The Bullet Garden

CHAPTER 1 Parris in the Summer

God was late.

For six weeks he had been everywhere on the firing line. He was a deity with far-seeing eyes and an eerie professional calmness that separated him from every man any of them had known. He lectured, he taught, he named the parts and took them through the ceremonial intricacies of disassembly and assembly, and when the young recruits found themselves behind their spanking-new M1 Garand rifles, it seemed like he found time to kneel next to every boy — there were three hundred of them — issue gentle sight corrections, adjust a grip, test for a dominant eye, tighten a sling, slap a recalcitrant bolt handle forward, jiggle an en bloc clip of Government .30 into a breech, or press on the trigger-guard safety to which young fingers — the average recruit was 19.7 years old — were unaccustomed.

He never seemed to sweat, as if that human attribute was itself too intimidated to perform. He never cursed or humiliated or threatened, as did endlessly their daily custodians, the drill instructors; his way was soothing, as if he knew enough real bad shit lay ahead for them and had determined not to add to it. This disposition was part of a legend that was growing toward the ecclesiastical, while in fact he wore no ribbons on his tunics and never spoke of the islands he’d been on.

Though it was barely halfway through the year of our war 1944, it was said he’d already been on three. Most could name them: Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Tarawa. The former was famous for its triple-canopy tropical rain forest, just the neighborhood for hiding the wily Japanese; the latter for its thousand-yard walk through the chest-high surf from amtracs hung up on unseen reefs while blue tracers flicked murderously through the air, killing randomly. He got through that. On the third day he’d been badly wounded, it was said, spending six months in the hospital. The Corps believed he’d seen enough combat and had assigned him here on Parris Island, the smudge of marshy land just south of Beaufort, South Carolina, and north of Georgia where young men were brutalized into Marines. He was the senior NCO in charge of Rifle Marksmanship, that central faith of the Marine Corps.

But where was he?

Did something dare impede the great Gunnery Sergeant Earl Swagger, or was this part of Marine stagecraft, designed to increase the aura around the man? They would never know. They swatted flies and sand fleas, glad of the island’s singular mercy, which was a ramshackle roof built over the amphitheater that somewhat distilled the near-lethal sun, and talked among themselves, waiting, waiting, waiting. They were full of piss and venom. Culled hard over the weeks, those that remained yearned themselves to get to the islands and kill a bucketful of Japs. All considered themselves invulnerable, whether they were Harvard graduates — there were fourteen of those — or had flunked out of Frog Snot High School in Swampbilge, Mississippi. They thought they were crack shots on the nine pounds of Garand rifle death they lived with; they thought they could toss a grenade through a gun slot in a pillbox forty yards hence or go all Errol Flynn with their bayonets, outdueling the yellow enemy and their cruel samurai swords. All knew they would be heroes or die trying; none knew they might just die by whimsy, accident, or tropic fever. That was too much heaviness to the spirit to bear.

“Here he comes,” came a call that became a ripple and then a wave as it coursed through the group. Indeed, a jeep came down Range Road through a meadowland of rifle acreage from a squad of administrative Quonsets a mile off, pulling up dust from the unpaved track. A PFC drove. Next to him had to be the gunnery sergeant his own self, big as life, maybe bigger, certainly the most interesting man any of them had ever met.

The sergeant bailed briskly from the vehicle, to be instantly attended by the DIs who supervised each platoon of the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, and each gave a smart report to the effect that all were present and accounted for, meaning that the recruits were seated and rapt. This would be Swagger’s last time to address the battalion as a whole and he had words for them.

Swagger was a solid six feet, immaculate in class A khaki shirt and, for the occasion, blue dress trousers with Marine red stripes, ending cufflessly in black oxfords so bright with shine you could signal a plane with them. His visored cap was white. He wore no tie but the shirt was starched hard, its array of pockets and plackets arranged to form a metaphor for perfect USMC-style order on the chest, and a perfect pie of T-shirt showed in the valley of the collar. No ribbons, just the dark three up and two down over the diamond on the sleeve that signified rank.

No one would call him handsome; no one would call him ugly. He was simply a Marine. His face had been baked in Pacific sun, so that it now resembled a Spartan shield picked up after the big fight on the Greek coast. It was a long, hard, lean face, unadorned by flesh. He had cheekbones like howitzer shells. His nose was a blade, its precision testimony to the fact that even while winning Pacific fleet light heavyweight champion in ’39, he had been quick enough to keep it pristine. The jaw appeared to have been smelted from steel and the eyes were intense. They were also legendary. Every time he took a physical, naval aviation boys came calling to beg him to take a commission and an appointment to Pensacola and fly with them, because they knew he’d see the Zeros before they saw him. He, however, was a man of the gun, the land, the forest, and the hunt, and his skills and inclinations pointed him irrevocably in that way. Besides, generations of Swaggers had found the earth good enough to die on.

He went swiftly to the podium, not requiring the seated youngsters to rise, as he knew that would unsettle them for no point at all. He faced them.

“Good morning, marines,” he said in a tone of voice familiar to military formations for a good five thousand years, and linking him to a long line of the foremen of battle who got them up the hill or across the river or through no-man’s-land, whether the setting was Guadalcanal or Borodino. His variation on the NCO’s voice had the softness of the mid-South to it, as he hailed from Polk County, Arkansas, but the tone could have been Zulu, Greek, Roman, Hun, even yeoman’s as spoken in the mud of Agincourt.

“GOOD MORNING, SERGEANT,” they replied, and he passed on any follow-up Corps-standard theatrical bullshit as in “Sound off like you got a pair” or “I can’t hear you” to get them even more ginned up. Swagger thought such rhetorical excesses unnecessary and of no use to the combat-bound.

“I call you marines and not recruits because, though a week shy of graduation and assignment to your next units, you have all passed rifle marksmanship. You are therefore riflemen and are therefore entitled to the respect of men, for all of you fellows are now men, even that squeaky little redhead over there”—he pointed to Richie Murphy, a kind of battalion mascot who was officially seventeen but widely believed to be even younger—“and in short order will be facing Japanese infantrymen in places you never heard of, you can’t pronounce, you couldn’t find on no map because they aren’t big enough. That’s man’s work. Only men can do it, and you have proven yourself. No matter how it turns out, know today you are a man and a marine.”

They cheered themselves. They had earned it: by mastering the hard craft of the march, the compass, the push-up, the grenade, and most of all the rifle. In that discipline they showed the skill to lie flat and put rounds on targets to six hundred yards. It would be harder under fire, but if their luck held — nobody said it would — the fundamentals Swagger had pounded into them would get them through it.

“Now, you may have noticed, ain’t no officers here today,” he said.

Some had, some hadn’t. But, yes, it was strange, as platoon commanders and battalion staff had been ever present over the rigorous nine weeks that had preceded.

“That’s because I want to speak freely, with no reports being filed and investigators from the Navy Department showing up. So what I tell you ain’t official Marine doctrine as vetted by the old men with stars on their collars. I’m just giving you straight shit, and I hope you listen on it and take it to heart. I believe it may save your life someday. But before I begin, let me ask: Is there a man here from Harvard University?”

In time a few hands raised. Swagger pointed to the nearest, and said, “All right, son, you come on up here.”

The boy climbed onto the stage in his much-sweated-in herringbone twill dungarees. Though tall and slim, he wore the olive drab cotton poorly, so that it hung on him like pajamas, obscuring the crew athlete he’d once been and the war athlete he’d become. His cover was the pith helmet, a Jungle Jim thing that actually did its job against the sun no matter how goofy it looked. He was shod in boondockers, rough side out, giving him the aspect, however unlikely, of a man who made his living pushing a plow behind a mule. He came to attention.

“Stand at ease.”

The boy’s posture relaxed but still showed strength through core muscles.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Sergeant, my name is Wallace F. McCoy, Sergeant,” he said smartly.

“Now, McCoy,” said Swagger, “I know on account of your fine university that you’re a smart fellow. I’m guessing you have a good memory. Would I be right?”

“Well…” The boy paused. “Sergeant, I can name all the presidents and all the states. I know the table of elements, the Declaration of Independence, the names and stories of all the constellations. I’ve read every British novel ever written and all the poets and playwrights. I know the Pledge of Allegiance, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the words to the Marine’s Hymn, and I speak Spanish.”

“That would seem to be what I had in mind,” said Swagger. “Now I believe in that brain of yours there might have been room enough for something the Marine Corps taught you called ‘The Rifleman’s Creed.’ Tell me I’m not wrong.”

“Sergeant, you’re not wrong, Sergeant.”

“Excellent. Now I want you to recite it for me and all your chums in 3rd Recruit Battalion sitting out there. Speak it loud, so they can hear in the balcony”—there of course being no balcony.

“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant.”

He turned, cleared his throat.

“Wait,” said Swagger. “It works better with this.” He leaned behind the podium and removed an M1 Garand rifle, the potbellied, eight-round .30-caliber semiautomatic weapon that made the American marine or soldier the best armed in the war. He handed it to the young man, who received it with accustomed hands, immediately cleared it to check that it was unloaded, again by regulation, then turned to face his cohort.

“ ‘This is my rifle,’ ” he said from rote memory. “ ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My—’ ”

“Skip to the brother part,” said Swagger.

“Yes, Sergeant. ‘My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I—’ ”

“That’s enough, McCoy. Stand easy.”

McCoy went to parade rest, the rifle held precisely parallel to his right leg, secured by the grip of his right hand.

Swagger turned to the group.

“You all know that. The DIs have drilled it into your ears for eleven weeks. You have nightmares about it. You probably will remember it for the rest of your life.

“It was written in 1942 by a general named William H. Rupertus, commandant of the big base in San Diego. I had the privilege of serving with the general when he was a colonel in Honduras in the thirties banana wars. He was a fine man. I’d serve with him anytime and follow him anywhere.”

He paused.

“And yet, marines, I’m telling you this one, not straight from the heart, but straight from the mud in which most battles are fought. It’s bullshit.”

The brigadier, a small gray thistle of a man who confronted reality under an iron-gray flat-top, hollow cheeks blackened perpetually by whisker that could not be shaved away, and eyes that looked like peep sights, was in conference with his senior staff in the big room just down from his office. All present wore perfectly starched class A khakis, open at the neck, short-sleeved, as much fruit salad as possible on chests, rank pins on collars and over their khaki slacks, highly shined brown oxfords. They looked like mushrooms with medals and suntans. They sat rigidly, they talked rigidly, they smoked rigidly.

The meeting had to do with construction shortfalls for the barracks to house incoming recruits for the newly designated 5th, 6th, and 7th Recruit Battalions. The new boys would be arriving by October and it didn’t appear the barracks would be habitable until November.

The issue, therefore, was where to put the boys until the building could take them.

“I don’t want them squawking about sleeping outdoors,” said the brigadier in an iron voice under iron eyes. He smiled in the presence of grandchildren only, except he had no grandchildren and his only son had died on Guadalcanal. “They should be concentrating on their training. Besides, the DI magic doesn’t work outside an intimate setting like a barrack. That’s where he builds the marine into them.”

“Sir,” a colonel said, “maybe there’s unused hangar space at Page. We could requisition cots, we could run lines with tarps to cut the room into more intimate space—”

But before the commanding officer of Parris Island’s Page Field could object, the brigadier’s aide entered, went swiftly to him, and bent over.

“Sir, call from Navy Annex,” he whispered.

Whoa!

The brigadier was taken aback. Such direct communications were rare. Orders and policies generally drifted down the table of organization, each level getting its turn. And Navy Annex, where the commandant and his headquarters staff were now located while something called Henderson Hall was expanded for them, meant interest from the highest level. In fact, such things almost never happened. Something large must be on somebody’s plate. He had to jump.

“Gentlemen, forgive the interruption. I have to take a call.”

He turned, left, involuntarily making certain his gig line was straight, his fruit salad as precise as a Technicolor chessboard, his shirt bloused tightly, his shoes as bright brown as a cow’s eyes, his one star freshly Brasso’d and gleaming on each collar wing. No one at Navy Annex could see him, of course, but he felt better prepared if he was as squared away as any headquarters officer.

In his office, he found another orderly holding the phone. He took it and a deep breath and said his name into it.

“How are you, Brad?” asked the commandant of the Marine Corps, a soft beginning that seemed to indicate the call wasn’t to be remonstrative.

“Sir, I’m fine. We’re working hard here to keep our programs on schedule and of high standard. I can send you a report if—”

“No, no, this is another thing.”

“Yes, sir, how may I be of help?”

“You have Gunnery Sergeant Swagger down there, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir. Swagger’s practically an institution. He turns out the best riflemen in the world. I hope you’re not telling me his requests have been approved and he’s off to the Pacific again. I’d hate to lose him.”

“I wish I could help you on that one,” said the commandant, “but I answer to higher parties. In about an hour, a B-17 from the Eighth Air Force”—those were the boys who were bombing the Reich from England! — “will put down at Page.”

Was Page big enough? Well, if the pilots were good enough and the brigadier instantly understood that a far more normal procedure would be to land them at Naval Air Station Beaufort, twenty miles to the north. So this had to be highest priority.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“It will be carrying two men. One is actually a psychologist, the other a field officer, but both will be in civilian clothes, for reasons nobody cares to explain to me. Still, both should be treated with formal military courtesy. They are attached to an outfit that even I didn’t know existed until a few minutes ago.”

“I will arrange to have them picked up and—”

“No, I want you there to greet them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want you to have Swagger with you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They may make him an unusual offer. I myself don’t even know what it will be. It is of course entirely voluntary.”

“I hear you, sir.”

“However, and I can’t emphasize this enough, I wish that he accepts it. I hope that you will make this clear to him and that you will add that you wish that he accepts it.”

By long tradition of Marine culture, a senior officer’s “wish” had the impact of a howitzer shell. It meant instant compliance, as in NOW.

“Yes, sir.”

“They require a meeting with him to make their pitch. I am told that it is acceptable for you to sit in on it, both to communicate to Swagger that the Marine Corps is in approval here, and that you personally endorse Mr. Morgan and Mr. Leets.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’d best get cracking,” said the commandant.

“It was a Canadian fellow designed this,” said Swagger to his three hundred zealots, now hanging on his every word and buzzed by his willingness to buck the hokum of “The Rifleman’s Creed.” He held McCoy’s Garand high in one hand, at the perfectly engineered point of balance, so that his audience could appreciate the lethal architecture, the high engineering art, the functionality that was the best part of the beauty that the nine pounds represented.

“Now, let me tell you, Mr. John Cantius Garand wasn’t in the Miss Lonelyhearts business. He didn’t want to hold your hand, he didn’t want to make you all happy-happy like the Easter Bunny does, he didn’t want you to fall in love with what he was designing. It ain’t your best friend. It ain’t a girlfriend, your baby, your brother, your grandma on Thanksgiving who knows how to roast up them birds, your old uncle. It’s not, no matter what General Rupertus, sitting in his office with a bottle of bourbon and all het up over Pearl Harbor, says. It’s not you. In fact, it’s your enemy.”

He let that one sink in as the boys, most of them, even the fourteen from Harvard, gasped at the apostasy.

“It wants you dead. It will always be looking for mud to choke on, for rocks to bang, for grease to slip it out of your hands and fall hard, for rain to turn its steel rusty and erode out the grooves in the barrel. Its gas plug wants to vibrate loose so it don’t get the right measure of recoil energy to operate reliably. Its rear sight wants to go out of zero, its front sight wants to bend, its sling wants to slip off your shoulder in the prone, its extractor wants to break so it don’t eject and it ties up. I’m telling you, young marines, it ain’t your girlfriend, and if you think it is, you will be sorry.

“Suppose you have to use someone else’s weapon when Miss Marianne is blown up? Suppose you have to use Jap weapons? Suppose you get picked to replace the assistant machine gunner and now you got his dinky little carbine? Suppose you’re on night patrol with a .45 and a knife? Are you going to get all Section 8 because your precious Miss Marianne ain’t there? You cannot plan what’s going to happen to you; you can only prepare for the most likely contingencies. The best way is to face the truth: it’s a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Its real good at what it does, if you do your part. We had Springfields on the ’Canal, and I’ll tell you in every way this one is far better, the best in the world. If you do your part.

“And what is your part? Real simple. You maintain it every single goddamned second you are on the line. You do not get sack time unless you ram the barrel clear, oil the bolt channel, check the clicks on your sight, run a rag over the insides, look hard into it, test that the trigger guard is still locked into the action and that the action is still rigid in the stock. All of that, every night, before every patrol, every invasion, every assault, every opportunity the Marine Corps gives you to kill Japs.

“You will grow to hate the goddamned thing because it demands so much of you. But it don’t care what you think. It only cares about itself and the springs and recoil energy and the parts and the levers that all work in perfect timing to make it operate. It ain’t going to congratulate you when you hit a Jap at 240, or gun down a fleeing Nambu crew fast as you can trigger it, or pot a sniper in a high green tree who’s been making life hell for you. You only impress it by working it hard every day.

“Maybe at the end of the war, your last day as you muster out and you go to the armory and sign it over to the battalion arms room for some other young green thing to use, maybe then, and only then, when you see Miss Marianne racked with all her girlfriends as you head out and back to your life, can you let yourself imagine that the goddamned thing is a gal that has a soul and is giving you a tiny bit of smile. At that moment, you will have earned it. So it’s okay to smile back.”

They rode in silence. It was beyond any service etiquette that an enlisted man, even a gunnery sergeant of vast experience, should ride in the backseat of a staff car with a general, even a brigadier. Thus, neither knew what to say as the car, which had showed unexpectedly at the rifle range amphitheater to acquire Swagger, rolled through the ranges, then into marshy land where Parris Island seemed as much liquid as solid and supported stands of vegetation that had once sustained the stegosaurus. Eventually, the road yielded to the dried-out southern tip of the island, where Page Field had been built to accommodate biplanes, then Wildcats, then Hellcats but never a bird as big as a 17.

“Gunnery Sergeant Swagger,” the brigadier finally said, “you should know up front that some very important folks are involved in this party, and all of them, including me, hope that you’ll enthusiastically embrace what is coming on.”

“Sir, you know I am 150 percent Marine Corps, and if that’s what the Marine Corps wants, I will provide it, same as any hill it told me to climb up under fire.”

“I knew that to be the case, Sergeant. I did want to get it out in the open so there’d be no confusion. I think that—”

But at that moment a great roar engulfed them, followed by enough shadow to kill the sun for a second or two, and then it swept over them, just one hundred feet up, a B-17 on landing vector, its twin tires cranked down to embrace the ground shortly.

It was a huge plane by any standard of its time, wingspan one hundred feet, four Wright R-1820-97 Cyclone engines whose whirling props chewed the atmosphere like hungry tigers, its streamlined seventy-five-foot tube of fuselage broken only by double bubbles of shiny Perspex turrets, 50-caliber Messerschmitt-killers bristling from each, its proud tail itself a two-story blade for cutting the air. It was beautiful like the Garand was beautiful, out of the perfection of its design for the hard task it had been assigned.

“That’s a B-17G, sir,” said Swagger. “The latest model. Chin turret, double fifties in the tail.”

“If they think coming to get you is worth pulling a ship off the missions to Germany, then that should give you some idea of how important this thing is.”

By the time they arrived at the airfield, a rude collection of Quonsets and wooden shacks as well as new corrugated steel hangars on a spit of land which yielded at its tip to Port Royal Sound and a gateway to the Atlantic, the plane had come to rest, its nose up on tires half as big as a man, its tail down. Fuel trucks attended it, mechanics swarmed over it, some Marine pilots had gathered just to admire it. Army Air Forces officers, in waxy-brown A2 jackets and squashed forty-mission hats and huge teardrop sunglasses, supervised. No Air Forces enlisted men were visible in the ceremony of refueling, which even more suggested the plane was stripped for weight for its longer-distance job today.

The brigadier and Swagger got out of the car and were greeted by the exceedingly nervous captain who was now in command of Page, since the authentic CO was back at Base HQ, presumably still arguing overusing the extra hangars for the new recruit battalions.

“Sir, they’re in here, sir,” he said.

“Were they annoyed we couldn’t be here to greet them off the plane, Mason?”

“Not at all, sir. Very friendly fellows, casual and joking. I have them in the pilot’s ready room enjoying good Marine Corps coffee and I’ve promised them and their crew real eggs and bacon as soon as Cookie gets it together. They seemed to like that.”

“Okay, fine, Mason.”

Mason led them in, through a briefing room loaded with photos on the wall of famous air machines and their flyers, all in jaunty leather coats with diagonal rows of buttons or slanted zippers, all “Smilin’ Jack” for the tremendous adventure of roaring through the air. The ready room was smaller, a comfy warren and fewer pictures with an alcove of lockers, a chalkboard with names and missions scrawled on it, and a sign that read: “…IN THE AIR, on land, and sea,” from the “The Marines’ Hymn.”

One older, one younger. In suits, gray and brown. The ties were red, the white shirts had little buttons on the collars, the shoes, heavy for both, had patterns of perforations about them. They were like star maps in Florsheim leather.

One looked like the sort who’d be comfortable anywhere. His relaxed position on the central sofa suggested ease of being, quick study, confidence in charm and wit, and nimble mind.

The other, younger, had football written all over him. Pleasant, open face; blond crew cut; maybe, despite linebacker size and shoulders, a little less sure. One smoked, one enjoyed a mug of black joe, and they seemed to be chortling over something.

They rose, smiling.

“Gentlemen!” the older one said heartily, as if all were old pals meeting at a golf course watering hole, “thanks so much for accommodating us so quickly. Brigadier and, I presume, Gunnery Sergeant Earl Swagger, Marine Corps star and already a three-island vet.”

This annoyed the shit out of Swagger; it was as if they were welcoming outsiders to their little club, not the other way around. It was also clear that they had no real interest in the brigadier, who took all this with dignity, but again it pissed Swagger off, because it upset the order of the world. All rule breakers start with the little ones, like these two, while working up to the big one that fucks everything up.

The brigadier nodded, let himself be ushered to a leather chair, while Swagger felt himself maneuvered toward another, better, closer one.

