The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The trucks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.
It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For the andartes concealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.
Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the pedlar, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank. It depended on how much time there had been to spare for such refinements. He looked for the stakes, but if they had ever existed, there was now no sign of them. Under a near-by bush he found a rusty German helmet; that was all.
“Seven graves,” remarked Miss Kolin as they walked up the hill again; “that is what one would expect from the Lieutenant’s letter to Frau Schirmer. Ten men and the Sergeant went. Two men return. The bodies of the Sergeant and the driver of the first truck are missing. Seven are buried.”
“Yes, but Phengaros said that there was only one prisoner-the driver. So where was the Sergeant? Look! The driver was wounded when the truck hit the mine, but not killed. Most likely the Sergeant was in the cab beside him. Probably he was wounded too. Lieutenant Leubner said he wasn’t a man to surrender without a fight. Supposing he managed somehow to get clear of the road and was hunted down and killed some distance from it.”
“But how, Mr. Carey? How could he get clear?”
They had reached the place of thte ambush again. George walked along the edge of the road away from the hillside and looked down.
The bare rocky ground fell away precipitously to the valley below. It was absurd to suppose that even an unwounded man would attempt to scramble down it under fire from the hillside and the road above. The two men who had escaped had been able to do so because they were in the last truck and unwounded. The Sergeant had been a full two hundred yards farther away from cover. He had had no chance at all of getting clear.
George climbed a short way up the hillside to look at the scene from the attackers’ point of view. From there, the plight of the men in the trucks seemed even more hopeless. He could imagine the scene: the trucks grinding up the hill, the ear-splitting detonation of the mine, the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, the thudding explosions of grenades lobbed on to the road, the hoarse shouts, the screams of the dying.
He clambered down to the car again.