Once a Warrior (6 page)

“Cannons.”

Her green eyes arrowed into his. “They look dangerous.”

“They are.”  Mike had made enough passes, both on and off the football field, to know when he was on the receiving end of one.

“I live at Thirty-third and the Paseo.”  She hadn’t buttoned her coat, and the January wind played peek-a-boo with the hem of her short, swingy dress.

His conscience raised a ruckus as his gaze moved down to her shapely legs. “That’s a long way to walk.”

“Alone,” she added meaningfully, her expression softening when his eyes met hers again. “At least until Kitty gets back next week.”

“I leave tomorrow morning.”  As if he needed another reminder that time was at a premium, the bell in the church tower chimed the noon Angelus.

“Have you ever pulled down your blackout shades in the middle of the day?”  Her glossy lips parted in a wide, wicked grin. “I do it when I take a nap and it makes the room dark as night.”

Damning the consequences, he unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. “Ready?”

“Willing and able, too,” the redhead parried silkily as she slid into the car.

The seductive way she crossed her legs, flashing him just a glimpse of smooth white thigh where the tops of her stockings met the tips of her garters, told Mike that he was probably in for the ride of his life. He should have been rarin’ to go; instead, he found he was dragging his feet as he cut around to the driver’s side. And when she reached over to unlock his door with her ring hand, he couldn’t help but think that whoever said “All’s fair in love and war” must’ve had heels like himself in mind.

CHAPTER THREE

Spinnazola, Italy

“
My darling Kitty: I got your letter yesterday. My new birthday picture of you, too. To answer your question—again—no, you don’t look fat and ugly. You look six
gorgeous
months pregnant. I only wish I were there to rub your back and your feet when they ache. Or to hold you on my lap, with your head on my shoulder and my hand on your belly, feeling our baby move inside you .
. .”

John Brown took a drag on his cigarette and studied his wife’s latest picture, which he’d propped up against the wall in front of him. Last month, while on “stand-down” due to bad flying weather, the officers in his squadron had contracted with a builder in the nearby town of Altamura to replace their pyramidal tents with small houses made of white tufa block and tile roofs. A reporter from
Stars and Stripes
had dubbed it “Bomber City.”

His crew had moved into their new quarters on April Fool’s Day. So for a couple of weeks now he’d had cement walls instead of canvas. Better yet, he was no longer tripping over five other men and their stuff all the time because he had a small single room with a door he could close when he wanted some privacy and a window he could open to let in fresh air.

There wasn’t much space for anything besides a clothesline and the cot he was sitting on the edge of, but he’d scrounged up a couple of spare cement blocks and cut down a piece of raw lumber to make himself a crude writing desk. He kept Kitty’s letters with the Air Medal he’d earned after five missions in a locked metal box but had left her pictures out, lined up against the wall. That made them the last thing he saw every night before he turned out the lights.

“
I really like your new hairdo. Makes you look like Gene Tierney in
Heaven Can Wait
—only prettier. Now I know what I’ll dream about tonight
. . .”

He’d never told her or anyone else about the nightmares. About the planes that went up in brilliant but silent explosions in his sleep. Or the ones that were shot down and went spiraling at two hundred miles or more toward the earth. No, the nightmares were something he was going to have to deal with on his own. Either that, or ask to be grounded. Which seemed like the coward’s way out of this damned war.

Exhaling smoke, John wondered what to say next. She already knew he was in Italy, but for security reasons he couldn’t tell her where. Nor was he allowed to tell her that he’d exercised his pilot’s prerogative and named his B-24 Liberator the “Kansas City Kitty” after her. And he damn sure wasn’t going to waste his precious V-mail paper trying to settle the ongoing dispute between his wife and his mother!

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Emmagrace Brown had finally broken her frozen silence and written him a long letter criticizing the amount of money Kitty was spending on things like maternity clothes and gin. And that redheaded roommate of hers!  Married or not, his mother had declared, that girl was a tramp.

Kitty, on the other hand, complained that Emmagrace had started stopping by the apartment unannounced. She was always snooping around too, opening her closet door or checking the liquor cabinet under the sink. And would he
please
tell his mother to quit being so rude to her roommate, his wife had demanded.

Just thinking about it, John ground his teeth in frustration. How either one of them expected him to settle their ongoing dispute from almost half a world away, he couldn’t imagine. So he simply ignored it, hoping for the best, and continued writing.

“
Did I tell you I got birthday cards from Charlie and Mike?  Charlie graduated from cook’s school with sergeant’s stripes, and says Daisy has set their wedding day for May 6. Buy them a nice present from us, will you?  Maybe one of those tea sets or some matching picture frames. Mike’s in England gearing up for the invasion of Europe, and seems to be getting along okay
. . .”

The last part of that sentence wasn’t exactly true. Mike had been assigned to a light armored artillery battalion that had already been through North Africa and Sicily. In the note he’d included in his birthday card, he’d said that the combat hardened “redlegs” weren’t all that receptive toward their new green “shavetail.”  But he’d sworn that he was going to earn their respect, if not their friendship, in the practice firing missions he was observing for them later this month.

John decided not to repeat the bawdy Latin pun Mike had coined regarding his encounter with an English prostitute. Kitty had enough on her mind, what with the baby coming and his mother driving her crazy. There was no sense in making her worry about whether her husband was remaining faithful to her when he hadn’t so much as
looked
at another woman in the two-plus months he’d been here.

“
It was swell hearing from the guys. I just wish we were all back together at Bully’s right now, having a beer. But we’ll do it again someday, I’m sure. (And the sooner the better!)  Mike told me to tell you hi. ‛Junior’, too
. . .” 

