jor, you a-wake?"

  As before, the head turned. "Yes, Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee. And you?"

  "Yes, I'm a-wake. What un-it?"

  "Company A, 1st Ranger Battalion, 77th Infantry."

  Ellerbee sighed. Without thinking, he replied, "Lucky."

  "Why do you say I am lucky, Second Lieutenant Tim Ellerbee?"

  "No wom-en. My com-pany com-mander. A fe-male in-fan-try cap-tain."

  After pausing to think about what Ellerbee had said, Ilvanich responded, "Oh, I see. She failed to get the company back."

  Ellerbee surprised himself when he shook his head. He was getting better, he thought. He could now move his head and control it at will. "No. Com-pany made it. All the way."

  "Oh. Then she lost every battle you were in. Wasted a lot of lives."

  Again Ellerbee shook his head. When he answered, there was a hint of pride in his voice. "No. We did good. Didn't fail any missions. Took all objectives."

  "Oh. Then she mistreated you and your men. Didn't get you food or supplies on time."

  "No. We ate what-ever was on hand. Never went hungry. She only yelled at me when I did some-thing—" He was about to say wrong, but changed the word. "Something dumb."

  "Oh. Then her tactics caused unnecessary losses?"

  This one didn't require any thinking. All their losses, Ellerbee had noted throughout the march to the sea, had seemed reasonable and unavoidable. And when compared to the damage they had done to the Germans, they had always been light. "No. We lost, lost a lot. But really punished the Ger-mans. Kicked ass."

  "Then," Ilvanich exclaimed, "what's the problem with your company commander? I don't understand. You are here. Your company did the best it could. Succeeded in all of its missions. Won battles. Suffered losses but reasonable losses. And it finished the march. It sounds like this company commander, other than the fact that she's a woman and you don't like that for some reason, is good."

  This was almost too much for Ellerbee's mind to absorb as it floated about in a state of drug-induced bliss. While the Russian major's comments were good ones, each and every one, there was something that Ellerbee and the Russian were missing. Perhaps if he rested a little while, the missing element that would justify his dislike of Captain Nancy Kozak would come to mind. Closing his eyes, Ellerbee quickly drifted back to sleep.

  Roused from a fitful sleep at 3:05 a.m., Jan Fields-Dixon was" not prepared to greet her unexpected visitor. Her mind was so clouded with sleep that she didn't even make any effort to consider who would be disturbing her at this hour. Not that this was an unusual occurrence. After working for an outfit like World News Network for as long as she had, Jan had learned that nothing, not even her home life, was ordinary. Just about everything that could have happened had happened to her, sometimes more than once, in her years as a correspondent. Still there were times when even a hardened news veteran like Jan could be caught by surprise. Reaching the doorknob, Jan stopped, swept back the stray hairs that had cascaded lazily across her eyes, and opened the door.

  In her worst nightmare, Jan couldn't have imagined a s
ight more frightening, more terrible, than the image of the Army colonel standing before her in the open doorway. For a moment the two of them stood there staring at each other. Jan in an old white terry-cloth bathrobe faced the colonel, standing erect and alert in his overcoat topped with a green scarf that covered his neck and a hat pulled down so low that it hid his eyes in the shadow of its brim.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, Jan could feel her knees begin to tremble. Grasping the doorknob with her left hand, Jan almost fell over as she reached out with her right to steady herself on the door frame. Though her mouth fell open and she wanted so to scream, she couldn't. Nothing, not even a wisp of air, came out. It was as if her entire being, everything that she was, had suddenly locked up and come to a sudden, terrible dead stop. Without having to be told, without having to hear it, she knew that Scott was dead. The one man who had touched her heart and soul as no one ever had was gone.

  After an embarrassingly awkward moment, the Army colonel reached out ready to catch Jan but did not touch her. Finally with great trepidation the colonel leaned down and spoke. "Mrs. Dixon, are you going to be all right?"

  Responding to the words, Jan looked up at the eyes under the highly polished hat brim, nodded, and even managed a weak, stoic "Yes."

  Taking her word for it, the colonel took a deep breath and prepared to carry out his orders. But before he could, Jan spoke first. "How, how did it—" Then she stopped. How stupid. What difference did that make now? Why in the hell was it so important to know how? Wasn't it bad enough that it had?

  Confused, the colonel looked at Jan, who was obviously having a problem with his being there, and started again. Though he thought it probably would have been better to go inside, and he wondered why this woman in front of him didn't invite him in, the colonel decided to go ahead and just blurt it out. "Mrs. Dixon, I'm here on behalf of President Wilson. She sent me to personally inform you that your husband reached Bremerhaven."

  There was silence as Jan's expression quickly changed from pain to confusion, and finally to wonder, all of them reflecting the jumble of thoughts that raced through her mind. When Jan looked up at the colonel, he wasn't ready for her next question. "Then," she said with great trepidation, still struggling to keep her knees from buckling, "his body has just been recovered?"

  Now it was the colonel's turn to be confused. Cocking his head to the side, the colonel asked quite innocently, "Excuse me, ma'am, what body?"

  Looking up with wide eyes at being asked such an extraordinarily dumb question, Jan shouted, "Scott's! My husband's body."

  Finally it became clear to the colonel. With a quick shake of the head, as if to clear it, he almost laughed. "Oh! Oh, my God, no, Mrs. Dixon, you don't understand. Your husband isn't dead. He's alive. He made it back with the last of his brigade. When I said that he had returned to friendly lines, I meant that—"

  Jan didn't let him finish. In a flash her near paralysis caused by the grief she felt over Scott's death turned to anger. "YOU BASTARD! You rotten bastard! How dare you wake me in the middle of the night, scare the living shit out of me, and then stand there and laugh at me?" Without waiting for a response, Jan slammed the door in the colonel's face and fled to her bedroom. There she threw herself on her bed and let go with a flood of tears brought on by an avalanche of emotions that she had up until that moment held in check.

