The destruction of the mortar batteries on Hill 88 forced Baron Korgan Rask to alter his working timetable.
Deprived of his forward artillery watching network, Rask could no longer land accurate indirect fire upon Dugout Seven. But the Baron was not a commander to accept defeat lightly.
Under the heavy veil of black smoke billowing from the ruined mortar pits and the dense, freezing rain, a secret ground operation was launched across the lonely expanse of no-man’s-land.
Arthur Vance stood at the listening post in Sector Two, his brass sight monocle humming softly as he scanned the muddy crater field through an infrared aligned filter.
Beside him, Grimm lay flat on the timber wooden walkway planks, his chin resting across his front paws. The sixty-two-pound hound was fully motionless. But his three-sided ears were swiveling in independent twenty-degree arcs. He tracked subtle sound shakes traveling through the underground mud.
Suddenly, Grimm’s ears pinned backward. A faint, low-hum tremor rippled through the coarse black fur of his throat.
Arthur adjusted his monocle, switching to a high-sensitivity magnetic flux aiming cross.
In the flooded shell craters four hundred yards beyond the barbed-wire outer edge, six faint, anomalous magnetic distortions were slowly creeping through the red sludge.
