Corrigon sighed with relief. ‘All set? Uh, okay?’
‘Si, oh-kay.’
He snapped off the light and lay with his eyes closed, listening. He thought, What the hell am I worried about? It’s a fairly simple operation and these guys do it all the time. The sector was isolated, no major roads anywhere near. Why would there even be any Germans around? He began to relax.
At first it was hardly a sound. It was a low rumble, like distant thunder, then it built, growing into the deep, solemn throb of four engines, coming in from the south.
‘Now,’ he whispered sharply and Fredo and’ Sepi were gone. The roar grew and then burst overhead, so low he could almost feel the slipstream of the B-24 as it passed overhead.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, one after another the flares sizzled to life as Fredo and Sepi ran along the two lines they had set, pulling the fuses, marking a twenty-yard strip between Corrigon and the lake. Corrigon threw the shoulder strap of the radio over his shoulder and ran down the hill after them. The plane wheeled hard and started back down the run towards him, its engines whining at full speed. It was then Corrigon realized the wind wasn’t coming off the lake at all. It was coming from behind him, blowing streams of smoke from the flares out over the lake.
‘Holy shit!’ he cried aloud. The plane was almost on top of them, roaring down the lakeside. He was vaguely aware of the engines backfiring as he slid the radio off his shoulder and knelt beside it, frantically cranking up the generator.
‘Spook Two, this is Spook Two to Angel. Go around, go around, the wind’s...’
Too late. The bomber rumbled overhead. A second later he heard the faint fump as the first chute opened, then another and another...
It was then that Corrigon became painfully, terrifyingly aware that he had not heard the engines backfiring. It was gunfire. Gunfire from Spook One’s position half a mile uplake.
There were flashes jarring the black sky, the rapid belch of a German burp gun, a faint agonized scream, the hollow crack of a grenade. Fredo and Sepi, etched in the ghoulish red glare of the flares, turned sharply and ran back down the line, kicking over the flares and throwing sand on them.
The first parachute, a grey ghost with its heavy load swinging below it, plopped into the lake. It sank immediatcly.
‘Spook One, Spook One, what the hell’s going on?’ Corrigon yelled into the radio.
‘Bandits, we got band...’
An explosion cut off the transmission. Fire swirled up into the black sky and vanished. Then a machine-gun chattered, no more than twenty yards away, and Fredo, running, leaped suddenly into the air. His back arched. Tufts flew from his ragged jacket. He fell on his face, arms outstretched in front of him, rolled over on his back, and lay still, his feet crossed at the ankles. Sepi turned and started back towards Fredo.
‘No!’ Corrigon cried. It was too late. The machine-gun chattered again. Bullets stitched the ground around Sepi’s feet, snapping his legs out from under him. He screamed and fell, skittered along the ground, started to get up to his knees, and was blown back into the air, dangling for an instant like a puppet, then dropping in a heap as the earth around him burst into geysers of death.
There were still flares burning behind Corrigon, but there was no time to bother with them now. Farther up the shore more explosions rent the night, more flames licked the sky. A burst of gunfire tore the radio to pieces. Corrigon veered, started running, hunched over, towards the safety of darkness. He slung the tommygun under his arm, firing several bursts behind him as he ran. He was almost to the top of the hill, almost outside the shimmering red orbit of the flares, when he felt something tug at his shirt, felt fire enter his side, boring deep and burning his insides.
He staggered but did not fall, dove to the ridge, and rolled over the top as a string of bullets chewed up the crest of the hill behind him. Pain flooded his body, seared his lungs, filled his chest.
‘AHHHH, G-O-D D-A-A-A-M-N!’ he screamed and crawled back to the ridge, laying the tommygun on the ground, pulling it against his cheek. Below him, shadowy figures moved towards the remaining flares. He squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed in his ear, shook him, jarred the pain deep inside him, but he kept firing and screaming. One of the figures whirled and fell, then another. A third turned and ran back towards the darkness, and Corrigon swung the gun, saw the bullets strike, saw the figure dance to his death. He kept firing, raking the three bodies until the barrel was so hot he couldn’t hold it anymore. He struggled to his feet, pulled the rice-paper niap from his pocket, and stuffed it in his mouth, feeling it dissolve in saliva as he started to run.
He did not know how long he ran, only that each step was worse than the last and the pain in his side seared deeper with each one. Vomit flooded his mouth; he spat it out and kept going. His mind wandered back in time and seized on an old chant from his Boy Scout days, ‘Out goes the bad air, in comes the good,’ and it became a cadence that kept him going.
Darkness gobbled him up. He tripped, staggered, fell, felt cruel stones bite into his knees, and ignored them. ‘Out goes the bad air, in comes the good,’ lurching back to his feet and running on. ‘Out goes the bad air, in comes the good,’ running through a black void with his eyes closed and then he smacked headlong into a wall and his forehead burst open like a tomato and he bounced backward and landed in a sitting position and madness seized him. He pulled his .45 automatic from the holster and in a rage fired over and over again at the wall, and then for no reason at all he started to giggle. Sitting there with his side shot apart and his head split open and a pistol jumping in his hand, lost in the middle of an alien land and alone, totally alone, with death snapping at his ankles, Corrigon laughed and the laughter turned to sobs. Once more he got to his feet, felt the wall, staggered along it to a corner and, turning, felt the gritty rust of a latch. He lifted it and went through the door, and leaned on it, closing it behind him.
Silence. And it was blessed. He felt for his penlight, but it was gone. Then his fingers touched the cold metal of his Zippo lighter. He took it out, snapped the flint, and held it high over his head. He was in a shed of some kind, abandoned except for spiders busily weaving webs in the corners. He walked to the opposite side of the small room and sat against the wall, facing the door.
The pain in his side hit him in waves, subsiding, then washing back through him and subsiding again. He heard himself groaning and he snapped the carriage on his .45 and ejected a bullet into his lap and put it between his teeth.
You’re crazy, Corrigon, crazy as shit, sitting here in the dark actually biting on a bullet.