“We’re not much on ranks in our outfit. I’m Bill Morgan,” said the older. “This is Jim Leets. I’m the psychologist. He’s the hero.”

“Mr. Morgan, then, Mr. Leets, welcome to Parris Island, and please tell us how to help you,” said the brigadier.

“Here it is: we have a bad jam-up in Europe,” Bill Morgan said. “Our organization — it’s supposed to be secret, but I don’t think I’m betraying anything when I tell you we’re called the Office of Strategic Services—”

“OSS,” said the other, Leets. “We do spy stuff. We blow stuff up and kill field marshals and connect with the underground all over Europe. At least, that’s the idea.”

“Jim, tell them why we’re here.”

Leets, the younger, continued. “On highest priority we were assigned to find the best combat rifleman in American service. Didn’t matter if he was a marine or a Boy Scout or an Army jeep driver. The deal is, we find him, we get him to Europe by the fastest route possible, and he starts working on our little problem.”

“You wouldn’t go wrong with Swagger,” said the iron brigadier, unbidden. “He may be the best NCO in the Corps. He should be a colonel by now. Why he won’t take a commission is something even the commandant has lost sleep over.”

“So we hear.”

“Can you tell me the problem?” asked Swagger.

“In one word,” said the one called Leets, “snipers.”

CHAPTER 2 Night Patrol

“Brooklyn!”

“What?”

“I said Brooklyn, god dammit.”

“Jack, is that you?”

“I say ‘Brooklyn,’ you’re supposed to say ‘Dodgers.’ Sign, counter-sign.”

“I forgot.”

“I’m coming across. Don’t shoot me.”

“Don’t worry, I can’t find my rifle.”

“Hold it down, god dammit,” commanded Sergeant Malfo in either a loud whisper or a soft yell.

Private Archer, of 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, Dog Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, Lightnin’ Joe Collins’s VII Corps, Omar Bradley’s First Army, Ike Eisenhower’s SHAEF, plunged into the cold water of a stream that ran randomly across this part of France that happened to be about twenty-seven kilometers west of Saint-Lô on the Saint-Lô—Périers line, where seven American divisions faced six German divisions.

The Germans seemed to be winning. Their position was solid, their gun pits well hidden, their machine-gun lanes laid out and staked, their artillery ranged, their elite SS Panzer units stationed to fly to attack points and torch the outgunned American Shermans. They were shrewd, tough, full of zeal and energy, and so pleased not to be in fucking Russia anymore they’d fight like lions.

The Americans, meanwhile, kept botching the skills of war, beginning with an intelligence failure that totally missed the primary difficulty facing the five thousand G.I.s ashore since D-Day: that before them lay a deathtrap of hills, forests, twisty roads and worst of all a maze-like array of eight-foot-tall, impenetrable headgrows. Other mistakes followed quickly: attacks in which preliminary shelling hadn’t hit; getting lost on the complex of roads, out of coordination and communication, with all the commanders at each others’ throats; and the Shermans reluctant to risk running into Tigers on the country roads, so they were always behind or had gone to the wrong place. The line had been static for three weeks — D-Day was four back, though neither of the soldiers had been there for it — and nothing seemed to suggest fortunes would change.

Archer, wet to the thighs, his Garand rifle held high over his head, scrambled up the bank, slipped in the mud, got some leverage, and rolled heavily into his squad’s position, a gully hidden by foliage overlooking the stream and the meadow through the trees that he had just low-crawled across. By daylight it looked like a land of lush, romantic fantasy where Cinderella might have lived, but at night it revealed its true nature: a nightmare region full of vegetable walls, ditches, tricky, treacherous, unknowable, unmappable. And full of men who wanted to kill you. He breathed in heavily, glad to be alive, if wet and back from tonight’s adventure in The War.

“Cigarette,” he said to his friend on sentry duty, Private Gary Goldberg.

“Jack, I’m low.”

“Mine got all wet when I fell in that fucking stream. Come on, Gary, give me a cigarette.”

Neither of the boys — one twenty-one, the other twenty-two — were heavy smokers or had quite mastered the inhale action of the cigarette, but they were of an age and a disposition that mandated conformity, and the American army ran on tobacco. Some of the men claimed tobacco was the sixth food group, others that it belonged in with the vegetables.

Goldberg got a Victory pack of Camels out of the pocket of his M1941 jacket and flicked it out, a very Bogart/Casablanca move, and Archer took it, cupped it in the same Bogart style, pulled a Zippo, and fired up. He sucked in deeply, accidentally inhaled, had a brief spasm of coughing, but then got with it, settling back, enjoying the buzz.

Both were new, not only to the squad, the company, the battalion, the division, the corps, but also to The War. They were high-IQ draftees (over 115) who’d been sent to college for a year in the strange Army Specialized Training Program with the ultimate objective of turning them into officers. Then someone had noticed: What the fuck are we sending these guys to college for while the other guys are getting killed all over the world? Thus the program was suddenly ended and the formerly lucky boys were simply distributed into line units. This meant two things: that everyone hated them for being designated geniuses and for spending the last year safe and warm (and missing the rather hectic time the 9th had experienced in North Africa, in Sicily, and assaulting Cherbourg) and that they became friends for life, however long that might be.

Their little cigarette tête-à-tête was shortly interrupted by a rather intimidating noncommissioned officer.

“You okay, Archer? Goldberg, I almost tripped over your rifle. Pick it up.”

“Is that where it is? Yes, Sergeant,” said Goldberg.

“Goldberg, nix on the wisecracks. Save ’em for Broadway. Archer, talk to me.”

“Well, I got pretty close to them.”

“How close?”

“I could have used their latrine but the line was too long. Is that close enough?”

Sergeant Malfo wittily responded with a dead eyeball look that would have crushed ball bearings. He had that part of the sergeant business down pat.

“Spill. This isn’t kindergarten. We gotta get out of here before the sun’s up.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay, no engine sounds. No tanks moving in. Nothing at all to suggest they’re going to attack anytime soon. Just soldier bullshit. A lot of pipe smoking — God, the shit they use for tobacco — and a lot of laughing. The Krauts seem to find the war very funny.”

“I thought they were supposed to turn and run when they saw the mighty American war machine,” said Goldberg.

“These guys just seemed… I don’t know, really happy. They like this stuff. It’s in their blood,” said Archer.

“Bear down, Archer. Save the psychology for the chaplain. Any sign of artillery? You know, clearings in the woods, haulage trucks, piles of shells?”

“Nah. Now, I’m not saying not there. I didn’t see so much in the dark. I didn’t exactly get into the trench. It was more a radio experience. I listened hard and I didn’t hear a thing that sounded like… like… I don’t know. What I heard was mostly just stuff. Guys on the line. I don’t think they’d be so comfortable if they were going to come at us soon. I saw the usual German solid work, what little I could make out. Barbed wire, machine-gun emplacements behind sandbags, a line of trench, rifle pits in front, to pick at us coming across the field, then fall back to the trench when we get close. If any of us are left to get close.”

“Okay, good work. I’m going to radio it on.”

He stood and the bullet hit him in the head. Back portion, left side skull, just below helmet, straight through, exiting in a blur of mess.

Neither boy had seen a headshot at close range before. The sergeant’s skull seemed to evaporate into smear, a sudden spray of warm drops that neither wanted to examine pelted them, and the older man — Malfo had been all of twenty-five — seemed to melt. Goldberg had an incongruous memory of the Wicked Witch dissolving in The Wizard of Oz, while Archer, an engineering student at Purdue, thought of modern art, somehow, as if Malfo had become some crazed painting.

The dead sergeant flopped without grace onto the ground, making a sound that seemed like meat falling off a truck. Some more liquid splashed them.

Both young soldiers went hard to the earth.

“Oh, fuck,” said Archer. “The Krauts can see in the dark.”

Goldberg began to sneeze.

CHAPTER 3 Trees

“Sergeant,” said Leets, “what brought us to you were rumors of an extremely successful anti-sniper program you ran on Guadalcanal in fall ’42. We’ve heard the story from a variety of sources, each of them different. Now we’d like to hear from you.”

Earl disliked nothing so much as talking about himself — unless he was on a drunk with seven or eight other sergeants, preferably in a whorehouse filled with jiggly Filipino dishes; then, of course, he wouldn’t shut up. That would be how the story got around.

He turned to the brigadier.

“Sir, may I smoke?”

“Sure, go ahead, Sergeant,” said the older visitor, Morgan. “We want you to be comfortable.”

But Earl waited until the brigadier nodded. It was part of his war on men in suits, these two, yes, but generally men in suits everywhere.

He shook a Lucky loose from the pack in the pocket of his class A, lipped it, produced a burnished Zippo with “USMC” engraved on it, lit, inhaled deeply, then sent two lungfuls of smoke on patrol into the room. The smoke lingered, separated into layers hanging heavily, forming its own weather system. More would soon join it.

“October, the rainy season. Everything had bogged down; we were low on supplies and energy, but not mud, plenty of mud. Our battalion was stretched thin but we had enough Browning .30s to hold them off when they came frontally. My company had high ground over a kind of meadow or gap or something, two hundred yards from a wall of rain forest. Believe me, nobody wanted to go in there, much less attack it. Thick, dark, wet, everything the Japanese love, everything the Americans hate.”

He took another puff, savoring it. Exhaling, he sent another front advancing north to south, enveloping the suits, who had to bear up. But he miscalculated. The two men looked at him, gone in Earl rapture: it was like hearing about war from Achilles on a hill outside Troy just after the fight with poor Hector.

“They didn’t have much artillery but they sure had snipers. Made our lives miserable. Couldn’t move hardly till dark. It was a surprise and we paid for it dearly. I lost seven boys killed or bad wounded the first two days. We never suspected they’d be that good. They were hitting dead zero from at least two hundred out, maybe further. Where’d they get glass that good? Where’d they get ammo that good? Where’d they get men that good? How were they hiding that good?

“Tried everything. Artillery, air strikes — no air to speak of, no napalm, not then — counter-sniper teams, machine-gun sweeps, the works. Every day they hit someone, and we just got fewer and fewer, since no replacements were coming in. There were nights when, if they’d hit us hard, they’d have busted on through to the sea.

“Morale stunk, the boys were extra-jumpy, the officers sullen and scared. Yep, happens to marines too. That’s what sniper war does.

“So I’m thinking: What don’t we know about this shit? What questions ain’t we asked? What do the Japs know we don’t? I come up with one answer: trees.

“They had to be in trees. Sure, but which trees? Thinking harder, I reasoned out that they’d have to be stout, tall trees to get the elevation so they wasn’t shooting uphill, which is always tricky. But what trees in a rain forest are like that? Nobody knew. So I went to the skipper and told him I wanted to do a one-man tree recon. I’d infiltrate down low in the dark and move into the rain forest. By day, I’d be trying to figure which trees, where were they, how could we ID them in the triple canopy, which was so dense, it obliterated everything.

“That’s what I done. I learned that most rain forest trees are shallow of root and weak of limb and trunk. Banyans was one I recognized from the Philippines. Mangroves was another; it was the one that grew in water. Some palms, and shit on the ground like barbed wire, all tangled, thorny, tough. That jungle could take a man down hard and fast. The smell of rot. Everything wet and crumbly. Mud everywhere, some flowers. Lizards, birds, maybe monsters. But there was one tree that was strong and tall. It had kind of fins deployed from the trunk to make it sturdier, it looked kind of like something from another planet or another age. Not so many of them; I guess it could only grow in certain spots where it could get deep roots in. I later found out it was called a koa. But the name didn’t matter; I just figured, if snipers were there, that would be the tree they were in. I managed to climb one: hard going for a light heavyweight, not easy, but happily there was no Jap in that one, though when I got up there I realized that one had been there. Obviously, they perch in one of them trees for weeks at a time, then move on before we get them zeroed. The thickness of the trunk was protection against random fire and artillery. Pretty good setup, and the Nip who’d been there had cut one limb for a rifle rest, just above a juncture where he’d sat.

“So the question was: How do we ID that tree so we can concentrate fire on it? From the ground looking up or from our line looking downhill, the jungle was so thick, you couldn’t see nothing.”

He took a puff. Even he had to acknowledge that what came next was smart. It saved lives. Boys got off that island that might otherwise not have. Made him happy. He’d done his duty that day.

“So I wiggled out a ways on a limb and cut off a branch. Looking at it carefully, I could tell that the leaves was significantly lighter than all the other jungle haberdashery. Couldn’t see it from the ground, but… maybe from the air.

“I got back that night and the next night got a jeep to Henderson Field, which we just barely controlled. I found an Army Piper Cub pilot — I think they call it an L-4 in the Army — and told him my plan. So he and I flew over our positions that afternoon and he got me a big Army camera for aerial recon. Hardly been used, as all it showed was trees.

“A day later, the pictures come to battalion. We look at them, and sure as shit—”

Another deep draft of Lucky, toasty, smooth, and pure, bringing buzz and happy, producing another front of heavy weather on the same north-south axis, smothering his admirers. Suits. Outsiders. Know-it-alls. Fuck ’em.

“—from five hundred feet up, you could pick out the taller, stronger trees because of the color difference. They looked near white in the black-and-white photography. So we oriented the photo to the compass and from a certain arbitrary point downslope shot azimuths to each of the trees — fourteen of ’em, within Jap 7.7 range — to the battalion front. Next night I took a volunteer gun crew down the slope, we dug in at the selected point, oriented the tripod to the photos, and were able to set the gun by tripod clicks on each azimuth. I figured there was no point in waiting for daylight, because by that time the Japs would be in their shooting positions with the trunk between them and us. Plus, they could bring fire on us.

“So at 0430 we fired fourteen two-fifty-round belts of .30 ball along the azimuths that led to each tree. Figured the first hundred would cut a way through the foliage and the next hundred and fifty would spray the spine of the tree. Fire for effect, it’s called in our talk. We got the water to boiling in the water jacket halfway through, we were firing so much, so fast. It boiled off and we had to refill from our canteens.

“Then we broke the gun down and crawled back up the slope, had a cup of joe, and caught some sack. The test was next morning. Would we catch same old sniper hell or what? And the truth is, we didn’t. And we never did again, even when we moved into them trees and across the island. And no other battalions did neither.”

“The Japanese aren’t said to value life,” said Bill Morgan. “Why do you think they didn’t just reload the trees and take the losses for the damage inflicted?”

“I figure it was because their snipers were their best men: smart, great shots, dedicated, willing to die. They’re the ones who make the outfit operate, probably NCOs with a lot of time on the trigger, been through China and Malaysia and the Philippines. It’s one thing to sacrifice conscripts, but if you get your best killed, you’re destroying yourself. Even the Japs ain’t that stupid.

“I later heard from an intelligence officer that they’d intercepted some radio chatter, and the Japs thought we had some new weapon that could see in the dark and through the heavy canopy. Nah. It was just Swagger and Corporal Tommy Malloy, two PFCs and a John Browning .30 water-jacketed. Malloy was a terrific gunner. He earned his pay that night. Too bad he didn’t make it off the island.”

“Here’s to Tommy Malloy,” said this Leets guy. “God rest his soul. And may we find more like him.”

Earl took a puff of Lucky in tribute to Tommy. Was that a moment of silence? Maybe this Leets got it, after all. Maybe he wasn’t so bad as Swagger thought.

The two looked at each other, saying nothing.

Finally, Bill Morgan said, “I hope you’ll excuse me a second, gentlemen. I have to make a phone call. Jim can keep you amused with magic tricks. He’s good at that.”

“I have calls to make as well, gentlemen,” said the brigadier. “Back shortly.”

The brigadier stood, Swagger rose, but the brigadier put out a hand, meaning: belay that.

He hastened out.

Swagger and Jim Leets were left alone.

“Do you blow stuff up, Mr. Leets?” Earl asked.

“Got a bridge after D-Day,” said Leets.

“Sounds like fun.”

“Seeing it blow was the highlight. But then we were jumped by Waffen-SS from God knows where. Lost some extremely good people. The SS executed a hundred French civilians in the town the next day. That’s the bad part. No big deal, but I also caught a piece of German junk in the hip. Thought it had shattered my joint, but it must have been a ricochet and there was no penetration, only massive bruising, slow to heal, and you’ll see that I walk with a limp. Just got out of the hospital in London a few days ago.”

Earl said nothing, not his way. But he thought, Okay, bud. You’re in the club.

Both the brigadier and Bill Morgan returned in nearly the same second. They reseated themselves without fuss.

“Okay,” Morgan said. “I called DC, talked to General Donovan; he’s our boss, Wild Bill, from the Great War.”

“I met him, as a matter of fact,” said the brigadier. “Great man. Medal of Honor in the Great War. Sergeant Swagger, if General Donovan is in on this, you’re in good company.”

“Yes, sir,” said Earl.

“Go ahead, Lieutenant Leets,” said Morgan.

“Here it is,” said Leets. “We will leave in an hour or so, enough time for you to change to civvies and get your shaving kit. The Fort is refueling now. Straight shot to London. Ten, maybe twelve hours, depending on prevailing winds. Best to sleep, because you’ll need it. Over there you will be assigned by Office of Strategic Services to investigate a sudden spurt in night sniper deaths inflicted in theater on our troops, holding up our entire offensive initiative. Colonel Bruce will detail-brief you. You will get all support and logistics via OSS as provided by the Army. You’ll have carte blanche to travel, investigate, interview, and, we hope, develop an anti-sniper campaign similar to the one you deployed on Guadalcanal. Much wider front, of course. You will oversee its implementation—”

“Meaning I get to shoot too? Not just sit in a tent, waiting for results?”

“If that’s what you want. You’re calling the shots.”

“When I’m done, I can come back to the Marine Corps? You’ll use whatever influence you might have through the War Department into the Navy Department to get me back to the Pacific?”

“Again, if that’s what you want.”

Earl looked at the brigadier, caught a nod so imperceptible, any civilian would have missed it.

“Sure,” he said, “let’s do it.”

“Excellent,” said Morgan. “If nothing else, you’ll be the first and certainly only man in the war to board a plane a marine gunnery sergeant and get off it a major in the United States Army.”

CHAPTER 4 70 Grosvenor

As usual, the nightmares: the blue tracers floating in from the smudge of rock called Tarawa on the horizon that was a mile away through chest-high ocean. Wherever they flicked, they tore up the surface of the water, and if a boy was in the center of that disturbance, he’d next be seen floating facedown in a liquid cloud of his drifting blood. Then there was the up-close stuff on the ’Canal when the Japs thought they could overcome the positions on pure manpower and sent wave after wave, men dying for nothing in the hundreds as they came through the night, and the .30s just kept harvesting them, like wheat or Arkansas corn, in some places breaking through when the guns jammed on their own heat, which meant it became a knife-and-shovel fight in the dark. You did things to them you didn’t want to remember but would never forget. That’s what the knife was for, but even Earl knew it was bullshit and so tragically wasteful, thought up by men far away. On the ground, it’s hard to hate a guy you’ve just sliced open from nipple to hip, but there wasn’t time to process it, as another one was on you in a second.

And the big wound. It was like being in the center of an explosion. You were blown out of your body, and when you came back to it you were wrecked. Legs, arms, all gone. A fog of fatigue that drew you into the sleep that was death. And when the shock lessened, the pain arrived, like someone corkscrewing into your chest on a lubrication of lava and gravel. You screamed, but no one heard you, there was so much noise, the sky filled with dust, smoke, blue streaks. And then a pair of eyes and then another. Two colored stretcher-bearers.

“Goin’ be fine, boss,” one said. “Me ’n’ Marcus git you on back now.”

And they did.

And when he woke in the aid station, the man next to him was Marcus, and Marcus was dead.

He awoke in the cold, vibrational dark of the B-17, chilled and yet thirsty. He’d awakened in many strange places; the Marines will do that for a man. It took him a second to get it organized, but then he had it, it was clear, and he knew that the fun was just beginning.

In an OD staff Ford, they drove through London, the newly uniformed major — after a stop at the Airborne logistics building at USAAF Station 486, previously RAF Greenham Common — and Leets in back. Silence. The city prowled by, its buildings, those that stood, old-time with ornamentation and fancifulness built into them. Far off, unnecessary barrage balloons floated at the ends of tethers, sandbags were built into walls everywhere to secure them against bombs that no longer fell, the traffic was sparse but the streets jammed. It seemed now a largely military city, as if the parade had ended and the men in uniforms, dozens of different ones, just milled about, looking for, as usual, liquor, women, and fights, in that order.

“Leets,” said Earl finally, “brief me on Colonel Bruce.”

“David K. E. Bruce. Two middle initials tell you something. Married to a Harriman. Wealthy. Connected. Charming, very social, which is his job. You will like him, as everybody does, but he’ll seem more civilian than military. Yale or Princeton, I think, then into politics so ‘getting along,’ ‘making allowances,’ ‘achieving compromises,’ not tommy guns, are his preference. Wants to do diplomacy after the war, I’ve heard, and this is a great first step. But don’t underestimate him. Smart as they come. Not a yeller or a martinet, not too comfortable with military etiquette. Has back-channel connections to the Roosevelt administration. Well-known in Washington. Knows wines, theater, literature. Reads both the New York and the London Timeses each day. Well-thought-of by Brits.”

“You know him well?”

“He visited me in the hospital after the bridge.”

“Good man. I like an officer who understands who does the bleeding in this shit. Is he Sebastian’s uncle? You related, Sebastian?”

Sebastian, the name of the driver, was a handsome kid who oozed privilege through every pore. A T/5 corporal, he had the kind of suave confidence that made Earl want to bust him in the mouth. He’d see if Sebastian could pass the Earl test. So far, not so good.

“Not by blood, sir. But his father and mine were at prep school—”

“That’s all I need to know, Sebastian,” said Swagger.

They pulled up to a building at last. It was dull, gray, nondescript, built sometime between Waterloo and the Somme, presumably by someone in a hurry, for it bore little ornamentation. No gargoyles, no inscriptions, no filigree, just your basic gray box, with a tiny bronze plaque by the double doors reading “70.” It was evidently designed by someone whose only tool was a T square, as it was mostly a pileup of right angles through all four stories to a flat roof. Nothing marked it as significant or vital to the war effort, or a supersecret spy lair.