Rereading the word “Junior,” he smiled. That was Kitty’s nickname for the baby. She wanted a boy, but he honestly didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, as long as it was healthy. But one thing for sure, he resolved as he resumed writing. Even if his son or daughter eventually married an atheist,
he
wouldn’t miss their wedding!

“
Better close now. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow
. . .”

His squadron had been put on alert this evening. A bombing mission was on for the next day, and wake-up time had been set for 3:30
A.M.
He hated those early calls because they almost always meant an especially long mission. Which made him think they were probably going back to Bucharest.

“
I miss you, sweetheart, more than words can say. Sometimes I lie awake at night, remembering our first date or how beautiful you looked on our wedding day, and I could fly back into your arms without a plane. God, I can’t wait until I belong to you again instead of to Uncle Sam!  Remember, I love you. Now and forever—
”

John signed his name, then set the unsealed letter atop the pile of folded clothes he planned to put on in the morning so he wouldn’t forget to drop it off at the censor’s desk on his way to breakfast.

He sat back on his cot then and stretched, trying to get rid of the kinks in his neck and shoulders. Two months of intermittent rain and snow and overcast skies had finally broken, and tomorrow’s mission would be his fourth in six days—which would make a total of fifteen since his arrival in late January. With a schedule like that, he should have been exhausted. For some reason, though, he was too keyed-up to sleep just yet.

When he’d finished formation training and started flying combat, he’d been told that after fifty missions, with a credit of two for one over Germany, he would be rotated home for a rest. He’d figured it out on a mathematical basis—how many months it would take him to finish his stint—and realized that he might well be home when Kitty had the baby.

But Mother Nature had thrown a monkey wrench into the works. In addition to February’s bad flying weather, Mount Vesuvius had erupted in March for the first time in almost forty years and volcanic ash had drifted down with the snow. The grit had covered everything and everyone, even getting into the food. It had also forced the cancellation of all missions for a whole week because it could damage engines.

So thirty-five, more or less, after tomorrow, John reminded himself as he butted out his cigarette, and he could go home.

Right now, though, he was going to bed.

* * * *

“Let go of your cocks and put on your socks.”

John sat up on his cot with a start when he heard the assistant operations officer in the hall. His chest was heaving and his mouth was dry from having silently screamed in his sleep. Another damned nightmare, he told himself, throwing off the covers and the vestiges of his bad dream in disgust.

No sooner had he swung his legs over the side of the bed than the door creaked open and the Ops officer shone a flashlight in his eyes.

John squinted against the flame and said, “I’m up.”

“Breakfast at 4:30, sir, debriefing at 5:30.”

The grumblings and the stirrings of the other men in the “Officer’s Quarters” filled the air as John reached for his own flashlight and headed for the latrine. No one spoke or joked. They just moved from the sinks, where they washed and shaved in the clammy water, to the urinals. Or vice versa.

Back in his room, John turned on the overhead light but left the blackout curtain drawn as he started getting dressed. He’d slept in his woolen long underwear to ward off the chill. Spinnazola was he anklebone in the boot of Italy, which should have made for warm weather. But the mountain ridge that ran parallel to the landing strip often meant long cold days and even longer, colder nights.

Over his long underwear he wore a dark Army shirt and trousers. Regulations required a tie. Sitting on the edge of his cot, he pulled a pair of heavy socks over his silk ones, then double-knotted the laces on his high-top combat shoes to keep them from snapping off his feet if he had to bail out. Later, in the equipment hut, he would put on a pair of fleece-lined boots over his shoes and zip into a flying suit, which he could heat electrically by plugging it into an outlet on his plane’s instrument panel.

As always, he wore his leather A-2 flying jacket. He never carried a gun, though, because the Germans could treat him as a spy if they caught him with one. But he did have a Swiss pocketknife, with a blade under six inches to conform to the Geneva Convention. And a silk scarf, on which a map of the Balkans was printed to help him avoid capture, went into his other pocket.

John couldn’t help but smile as he tucked the scarf away. He’d first become fascinated by the idea of flying in grade school, after Charles Lindbergh had flown to France by the seat of his pants. And in high school he’d been an avid reader of “G-8 and His Battle Aces,” a pulp magazine devoted to World War I aerial battles. In his dreams, he’d been Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, his white scarf streaming behind him in the wind as he flew over the trenches and maneuvered the enemy’s plane into his gun sights.

Then the war had offered him a chance to make his dreams come true. His country needed flyers, thousands upon thousands of them. And now here he was, dressed to answer the call.

His letter to Kitty in hand, John turned out the light and left the room. There was no sense in opening the blackout curtain. By the time he returned, it would probably be dark outside again.

“Good morning.”  He met his co-pilot at the censor’s desk by the door.

Bob Kiefer hunched his shoulders against the first shock of cold as they headed outside. “What’s good about it?”

“Thirty-five to go after today.”

“Yeah, well, I missed a pass to Bari because of this damn mission.”

John laughed. “Don’t worry, the wine will still be there when you get back.”

Bob smiled crookedly. “It’s hard to say which is aging faster—the
vino
or me.”

They crossed through the olive grove to the officer’s mess. The morning of his first mission, John had been struck by the irony of walking by olive branches—the symbol of peace—on his way to war. Now he just passed them without giving it a second thought.

At the door of the mess, they put down one military lire each and picked up one orange and one egg apiece. Then, seeing that the navigator and bombardier of the “Kansas City Kitty” were seated and already eating, they joined them at the table.

“Sunnyside up, Lieutenant?” the waiter asked as he took John’s egg to give it to the mess sergeant.

He nodded, added Spam, pancakes, toast and coffee to his order, and then started peeling his orange.

Bob seconded his order, but asked for a bowl of fresh figs in canned milk to finish it off.

Their bombardier, Pat O’Toole, pulled a face at that last. “Figs give me the runs.”