Sorry for the delay, everyone. This chapter is kind of short, but I'll post again within the next two days.

Also, thanks so much to everyone who's taken the time to review. RDR, EPM (LOVE your work), and the others-Alice A, that was especially nice. Thank you everybody!

Hanley spread half a clip into the woods on his way to the ground, and suddenly the air was full of high-velocity lead from both sides of the trail. Vague shadows moved through the trees and he mindlessly spat out a mouthful of muddy grass and fired at them until the empty clip ejected. He clawed another from his belt and jammed it in.

And just like that, they were fighting for their lives.

Chapter Three

Saunders dropped the spent mag from the Thompson, yanked another from his jacket, seated it, and emptied it.

The weather had cooled considerably and a wet haze combined with gunsmoke drifted through the woods. The tranquility of the pastoral scene overlaid with the ear-shattering roar of pitched battle was unsettling. In the surrealness of the forest it seemed like there was movement all around them, and Saunders had seen enough action to know shifting shadows didn't necessarily equal numbers, but he suspected this time it did. They were catching it from both sides. It was a poorly chosen area for an ambush, but the fact remained: they were in a crossfire.

As the only source of automatic fire the sergeant garnered more than his share of attention. He felt and heard a loud clang as a slug clipped his helmet, and another sent sawdust exploding from his little tree stump into his already-tearing eyes. The Thompson was almost smoking hot and bucked in his hands as he poked it up and hosed the area he thought they'd come from. Two of the shadows jerked but he never saw them fall; he was already shooting at someone else.

Even as he poured ordnance into the woods his mind automatically catalogued the other members of the squad, their status and locations. With Hanley and Caje he was intimately familiar with their different weapons and habits, and assessed them almost instantly.

Under their initial fusillade Caje had slithered back through the dirt and exposed tree roots and was now about six feet away on Saunders' left side. The almost constant fire from Hanley's carbine was maybe five feet back; somehow he'd ended up behind them.

From the left side of Saunders' extreme peripheral vision he suddenly saw the quick, smooth movement he associated with someone throwing a grenade. He started to pull that way when both Hanley and Caje fired in that direction at the same time, and even while appreciatively noting the decimating explosion of a failed throw, Saunders swung back to the right and sprayed the entire treeline, to fill in the absence of fire on that side.

He threw down the empty magazine, reloaded, and looked around. It was time to go. Caje and Hanley were both top-level riflemen, and it was only the blistering level of fire the three of them had been putting out that was keeping them from being overrun. Time to go.

Saunders spared a quick glance behind him as he yanked back the bolt on the SMG and opened up again, swiping desperately at the sweat and dirt running into his eyes and obscuring his vision. Maybe there hadn't been as much of an absence on that right side as he had thought—he'd almost forgotten about Kalgren and Philips.

Kalgren was behind and to his right, and between throwing out short bursts at anything that so much as twitched, Saunders watched him fire, dropping a Kraut who'd only popped his head out from behind a tree for an instant. The private hunkered down for a moment before he crept back up, brought his rifle to his shoulder, and peeked out, waiting. He fired again.

He had a method some might find slow, but one Saunders had already seen was effective. He'd pick a target and lay low, waiting for it to show, and then hit it, every single time. Saunders had no doubt he'd been slowly but steadily thinning out the opposition.

They all were. In a situation that was thoroughly hopeless. It was time to go.

Bullets suddenly stitched a line a couple inches in front of him and Saunders buried his face in the loam, panting and breathless. Just a few pounds of dirt and weeds between him and eternity. He sent out a volley, then jerked around to look at where Philips had crawled up and curled into a ball.

"Get that rifle up!" Saunders screamed at him. At the first shots the non-com had seen where the kid had tried, poking the rifle out and shooting blindly, but as the noise had risen to a din the private had folded in on himself.

Saunders reached over and grabbed a fistful of his jacket, yanking him up and shaking him. "You get that rifle up! Get ready to fall back! We need cover and if you don't start shooting at Krauts, I swear I'll kill you myself!"

Philips hunched tightly for a second and made a sick, keening sound but dragged himself up, stuck the gun out, and started firing.

Another shadow darted through the trees holding the distinct outline of a German hand grenade and Saunders dropped it with a short burst. This was completely untenable. Stumps and deadfalls gave them fairly good cover, but that was it.

As far as Saunders was concerned, the fact they were all still alive was a God-given miracle. Caje had thrown out the signal at almost the same moment the sergeant had seen one of the dark splotches in a forest full of dark splotches move. They'd bought them a single second to seek cover and nothing more. It was surely just a matter of moments before one of those grenades slipped through their meager defenses.

Time. To. Go.

Saunders had a sudden feeling it was about to get close and dirty. "Fix bayonets!" he shouted, raking both sides of the trail. At times like this it was so good to have an experienced officer like Hanley with them, who didn't resent shared command. Indeed, Hanley echoed the order. "Fix bayonets!"

In anticipation of the command to fall back, Saunders pulled a grenade from his jacket with his left hand while still firing short bursts from the Thompson with his right. He reloaded while yelling to Caje through the clamor and when the Cajun looked over, he signaled what he wanted. Caje nodded and pulled his own grenade free.

"Fall back!" Hanley yelled, his voice almost lost in the constant gunfire. "Withdraw!"

From beside Saunders Philips whimpered and truly, in spirit Saunders whimpered with him. They would probably be cut to pieces trying to move, but they definitely would be if they didn't. Saunders echoed the order out of habit and pulled the pin. "Fall back!"

He leapt to a crouch and was about to let the spoon fly when he heard a sound he'd heard many times before and sometimes heard in his sleep. To an experienced infantryman a grenade landing makes pretty much the same dull sound every time, and Saunders' hindbrain mutely screamed in terror while the rest of him twisted in a hopeless attempt to reach for it.

He jerked around just in time to see Hanley whip the masher back into the woods, hopefully right back where it had come from. It exploded while airborne, maybe eight feet off the ground, and in the midst of men shrieking in agony the lieutenant turned a muddy, terrible visage to his men and bellowed, "GO!"

In the heightened peripheral awareness afforded him, Hanley simultaneously registered Kalgren running past him and Saunders and Caje throwing their grenades, deeply into each side of the trail. The lieutenant reached down with one hand and almost yanked Philips off his feet, bodily hurling him in the right direction before he took off himself, firing constantly as he ran. Over the ear-splitting noise of the grenades exploding Hanley could hear Saunders right behind him, almost stepping on his heels while burning through an entire magazine. Caje, too.

They'd made it. Hanley couldn't believe it. The whole lot of them might die in the next sixty seconds but against all odds, they'd made it off the ground.