“This part of Mayfair,” said Leets, “is kind of a little America. Down the street you’ll see the American embassy. The Connaught Hotel is near Grosvenor Square too; it’s bachelor officers’ quarters for our people. You’ll have a room there, as do I.”

They entered to find a foyer with a civilian at a desk and four sharp-dressed Army MPs in white helmets and leggings, with .45s holstered and carbines at the ready. Their IDs got them into a hall that led to the elevators, which in turn took them to a fourth floor — the big guy was always up top! — and down a hall notable for its dowdiness, decorated in a style that might be called the Faces of Old Men. Pictures of Roosevelt, Marshall, Ike, Bradley, other weathered pork chops with stars on their collars, plus a few framed exhortations to security and patriotism, nothing to suggest the mayhem that this building was said to unleash. Entry into the last office yielded a view of a young woman sitting behind the desk in the uniform of a WAC lieutenant, next to a typewriter and two telephones.

“Lieutenant Fenwick,” Leets said, “I’m here with Major Swagger to see the colonel.”

“I’ll notify him, Lieutenant,” she said, smiling.

Maybe it was the smile, which showed a set of brilliant white teeth; maybe it was the quiet precision of the makeup, applied by someone who knew of such things; maybe it was the size of the eyes or the luster of their expressiveness; maybe it was the symmetry of the face, the tautness of the noble cheekbones, the aquiline perfection of the nose — but she was definitely a cover girl waiting for the flash to pop. Or maybe an actress, with a face that was still flawless when blown up three hundred times on-screen.

He thought too that he picked up a little something between her and Leets. They both did a good job at pretending to perfunctory engagement, but Earl sensed it to be performance, not authenticity.

“Gentlemen, please go in,” she said.

Was this OSS or MGM? Another movie face. Bruce, mid-forties, looked like someone Earl had seen a few times twenty feet tall on a screen, but the name hadn’t stuck. Maybe Walter, maybe Phillip or Kenneth? Probably Walter. Blade of nose, silver-gray hair brilliantined back, face too tan and lineless, eyes too bright and lively, mustache too trim, like a brush. He was in shirtsleeves, tie tight and cinched in a precise Windsor knot, the khaki shirt tailored perfectly, fitting as if poured over his still-lithe body. Not a wattle or jiggle anywhere; you’d think he rode to hounds every morning. Behind him, a cityscape of London seen only by generals and German Heinkel pilots stretched across two windows, divided only by a corner. Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, Nelson on his column, the king in his castle, the view tourists used to pay Cunard hundreds for a gander at.

“Gentlemen, do come in,” the colonel said.

Both men fronted the desk, came to smartly, saluted. Colonel Bruce threw a loose wag back, then stood.

“So glad to see you, Major. Welcome to our little tea party. Leets, how’s the hip?”

“Sir, it’s fine.”

“I doubt that, but I admire your willingness to push on. Come, I don’t want this too formal, it’s too important for formality.” He gracefully shepherded them to a sofa and leather chairs arranged at a fireplace. On the mantel, photos not of old men in uniforms but of the dogs he must have once raised at his estate, wherever that was.

“Please, sit down. Coffee? Millie, get us some coffee, will you?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Vogue, July ’39, called in.

“Major,” the colonel asked, “thanks for pulling up stakes and getting here so quickly. How was the flight?”

Earl, face professionally stern, could not but yield to the colonel’s warmth and modesty in its package of upper-class American perfection.

“Sir, it was cold and bumpy… and long. But I got enough sleep. Ready to go to work.”

“Good man,” said the colonel. “How do you like being a major?”

“Feels pretty much the same as gunnery sergeant. I guess it’s legal.”

“You may not have noticed, but one of the signatures on the paper you signed was General Eisenhower’s. That makes it legal. That makes anything legal.”

“Hope to be of service, sir.”

“All right, let’s get to it. You don’t have time to waste and I don’t either. You may wonder why you’re here, in a building with the professors and code-breakers instead of at SHAEF HQ with soldiers. The reason, General Eisenhower decided and General Bradley concurred, is that SHAEF or Henderson Hall or the Ministry of Defense or the War Department — any military bureaucracy that considers itself important — is usually a nest of cliques, factions, plotters, coups, and countercoups. Politics. Everybody watches everybody and it’s a wonder anything gets done with all the watching. We don’t want you getting waylaid by any of that. You’ll work from here, and your contact with regular army will be through liaison. We don’t want you on the phone yelling at lieutenant colonels who won’t return your call unless they hear from their boss.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leets is a good man, knows the ropes. He’ll get you anything you need. If he can’t get it, my door is always open, as are several other doors in this building. Everyone behind those doors knows who to yell at. Every one of them gets his phone calls answered. Don’t hesitate to pull rank. That is what rank is for.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now. Major Swagger, let me introduce you to an unfamiliar phrase: the bullet garden.”

CHAPTER 5 The Bullet Garden

“Where are we?” asked Goldberg.

“In France, I think.”

“Jack, I’m the comedy writer. Where in France?”

“Not inside our own lines. Not inside German lines. Somewhere in between.”

“What do you see?”

Archer had taken his helmet off and kind of squished his head up through a tangle of vegetation so that he could view something other than the tangle of vegetation.

As much as they hated it, Privates Goldberg and Archer also loved this tangle of vegetation with its crest of dirt down the middle for a spine, its arboretum of interesting French flora twisted like barbed wire about everything, including their necks and faces, for it seemed to offer them some sort of camouflage from what they assumed were three thousand pairs of German binoculars searching for them.

“I see fences made out of this shit,” said Archer, meaning the veg. “I see meadows and clumps of trees. I see a line of trees that must be a road, though it would be sunken. I see what we’ve been seeing since this morning.”

“Any Tiger tanks?”

“No Tiger tanks. No Germans. But… no Americans either. No Shermans.”

It was about four in the afternoon. The sun had another three hours of work to do designating targets for snipers, and nothing could hurry it along.

“I say we wait for nightfall,” said Goldberg.

“We’ll get even more lost than we are now if we wait for nightfall. We’ll walk straight into a prisoner-of-war camp.”

“Maybe for you, Farmer Brown. For a Goldberg, it’s a bullet in the head.”

“I’m not a farmer; I’m an engineering student.”

“So engineer us a way home.”

The two had lain next to the fallen Sergeant Malfo for at least five minutes, frozen in terror and utterly incapable of movement. The only sounds they heard were the other patrol members as they hauled ass away from the site of the sergeant’s sudden death. What had become of them, neither of the privates knew nor particularly cared.

After a bit, when they realized the German airborne wasn’t about to parachute onto them, they got up and decided that it was time to vacate. Goldberg remembered his rifle, located the end that went up, and grasped it to his chest. He couldn’t remember if the safety was on, but he also couldn’t remember where the safety was. Meanwhile, Archer had been wise enough to snatch the dead sergeant’s map case, hoping it might offer them some kind of guidance. But what good is a map when you don’t know where you are?

They had wandered somewhere between abject fear and abject paranoia, with interesting flashes of panic, hysteria, and the urge for contrition, along hedges and across roads and through glades, keeping low, rifles at half-port, eyes opened like wide-screen lenses, encountering no signs of anything except cow life on earth, and when the sun reached its zenith they realized almost simultaneously that walking around in broad daylight in no-man’s-land was a good way to get killed. The nearest sanctuary appeared to be a seven-foot wall of bush into which, oblivious to thorn and scratch, they had pressed themselves. If invisibility was the goal, they had not achieved it, as the faded khaki of the beat-to-hell American M41 jackets stood out against the lusher garden green of whatever sort of growing stuff had more or less absorbed them. But the artifice might serve against casual observation.

“Try the map again.”

“I looked at the fucking thing a thousand times. It makes no sense to me. I see where we were, I see where we want to go, but I can’t figure where we are.”

“Orient it to something.”

“There’s nothing to orient it to. I don’t see buildings, roads, a village, a hill, a stream. Nothing.”

“What do you see?”

“This shit,” he said. “Everywhere.”

It was like a scene from a fairy tale, only set in hell. In its way, unlinked to the fact that it was full of men in Feldgrau who wanted to eat them for dinner, it could have been considered beautiful. That’s why they called it the bullet garden. Green and rolling, it was crosshatched by more of these brush fences that turned it into a maze. Stands of trees knotted it, dips occasionally swallowed it, small humps of hill offered themselves up, stone walls that came and went made it more confusing. The dominant feature was this hedgerow thing, a wall of thatched hawthorn roots, raspberry bushes, lupine, violets, and greasy mud that had become more formidable through the centuries. From a little altitude it made more sense, but inside it you were in a puzzle, cut off from any longer view. It only followed to move in the lee of the hedgerow, rather than in the lush green meadow. But that was slow going, confusing, and seemed to lead to nowhere.

“We have to find something to orient on,” said Goldberg, then added, “I can’t believe I actually used the word ‘orient’ in a sentence. Twice, even.”

“Why, it’s like you’re a soldier or something,” said Archer.

“So orient, please. And hold the soy.”

“That’s professional comedy?”

“Bob Hope’s people would have gobbled it up.”

“Yeah, Bob Hope,” said Archer, knowing his pal was no closer to Bob Hope than he himself was. But he squirmed, got the map out, wiggled, put on his glasses, took a few more peeks, and generally made like he knew what he was doing.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Here’s what I come up with. We do know that the sun moves from east to west. From that we can learn east, west, and, by elimination, north and south. We have to get west. Our lines are to the west, more or less. Theirs are to the east, more or less.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Actually, no. Because in war everything gets messed up and sometimes you end up attacking in the direction you came from.”

“You’re making my head hurt. Can’t we just take the subway?”

At that point Archer unloaded a solution to their problem, which involved reading the east — west transit of the sun as a kind of central feature, figuring north and south from that, and therefore proceeding south until it was time to turn west.

There seemed to be something about a river in there somewhere, and he finished with a flourish.

“At the point of the bend in the river, we stop going that way. We head due west. The sun is setting sort of ahead of us. In a couple of miles, we should hit this road”—he pointed again to the map—“and our lines are just beyond. Remember yesterday evening, we crossed a road just after we started out?”

“Not really. But I guess it’s okay.”

“Don’t forget your rifle.”

“Jack, I have the rifle, but the safety. It’s mysterious to me.”

“Front of trigger guard. If it’s pushed ‘OUT’ it’s off safe. Gun go bang. If it’s pushed in, no bang. Got it?”

“I really don’t belong in the infantry,” said Goldberg.

“Nobody does,” said Archer.

They disentangled themselves from the hedgerow. It was like escaping a giant, ill-tempered octopus. All tendrils and crawlers and thorns scratching at them, puncturing them, drawing blood, tears, and sweat. Prickly annoyances severed, they assumed the scuttle position, bent forward, ready to move on, all equipment… well, most, present and accounted for.

“I think I lost a couple of grenades,” said Goldberg, counting only the four of the six he’d been issued. They scared him, actually. He couldn’t actually imagine setting a bomb to ticking in his hand, then throwing it. Or rather, yes, he could imagine it; he just couldn’t imagine himself doing it.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Archer.

“Should I take my safety off?” he asked.

“No, because you’re more likely to fall than run into a Kraut. If you accidentally fire, we could run into a whole lot of Krauts.”

“Okay,” said Goldberg, quavery in both heart and voice, but game to do his best. It was The War, after all.

They scuttled. It was not fun. Walking standing up would not have been fun either but it would have been easier. Instead, in the artificially constructed caution posture, bent double, nine pounds of rifle at diagonal across chest, six (or four) pounds of grenades on belt, plus bayonet and canteen, rucksacks full of candy bars, cigarette packs, socks, and even underwear changes and condoms (you never knew), they advanced in short stutter steps, pausing every fifty or so yards for a look-see. Each lower back signaled displeasure at the situation, but if they’d gone to a medic, he would have said, “Take two aspirin. If that doesn’t work, tough shit,” and gone back to his paperback copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

They got to a juncture in hedgerows and, based on Archer’s sense of the sun’s direction toward the horizon, burrowed through. Also not fun. In the thorns, equipment snagged as they went over the crest, sliding down. But then, war isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s your job. It’s what you do.

In this manner they proceeded, sweat eventually blossoming on all the danker body areas but including the undank forehead, where it slid down into eyes, bringing blur and salt, causing squinting, sniffing, general discomfort. Insects, attracted to the smell of greasy man meat, seemed to swarm even as birds made bird sounds, vegetation ignored them, and the sun moved, if warily.

Finally they came to a road. Blunder across it? No, sir. Not that dumb. Instead, they sort of lay up next to it. It seemed to be in a kind of trough, garlanded on each side by heavier rows of shrubbery and tree, the limbs interlocking overhead until they formed a kind of green tunnel in each direction. It reminded Archer of an Orrington Avenue, on which he’d grown up, a million years ago.

He kind of slid down the bank, got to the road — packed dust and gravel — looked each way hard for a minute or so, detected no sign of human activity, and then made clicking sounds, their version of “secret code,” and Goldberg, much smaller and scrawnier, slid down the embankment. His helmet, not very tightly attached to his head, rolled around, threatened to pop off. He got it under control, gathered himself, adjusted his glasses.

“Let’s—”

At that moment, the Tiger tank cranked around the bend.

CHAPTER 6 Bocage

“The French word — actually it’s a Norman word,” said Colonel Bruce, “is bocage. Ancient by any standard. Won’t trouble you with etymology. Basically it describes a terrain featuring a checkerboard of pasture, woodland, brush, hill, hedgerow, farmer’s fields plowed or unplowed, lots of cows and bumblebees, all set across a rolling landscape, heavily riverine, verdant beyond imagination. The G.I.s call it ‘the bullet garden.’ ”

“It sounds like sniper territory,” said Swagger. “Not a place to go walking.”

“Not a place through which one advances an army. General Bradley’s First Army has run hard against it and is now and has been and will be stuck for a long, long time. Why? Mainly, snipers. Thoughts, Major?”

“The Germans have been there for months. They know the ranges, the hides, the get-outs and fallbacks, the elevations and their own ballistics. They’re all hard from Russia or Italy and won’t make a beginner’s mistake.”

“It gets worse. Some of them, the most terrifying and morale-shattering, work at night. Maybe it’s new technology, maybe it’s closer range shots, maybe it’s highly developed hearing capability which enables them to target our boys at night; we don’t know.”

“These night snipers. That’s why I’m here?”

“Yes, Major. We need someone with the brains to approach the problem from a new perspective. We need him to come up with a counter program and fast. The war has stalled. The British are hung up too, but not as bad as we are. Ike is frustrated and losing bargaining power with Montgomery, the President is embarrassed, and the press is harping.”

“Is there some kind of time limit, sir? What are the bigger parts in which this all fits?”

“We’ve got to break out. Something is planned, yes. We’d like a program in place and operating before then. No dates, no operation names, but I think the last week in July, a month off. So there’s a lot of SHAEF pressure to produce. If you can shut down the night snipers, you will have made a major contribution. What are your needs?”

“First off, I want all technical ordnance intelligence on German sniper training, German sniper equipment, especially ballistics, German sniper tendencies in other theaters, particularly Russia, if possible.”

“Millie, you’re getting that?”

“Yes, Colonel,” came an amplified voice.

“She’s on intercom. She’s taking dictation. Not too many Smith graduates do shorthand, but Millie’s a whiz.”

Swagger shot a look at the inert Leets, who was himself scrawling notes in a notebook. Nothing showed on his face, but his ears burned red, out of some significant emotional reaction. Swagger noted it.

“Go on, Major.”

“Next I want our POW reports to see if we’ve taken any snipers alive. If so, I’ll go to the camp and interrogate them. SS and regular army.”

“I have to say, for whatever reason, you won’t be finding too many sniper POWs.”

“Most important, though, I want carefully culled casualty reports on entire First Army engagements since hitting this bullet garden. The culling should be along these lines: on all men killed by single rifle shots to upper body and head. Multiple wounds indicate firefight, meaning machine guns, grenades, artillery. The single-shot deaths may or may not prove sniper but it reduces the number considerably. I want time, date, and, if possible, circumstances. I want to calculate attrition rates by single rifle shot across the front. Not just at night. I have to figure out how that effort fits into the overall sniper campaign. We need to understand where are they most active, where the least. Does it shift? Do the night shooters move from sector to sector and, if so, how?”

Leets scrawled.

“That will take time and manpower,” said Colonel Bruce. “But General Eisenhower’s name on the order should prove helpful. Nice to have a four-star general backing you up.”

“Sure is,” said Swagger. “At a certain point, when we’ve broken the dope down far enough, Leets and I will head to the front and find survivors. We need to know exactly how the killing occurred and look for signs. Ejected shells, boot prints, shooting platforms improvised into trees and buildings. All of that is valuable. What do they shoot? Standard infantry rifle with a scope screwed on or a hand-built marksman’s weapon tinkered over for maximum accuracy at long range and nothing else? What does such a weapon allow them to do? When do they shoot? What was the wind, the weather? Most importantly, is this new technology? Do they have some vision-enhancing technology we know nothing about?

“Then target selection. What is their preferred target? We have to know not only who they’re hitting but who they’re not hitting. Why A and not B? That’ll tell us a lot.”

“Excellent, Major. You’re in Room 351. Large, used to be headquarters of an insurance company. Plenty of room for maps. Plenty of room for crates of documents. Leets will be your majordomo and can get you anything you need, top priority. He has all the phone numbers. Maybe every Friday at 0900 you’ll come up for a report? I may drop in once in a while, as will some of my staff or some cleared people from SHAEF. But you’ll always be alerted before. In your office, it is to be understood, military etiquette is secondary to efficiency and results. You build the culture you want. Saluting or no saluting. First names, last names, rank, whatever. Nobody cares if you do or don’t say ‘sir’ all the time. If you need me, call Millie and no matter where I am, she’ll get in touch and I’ll get back to you fast as humanly possible. Is that all square with you?”

“Completely, sir.”

“Great, Major Swagger. Glad to have you aboard. One more thing, if I may.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you like parties?”

CHAPTER 7 Machine

In the industrial manufacture of death, no machine’s design expressed its destiny more perfectly than PzKpfw VI Ausf. E. Thus, it haunted every GI’s nightmares, it frightened every officer’s deep reptile brain, it drove tactical planners bats, and it dominated the battle imagination of the western armies beyond comprehension.

Airplanes were more lethal, but they were specks in the sky. Artillery was more violent, tearing men from limb to limb, but it was far off and arrived silently, like a curse from God. Machine guns killed faster, especially when fields of fire were carefully interlocked, but good management of counter-fire and maneuver and mortar implementation could deter their impact. Barbed wire was not the dragon’s teeth it had been in War One because the front was so mobile, changing, evolving or devolving, going liquid here and turning to stone there every day, sometimes every hour.

But the fucking Tiger! PzKpfw VI Ausf. E, PzKpfw VI Ausf. E, burning bright, / In the forest of the night… It laughed at the doctrine of streamline. It mocked irony, introspection, poetry, and whimsy. It scoffed at heroics, it crushed nobility, it shattered aesthetics, it shit on honor. It vanquished all that came before it, particularly any tanks that presumptively dared to stand against it. It whacked the Russian T-34s into atomic particles. Ask about Kursk. It turned Shermans and Cromwells into bonfires of the apocalypse, filling the atmosphere with the debris of burning metal and flesh.

Archer and Goldberg tried to melt into the ground as this rough beast approached. They were off the road, half shrouded in the weeds and flowers of France, sweating and pissing and issuing the gas of panic while their mouths filled with gray sand, their limbs went all spastic elastic, and their brains emptied of everything except regret for all the evil things they had done. Archer had once cheated on a math test because he was not going to let Jean Silverstein beat him out as valedictorian at Evanston High in 1942. As for Goldberg, he remembered a joke he’d stolen from Marty Greene and sold to Fred Allen for $5. Actually, he’d stolen two or three from Marty. Well, okay, it was four or five, maybe even six or seven. Marty was funny, but he was shy and his stuff would have died if Gary hadn’t moved it along the chain. He had a brief image of apologizing to Marty, of the two of them going to Hollywood and becoming a comedy writing team, of Beverly Hills, the pink and black future of Cadillacs and dumb blondes with big melons and the company of other funny, sharp, clever Jewish boys like themselves. That is, if the Tiger didn’t kill them.

Though of different faiths that were practiced in different languages, their prayers were identical, almost to the syllable.

PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod!

It didn’t match the formal elegance of either Old or New Testament, but it was all they could come up with at the moment as they lay fetid and craven in the vibrational zone of the thing, fifty-six tons on the hoof smashing remorselessly toward them, followed, they now saw, by a loose gaggle of Panzergrenadiers.

The machine — each caught a glimpse as they went hard to and into earth and tried to become one with the soil itself — was perhaps the single most masculine object in the world. It had no feminine curve, no whispers of softness, anywhere about its being. It was primarily that most male of constructs, the box, or rather several of them, all Krupp steel, arranged as if by a child on a carpet, held together by the blue purity of a welder’s torch, then mounted on the biggest caterpillar treads in the world, about a yard wide, which in turn encompassed nine, count ’em, nine steel wheels staggered in precise density, giving traction at the insistence of the mighty engine capable of moving the whole construct virtually anywhere it wanted to go or through anything it wanted to go through. Here the word through meant penetration, violation, disruption: no house, no building, no wall — nothing erected by man — could resist its moods or whims.

It bristled with guns, most notably the famous 88mm cannon with a telescopic barrel, the most feared ground weapon of the war, which, so far, could outshoot any other tanks on either side. It quite routinely turned blots on the horizon into volcanos of melting steel and men. To see the length of the thing was to know that in far-off lands engineers toiled into the night, trying to figure out how to get something as big as an 88 on one of their own brazen chariots. Maybe it would happen — but it hadn’t happened yet. A machine-gun snout protruded from the shelves of steel lower down, and up top, next to Herr Kommandant, another gun was at rest, ammunition belt dangling insouciantly from the breech.

