The Bullet Garden

CHAPTER 24 Milton Hall

On the day of, Leets just back from his journey to the Thunderbolt gods, Sebastian drove them to Milton Hall, ninety minutes north of London, where the OSS and SOE lads had trained to form up into Jed teams. Jed teams that hadn’t gone in yet were still much in evidence.

There, the two kitted up, drawing what was necessary from the supply rooms in the cellar of the big, fancy house where Leets had bunked for a couple of months. They were issued battle gear in the paratrooper style, which meant everything was slightly more raffish than the usual G.I. gear, as the paratroopers were the most stylish of the invading forces.

The only trouble came at the arms room, where both men presumed to require Thompson submachine guns, because both had fought with them before. The NCOIC was surly. Thompsons, especially the newish military-only M1A1 variant, were a treasure and he hated to issue them to guys not of a Jed team, no matter what OSS command demanded.

He tried to stick them with something called a UD-42. It was a 9mm replacement for the Thompson that the Army didn’t like and never went anywhere, so the first and only run of manufactured guns were dumped on OSS. The thing looked like a toy and was so delicate it would disassemble itself at the threat of combat. Then there was that little Mickey Mouse caliber, the 9, which by Swagger’s thinking was something that belonged in a boy’s club, not a war.

“Thompsons,” said Leets. “M1A1s, not ’28s.”

So, after much drama, the sergeant issued them the guns, each battered enough to suggest tales could be told, plus ten thirty-round magazines, a Remington Rand 1911A1 pistol with two mags, a pull-over tanker’s shoulder holster, and five boxes of .45 ACP.

“We’ll fill mags on the way to the airfield,” Swagger said.

For him, sitting in the back of the car with the big gun across his knees, busting his thumb sliding .45s into the long magazines, it was like old-home week. He’d fought his wars with Thompsons since 1934 and had drawn blood with each iteration, the first Colt-manufactured 1921s, glorious royal blue almost too beautiful for rough usage. G-men and marines and gangsters loved it for the same reason moviemakers did: it was so sweet. It was never clear who was copying whom. Then came the ’28, less polished, less finished. And now the M1A1, a blunt wartime expedience, stripped of glamour and thus more glamorous, in gray phosphate with all flashy touches banished in favor of the rugged, the reliable, the easier to manufacture — exactly as a sergeant hoped the men in his platoon would be. The signature vertical foregrip, which paralleled the sculpted angle of the pistol grip on the preceding generations, was one such. In its place, a utilitarian forestock lay under the barrel. The sight was a prong with a hole in it, the bolt a knob now on the side instead of the top, the elegant muzzle compensator devolved into a pig’s snout.

It didn’t matter. The damned thing was still a choreography in steel and walnut furniture of angles, planes, sweeps and streamlines that achieved spontaneous, perhaps accidental perfection, art deco on the way to pure classicism. Of its beauty, he was quiet, as that was private, between man and gun. On its utility he could be eloquent. It was heavy, solid, reliable. More than once Swagger had used his to save his or others’ lives, and it never let him down, always issuing destruction with urgent precision to those who would do harm. He couldn’t imagine going to war without one.

The plane — now called a C-47 in place of its nom du temps de paix DC-3, with the giant letters CU in white against the dark green just under the cockpit — clearly had just barely survived a rough D-Day night. Rocked back on its tail wheel, nose up pugnaciously, it displayed battle dress of black and white stripes on its fuselage, tail, and wings. That scheme had been adopted as identifiers to keep it from being shot down by its own side’s fighters. Nevertheless, the Germans had not been confused and managed to fill this one with holes and rips.

But CU, under the guidance of its teenaged captain, got them there, despite the roaring currents that poured through its tattered fuselage. It was late afternoon when they finally set down at Deux-Jumeaux, one of the dozens of hasty airfields erected on the Cotentin Peninsula primarily by bulldozing a farm field flat, and then laying down a thousand feet of steel plating.

On the ground they encountered few surprises. Both knew that war was squalor. Wherever it touches, it leaves mess, litter, destruction, discarded or damaged equipment, knots of listless men who seem to have nothing to do, a few earnest heroes trying to make sense of it all and keep things going, and junk everywhere, plus more junk, and then some junk. That is what they expected; that is what they got at Deux-Jumeaux.

They hustled off the plane and out of the way of the guys in T-shirts who would be unloading stuff and soon found a jeep with a First Army intelligence officer, who ferried them quickly to First Army HQ for that night’s bunking.

“You guys must be exhausted,” he said, maneuvering his way through a misery of mud around dead tanks, some turretless, some burned to husks, some upended like toys by a child’s rage. It seemed the metallic corpses were equally of German or American affiliation. The roads were bordered with telephone wires, which looked like thick, twisted vines in the jungle; dozens of wires draped and hung over what trees remained or simply trailed on the ground. Sullen squads of infantrymen, looking like used machinery, moved aside for the vehicle but were uncurious about its contents. They just wanted to get where they had to be and sack out. Now and then the major had to sideline the jeep as a column of Shermans ground along the road, pulling up a coughing fit’s worth of dust as well as releasing spumes of octane consumption and more noise than could be easily borne. They sounded like radiators clattering down a marble staircase. Meanwhile, too far off, artillery landed, small-arms fire cracked, buildings burned, men squatted and shat, crawled and died, became heroes or cowards, sometime the same man in the same five minutes.

“We’re fine,” Swagger said. “Just checking here, but you’ve got the names and units of the men we’re here to see and transportation to and from?”

“It’s laid on, more or less. You know the units are always moving, depending on the local situation, so you may have to improvise.”

“I think we can do that. Any luck with my request to interrogate a captured German sniper?”

“We’re still looking, but things here are confused and if and when we take snipers, they’re in no hurry to tell us what they did. They think we’re going to torture or execute them.”

“We’re not here to torture or execute anyone,” said Swagger. “We just need information.”

The First Army HQ officers’ mess, third tent on the right after a left turn at the intersection of Tent and Tent, was unsurprisingly sodden, a bigger tent with a food line, overhead bulbs, and the smell of musty canvas obliterating the smell of the food, which might have been a blessing. The chow was basic field Army: corn beef, canned corn, a teaspoon of watery mashed potatoes, and all the thinned milk or coffee or powdered lemonade you could drink. At least, unlike the K rations that would sustain them from now on, it was reasonably warm and salted up.

They sat alone, but eventually a known face emerged from the background. It was Colonel McBain, of First Army S-2, who’d received the 70 Gros briefing. They rose but he gestured them down, dispensing with the etiquette required but usually ignored in a war zone.

“The general wanted me to tell you he found your analysis of our sniper problem first-class work.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Swagger.

The general, of course — the “G.I.’s General,” as the press had fashioned the First Army commander — had a widely known aversion to actual G.I.s of any rank below field grade. He was a work-haunted technocrat who kept to his own tent and quarters and communicated with the world through a cadre of colonels, like McBain.

“We’re hoping for the same quality in your next phase.”

“We’ll do our best, sir.”

“If you have any difficulties, just radio call sign Master-2-Alpha. That’s G-2, Army-level. The message will get to us and the difficulty will go away.”

“Good to know, sir.”

“Enjoy your meals, pick up a beer or two at the officers’ club and sack out. You meet your driver at 0430. Sergeant Major McElroy. He’s old Army, knows everything and everybody.”

“Yes, sir.”

That was it. First Army, after its leader, was an entity of few words.

The officers’ bar — another tent, two tents down from the original tent but on the other side of the tent street, not far from another intersection of Tent and Tent — was stocked with tables and chairs and held little charm. It looked just like the inside of a tent. It was pretty empty except for cigarette smoke and the odor of a nearby latrine, and Swagger and Leets found a place quickly enough. They each had a beer.

“All set for tomorrow, Leets?”

“Yes, sir,” Leets said.

“Okay, Leets,” Swagger said. “Normally, I don’t pay mind to what the people under me say or think. It’s bad leadership to get too close to a subordinate. But since it’s only the two of us and I am dependent on your skills and enthusiasm, I’m going to break my policy. I’ve been around this business enough to know when someone’s got the snoot on. It’s not that I miss your chatter or want to hear about how your girlfriend broke up with you, but I need to know what’s eating you and whether it’s going to fuck us up. Did you figure out the Luftwaffe fighter pilot theory was bullshit?”

CHAPTER 25 Confidential

A shadow fell across her typewriter. Millie looked up to see the unwelcome figure of Major Frank Tyne looming over her. He wore his full Class As, not just his less formal Ike jacket, with his decorations, all three of them, pinned to his chest.

“Major Tyne. Oh, you surprised me.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak in. The door was open and—”

It was late on a Thursday afternoon. She was alone in the office, and after her typing still had to make mimeo copies of the SHAEF daily sitrep to go to all division chiefs, go over the colonel’s weekend schedule, and make arrangements for his transportation.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m just finishing up some typing.”

“I came by because I have something for the colonel. I hoped to get it to him right away. I don’t want it going into the circular file, where most of my other—”

“Oh, Frank, don’t be silly. Your memoranda go into his in-box the same as everybody’s. He sets the priorities, and if he doesn’t get back to you, it simply means he sees other concerns as more important.”

“Well, I’d like to give this to him personally.”

“He left for Scotland this morning. We had a dust-up between one of our training cadre and a local policeman. Alcohol and fisticuffs were involved. Lots of ill feelings were unleashed. It called for someone of Colonel Bruce’s diplomatic skill.”

“Oh. Well, then, I guess I’ll have to take it to SHAEF. Maybe they’ll act quickly as the law requires.”

“What does the law have to do with it?”

“By law, military entities are required to respond to these inside of twenty-four hours.”

He handed over a manila envelope. It bore the impressive seal in one corner that declared it to be an official document from the United States Congress.

“Frank, this is so unnecessary. I’m so disappointed in you, Frank.”

“Millie, your boyfriend, Leets? Get ready to kiss him good-bye. He’s on his way to Burma.”

CHAPTER 26 Talk

“They said—” began Leets.

“I’ll tell you what they said,” said Swagger. “They said that the similarities between fighter pilots and snipers are superficial. They don’t mean a thing.”

“Something like that,” said Leets, trying to figure an angle on this development. It hadn’t occurred to him that Swagger knew the fighter thing was bogus.

“The sniper is oriented to achieve stillness,” said Swagger. “He’s got a simple yet refined thing to do. But its microscopic: a single tremor of finger or wisp of breath and he misses. Maybe he gives up his position and his life for nothing.”

“Yes, I see. That seemed to be what they were getting at.”

The major lit a Camel, took a drag, enjoyed, expelled a cloud that hung in the stale air, captured under canvas like everyone else’s smoke.

“The fighter pilot,” he said, “has to be an eyes-everywhere guy. He’s got a 360 to monitor. He’s got calculations to perform, meaning his own direction and how it relates to other objects in the immediate vicinity, friends or enemy, all moving at three hundred and fifty miles an hour in three-dimensional space. Plus, he’s got fifteen gauges, twenty-one lights, and thirty-five switches to monitor. Oh, and folks are shooting at him and big airplanes are all around. Did I mention flak? Did I mention the pull of gravity? Did I mention a tiny gunsight in all that expanse of canopy? Did I mention cramps from sitting, chill from the altitude, mask discomfort, anxiety about the oxygen flow from it?”

“They were more gentle in their explanation.”

“I’ll add something they didn’t think of. That is, 3D versus 2D. The fighter pilot is in space, the sniper is on space. The fighter pilot has to operate up, down, and sideways, among other folks operating up, down, and sideways. So it’s not only important what’s happening now, but how all those things will be happening, and where, in five seconds, ten seconds, and so on. Meanwhile the sniper’s on a tabletop called planet Earth, and up or down means nothing, not really. The elevation is measured in feet, not thousands of feet. He’s got to concentrate and minimalize. The pilot’s got to get with the rhythm of motion, his own and everybody else’s. Seems I forgot weather. Clouds, the position of the sun, on and on.”

“I didn’t realize you could write a book on this stuff.”

“So if I knew all that up front, what the hell did I sell it to the brass hats and send you on a wild-goose chase for?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah, that would seem like the next question.”

“Leets, if I send you to do something, it’s for a reason. I may not tell you that reason. I may need you believing something else. I would believe it to be better for you, not just me. If I’d told you the pilot-sniper deal was phony, the Thunderbolt boys would have seen through you in a second. They had to believe you, because you believed you.”

“Okay, I get that.”

“So here’s why. Listen hard, then tell me I had another choice.”

Leets leaned forward.

“Basically, it’s two things. Number one, you and I know how bad the building leaks. It spills secrets like a busted sewer. All those smart people talking, bickering, plotting, screwing, smoking, running around, going to parties, a third of ’em red, another third FBI, and a final third, maybe the worst, just plain career scum. You can’t trust ’em any further than you could toss ’em. But I don’t want no one — excuse me, anyone knowing what I’m thinking. And I am thinking something. But it’s not fighter pilots as snipers. I’d tell you, but then that’s what you look for as you investigate. So I keep it secret from everybody but me, and I put out this crazy airplane shit, just logical enough for the brass hats to believe, because for now I’m the emperor that nobody’s yet got the guts to say has no clothes. They want to believe me.”

“I see that.”

“And to sell it, I send you out on a wild-goose chase. That puts the stamp on it, for damn sure. So if somehow word leaks via this or that channel and ends up in German hands, the Germans would then have a good laugh at how stupid we are. ‘These bozos don’t know a damn thing. Americans are idiots. Ha, watch us kill their night patrol leaders and tie up the Normandy front for months.’ ”

“You said there was a second reason.”

“Yep. I had to move against somebody. Move hard, move fast, blindside block him, bump him into making a stupid move. Whatever, just get rid of him.”

“Tyne, I’m guessing.”

“You got it.”

“That bastard has it in for me, and he’s got all that Irish blood — a good thing if the boss is named Donovan.”

“Shouldn’t matter, but it does. That’s the way the world works. Realpolitik, someone told me.”

“Is that why I heard you showed up at SHAEF commo two nights ago and sent a confidential radioteletype to someone in the Naval Annex in Washington?”

“Maybe so, maybe not. If you need to know, I’ll tell you. I will tell you this: I wanted you out of the building. The timing was an accident but it was perfect. You gone, you can’t be blamed. What happens will have nothing to do with you. No one can say, ‘Leets got rid of Tyne because Tyne liked the Fenwick girl too much. Leets won the war of Fenwick.’ I don’t want that shit in the air, giving people stuff to talk and wonder about, secretly being a factor in every decision they make regarding us.”

“I didn’t know Millie and I were a problem.”

“Only to Tyne, which is why I’ve got to get rid of him.”

“You don’t mess around.”

“If a guy’s after your scalp, get him now. Tomorrow is too late. You don’t want to look back after you’ve been fucked and think, ‘Gee, if only I’d done something then.’ ”

“So—”

“So nothing. You bunk out now: 0430 we’re on the road. We got some hard days ahead. I need you rested and ready. Besides all this bullshit, we’ve got a war to fight, or so I read in the funny papers. And on top of that, I think it’s going to rain.”

CHAPTER 27 Karen

Karen was never beautiful.

Even in her best picture, standing with a light smile on her face next to and holding hands with her beloved brother in a frock of the early twenties, there was something in her that forbade beauty.

He thought of that picture often. The frock had ruffles, as was the fashion then, even where Karen was. She wore a kind of bucket hat of the same white linen as the dress, meant to cool but unsuccessful in that attempt in the unforgiving climate of a farm.

