“Thank you, sir.” Gary's face was expressionless. “The grub, Lieutenant?”
“Oh, yes.” He tossed out two boxes of C-rations. “I'm sorry I can't give you more, but we are short. Just where are we, do you know?” He looked around as if expecting guideposts.
“Thank you, sir. This is Ohio — pretty close to the Indiana line. And Lieutenant, I wouldn't stay in any of the towns overnight — they'd probably gang up on you. Keep to the open country.”
“Thank you, Corporal. We've already found that sound advice. And now, don't recover your weapon until we are out of range.” He gunned the motor and put the truck into reverse gear, pulling it back onto the road. An impatient beat on the horn urged the other truck forward. “Good-bye, and good luck.”
The two vehicles rolled away.
Gary watched them go. “So long, you scurvy sonofabitch.” The machine gunner in the rear truck tossed a package of cigarettes through the broken window. Gary bent over to pick up the rations and turned to get the gun. When he straightened again the swiftly moving trucks were some distance away. He walked along the pavement, retrieved the cigarettes and stuffed them in an inner pocket. When the vehicles vanished from sight he quickly abandoned the road and took to the field, to follow. If he had guessed right on that leaking tire, he should overtake the convoy when they stopped for the night.
* * *
The trucks were parked back-to-back in a small grove of trees. That would mean a machine gunner sat in each cab, covering three avenues of approach. Gary studied the scene. They had stopped for the night in a small roadside park built and maintained by the state highway department, a stopping place originally installed for tourists. A gravel road curved off the highway and through the clump of green trees; there were two or three picnic tables that somehow had been overlooked in the search for firewood, a drinking fountain Probably fed by a fresh-water spring, and a pair of rusty cans for trash. The graveled path made room for a half dozen cars beneath the shading branches before completing the arc back to the highway. The trucks were but shapeless masses in the night; he might have missed them altogether had he been traveling along the paved road.
Gary waited in the underbrush on the far edge of the grove, wondering how to take the convoy.
They were green troops — they had allowed him to come this close undetected, but he knew they weren't so green as to permit him to simply walk up to the trucks. He had been lying at the edge of the grove for two hours, watching and waiting, and still he lacked a plan of action. Each cab held a man — they had betrayed themselves earlier and many times as they held matches to cigarettes. The flare of the matches revealed no other faces beside them, and although he could not be certain, he thought he could distinguish the shapes of men lying on the ground beneath the trucks. There may be one man in the rear of each vehicle, stretched out on the boxes. Maybe. If so, that left two on the ground.