Still, this particular panzer, as mighty a war dinosaur as it might be, sounded discordant notes. For one thing, the sloped castle keep of the turret was turned backwards as if in the reflective mode, not the predatory mode, contemplating where it had been (Russia?), not where it was headed (death?), and the cannon was itself depressed. Herr Kommandant, enthroned within the turret but seated so that his upper half was free to enjoy the health-giving benefits of German nudism, was a strange fellow, far from the black-coated, monocled Raymond Massey type of Desperate Journey. Instead, he wore a beard and thick torrents of blond hair pushed back and had hung sunglasses on his broad, rather handsome face. He had a scarf wrapped around his neck. But he had no shirt on. He was smiling. He was happy. He was exactly what the Germans were not supposed to produce, an individual, freeborn and ecstatic to be so. He had no interest in the MG-42 on a steel pedestal next to him. Moreover, two other hatless German heads peeped out of the hatches forward, beneath the turret, and they too were pleased to be taking a day off.

Archer, who had come to rest with his head tilted to the right, saw all this as he saw the number 503 in heavy gothic script on the flank of the turret. Meanwhile the heavy infantry boys in support seemed themselves on some kind of lark. No marching here. Helmets off and strapped to belts, just Feldgrau cloth caps, those who wore them, nearly everyone smoking either pipe or cigarette, weapons slung haphazardly about the torso for comfort, not for fast action. If one of them was an officer or a sergeant, he didn’t declare himself by uniform or disposition.

The noise of the heavy engine, the dust that even at cruising speed the tracks ripped from the fragile road, the buzz as the earth yielded to the mandates of the 700-horsepower grinder — it all reached such a crescendo that Archer could no longer take it. He put his face down, closed his eyes, and waited for a bullet to the head.

So too with Goldberg. His nerves almost gave out, but heroism didn’t demand fine motor skills, only paralysis, at which he was a high master. He didn’t see a thing.

CHAPTER 8 Are We Having Fun Yet?

“Parties?” said Swagger. He had to admit, he hadn’t seen that one coming.

“Yes, Major, parties.”

“No, sir. Not at all.”

“That’s the best news I’ve had so far. By the way, what would your definition of a great party be, just so I know for the future.”

“Two guests, sir. Me and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s No. 7.”

“Now, that’s a party I’d attend. Can you get me on the invitation list? I’d imagine it’s pretty exclusive.”

“So far, sir. But on V-E Day you’re invited.”

“Great. Major, I ask because… well, maybe you’ve heard the joke. If not, you will. OSS is sometimes nicknamed ‘Oh So Social.’ That’s because the need for foreign-language skills and advanced analytical skills, plus a gift for conspiracy, deceit, and cold-blooded violence, seems to usually suggest the wellborn. They have too much time on their hands and love the thrill of the abyss.”

“Yes, sir,” said Swagger. It accorded with his sense of the world and he was not unimpressed by Colonel Bruce’s acknowledgment of what was abundantly clear to anyone with a brain.

“These people are very bright, all of them. But when you put a lot of very bright people in one building, they almost always and almost instantly become involved in competition. And one of the things they squabble about endlessly is who gets invited to which party.”

“I see, sir. Probably the same at Marine HQ in Washington.”

“So I’m sent here to get along with the British and wage war on the Third Reich but I spend my days monitoring party invitation lists. Is this any way to fight a war? Well, you’d be surprised. A lot of business does get done. Some major initiatives only exist because two chaps shared a cocktail at Lady Diane’s. So I suppose they are necessary. At the same time, human nature, alas, is eternally human nature, whether in wartime London, Berlin, Tokyo, or Washington. God, the wasted energy, the stupidity, the nonsense, the sheer folly. That’s why I’d never write a book. Nobody would believe it.”

“I understand, sir. I have no intention of going to any parties whatsoever and don’t give a damn who does or doesn’t. I intend to keep Leets over there so busy, he won’t go to parties either. Right, Leets?”

“Yes, sir,” said Leets.

“Very good news. I don’t have to worry about getting you on the party list.”

CHAPTER 9 Yes, They Have Some Bananas

The noise grew and grew and then it shrank and shrank. Finally, it was gone. Archer lifted his eyes and saw only a settling shroud of dust illuminated in late shafts of sun randomly sneaking through the canopy.

“Gary? Did you die?”

“Twice.”

“Me too.”

“I wet myself. Don’t tell the guys.”

“I won’t if you won’t.”

“Deal. Man, did you see that thing? It was a dinosaur. It was a Tyrannosaurus rex. If it decides to eat you, it eats you. I feel like an hors d’oeuvre.”

“I’d hate to be where it’s going. When they buckle down for the game, they’d be hard to stop.”

In his exhaustion and still febrile terror, Goldberg reverted to his native language: “Ets-lay et-gay the uck-fay out of ere-hay.”

“Ammed-day ight-ray,” said Archer.

Behind them, somebody said, “Ello-hay, oys-bay.”

It was a German. With a big black gun.

CHAPTER 10 Paper Deaths

It took a while for the anonymous clerks of SHAEF to cull the necessary death reports from the casualty lists, and in the intervening time Swagger tried to make himself an authority on the German sniper.

What he learned was slightly surprising. The first was that, as a phenomenon, sniper war wasn’t terribly interesting to Western intelligence. Therefore, no one had devoted intense scrutiny to it, and it was covered merely as an afterthought. As Earl sifted through the reports, he noted a curious lack of urgency, clearly reflecting a lower priority. Most reports were based on published secondary reports from German propaganda magazines, not secret-sourced documents as examined and translated cursorily by the British. Only the sudden and unanticipated success of the bocage catastrophe got their heads turned in the right direction at the expense of far too many G.I. lives, and Earl realized that his was the first direct, high-importance focus on the issue. But this indifference had its own parallel in the Germans themselves.

Though they, like all the major powers, had run a highly successful sniping program in the Great War, they had more or less abandoned it as they geared up for what became The War. This was because they had been so entranced with lightning warfare — blitzkrieg — and the development of armored and ground troop coordination, with Stukas thrown in for laughs, that they had bypassed the sniper, who was after all an exemplar of stationary warfare as fought in trenches.

For a long time, as they blitzed across Europe and halfway across Russia, that bias held. But the Russians, once they put a stop to German advances and hung them up in cities like Leningrad and Stalingrad, retaught them the forgotten lessons: a man with a rifle and a scope could do severe damage to not only his targets but to all those standing near his targets and all those hearing from those who’d been standing near his targets.

Thus the Krauts got into The War sniper game late, which explained their lack of development. These fellows almost always fired the standard 8mm Mauser K98k but with a bewildering complexity of telescopic sights and mounts, most from the commercial sources, or so the authorities of army ordnance claimed. As they tried to come up with doctrine, they fumbled.

Their initial foray into an official weapon was coded Zf. 41 and it had a little long eye-relief 2x sight mounted halfway down the barrel where it seemed like a toy and had to be more appropriate for hitting squirrels than men, as the image would have been tiny to eyes twenty inches from the lenses. Moreover, its lens was so narrow—20mm — that its light transmission capabilities would be minimalized. It would be useless in stormy weather, dawn or twilight, deep forest, or even the shadows of ruined cities. What was the point?

Realizing this and dumping the program, they had commercial scopes from manufacturers like Ajack, Hensoldt, Zeiss, and J. W. Fecker, in a multiplicity of powers (2 to 10) and diameters, and a multiplicity of “graticules,” as they called reticles, ranging from cross-hairs with different thicknesses to the hairs, post and line sometimes touching, sometimes not, and even target dots. Such a disparity of elements meant that it was up to each shooter to master his optics, as there could be no consistent doctrine.

What a mess!

Whoever was hunting the bocage was doing much better.

But who was that?

CHAPTER 11 Kurt

The German, who was in a T-shirt, seemed quite casual, except for the rifle with its curved stock and Amazing Stories ray gun look.

“The look on your faces when you saw this gun!” he said, delighted. “Man, that was something I’d like to have a photo of. Scared shitless? You were beyond shitless!”

Neither hero could think of a thing to say. Archer was silent. Goldberg gibbered like a fool.

“Okay,” said the German, “let’s go. Taking you to see Kurt. He’ll figure out what to do.”

“How do— What’s with— I mean, why—” blurted Archer, his curiosity overwhelming the danger.

“The English? Man, I grew up in L.A. Five years. My dad was a cinematographer at RKO. Hope to get back there when this shit is over. Come on, let’s go. We’ll miss lunch.”

The soldier led them down the middle of the road, hands up, to a bend, where they discovered the Tiger had halted and its crew and the soldiers had taken a break in the lee of a particularly high spurt of hedgerow under a cluster of shade trees, where they’d be spared the sun and the predation by Thunderbolt. The machine itself was still mighty and gigantic, bigger than any tank either G.I. had ever seen, dappled in the colors of the woods.

But the men attending Die Maschine hardly looked like avatars of blitzkrieg; instead, the get-together resembled a fraternity party: a lot of laughter and horseplay, maybe some girlfriend teasing or football chatter, some letter writing, some pipe smoking, some catching up on naptime. One played the harmonica, not “Lili Marleen” but jumpy licks from Benny Goodman.

The boss was the bare-chested, bearded sergeant sitting atop the fender of his vehicle as a fullback sits on the bench after his fifth touchdown that afternoon. Most of the pack was gathered around him, in fear, fealty, or admiration; who could tell?

He looked at them. He began with a critical strategic question.

“Have a banana?”

He was, indeed, himself having a banana. He did, indeed, have a bunch of bananas next to him, slightly greenish at either end. He handed it over, and both G.I.s took one. What were they supposed to do? Turn down a banana from a German?

He smiled at them. If they expected torture or at least a brutal grilling, it did not arrive. Instead, the German tanker said, “I’m Kurt.” Then he spoke rapidly to the guy who’d captured them, who no longer held the rifle on them.

“Kurt wants to know if you’re snipers.”

“No, sir,” said Archer.

“Good,” said the first German. “Kurt hates snipers. Go ahead, eat your bananas.”

Again, Archer and Goldberg flashed What-fresh-hell-is-this? looks, and then tore into the fruit. Actually, it was pretty good, if a little chewy. All that fiber. Good for the stool, good for the spirit.

“Good, yes?” asked Kurt.

“Yeah, I’ll say,” said Gary, a little overanxious to please.

Kurt spoke again to his translator. Was it German? Hmm, maybe yes, maybe no — after all, what did Archer or Goldberg know? — but it somehow didn’t sound like Raymond Massey in Desperate Journey. The translator said, “He wants to know what you’re doing out here so far beyond your own lines. You don’t look like commandos or paratroopers or saboteurs.”

Goldberg and Archer stumbled all over themselves. The message, though garbled, was something like “On patrol… sergeant killed… lost… wandering… no idea where our lines are.”

Kurt listened to the explanation, then asked a question.

“Do you hunt tanks?”

“No, we run from tanks,” said Goldberg.

“No, no,” said Archer. “We were just on night patrol. We got lost.”

“How many Germans have you killed?”

“Sir, none. I haven’t even fired my rifle in combat. So far the war has been hiding and shitting in holes, usually the same one.”

Kurt considered carefully.

“What should I do with you now? Do you want to join the German army?”

The two were dumbfounded, but the laughter suggested Kurt was joking.

Then he said, “I suppose I should turn you over to the SS…”

“V latrine nehmoli najet havno,” someone more or less said, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

That set off a little explosion of bon mots, one liners and hoots about nejdzniki, whatever that was, all of it lost on the G.I.s.

“This guy is pretty funny,” Archer muttered to Goldberg. “Maybe he could give you some material for Bob.”

“I think we’d be a disappointment,” said Goldberg to Kurt. “I’m a comedy writer for radio—”

“Hardly,” said Archer.

“—and he’s studying to be a farmer.”

“Farming is good!” said Kurt. “Myself, I built automobiles. That too was good. Farming, autos, both for the people. And… what is ‘comedy writer’?” The translator was now up to speed on the rhythms, and the words reached the guys almost simultaneously with the expression, though the syntax was sufficiently fractured to give it that Hollywood convention of foreignness.

“When people say funny things on the radio. It’s not spontaneous,” said Goldberg. “It’s all written down. I’m the one who writes it. I’m the funny one.”

“Theoretically,” said Archer.

“Do you know Bob Hope?” asked the translator on his own.

“I know his people. You don’t get to meet the star.”

“No comedy on German radio,” said Kurt. “They just yell at you.”

“I hate that,” said Goldberg.

“Okay, boys,” said Kurt. “I guess not kill you. I no like killing people. Oh, so much killing I’ve seen! I could tell you but it make you cry. I don’t mind blowing up tanks that are trying to blow up me and crew — machine against machine — but shooting actual people quite revolting. This is why Nazis hate me. They like killing people.”

The two G.I.s nodded dumbly. Neither could think of a thing to say. Even professional quipster Goldberg came up dry.

“You promise me you won’t kill Germans. Just hide in hole and shit and think up jokes. You, taller one, you think of corn.”

“Yes,” said Archer. “Definitely. Corn all the way.”

“Go on, get out of here. Leave rifles and grenades—”

“They already left their rifles behind,” said the translator.

“Well, take their grenades. Throw them in the pond. I don’t want them near machine. And bayonets. Then send them on their way.”

He turned back to them.

“Do you know way?”

“Uh, not really.”

“Go west. Toward setting sun. Stay close to hedgerows. Hack through with those little shovels. Be careful of middle of the fields. Travel at night, but later, after sun has set, then quit when sun is about to rise.”

That’s when the translator quit, seeing his duty finished, but Kurt added, “Davjte pozor na nejdzniki.”

Nejdzniki again.

CHAPTER 12 Ammo

The ammo was the key, Earl realized.

The 8mm was not what he would have chosen as a sniper round, producing too much kick and, by reputation, too much muzzle flash and standard, but not notably effective, accuracy. Pretty much like the .30 of Garand and Springfield provenance. Could the 8mm be tamed by specialist ammunition? Possibly, but if they don’t take the trouble to standardize the scope, it seemed unlikely that they’d go to the trouble to produce a specialized sniper round. And in fact their first sniper hero, an SS officer named Repp at an engagement called the Demyansk Encirclement in 1942, had used a Mannlicher sporting rifle, if the propaganda photos of him were to be believed.

Perhaps it was merely a reflection of intelligence analyst lack of interest in the topic, but if a special sniper-grade cartridge had been designed and issued since Repp’s 122 kills in a single engagement, no reports of it had yet reached Allied intelligence.

At any rate, once the Germans rediscovered the power of organized sniping after Repp’s feat, by late 1943 they went at the process headfirst. They finally settled on a rifle and a scope, this one called Zf. 39, a K98f Mauser with a turret scope by Hensoldt. The schools, or so propaganda indicated, were numerous and rigorous, the biggest being at Vilnius in Lithuania. That establishment, by location, would provide shooters primarily against the ever-advancing Soviets; others were spread throughout the Reich, including the Motherland and its little brother, Austria. Perhaps those schools were sending their newly trained heroes to the bocage and maybe a couple of visits from the Eighth Air Force could shut them down and kill the future killers.

However, assuming the reports from the bocage were reliable and not overexaggerated (yet to be determined), the shooters in this part of France appeared, most of them, too salty to be recruits just graduated from a school. Maybe they were seasoned vets of Russia, with a batch of red kills to their credit. But it wasn’t as if the snipers weren’t desperately needed in Russia either, so Swagger doubted the Germans would pull their most productive soldiers out of the more urgent Russian battlefront and send them to Normandy. If that assumption held, the question would then still be: Where are they getting these guys? Who are they? Is it little Hans, the champion of the Frankfurt junior shooting club, all grown up? Or someone else from somewhere else?

CHAPTER 13 503

Hard to believe, but they were there.

Nobody had shot them. Nobody had thrown a potato masher grenade down their pants. It had been a long, stoop-shouldered, dash-and-squat progress across rural France, amid loveliness too beautiful to describe, but they were too anxious to have noticed.

Now they were collapsed in fatigue just a few yards from the actual beginning of American territory. They were a mess: drenched from stream crossings, bleeding from thorns, exhausted from the frequent long, long, low crawls across the pastures, and basically into hour 40 of sleeplessness.

Archer could make out sandbagged revetments and what he took to be the barrel of a .30 air-cooled in a gun notch. Shapes clustered behind, but butts, ever-present in all armies in the world, glowed in the dark. The odor of the tobacco was definitely American. After all, LS/MFT.

“We made it,” he said to Goldberg.

“We just have to get through this part without getting shot to ribbons,” said Goldberg.

“We’ll take it real slow. No sudden moves, no shouts, nothing to get the boys riled.”

“Got it.”

“But, Gary—”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Always a bad sign.”

“No, listen. When we tell them about the last couple of days, maybe we ought to skip the Kurt-and-the-bananas part.”

This had never occurred to Gary. When he hadn’t been fantasizing about his own death, he’d been trying to imagine a radio skit built around a “funny” German who kept saying “Have a banana.” He knew it was good stuff, but he just couldn’t get the right angle on it. If Bob says, “Hands up, Schweinehund!” maybe Bing comes back with “Have a banana!” No, there was a beat missing. It needed another wrinkle, a complication. Maybe the response would be, “Hmm, pie or split?”

“Why?” he asked.

“You can’t outguess these officers. You don’t know how they’ll take stuff. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Well, why didn’t you grab your grenades and pull the pins and kill everybody, yourselves included?’ ”

“What, and ruin a perfectly good pair of pants!”

“I think that’s our job out here. And we didn’t do it. Instead, we had bananas with a batch of oddball Nazis, including a guy in a T-shirt from L.A. and a bearded nudist, and went our merry way.”

“What I want to know is, where did they get the bananas?”

“I would say Germans are supermen, they can get anything they want. I mean, if you can build a Tiger tank, you can get a banana.”

“So ix-nay on the bananas. And the whole Erman-Jay thing.”

“Right. We saw the tank and the soldiers. Then we lay there another hour. Then we took off.”

“The rifles?”

“We left ’em in panic when Malfo got his brains blown out.”

“The grenades?”

“We never had grenades. They scare us.”

“They do, but we’re supposed to have grenades.”

“So they can yell at us. They can put us on KP or send us to Graves Registration. But they won’t put us in front of a firing squad.”

“Americans coming in!” Archer called.

“Sign?”

Archer turned to Goldberg.

“Do you remember the sign?”

“Yeah, but it was a patrol sign. But that was yesterday. They’ve probably changed it anyway.”

They were closer now. They crouched behind a tree and the sandbags were just a few yards away. The .30-caliber air-cooled barrel sticking out of it seemed to rotate toward them, or was that imagination? Now just this last little—

The machine-gun burst ripped up a hurricane of dust and twigs and other frags, the noise crashing, the flash blinding. It stitched its welcome into two feet of earth to their immediate right.

“JESUS CHRIST!” screamed Goldberg. “We’re Americans!”

“Sign, god dammit!”

“Brooklyn,” said Goldberg.

This time the machine-gun burst cut into trees, shredding them, spewing supersonic nuggets of bark everywhere.

“That was yesterday’s sign!” the gunner called.

“We left yesterday,” said Archer. “On patrol. Sergeant Malfo got hit by a sniper. I don’t know where the rest of the guys are. We’ve been wandering around in the bullet garden all day.”

“What unit?” came another voice.

“Ninth Division, 60th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, Dog Company, 2nd Platoon, 2nd Squad.”

They could hear mumbling, maybe some arguing.

“Okay, come in slowly, rifles in both hands overhead. This gun is on you the whole way.”

“We lost our rifles.”

“Great,” somebody who had to be a sergeant said.

They scrambled over the revetment to find themselves poked, prodded, examined by hobos who were actually other American infantrymen.

“You almost killed us,” Goldberg said.

“I was trying to kill you,” said the machine gunner. “That’s my job.”

“You’re sure it said ‘503’?” Major Bingham asked Archer.

“I am, sir. Absolutely.”

They were running on the fumes of the fumes, in waking hour 45 or so. This interrogation was occurring in the 3rd Battalion G-2 tent adjacent to battalion headquarters, about a mile back from the front, a dreary village of rotting, sagging canvas and unstuck pegs — too much wet in the earth to hold — in a debriefing that surprised both privates for its detail and intensity. Even Goldberg wasn’t going for laughs anymore after his “I felt like an hors d’oeuvre” line got no smiles from the inquisitor.

“So let’s go over this one more time,” Bingham said, “because I want to be dead accurate before I forward to Nutmeg under a flag.”

“Yes, sir,” said Archer, who knew that Nutmeg was Regiment.

“Start with the map again.”

What was with this guy? He looked like an English teacher and carried on like a homicide detective. His rimless glasses gave him the face of a Hawthorne expert. But it was no Scarlet Letter, it was the Scarlet Map!

Archer had told them over and over again he had no idea where they’d been, as they’d fled pretty much blindly through the night after the death of Sergeant Malfo. The map was at this time pointless.

“I can locate the site where we laid up near the German lines, sir. But after that, I have no idea where we went, which direction. Just away, you know? I mean, the guy had his head destroyed.”

“He looked like a dead balloon,” said Goldberg.

“And then Gary started to sneeze. I mean it was a ridicu—”

“How much time passed before you evacuated?”

“Seemed like an hour. Gary?”

“Seemed like ten hours. I got him all over me. Plus, I’m suddenly ka-chewing like an old man in a snowstorm. Maybe I’m allergic to death.”

“So five minutes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any sense of initial direction?”

“None, sir.”

The intelligence officer sighed heavily, as if all of Job’s woe had descended upon him. Or his show had closed in Boston. He took a pack of Camels out of his tanker jacket, lit one up, then offered smokes to the two privates.

“Go on,” he said.

“Do you want me to skip to the tank part? It’s just walking until then.”

“Yes.”

So Archer went through it again, the dive into the gully, the rumble in the earth as the giant war machine clanked by, the odd casualness of the Germans, especially the shirtless tank commander in the turret with the sunglasses. Nothing about bananas for lunch with the boys in gray.

“You’re sure it was a Tiger?” for about the tenth time.

“Yes, sir.”

“It wasn’t a Panther? They have similar profiles.”

“No, sir. I’ve seen a lot of dead Panthers outside Cherbourg. I’ve never seen a Tiger before. Big as a whale. This was a Tiger.”

