I’m so glad the war has brought us together, oh Millie.”
She smiled, and when he closed his eyes to kiss her, she brought a handkerchief full of knockout drops to his nostrils and felt him struggle, then go limp.
She got up quickly, went to the map, marked the coordinates for Nantilles and Casey’s operational area and then realized of course they would know all this. The big info was that a red group had agreed to assist the Jeds, which meant assist the FFI. She knew NKVD would go through the roof on that one! It felt so wrong to her, so unjust. If you helped FFI, then the war would have been for nothing; when it was over, it would just go back to what it had been before, with big money ruling everything and the little guy squashed to nothingness and all the bullies and all the rich scum and all the boys who’d pawed her at Smith — brutal, smelly, drunken Frank Tynes — all those men would be triumphant, and what, really, what would have been the point? The only hope was the Soviet Union, the greatness of Uncle Joe, the justice of a system that didn’t depend on exploitation but that enabled man to be all that he could be, noble and giving, generous and loving. That was a world worth fighting for, and if she didn’t have a gun, she had a telephone.
She picked it up and dialed, knowing that nowhere on earth would anyone see anything suspicious about Frank Tyne of OSS calling David Hedgepath of the Office of War Information at 10:14 p.m. on the night of June 8,1944.
Leets did a quick tumble through the facts as he thought them to be and concluded that yes, Team Casey had a chance.
Luftwaffe troops were basically antiaircraft gunners, their rifle marksmanship and combat aggression had to be somewhat deficient. They wouldn’t understand elevation or deflection fire at moving targets. It was dark; untrained, unblooded troops didn’t care for the dark. They weren’t sure where they were going, and at best they’d put in a half-effort, each fellow thinking, “I don’t want to be the one guy who dies tonight.”
“Okay,” he said to the maquis, “we’ll go ahead by leapfrogging. As each guy runs, the other three pour fire on Les Boches. When you hold on them, aim a man high, or your rounds won’t reach the target. Shoot, move, don’t stop no matter what. We spread out, try and go about fifty yards per spurt. Up top they’ll be covering us. We don’t need the damn Brens; we’re fine.”
“Fuck that fat Roger,” said Leon. “He is pig filth, swine, a screwer of mothers and babies.”
“That communist shit, the reds should be rounded up after the war and—”
“We will visit Roger, I promise you,” said Leets. “Now come on, guys, let’s get a move on.”
Franc went first, then was passed by Leon, and finally Jerome. Leets crouched behind a sandbag revetment and had a wild, insane heroic impulse. Maybe I should stay here, cover them, and keep the Krauts off until the bridge blows.
Then he thought, Fuck that.
He was moving, was past Franc, past Leon, almost to Jerome, moving through fire that was sporadic at best, now and then licking up a spit of dust in the general area, and he’d heard nothing blazing by his ears, indicative of the fact that Jerry had zeroed on them.
The flare popped, freezing him.
Flares? These clowns have flares?
He looked back to the bridge and beheld with horror the reality that two more trucks had arrived, in the dappled camouflage coloring of 2nd SS Das Reich, and watched as from each truck spilled lean, toughened Panzergrenadiers in their camouflage tunics, hardened by years on the Eastern Front, a unit noted and feared far and wide as the finest of the SS Divisions. These characters carried the new Stg-44, something the Germans called an “attack rifle,” which fired a shortened 8mm round with accuracy and a high rate of fire. Oh, fuck, they could really lay fire with that sonofabitch.
Another flare popped, and then another, and the whole scene lit up, this puny French river valley, he and his three maquis racing uphill toward a treeline through a landscape of flickering shadow, as the descending parachute flares caught on the stumps of the so recently cut pines and threw blades of darkness this way and that, like scythes, the Germans still two hundred yards away but coming strong, the camouflaged Panzer-grenadiers racing through and past the confused young Luftwaffers, and now, suddenly, from the ridgeline, a long arc of tracer as the MG-42S tried to range the target.
We are screwed, he thought. This is it.
The bridge went.
It wasn’t the blossoming, booming movie explosion so familiar from the Warner Bros, backlog agitprop films, but more of a disappointingly insubstantial percussion, lifting a large volcano of smoke and dust from the structure in the aftermath of a flash too brief for anyone to see. Leets stole a moment in the fading parachute flare to examine his legacy: The bridge, as the dust cleared, was not downed, leaving a gap as if a mouth had been punched front-teethless, but the roadway span hung at a grotesque 45-degree angle, torquing downward, meaning the truss Leets had 808’ed had gone, but the other one held. It would take days to repair, or to detour around, and those would be days with no 2nd SS Das Reich at Normandy.
He stood, dumped a mag a man high at the nearest parade of SS Panzergrenadiers, and shouted to his guys, “Go, go, go, go!”
Franc took the first hit. He just slumped, tried to get up, then sat, then lay down, then curled up.
“Go, go, go!” screamed Leets, dumping another mag. He had three left.
Of the two maquis, Leon, the youngster, made it closest to the treeline, but then a new flare popped and the German fire found him and put him in a beaten zone, and no man survives the beaten zone.
Jerome didn’t make it nearly as far, and Leets was unclear, for he ran himself through a sleet of light and splinter as the Germans tried to bring him down, but in the second before he was hit he saw Jerome jack vertically from his runner’s crouch and go down hard as gravity took hold of his remains.
The bullet struck Leets in the left buttock, blowing through his hip. Man, did he go down, full of spangles and fire flashes and lightning bugs and flies’ wings. His mind emptied; all visible movement ceased in the universe, and it went silent — I am dead, he thought — but he blinked himself alive again and saw SS coming up hard in the light of a new flare, holding their fire, for they wanted someone alive for the info before the execution, and he cursed himself for throwing out the strychnine tablet he’d been issued.
The pain was immense, and he tried to make it go away by rushing a mag change, lifting the ever-loyal, faultless best friend of the Thompson gun, and running another mag, seeming to drive them back or down or whatever.
He was twenty-four.
He didn’t want to die.
He tried to get through another mag change but dropped the heavy weapon. He got a Gammon bomb out but couldn’t get the cap unscrewed. He pulled out his.45, jacked the slide, held it up stupidly without aiming, blinked in the bright light of another flare just overhead and squeezed off a few pointless rounds.
The gun locked back. He saw two Panzergrenadiers quite close with their fancy new rifles and was amazed that at this ultimate moment his lifelong interest in firearms reasserted itself, and he thought for just a second how
Then the two Germans sat down, as if embarrassed.
A wave of explosions wiped out the reality that was but a few yards ahead of him.
“There, there, Beets, chum,” said Basil. “The fellows are here with a stretcher. I see a bit of bone, but any horse doctor can set that.”
“Basil, I, what, get out of here, oh, for—”
But Basil had turned and was busy running mags through his Sten, as around him, the other maquisards fired whatever weapons they had.
Somehow Leets was on a stretcher and being humped at speed the remaining few yards to the treeline.
“Basil, I—”
“There’s the good chap. Beets, these fellows will take good care of you. Get Leftenant Beets somewhere to medical aid. Get him out of here.”
“Basil, you come, too, come on, Basil, we got the bridge, we can—”
