pleased. She could feel him relax, as if the very air had changed, and heard him unbuckle his webbed belt as he sat down at the table. Filling the kettle, she could see outside that the troopers were still surrounding the building, some trucks, packed with civilians, leaving, and others, empty, arriving. But even the line of soldiers seemed more relaxed, their circle around the apartments sagging in places, confident now that no one had gotten out who shouldn’t.
“Have you been posted in Tallinn for long?” she said lightly, turning up the gas, the stove’s yellowish-blue circle of fire hissing softly, comfortingly.
“In Tallinn,” he said, “a year. I like it. You can buy more things here. Not so good now, of course.”
“No,” she said, reaching for the tea and spooning it out carefully into the pot. She thought she heard a noise, possibly from the bedroom, and feeling herself stiffen with alarm, rather than let him see her reaction, took her time replacing the lid on the tea jar and putting it back on the shelf above the gas ring. She heard the noise again and quickly turned the tap full on, topping up the kettle, though it was already half-full, not daring to look at him for fear he might see the alarm in her eyes. “You have a family?” she asked, concentrating on the kettle.
“Yes,” said the corporal, “I’ve been married now for three — four years. My wife’s name is Raza.”
The noise sounded again, like the rustle of a curtain.
“You must miss your family.”
“I have no children. But yes, I miss my wife.”
“Yes.”
When she turned to face him, she gasped, almost dropping the kettle — his erection purple, swollen and rising like some huge fat earthworm, the most disgusting thing she had ever seen. He nodded toward the bedroom with a crooked grin. “I’ll take the boy off the list,” he said. She was transfixed.
“I don’t care if he’s joined the
Stunned, Malle lifted the kettle, which was so heavy it splashed, almost extinguishing the gas ring, making a loud, steaming noise.
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Through the mist, the silence after the shelling screamed its presence, the pounding of the heavy guns having pummeled eardrums so badly that only the high tones were left, their ringing so intense that the sound of the dawn birds’ song was lost to David Brentwood as he lay, muscles aching, his whole body tense, hands still gripping the squad automatic weapon, his eyes adjusting to the bronze dawn of his goggles until he took them off. The glare of the sun-infused mist was hurtful to his eyes, but now at least Brentwood had a wider field of vision across the cratered landscape, which he remembered from the aerial reconnaissance photos had once been a meadow backed by a wood of Lombardy poplar. The wood was now gutted, the few remaining poplars blackened and splintered, leaning at impossible angles, looking like burned Christmas trees, leaves that had no doubt once flickered gold in the autumn sun now gone, one of the starkly naked trees that remained reminding him of the gaunt “lynching trees” he’d seen in old movies, stripped of foliage, charred, only one leaf still defiantly attached, a hundred yards from him. It was on this leaf that he focused, at once amazed and buoyed by its resilience against all odds. Or was it less resilience and more sheer luck?
There was a flash to his right, sun on steel. He swung the SAW up and around, its burst driving the butt hard into his thigh, the gun now silenced, squashed into the mud and guts of the corpse next to him, the long, razor- sharp blade of a knife at his throat, motioning him up — the Russian, if he
“Up!” he told Brentwood. “C’mon, quickly!” The ease of the man’s English, its purely American sound, devoid of any foreign accent, was the next thing David noticed.
The craters were now alive with the black figures moving forward. He counted at least fifty of them as he was hurriedly taken back toward Russian lines, escorted by relay, stumbling dizzily at first, his muscles still tight from the trauma of the shelling. A quarter mile farther on, he passed over more heavily cratered ground littered with the rotting corpses of what had been the American airborne, whole bodies the exception, limbs savagely amputated by the 120-millimeter shrapnel — from friendly fire. Stomachs literally blown apart, unrecognizable organs and intestines were scattered all over the battlefield in various hues of decomposition, some invisible in the mud except when revealed as a moving mound of maggots, others surrounded by crows pecking almost disinterestedly, waddling like ducks, so gorged they were too heavy to fly. And over it all the revolting burnt-chicken smell of death.
But for all the horror, worse than anything he’d seen during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang in Korea, the thing that struck David most was the catlike grace with which the black-suited Russian commandos moved, up and over the deep craters, taking no notice of the human detritus about them, or if they did, not showing the slightest sign, pausing only at the butchered chunks that still had heads attached or stopping where a severed head lay encrusted with mud, bending down, removing the airborne’s dog tags, which were sometimes still attached to the neck or pressed into the mush that had been a face. Now and then he saw one of the black jumpsuits pause, raising his hand moments later with a clutch of ID tags. A runner, one of the Poles brought up from the support battalions, would dash up, grab the tags from the Russian, and then head back to the Russian battalion’s headquarters in a thick stand of pine, where David now sat silent with the other two-hundred-odd prisoners, a few British but most of them forlorn remnants of the disastrous airborne drop.
It was only after they took his own dog tags that he realized why he hadn’t been killed on the spot. A very fit, no-nonsense, English-speaking Russian NCO in army greatcoat ordered them to remove their uniforms. Walking behind him was a private, his arms festooned with wire coat hangers, one for every prisoner, and a small plastic garbage bag for personal effects. A British private, peeling off his brown-and-green-splash combat tunic with the British Army of the Rhine shoulder patch, offered David a cigarette. David normally didn’t smoke, but he took it. The Englishman, a cockney, brushed a sprig of sticky pine from his sleeve. “Don’t want ‘em all messy, do we?”
David looked puzzled.
“When they cut your throat,” said the cockney. “Makes a mess of the uniform.”
David nodded. His ears were still ringing so that the Englishman’s voice seemed to come from a long way off and as if he were talking underwater. Putting the cigarette in his mouth, still dry from fear, he reached over to steady the cockney’s hand as the Englishman flicked his lighter, but David found his hand was no steadier, both of them trembling.
David was surprised how good the tobacco tasted. He took a piece of the loose weed from the tip of his tongue and flicked it to the ground. “Could’ve—” he began, but his throat was so parched, he had to begin again, and only now, as he took off his trousers to put on the hanger, did he realize his thigh was wet not so much from the blood of the corpse against which he’d cringed during the barrage, but also from water that had leaked from his punctured canteen. The bullet had penetrated halfway up the canteen. He took a sip from what was left, offering the rest to the Englishman. “Could have strangled us, though,” said David. “Taken our uniforms there and then. Why march us back?”
“Nah, mate. You shit yourself then, see? If they strangle you. Have to wash your duds out. No — they want ‘em Persil white.” The Englishman paused. “Reminds me of when I was a kid: ‘I’m no fool, I use Persil on my tool.’ “ He shook his head, forcing a grin, and put out his hand to the American. “Fred Waite’s the name.”
“David Brentwood.”
“
“Bit late now, Fritz,” said Waite. It was clear that it wasn’t only their talking but the apparent friendship