“It couldn’t have been 508? ‘8’ and ‘3’ are easy to confuse, especially under pressure and if only seen for a second.”

“It was 503,” said Archer.

“Goldberg, you concur?”

“Sir, I was trying to insert myself into an ant hole at the time.” No laugh. What an audience! The show deserved to close in Boston!

“Okay, I want you each to write a detailed narrative of the patrol. Not just the tank. Everything.”

“The sneezing?”

“The sneezing. Everything. Get busy now, get some coffee if you need it to keep going. But I want this getting to Division ASAP.”

“Sir, may I ask? Why is ‘503’ so significant?”

“It sounds like elements of 12th Panzer are infiltrating north. They’ve broken down into individual tanks so as not to attract air strikes. The ‘503’ would indicate one of their most illustrious units, Abieltung 503, that is 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion. These guys are the best tankers in the world. They ate T-34s for breakfast in Russia. Twelve-to-one kill ratio. But it looks like they’re trying to slip through the bocage without incident to get to the Brits and a landscape where their superiority can come into play. The Brits have to be alerted that the big bad wolf is at the door.”

“Yes, sir,” said Archer.

“You two boobs may have actually made a significant contribution to the war effort,” said Major Bingham. “Good work.”

“Thank you, sir,” they said, each feeling maybe a little guilt in holding back on the banana affair. But still, it was the first compliment either had gotten in their own private war against Hitler.

CHAPTER 14 The Boy

Swagger had turned Leets into an errand boy by sending him off with Lieutenant Fenwick to round up office supplies: index cards, hundreds of pins, RAF Biro pens that applied ink via a tiny ball without smudge, in the dozens. Also, there had to be a maps office, so that was on the route too, as Swagger demanded maps in duplicate of the bocage areas of France, in all scales, from the whole VII Corps front down to individual village districts with their streams and gullies and winding cow paths diagramed. He saw what was coming as a map hunt before it became a sniper hunt.

That done, he went to Room 351, unlocked it to find a surprisingly large space with corner windows to admit the light, though no particularly impressive views of London. The ancient city, outside the T square of windows of 351, was just a grim stretch of low, indistinct buildings and trees, lacking anything of ceremonial or historical note. It could have been Fort Wayne. No one had even bothered to float barrage balloons in this sector. Nothing to protect.

Worktables had been provided and folding chairs. He noted a smallish office defined by a glass wall in the far corner that would become his own, he knew. He also found his driver and go-for T/5 Sebastian, sitting there, trying to look useful.

Sebastian snapped to but knew you didn’t salute indoors, uncovered.

“As you were.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sebastian, is that the name?”

“Yes, sir,” said the young man, who had one of those beautiful faces that belonged on a vase or a wall — and not a post office wall. His uniform, Earl noted, was superbly fitted, the Ike jacket lustrous and freshly pressed, the two T/5 stripes immaculately placed, as were the small collection of meaningless ribbons. No CIB, no wound stripes, no decorations for anything except attendance. His brown oxfords glowed, achieving a luster unobtainable on government leather.

“Okay, Corporal, we need a little talk here, alone, get some things ironed out.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sebastian.

“As I see it, you’ve got the best job in The War. No real responsibilities when kids your age are leading hundreds of bombers against German cities in broad daylight or taking patrols into triple-canopy jungle. No danger anywhere in your life except if you look the wrong way crossing the street and get hit by a cab. Three hots, a cot, probably an actual bed. I’m guessing there’s a pretty jazzy social life in this city every night and you’re a big part of it.”

“I can’t deny it, sir.”

“I don’t want to know the family details, but yours is fancy, and strings were pulled and that’s why you’re here instead of a shithole outside Saint-Lô. Harvard, right?”

“Yes, sir. Like my father and his father and—”

“In the islands, I buried plenty of Harvard boys. Guts shot out, heads blown off, chopped to ribbons by Jap bayonets. Just last week I was addressing a battalion of young riflemen about to head to the Pacific. I asked how many Harvard boys were there. There were fourteen. They thought it was everybody’s war, despite family and brains that might keep them out of the explosion circus.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You seem to think the explosion circus is for other people. Your sort doesn’t do dirty work.”

“It’s not that; it’s only—”

The boy did look abashed. He swallowed dryly. This was probably his most uncomfortable exchange in the military. He had run out of words.

“Just on general principle,” said Earl, “I’m about this far from shipping you out to the 1st Ranger Battalion. You can spend the rest of the war hanging off a cliff in subzero temperatures while being shot at by Krauts. How does that sound?”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

“I’ll bet you are. So you have one minute to explain to me why I should keep you around. What can you do? What can you bring me to keep you off that cliff? Make it quick.”

“I can explain stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“This stuff, sir. Everything, really. Professors would call it Realpolitik, meaning how it really operates and who’s really powerful, not what the charts or newspaper stories say.”

“Realpolitik? German word, huh?”

“They’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. They were onto something with this concept. I’m talking about things Lieutenant Leets doesn’t know. He’s a hero; he sort of floats above it all. Very decent man, brave, loyal, earnest, hardworking. But he still thinks the Germans are the enemy. He’s exactly the sort who will get destroyed in this place, not see it coming, not know why it came. He doesn’t know the building is the enemy. Before you can defeat the Germans, you have to defeat 70 Grosvenor. I’ve been here since ’42. I know everything, and that’s intelligence you can use.”

“Go on.”

“I know who’s red and who’s FBI tracking red. I know who’s secretly sleeping together. I know who’s a homo. I know who’s kind of weird. I know who’s affronted by everything. I know who hates who and why. I know who’s smarter than he seems and who’s dumber than he seems. I know who works and who loafs.”

“What’s the first name?”

“Edwin. Edwin Gaines Sebastian. Ed.”

“Suppose you give me some particulars, Edwin.”

“You and Leets don’t know that before you even start, you’ve got an enemy sworn to destroy you. I can name names. Major Frank Tyne in Operations. Why? Because of Operation Millie, his true objective in the war.”

“Meaning?”

“He is in love with Lieutenant Fenwick.”

“Who wouldn’t be? She’s a beautiful gal.”

“But it’s more than that. She’s also wired into the New York — Boston hotshot class who really run things and regard the war as a minor interference in their business. That’s why I’m here instead of that shithole outside Saint-Lô. I’m one of them. They like me. They like my father’s money.”

“Well, Edwin, at least you’re up-front.”

“Yes, sir. And that’s why I know the value of Millie. If you marry her, not only do you get the number one swell dish in London, you’re connected, your future after the war is settled, and it will be excellent. Brokerage or law practice partnership. Great houses on maple lawns overlooking the sound. Doesn’t matter which sound, there’ll be a sound. Access to the secret rooms in D.C. where the decisions are made. It’s all foreordained.”

“What does this have to do with Room 351?”

“Lieutenant Fenwick seems to have chosen Leets of all her suitors, and she had many. She went with the colonel to visit him in the hospital when he got back from France. I guess that’s where it started. He was the hero, the only Jed who actually blew a German bridge on D-Day. She went back on her own a few more times. Now he’s here permanently and they seem to be an item, and he’s assigned to the building’s hottest project, Room 351 with the mystery movie star from the Marine Corps, a true hero who shrinks the balls of all the would-be warriors around here.”

“I thought I picked something up between them. It was the way they didn’t look at each other.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly. So, if Room 351 succeeds, Leets succeeds and looks bigger and Tyne looks smaller. So he doesn’t want that success; the hell with the war. That means any dealings you have with him will be tricky, any requests will somehow get lost or derailed. Any rush orders will be unrushed. Any schedule will go off the tracks. There will be bureaucratic initiatives to take you over. That is, unless you know the way around the problems. And I do. That’s what makes me a help. I can get you anything, fast and clean, through other Ts. The Ts hang out together. A Tech 5 at 70 Grosvenor can do you a lot more good than a Tech 5 clinging to a cliff at four thousand feet in the Italian Alps.”

“Hmm,” said Swagger. “I still like the idea of you on that cliff. But suppose you make a habit of giving me the intelligence every morning so I know what I’m facing that day. Who’s going to come after me, when’s it going to happen, what’re my moves. Who can I punch, who can I beat down with Marine Corps profanity, who should I ambush up front, who should I avoid?”

“I can do that.”

“Then get the coffee and don’t wreck the car.”

Enter Millie Fenwick. Millie, from Millicent, from the Fenwicks, you know, the Fenwicks of the North Shore. Millie was a lovely girl, clever as the devil. She graduated with high marks from Smith but never bragged or acted smart; got her first job working as a secretary at Life in Manhattan for the awful Luce and his hideous wife; spent some time on a Senate staff — her father arranged it — and then, when war came, she gravitated toward the Office of Strategic Services just as surely as it gravitated toward her. People knew where they belonged, and organizations knew what kind of people belonged in them, so General Donovan’s assistants fell in instant love with the willowy blonde who looked smashing at any party, smoked brilliantly, had languid, see-through-anything luminosity in her eyes. Everyone loved the way her hair fell down to her shoulders; everyone loved the diaphanous cling of a gown or blouse to her long-limbed, definitely female torso; everyone loved her yards and yards of leg, her perfect ankles well displayed by the platforms of the heels all the girls wore. It was rumored that both Warner’s and RKO had scouted her.

By ’43 she’d transferred to London Station at 70 Grosvenor and become one of Colonel Bruce’s assistants and wore the uniform of a second lieutenant in the WACs. She was in charge of the colonel’s calendar, important for Oh So Social. She answered his phones or placed his calls, but it was more than that. She also knew the town and so was able to prioritize. The colonel was hopeless and said yes to every invitation in the days before she arrived on station. She had keen, perhaps even eerily prescient social instincts; she knew who counted, who didn’t, which receptions it was important to be seen at, which could be safely ignored, which generals were on the ascension, which were on the decline, which Gaullist liaison officers could be trusted, which should be avoided, which journalists were helpful, which were not. She was indispensable, she was efficient, she was beautiful and brilliant at once.

Then what was she doing in a crummy office supply storage room with a dropout from medical school and a purple-pink continent of bruise still lighting up his hip? Actually, kissing.

Then some more kissing.

Finally, kissing.

“When will I see you again?” she said, when their lips came unglued. They were hidden behind shelves of paper supplies and beat-up English desk sets, plus more Biro pens, typewriter ribbons, sheets of carbon paper, unused mimeo machines, Dictaphones. A war runs on blood, gas, and paper, and they were in the paper part.

They were close. Body on body, breast on breast, loin on loin, thigh on thigh. If he let himself he could feel the garters holding her stockings up. He didn’t let himself. It could lead to complications.

Breaths mingling, hearts beating in synchronicity, pulses racing, faces flushed. One more inch and it would have been sex; this was near sex, separated but by atoms against the possibility that someone would see and report to all what all already knew. It’s what they had instead of sex in the forties.

“He’s going to work us hard, I think,” said Leets. “Twenty on, four off, for sleep. Maybe sleep here on cots. Lots of coffee. He just wants to get this over with and get back for his scheduled death on some island you and I and even he has never even heard of.”

“Jim, I will miss you. If something breaks, let me know. Maybe you’ll get a little time off and we can steal some privacy.”

“Sweetie, I will miss you too. So. These last few weeks have been the greatest ever. Maybe getting hit was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I guess I didn’t mean it, really. Love you as I do, I’d give it all up to have Basil back.”

“I’m not sure if it’s your honesty or your loyalty that stole my heart. Fortunately, you’ve got both. Plus courage and decency. And you make an excellent martini.”

“The major’s the hero type. I’m just an idiot who follows orders. He’s like mad Basil, who saved my life at the expense of his own. Still can’t figure that one.”

“He saw in you what I see in you. The bright and hopeful future, earned, not presumed. He knew his kind would be obsolete with The War’s end. He knew you could build a better world than he could dream of. God bless Basil, God bless the major, but let them enjoy their war in peace. Their big secret is how happy they are. They were born for it; nobody else was.”

They kissed again. It was a standard movie thing, maybe in its way better for lack of backlighting and Hoagy Carmichael. Lots of fun, even if shot through with regret and doubt and sense of other issues calling. It was still the same old story.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said.

“Me too. Ugh, and tonight I said I’d have drinks with Frank Tyne—”

“That guy? Good Lord, why?”

“Colonel Bruce asked me to. Frank has been writing memos about Room 351 and the colonel can’t figure out what’s going on.”

“Nothing good, I’d say,” said Leets.

CHAPTER 15 The Hunter

Tonight’s beast was loud. Sometimes they were slow and careful, moving as silently as possible, gliding between trees, hopping on stones over water so as not to splash. They rested quietly, in the dark, and made good use of the land’s natural features. Intelligence governed, not blind instinct.

But not tonight. This one was stupid. It made all kinds of noises, left enough sign to trail in a blizzard. You could track on shit and piss alone, for the rank odors of elimination trailed it and identified it on sheer miasma. Shoot into the smell of the shit and you killed. But even without that immense advantage, it presented him with others: it destroyed the foliage, looking like the path of a hurricane of shattered branches and torn limbs; it left huge, muddy tracks in the damp earth; and it made endless low sounds to accompany its clumsy efforts to navigate and remain directional. A fool could follow and track.

But he was no fool. Far from it. Slim, hard, tough, he was above all wise to the ways of wood and field. He had in his time faced and destroyed many beasts. Some came at the end of long stalks — days, even — the distance between hunter and hunted never opening, never closing, as they ranged over the land. Those were his favorite hunts, since he felt then he had earned his kill and the rifle shot was merely an afterthought. Others may have not offered much of a chase but fought valiantly at the end. Risking everything on one last, crazed charge to crush him, demanding of him the nerve to stand tall and calm as pounding destruction approached and shoot well at the last second, they required that he place the bullet precisely in the only spot it could find brain. That too was an earned shot, always worth the risk and always celebrated afterwards by a drink or twenty. He was so proud then, knowing he had the heart of a lion, the nerves of a hyena, the strength of the baboon. He never panicked. It was not in his mind to do so.

In fact, his mind was quite interesting. In it, things proceeded logically from causality, and he felt his excellence at his life’s work came from that, not his physical attributes, however spectacular they might be. He had the knack for memorizing the landforms so that, even in dark or rain, he knew when his prey would be climbing or descending, which valley it would choose to follow on the principle that less climbing meant less energy expended and thus less time in the zone of maximum vulnerability. These animals were never clever. It was not in them to be clever. They didn’t have a mind for strategy, for ruse, for disguised intent or counter-ambush. That was one disappointment.

The other was how easily they died. It was, he supposed with some melancholy, to be expected. The bullet was slim and fast, built to penetrate muscle and blood, to destroy the organs that were the motors of the body, to smash the brain that was the controller, to rip the heart that supplied the blood fuel to all parts. Some animals of the past had been difficult to kill; one had to love them for that. These, however, surrendered without a whimper, flattening to the earth almost instantly.

He had but one flaw. To his credit, he knew it. That was the memory of a woman. Karen. It came upon him suddenly, like an ambush. It took him out of his head. It rattled him, filled him with regret. It destroyed his certainty, his will, his ambition. He wallowed in a sludge of despond, a worthless soul praying for death to arrive sooner rather than later. She would win again, as she had already.

Karen!

But not tonight. That was, after all, the point. In mission was the only surcease from pain and memory. It alone — at least so far, in ways the liquor and sex had not — drove her image from the front of his brain, cramming it into a little faraway hole until the next time. Karen!

It was getting time to shoot.

He was well behind and had been still for a long time. Another hunter’s gift: the gift of stillness. Most creatures had to shiver and twist and torque, reminding themselves they were still alive. Noises served the same purpose, as did, he supposed, the need to defecate or urinate. All announced and symbolized life, and if they were incapable of conceptualizing the self, their instincts nevertheless proclaimed it, loud and clear, to all in the neighborhood. I squirm, therefore I am!

The hunter is different. Stillness becomes him. It is as though he can reduce himself to inanimateness at the cellular level, will his systems to close down to the merest of oxygen sustenance level, to purge his brain of the need for constant visual stimulation. Pins and needles do not afflict the parts of him that touch ground, his neck never cranks in upon itself in pain; his need for water does not explode in his imagination; his lips, dryer than parchment, do not annoy him; his digestive system, in obedience to a will as achieved over long periods of self-discipline, has no desire to perform evacuation. He is close to animal death, unfazed by tremor or twitch or yip or gurgle. If hungry, his stomach walls do not vibrate; if uncomfortable, his muscles do not complain; if bored, his mind does not wander. He never gets horny. He finds nothing funny. He knows no awe. He never wants it to be over. This close to death, he is fully alive.

He checked his watch. Time approaching. He was low to earth here and could not get the shot he wanted, as the undergrowth was too dense. But he had already picked his spot, a stout tree that would sustain his weight for steadiness and at the same time give him shelter. He slithered to it, now a snake or a lizard, moving as if by rhythmic flexes from musculature beneath his skin. Noiseless, calm, unrushed, in his element.

He felt the beast’s comfort ahead. They were like that, complacent anywhere, almost instantly. They lacked the predator’s discipline to concentrate on alertness, which was why they died in such numbers. Odd bits of sound reached him, for the creature had no noise discipline either. It went with its confidence and sense of foolish invulnerability.

He reached the tree and in the darkness slid up to it, moving slowly on leg power, pressing his left biceps against it for steadiness. He could make this shot standing clear, but he knew himself never to be arrogant. If rest and solidity was possible, then it should be taken. It was a gift from whatever gods there were and one does not scoff at the gods out of arrogance. He whom the gods destroy first they make proud.

He rose, leaning into it, rifle sling spiraled about his arm for tightness when he went into the hold. His breathing was steady, his heart regular, his sense of time somewhat distended as he focused on the ceremony of the shot. The darkness was easing, bit by bit, in the east as, on schedule, that steady old bastard the sun drew close to the lip of the earth. The light seemed to ooze; it was a liquid looking for form to sustain it. It filled in details as it edged over the earth’s rim, and the trees became structures of leaf and limb, the underbrush a riot of complexity, the flowers, a few of them, bursting into color as if explosions. The whole scene was active in its acquisition of singularity and identity.

He raised the rifle. It was the best in the world for this kind of thing. Superbly accurate by fate, it had been selected by the factory experts for this specialist’s role, and made all the better. The surfaces of the trigger engagement mechanism had been stoned to smoothness, the action fitted precisely to the stock, the barrel floated for freedom of vibration, all of which supported the purpose. The scope, the world’s best — boasting glass so flawless, it seemed to have been cut from sky itself — was harnessed to the rifle by a heavily engineered system of uncompromising reliability. A bridge builder’s ingenuity had gone into its systems of lock-down, buttress, and engineering integrity. He himself, with the selected ammunition, had spent hours achieving dead zero at two hundred meters, at which most opportunities would present themselves and which would be out of the reach of his quarry’s sight in the low just-predawn light.

As the scope came to his eye, the world increased in scale by a multiplier of four, which meant that the light increased in scale to that degree. He saw the head, he saw the shoulders, the back of the neck, and knew the perfect spot as the great Bell had discovered so many years ago. Imagine a lateral line from ear to ear intersected by a vertical line from the center of the target — not the anatomical center but the center as presented by the creature’s posture — and place the point of the sight there. It was like a blade piercing the brain, isolated in space though flanked by two horizontal blades, the three of them designating the mathematic point of impact, which was, at this calculated range, identical to point of aim.

He thumbed off the safety, feeling a slight shudder as it snapped. His fingers reacquired the comb of the stock, knowing the wood intimately, knowing where to place themselves for maximum comfort and therefore security. The fore pad of his trigger finger came to rest on that lever, but just so, a feather’s touch, no willed pressure, no sense of obligation or urgency.

He never fired. His subconscious administered that effort and it surprised him as much as it must have surprised his respondent two hundred meters away.

If there was noise, he didn’t hear it; if there was recoil, he didn’t feel it; if the powder released gases, he didn’t smell them. He slid down the tree, knowing the excellence of the shot, and melted into the ground cover.

CHAPTER 16 The War of Pins

The boxes from SHAEF began to arrive by armed escort. Military policemen, white helmeted and white gaitered, delivered them and then, by arrangement, went to the canteen, where they had coffee and pastry until the day was done, though one at a time stood outside the door of 351, hand placed on the holster flap of his .45 automatic. You never knew when Fallschirmjägers were going to drop by.

In the room, the three men worked. It was melancholy and ceaseless. The boxes mostly contained Form No. 1, “Report of Decedent,” a banal one-page form from various theater cadaver collection points before shipment to the big cemetery at Blosville. Most of the documents came from platoons of the 603rd Quartermaster Graves Registration Company, which administered this part of the war for the various corps of Bradley’s First Army. They had the worst job of the war. The dead were theirs.

Theoretically, as the Form No. 1s arrived, packed chronologically in the crates, they had been pre-culled and selected by Swagger’s criterion of only fatalities by single bullet as designated in the “CAUSE OF DEATH” box. It was a crude distinction. Maybe the poor G.I. had only caught one of a fifty-round machine-gun burst. Suppose he’d been toppled by a Luger at close range when bumbling accidentally into a German position. Perhaps a single chunk of mortar shell, falling short, had replicated the wound profile of a bullet. All of those were possible, but all were outliers. The criterion, in its clumsy way, went a good bit of the way toward identifying the victims of the sniper campaign.

Leets tried not to think of what each Form No. 1 represented, or of the process by which the blank had been filled in. But he couldn’t keep it out of his mind, seeing a private in a vast, tented mortuary, a democracy of the dead where white and colored, rich and poor, educated and ignorant, officer and enlisted, lay in rank on rank, in crude wood coffins on the ground. A man too sensitive to ontological meaning would go Section 8 in such a cathedral of the killed and have to be straitjacketed and led gibbering and drooling to the ambulance and then the bin. Thus the guys of the 603rd had to be of impoverished imagination who stooped, going from body to body and inspecting for wounds, identity, unit affiliation, and numbly doing the paperwork, recording time of death and condition of remains.

Even at one remove, it gave Leets the willies.

