He was noting the movement of the men carefully, seeing them deploy, luminous green shapes in the eerie dark. A recon team and three squads in waiting, he noted. He gave a quiet hand signal to his fire team, just five men here on the high knob of Hill 272, and another five under Zykov on Hill 264 to the northwest. Neither team was adequate to the task it had been given, but at least he had men on both hills, which was better than yielding one to the enemy without a fight.Yet when he saw the forces deploying below, he knew his five man team was going to be easily flanked. They simply could not cover all angles and approaches to the hilltop, so he immediately called for Chenko to bring up his team from the airfield and cover the ground between the two knobs. His own grim prediction was soon to be proven true. The Germans moved in Altmann’s platoon, along with all the men in Reinhardt’s Schwere platoon, which had assembled to support this attack. Troyak could see them moving, and settling into depressions in the ground below, and he instinctively knew what he was looking at.
