The Fog Before the Line
The forest had a way of swallowing sound, and that was what troubled Michael most. Six men moved through the trees behind him, spaced ten yards apart the way he'd taught them, rifles low, breath fogging in ragged clouds that dissolved before they rose past the pines. Snow lay in uneven drifts, blue-shadowed in the dying light, and every footstep sank through a crust of ice with a sound like a held breath finally released. Nobody spoke. Nobody had spoken in an hour.
Michael raised a gloved fist, and the column stopped as one, six shapes going still among the trunks like men playing at statues. Ahead, through a gap in the pines, the ground fell away into a shallow valley, and beyond it, maybe two kilometers distant, smoke rose thin and gray against a sky the color of a fresh bruise. That was where the German line was supposed to be. Supposed to be. Command's maps were three days old, and three days in this war could rearrange the world.
"Barnes," Michael said quietly, and the young corporal came up beside him, breath rasping.
"Sir?"
"What do you make of that smoke?"
Barnes squinted, wiping frost from his eyelashes with the back of a mitten. "Cook fires, maybe. Or something's…