  Back at Jan's front door, the Army colonel stood motionless for several seconds in front of the closed door, not quite sure what he had done or what to do now. Finally, satisfied that he had accomplished his assigned mission and not wishing to disturb the crazy woman inside the house again, the colonel slowly pivoted about and headed back to the sedan that was waiting to take him back to the White House. As the driver pulled out of the driveway, the colonel looked back at the house one more time and wondered what he was going to say when he got back. Finally he decided that in this case the truth was the safest bet. With that decided, he pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, folded his arms across his chest, slumped down in the passenger seat, and went to sleep.

  Though the Thirteenth Corps had assumed control over all tactical operations in northern Germany and relieved the battered and exhausted Tenth Corps staff of that responsibility, the press corps continued to hover about the final command post site of the Tenth Corps like a pack of wolves waiting for food. Located only a few kilometers from the flat sandy beaches that bordered the North Sea, the staff throughout the Tenth Corps command post waited for the same thing that the media did— the appearance of Lieutenant General Alvin Malin, the renegade general. The correspondents, like the rest of the world, waited to see if Big Al, the most controversial American military figure since MacArthur, would stay true to his word and surrender himself to American authorities.

  Though rumor abounded that Malin had in fact returned to American lines the day before, no one outside the staff of the Tenth Corps knew where he was. This failure to report immediately as he had promised was causing problems for the President in Washington and delaying the scheduling of her talks with representatives of the German Parliament. Though both were anxious to put a quick end to what both sides were now referring to as a regrettable affair, the issue of General Malin had to be cleared up before anything on the diplomatic level could go forward. The silence surrounding the whereabouts of the man who had led the Tenth Corps in the dead of winter from the mountains of the Czech Republic to the North Sea seemed to weigh heavily on everyone's mind.

  It was in the late afternoon, just as the pale winter sun was preparing to fade off in the distant southwest, that the reporters and camera crews of the media pool, camped out across the road from where the Tenth Corps main command post sat, noticed a stirring throughout that headquarters. Alone and in pairs, the officers and the noncommissioned officers of the Tenth Corps staff emerged from their expandable vans and tents and began to line the road in front of the headquarters main entrance across from where the newsmen sat waiting. As the newsmen watched, the officers and NCOs gathered around the corps chief of staff, who was standing at parade rest, legs slightly spread apart and hands held together loosely in the small of his back. The look on his face, one of great sorrow, was no different than that of other staff officers and NCOs as they lined the road to either side and assumed a similar stance. Not knowing what was going to happen next but sensing that something was amiss, newsmen and camera crews began to record their observations with words and images.

  Critics would later claim that the grim procession was staged for the eye of the camera that caught every moment, every participant. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even if someone had thought of doing so, neither the corps staff nor the soldiers who made up General Malin's escort would have agreed to such a cynical plan.

  As the sound of an armored vehicle moving north along the road became audible, the chief of staff of the Tenth Corps, in his best parade-ground voice, shouted out his commands. "CORPS STAFF, ATTEN-TION!" With that, every man across from the newspeople came to a rigid position of attention with a snap. When the armored vehicle that had caused the chief of staff to call his staff to attention came into sight just down the road, he shouted out his next order. "PRE-SENT ARMS." As before, the response was immediate and snappy.

  Only the soft hum of generators in the background, the muted comments of correspondents talking into tape recorders, and the wail of the mournful winter wind blowing in off the North Sea disturbed the silence of the headquarters that had been the eye of an international storm for so long.

  In the lead was a young female captain riding low in the open hatch of her M-2 Bradley fighting vehicle. The haggard expression on her face made Nancy Kozak look ten years older than she was. Next to her, Sergeant Wolf, her gunner, grimly looked ahead with eyes that didn't seem to blink at all. -As Kozak's Bradley came abreast of the corps chief of staff, Kozak turned her head slightly, saluted the chief for a moment, then, after dropping her salute, she turned her attention back to the front without changing
expression. Immediately behind Kozak's Bradley came a second Bradley, the only other combat vehicle of her company that had survived the long trek north. The other eleven Bradleys and four tanks, as well as far too many of their crews, littered their route of march that started in Bavaria and ended here. Though the abandoned hulks of her vehicles were only metal, rubber, and plastic, each stood as a temporary headstone that marked where an American had fallen and where a little more of Captain Nancy Kozak's heart had died.

  Next came the battalion commander's Bradley. No one on the ground realized that the young major riding high in the hatch had not started out in that position. Not that Major Harold Cerro's story was any different than that of hundreds of other officers and sergeants in the Tenth Corps. Military necessity, a term often applied to something that was often unpleasant, had resulted in the sudden shifting of officers and NCOs into positions vacated by those who had fallen in battle, collapsed due to stress and strain, or proved incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of the position. In peacetime, Cerro, like many of his fellow officers, had joked about the wonderful opportunities that war offered a professional soldier. The reality of how such opportunities came about, coupled with the grim realization that a friend or peer had to fall in order to advance in such a manner, made such a promotion a thing to dread. For Cerro, because he lived, there was no escaping the price that others had paid so that he could be where he was. When his Bradley slowly trundled by the corps chief of staff, he like Kozak saluted him. After passing, Cerro looked to the north, toward the sea, and returned to his own grim thoughts and memories.