Still, the distance from the lens and the total joy she took in the presence of the man who stood beside her — and would always, no matter the distance between them — occluded perceptions of the face. She looked like any hausfrau or milkmaid of rural declension with a difficult path in life.

Other pictures, other memories, showed more precisely the nature of the woman.

Why, oh why, did I lose you? Oh, why did I drive you from me?

The melancholy of it would never leave him. How could it? She loved him, so he destroyed that love out of his wantonness of appetite, his love of liquor and the company of other men, his need to play harder than he worked, and his inability, in most crucial areas of human intercourse, to exhibit a twitch of discipline.

Gone, gone, gone. Forever. Nothing would get her back. It was over, finished, gone. You stupid bastard.

The hunter shook his head, not quickly but powerfully, trying to knock the past from his brain and confront the present as it lay before him.

The smell of rain in the air — soon. The dim forms of the land, not yet illuminated. The warmth that was near July — or maybe it was July; he didn’t know. A smell of vegetable and flower — and cow shit. Some breeze, but not enough to matter. Before him, a gully. Or more: a fold in the meadow, not deep but definite and exactly where the beast by natural instinct would rest.

And soon the beast would arrive. He’d heard him already, for by nature it was not a nocturnal animal, it feared the dark and was awkward in it, making bad decisions and ratcheting into panic at the slightest disturbance.

And tonight was special. Such plans had been laid, such traps had been set. This was no routine hunt. This was special, given the possibilities of the landforms. He could not fumble it and let all that planning go to waste.

But still: Karen. Tonight, for some reason, it was peculiarly hurtful, a species of pain that rotted the soul. If he could just reach through time and do this differently or that, such small things, it might never have come to what it had come to.

Her face was that of an ascetic. For she was an ascetic, but he had never had the patience to read what she wrote, and even if he had, it would have meant nothing, for that was not how his mind worked. Her face had sharp cheekbones, a sign of what one would call “good upbringing” or “good family,” meaning it went way back. Her eyes pierced. She missed nothing, and when she settled on something, her eyes registered it with precision and seriousness. She would stare at it — whatever — for a long time, appraising its nuances, memorizing its shape and shade, seeing how the sun played off it, how the wind affected it, if at all. She made no rash decisions, she made no wrong decisions. Well, save one.

Why did you marry me?

They were young. The Great War and the Great Dying of the Influenza were over. It seemed to be spring everywhere, but dying old Europe still reeked of corpse rot and the same old men still ruled with iron wills and fists and self-deception amid piles of skulls and miles of graves. Both he and Karen were by nature adventurous, if each nature took “adventure” to have a different meaning.

For her, adventure meant learning, seeing, experiencing, recording exactly. Her adventure was fuel for her artistic nature. She needed provocation to function fully and express what she had.

For him, adventure meant conquest, dominion, wealth. It meant subjugating all, but preferably nature, in the form of agriculture or large beasts whose ways were to be learned and whose deaths were to be administered. It made him feel so very alive to see an immense thing crumple without noise, thump to earth in a cloud of dust. It meant something primal: The village elders will sing my praises at the council fire, my children will go to bed with full bellies, and I will fuck my wife.

It didn’t matter that he was of no village, had no children, and upon return would indeed most assuredly not fuck her.

Thus it was doomed. Their courses took them in different directions, farther as the years passed, and what joy had been shared between them alchemized into something else, perhaps not hatred or even dislike, but at least a willed disinterest in each other’s lives.

In such parched soil, how could anything last?

Noise.

It was here. It slashed him back to reality. He squirmed into the shot, checking his always-precise watch. Yes, near dawn. The sun’s light had begun to infiltrate the eastern sky. Still too dark to see except vaguely, but the magic few minutes were approaching.

Movement, generalized, not specific, accompanied by, as usual, heavy groaning and grunting, a sense of clumsiness and uncertainty, halts and then irrational spurts, the movement of something that didn’t want to be doing what it was doing.

It filled the hollow 250 meters before him. He saw its components in stumbling ecstasy, eager for rest and what it believed to be safety. The beast at rest. Like any organism, it spreads, seeks comfort, experiments with postures until it finds one, then finally settles in.

A whisper of sun. The edge of the star 93 million miles away. It pierces, at least to him but not the beast, who is too low to see it and hasn’t noticed its presence at the tips of trees, nor the oozing glow of those precious minutes before the fullness of the disk has emerged to present itself.

To scope now. As always, a few twitches and adjustments, getting body and rifle and eye and finger aligned and in coordination, the structure beneath stable, the breathing measured, achieving that utter sensation of calm that is at the root of the entire art.

In the world of the magnified, he could now make out his target. It was the head, though bent, consulting or thinking or possibly — not probably — praying.

More light. Enough. The head came up and settled precisely in the three prongs of the reticle, and without willing it, for at this level will had been vanquished, to be replaced by pure if cultivated instinct, the trigger seemed to fire itself, the rifle jumped — a bit, not much, such were the glories of the cartridge — and resettled, the flash subsumed itself at atomic speed, the noise echoed, diffusing, amid trees and leaves and embankments shrouded in ground cover, and he could see his target hinge to earth, toppling like a statue in a revolution.

The American boys panicked. He knew they would. The death of their leader — sergeant, lieutenant, major? — terrified them. In seconds they had vanished and would by instinct race across the meadow to the streambed where there was more cover and a deeper trough. There they would gather, a second-in-command would settle them down, and a new course would be set.

The Germans had set their machine gun well. He himself had picked the spot. It was an MG-42. Only one burst was needed.

CHAPTER 28 Rain

The rain came. And it stayed. Unusually for this or most years, it rained and howled for four days. The world became a swamp, a green bog not fully on land, not quite underwater. No planes dared fly, ships lay far off, away from the potential wreckage of the littorals. Most patrolling halted.

The fucking Germans, of course, would endure it better. They’d had plenty of time to prepare and were by inclination war beavers, always building sophisticated, watertight fortifications, caparisoned under wet-weather gear that actually worked — their fucking garment engineers out-designing the Americans again — and saw the rain as a godsend, a vacation from war. If they were laughing earlier, by now they’d be positively in the aisles with joy and delight, as well as warm and toasty.

For Leets and Swagger, it turned the tour of the front and the interviews with the sniper survivors into an ordeal by mud — it looked like churned brown cement — and crappy American rain gear. The rubberized poncho was so poorly put together that it leaked everywhere, ripped if you turned or got up or down in it, kept coming unsnapped, and, no matter what, allowed a funnel of cold water to sluice perfectly into the neck of the shirt it meant to protect.

At least the guns were dry. The Thompsons were secured in green canvas zip-up carry bags that, given the irregular shape of the weapons, looked like giant worms a giant person had squished on a giant sidewalk. They lay in the well of the driver’s-side rear seat, next to Leets, who always kept a protective hand on them. They were the most efficient part of the enterprise: the guns were in better shape than the two men who might use them and who spent their time hunched in misery as the spectacle of America at war unspooled beyond the heavy transparency of the plasticine jeep windows.

Even with the banty old First Sergeant McElroy behind the wheel — his face looked like leather pounded by rocks and stretched hard over bones — progress was slow, sometimes impossible. Before them on every road, the great machines of war foundered, slip-sliding into gullies, rooted in a gravy of earth and rain, clogging the roads, turning the Normandy front into a version of Times Square on a rainy rush-hour Tuesday when the subway workers were on strike. Nobody got anywhere fast, or sometimes even slow, or sometimes even at all.

“Uhhh!” screamed Leets, shoving desperately against the back angle of the vehicle — Major Swagger was on the other rear corner — hoping against hope to somehow nudge it onto ground dry enough for traction. No luck. He slipped, driving his knee into the cold French sludge that crept and oozed everywhere.

“Come on, Leets,” called Swagger, who’d largely ignored the inclemency. “Give it another shot.” Then he called, “Top, almost ready, as soon as the lieutenant gets his ass out of the mud.”

“It’s my fucking hip,” Leets clarified, “for about the ten thousandth time today. It hurts like hell.”

Somehow the tires bit, spewing spurts of wet slop upon each man, the bantam car leaped ahead, and Leets and Swagger managed to get aboard, seeking shelter under the vehicle’s canvas canopy, though it too was so poorly designed and constructed, rivulets of cold rain slipped in, and there was no position in which one or more of them didn’t land upon and penetrate the passengers. Meanwhile, the windshield fogged, the wipers cranked sluggishly, and the thing made signals of defeat, as if its plugs had drowned, screaming, in the surf.

“Okay, Major,” said the old sergeant, “just a few more miles to the 4th Infantry. We’d best bunk there tonight. By night these roads are going to be impossible.”

“That would push the 9th to tomorrow and then on to VIII Corps not until day after,” Leets said. “Even if it stops pouring tomorrow, the roads will still be a wreck.”

“Okay,” said Swagger glumly. “I don’t want to get mashed by a Sherman in the dark. Who’d that help except the Germans? And Major Tyne.”

Yesterday, a runner caught up with them at the VII Corps tent village and delivered two top secret radio teletypes.

The first was from SHAEF HQ in Bushy Park, subdivision G-2, from the notoriously well-connected “Colonel” Sebastian.

“Is there a closed door in England that kid can’t talk his way through?” wondered Leets, opening it.

SIR, it said,

“Tyne is a bigger fuck than I thought,” said Swagger.

“Can he do this?” wondered Leets.

“Only if we let him,” said Swagger, opening the second. It had arrived, of course, three hours after the initial one from Sebastian and was from Colonel Bruce himself, warning of the same impending catastrophe, and closing with the worried admonition, I’LL DO ALL I CAN BUT NOT EVEN IKE CAN STAND AGAINST CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY.

“What do we do?” Leets asked.

“Our jobs,” said Swagger.

“Hope we come up with something big in the next few days,” said Leets.

That seemed unlikely. What they had so far found was far from the anticipated intelligence gold mine. The survivors of the sniper attacks had jangled memories, often contradictory. They couldn’t locate the sites of the incidents. Even if they could, the rain had obliterated any tracks, swept away spent shell casings, rearranged foliage that might have been prearranged for a shooting position. No one was even sure where the shots had come from.

The stories were the same. A sergeant or second lieutenant’s head suddenly devastated by a bullet out of the dark, hitting just under the lip of the helmet. Panic, confusion, abject flight on the part of the suddenly leaderless patrol.

Sometimes most or even all made it back, sometimes not many. A rumor was currently circulating that an entire squad had been annihilated by a machine-gun team working with a sniper who’d put down the leader and, presumably realizing where the men had to go for shelter, had arranged for the MG-42 team.

“This is the first sophisticated thing they’ve done,” said Swagger. “They’re working in tune with other units. They’re learning.”

He paused.

“It also means — possibly — they have very good intelligence up front.”

Leets said nothing. He had no opinion. He simply nodded, as if gravely considering the situation but had no read on the possibilities.

Just to provoke him, Swagger said, “Could the Germans have a spy in SHAEF?” when they got settled that night at the 4th Infantry HQ tent compound. The rain beat down, a cold wind turned the night to frozen misery, and all sane men were under cover.

“My guess,” Leets finally said, “is probably not at this level. Planning at the squad patrol level is all improvisation. The CO looks at a map, consults with the XO over which company to send on that night’s patrol, and the company commander decides which platoon and the platoon leader decides which squad. Or maybe they mix ’em up, combine them. Or maybe they’ve got special guys who like the patrol game because they get to sleep late and it’s a lot more fun than shivering in a hole on the line.”

“Go on.”

“So that info is ripe for just a few hours, and only in company quarters. It probably doesn’t even exist at SHAEF HQ. Why would General Eisenhower have to know that 3rd Squad, 2nd Platoon, Baker Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Infantry, was heading out a thousand yards to an unnamed creek on a map, following it for one mile, then setting up a watch post on Old MacDonald Road to see if there were any night panzer rearrangements ongoing? Third Squad does its job and gets back at 0600, and at that point the info is moot. To get it into play, someone in Baker would have to know and have secret communications across the line to the Krauts, who in turn would have to be set up to move fast.”

“That’s solid,” said the major.

“Not enough time,” said Leets. “And since it’s happening all over, they’d have to have spies in every platoon in Normandy. Ridiculous. It’s gotta be radio intercepts. It’s a game they’re really good at. Somehow they’re reading our sector orders and getting the info to these specialized night snipers fast. Maybe it’s some new technology.”

“So I guess we’ll forget that tangent. We’re not in the spy-catching business, are we? We don’t know jack about radio games. We can just send memos when we get back. For now, we’ll just settle on what’s in front of us.”

What was in front of them, next day, were nine bodies. Yes, the rumors were true. An entire squad plus the platoon leader, a Second Lieutenant McMurchison, had been wiped out. That afternoon, a patrol in force, complete with mortar crews, two .30 machine-gun teams, and a couple of bazookas, had recovered the bodies, though not without incident. A brisk firefight erupted, nobody in olive drab got seriously hurt; maybe some of the players in Feldgrau did, but who knew?

By the time Leets and Swagger got there — they had to retrack their journey back to the VII Corps sector and the 4th Infantry area of operations — all nine lay under ponchos. Some guys from Graves Registration were due in to take them onto the next step of their voyage into the earth, but for now it was peaceful. The rain had stopped at last, a wan sun reluctantly pushed wan light through wan clouds, and the world was mud-gushy, sporting puddles and foot and tire tracks everywhere in the goo.

The CO, a Captain Melville, met them.

“You’re the G-2 experts?”

“We’re not expert yet,” said Swagger. “We’re still trying to make sense of all this ourselves. Maybe they can tell us something.”

“Well, I wish I’d had time to put them in a tent. I don’t want our guys to see you poking around with the bodies. Bad for morale.”

“Got it, Captain,” said Swagger. “Nothing unseemly. Just want to look at the wounds. Maybe you have a sergeant who can briefly pull back each poncho for our check, then cover up. Be done fast.”

That made some sense and the captain seemed to appreciate the offer.

It went quickly. The men had been stripped to G.I. underwear, as no army in the history of armies can allow its dead to be buried in reusable uniform and gear, and lay behind the headquarters tent. Swagger and Leets did their work, aided by an unnamed staff sergeant while the captain and his XO stood by.

The sergeant snapped off the poncho halfway, to reveal each dead kid. All so young. Most died with eyes closed, faces at rest. The wounds were high-velocity, chest or belly, leaving small trace except for raspberry sherbet — soaked G.I. undershirts, since the German 8mm Mauser moved so fast, it usually produced a through-and-through smallish entry and exit punctures, massive blood loss, but not much in the way of blown-off limbs or blown-out chests.

Swagger merely said, “Mauser. Okay, next,” and moved the train along until at last they came upon Second Lieutenant McMurchison.

Different. Headshot from behind, the bullet producing a tidal wave of pressure as it passed through the skull, and it was the pressure that erupted on the other side, the face, not so much the bullet. Looking at the face was not easy; it had been rearranged, all features now askew and unrelated to other features, identifiable by shape but not location. A cavity, disclosing hideous gobbits in unnameable colors, frags of bone, an eye missing entirely, tatters, blobs, and noodles of tissue, also in odd colors, the remaining eye drained of meaning and spark.

“Have to look harder here,” he yelled back to the CO. Then, to the sergeant: “Lift the head, please.”

The sergeant did, and Swagger bent to push through the hair. Entry wound, seemingly dime-sized, small, black, hidden in tufts. If you wanted, you could have put something narrow, like a pen, through it, into the skull. Swagger bent, and examined yet more closely.

“Leets, take a look.”

