Once a Warrior (8 page)

“Oxygen check,” Bob clipped out.

“Pilot OK,” John said tersely.

They were nearing Bucharest now and everyone was on full alert. Going in on a bombing run, they were bound to attract heavier flak than when they were coming out. After all, an empty bomber couldn’t hurt anyone. The cloudless sky was no comfort, either, because it gave the German gunners a clear shot at them.

John had just taken over the controls again when he heard it . . . a faint sound, like gravel being thrown on a tin roof.

“Did you hear that?”  Narrow-eyed, he scanned the instrument panel but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Bob frowned. “Hear what?”

There was no mistaking the second hit. It tore through the ship with a thunderous roar, shattering the windows and buckling the floor. A hunk of hot metal caught Pat in the throat, killing him instantly.

“Oh, my God!” Bill screamed as he stared at the mittened hand with which he’d just wiped his face. “I’m bleeding!”

“Everybody into their flak suits,” Bob ordered as the sky suddenly erupted into a sickening mass of smoke and flame and spheres of exploding steel.

B-24s began going down all around them. The lead plane went into a steep dive with both wings trailing bright orange flames. Another one barrel-rolled onto its back and plummeted toward the ground. Yet a third plane took a direct hit in the bomb bay and disappeared in a cloud of oily black smoke.

“Two o’clock low, sir,” Norm directed.

John had already moved up to the lead position when he looked to his right and saw those ugly black spots climbing ever closer to their altitude. They missed completely. But seconds later the plane lurched again, as if swatted by some giant hand in the sky, and red-hot shrapnel ripped through the ship.

“Mary, Mother of God.”  Norm sounded surprised as he slumped forward in the rear of the nose—blown back there by the flak blast.

“I smell smoke!” the tail gunner cried.

“Right waist gunner to pilot, we’re on fire.”

Smoke from the battery of antiaircraft guns protecting the marshalling yard boiled up before John’s eyes. He tried to blot it and everything else out of his mind and concentrate on flying. The controls had gone soft on him but the railroad tracks he was following told him he was right on target.

“Hit the bailout bell,” he snapped as he started losing altitude.

Bob did as he was ordered.

“Get out, you guys.”  John feathered the prop to cut down on drag and air resistance, then pulled up so that his remaining crewmen could jump. “I’m going in.”

Fumbling with his parachute straps, Bob looked at him like he had oatmeal for brains. “You’re coming, too.”

“I can’t.”  An icy calm descended on him as he glanced down and noted that his right leg had been severed and was hanging by just a few shreds of skin. His life’s blood gushed from the torn tissue but, oddly, there was no pain—only a merciful numbness. “I’m hit. Bad.”

“I’ll help you hook up your pack,” his co-pilot insisted.

“Get the hell out of here,” John shot back.

“You gutsy sonuvabitch, you.”  Bob’s voice shook with emotion as he squeezed John’s shoulder hard in farewell. Then he dropped to his knees and began crawling behind the other crewmen through the choking smoke toward the escape door.

John thought of his beautiful wife, Kitty. And of the baby he would never see. It was enough to make a grown man cry. But just before his bomber hit the railyards and exploded in a ball of fire, he smiled.

CHAPTER  FOUR

Ste. Genviève, France

“
Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone
,” the announcer intoned.

Kneeling beside her radio set in the attic, Anne-Marie Gérard was stunned by the impact of the words she’d just heard. “Wound my heart with a monotonous languor” was the second line of one of her favorite poems—“Song of Autumn” by Paul Verlaine. The first line had been broadcast two nights ago, putting French partisan groups on alert. Now this was the last half of the message telling them that the Allied invasion of Europe would begin within the next forty-eight hours.

Which meant she had work to do.

Before she got started, though, she had two other coded messages to listen for. Sitting back on her heels and clenching her hands together in her lap, she strained to hear the BBC broadcaster’s voice over the static created by the early June storm that was sweeping through the village. The messages she was waiting for would confirm that the underground’s prearranged sabotage plans against the Germans were to go into effect tonight.

“It is hot in Suez . . . It is hot in Suez.”  The announcer’s solemn voice triggered off the “Green Plan”—the sabotaging of railroad tracks and equipment.

