“What was that all about?” Carmen muttered as they followed a footpath through the snow in search of Lieutenant Clancy.
“I just asked if he knew anything about Company C. He didn’t know but said they might be down there with the rest of the men in the valley.”
“Does he really think we can spring them?”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
They found Lieutenant Clancy in a long, deep secondhand dugout covered with fir trunks against air-burst and treetop shrapnel. There was a fire going at each end of the dugout. A dozen soldiers stood along the walls, those who had guns checking their magazines, those who hadn’t loading up with anything else that might prove useful until—the calculation was unavoidable—one of the guns might lose its present owner and become available for reallocation. Some of the