Leets did. Saw nothing out of expectation, from a few blood rivulets disappearing into the young officer’s hair to a slight inward beveling of the wound itself, signifying its direction and identifying it comprehensively as entry, not exit.

“What do you see?” asked Swagger.

“Straight-up entry.”

“Tell me if I’m going blind or not. Is it possible that hole is of lesser diameter than we might expect? Smaller than 8mm Mauser, I’m thinking. The 8 runs .324 in diameter, a little bigger than our .30, which goes .308. That’s looking to me just a bit smaller, maybe 6 or 7 millimeters. Smaller than the Jap 7.7, which is a .312, like a Brit .303. I’ve seen a lot of Jap 7.7 holes”—one in his own chest from Tarawa, he didn’t mention—“and they were bigger. Or am I imagining it? You don’t see anything like that?”

“Sir, now that you mention it and I’m looking for it, yeah, possibly. You’d have to have calipers to tell for sure.”

“You could also pick out little bits of metal from the skull,” Swagger said. “And do an FBI spectrum analysis on it, to see if it was composed of the metals of the 8 Mauser, and if not, what? But we’re not FBI, we don’t have tweezers, a spectrum analyzer, a laboratory. We don’t even have a—”

“Sir,” said the staff sergeant. “Pardon here, but I’m thinking if you tried to insert an M1 .30 caliber into the hole, you’d at least get some idea of the diameter — rough, but in its way a good indicator.”

“Good thought, Sergeant. Why is it always the sergeants who figure shit out, Leets? Do you know?”

“By rights, the true noblemen of the world?”

“Or just damn good shop foremen. Let’s get us an M1 cartridge. Take a break, Sergeant. Smoke one if you got it; if not, smoke one of mine.”

Smokes done, cartridge obtained, all four men — the captain and the XO joining — watched as Swagger ran the test. He did it delicately, out of respect to the dead lieutenant.

No, the .308 diameter of the U.S. 30-caliber ball cartridge, suitable for the Garand rifle, the BAR, and the Browning machine gun, water- or air-cooled, would not fit the entry wound. It was close — it could have been forced — but it hung up just before the furthest expansion of what only Swagger knew was called the ogive; to the others, it was just where the bullet got fatter.

“Does that tell you anything?” asked the captain.

“It suggests whoever’s doing this is using some kind of new-to-inventory cartridge. Maybe a better-performing one, chosen for ballistic reasons, chosen because that’s what he was used to shooting, chosen out of some kind of bureaucratic or supply chain necessity. I don’t know of any military using a main battle cartridge under .30 caliber.”

“Maybe a varmint round?” said the XO. “I’m from Pennsylvania, and the shooters there do a lot of groundhog work with high-speed wildcats in weird calibers like .22-250, 22 Hornet, even one Mr. Ackley called a ‘.22 Earsplittin’ Loudenboomer.’ Fast, flat shooting, little recoil, highly accurate, especially with the long scopes they use. Just exactly what a sniper might need. He’s a kind of groundhog hunter, after all.”

“Damn good thought,” said Swagger. “Even so, I’d have to say, this one looks too big for that. Maybe .240? Some kind of .264? Two-seventy, even: Jack O’Connor’s big-elk medicine?”

Nobody had an answer.

CHAPTER 29 Maps

For Goldberg and Archer, the rainy weather got them something rare in wartime infantry service: a weekend off. Well, maybe it wasn’t a weekend, since neither was entirely sure of the day, much less the month — it was still 1944, though, wasn’t it? — but the effect on morale was the same. The captain didn’t want to send them back to the line when word came the First Army G-2 aces would be late, owing to conditions. This was out of extreme empathy — to himself, not them. He thought it would impress important folks if the G.I.s he presented appeared to have stepped off the cover of Yank and knew that another few days on the line, unlikely to be attacked so their absence had no strategic importance, would wilt them hard. He wanted them sharp, not looking like the sodden, weary, hobo dogfaces of Mauldin cartoon fame, Willie and Joe. No, Jack and Gary would be smart, trim, clean-shaven, and spiffed up. Thus, he found them meaningless indoor tasks and required a sergeant to check each night that they had hung up their uniforms, cleaned any mud off their boots, and shaved clean. Basically their job was hygiene.

So he was disappointed when at last the celebrities showed up: two sodden paratroopers, by the gear and weapons, each with a tommy gun and a .45 in a shoulder holster, each in green herringbone twill that had of late seen much rain and was therefore more grocery bag than garment. He might have doubted their identity if Major Jackson, the Hawthorne expert, of Battalion G-2, hadn’t been their escort, or maybe chaperone.

Intros, brief, professional, quick transit to the G-2 tent where the boys would be delivered shortly. The two sloshed through the mud indifferently. They were so sodden, it hardly mattered.

“Major Swagger,” asked Jackson, “do you want the captain and me here for this? It might relax the men.”

“Thanks, good offer. But I may have to get stuff out of them they haven’t told you. Guys always know a lot more than they pretend to. They may even know stuff they don’t know they know.”

“Understood,” said the other major.

“Do you have any doubts about them, either of you?” asked Swagger.

“I try not to hold ASTP against them,” said the captain. “Yeah, they’re smart, but not in a way that is helpful to the Army. Too much imagination, too keen to see through our games, too quick on the wisecrack. To me, the lost weapons were a red flag. I guess I buy the story. They panicked after the death of Malfo and took off to God knows where. They’re not by nature soldiers, so I suppose I can get it that they didn’t notice until the next day. But that happening to both of them?”

“I found them typical ASTP kids. Smart in the abstract, unable to figure out the shovel in the practical,” said the G-2. “They did note the presence of a 503rd Battalion Tiger moving through the sector, and I’m told that was forwarded to the Brits, where I hope it did some good. They got back in one piece somehow. They’re not in the ten percent who’ll win the war for us, they’re the ten percent who’ll complain about winning the war.”

“I’m sure they’re here for an update on the miracle of television,” said Archer. “Or was it radio vision? Or tele radio? Or atom vision?”

“Jack, could it be about our bananas with the Tiger guys?”

“No way they could know about that. Unless they have spies in the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion, German Army Division No. 6, or whatever it is.”

“Tell me again: We didn’t do anything wrong?”

“Nothing. We actually did right. We ID’d the tank. I’m sure it’s all about the tank, yeah, more on what camouflage it had, which way was it headed, could we find that road on a map—”

“And the rifles?”

“It’s an okay story. Stick to it. When Malfo got socked, we took off like jackrabbits. Ran like hell for six hours. Then we noticed they were gone, but we didn’t have any idea where we were, much less them. Who can say otherwise?”

“Kurt.”

“Kurt’s busy blowing up British Cromwells and eating bananas. I doubt he remembers. Just be cool. Cool, cool, cool.”

So with cool in mind, they were taken to Major Something and Lieutenant Something, who actually looked very cool: unshaven yet dignified, utterly calm, totally focused. Tommy guns leaning in a corner, cool-guy paratroop jackets, 45s in shoulder holsters, fast to hand. They looked like gangsters of war, clearly a different category of officer than the bumblers who led them. By contrast, the two privates were soldiers out of a back-lot musical, all spick-and-span, unwrinkled, clean-shaven. What kind of nutty movie was this?

“Where did the shot come from, Goldberg?” was the question the major got to sooner rather than later, after hurrying him through the preliminaries.

To Goldberg, in a tent partition alone with the man, both in rickety chair over a rickety table, he was another war god. He scared Goldberg, but at the same time Goldberg loved him, just as he would have loved Bugsy, knowing that Bugsy’s way was far from his, but nevertheless accepting that it was cool beyond words. The major’s own skin seemed to satisfy him very much. He smoked, listened hard, didn’t poke or twist, never smiled, never frowned, took earnest notes, but always circled back to this one moment: the death of Sergeant Malfo.

“Behind, sir.”

“Behind relative to what?”

“Ah, I guess the gully. We’d set up there and sent some guys out to listen. I think it was twenty or so yards long, just one of those depressions or hollows you get. Next to the stream in a sort of glade of trees. So that’s where Jack and I were at the end of the line. The sergeant came along to get Jack’s report. Then his head—”

“Was he standing?”

“Yes, sir. He’d sort of risen, as if to go. And wham, no face.”

“And you heard the shot?”

“I think so. It’s hard to remember, it all happened so fast. I think there was a shot.”

“Loud, soft? Close, far?”

“I’d have to say sort of far.”

“You heard German rifle fire in the assault in the bocage a week ago. Those were Mauser K98s. Can you compare or contrast?”

“Maybe softer. But then, farther away too, so… but still, maybe didn’t have the huge crack of the Mauser.”

“What was the light condition at the time?”

“Not pitch-dark. Maybe a little glow from the sun, which hadn’t quite risen but was starting to. No direct sunlight, for sure.”

“You thought the Germans could see in the dark?”

“I did. But in thinking about it, I’m not sure it was totally dark. Shapes were beginning to come clear. Distance vision was starting to improve. He could have… well, I suppose, he could have just seen us.”

“Sunrise on that day was 0541 British war time. Sound about right?”

“Just about perfect, sir.”

“Now, I noticed in your report, although you didn’t mention it when you told me about it, an interesting phenomenon. You started sneezing.”

Wow! The guy had read very closely. Plus, he’d come all this distance to the front to ask about sneezing!

“Yes, sir.”

“Any idea why?”

“Ah—” A new one. He’d forgotten it. It seemed to have taken place in a world that no longer existed. He tried to re-create the moment but could come up with nothing, only a memory of uncontrollable sneezing for a few seconds or so. He did remember that Jack had teased him about it later, slightly pissing him off. But that had nothing to do with anything.

“No idea.”

“Big sneeze? Little sneeze? An ah-choo! or more like a stifled, wet thing? Uncontrollable? A series? A single, or did it come in the dozens?”

“It lasted for a few seconds, sir. Less than a minute.”

The sneeze! What the—

“Why, typically, do you sneeze? Medical condition? Asthma? Allergies?”

“Nothing that I—”

“Try and think of another time you sneezed.”

He ransacked his memory. Coney Island with Sylvia Grossman? Running from the Italian kids on Columbus Day? Sneaking down to Times Square to the dirty bookstores? Basketball in gym class and on the playground? Ebbets Field?

The memory reassembled in his mind. It arrived in sepia, as if out of a scrapbook, golden-hued, under the magic sky of towering clouds, the expanse of the green field rolling out to forever, or the Bronx at least. He remembered his father that day, so proud to have the tickets. He remembered the smells of popcorn and Cracker Jack and fresh, cold beer out of brown bottles, carried and sold by men in white uniforms. He remembered how sticky the cement had been, from generations of tobacco and chewing gum, the way his shoes stuck to it and crackled when they came loose. He remembered how weirdly mythical it seemed, as if animated by the Disney guys after the fashion of Snow White. He remembered how happy he’d been. Nobody was trying to kill him. And he thought nobody ever would.

“Ebbets Field. We had really good seats. My dad got them from his boss. Good game. Play at the plate, late in game. Wham, guy slides just as ball gets there, they collide, dust all over the place, and — I don’t know why — I begin to sneeze. ‘Gary,’ Dad said, ‘you missed the most important play! The Dodgers won!’ That’s the last time, sir.”

“Dust,” said the major. “Dust.”

When it was over, the two were told to go to the mess tent and chow down while the big G-2 guys consulted and discussed and then brought in the battalion G-2 and the company commander.

Dinner: meat that had once been flesh of a mystery animal, possibly a gnu or an ibex. Green beans soaked in water, so limp you could tie them around your fingers. All of it heated ever so slightly, more an imitation of heat than actual heat. Powdered milk, an apple, a flattened sludge of what was rumored to be pineapple upside down cake, lacking only pineapple and cake. Coffee that almost remembered that it was coffee.

Plus, interesting discussion:

Today’s dispute, over the upside down cake and the near-coffee coffee, was in regards to this significant issue: How cool was Swagger?

“Cooler than McKinney?”

“By far!!”

“Cooler than Robert Taylor in Bataan?”

“Robert Taylor has fifty people to make him cool,” said Archer. “Swagger just is cool. Clearly, cool enough to be a war god.”

“But which war god? Just any war god?” responded Goldberg.

“I think he’d have to be Mars himself.”

“No, no,” said Goldberg. “Mars is Patton. Both generals, see? This has to be some other war god.”

“Then he’d be Achilles. Achilles was a major. Swagger’s a major. Seems more like a sergeant than a major, but he is a major.”

“I agree, but Achilles was a man, wasn’t he?”

“He was a man-god. Half god. Mothered by somebody important. Dipped in magic stuff to be invulnerable except for his heel. That’s god enough. Moreover, Achilles did his own killing. Ask Hector about that one.”

“Fair enough,” said Goldberg. “The next time I see him, I’ll run it by him.”

“Okay, you guys,” said a strange sergeant, leaning in from nowhere, “they want you back at G-2.”

They slipped into the tent, and the sergeant led them to the connecting tent — tents, tents, tents! — in which the original interrogations had taken place. They looked to formally report and salute as per regulation, but the major gestured them to the table where two chairs awaited.

“Chow good?”

“Delicious, sir.”

“Wonderful,” added Gary. “The best! I did have a question about the pineapple cake. They said it was upside-down. How could they tell?”

“I take it that’s a joke,” said Swagger and flamed him with a melting stare.

“Yes, sir,” said Goldberg. “Sorry, sir.”

“You know, I told a joke once. Think it was ’37 or ’38. Folks seemed to like it. I may yell another one too. But until then, Private, no more jokes. There’s a war on. Have you noticed?”

The moment seemed to last a thousand years.

“All right,” said Swagger. “Here’s the deal. Go to the officers’ bar and you will be permitted a couple of beers. Then go back to quarters, sleep late. Take a hot shower. Have a nice lunch. Then go to the HQ tent and pick up your new gear. Battalion is shipping it out specially for you on my request, most importantly each a roll of duck tape. Duck tape is your new best friend, your mother, your cousin from someplace interesting. You’ll get two grenades. Tape the levers down, tape the pins flat. They go in your pants pockets. You’ll get an angle-head flashlight, TL-122, OD with a hook. Check the batteries. Then hook it to your pistol belt and then what, Goldberg?”

“Tape it, sir.”

“You’re catching on, Goldberg. No M41 field jacket, no helmet and helmet liner, no cartridge belt, no combat suspenders. You don’t need a cartridge belt because you won’t be carrying Garand rifles. You’d just lose them. You’re each getting an M3 grease gun, five magazines, three boxes of fifty rounds. Load the magazines to a capacity of twenty-eight. Don’t lose them, all right? They could come in handy. You’ll have a bandolier for the grease gun mags, each in a pouch purpose-built to the shape and width of the mags. Hang it over your shoulder. Tape it to your shirt. You’ll have a bayonet. Hook it to your pistol belt. Tape that down too. When you get the belt fastened, tape the latch. Tape the bayonet so it doesn’t rattle. You will have a canteen. Tape the little chain that holds the cap to the mouth. Tape the buckles on the straps of your combat boots. For cover, you’ll be issued a paratrooper knit cap, A-4, OD, winter wear, quite warm. Pull it down over your ears. Goldberg, tape your glasses on. When you’re done, you should be mostly tape. Have you got all that?”

Both men nodded.

“Can you handle a grease gun, Goldberg?”

“Er, point it, pull the trigger? Is that it, sir?”