Time seemed to drag out interminably in the crackling silence following that first message. Anne-Marie bit her lip to keep herself from screaming at the broadcaster to hurry up. Then she heard it, the second message.

“The dice are on the table . . . The dice are on the table,” he said, calling for the “Red Plan”—the cutting of telephone lines and cables—to begin.

Overcome by emotion, Anne-Marie bowed her head and allowed herself a moment to collect her thoughts. It wasn’t quite seven o’clock in the evening, and the attacks couldn’t begin before dark. But the freedom for which so many of her countrymen had been fighting and dying these last four years was finally close at hand.

Fear prickled across the nape of her neck as she prayed for courage for everyone involved. It was going to be a long and dangerous night for French resisters. An even longer and more dangerous day lay ahead for the Allied soldiers who would soon be confronting the Germans.

The announcer droned on, delivering messages to various other resistance units. Having already heard the ones that concerned her, Anne-Marie concentrated on her next move. She needed to contact Guy Compain, who’d been receiving airdrops of explosives and stockpiling them in a cave near the village, and tell him that the signal had been given. In turn, he would inform the demolition experts within their group that it was time to blow the main trunk line leading out of the village and into lower Normandy. Yet other subagents would go to work smashing the steam injectors on the railway cars sitting unguarded behind the depot.

Then the Maquis, perhaps the noblest saboteurs of all, would step in to engage as many German patrols as possible before the Allies began disembarking on the beaches.

Anne-Marie smiled—a small, bittersweet smile. While she still didn’t know exactly where or when the invasion would take place, she was elated to hear that it was imminent. At the same time, she was heartsick that it was coming too late to save Henriette’s brother, Maurice.

Last month, a German company had attacked the forest camp where he and his comrades were training new recruits to the Maquis. By all accounts, the fighting had been bitter and brutal. Maurice had escaped with minor wounds, only to be discovered the next day hiding out in a farmer’s barn.

Now, remembering how his lifeless body—tortured and beaten almost beyond recognition—had been dumped on her aunt and uncle’s doorstep, she was more determined than ever to see the Germans defeated.

Thunder boomed, loud as a cannon shot, as she switched off the radio and got to her feet.

Downstairs, her grandfather was dozing in his chair. His neck was bent at an odd angle and the medical journal he’d sat down to read after dinner had fallen to the floor. Something inside of him seemed to have died with Maurice. He could barely drag himself out of bed in the morning and he just picked at his food. When he wasn’t working, he slept.

Anne-Marie hated to disturb him, but she didn’t want him to wake up later and be alarmed by the fact that she was gone. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to turn his head tomorrow if he didn’t change positions pretty soon. She finished buttoning her raincoat, then leaned down and gently kissed his brow. He opened his eyes and looked up, staring at her in confusion.

“I have to go out,” she told him.

“Is it still raining?”

Her face softened. “Yes.”

“You should wear a scarf.”

“I will.”

Once he might have grilled her. Demanded to know where she was going and why, and when she would return. Now he simply nodded and began drifting back to sleep.

The rain was coming down straight as a measuring stick when she went out the back door of the house and into the garage. She would have to ride her bicycle because there was no gasoline in her grandfather’s car, and she only hoped that the new patch on her front tire would hold. If it didn’t, she could always hide it in a ditch and complete her errand on foot. That would add almost an hour to her journey, though, and time was of the essence.

Anne-Marie was fairly certain that no patrol cars would be out on such a foul night. Still, she kept a weather eye out for them as she pedaled along the street. Rain soaked her scarf and cold droplets ran down the back of her neck, but she took comfort from the thought that, even if the Germans caught and killed the messenger, they couldn’t kill her message.

The Allies were coming!

* * * *

Omaha Beach, France; June 6, 1944

One minute Mike Scanlon was stationed behind the Landing Craft, Tanks’ lowering ramp with his rifle in his hand, ready to hit the beach; the next, he was hurtling through the air sans rifle.

They’d hit an underwater mine; it had blown the ramp off and sent him flying.