He supposed the poor kid of the 603rd doing the hard work grew inured to it. Perhaps he’d been sent punitively, because he was a screwup; perhaps he’d volunteered, hoping to go into the funeral industry postwar or having been in the funeral industry prewar. The boy, like a medic, was used to the impact of steel on flesh, and the necessary rearrangement of features that followed, anything from a single red hole dead center of chest to a sack of body parts that might or might not have been just one man. If that kid, whoever he was, could get through it, Leets determined that he could handle the paperwork at least, though over the long hours he could not put the sweetness and the softness and the nut-crunching beauty of Millie far from his troubled mind.

He worked hard. They all did. Shuffle, shuffle, note, record, and move on. Finish, so the material could go back to SHAEF and be reinserted into the industrial process of loss, The War — style, which would include notification of next of kin, alert to Payroll for pay cessation, invocation of insurance liabilities, entry in theater-wide casualty report to SHAEF and ultimately the War Department. It wasn’t simple to die; it involved a lot of paperwork.

There were six possibilities of death. A red pin was officer/nighttime, black was NCO/nighttime, yellow was PFC or lower/nighttime, blue was officer/daylight, brown NCO/daylight, green was PFC and below/daylight. Each went to a map designated by color.

It wasn’t perfect, as the battalions of dead crawled across the big theater maps on the wall. Black and brown were hard to tell apart without intense scrutiny. Nighttime as well was too broad to be of much immediate use, as it included the minutes just before sundown and just before sunrise, along with those — not many — in the hours of true dark. The end product was six of the full-theater maps, each denoting a category of death via colored dot. They presented a selection of shapes: one linear, the others kidney shaped, tending to oval, some darker, some lighter in color. It was something that could at last be analyzed, and Swagger poured himself into it. Nothing else existed. He told his two assistants to get lost. It was just him and the dots.

CHAPTER 17 The Poet

“Don’t send it,” said Archer.

“Why not?” said Goldberg. “It’s true.”

It was another day in the bullet garden, Dog 2–2 style. Their foxhole faced a broad sweep of nothingness. They could see hedgerows and also hedgerows as well as hedgerows. Also: dead cows on their backs with bloated bellies, legs upward. Some fields seemed to grow them.

The land was empty but at any time could fill with Germans. The sky was clear but at any time it could begin to rain mortar shells. The atmosphere was calm but at any time swarms of bullets could rip across it. Plus, they had to shit in a hole. All of these things happened frequently.

“They don’t want the truth,” said Archer. “They want, ‘Gosh, everything here is fine. The fellas are great. The new sarge reminds me of Uncle Ted.’ ”

“Uncle Jerry,” said Gary.

“ ‘Anyway, blah blah de blah blah. Love to all, even Uncle Jerry. See you soon. P.S.: Morale high, food great!’ That’s what they want to hear. That’s what the censors will let you say.”

“Well…,” began Gary, his mind flooding with clever ripostes.

But the new sergeant, a large, perpetually angry man named McKinney, who looked like the entire Notre Dame backfield, loomed over their foxhole.

“Okay, you two cracked eggs, vacation over. Archer, you find Blikowicz in the company area. You clean his BAR for him. He’s been lugging it plus 340 rounds of ammo since I got here. He needs relief and sack time.”

“I don’t—”

“No such words in the United States Army. Only words are ‘Yes’ and ‘Sergeant,’ in that order. We need that gun maintained daily. It’ll keep us alive. Goldberg, get on your bicycle and head back to Battalion G-2. They have some new maps in. Nice to know where we’re going, wouldn’t you say, Goldberg?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Now, that’s my language. Learn from your buddy, Archer. Now, get—”

Mortars.

First the pop, hollow and stupid. Sounded like one of those Ping-Pong ball guns. Then the whistle. If it was soft, you’d probably live. If it was loud, you probably wouldn’t. But it was hard to tell one from the other in a hormone rage of fear and dread.

“Hit the fucking dirt,” yelled McKinney, piling in on top of them. Maybe there were actual atheists in foxholes somewhere, but not here, not today.

CHAPTER 18 The Restaurant

Major Tyne was nervous on the way over, which was not like him. He was a big guy, a former New York City cop. His ambitions were likewise big. He ran for and won the post of councilman on the city’s raucous West Side, pushing hard on the I’ll-control-the-Negro platform, which was called “I’ll conk the niggers” by his staff. But as a councilman he met a better class of crook — the landed Irish gentry, high politics, law and brokerage partnerships, newspaper voices — and had a gift for doing and receiving favors, including cash and jobs. It was his true talent, although he’d been no slouch with the billy club either.

He was infected with toxic ambition. When war came, he looked hard at it and tried to figure what would earn him the most glory with the least risk. He came up with the OSS, where all the swells coagulated under the leadership of the highest of the high-table Irish of New York, William Donovan of Fighting 69th fame, and he pulled every string in the book to get in. He somehow succeeded, although no one particularly liked him, and he spent a year on Catoctin Mountain in Maryland teaching marksmanship and close-quarters combat to the French-speaking Ivy League poofs who would actually land behind enemy lines. He also lobbied incessantly, making calls, writing letters, sucking up like a whore at a rodeo, and finally got the coveted 70 Grosvenor assignment, ending up in Operations, where his “real-world experience” would supposedly come in handy.

The rumors persisted that he had done missions in France, killed Germans, liaised with the Maquis, was quite the party-poopin’, paratroopin’ tough guy. It was also stated or assumed that he was Wild Bill Donovan’s best boy, with an open line to the big guy himself. He had started them all and they were patently untrue. He had conked quite a few Negroes in his time, and shot a pimp above 110th, but none of them wore Feldgrau. Additionally, he’d seen Donovan only a couple of times, on parade duty when the old man was driven down Broadway in a limo ahead of the Fighting 69th vets on Saint Pat’s.

So now he was with Millie in a cab to the restaurant, trying desperately to think of something witty to say that didn’t require the word fuck in one of its many variants.

“Sure hope a doodle doesn’t land on us,” he said, laughing heartily if fraudulently. “Those damn things sure put a damper on things, eh? And the ridiculous part is how randomly they fall. You’re no safer in one place than another. And even if a Spit gets lucky and knocks one down, who’s to say it’ll crash in a worse place than it might have hit otherwise?”

Doodles were the topic du jour in London, early July 1944. Unmanned German jets, called V-1s, they were launched from France and pointed toward London. They weren’t so much aimed as lobbed underhand, as with a beanbag. They simply fell from the sky when they ran out of fuel and fell, detonating four hundred pounds of high explosive. They went where wind and luck took them. You were lucky or you weren’t, though some claimed if you heard one, and its engine suddenly cut off, you might have seconds’ worth of time to take cover. But the fatalism was general all over London: if your name was written on Herr Vergeltungswaffe-Eine (Vengeanceweapon-1), that was it.

“They ought to let me take a squad of good men over there,” he said. “Nothing like a dose of tommy gun medicine and TNT to close down a Nazi installation. I’m sure Wild Bill would approve.”

“I’m sure the Germans would stop shooting them off if they knew they were upsetting Major Frank Tyne,” Millie said, and Frank got that she was kind of sporting on him.

“Okay,” he said, “I got a big mouth. Still, we ought to do something to those installations. I don’t know, bomb or raid or something. I’ve sent several plans to the colonel with copies to General Donovan — well, you know that.”

“And the colonel will read them. I’ll put them in the top of tomorrow’s pile,” she said. Actually, she’d already placed them in the round file, so, swiftly incinerated, they were presumably part of the very vapors they now breathed.

The cab entered the darkened theater district, pulling up at a posh-looking spot, and the driver said, “ ’Ere we are, guvnor.”

“Oh,” said Millie, “Simpson’s. How nice, Frank.”

Tyne shoveled over a crunchy wad of bills and raced around to open Millie’s door.

“Wasn’t easy getting the ticket,” he said. “This one’s not for the commoners. I dropped General Donovan’s name and here we are.” Actually, he had a kid on staff whose dad was a two-star at SHAEF (“How else he’d get into our outfit, huh?”) and he called Dad, who called this or that lord; Frank had no idea.

“It’s the Waldorf Astoria of London,” he said — wrong because the Waldorf was a hotel and it had a dining room while Simpson’s was a restaurant and had no connection to a hotel.

Millie, he realized instantly, would see through the stab at swank and thus have no reaction, another dud move on his part. He cursed his own stupidity. If he’d still had a beat to walk, he would have done some conking tonight, just to let off steam.

He took her in, they walked past liveried chaps outside, and were greeted by the maître d’ as if they were Lord Bosie’s godparents. A lot of la-la was invested getting them into a room furnished in glowing oak with chandeliers and an opaque glass curvature as a ceiling. Old paintings adorned the walls, mostly horses and generals, so it was hard to tell them apart, and every square ounce oozed the highest of breeding, the most lavish of tastes. It looked like the place where the British Empire went to hide during the Blitz.

They were an odd couple: she looked like she’d stepped off the cover of Vogue, in a silky gown that merely suggested her lithe construction, easeful grace, and artful aplomb, while he trailed in dumpy American class As with his tiny issue of ribbons on his chest, bouncing along in the beat cop’s lumbering cloppity-clop. Beauty and beast? Princess and knave? Slim and husband three, the rich one from Cincinnati? Something like that.

Once seated, he again reached for jokes not there. “That roof doesn’t look like it’d be much good against doodles, does it?” he laughed, pointing at the frosted glass capping the room.

“I doubt the Germans would be so rude to interrupt us,” she said. “At least a few of them still have manners.”

Far off, a thunder-boom signaled touch down, from the direction possibly in Islington.

“See, he deliberately missed,” she said with a smile.

Get to it, he thought.

“Millie, I’m so glad you agreed to come out with me tonight.”

“Frank, the pleasure is all mine.”

“I’ve had the impression you’ve sort of been ignoring me since — you know, the night the Jeds went in.”

That one was of particular embarrassment. He’d been so proud of his part in it all and she’d been all of a sudden unusually open to him, so he’d taken her to the ops floor, and there they looked at the big map of France with all the Jed targets designated on it and a cast of dozens pushing pieces around it on guidance from live radio communiqués out of actual battle. She’d seemed fascinated by it.

He made up a little fib to make himself seem bigger.

“See this one.” He pointed to a small town — Tulle, actually — on a small river that had a small bridge. Someone had written “CASEY” in crayon over it. “Maybe Das Reich comes that way. You know, Tigers and all, straight on into Normandy. So we had to blow it. Problem there was Casey had no Bren guns and thought they’d be visited by Krauts in trucks during the op. A Sten or a Thompson won’t knock out a truck. So I found out what group in the area controlled the Brens — turned out it was red — and I went to communications, got them on the shortwave, and told them how important it was that our guys had the Brens. And that’s how it happened. So if anything gets done tonight, it’s because Team Casey has Brens for backup!”

“Oh, Frank,” she’d said, “that’s so wonderful,” and touched his arm. It was the first time she’d touched him. The electricity was enough to fry Dillinger.

Then he’d invited her to his office for a nightcap “to celebrate,” he said. Though the building was all abuzz with Jed frenzy, his little coop was dark and empty. Not that he hoped to uck-fay, not with a nice girl like Millie, but he wanted to know where he stood with her, maybe hold her close, smell her, nuzzle her neck, bank some encouragement. It was the forties, so a kiss, even sans tongue, would have been paradise. She was so goddamn beautiful and her father was so goddamned rich.

A glass of rye, neat, American stuff, bought for just this reason on the black market. A lot of eye contact — hers were as big as lamps, deep and brown and serene, unblinking and inviting — and just when it was getting interesting… he fainted.

“I just wanted to explain. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was all the pressure of supervising the Jed teams. Maybe it was the excitement that my teams were finally going in and that this was the night. Maybe my blood pressure got the best of me. I just hope it wasn’t something for you to hold against me.”

“Frank, whatever gave you that impression?” she asked.

“Well… I can’t seem to get you on the phone. When I drop by to deliver something to the colonel, you’re so all-business. It’s just a feeling I had.”

“Frank, it’s a terrible time.”

The drinks came. His a straight shot of Jameson, hers a martini, which, after a first sip, she would not touch.

“It’s so busy since the invasion,” she went on. “I even feel a little guilty about tonight. The colonel’s got appointments, meetings, inspections. Scheduling, drivers, sometimes quarters — it all has to be arranged. And the parties. His job is to go to parties and talk up the outfit. And you know what an organizational mess he is. I have to keep it all running straight, I have to supervise the list for his own parties—”

“Somehow I’m never on the list.”

“Frank, it’s business. It’s not pleasure, believe me.”

“I suppose.”

“Anyway, that has to come first. We all know that. That’s what’s going on.”

“Well… I keep hearing about you and Leets. You know how people will talk. I mean, are you seeing him?”

“Oh, my goodness, Frank! Where did you ever get that idea? I went with the colonel to visit him after he came back. We got along. I visited him a couple of times. Frank, he’s a hero who doesn’t act the part. In fact, he was upset at the way CASEY turned out, not proud!”

“Well, he doesn’t have much to be proud of. He SNAFUed in a bad way. He got his teammates killed and everybody said it was probably the British guy, Basil St. something, who did the real stuff. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t gotten them the Brens! The colonel needs him more for public relations than as anything else. We had to have a hero and Leets was the lucky guy who got on the hero bus. The people who really know what’s what all say that.”

“Frank, I wish you wouldn’t talk poorly of Lieutenant Leets. He’s a very fine young man, a football hero, in fact, and he just wants to do his duty. He’s going to be a surgeon after the war. He went to a fine university and—”

“I just don’t want you blinded by all the lights shining on him. I saw the photos on the damage CASEY did to that bridge. It wasn’t much. It didn’t cost the Germans a damned thing.”

This was a lie. He hadn’t seen the recon photos. Nobody had. They were still classified top secret while the Eighth Air Force damage assessment team got around to them, but it had put a much higher priority on strategic recon of damage to German industry, its true bread and butter. So the bridge photos would sit until someone got around to them, sometime in 1956. They were notoriously slow on this. By their way of thinking it was only a dinky bridge blown up by somebody else.

“Frank! Really, let’s change the conversation.”

“Millie, I have to ask where I stand with you. I just can’t stand not knowing. It’s making me crazy! I mean, do I have a chance? I know a dozen guys are in love with you and maybe I’m pretty far down the list, but just give me a chance. I will be someone big after the war; I will make you proud. I have ambitions. You—”

“Frank, really. There can’t be an ‘after the war’ for any of us until there’s an actual ‘after the war’ for all of us. Everything else has to be put aside.”

“Okay, okay, I hear you. But I’ll always be here for you. If there’s anything you need, I can get it for you. Nylons, lingerie, perfume, anything. I can—”

“Oh, the hors d’oeuvres! They look so good. Oh, Frank, let’s eat, I’m starved. And then I think you should take me back to the office, because I’ve still got work to do.”

He smiled, thinking: I am going to fucking massacre that prick Leets.

CHAPTER 19 Meeting

The colonel was due at 11. He said he’d have some brass from SHAEF and First Army with him, but not to worry, they were just messenger boys with too much junk on their collars. But everybody was looking for progress and he hoped that the Room 351 operation had something to show for the two weeks of effort.

Earl had definite ideas about how to present. He wanted all the maps mounted on the wall but all shielded so that he could unveil them in chronological order. He was afraid if the various idiots tried to apprehend it all at once, they’d get all screwed up and the whole thing would fall apart. The art of the pitch was to keep it clear, quick, with a good sense of suspense toward a climax, leading to a single conclusion. It had to be a story, in other words.

“It’s got to be simple enough for officers,” he said.

But at a certain moment, late, he got some eye contact from Sebastian, meaning: I have eyes-only dope. Earl said to Leets, “Lieutenant, why don’t you go upstairs and wait with Lieutenant Fenwick to bring the brass down here.”

Leets didn’t need a second prompting to kill time with Lieutenant Fenwick: he nodded and took off.

“Okay, Sebastian. You look like the cat that swallowed the chicken. Spit it out.”

“Sir,” he said, “I have it on authority that Major Tyne in Operations has sent a blistering memo to the colonel, with copies to SHAEF intelligence, and finally to E Street”—meaning General Donovan, at the E Street HQ in Washington, boss of all bosses, Mr. OSS himself—“raising a rumpus about Room 351. It was only summarized to me by the T who delivered it to both the colonel and to communications for transmission. I’ll summarize. He says he thinks that Room 351 is wasting resources and manpower in that nearly two weeks in, it has produced no actionable material and nothing seems to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, its presence at 70 Grosvenor is so disruptive, it’s interfering with the ‘real’ work of OSS. He thinks it should be sharply cut back and placed under jurisdiction of Operations, since it obviously is intended to reach an operations phase, and that it should report directly to him. No one should have the operational carte blanche Room 351 has. He also thinks that your position should be clarified and wonders if rumors suggesting you are actually a Marine NCO are true and, if so, you should be immediately reduced in rank to the equivalent E-7 of the Army, and required to address all officers via protocols of common military courtesy.”

“Who is this fuck again?”

“Ah, some extraneous major in Operations. He’s like a vice president without a real job. He just sort of wanders around, stirring things up, trying to get himself promoted. He claims to have been the mastermind behind the Jeds, but everybody knows that’s bullshit. He claims he has Irish connections, being an ex — New York pol. He likes to pretend he has Donovan’s ear.”

“Why’re his shorts up his crack over me?”

“It’s not you, it’s Lieutenant Leets. Tyne’s one of the hopeless dopes who thinks he has a shot at Lieutenant Fenwick and is all browned off because he isn’t getting anywhere with her, while she’s widely known to be sweet on the lieutenant.”

“Is this high school?”

“Pretty much, sir. Do you want me to draft a reply or counter for your signature, to counteract quickly?”

“No, that’s how you get a crybaby reputation and they tune you out. What we have to do is shortcut our plans, move ahead to the next stage, maybe overstate the importance of our findings. Then find a way to crush this bug. I hate to play these fucking games, but if you’re going to work in a building instead of a foxhole, that’s what it takes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good work, Sebastian. It’s always good to know who’s trying to fuck you over. Plus, you get another two weeks in London before you report to 1st Ranger Battalion.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

Leets and Colonel Bruce showed up with two geldings from SHAEF. Both appeared a few degrees below room temperature. Not your combat leadership types, these two were pale men in their late thirties, one bald, one balder. They wore rimless glasses — Earl had seen a famous painting of a farmer standing with his grim wife in front of a Gothic farmhouse once, and that memory, unattached to time, place, circumstance, flittered through his memory — and had faces unpatterned by emotion.

“Brigadier Stacy, SHAEF G-2,” said the one.

“Colonel McBain, First Army G-2,” said the other, not that there was much difference between them. Etiquette forbade handshakes or routine human courtesies, so Earl gestured them to seats placed in front of the west wall, which they took.

“Gentlemen, I hope you’ll find this interesting and worth your time,” he said.

“Please proceed, Major.”

He began by explaining his sniper criterion, waited for objections, encountered none, and went on.

“Yes, sir. Now direct your attention to the six maps on the wall. I’ve had them covered because I want to show them chronologically. Less confusion that way.”

No response.

“Corporal,” Swagger said, and Sebastian removed the sheet from the first map.

“This map represents all casualties in theater killed by the single bullet standard,” said Earl. “The time period here runs from June eighth, when First Army troops moved into the area to two days ago, as derived from Graves Registration Form 1s. It makes clear what a big sniper problem you’ve got.”

The two — Colonel Bruce sat behind — looked intently at the carnage represented before them. It was the Cotentin Peninsula as currently contested by First Army. It was the purple dot nightmare, a documentation of swirling, chaotic aggression, as the German reaper took them all, long, short, and tall, good, bad, lazy, smart, by the violent whimsy of industrial war making.

“It tells us what we know. Snipers everywhere. You got ’em on the line, you got ’em on patrol, you got ’em day or night, you got ’em behind the lines. By our count, you’ve lost more that fifteen hundred men to snipers in the last few weeks.”

“We’ve all seen the casualty reports, Major. We’re interested in the night sniper problem, not the day casualties. Please move on,” said one of the bald ones bloodlessly. But Earl liked that both he and the other were taking their own notes, not arriving with a staff of go-fers, door openers, and yes sayers. In other words: serious men.

“Yes, sir, that’s our focus too. We’re headed there. Corporal, go ahead.”

The young man removed another sheet from the map.

“These green dots record theater-wide deaths in a category we call daylight non-leadership. That is, ranks E-3 and down, your basic G.I. Joes.”

The map looked like an attack by killer eels. Sweeps of curvy green dots seemed to obscure the geographical information below as reptile forms formed a formation slowly advancing horizontally through the bocage.

“You’ll note the way the kill pattern traces our own line pattern on a week-to-week basis. That means our fellows are getting hit in their own positions, and as the lines move slowly, so do the hits. Where it’s dense is where we were stalled out. So this would be PFCs and privates.

“This represents sound infantry deployment of precision marksmanship at the battalion level. The German knows what he’s doing, and he places his sharpshooters where they’re most inclined to encounter targets in daylight.”

Another map. Much less dense, but tracking more or less along the same lines as before.

“Leadership, meaning E-5 and above. Daylight. Not really a problem, because these guys are experienced and have other responsibilities than holding ground and looking over brush fences. Questions?”

None.

“All right, let’s get to the night action.”

He nodded and down came the fourth sheet. Map No. 4 was without eels; instead it seemed random dots splattered across the landscape, though not terribly dense and spotted by occasional outliers.

“Non-leadership after dark. Let me define ‘dark.’ We chose fifteen minutes before true sunset, as calculated by your meteorologists, to fifteen minutes after true dawn as our definition of ‘dark.’ So these are your infantry night patrol deaths. Sergeant or second lieutenant takes a squad out to check German dispositions. Occasionally, firefights will develop in the dark, and I’d read these as firefight deaths, not sniper related. The shooting is pretty indiscriminate. Some people get hit as they withdraw or on the approach. That’s what happens if you patrol aggressively, and if you don’t, you have no idea what’s happening, and you get hit in company strength or larger and lose far more.”

“Did it occur to you to separate the night casualties into zones according to hour of night, Major.”

“It did, sir. That’s also interesting. I’ll get to it shortly.”

“Excellent.”

Sebastian exposed the fifth map. By now the spray of dots had solidified into deep and dark magenta, the color of spewing blood before it oxygenates, and they roughly followed tendrils out beyond the American lines. They represented a higher, more organized form of carnage.