“That’ll do for now. Lieutenant Leets will show you more specifically. Archer, pay attention to your pal. Make sure he can run it, got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Report to the company yard at 1830. We’ll travel to the lines by truck and at dark, around 1915, we head out. Lieutenant Leets will navigate; he’s in the lead. Goldberg, you’ll be after him. Then you, Archer. I’ll take up the rear. No chatter. No cigarettes, no gum or candy. You do not discard anything. Try to walk lightly. Go through brush sideways. Don’t cough, wheeze, or sneeze. Don’t fart or burp. Pretend you’re on a date. Any questions?”

“Ah, sir,” said Archer, “if you’re counting on us to lead you back to the spot where Sergeant Malfo got killed, I don’t think we can do it. It was dark, he did the navigating, we just followed his directions and—”

“Someone ASTP-smart recovered his map pack, Archer. Any idea who?”

CHAPTER 30 Mr. Hedgepath

The one thing you could say about Limehouse Chinatown was that it had so far escaped destruction, from either the German bombing of 1940–41 or from the county council slum clearance initiative of 1938. Well, yes, the random five-hundred-pounder, or the council bulldozer, flattened a building here or there, leaving what looked like a gap in a set of very dull teeth, but no big damage as had crushed the East India docks a mile or so down the road.

The cabbie wasn’t even that familiar with it, as few in the East End, either coming or going, could afford a cab. It was gotten to and from almost entirely by tube. And, never having been there — in fact, never having been anywhere east of Aldgate Pump — Mr. Hedgepath was of no use to him. Most of the streetlights were out; few roamed the dark streets; few celebrated. It was a town of ghosts, as most of the thousand chink restaurants had closed down, men off to war as cannon fodder for the crown, women living on the army checks, the children scabby ragamuffins in tatters, with big, hollow eyes, going to scurvy on the ration card. They’d do anything for a piece of candy.

“Here, sir?” asked the cabbie.

“Well, possibly,” Mr. Hedgepath said. He wore his silly army suit on the principle that an American out of uniform was more memorable than one in uniform. He was technically a lieutenant colonel or something like that. Major colonel? Lieutenant brigadier? It didn’t really matter. He was serving in the Office of War Information’s London station, where army rank was viewed as rather amusing but nothing to be troubled with; his job was to vet scripts before broadcast to make certain they didn’t divulge anything unnecessarily, as if he had any idea what was necessary and what was not. He had been a senior radio public relations executive at CBS before the war and knew all the broadcast people quite well. This got him an office, a secretary, a small section of earnest young women who did most of the work, and a kind of roving commission to do this or that socially, at Mr. Sherwood’s pleasure, the latter being the head of the overseas division of OWI in Washington. Fortunately, Mr. Sherwood didn’t have much pleasure; he generally left things alone, as he too had a busy and demanding social life in America’s capital. Plus a play to work on.

Mr. Hedgepath got out. He saw the sign, though no light illuminated it. WING CHOW RESTAURANT, it said. The windows had been boarded over, then covered with grating. Only a dim light above the transom signified that it was more or less open.

“Yes, this is the spot. Well done.”

“Sir, beggin’ pardon, this ain’t a neighborhood where a Yank of high officer class ought to be caught. Not just the Judys lookin’ for a quid for a quick stand-up in the alley, but all kinds of devious Chinamen, opium hounds the lot, plus wogs, Jews and Russians, seamen and fishmongers, all ready to take a cosh to the head and disappear with a gentleman’s wallet.”

“I assure you,” said Mr. Hedgepath, “I am to be well protected.”

“As you say, then, sir.”

He entered, finding it as dark inside as out, at least in appearance. It was colorful in scent, however, as from an unseen kitchen poured a rainbow of odors, a far reach from anything his delicate nose had ever encountered. No chop suey house in Manhattan smelled like this. Fireworks of various sorts seemed to explode in his mind.

“Sir, a table?” said a fellow of oriental aspect in white. Thank God he spoke clearly and not in that jibber-jabber Chinese English of the Chan movies.

“Actually, have we a bar? I’m to meet a man, sooner or later. A quiet table there would do nicely and not take up space set aside for diners.”

“No bar, sir,” said the man, “but no diners either. You may sit without worry.”

He was taken to a table in a darker part of the darkness, a corner, and while his eyes found the proper exposure setting, he ordered a pot of tea. It came. Chinese, of course, and though he’d only had a Chinese tea a few times, he judged this one as quite well done.

Some cookies came as well. Curled crispy, slightly sweet, one crunched open to his fingers, ejecting a message on a white strip of tissue. He peered at it, could see nothing, put on glasses.

A TIME FOR NEW ENTERPRISE, it said.

Quite nice, actually, not that he believed in such nonsense. Outside, far away, a doodle hit. The building shook, some dust drifted about, and the vibration lasted a second. But he judged it to have hit no closer than Brixton at least, on the other side of the river.

Time floated by. A candle was brought, flickering gamely even if its reach was not impressive. The odors seemed to constantly reorganize themselves; he imagined a tapestry, undone, forever being respun to new design and hue. It was actually quite nice. A fellow came in, left with a bag of food. Then another. A couple of racial peculiarity — very brown but white in feature, nothing at all Negro to them — came in, sat far away, and ordered and ate quietly.

He’s checking, Mr. Hedgepath thought. A man in his profession must be very careful. One assumed one would be observed leaving the cab and the street studied to ascertain if followers were present. Possibly, then, he had a spyhole, and was watching at this exact moment, searching for an odd giveaway that might suggest inauthenticity. And, actually, Hedgepath did feel inauthentic. This sort of thing wasn’t his specialty. He was far more valuable in other offerings, and his handkerchief was slightly ruffled over being sent on such a crude mission. But in for a penny, in for a pound.

At last, a figure materialized in front of him and slid to a seat. Even so, Hedgepath couldn’t get a fix on him. He was as dark as the place, maybe darker, dark in low hat, dark in coat wrapped full about neck, dark in scarf about the lower face. He appeared as a character out of Conrad or some lower form of amusement.

“Join you, Mr. Hedgepath? That’s it, eh? Hedgepath?”

“Hedgepath, yes,” said Mr. H. “And you are…? I was not given a name. Only the number I called.”

“Raven.”

“As in the Raven, from a radio serial or such?”

“No, Raven, as in Phillip Raven. Just a name. It’ll do for now.”

Mr. Hedgepath was relieved. So far, so good. Nothing tricky here. Seemed straightforward. No code words, signals, secret handshakes, shoelace codes; just everyday practices.

“Are we ready to proceed?” he asked.

“You seem nervous.”

“I am not used to business such as this.”

“It’s quite commonplace, I assure you. Please, finish the tea, order more. The chinks know how to brew tea, eh?”

He nodded, seemingly to no one, but instantly another pot was delivered and his cup was placed.

“Not sure how this works,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “Do you start or do I?”

“You, I think. But not the issue for tonight. Instead, speak generally as to who and what you do by day. I may check some things.”

“Of course,” said Hedgepath. He launched into a rather tedious account of his career, its various ignominies and failures, the plots against him, the taunts he had to endure from those who suggested he was not quite right. Finally, he got to his favorite time, the drift to radio after the newspaper and publishing house miscues. There, nothing was held against him and he flourished, meeting the cultured artistic set of the big town, writers, artists, film people, all of whom welcomed him for what he could get them. Some of them may have actually liked him. Then he saw the light. Gave him purpose, and when a chance to join the true elite came along, he could not have said no.

“And now,” said Mr. Raven, “high-power Yank officer.”

“Hardly. Nobody pays us much mind. But it’s fine. I can help in many ways and this gives me a chance.”

“All right,” said Mr. Raven. He paused, poured tea, sugared it, creamed it, had it. Took a fortune cookie.

“Let’s see what the Chinese predict.”

A TIME FOR NEW ENTERPRISE, it said.

“Excellent. You may proceed.”

“I think they all say that,” said Mr. Hedgepath.

“Be that as it may, we shall take it as a blessing from the Buddha himself. So. Proceed, please.”

“There is a fellow who seems to be stirring up trouble for us in certain areas. I have his name written down. He is at the front now but will return shortly.”

He took a folded piece of paper out.

“To remove him administratively would take time, energy, finesse, all of which are in short supply. It would also be ugly. Therefore, we turn to other means. You are the other means. Highly recommended, I might add.”

“He is American?”

“Yes. An officer, a hero, a man with a bright future ahead. Handsome too.”

“I do so love working with the handsome ones. They have too much. More, they have no idea of how the ugly or maimed suffer. Their destruction is always a satisfaction.”

He pushed down his scarf and leaned into the flickering circle of candlelight.

It explained everything — or perhaps nothing. Deviated septum. Man with a crack in his face. Exiled forever from daylight. The discontinuity of the upper lip under the nose exposed a ragged dark delta of teeth and gums. It was hard to look at. Harelip, it was so cruelly called. It meant a life without love.

The scarf came back up.

“So the doing of it will be no problem morally,” he said. “The only problems are technical. Well, and the fee. You know of it?”

“I do,” said Mr. Hedgepath.

He pushed an envelope across.

Mr. Raven opened it, counted the notes inside without removing them — much practice at this, it seemed — and said, “Bought and paid for.”

CHAPTER 31 Commando

It turned out to be the crank that had him so worried. So worried, he made no jokes about the phallic nature of all this war stuff, which he’d already filed away for his first television script. Anyhow, the gun itself was considerably lighter than his nine-and-a-half-pound Garand rifle, shorter too, easier to handle, especially with the stock retracted.

A wartime rush job built actually by an automobile manufacturer, it was just an assortment of stamped metal parts welded more or less together in a hurry. It had a Hey-kids-let’s-build-a-machine-gun! look to it, the complexion of a hand grenade and the grace of a coat hanger. Lieutenant Leets had shown him how to make it go bang, or rather bang-bang-bang: first, pop the ejection cover; second, grab and rotate the crank, pulling it back and down until it locked; third, pull out the stock. Then point and bang-bang-bang, bursts of .45 sent downrange, probably best to hold to three-round sprays, as the gun, like any other automatic, rose higher and higher with sustained bursts.

Yes, fine. Yes, all commando, ears covered by watch cap, glasses taped on, everything else taped so that he felt like the Mummy: he made almost no noise at all, looked cooler than he’d ever hoped to look, his M3 grease gun sling looped over his shoulder, one hand on the pistol grip, the other on the thirty-round magazine filled with twenty-eight rounds, his face smeared with a commando’s burnt cork.

“But what if I’m not strong enough to crank the crank?”

“Pretend like you’re cranking your other crank,” said Archer, always willing to go low for a laugh in the cheap seats.

“Ha-ha,” said Goldberg. Then he turned to the lieutenant.

“I’m not exactly football material, sir. I’m not sure it—”

“Let’s see how you do.”

So he tried it, under the lieutenant’s gaze.

Ooof! Acchhh! Ughhh!

Not the easiest thing but, with effort, doable, he supposed.

“I think that, if it comes to a firefight, you’ll find your muscles fill with energy. You’ll be much stronger, Goldberg. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”

“Maybe crank it now?”

“Not a good idea,” said the lieutenant, who, unlike Achilles/Swagger, seemed somewhat human despite the authority and experience. “You could trip, a branch could catch inside the trigger guard, you might have an involuntary seizure or flinch — even one of those famous sneezes — and suddenly you’re hosing down the bullet garden with .45s, maybe hitting me just ahead of you, and certainly you notifying the Krauts that they’ve got trespassers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Goldberg, you can do this thing. I know you can.”

“He’s got stage fright,” said Archer. “This is a new role for him. He doesn’t have any material for it.”

“In the Army,” Goldberg said, improvising for his debut as “Kid Commando” on the Bob Hope television show on NBC, “when they told me I was getting a grease gun, I thought that meant I’d be working in a garage. Instead, I ended up in a war!”

“That’s a start, Goldberg,” said the lieutenant, giving him the ghost of a smile, real or just a fake morale builder; who could tell?

So now they crept through darkness, trying to be silent and efficient. Leets led, Goldberg was second, next came Archer, and finally that sphinx of masculinity, taciturnity, and implacability, the war god Swagger, who said nothing to anybody and looked as familiar with his Thompson as a golfer would with a club.

They moved along in the dark, close to a hedgerow, and — upon reaching its termination in another hedgerow — slithered through and over carefully, fighting to keep breath low and effort minimal. No grunting, heaving, sighing. The key was noise, which was death, was to be avoided at all costs.

“These guys work off of noise,” the major had said. “That’s how they initially make contact. No noise, no contact, no sniper. Get it, guys?”

“Got it, sir,” both kids had said.

Was the route familiar? Ah, hard to tell in the dark. It was like invading a dreamscape, taking a tour of a nightmare. They confronted the maze of field and hedgerow made more baffling by the shield of darkness, under a moonless sky, a vault full of stars, now and then a sunken road or a creek, both to be negotiated carefully. A small roll of hill, a zone of rocks, the ghostly specters here and there of cattle standing in the dark, some low cow sounds or shuffling, the stench of their shit. Occasionally, from the universe next door, the brisk sputter of small-arms fire, muted by distance. A flash, a rumble, not the weather of nature but the weather of man. Nature was gentler tonight, providing a soft breeze, a temperate climate, all sorts of niceties that unfortunately had to be ignored due to the exigencies of the situation.

Now and then the lieutenant would call a halt. Not for smoking or resting or drinking from a canteen but for map-and-compass check. The major would scoot forward, he and Leets would bend low to the ground and consult their instrument and document under the carefully disciplined light of the angle-head flashlight held close to both, they would chat briefly, then the major would return to his tail gunner’s position and the group would begin its travels again.

Goldberg kept thinking, When, exactly, did I volunteer for this?

It made no sense, it made no sense, and then, suddenly, it made sense.

Archer achieved the same insight and tapped him on the shoulder. The lieutenant’s fist came up, stopping the parade.

Yes, it was just ahead now as things organized themselves and in so doing clarified and provoked images long thought gone.

A glade of low trees and, barely visible in the dark, what seemed to be a kind of trench bulked up on one side. It touched some chord in his memory, as if from a dream or another life recalled. Beyond that would be the creek. Listening now, all heard the slow gurgle of the water. They were there, but that also meant that, by the index of a month ago, the German lines were four hundred yards or so beyond them, once over the creek.

The major kept them still for what seemed like hours. He listened, he looked. Then he gave Leets the nod, and the lieutenant edged through the trees and slipped into the gully. Then Goldberg, then Archer, then the major. The officers kept them at the farther end of the gully—depression was more like it, Goldberg saw, realized it had acquired depth and length in his dreams — and kept the no-talking discipline. The major stationed himself behind and took watch. He had good eyes. He could see stuff nobody could. He was looking for movement, listening hard for ding or clink or cough, and it occurred to Goldberg that he had diagnosed the sniper’s method as based on following in the dark, not waiting for an interception. That would explain the emphasis on noise discipline too.

Evidently satisfied nobody was on them, he turned and the four folded back down the gully. They halted two-thirds of the way down and went into infantry squat.

“Okay,” whispered the major. “Where, exactly, was the sergeant standing when hit? Can you remember?”

It was Archer who scooted down a bit, hunching near the end of the depression.

“I’d say here. Gary, right?”

“That’s it,” said Goldberg.

“So like this?” asked the major, and he put himself in the late sergeant’s position, standing.

“Yes, sir,” said Archer. Like Goldberg, he was wondering what the fuck this was all about.

“And you were…?”

Each man re-created his position on that night. What was this macabre bit of war theater about?

“So that’s where you were when you started sneezing, is that right, Goldberg?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure?”

“Well, maybe more like this,” he said, and squirmed backwards, relocating about a foot.

