Rhineland Inheritance Read Online Free

You’ll have to excuse me.” She stepped between them. “Nice to have met you, Captain, I suppose.”
    The two men watched Sally as she walked down the corridor and out of sight. Jake realized he had been holding his breath. He straightened and asked, “Who was that that? ”
    â€œSally Anders.” Pierre’s eyes had not shifted from the point where Sally had disappeared from view. “Also known as the Ice Queen. Late of Ottowa. Secretary to the general staff.”
    â€œMarried?”
    â€œHer fiance was lost at sea. North Atlantic convoy duty.” Pierre shook his head. “My friend, if I’d had someone like that waiting for me at home, I would have learned to walk on water.”
    ----
    The three platoons were drawn up under a gray sky that threatened to blanket them with yet more snow. Pierre’s orders were given from the hood of the jeep. Jake Burnes understood not a word. Yet his lack of French could not keep him from observing the casual hold which Pierre maintained over the power of command. The troops listened carefully to his clipped sentences. He lightened them with a joke that brought smiles to most faces. He gathered them together and made them feel a part of something larger. Jake did not need to know the words to understand what was happening. He was watching a leader.
    Pierre jumped from the jeep, said in English, “There’s been a lot of movement down the southern stretch. I thought I’d take them myself today. Care to come along?”
    Jake understood that he was being tested. He knew that it would jeopardize their work together if he pointed out that this excursion was not part of his duty roster. “Whatever you say.”
    Pierre placed a grizzled Belgian sergeant-major on point and two hard-eyed corporals as back sentries, and ordered them to move out. They were soon tramping along paths that were invisible under their mantle of snow, trusting their sergeant’s experience to take them out and bring them back.
    The pace was hard. The ground was broken, with invisibletraps for the unwary beneath the white covering. They moved in a silence disturbed only by grunts and heavy breathing.
    Every mile or so they would come upon a guardpost, usually invisible until they were almost upon it, any roughness from the recent construction hidden under winter’s blanket. A half-frozen man would crawl down from his tree house, stamp up and down, slapping feeling back into his body, and make a shivering report. A new man would be assigned to shinny up the tree ladder. Once in place, the squad would be again under way.
    They had been going long enough for Jake to work up a fair lather when the ground exploded at his feet. This time there was no bomb; only a young deer that had taken shelter in a steep-sided levee. The deer bounded upward, throwing up a glorious blast of snow, then disappeared into the woods.
    Jake leaned against a tree, slowing his breath and letting the weakness drain from his legs. Around him the men laughed with relief. Jake smiled at chatter he did not hear, and recalled his last injury, when a land mine had exploded less than a dozen feet away. The point man had hit the trip wire, and had simply vanished. Jake had caught a sliver of shrapnel across his forehead, slicing him open clean to the bone. There had been more blood than damage, and after a couple dozen stitches and one night in the mobile infirmary, Jake had been sent back to his squad.
    As he stood and gathered himself, Jake glimpsed something moving rapidly to one side of his field of vision.
    â€œThere!” he shouted, then was up and after the running figure.
    The man raced through the trees in great leaps that lifted him clear of the clinging snow. Jake felt the air pumping in and out of his lungs as he pounded after him. The man was carrying a dark sack, that much Jake could see in his fleeting glimpses as he chased him through the woods. Twice the sack caught