He felt weightless—like an eagle soaring. Which seemed impossible given the gas-impregnated coveralls, heavy boots and steel helmet with the white officer’s stripe up the back that he was wearing. Only when he came splashing down in front of the crippled craft did it occur to him that he could easily become hamburger if the current pulled him under and the propellers caught him up.

To his relief, his lifebelt inflated, keeping him afloat. But his heart sank like a stone when he opened his eyes and saw the carnage before him.

The body of the first lieutenant who’d been standing to his right was now bobbing facedown in the water. The scarlet stains on his back told Mike that machine-gun fire from the German pillboxes on the bluffs had gotten him. Another body, that of the staff sergeant who’d been standing behind him, drifted face-up—dead from a bullet to the throat.

A spray of water exploded in front of him, and he realized with a start that he was the target now.

“Need a hand?” a loud voice called above the spanging of shells on steel.

Mike glanced up and saw a Navy crewman, hunchbacked in a bulky life vest, looking down at him over the side of the beached craft he’d just been blown off of. Without waiting for an answer, the sailor threw him a line. Geysers of water from machine-gun fire erupted around him as Mike grabbed hold of it and let himself be pulled aboard.

Except for the two of them, the LCT was deserted. The water was knee deep. None of the self-propelled guns or jeeps from Mike’s battery had debarked.

“Want a drink?”  The sailor proffered a half-pint-sized bottle that was about three-quarters empty.

Still too shocked to speak, Mike nodded and grabbed it gratefully. He took a pull, careful to leave some for the other man, and felt bourbon whiskey blazing a trail down his throat and into his stomach.

As he lowered the bottle, salvos straddled the small craft, shaking it and dousing them with yet more water. On the beach, a mortar scored a direct hit on a tank. Within seconds, it was a roaring inferno.

“Holy shit!”  Mike’s throat was raw from the saltwater and bourbon he’d swallowed, tight with emotion he couldn’t afford to let loose as he watched two men, their clothes afire, leap out of the tank’s turret and fall like a couple of spent matches onto the sand.

The explosion served its purpose, though. It snapped him back to concentrating on the job at hand. And that job was to survive this fiasco and find his battery so he could start fighting back.

He thrust the bottle at the sailor, who waved it away. “I’ve had plenty,” he said. “You finish it.”

Mike emptied the bottle in a head-back, walloping gulp. Then, full of Dutch courage, he jumped off the front of the landing craft and started wading to shore.

And stepped into the jaws of hell.

He’d never been exposed to small-arms fire before, much less mortar fire, so his heart, if not his feet, was doing double-time. Despite the fact that he’d just wet his whistle, his mouth felt as dry as cotton. Slogging through the waist-deep breakers and the blood-red water, he couldn’t help wondering whether the rest of his life could be counted in minutes or hours. Days and years didn’t even enter the equation.

Without his rifle, he felt totally defenseless. He took refuge behind a beach obstacle shaped like a giant jack. Then, soaking wet and shivering with fear, he tried to figure out where he was in relation to his battery. With their guns still aboard the landing craft, they were obviously going to have to regroup.

“I’m hit!”

Mike looked to his right, into the white face and frightened eyes of a young soldier. A boy, really. Not much older than his own brother. Instinctively, he made a grab for the kid and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Medic!”

“Maa-maa . . .”

“Hang in there.”  However frantic his thoughts, Mike’s voice was calm as he dragged the badly wounded boy behind the obstacle with him. “Help’s on the way.”

But the medic got there too late. He took one look at the motionless soldier, his eyes glazed and his mouth frozen on that agonizing call for his mother, and shook his head. Then, ignoring the bullets kicking up spurts of sand at his heels, the corpsman moved on to do what he could for some other casualty.      

Mike felt rage burn like a hot iron inside his head. It was time to do some killing of his own. For that poor dead kid lying beside him. And for John Brown, shot down in the prime of life.

He took his .45 service automatic out of the plastic he’d wrapped it in before the landing and found that it was sticky with salt and gritty with sand. When he pulled the slide back to load a round into the chamber, it stuck halfway. Cursing a blue streak, he tossed the useless pistol aside and reached for the dead soldier’s Browning automatic rifle, only to discover that it was similarly fouled.