Leets’s flashlight startled the infantrymen. He held the cone of light tight to the ground, defining a certain space of raw earth, finally to a slight uphill to an edge, and then the trees took over.

“That would be it,” said the major.

He called them together.

“Dust,” he explained. “That dust made you sneeze, Goldberg. It hadn’t rained in a month. That means the bullet that hit the sergeant probably deflected downward and struck the dry dirt. It yanked a cloud of dust in the air. We’re here for that bullet.”

That was enough talk for the major. He grew bored with talking easily, it seemed. Lieutenant Leets took over.

“Okay, carefully lay down your weapons. Carefully untape and withdraw your bayonets. Then carefully creep to the area just defined. Each of us will take a quarter of the sector. We believe that, having traveled through the head and two walls of skull, it has lost a lot of velocity, and so, when it hit, it probably didn’t go that deep. No use looking for disruptions in the dirt where it struck, as the rain turned all this to mush over the last week. Slow, smooth scrapes, like a road grader. You’re probably looking for something very un-bullet-like. It’ll be crunched, ripped, maybe even blossomed into a kind of flower. It may have broken into smaller chunks. That’s what happens when bullet meets bone, and this one did it twice. Also, it might have shattered, even blown up. Look for particulate. Archer, define ‘particulate.’ ”

“Tiny pieces. Fragments. Little slivers or crumbs of metal. Possibly shiny in the light.”

“Good job. Comprenez, Goldberg?”

“J’entre dans la salle de classe,” said Goldberg.

“Another joke, Goldberg,” said the major, who might have been exposed to high school French as well, “and I’ll J’entre dans your salle de ass with my boot.”

The lieutenant set up his light, low enough so the Krauts couldn’t see.

It was not easy. Well, it was easier than getting shot at or yelled at, but still… it was not easy. Hunched, knees going numb, fingers bleeding, small of back hurting, running surprisingly low on energy after the long trek in, anxious about Germans moving about in the dark, they toiled and toiled and—

“Something?” asked Archer.

He displayed a grimy little curlicue of metal, looking like a gilded fingernail, in the center of his hand. The major’s light came onto it.

“Possibly. We’ll keep it.”

He removed a cellophane bag from his pocket and held it open for the deposit.

What could anyone do with anything that small?

Next, Goldberg’s turn. Should he, should he not? It was hardly anything. But he made a noise, the major’s light came onto his palm, displaying another sliver, this time not curled but straight, as if of ice.

It went into the bag.

On and on they went. More slivers, more flakes, more curlicues, in all for the work at least 0.005 of an ounce accumulation. Was this trip really necessary?

Three hours in, they were done, at least with the designated area. Still, nothing that was or could have been a bullet.

“Take a break,” said the major.

The two guys slid back, taking breaths, shaking pain out of their crabbed hands and easing off their cramped haunches, but they could hear the officers’ whispers.

“Do we have enough to send to the FBI lab?” asked Lieutenant Leets.

“As I understand the process, the answer would be yes. But that would just tell us metals. We’d then have to assemble a baseline of metals in all the other service cartridges for comparative purposes. Plus, who knows how long the Bureau deal would be. They see us as competitors. It doesn’t matter if Ike gets on the horn and screams his lungs out. They’re not going to hurry. We jump all that if we can find the goddamn bullet.”

“Sir,” said Archer, “maybe we could work till dawn, then just go prone here until tomorrow night. We could get the whole gully done.”

“Good thought, Archer, but the longer we’re out here, the more likely some Kraut-head bumps into us. We don’t know how active they tend to be in the daylight. We all get killed or taken, we haven’t accomplished anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, Lieutenant Leets, you pick the most likely areas. We’ll go over them, only deeper.”

Much work. Harder, deeper, more demanding. More back pain, more finger numbness. Goldberg cut his pinky on his bayonet but manfully kept going, pausing for only seconds for a quick suction application, then returning. Everybody worked, everybody sweated, nobody talked. And nobody had any luck.

“Okay, relax for a few,” said the major. “Then we’ll haul ass. I want to be gone well before the sun comes up.”

Without any explanation, he took himself to the rear of the gully and set up shop. Those great eyes. If there was a sniper out there, all believed and took relief from, he would see him.

In five minutes, he slid back.

“Nobody there. Okay, let’s—”

“Here’s an idea,” said Leets. “It rained hard, right? If the bullet wasn’t deeper but shallower, only half buried, maybe the water would have swept it away. Where’s it going to go? Down the trench to the lowest point, where it would collect. Let’s—”

But Goldberg and Archer were already at the single significant puddle of the gully, halfway down. Kneeling, they plunged hands into the water and began to explore the muck. Leets and the major joined them.

Anyone observing this ritual would have thought it religious in nature. Four supplicants worshipping the church of the puddle, bent in the concentration of total prayer, their wet, cold fingers sliding through the subsurface goop, trying to do it without disturbing the placid surface. There was no need for orders here; all knew by instinct that too much disturbance could destroy the thing’s delicate resting point, drive it deeper, out of touch or reach. It just went on and on and on—

“Hey,” said Goldberg. “I think I got—”

He lifted his treasure. It was a piece of gravel.

“Nice try,” said the major.

“Okay,” said Archer “Okay, I got — shit, it slipped, it’s got to be… yeah, yeah, here it is.”

He pulled it out and, yes, there it was.

Even before the major’s light hit it, they could make out an abstraction of destruction, yet sustaining an odd sense of density, of being heavier than it looked, as did all bullets, its streamlines vanished in the drama of its impact.

The light hit it, showing that it had somehow sheared in two upon the hit, the newly exposed face displaying its inner core of lead, the gilded jacketing cracked into slashing petals, like a lethal rose, the point flat as a boxer’s snout. The base was totally gone, in some other puddle, perhaps, or flung whimsically into the trees.

“Good work,” said the major. “That little bit of scrap metal is going to tell us a lot. Now let’s get out of here.”

He deposited it in the cellophane bag, the bag into his pocket as all rose into a crouch, quickly wiped wet, dead hands on their pants, and gathered their weapons. Leets led them, same formation, out of the gully to the edge of the trees, checked his compass, and they set off through the darkness, disappearing into the dark maze again.

All, but particularly Goldberg and Archer, felt the amphetamine of success coursing through them. They’d done it! They were headed in now! Another adventure of The War successfully survived! Another day off at Battalion tomorrow, a sleep-in excuse for at least a day, and since it was a dogface habit to count the future in twenty-four-hour segments, that meant a lot.

The hedgerows fled by as if in a blur, each field navigated and crossed, each row penetrated and passed, streams leaped, sunken roads crossed, the odd fence or clump of mute, bored cows passed. It would be light soon. They were getting closer and closer.

The lieutenant’s fist came up.

All stilled, went quiet.

Nothing at first. Then from far away, though drawing nearer and nearer, came the sound of a German tank.

CHAPTER 32 The Admiral Duncan

He deserved it. He’d earned it. He had performed heroically, lived up to his deep creed, once again proven his worth. Who could begrudge him? Not even his most severe critic, himself, could begrudge him.

It was allowed. It was convenient. It was appropriate. Plus, he’d filched a fiver from the money due Mr. Raven, and it was therefore affordable.

The cab dropped him at his quarters, the May Fair hotel, where all Office of War Information officers stayed, but he did not enter. He watched the vehicle pull away and quickly disappear in the night’s fog. It had stopped raining, but the true London curse, that density of vapor that somehow turned yellow in the lights of occasional lamps, was everywhere. For Mr. Hedgepath’s purposes, that was good, not bad. It was another sign that tonight’s indulgence was meant to happen.

He crossed the street, took a block down, then turned east, toward Soho. Occasionally a cab sailed by, less occasionally a private vehicle or somebody’s military lorry, but nothing of note. No American staff cars. Excellent. He felt secure in the cloak of anonymity the fog, the late hour, and the threat of a doodle dropping on one’s head, which kept things quiet.

Soho still stood, though, like all of London, it had its gaps from bomb or doodle. Tonight, however, there was no danger, as the doodles had fallen on the other side of the river, where poor Brixton was getting hammered flat by the cunning little pulse-jet bomb.

No crowds, no outdoor lights, no buzz of rush and dither that suggested the presence of civilization, but still the club district of London purred on, war or not. He knew exactly where he was going.

It was called the Admiral Duncan, after a navy chap who’d sunk a lot of Dutchmen, and it had been in the trade since 1832, with all sorts of dreadful business in its sordid past. At 54 Old Compton Street, it looked to him rather like dear Judy’s Oz, where most others saw a commonplace storefront dive.

He stood there watching for a few minutes. He’d seen it before, of course, on pretend random walks. But he’d never quite mastered the nerve to enter. Nerve was not a strong point of his. Doubts whirled through his now tightly focused mind, but then they always did when one gave in and did what one needed so desperately. Suppose there are other Yanks in there, or someone from the BBC whom he knew from official intercourse regarding broadcast policies? Or someone far more mundane, a driver, an MP, a janitor, even? But he thought the chance small this late, a weeknight, foggy, doodles dropping randomly. Besides, the fiver burned in his pocket.

“Bold, then, are we? Out for a blag?” a voice next to him suddenly inquired. He jumped and turned. The fellow was a boy, eighteen by the look of him, cockney by the sound of him, available by the posture of him.

“Upf, er, ah, no, by no means, no, of course not,” Hedgepath gibbered in response, completely nonplussed by the nakedness of it, knowing what the slang had to mean.

“I’m trade,” said the youth. “Dilly boy. Knows a nice alley. Safe from rozzers. Get you dolly soon enough.”

“Please, no,” he said. “I’m not here for that.”

“No, and Jerry ain’t dropping buzzies on our arses neither, is he?” said the boy. “Only a quid. You’d be wasting time and gelt at the Duncan finding a lad to molly.”

“Please, sir,” Hedgepath begged.

“All right, then, Yank. Hope you get your cottaging done,” said the boy, smiled and disappeared quickly into the fog. “You’re passing up the best queen in the town.”

Hedgepath was shaking, his confidence suddenly vanished. He wiped his brow of perspiration, took deep breaths, and tried to talk his way out of the tremors that assailed his limbs. It’s nothing, he said. It means nothing. Why am I so frightened? Nobody saw, nobody knows, it’s all dandy. His superior officer didn’t know, nobody knew. His secret was safe.

Bravely, he crossed the street and entered the Duncan.

An hour later he emerged, feeling quite spiffy. It had gone well, for a first time. Who knew what paradise lurked in such dark places? He tasted air uncontaminated by the rude English Ovals they all smoked and felt it purifying and gratifying. For once his need had vanished. It would of course return tomorrow, as it always did, but for now he felt composed, undistracted, able to face his duties with vigor.

He walked the block, bent almost into a huddle, as now and then a cab passed in the fog, and shortly he had arrived at his own Mayfair block, saw the hotel ahead, and knew that—

“Oh, hullo.”

It was Mr. Raven, stepping smartly from some Edwardian crevice.

“Imagine meeting you here, chum,” said the man with the cracked face from behind the dark scarf that shielded his face from prying eyes.

Utterly befuddling for Mr. Hedgepath. He was a genius at compartmentalizing. He kept his many separate lives indeed separate. There was no sloppy sloshing in deportment, and whichever of them he had to live, he exiled the others from mind totally. That was his true gift, though having accommodated the one called NEED, he had yet to find another one into which he could insert himself.

Thus he fell into paralysis.

“What are you doing here?” he asked after a few seconds of sorting through various responses.

“It seems our business is not quite finished.”

“I assure you, it is. You have your fee, you have your assignment. Nothing more should be necessary. It is understood that we shall never again meet unless absolutely—”

“I’m happy to tell you that the job shall be done. Raven always delivers. That’s why his fee is so high.”

“Look, if it’s about the fiver, I do so apologize. It was a moment of weakness. I can get it back to you shortly.”

“Well spent, was it, in the Duncan? You’re satisfied, then? That’s superior. Your officer told me that’s where I’d find you. To each his own, says a man with a ripsawed face.”

“Please. My weaknesses should be no part of this conversation.”

“And they won’t. But it does seem that your officer values that which you are sworn to protect rather more than he values your ability to protect it. He views you now as a liability. Life can be cruel, eh?”

With that, he drove the murderously sharpened edge of a nine-inch recurve Gurkha cutting blade (called a kukri, brought back from the East by one of Her Majesty’s boys in red half a century ago and picked up for a song at a West End pawnshop) into Mr. Hedgepath’s raw neck, an inch below the jaw, an inch above the collarbone. It was the Ripper chop. It instantly sundered both carotid artery and entwined jugular vein. The blood spurted like a spritz from a seltzer bottle, driven by pressure from the perfectly healthy heart. The brain drained before the poor fellow hit the ground. He went down like a Whitechapel whore, graceless and loose as a rag doll, hitting the pavement with a bit of thud, a spot of splash from the lake of his own black fluid. Drops flew through the air. His eyeballs rolled up into his head, leaving blankness to spook his discoverers the next morning.

It was a silent operation, perfectly executed, another reason for Mr. Raven’s higher fee structure. He was worth every penny.

He checked the deserted streets, and no witnesses lurked in the sulfurous fog. He bent, plucked the wallet from the body’s rear pocket, for the necessary fiction pushing the line that the fellow had run into robbers. He was most pleased to see that the remaining bills amounted to the fiver invested in chicken gelt. It was his, after all.

CHAPTER 33 IV

Possibly the only field-grade officer in the U.S. Army to perform his own recon, Major Swagger slithered back to his boys shielding in the lee of a hedgerow about two hundred yards off the sunken road.

“Leets, map.”

The lieutenant got it, unfolded it, held the flashlight low to it, and he and the major bent to see.

“Okay,” said the major. “Panzer IV, maybe thirty-five Panzergrenadiers in support, all in that autumn-color dot camouflage, so that means SS. Heavily armed. Unusual number of MG-42s among them. Das Reich, Leets, your old buddies.”

“Can we get by them, sir?” asked Archer.

“That’s not the question. The question is: Should we get by them?”

He let it sink in. It did.

“Okay, the fact is, we have to kill this fucker. Why? Two reasons, Well, three. The first is, if we divert, we go off the map. It’s Malfo’s map, tight, restricted to patrol route. We go around, we enter the wilderness of the bullet garden. Who knows where we end up? Maybe Berlin, maybe San Francisco, maybe hell.”

He waited. Nothing. Not even from Leets. No joke from Goldberg.

“Number two: this is setting up like some kind of killing raid on your company, which is dug in about a thousand yards due west. It’s not a major attack, aimed at retaking ground; it’s too machine-gun-heavy and man-light. I think what they’ll do at dawn is take the panzer on a beeline hard cross-country, close in to three hundred, and then open up. Tank 75s, four or five MG-42s. They’ll just hose down Dog Company, kill as many as possible, then withdraw before artillery or air support can do a thing about it. A probing attack. Just part of the war of harassment. They know we’re not night patrolling because of the sniper, so this is a free shot for them.”

“Number three?” asked Goldberg timidly.

“It’s fun to blow up tanks,” said the major. “Goldberg, get that bazooka out of your pocket.”

“Sir, it’s in my other pants.”

They squat-walked 150 yards, pausing every few seconds, following the line of the hedgerow — it was a border-line hedgerow, not as thick as those that hid paths — to the bushes that marked the presence of the sunken road. This time Swagger led, followed by Goldberg, then Archer, then the lieutenant.

Archer carried the — what? Device? Bomb? Demolition? Anti-tank thingamajig? Okay, “baseball” seemed to be the term of art.