“Bingo,” said Earl. “This category is leadership, nighttime. They’re hitting sergeants and junior officers, those that lead the patrol. All or almost all headshots, by the way, an interesting finding. Mostly to the back of the head, on a kind of three-quarters angle between the ear through-line and center-head through-line. That’s the preferred shot, and it’s too common to be anything except acquired by practice, discipline, and experience.”

He let the graphic of so many dead young leaders sink in for a second.

“You know what this means. It gives the troops fear that the Krauts have some kind of night-vision technology. They can see in the dark. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, but it sure as hell flies through the platoons in a hurry, and its effect is that the patrolling will be less aggressive and too prone to panic even in the absence of the sniper. They won’t go as far and as hard, and they’ll turn back early. That’s the strategy, the big picture.”

“We’re seeing that all through First Army,” said Colonel McBain. “You can’t make the men do more, because, to them, more is death. Go on, Major.”

“The small picture is that, at the squad level, it all but destroys that patrol that night. The men see their leader hit in such a destructive way, and they panic and break up. Any firepower advantage with our BARs and Garands is immediately lost. Our guys wander, some into German lines, some into areas the Germans have flooded so they drown, some so beat up in the mind that when they do get back, they aren’t much good for a while.”

“It’s everywhere,” said McBain. “General Bradley calls it the ‘sniper disease.’ ”

“So the questions would be: How do the Germans identify the patrol leader and kill him? Do they have that night-vision technology so refined, they can read rank in the dark? How do they find our men in the first place so unerringly? Do they know where they’re going? Is it an intelligence leak to be plugged? Have they developed a pattern read on your people and can make predictions that solid? Then why do they always take that three-quarters-angle shot? Why do they like that shot? Then how do they get out of there? Then who? Is it one guy? Is it a squad or special unit whose existence might come up in radio intercepts, espionage results, aerial recon? Is there an HQ site to be bombed or raided? I’d happily take a team in. I know Lieutenant Leets would join me. But anyway, has it left a paper trail? Do we have sources that can get into their files? Maybe the Russians would.”

“I doubt they’d share,” said Colonel Bruce. “They’re allies, but not that allied.”

“Have you compared our ‘leadership deaths’ to the same in other theaters, Major?” asked McBain. “Is it possible this is, again, just war? Snipers, after all, are trained to hit leaders.”

“I happen to have some acquaintanceship with the campaigns on Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Tarawa, sir. The marines had a sniper problem, and while nobody broke the ranks of the killed down like this, that’s because no such pattern existed. Moreover, there was no night sniper activity. In that war, the deaths pretty much reflected the dispersion of the ranks in the command. More privates than sergeants, more sergeants than lieutenants, more lieutenants than colonels, more colonels than generals, and no generals.”

Neither senior officer said a thing about the reference to the marines on the three islands.

“Okay, last map. Some answers, I think.”

Hmm, strange: it was identical to the one before.

Was this a joke?

No, wait. The pins were of different color, though intermixed, being mostly green and a little red, giving the display a kind of Macy’s-at-Christmas splendor.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to explain this one to us,” said Colonel Bruce.

“It was Lieutenant Leets’s idea. He saw it. Let him tell. Leets?”

“Yes, sir,” said Leets, rising from the dark. It hadn’t been his idea. It was Swagger all the way, all of it, but Swagger didn’t want it turning into The Swagger Show, knowing that in certain kinds of wars that set you up for destruction.

“The idea was to identify the night patrol leadership deaths by hours, meaning first hour from sunset to first hour before sunrise with a different-colored pin for each hour. I thought we’d need a lot of pins. But it turned out we only needed two kinds of pins, green for the half-light of dawn and red the half-light of sunset. That’s when the majority of the hits took place. In dead of night, the darkness remains just as mysterious to the Germans as to us.”

“That suggests that, as of yet, there’s no technical night vision at play here,” said Swagger. “They’re hitting in low light but it’s enough for them to see from a good way out, making a specific shot on a small target, even waiting till it’s turning into the right position. They could easily shoot mid-torso, which is doctrine to all the armies of the world, but they wait longer for that peculiar shot. We can only speculate on why.”

He paused.

“So, Major,” said the brigadier, “speculate. That’s why you’re here.”

“I’m guessing a small mobile unit of men in a largely independent unit. They are deployed in an unsophisticated manner, never in coordination with other units, a tactical subtlety the Germans would normally be more than capable of. They just go here and there. We can tell when a group of them move north, because you get a bunch of night kills in a northern sector for a few days. Then they move south, and that’s where the kills occur. They seem to report to no one. They’re on their own, contrary to the Wehrmacht practice. I’m guessing the SS, with sponsorship high up that gives them their freedom.”

“How big a unit?”

“We note that there’s never more than twelve night hits, so I’d put the unit at twelve superb shots. They may have special training, special tactics, special capabilities. They target leadership on down to patrol leaders. They know if they do that they spread fear and paralysis. They’re the ones who have First Army shitting in its pants and bottled up on the roads.”

“Okay,” said McBain. “But who are they?”

CHAPTER 20 Sleet

“You go,” said Archer.

“No, you go,” said Goldberg.

“You both go, clowns,” said Sergeant McKinney.

Ulp. No choice. Direct order.

Archer shimmied through. It was a burrow in the hedgerow, chopped by G.I. shovels through the spine of dirt and root, the vegetation sheathing it hollowed out by severe application of bayonet over several hours.

Archer emerged from the mucky tunnel into bright sunlight infused with filaments and patches of green from the vegetable universe around them. He saw ten or twelve of his buddies just ahead, kneeling nervously in the sunlight, waiting on everyone else. They’d formed up into a loose skirmish line. No fire came at them yet, as the Germans a hundred yards away were either waiting for their shooting lanes to fill with targets or had withdrawn the night before. Every man went tight and concentrated into himself.

“Uggk. Agghhkk!” Goldberg was stuck.

Somehow his canteen had come half-loose and only one hook secured it to his combat suspenders, and the aluminum jar of water had managed to hook itself into a loop of root.

Archer poked it with his rifle butt, it came loose, and his buddy managed to squirm through.

Goldberg never quite made a convincing infantryman. He was so scrawny that no belt or strap could cinch tight enough. His combat suspenders in fact suspended his cartridge belt, but — being heavy with M1 clips in pouches, an entrenching tool, a first aid pack, and grenades — it slopped around his narrow waist, always reorienting itself. Sometimes the shovel was in front, sometimes in back, depending. The sloppy fit of the M41 field jacket, with its vast peak lapels, its flaps and buttons everywhere — it looked like half a slime-green zoot suit jacket — complicated the issue still more, as it gathered where it shouldn’t, formed pleats everywhere, worked its way too far left or right, and offered sleeves that wouldn’t stay rolled and fell below his fingertips, tangling up things to yet another degree of confusion. The canvas leggings, meant to seal his boots off from the world and thereby preclude the entry of rocks and pebbles to them, couldn’t be gathered tightly enough to (a) do their job and (b) stay secure. Thus, they twisted and scrunched at will. He had to insert rolls of TP to fill up the space and moor them, but that was an imperfect improvisation, as the rolls compressed with usage and lost their effectiveness. Then, despite every effort made by various volunteers in the squad, the webbing in his helmet liner never really secured itself to his head. Consequently, the steel pot itself, capping the liner, owed no fealty to any particular directional mandate of the head and rotated randomly, sometimes correctly aligned with his face, sometimes fully backwards, but usually somewhere in between. The rifle seemed gigantic in his pale hands, and since he had never made friends with it, it compelled him to yet more awkwardness and, by comparison to his five feet six inches and 117 pounds, suggested he’d been issued one of those giant basic training cutaway models to illustrate the working of the operating rod. The pallor of his thin but freckly face and the magnification of his wire-framed G.I. glasses inflating his hyperintelligent, hypersensitive eyes all suggested a What-is-wrong-with-this-picture? puzzle. He was always out of breath — that is, when he arrived at all. Thus discovering him in a bocage meadow about to attack an element of 7. Armee, LXXXIV. Armeekorps, 353. Infanterie-Division, under Oberst Mueller seemed ludicrous. No matter, here he was.

“Get going, god dammit,” the sergeant bellowed from behind. “This ain’t no picnic.”

“See?” said Goldberg to Archer. “I thought it was a picnic.”

They got themselves motivated to join the half-assed line of kneelers as behind them a few more squad mates scrambled out, supervised by Tarzan McKinney, new to platoon and squad in replacing the late Malfo, but not new to The War.

Give it to him, he did his job. He ran to dead center of his line, then outward a few feet. He had a tommy gun and seemed to be dressed in grenades. He checked a watch, worn NCO-cool — style inward on his wrist.

And he had a plan. It wasn’t just to witlessly race into implanted German machine-gun fire. Instead, he’d instructed the platoon’s best rifle grenadier to infiltrate the hedgerow at 0300 and slither forward through the grass a good fifty yards and there go as flat as flat could be. The contraption he carried was most notably a festival of the Ms so beloved by official U.S. Army nomenclature: an M1 rifle with an M1909 blank .30 round chambered, an M1 grenade projector muzzle adapter (22mm), an M1 grenade appliance with four spring-metal prongs defining a grenade-sized hold space into which would be inserted, pin pulled, lever locked in a lever-restraint compartment a Mark 2 fragmentation grenade. If it worked, and it usually did, the power of the blank round would propel the grenade appliance from the barrel and it would separate from the grenade proper, thus freeing the safety lever and arming the nasty little bastard. A second or two after landing, the grenade fuse would inform the grenade charge that it was party time. Lots of stuff would get blown up, hopefully a German machine gun or two.

The plan held that the grenadier, five feet three inches of crazy-brave Pole named Blikowicz, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, would remain flat prone until the attack launched at 0730 in position with just half an eye open. Theoretically, the hero Blikowicz’s life depended on the deception: the Krauts would not pick him out within the wild grass and various styles of flower and plant that obscured it. When the platoon got in its position and began its move, no doubt the Germans would open up with their heaviest lawn mower, called an MG-42, which fired — or so Goldberg swore he saw in Popular Mechanics—five thousand rounds a minute. It was on Blikowicz to note the muzzle flash, rise fast, and, with his good instincts for geometry and loft, loose his grenade into the flash. That would be that. Having lost its main advantage and being spread thin, the Krauts would undoubtedly fall back.

“It’s a good plan,” Archer had said.

“Not as good as mine,” said Goldberg, “which is we return to London, catch up on our sleep, take a good shower, and go out for a beer.”

“You don’t even drink beer,” said Archer.

“For that,” said Goldberg, “I would learn.”

“Our mortars opening up,” McKinney said. “Get ready.”

And indeed, the weather turned to 100 percent chance of destruction. The sky seemed to fill with arcs of dark blur, since the shells didn’t move fast enough to invisiblize themselves. They rose, lost interest in ascension, then fell, and a hundred yards beyond they detonated.

Loud. Scary. Also frightening, plus terrifying as well as deeply intimidating. Each bomb hit, ruptured, released a hot spew of energy, steel, and bad breath, and caused commotion to rule within its limited cone of destruction. Such a sound! Hurt the ears, made you cringe and wince, even as a rush of hot wind snorted twigs in your face. Smoke and debris exited the strike in good order, then lost shape and disorganized into a gray haze that drifted everywhere. It smelled like somebody was burning Hitler’s socks. Pricks of something — dust, cinder, frag, pulverized branch, German femur, who knew? — blew hard against the crouching men. The far hedgerow seemed absorbed by this new front of very angry weather, and the sounds were so major they seemed to beat tattoos on eardrums. It was the Boom-Boom Room at the midtown Van Barth without the syncopation and the shimmy and the babes in nylons. Just the boom-boom part.

“Let’s go,” screamed the sergeant.

“Better never than late,” said a smileless, bloodless, parchment-lipped Goldberg, afraid equally that he was going to die or piss in his pants.

“I missed Confession,” he said to Archer.

“You’re not Catholic,” said Archer by way of explanation.

“Now you tell me,” said Goldberg.

The two high-IQs rose and, hunched and forlorn, started the nightmare walk toward what was either enemy positions or just bushes.

It was an attack. Why was it happening? Who had ordered it? What was the point? Was this trip really necessary? No one knew. The best theory was that armies, being armies, are supposed to attack once in a while just to show they remembered what they were. But it wasn’t a big attack with thousands of troops scurrying across a front the size of three counties in Texas. It was a sort of small attack, one company, four platoons, moving in synchronization across four bocage meadows that abutted each other, to the accompaniment of a mortar barrage, bazookas, light machine guns, and rifle grenades. This meant noise, noise meant smoke, smoke meant confusion, confusion meant danger, danger meant death. But who could say no? After all, as people kept reminding them, it was The War.

The line hardly charged but more or less kind of drifted forward, each individual looking ahead for inspiration to Sergeant McKinney, who stopped now and then to hoist Thompson to shoulder and release a burst. He was shooting at the smoke and hitting it too. Was he hitting anything made of flesh? Hard to tell. Maybe he was just showing off, a little combat theater for a somewhat tough-to-please audience. He sure looked the part.

“Should we be shooting?” said Goldberg.

“At what?”

“I don’t know. Stuff.”

“I just see smoke, but what the hell.”

Archer wedged his M1 into his side, clamped it still with his elbow, shoved the safety off at the front of the trigger guard, and fired once. Except that the whizzers that suddenly came pouring out of the thing — hot spent brass casings — signified more than once, not that he had any sense of pulling the trigger eight times. He had felt no recoil, seen no smoke. As an experience, it left zero impression.

The empty clip popped up like toast at Sunday breakfast and the rifle stopped shooting.

That meant yes, he had fired eight times, but it was so unusual, the details didn’t quite register. He just carried the thing and hadn’t actually fired it in several months. It still worked, he was happy to note.

“Come on, Gary, let those bastards have it!”

But of course Gary couldn’t remember how to get the safety off; then, when he did, he found it too mucked in gunk to fire.

“I’ll just go bang! Maybe they won’t notice,” he said to Archer.

The Germans finally noted they were being assaulted. It seemed they too had mortars. In various locales around the field, fountains of turf and grass erupted, unleashing a devil’s breath of wind. The air filled with hummingbirds. A man fell, another ran to him. Another fell.

“Come on, god dammit!” shouted McKinney up ahead, then he plunged forward. Heroism was his business. Less enthusiastically, our non-heroes, now animated by the war between fear (go back!) and shame (go forward!), scuttled along, somewhat passive-aggressively. At least Archer was consumed in the drama of reloading, which meant pulling another en bloc clip of eight .30s from a pouch, inserting it into his breech, shoving it in so hard with his thumb it threw the little lever that let the bolt fly forward. Not easy to do while walking through a shower of mortar shells. Each of these new phenomena brought with it a contribution to the symphony of percussive tonalities, so loud a fellow couldn’t hear himself think, even if he could think of something to think of. Goldberg, for his part, just felt like an imposter. He was a Jew in the middle of some WASP ceremony, mysterious and dangerous.

A machine gun opened up. This alarming development announced itself in the form of globs of green light floating up from the hedgerow and curving toward them. It looked like neon sleet. It was so pretty, it was hard to imagine each chunk of light was death its own self. Associated with the show came noise, which sounded like a chain saw versus a radiator, as the German gun emptied five thousand rounds in a single minute toward them — well, eight hundred. Someone burned another pile of Hitler’s socks. The air was loud and occupied, filled with unclassifiable optical illusions, unknowable flying pieces of alternating shape and speed, sparks and gobbits of pure heat, flaming butterflies.

At this point — sequence ambiguous; no one could actually pinpoint it — Blikowicz got his grenade launched and it hit three-quarters down the hedgerow, where it detonated with a thunderclap and a bladelike flash of hostile intent.

Fuck, it was loud! Everybody went down, waited, and indeed the gunfire abated. So off they went. Was there a man dismayed? Yes, all of them, each heavily dismayed. Still, they went. Onward, onward, lurched the thirty-five.

Most of them made it to the hedgerow, sheltered in it, and tried to see through its density even as again gossamers of sheer radiance drifted overhead.

Archer had a sense of human figures fleeing on the other side of the bocage, but no targets presented themselves with enough clarity to fire at. Next to him, Goldberg was too winded to consider firing, as breathing was his current drama.

“Holy Christ,” he said. “Can you believe we made it?”

“Gary, here, let me get your safety off.” He took the weapon, though no Superman was strong enough to force the safety forward where sludge, dirt, and other filth had sealed it shut. The prospect of Goldberg with a hot M1 in his hands did not fill him with confidence, however.

“Be careful with that thing. Keep your finger off the trigger unless you aim at something.”

Sergeant McKinney worked his line.

“Okay, guys, good work, stay low. Get ready to dig in if we get the order. You guys okay? Goldberg, good job, glad to see you up here with the big kids. Archer, watch out for your little buddy. He might need some help. Get his fucking gear on right, okay?”

Archer went to work reorganizing Goldberg’s hopelessly tangled mess of straps and things and soon they reverted to their little game.

“How cool is McKinney?”

“Coolest so far,” said Goldberg. “Much cooler than Malfo.”

Cool, meaning somehow glamorous and capable at once and therefore intrinsically admirable, was part of the vocabulary of their own private Jack-Gary War, no one else permitted. Goldberg had picked it up from some colored musicians on a Harlem jazz expedition in 1943, and had brought it into play with Archer, who got it right away. Nobody else did.

“Cool enough to qualify as a war-god?”

This was the highest form of cool. They had yet to meet anyone that cool.

“I go with godlike. Almost there. Definitely deity class. Not way up there, but at least a lesser god, maybe a half god. Did you see the way the German tracers refused to get near him? They sensed his might.”

“Maybe he’s so Olympian he can actually keep us alive.”

“Doubtful, but who can tell?”

A few minutes passed. A few guys smoked. In the meadow behind them, medics worked on the fallen. The sun was still out. Socks were burned, but not so intensely. The dry snap, pop, and crackle of infantry small-arms fire randomly provided background music, most of it from far away. It was all a movie, except it wasn’t. From their position, neither Goldberg nor Archer could tell who had been hit or how bad. Was anybody actually dead?

A message was relayed down the line, man to man to man, under the “Pass it on” mandate.

“We’re pulling out. Back to original positions. In five. Wait for the mortars for cover. Pass it on.”

Archer passed it on to Goldberg, who passed it on to…

“All right, Jack,” said Goldberg, “you tell me: What was the point?”

Not even Archer, who knew everything, could come up with an answer.

CHAPTER 21 Luftwaffe

“So if the Germans aren’t using new technology, what are they using?” asked Brigadier Stacy.

“Men,” said Swagger. “Certain men.”

Bright day in London. Outside and far off, the now-moot barrage balloons drifted musically, riding as much wind as their cables would permit this way, that way. What trees could be seen were green with midsummer leaf, glittering as they wobbled in the same low breeze. Sun glints marked bombers en route to Germany not yet high enough to mark the sky with contrails, and the honk and squawk of traffic — muted, to be sure — nevertheless rose to the third floor and to Room 351.

“Not sure I—” the brigadier began, and Swagger cut him off, knowing him to be more interested in intelligence than etiquette.

“There are certain men with unusually good vision among those millions with solid but ordinary vision. A ballplayer like Ted Williams is one example. It’s said he can read the rotation of the ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand. That’s how he hit .400.”

“So you think the Germans have put together a squad of .400 hitters. They aren’t that easy to find.”

“Maybe if you know where to look, it gets easier,” said Earl.

“Go ahead, Major. This is very interesting.”

“I’m guessing these Germans started with the vision requirement. They knew they needed men who could see in the low light of dawn and nightfall when everyone else was still blind.”

“I could see finding such men in routine eye exams. But an eye exam wouldn’t tell you much about guts. Where would you find such men? There can’t be many.”

“Exactly. So, putting the two together, I’m figuring on a squad of former fighter pilots. You have to meet high vision requirements to hunt men fifteen thousand feet up at three hundred and fifty miles an hour, and you also have to understand the principles of marksmanship such as deflection, drop, and windage. But clearly you need guts in spades. And something else: mental strength. It’s not easy work. You’re mostly alone, and if it goes wrong, nobody can get you out of it, so you have to have resilience and high adaptability. Fighter pilot, dawn sniper. Pretty much the same thing.”

“Seems credible.”

“I’m thinking fighter pilots who’ve been injured. It takes a lot of refined skill to fly something as complex as a fighter plane well, to say nothing of reflexes, and coolness. A bullet, a bad burn, broken legs from a too-low parachute landing — all that can reduce aerial capability. So why not transfer Lieutenant Von Richthofen from the Eastern Front, where he’s shot down fifty Yaks until one finally got him, to the Western, where his same batch of talents makes him an extremely dangerous sniper, except he doesn’t have to have the reflexes or the ability to watch fifteen different dials while under fire. He’ll get the same fifty kills damned fast.”

“What does this tell us? How does this help us?”

“First off, it goes to tactics. Let’s look hard at German fighter doctrine. How do they attack? What are their tendencies? If that’s their core training, under pressure they’ll revert to it. That can help us predict their moves.”

“Excellent,” said the brigadier. “I’ll put it to my superiors and we’ll get you talks with our air-to-air combat veterans. They’ll know what the German does in the skies.”

“Yes, sir, extremely helpful. But another aspect here is what you might call bureaucratic. This isn’t happening by chance but in a highly organized structure, one that prides itself on record keeping, discipline, rigor, labor, and thoroughness. So it leaves tracks. To put such a thing together, someone has to go somewhere, propose it, get sponsorship for it, set it up organizationally. It was thoughtfully constructed, layer by layer, by someone who knew what the needs were but also how to slide it through the machine. A senior executive, you might say.”

“One man.”

“I see one man conceptualizing, knowing where to find his talent pool, selling someone with influence, and assembling the ace’s sniper unit. That has to leave tracks. Therefore: a unit designation or operational code name, records of manpower requests, travel orders to collect the right personnel, a budget. As I said, this SS thing the Germans have would be the natural home for such a unit.”

“SS,” said Brigadier Stacy, “is at the center of most of their worst mischief.”