It was strictly improvised. Swagger had directed them all to lay their pineapple grenades on the ground. Then, taking his watch cap off and opening it up to form a pouch, he untaped each lever, unscrewed each Mk 2 fuse cap, and poured from each of the eight 1.5 ounces of flaked TNT, making for a total of twelve ounces of explosive, which he carefully poured into the cap, then gathered it up into a ball. Then, of course, duck tape, the war’s most efficient weapon. He wound it about the clump of explosive and wool adroitly until it was about the size of and could therefore be called a baseball. Not enough to blow a tank in the sense of destroy, but enough, if placed carefully, to disable.

“They’ve run some barbed wire around the thing,” he explained. “I’ll squirm through and get up on its back. Weakest point of any tank is the side of the turret. I’ll tape the baseball to the turret low, left side. The armor’s only about fourteen millimeters—”

How does he know all this shit? Goldberg and Archer wondered, but not Leets, who knew that in his off-hours Swagger went to the 70 Gros library and read technical intelligence manuals on German weapons and tactics.

“—and it’ll blow right through. More important, that’s where the turret traverse motor is located. It rotates the turret. I’m going to blow it to shreds. Without that, they can’t aim the big gun; with no big gun, they are dead if they run into anything from thirty-seven millimeters up. That means they will withdraw to make repairs.”

“How to detonate, sir?” asked Leets.

“I’ll push one of these grenade fuses through the tape and material of the hat, jamming it down into the shit. I’ll pull the pin, then roll off and cover low to its tracks. It’ll go in four seconds. Should rip open the turret, send the traverse motor to the shithouse, seriously maim the seventy-five gun, tear out wiring and stuff, set small fires everywhere, produce a lot of smoke.”

“Earl,” said Leets, “I don’t think the Germans are going to let you do that.”

“That’s where you come in. When I move to the tank, you go with me and get to the other side of the road and cover up. After the blast, you turn your attention to the Kraut bivouac a few yards out. Should be lots of confusion there, but to make it more confusing, you open up and spray the area with suppressive. That gives me cover to get across to you, and when I get there, we take off. Gotta move fast. They’ll eventually get around to sending people after us, but I’m guessing we have too much lead time. Questions?”

“What about sentries?”

“Aren’t any. They know there’s no patrol activity in this zone tonight.”

“How do they—”

“Never mind,” said Swagger. “They have no idea we’re out here.”

“How do you—”

“Lieutenant, you’re asking too many questions. Let’s concentrate on making this IV a piece of scrap iron. Okay?”

They low-crawled the last fifty yards, a good ten yards apart. They made no noise, as they were taped up everywhere: no clinks, no rattles, no jingle-jangle. They came eventually to a tangle of low trees just above the descent to the road. And there it was.

Panzer Mk IV, or PzKpfw IV, Ausf. H, in the clinically insane Wehrmacht nomenclature. Twenty-six tons of tank, a little bit more than half of its younger brother the Tiger. It didn’t so much resemble the Tiger as give clear evidence of emerging from the same gene pool — that Guderian touch! Squared off at all angles, contemptuous of streamline, it was an all-Krupp production number from the heart of the heart of German industrial power and brilliance. It definitely made the Teutonic all-star team, dictated by iron logic, driven by cold ambition, solid as the ingots from which it came. It moreover acquired a certain spook charisma by virtue of a convincing camouflage scheme that reduced it to waves of brown, beige, and green dots on what had to be a late-autumn background, its details lost in the rhythms of the dots and colors. Somebody knew what he was doing.

That same capable person — obviously Panzer star Generaloberst Heinz Guderian again — had to be responsible for the long tube of 75mm barrel protruding from the Gothic cathedral of the turret, a replacement for the stubbier version on earlier models made inevitable by the persistence of enemy steel. It didn’t compare with the velocity and delivery power of the mighty 88 on younger brother Tiger, a legend in its own time, but it was still a formidable weapon, as all too many burning Shermans littering the beautiful countryside made clear. The MG-42 in pintle mount at the commander’s hatch spoke to the same need. One could dispatch death at hyper-speed with such a weapon, easily the best machine gun of the war: Goldberg still believed it fired five thousand rounds a minute. Another machine gun lurked under the front hatch, right side. More hyper-speed death. Fuck the Germans! Why did they have such good shit?

But the problem became instantly clear. The barbed wire laid around it wasn’t unspooled in U.S. Army amateur indifference but tightly strung, staked deep into the ground, extremely dense. Again, somebody who knew what he was doing had set it up, maybe the generaloberst himself. As usual, superb warcraft.

Swagger stared at it. Getting through it was going to cut the hell out of him. Well, okay, nothing deep, maybe a lot of blood. Tomorrow — assuming it arrived on schedule — there’d be stitches, bandages, alcohol smears, maybe some plasma, and plenty of penicillin. Oddly, he feared that the most. He hated shots.

“Sir,” whispered someone in Goldberg’s body, though by no theory should it have come from Goldberg’s mouth, “you’ll never get through that wire. Neither will anybody else. It’s too tight. It’ll hang you up and cut you to pieces.”

Swagger looked hard at the wire. The kid was right. It was more a hedgerow of barbed wire than a roll of the stuff. And you just knew that the German barbed wire would be sharper, cut deeper, hurt more, grip more savagely, than any barbed wire in the world. It was probably Krupp barbed wire, fucking Krupp!

“He’s right,” said Lieutenant Leets. “Sir, that stuff will eat you alive.”

“Fuck,” said Swagger. “So what do we do, throw the baseball at it?”

“Sir,” said the other person inside Goldberg, “I can get through it.”

“Gary, are you nuts?” said Archer. “He can’t do that,” he said to the officers. “He’s 115 pounds soaking wet, so scrawny no uniform or piece of gear fits him. He can’t even chock his gun.” He turned back. “Gary, I’m not going to let you.”

Bicker-bicker-bicker.

“I can do it,” said Goldberg, “because I’m a scrawny runt. No big guy—”

“Do you even know what a turret is?”

“Yeah, it’s that thing up top with the broomstick sticking out.”

“Shut up,” said the lieutenant. Then: “He’s right, Major. He’s the only one here.”

“So there, Jack. The lieutenant agrees with me!”

“Okay, Goldberg,” said Swagger, “you’re onto something. Give your grease gun to the lieutenant and dump your pistol belt, bayonet, and canteen. You’re going to approach from dead rear once you’re through. Carry the baseball in your teeth. Just squish it on the turret and tape it, left side, two-thirds of the way down—”

“I can do that.”

“The armor is angled as it rises, to deflect shells, so don’t let it throw you off. Archer, cut some tape for him. Wrap it around his thigh. Goldberg, peel the tape off, just stick the baseball on there. Neatness doesn’t count. Then jam the fuse prong into the explosive. Secure the fuse housing in your other hand, but do not cover the lever. Pull the pin. We’ll loosen it up so it’s no problem. Pull the pin; when the lever pops off, you roll hard off the tank, and when you hit ground, roll even closer to the tank. The blast won’t hit you. When it goes, you get up and—”

“Yeah, the hard part!” said Archer. “How is he going to get back through the wire? The Germans are not exactly going to be pleased the little comic from Brooklyn just blew up their nice tank. That’s going to be a long ten minutes with Germans shooting at him.”

“I will lie on the wire and flatten it,” said the major. “Goldberg, you trample over me. Or crawl, or whatever. Then you guys pull me out, and we disappear.”

“He’s my buddy!” said Archer. “I’ll lie on the fucking wire. I’m taller: there’s more of me.” Then he remembered it was an officer he was snapping at and he started to add, “With all due—”

“Forget it, Archer. You want the job, you have the job. Is everybody square?”

It seemed they all were.

“Goldberg,” said Swagger, with what might have been his first recorded half smile in twenty-three years, “when I asked you if you had a bazooka in your pants, I had no idea you were the bazooka.”

CHAPTER 34 Wire

It didn’t hurt like he thought it would. It hurt much worse. Goldberg made it through the barbed wire hedge with wounds only to neck, back, both arms, chest, ears, hands, fingers, pelvis, thighs (both sides), calves, and shins, even one through his boot into the top of his foot. He bled about fourteen gallons. In fact, he was in so much agony, he forgot to worry about the Germans.

The worst one was a particularly deep jab on the right upper arm, so deep that it hung him up. It felt like a spike, not a barb. At a certain point he determined that he’d probably die of starvation, not German action. But then he reconsidered and recommitted to death by German.

And then he was out. He lay on the dirt of the road, breathing raggedly, gathering strength, will, and nerve. The weight of the baseball clasped between his teeth began to administer a new form of pain, to the muscle on the underside of the jaw. He’d never clamped before, so this one was a new sensation. He removed the bomb, coughing, gagging a bit, rotated his jaw to bring some life to the deadness it was currently registering, then regripped the thing. Ugh, tasted awful. Who said TNT wrapped in wool and tape made a good appetizer?

He slowly low-crawled forward. He could hear laughter coming from the Germans camping out a few dozen yards beyond the tank as if they were in the Catskills. Maybe they were feasting on bananas and about to break into a hearty round of SS banana songs. “Yes, ve kill no bananas today / but lots of Jews to make them pay,” something like that, to accordion, tuba and deep, rumbling belches.

Then he bumped into the tank’s tread. Viewed from half an inch away, it was quite alarming. Steel, much scarred and scratched from crushing all before it, including gravel, stone, trees, dirt, and skulls. It looked the sole of the devil’s boot. It stood for everything German: unmalleable, expressionless, brutish, nasty, and smeared with shit. He blinked his eyes. Yep, still there. No dream this, but reality.

Do it do it do it!

He dragged himself up, realized how gigantic this steel beast actually was, particularly when you’re five foot six and 117 pounds and never made a basket in your life. Crouching, then standing, he searched for a handhold, found one, planted his left boot against the nearest available tank wheel, and hoisted. Not quite enough. Try again, more upward thrust. This time he got almost aboard, was slipping, grabbed something he hoped wouldn’t explode, and pulled himself up.

More breath catching, more sweat on his face, maybe some aroma of Nazi wieners and sauerkraut from a cooking fire. Could that really be what they ate? Really? He kind of swam forward, across the flat back of the thing, encountering tidbits of German efficiency. Spare wheels were bolted to a rack, a grille let the engine breathe, some shovels were held in place by stout metal locks, everything was hard, metallic, awkward, all angles sharp, not a nuance of softness to be found. It’s a tank, you idiot. What did you expect: feather pillows, teddy bears, knishes, egg creams?

He arrived, finally, at the turret. Angled, as the major had instructed. Again, seeming gigantic. It could have used some face cream. Its raw metal complexion was rough under the handsome dappling of autumn’s tapestry of color, and as he ran his fingers across it, he felt its smelted waves in the steel, its accumulations of melted seams where the welder’s torch had turned it briefly liquid in the joinery of plates. Rough beast. Where did that come from? Yeah, a rough beast. Now, time to kill the rough beast.

Move slow. The eye is attracted to fast movements, so if you hurry some Kraut may just catch a trace of blur in his peripheral, turn, and you’re dead. Wisdom of Swagger. What made Swagger run? Swagger made Swagger run. Always right. Knew everything. Feared nothing. Six foot, one eighty, all goyische rectitude and duty, boxer’s scarred knuckles, eyes like ball bearings out of Warner’s George Raft Department. He never felt a pimple of fear in his whole life. He was born so brave bullets were afraid of him.

Hating Swagger, loving Swagger, wishing he were a war god like Swagger, he oozed ahead, trying to keep himself both slow and flat to the turret. Funny, the thing was so rough against his chest, it kind of soothed him. Didn’t feel bad at all. Who’d have thought that would happen?

The world didn’t end. Nobody cried out in German, Achtung! Eine Jude! Instead, a loud chorus of laughter broke out. Someone must have told a really funny fart joke.

He was there, three-quarters down the turret. He took the baseball from his jaws and squashed it against the steel, feeling it mush somewhat. Pinning it with his left hand, he reached down with his right and unpeeled a strip of duck tape that had been wrapped around his thigh by Archer. It crackled off easily and he got it planted next to, around, and on the other side of the baseball, holding it tight. One more to go. Ach, when peeled, it somehow flitted back on itself like Scotch tape and the two sticky sides meshed. It added seconds to his ordeal as he carefully separated the connection, then got the strip oriented around the baseball. Seemed pretty solid. Now only the fucking fuse.

He reached in his shirt pocket, opened it, pulled the thing out. Bad news. Evidently he’d picked up some mud on his shirt somewhere in the ordeal. It had dried. Pulling the fuse free cracked a little hunk of solidified mud.

Solid mud + stress =?

= dust.

He sneezed.

Crouched at just outside the circle of wire at the front right bogey wheel of the IV, they heard it.

Ah-choo!

Then that gulping, perhaps drowning sound of someone trying not to sneeze, but the sneeze won, and broke from him in a wet splutter of high velocity and violence. Sneezed, sneezed again, sneezed a third time, serial sneezes, a machine-gun burst of sneezes.

Someone heard it in SS tent city. The man rose, fearsome in camouflage the color of nature itself, unleashed some kind of big black gun, looked hard at his big machine, trying to figure out what the hell was happening, and then screamed, “Amerikanische Pionier! Amerik—” before Swagger cut him down with a burst of Thompson.

“Kill ’em,” Swagger yelled, and all three Americans went into full auto mag dumps. Flashes like small stars exploding, pinwheels of brass spitting free, the noise of hell’s chariots on cobblestone, the guns hammering and leaping, and each could see — not much. The fire streams hit the tents, tore up so much dust that most details were obliterated. Then it was quiet. The three reloaded, seeking targets.

“Could we have gotten them all?” asked Archer, sliding another long box into the mag well of his grease gun, pulling the cocking lever, almost exactly as the snaps and clicks signifying mags, breeches, bolts, rounds all doing in concert what they were supposed to do from the others. Lots of smoke, lots of dust. Then flashes began to explode from the obscured target area as the Germans, most unhurt, quickly slithered from the target zone, found positions at the margins of the road, and began to counterfire.

“He better blow that thing before they get their machine gun into play or we are fucked,” said Swagger, then raised his weapon as German bullets began to rip the dust near them — too near them — and started tracking Kraut muzzle flashes for destruction.

The noise was so terrific and terrifying that Goldberg, atop the tank, almost dropped the grenade fuse. But he didn’t. He knew from the nearness of the gunfire his pals were hosing down Camp Nazi but that he’d better get the lead out or somebody in gray would get the lead in—him.

But now he was surprisingly concentrated, surprisingly not neurotic, surprisingly bereft of comedy. Combat does that sometimes. He mastered the geography of the grenade fuse, a kind of metal gizmo the size of a lighter, with a tube descending from the center and a curved lever bending down one side. It looked disturbingly primitive. Still, he plunged the tube into the heart of the baseball and it penetrated and sunk with no difficulty.

A bullet hit the tank turret — it sounded like somebody hitting a pipe with a wrench — and then another. More dust, or more likely metallic particulate, but this time no sneezes. Too busy. He secured the fuse with his left hand, making certain to leave clearance for the lever to spring, and pulled the pin — surprisingly easy — with his right. The lever popped off, reminding him of toast in an MGM comedy short about goofy husbands in the kitchen. The thing began to sizzle.

Go! Go!

He launched sideways, felt gravity claim him, fell six feet to the ground, where the thump of arrival was considerable but not so much that he didn’t remember to roll back to the tank, not away from it, and—

It went.

The effect, so close, was experienced more as pressure than noise, for it seemed to release violent tremors, the earth itself shivering, vibrations bouncing crazily, new oceans of superheated gas sent spurting into the atmosphere, maybe the twenty-six tons of Krupp war steel even rocked on the springs that supported it.

“Archer, get back there and into the wire. Give him something to climb on. Leets, cover him. I’m going to move in a little and burn some more ammo.”

Crazy major. Was he nuts? Everybody wanted to run, except for Swagger, who saw more damage to do. He scooted forward, set up in a kneeling position about fifteen yards ahead, and started squeezing off bursts. For Archer, who saw him as he landed in a jungle of wire, he was definitely Achilles outside Troy, his darkened face lit by muzzle flash, the empties pouring from the breech of the weapon, which he held in tight control against his shoulder. Done with one submachine gun, he let it drop on its sling and pulled another, Goldberg’s grease gun, also slung about him. He thus lost no time on a reload but kept up the fire, spewing dust and death at the German encampment.

Archer felt a thud, then another; he had been so fascinated by the heroics of Swagger, he hadn’t seen Goldberg approach at a dead run, leap aboard his back, plant another stride just as forcefully, then leap off. It was Leets then, pulling him out of his entanglement. He felt a hundred little stabs, but they hadn’t begun to hurt yet.

“You okay?”

“Yes, sir,” he lied as one by one the punctures lit up.

“Goldberg, help him,” said Leets as he himself turned to assist the major in killing as many SS monsters as time and ammo and opportunity allowed.

But in seconds they were both back.

“You guys okay?” the major asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You can move, right? Nothing broken, no veins bleeding out, no broken bones?”

“All good,” said Goldberg.

“Okay, same as before. Leets on the compass, then Goldberg, then Archer. I’m on the rear. Only double-time this time. Let’s get the hell out of here. These boys are seriously pissed.”

CHAPTER 35 Vivien

For once, Millie wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the room. That honor went to Miss Vivien Leigh, the film star, who commanded fealty as had the Hamilton woman she so recently played; exquisite in face and bearing, her eyes alight with the fires of wit and mischief, her form, which was long as winter and slim as a flower’s stalk, shown so lovingly by a clinging green chiffon dress. Its emerald hues made the alabaster of her skin shine in glorious contrast.

She was on the arm of her husband, Larry, who would elsewise be Laurence Olivier, the other film star, and easily the handsomest man not only in the room but in the world. Cleft chin, glossy black hair, trim as a blade, dapper, charming, cleft chin, beautifully tailored tweed suit, eyes intense and passionate, and, of course, cleft chin.

Each attracted worshippers. She was recently back from a Middle Eastern tour, three months of sleeping on cots in tents, scorpions, lice, sand everywhere and water nowhere; he was editing his Henry V, shot in Ireland where a rousing battle of Agincourt had been re-created, to do for the home island what Miss Leigh had done for the Desert Rats. Everyone had to do his bit, but Mr. and Mrs. Larry were doing so much more than their bit, it was hard, perhaps even wrong, not to adore them.

So Millie just stood smiling at the colonel’s arm, filling in for his tired, ritzy wife. It was one of her duties. You could say — though she never would, as she was far too classy for such nonsense — she was therefore doing her bit too.

About her, rank, style, decadence swirled, as did pink faces, thin bodies, beauty and its by-products lust, envy, hatred and awe, which were so palpable one could but touch them, feel them, rub them. Cigarette smoke, diamonds and furs, silk and chiffon, the indefinable thing called glamour, particularly when set against a glistening style moderne of simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements, expressed in sweeps of streamline and shimmer that suggested the speed with which the future was sought, all driven by the beat beat of an authentic Negro jazz trio from Harlem, U.S.A. Despite the jive, the larger thing was a waltz called “The Fancy at Play,” war or no war. Everyone had a tribal identity: the Smart Set, the Children of the Sun, the Colonels and Missuses Blimp, the occasional hero, the occasional genius, the spies. Chatter, gossip and slander, bitterness and eagerness, floated on air, moved about by zephyrs of ambition, small or large. Sex lurked. Well, the illusion of sex. No actual fucking with this lot. Too old, too smug, too much of a bother, all that snapping, unfastening, unbuttoning to the forties wardrobe, whichever gender.

The colonel was there at the invitation of Sir Colin Gubbins, who was impresario of Special Operations Executive, which was the British coequal to OSS. Sir Colin was there avec fils via his subordinate Maurice Buckmaster, head of F Section, and Buckmaster was there because his wife liked the high life. So it all occurred on the whim of one silly woman, but then, how often is that not the way of the world?

“Millie,” the colonel said, “if I look at my watch, it’ll seem I’m bored. Can you check yours, discreetly that is, please?”

Her neck a long and elegant porcelain vase well shown by Madame Chanel’s plunging neckline, the hot thing of 1939, there having been no collections since, she had no difficulty in rotating it slightly as she reached as if to check her auburn hair and got a glimpse of the tiny Cartier face.

“Eleven twenty, sir,” she whispered in his pink ear.

“Another ten minutes,” he said, “and this ordeal has passed. I must canoodle now with both Colin and Buck, make my thanks and farewells to our hosts, the, uh—”

“Fitzreillys, sir. He supplies Supermarine with oil filters, she’s a minor poet. Quite minor.”

“They always are, aren’t they? At any rate, you needn’t bother to come. Just look beautiful and mysterious and all will pay tribute by genuflection but otherwise not be of bother. I’ve circulated a rumor that you’re our office’s top assassin, so that should keep the rich old pinchers at bay.”

She laughed. He was always a good companion, charming, so witty and unpretentious, with that politician’s gift to speak easily to anyone anywhere on the ladder. She watched him vanish deftly in the social pavane, took a sip of her excellent wine, shifted weight from one beautiful leg to another and—

“Hi, darling.”

She turned.

“Miss Leigh! Oh, my goodness, what an honor it is to meet you! Why I—”

“Shush. Among us girls, it’s always Vivien. Even Viv, if you like it. I had to come over. My goodness, what a beautiful girl you are. Have you any interest in cinema?”

“Actually,” blushed Millie, “I was screen-tested by RKO. I just stood there like a tree stump. They gave me some lines to read and I just, you know, read them. I was incapable of making them come to life.”

“Nonsense. I could teach you all you need to know about screen acting in an afternoon.”

“They did offer me a contract. But it wasn’t for me, even if I do so love movies. Obviously, Gone with the Wind is my favorite.”

“Right. That one turned out. Not all do. Some go straight into the loo, which is where they belong. It’s an uncertain thing, and perhaps you’re wiser to steer clear. And what is it we do now?”

“I’m personal assistant to Colonel Bruce. I suppose I can tell you he’s of the spies. There’s a lot of spy people here tonight.”

“So I’ve been told. I’m sure they’re the same as the chaps who actually wear uniforms. Here in London, it’s a game. All these generals and, one supposes, spymasters just want to pinch your bum. What do they think that’s going to get them? And how much of a thrill can it be? I mean, good heavens, an arse’s an arse, whether it belongs to Scarlett O’Hara or Lulu-Jane the fishmonger.”

Millie laughed. Vivien Leigh was quite a character! How could she be so famous, so gifted, so successful, and yet so much fun?

“Oh, God,” Viv suddenly said. “Darling, here comes Larry. Not to see me but actually you. If he’s had a third champagne cocktail, he could be feeling quite sure of himself. He’s rather ecumenical when it comes to bed partners.”

“I would never—”

“Of course you wouldn’t. But he can be, shall we say, difficult to unhorse in these matters. I’d brace myself for a run-up.”

But at that moment, who should ride to the rescue but Colonel Bruce?

“Miss Leigh, I’m afraid I must steal my assistant back from you. Come please, Millie, it’s time to go.”

“Of course, Colonel. Do take care of her, as she’s quite marvelous. I love a pretty one with a sense of how mad it all is,” said Vivien behind a 9,000-watt smile.

He deftly plucked her from the girl star, neatly avoided the onrush of the boy star, and steered her to door and stairway all without a tremor.

Yet just the shadow of upset drifted across his patrician features. “Is something wrong, Colonel? You look upset.”

“Not an emergency but a situation. I’ve just had word that an American officer has been murdered. In Mayfair, for God’s sake. Seems to be some sort of poof incident. He was that way inclined.”

Millie said nothing. Her face darkened.

“His name was Alan Hedgepath. OWI, broadcast specialist. Can’t be war related, as he held no secrets, other than what Eddie Murrow was leading with. Did you by chance know him?”

“I think I met him at a party in New York.”

“My dear, I must say, you look shattered.”

CHAPTER 36 The Hunter

Karen, in white. She never tanned like the British women but instead freckled, so that in high summer she looked like a boy on a raft in a vast American river under her strawberry hair, her body lithe and swift, her eyes dark and luminous. Except her Negroes were everywhere about her, in love and awe, living for her smiles, for that was her affect.

Then bright sun. The umber earth. The crush of heat, the song of the insects, the crackle of the dried brush. The spoor. The tracks. The smell of blood exciting the boys. Their eagerness, his rectitude and care. The process demanded care. You do not rush when—

Gunfire pulled him back.

He blinked awake in the darkness, hearing the roar from close by. Suddenly the tent canvas shrouding him shivered as fire laced through it — a burst of submachine gun, he reckoned — and as part of the same phenomenon it left a sweep of punctures curving across the canvas where the bullets had sought him.

He grabbed his long rifle, rolled left, pushed his way out from under the edge of shelter half pegged into the earth. He emerged at exactly the moment the tank exploded. The noise was a spike to the ears of even one as experienced as he. A stab of incandescence pierced the night as the turret of the beast twisted under the strength of the blast, seemed to rise a bit, then fell back, hopelessly askew. The proud gun was useless, smoke and some flame began to bleed from the wounded steel, the smell of burning rubber as the hoses melted in what turned into conflagration.

Someone was still shooting. The air was full of the whine and whisper of bullets overhead or striking nearby, plucking dust to float and haunt the night air. Screams, echoes, wild shots, yells in German as Scharführer Ubrecht tried to impose some sort of order.

The raiders quit shooting, but for another full minute the Panzergrenadiers of SS Das Reich kept their fire up. Eventually it dawned on them they were shooting at memories. Everyone lay quiet, waiting for someone to take initiative, but the only initiative demonstrated was by the flame-eating SS-Obersturmführer Rothmann’s beautiful machine, an ace T-34 killer that had met its ignominious end somewhere in France. Eventually the dust settled, the smoke and gas drifted, the wind blew clarity across the scene, and it revealed the chaos of post-attack: many of the tents felled, men either clutching wounds or dead, a few urgently seeking equipment in fallen tents. The air stunk of spent powder and blood.

He rose, found Rothmann in command of five men gearing up for pursuit.

“Herr Obersturmführer, no, don’t go,” he said.

“Did you see what the bastards did?” replied the young officer, his face in pain. “I lost eleven men killed outright, another ten wounded, plus the vehicle. And fucking intelligence said no activity tonight. Nothing like this ever happened in Russia!”

“These are different people,” he said. “Normally, it’s not like the American soldier to be so aggressive — the paratroopers, perhaps, but these are now line soldiers with no interest in heroics. So this bunch is quite proficient.”

Rothmann quit fiddling with his MP-40 and lit a cigarette; the flare of his match displayed five hard-core Waffen-SS storm troopers, weapons and harnesses in place, their combat tunics wearing the dapple of the woods, faces grim with sweat and dirt and anger. It was a scene from the movie Leni Riefenstahl had yet to make.

“Whatever, they tore us up terribly and the attack is off. It’s back to the lines on foot, with wounded on stretcher. God, what a fucking mess. But first we must catch—”

“You cannot catch them,” he said. “They’re too far gone. You’ll lose control of your men in the dark. You’ll make noise. Maybe they’ll set up an ambush and you’ll lose yet more.”

“But, Herr Sturmbannführer, we cannot just slink away. I cannot report to our officers that we were ambushed by American devils in baggy pants or whatever who destroyed us and went home to bacon and pancakes.”

“Of course not. Get your wounded to Medical. I will track them in the dark and I will make them pay.”

The young officer looked at him.

“Go ahead. Heil Hitler, or whatever you prefer. Just kill them. Kill them all.”

“Unlikely. But I will kill their leader.”

He was alone now, preferring it that way. He knew the land, having daily explored and mapped it for over a year, rain, shine, night, day, fall, winter, spring, summer. He knew each hedgerow by shape and height, where its soft, penetrable places were, the organization and sequence of the checkerboard units of the meadows, how the sunken roads crossed the land, how deep the streams were, how thick the trees were in the small patches of forest that still survived from medieval times.

He didn’t need a moon to hunt. He didn’t need any scientific apparatus, as rumor predicted. He needed only his five senses, his ability to look at a landform and project from that a map, his understanding of how an animal in flight would read that land instinctively and make certain choices inevitably.

But mostly he needed his vision. It was and always had been remarkable. He could see at a level of detail in low light as no one but a few he had ever met. He could identify airplanes at ten thousand feet, the spin on a football traveling at him — he had been a top goalie off this gift — so as to understand how it would curve as it flew at him. But the rifle was his natural métier, the most perfect expression of his gifts.

His father was a hunter and had the gift of vision too, but it had eroded long before the old man died.

“You will surpass me,” his father had told him at the age of twelve. “Every small gift I have, you have twice as large. Every strength I have, you have twice as much. You can track all day and never miss a sign. You can memorize the land and the habits of your prey, and you have the hunter’s calm at the moment of the kill.”

“What, then, should I do, Papa?” he had asked.

“You must leave. You will never be happy here, nor express a tenth of your gifts. Your gifts will destroy you here. All gifted men lack humility. They understand their superiority. It’s hard for them to show patience, solemnity, and dignity when among the inferior. That is to be expected. Thus you must travel. This place cannot contain you. You must go where others of your skill will go, and only among them will you feel comfort. You cannot be responsible for idiots as you would be here. Go elsewhere, where the land teems with animals. Learn the ways of the most dangerous of them. Only in testing yourself against death at its rawest will you become who you can be. You will draw their blood, but if they have not drawn yours, you will not have had a full life.”

He had had a full life, as his scars signified. Ripped, raked, trampled, nearly drowned (twice), his body looked like a big-cat scratch pole, which in some ways it was. But he had survived grievous wounds, secretly enjoying the agony, the blood, the urgent gravity of the surgeons sewing him back together, the life-giving relief of the penicillin. Pain was life. Death was life. He was the apex predator.

And his proudest accomplishment: a thousand! Only a few had reached that toll. It took years, it took dangers undreamed of, it took discipline, knowledge, an unrelenting sense of mission, and most of all will. You hunt the strongest, you must be the strongest. Otherwise he smashes you and your guts are eaten with glee by birds and hopefully you are dead by that point.

He heard them. These men were far more skillful than any before. They made no extraneous noise, they left no track, they traveled swiftly without pause for drink or rest. They were, as he was, professional.

Paratroopers? Perhaps they had returned. Or the Rangers who’d climbed the rock face against fire at Pointe du Hoc? Those were soldiers! It could be either or neither. Who else would the Americans have capable of such daring and skill? They were not a warlike folk and would be only victorious on an immense tide of supply that could not be stopped. But these, he thought, these were interesting.

His ears told him probably four, no more than five. Moving in a vertical line, at the lee of the hedgerow two units over. They would leave no sign, for whoever led them knew about sign, just as he knew about noise, and did not fear the night. His eyes too must be superb.