“But they’re also new, right, sir?” asked Swagger. “Meaning not tangled up in tradition, politics, rivalries, and grudges that never disappear. So these guys could set it up fast.”

“They certainly could,” said Stacy.

“We don’t have high sources in the SS,” said Colonel Bruce. “It’s tight, and Himmler is a fanatic at security. But we do have radio intercepts.”

“I’d advise having our analysts look hard at those intercepts again with a new focus: anything involving movement of fighter pilots, acquisition of telescopic sights and match-grade rifles, construction of shooting ranges near the front, transfers of senior instructors from sniper schools to Normandy, anything of that nature. I’d look for any unusual communications between Luftwaffe and SS HQs. Meanwhile, I’ll send Leets out to some fighter bases to talk to our own aces about the Luftwaffe doctrines.”

“I’ll communicate this to SHAEF command and we’ll all get behind it for a big push,” said Brigadier Stacy.

“Lieutenant Leets, pack your bags.”

CHAPTER 22 Coach & Horses

Overfed, overequipped, and over here, the Americans of the OSS variety had taken up a nearby pub as theirs till parade’s end. It was called the Coach & Horses, and to anyone who cared — Earl did not — it was a mock-Tudor building a few blocks from Grosvenor at the edge of Mayfair. If he had cared — he did not — the Tudor connection would explain its white stucco sustained by struts of dark wood, its gabled roof, its wooden shingles, its Shakespearean melody in a district otherwise given to now-empty department stores, from the days when Mayfair was so chic even Vivien Leigh shopped there.

Earl only cared about the directions — gotten from Sebastian while Leets was out hanging with the Thunderbolt heroes in the hinterlands — and the address, No. 5, Bruton Street.

He entered, not to find a road show production of Hamlet unreeling, but about two dozen clearly American bodies that spilled or hunched or leaned everywhere amid a rippling Pacific of cigarette smoke and the clink and slosh of beer and harder being indiscriminately absorbed. Noise too, lots of it, for as a species your Yank cannot keep his mouth shut, even when another Yank is sounding off, and so in their race for dominance the effect is that of people shattering dishes in the back room of a large cafeteria.

No one paid him the slightest attention — just another American officer — as he slid in, found a space at the bar. The lone Brit barman, so used to Americans by now he could almost speak the lingo, landed quickly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t know your beers. Something with bite. You pick it.”

“Yes, sir. I see no branch insignia. I know what that means. First one’s on the Coach & Horses, for your help.”

“There’s inter-Allied cooperation for you. Bring it, and maybe I’ll ask you for more help.”

“Glad to oblige,” said the barman.

If Earl noted such things, he might have been impressed by the late medieval buzz of the place, illuminated by flickering lanterns, all of the large and complicated room well fitted with wood, mostly buttress and panel, all with a walnut glow. Shields, a boar’s head, crossed broadswords, and a helm or two suggested that knighthood had been in flower until yesterday.

The barman slid the brew across and Earl sampled and approved, though of course he found it a bit warm.

“Not being nosy, Major, but I’ve become expert on American accents. Can I try and place yours?”

“Go ahead,” said Earl.

“All right, southern for sure. But not Texas, which is somehow broader and slower. I’d say mid-South, narrowing it to a belt running from North Carolina to Tennessee to Arkansas. Of the three, I’d pick Arkansas, as perhaps just as flavorful but less forceful than the others.”

“Town called Blue Eye,” said Earl. “West of Little Rock and Hot Springs, not far from Oklahoma. Good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, since you’re so good, I’m sure you can recognize a New York City accent.”

The barman rolled his eyes.

“They sound like the IRA planning the bombing of a post office.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Irish, real Irish.”

“I’ve no brief for the Irish, sir, nor am I opposed. But these chaps are indeed the loudest and most demanding. Are they bosses in America?”

“They seem to think so, I’ve noticed.”

“Indeed.”

“Is there a mob of them here tonight?”

“As always. The large table in the back then.”

“And I’m betting the loudest is a Major Tyne.”

“Seems to be their squadron leader. I can see him, looking over your shoulder. Back to wall, jacket off. Well bellied. Ginger turning gray. Face like a potato sack, and as usual needed an evening shave, which he didn’t do. He’s quite the loudest. The others seem to find his braying mesmerizing.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll quietly finish this, then go conduct some business with Major Tyne.”

Leets sat at a table at the 56th Fighter Group officers’ club at AAF-150, until recently called RAF Boxted.

Behind the wall was a large white piece of painted wood with the insignia of the 56th at the center, a bolt of lightning bent to fill a blue chevron running across an orange shield. Below was a mysterious Latin inscription: Cave Tonitrum. Surrounding this emblem, arrayed row on row, small swastikas filled much but not all of the available space. The two men sharing tobacco and bourbon with him had put many of those swastikas up there.

They wore leather, crinkly and twisted yet still shiny brown, signifying newness, used not years but months. Underneath, open-necked khaki shirts well beaten by years and laundering so they looked all puckered like prehistoric lion skin. They wore — even indoors and in defiance of the rules and regs, as if droit du roi—officers’ caps, though scrunched almost shapeless by the pressure of radio earphones. Nothing else of note.

It was a dark room, full of smoke and other men in leather. The leather, of course, was the Army Air Forces’s Type A-2 flight jacket, which used to be an elite fighter pilot’s signifier but was so attractive, it had been taken up by everyone, everywhere who could get their hands on one. Two hundred bucks on the London black market.

“So, Lieutenant, I notice you don’t have any branch insignia on your lapel. What would that mean?”

“He can’t tell you,” said the other, the dry stick whose face communicated the spontaneity of marble. “It’s top secret. He’s with the spies.”

“Something like that, sir.”

“Well, then, let’s move on. You also have a silver rifle on a blue plaque with a wreath on it atop your little array of decorations. What’s that?”

“It’s called the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, sir.”

“So you’ve been shot at?”

“Nowhere near as much as you guys.”

“I saw you limping after the XO made the intros. Did someone hit you?” asked the one clearly classifiable as human.

“Yes, sir.”

“Story, if you please,” said the dry one, his eyes the color of the ball bearings that probably filled his dreams.

They were the champions, one voluble and sparkly, the other some kind of brainiac machine the War Department was rumored to have in its basement.

“Not much. I was part of a team that dropped into Normandy the night of the invasion. We were supposed to blow a bridge to slow down the arrival of German reinforcements. We blew it, but some very good people didn’t make it out. I was the lucky one.”

“What’s your first name, young man?”

“Jim.”

“Okay, Jim, Army Air Forces isn’t Army, we don’t make much of rank, only what’s been earned. I’m Gabby. He’s Bob. Now tell us what you need.”

Earl found a small, empty table. The barmaid finally saw him and came over.

“You’d be having, then, sir?”

“Jameson. A bottle. Two shot glasses.”

“Ooh, that’s expensive, sir. It’s not on the regular ticket.”

“Take this. Keep whatever’s left.”

He slipped her a hundred. Her eyes went all goo-goo on him, since the dough meant so much more to her than him, maybe meat off the rationing for her youngsters. She smiled, showing standard Brit twisted teeth, and left. He lit a Camel, inhaled, enjoyed. The place had a nice buzz. A man could relax here.

She returned with the bottle, opened it, poured out a shot.

“One more thing,” he said. “Go over to that big table.”

“Them bloody micks?”

“That’s it. The big guy, back to wall—”

“Major Tyne, that would be.”

“You got it. Tell him Major Swagger would like to buy him a drink.”

“He’d do near on anything for a taste of Jameson’s, I’m betting.”

“I’m making the same bet.”

He watched. She went to Tyne, bent, whispered. Tyne looked over at Earl, seeing him for the first time. He nodded. Earl nodded back, affably. Tyne said something to the goon squad, and the table erupted in laughter. The guy was evidently quite a comedian.

Eventually, Tyne stood — a lot of belly wobbled against gravity — and lumbered over. Big guy, lots of meat. Red face, needed that shave, pug nose tilted up. The mug said Ireland everywhere, his ginger coils still sea-foam frothy but now going north toward winter.

Earl stood, smiled.

“Major,” he said, “thanks for joining me.”

“Happy to oblige, Swagger. What’s this all about?”

“I’m hoping we can talk out any problems.”

“Sure,” said Tyne. “Neater, happier that way. Stay friends, go drinking, enjoy London.”

“My goal exactly. Please, tell me why I’m on your shit list,” Swagger said, pouring him a shot of the J.

“I was a New York cop for fifteen years,” Tyne said. “Walked a beat. It was the Tom Dewey era.”

“The hero DA?”

“Hero my ass. Another pol, like all of them, only in it for himself. Publicity hound. Anyway, he was big on special squads. Anti-racket. Anti — Murder, Inc. Anti-dope. Anti-whore. All these little units with a favored guy in charge. They reported to nobody, didn’t work in the squad room, had nothing to do with beat cops. So much better than beat cops. But in the end they did nothing. In the end they accounted for none of the money they spent, they didn’t make any arrests, they busted no hoods. Lepke Buchalter went to the chair because of Lepke Buchalter, nothing Tom Dewey did. So every time I hear of some ‘special squad’ deal like you guys have going in your Room 351, with the MP outside and a direct line to Bruce and an unlimited budget, it gets me remembering what a joke ‘special squads’ are.”

“And that’s why you want us under you?”

“Oh, you know? You’ve seen the memo. It was supposed to be confidential.”

“I heard about it.”

“Listen, nothing personal here, pal. I just know how things work in this building.”

“So what can I do to please you? Is there one thing to get you behind us instead of against us?”

The Irishman poured himself another slug of Jameson, finished it in a single gulp, and then another.

“One reason you’re so golden at 70 G is because you’ve got a golden boy. The ‘hero.’ Leets. Everybody thinks he’s the John Wayne of OSS. But he ain’t. I’ve seen the photos. They didn’t really blow the bridge; they just sort of twisted it. Only one buttress went down. SS Das Reich got it back up by the night of the ninth; they were funneling panzers to the front. So what did Leets accomplish to get a Silver Star and a CIB and all the gals in love with him? Not a goddamn thing. While guys like me, who set up the whole Jedburgh thing”—did he know this was a lie or had he come to believe it himself? — “we get nothing. A golden boy, a secret squad reporting to nobody — it’s bad shit, Major. Everybody in 70 hates it. If you like your career, you’d better think of some way to deal with it.”

“Where would I start?” asked Swagger.

“Get Leets transferred. There’s a training camp outside D.C. in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I spent some time there. He could teach marksmanship, combat leadership, patrolling, radio contact. He’d do much better there than here. Hell, it would even be better for him. He’d be a star. He’d actually be John Wayne. Word would get around.”

“I see,” said Earl.

“Second, go to Bruce. Tell him you’d feel better if a senior executive was looking over your shoulder. Someone with field experience.”

“You’ve been in the field?”

“It’s a long story. I know my way around, believe me. So we move whatever is going on in Room 351 to Special Operations, where I’m vice-chief, under my direct command. Then I could judge what would be important, what not. I could take the important stuff to Bruce. He’s got a lot on his mind, no sense in troubling him with detail. He’s really a politician, not a military guy. Then I could take it to SHAEF. Make a presentation. I know how to do it. That place is a nightmare, believe me, I think you’d be lost over there. You’d get blindsided by some ambitious lieutenant colonel, he’d take credit for your work, and all rewards would go to him. If he was West Point, his pals would grease the tracks for him. Happens all the time. You’ve got to know the ropes like I do.”

“They promised me no politics.”

“I don’t know what you’re used to, but everything is politics. Look, I know you’re really just a sergeant in the Marine Corps. But I’m trying not to be an asshole about this. You play ball with me, I’ll see you keep that rank. Maybe join my staff. You seem like a good egg; maybe we can work it out so that we both benefit.”

He poured himself another shot. The bottle was already three-quarters gone.

“Good whiskey,” he said.

“Actually,” said Earl, “I do have another proposal. Let me run it by you, just to see what you think of it.”

“Sure, no harm done,” said Tyne.

“We can’t say anything bad about the German aviators we face,” said Bob. “They are brave, resourceful, well-trained, and determined. They are the best, and how you win or lose has nothing to do with tactics, only with experience, luck, and maybe the fact that the Jug is a bit better than the 109, performance-wise.”

The Jugs — official designation, P-47 Thunderbolts — that they flew were huge-engined tubes of steel not particularly designed for streamline but only for power. They attacked the atmosphere with a gigantic four-bladed propellor and a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine that cranked them up to 400. In a power dive, some had come close to 600. They were strong, impossible to bring down, and flown by men who got in close, held off till dead zero, then hammered the German kites with eight .50s. Nothing left but a smear of smoke in the sky.

Compared to the Me 109 that they flew against or the P-51 they flew with — both looked like sharks — they looked like the fat kid who lives down the block. The pilots sat atop all this engine in a little plastic bubble for a full 360-degree scan that would be the coming thing in fighter design. But for all their bluntness of design, they were the fastest airplane up there. They ate the sky.

“So you don’t think—”

“I see some things that might help you, Jim.” Friendly guy, next to Mr. Brain Machine. He seemed like a Wisconsin bartender.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Gabby, not sir. Have another sip. That’s an order.”

He laughed at his own joke. But Leets took the bourbon, savored and enjoyed it, but not as much as he enjoyed sitting like a kid in the presence of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

“They do have some peculiarities that might bear on your sniper theory,” said Bob. “For one thing, they’re willing to stay and fight within the bomber stream itself. That is a very risky proposition. There are planes everywhere, they are moving, changing positions, and meanwhile us Jug jockeys are trying to get on their tails and flame them, so it’s an incredibly uncomfortable situation. I’m equating that to the sniper’s need to stay jacked in an uncomfortable position, especially when the targets are near. It takes a certain kind of concentration, maybe the same kind. No weak sisters need apply. The highly nervous wash out in flight school and sometimes even guys who can do everything lose their nerve and are quietly rotated home before fifty missions, so they don’t kill themselves or anyone else.”

“Guts,” said Leets. “We figured that would be high on the list of similarities.”

“Second in both cases,” Gabby continued. “You’re either a hero or dead. Nothing in between. Fighter pilots rarely go home because of wounds. If the plane is hit, it burns, and if he gets out — he doesn’t always — he goes into a POW camp, if he’s not shot on sight.”

“That’s sniper stuff,” said Leets. “Occasionally but not always they’re taken prisoner. Their job is to show no mercy so they know that mercy isn’t coming to them. They also know that from most hides — say, a tree, a church steeple, a hill — there’s no getting out. You’re stuck there. So they live with that, just like the pilot.”

“Good,” said Bob. “Here’s another one. I’d call it tactical selection. Against our big birds, the Germans prefer the twelve o’clock approach — that is, straight on at the front. They come right at the big birds because they know that way they’re in less danger of retaliatory fire. The top turret of the Fort can’t crank low enough, and on the G model, that chin turret looks good, but it’s mostly for morale purposes. It’s run by the navigator, but he’s not behind the gun, he’s behind the bombardier in the fuselage, and the thing is a robot servo-mechanism. I don’t know of a single German that’s been shot down by the chin gun.”

“So how does that equate to a sniper—”

“There’s another reason for a twelve o’clock angle: that’s his easiest angle to the cockpit. He knows if he kills the brain, the animal dies. No pilot, no airplane. His whole thing is based on getting the brain shot, because you can fill a Fort with holes so that it looks like Fearless Fosdick, but it stays up there. Kill the boys flying it and down she goes. No sadder sight than a Fort going in. You pray for chutes and sometimes you get ’em, but usually you don’t.”

“Maybe an ex-fighter pilot sniper,” said Gabby, “is choosing his variation of the Fort-killing shot. Tactical selection. Back of the head — there’s the parallel there. The cockpit. That’s what he’s trained to do, and on the ground, in the low light, he probably goes back to that training.”

“That’s very good,” said Leets.

“The other stuff — the eyesight, the awareness of shooting realities, including deflection, trajectory, and velocity — all that lines up nicely,” said Gabby.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “It’s almost a shame it’s baloney.”

“See, here’s how I’d handle it,” said Swagger. “Let’s you and me go outside, find a nice alley, and square off. Just so you know, I’m the three-time light-heavyweight champion of the Pacific Fleet. In ’39, I won my last fight on the deck of the Arizona in Manila Bay in front of two thousand gobs and marines. Fifteen rounds. A long, hard night’s work. Negro cook; he was a good fighter. You’re not.”

Tyne swallowed air hard.

“So I’ll punch you so hard in the mouth, you’ll shit teeth for a month.” He smiled. The red vanished from Tyne’s face as if his carotid had just been cut and he was emptying fast. A pasty white swept across his features.

Swagger lit another cigarette, just to show the big man how tremorless his scarred hands were. Meanwhile he kept a steady glare on the guy, watching him melt under its power.

“Y-you’re making a big mistake, pal,” said Tyne finally.

“I don’t think so. I think I just ran over a cop who thinks he’s still wearing a badge when in fact he’s not wearing anything but a belly.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“Sure I can, Fatso. Anytime I want.”

“I have friends, I have connections… When this gets around, you are dead, pal, and I mean dead.”

“You tell ’em and I’d bet they’d wonder why big, tough ex-cop Tyne let some Arkansas cracker push him so hard he pissed three pairs of pants.”

“I–I—I—”

“You, you, you — my ass. See, I had someone who knows how to do it pull your OSS file. You haven’t seen any action, mick. You haven’t been in spitting distance of the Germans. You haven’t been in howitzer distance of the Germans. You’ve always had an ocean or a channel between you and them. In my book, lying about combat is as lowdown trash as it gets. I’ve seen too many good young men die to let an ass-licking, politics-playing, potato-sucking monkey like you get away with it. You come after my people again and I will chop you up for Irish stew. Now get your fat carcass out of here. I have a bottle to finish. Only men with guts allowed at this table.”

CHAPTER 23 Television

Archer and Goldberg were having an important discussion. They were also digging an important hole. Aerial photos had revealed that the Germans never returned to their positions, so the entire company moved one hundred yards eastward to the next hedgerow, theirs by right of conquest and German disinterest. However, it would remain theirs only by right of fortification.

Thus, the hole. It was for two men, as the entire hedgerow line would now be staffed by two-man foxholes. To occupy a hole, you have to dig it first. Neither of the young men enjoyed this part of the infantry life, while on the other hand they despised all the other parts of the infantry life too.

The Model 1910 T-handled entrenching tool each G.I. carried with him was basically worthless. It wasn’t an actual shovel, being too short and light. It provided no leverage. Its main use was for tossing French apples into the air and batting them into atomic particles, always a good time killer. As a tool rather than a recreational device, it was calculated to do maximum damage to the lower lumbar region while doing minimum damage to the ground. It took a massive effort to cram it into the earth, twist it free, and hoist the load out, and for all of that, you got about a spoonful of dirt. Evidently it had been designed and adapted by the Army before anyone noticed soldiers all had backs, particularly those unused to physical labor of any kind, like comedy writers and engineering students. So the hole did not progress at any meaningful speed, while all up and down the line, men had finished theirs, having cut gaps in the actual wall of dirt before them so that they could fire on the next hedgerow, which was exactly like this one and exactly like the last one. The bullet garden was forever.

But the time digging was not wasted, as nothing less than the future was discussed. “I’m telling you, it’s the next big thing,” said Goldberg between teaspoonfuls of earth. “And the point is, you have to get in on the ground floor. Once they have it built, the only way in is via connections. And my only connection is my uncle Max, the cabbie, who once drove Fred Allen to the Bronx.”

“Gary,” said Archer, patiently explaining the reality of the situation, “the American people go to their radios every night and listen to news, music, comedy, and drama. Gang Busters, Dick Tracy, The Goldbergs, The Pepsodent Show with Bob Hope, The Mercury Theatre on the Air—it’s entirely satisfying to them. They like a theater of pure sound. They don’t want to change. If they want pictures, they go to the movies. To them, pictures are people twelve to twenty-five feet high, sometimes in color, with teeth the size of hubcaps and eyes the size of oil tanks. That’s the rhythm. That’s what they’re used to, that’s what they love. They’re not going to chuck that to watch shows no better than the radio with pictures, what, ten inches high, if that, blurry black-and-white, no less. Why would they do that? What’s in it for them?”

“Jack, they say the big networks are already pouring the bucks into the television kaboodle. They’re betting on it being big. You’ll have a million G.I.s coming home—”

“Not us, because we’ll be dead.”

“Of course. But let’s skip the dead part. It’s too depressing. Let’s go to New York, 1948, the miracle of the television, and the one thing it’s going to need more than anything which is—”

“Dames with huge kabongas.”

“Besides that. Hell, everybody needs dames with huge kabongas. No, what they’ll need is writers. Someone has to figure out what the dames will say. They can’t just say, ‘Hey, look at my kabongas!’ ”

“That would be enough for me.”

“No, they need skits, lines, little stories, segue lines to the commercials, jokes, they need jokes, and the bigger it gets, the more jokes it needs.”

“And that’s how Gary cracks the big time.”

“Yeah, and—”

“All right, take ten, smoke if you got ’em,” yelled McKinney, the god sergeant, walking down the line. “Well, except you guys, you two geniuses, finish your goddamn hole, for Christ’s sake. Archer, can’t you teach him how to fasten his canteen to his cartridge belt?”

“He refuses to learn,” Archer said, but by that time the sergeant was gone, on to the next few boys, and then the next.

So the two guys actually applied themselves and got the hole dug at least deep enough to protect them from—

But suddenly McKinney was back.

“Okay, you jokers, you’re off the line. CO just radioed. He wants you guys back at the bivouac area at Battalion Headquarters.”

“Us?” said Archer, astounded that anybody had noticed them.

“Yeah, you. Take a shower, shave, get a good night’s sleep in a tent instead of that sorry hole, crap in a latrine, not the mud, put on some clean clothes. He wants you sharp tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Is it our cover shoot for Life as ‘G.I.s of the Year’?” asked Goldberg.

“One of these days your wisecracks aren’t going to make me laugh, Goldberg, and then you’ll be up shit creek. No, for some reason some hotshot intelligence guys are coming in to talk with you. Archer, make sure his straps are on right.”