He knew pursuit was not an option. If he followed them, they would arrive at their own lines before he could close the distance for a shot. That would not do.

Thus he had to arrive before them and wait, not by any means his favored tactic. Still, one must adjust. Knowing the land, he knew the meadow the raiders traversed was aligned to take them off to the right, and if they stayed on that line, where the travel was easier and the security of the wall of brush to the left more attractive, they would travel one thousand yards to cover five hundred. His solution was simple: he would just travel the five hundred.

He raced ahead, veering off to the left, plunging centrally across a meadow, unconcerned with security. A sniper could take him, a machine-gun position could finish him, a fusillade from a patrol could down him. But there was no sniper, no machine-gun position, no patrol. He reached a road, dashed across, climbed the other embankment to find trees, but rather than detouring around the trees, as most would have done on a dark night, he charged ahead, knowing there to be little undergrowth among the scrub pines whose layers of fallen needles closed other vegetation out, and he emerged a minute or so later into a wider field. Ahead lay a line of trees, which suggested a creek, and just behind that the American line. Having examined the line with binoculars, he understood where the most likely approach would be, where they’d close in enough to issue the password, and be admitted without gunfire. There was no shot from cover. From the trees where he was, it was too far, in what would be low light. From either edge of the field, the angle was too extreme, and he’d be shooting at a moving target, in the dark from way out, the angle of deflection being all but impossible to read.

The solution: he would lie flat in the field, still as death. In their joy at being so close, they’d pass him by. A fatal mistake. But they’d halt at the streambed, feeling themselves safe. They’d put out the password and one by one slither across to that breakfast of pancakes and bacon.

But the sun was beginning its rise. A glow had begun to suffuse the eastern sky. He checked his watch and knew that it would break just about perfectly, giving him light to shoot.

CHAPTER 37 Happy

It might have been the happiest day of his life. Better than Coney Island. Better than the top of the Empire State Building. Better than hearing his first joke on The Izzy Morton Radio Music and Comedy Hour.

I blew up a German tank!

That was the totality of it. He, Gary, who had never made a basket in his life, 117 pounds, five six, freckly, frizzy redheaded, 20/10 in both eyes, avoided fights like a crazy man, mocked even by Ma and Pa, to say nothing of Uncle Max and Aunt Sylvia, scared of the roar of the subway downtown, scared even of downtown, joke writer (sort of: actually, three jokes sold, total income off of comedy $12.50): little Gary, he had blown up a German tank.

Hero? Well, sort of. Alone on the turret, the Germans shooting at him, he’d stuck to the job long enough to get the baseball taped up and insert the fuse, and recalled remembering how to manipulate the fuse. The pin came out, the lever sprung away, he dove for cover.

The noise. Who would have thought it would be so loud? It was so loud. Cowering shakily under the thing, he swore he felt the earth move, heard the rip of steel rupturing, experienced the bright light of noon in the vividness of the flash, smelled the smoke, felt the heat. Maybe he was inventing a few sensations? It hadn’t really started burning for a while, so maybe there was no heat. Smoke? Sure, probably, but did it actually smell?

Well, whatever. Next he was up and there was good pal Jack stretched across the barbed wire like an overcoat across the sofa. He felt fleet and graceful, hit Jack full speed, and was over in two bounds. Then he and the lieutenant had pulled Jack off the wire.

“Nice going, Gary,” said Jack.

“Are you all right?”

“The only thing that hurts is my whole body, so no big deal.”

Suddenly, Major War-God was there, calm, southern, fully godful in all respects.

“Let’s go before they figure out we’re not the 101st Airborne.”

Of the next, he had only vague impressions of following the major through the dark fields, squirming through holes in the bocage, dipping down into the troughs of roads, sliding through belts of trees. He had no idea where they were going because he was replaying his heroism (Heroism? Yeah, maybe. Bravery? Suppose so. Capability? Definitely!) in his mind, and trying to figure out how he could work the experience into a routine without seeming obvious. Something like that is so much better, he understood, if someone else tells the story and it just gets known.

“Say, are you the guy—”

“Oh, that. It was so long ago; I can hardly remember it.”

Actually, he did, and would forever remember every single thing about it. He remembered how high the tank felt and how he stretched to climb up off the step of the drive wheel. He remembered how sharp the steel of the rear of it was as he squirmed along. It cut his knees, bruised his shins. He remembered how slanted the turret was. He remembered the waves in the steel, the crudity of the welding, the smell of the gasoline that drove the thing. All those details… yet, oddly, he had no picture of the tank itself. So he replaced it with some memory shifting with the Tiger he’d seen under more opportune circumstances. It was pretty much like a Tiger, wasn’t it? What did the major call it? Yeah, a Panzer IV. Oy vey, so much bigger than a III. I’m telling you, a Four is one giant piece of goyische machine. It’s as big as a subway car, only with a gun!

“Hold up,” said Leets.

The four stopped, as on a darkling plain. Maybe a glow to the east, where soon enough the sun would peek above the rim of the earth. Cool wind, almost soundless, no cows, little rustle to brush or trees. Gary stopped, was surprised how much he hurt. He hurt everywhere! Memo to self: in future, avoid barbed wire.

Major Swagger slid to him.

“Hear anything?”

“Uh, no, sir.”

He asked Archer the same question, then reached Leets and the two had a whispered conversation. He gestured for them to join.

“Okay, we’re about five hundred yards out. See that line of trees? Can you make it out? That’s our line. How do you guys feel?”

“I’m okay,” said Archer.

“How about you, Killer?”

“Holes everywhere, but I’ve got at least five hundred yards left.”

“Sir, did you hear anything?” Archer asked.

“I don’t think so. I think we made it clean out of there. Okay, listen up. In case there’s shooting, I’ll move on an angle to the right; then, when you hit the trees, work your way back to your outfit.”

“D-do you think there’ll be shooting?” old Gary blurted.

“No patrols on our heels. We’d hear them coming. One guy? I don’t see how he could have gotten here so fast. But Germans, who knows? So we play it calm and slow. No sudden moves. He might not see us, but he’d see movement, and that’s enough target for him. Stay low. High is death, low is life. Just this last little bit, got it? I want to get this done before the sun.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leets, I’ll take point. You herd these dogies along.”

“Yes, sir.”

They went, low, bent onward. In the lee of a hedgerow, the last one for this adventure. Ahead the trees, the stream that ran through it, and the happy arms of Dog 2–2. No fatigue. Pain dulled by the morphine of survival. A whole new world awaited, and it would be a good place for all of them.

A last bit of naked field. A little like crawling across a bull’s-eye, but everywhere in all the universe, it seemed, stillness prevailed. They were completely alone with the fading night, the dimming stars, the rising sun, the softness of France in high summer before the day’s heat clamped down. Even the birds were quiet.

Made it.

Got to the tree line.

“Incoming,” Swagger announced, in what could only be called the paradox of a “loud whisper.”

“Password?”

“Boise. Countersign?”

“Idaho.”

“Okay, Leets, you first.”

The lieutenant, a big man, made like he was small. As low to earth as he could get and yet still be bipedal, he crouch-walked through the stream to the sandbag revetment and toppled over. Appearing in one second behind his Thompson, he was safe. Now Archer. Same drill. No problem.

“Ready, Goldberg?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No comedy, got it?”

“Got it, sir.”

But comedy was gold. A line hit Goldberg. It was too good a line to let lie, and it had to be delivered at this moment or the timing would be all fucked up, and in comedy and war, timing is everything.

In midstream he rose, not far, just a bit, and proclaimed, “Toto, there’s no place like—”

The bullet hit him two inches to the right of his left ear.

CHAPTER 38 Pistol

He knew nothing about guns. On its barrel the thing said MAUSER and then 7.65. He thought the first was the maker, obviously, German or Dutch or something, and the numerical must be a size designation. It was a hunchbacked thing, its wooden grip curved around the handle. Short, blunt barrel, most angles squared or somewhat squared. Surprisingly heavy for the smallness of the package.

He’d bought it from a dissolute soldier in an alley in Lambeth in 1934 at a quid ten for the tattered box of ammunition, pale brown, on which the script read SELBSTLADE-PISTOLEN and above that KAL. 7,65 m/m. That box, designed for twenty-five, only held nineteen. Perhaps an earlier owner had his own professional needs. The bullets were perfect little sparrow’s eggs, each in its separate partition. Again, heavy for size, the bullets had a pleasing solidity to them. They rested heavily in the hand, and it only took a few minutes in the daylight of his rooms the next day to figure out how the system fit together, the bullets sliding into a spring-driven box which slid into the handle and locked, then another sliding enterprise, this time of a kind of cover to the thing. Draw back, let pop forward on yet more springs. A satisfying mechanistic click as the whole thing reached full potential. He had tested it on a sleeping vagabond near the river, saw enough blood to know it worked admirably.

Since then he had fired it seven times, leaving eleven more bullets. Each time it had worked perfectly and his target had been felled fast, stilled forever. His technique was simple: Get close. Then get closer. Point to head or heart, pull trigger. Then depart. It had never failed.

It wasn’t always by pistol, of course, but when it could be so done, he had done so. Easier than the knife, no mess or spatter, as in poor Hedgepath’s case. Much easier than the strangler’s knotted scarf, no struggle, no hideous festival of choking and gagging, no bowel release at the ultimate second, no nightmares afterwards.

It was now in his mackintosh pocket and his hand had closed about it, learning its contours. Was he to use it today? Unlikely. Still it gave him comfort, and as he knew its deployment was upcoming, he wanted to re-familiarize his fingers with it.

But today would not be about killing, only watching and following, learning and plotting. He wasn’t sure if the target had returned from the front yet, and until and if Hedgepath’s replacement made contact, he could only go on what instructions were found in the paper that the late Hedgepath had provided in the Chinese restaurant:

He can be identified by the presence of a beautiful woman in well-tailored American uniform. She is tall and willowy. She could be in cinema. You cannot miss her. He is also tall, well-built, in the uniform of the American Army, where he is a lieutenant. He will have one bar on his shoulder epaulet, either gold or silver. He may have a bit of limp from a recent war injury. His name is Leets.

You will probably encounter him leaving 70 Grosvenor around 8 p.m. They go to dinner, or at least have gone to dinner, twice a week, when their schedules permit. Usually they walk, being young and robust still, and usually they choose a close-by Mayfair pub for repast, nothing fancy. He will then walk her to her rooms at Claridge’s, where women of her position are quartered, and then return to his quarters at the Connaught. That segment of the journey would seem to be the most propitious for your enterprise.

In time, the service across the street let out. It was held in an ancient church of Anglican denomination, not far from the headquarters, here in American Mayfair. The spot was well chosen: it had that British dignity the Yanks always think is so fabulous. The get-together was a farewell to the same Mr. Hedgepath he had helped along the path to heaven. Mostly Americans in attendance, but a smattering of English, boys from the spy game and coppers, perhaps a mucky-muck or two.

She was easy to spot. That would have been so in any crowd, but in this one particularly. She was accompanied by an older gentleman, quite dapper, himself in uniform, who was quite oblivious to her charms. But Raven’s eyes went to her and lingered, as would anybody’s. And as did everybody, he fell instantly in love with her, and that kind beauty of hers. Yes, beautiful, yes, decent. So naturally the love was infused with and driven by hate. It pleased him to take her lover from her. It was what all the beautiful ones deserved. Her tears would be many and bitter. She would know his pain.

CHAPTER 39 Field Hospital

The jeep was ready. Leets and Swagger said their farewells to Dog Company, Second Battalion, 60th Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, VII Corps, First Army. To everyone on the outside, it seemed they had a rousing success. A German tank destroyed, a German attack prevented, intelligence obtained that pointed to success in the overarching mission that had brought the OSS officers to Dog 2–2’s little part of the war in the first place. And now home by the same methods as arrival, only backward, to pursue newly uncovered leads.

Yet neither Swagger nor Leets felt sanguine about it. People die: that’s why it’s called a war. Even worse, people die for stupid reasons. But to die for a funny line?

“It wasn’t even that funny,” said Archer, before they evacuated him to the battalion field hospital.

Upon the shot, Swagger had pivoted, emptied his last two magazines into the dawn at the far bank of hedgerow, where all evidence would have suggested the shot had originated. Meanwhile, all up and down the line, Dog had joined in. The hedgerow briefly disappeared in a blitz of impact dust. But a nervous recon that afternoon — Swagger led it — found no blood trails, no tracks, no spent shells, no other indications that the sniper had been there. It was as if the man had vanished.

“Was he invisible?” Leets had asked.

“No. He just knows a little about this sort of thing. Advanced fieldcraft. Lots of miles on this boy. He can move without leaving a sign. A dog might be able to track him, not a man.”

“I thought we might find a shell casing at least.”

“Doubtful. There was no shell, because he didn’t eject one. They only fire once. They do not recycle the weapon, even if they have secondary targets. They have shooting discipline. They do not want us finding a spent shell. That would indicate what rifle they’re using, which might tell us who they are, which might tell us how to kill them. Same thing on the headshot. Given the velocity of the bullet, the headshot will certainly exit, deviate, and disappear. No evidence. This thing has been put together very carefully.”

Leets mulled Swagger’s information. The major didn’t give it up easily. He’d only tell you what you had to know. Who knew what was cooking away in that USMC brain?

Now the jeep was about to pull out, but Swagger told the sergeant major to hold it a few minutes.

“What’s going on, sir?”

“I’m waiting for Archer to come through for me. He’s torn, but he knows the right thing to do. He’ll do it. He owes Goldberg.”

Leets looked up to see Major Jackson, the battalion intel officer, racing to them from the company HQ tent.

“Major Swagger?”

“What is it, Major?”

“I just got a call. Private Archer said he’d like to see you. He’s got something he has to tell you.”

“Okay. Did you hear that, Sergeant Major?”

“Yes, sir,” said the salty old driver.

“What’s this about?” said Leets on the way over.

“He’s going to tell us how they really lost the rifles. There’s something funny about it, but he wouldn’t spill because he was afraid it would get Goldberg in trouble, and Goldberg was always in trouble. Now it’s time to spill.”

“Sir, you knew and you didn’t say a thing?”

“I’ve been around enlisted men enough to know when they’re covering something up. But I also knew that if I poked them on it, they’d go silent and get defensive. I thought they needed room to rethink.”

“You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

“Wish I didn’t. But I missed the German sniper,” said Swagger. “I only figured it out last night. He was SS and he was with the tank because he knows the territory so well. He was going to guide the panzer and the machine-gun crews in. He was in that encampment. Too bad our suppressive didn’t finish him. But once we left, he realized that he knew the ground better than we did and he could beat us back. He did.”

“He was waiting for us?”

“We walked right by him. He was prone in the field, maybe fifty yards out.”

“But when you fired at him, you fired at the hedgerow two hundred yards out.”

“That was the one smart thing I did. If I’d fired into the field, my chances of hitting him were minimal. More importantly, he would figure I knew where he was and was onto him. So it was a little misdirection on my part. He thinks we don’t know a goddamned thing. In fact, we’re breathing down his neck.”

“Do you know who and what he is?”

“I believe I do. I’ll tell you when you need to know.”

A fifty-cot tent filled with one hundred cots, a nurses’ station, some low-hanging light bulbs, sides up to vent in summer, sides down to heat in winter, a red cross emblazoned on the tent’s roof. Wounded men, white as sheets, their nostrils tight, their eyes rolled back. Wide bleeding lacerations, shattered limbs, internal injuries, faces in shreds, some alert, some out cold, some clenched in pain so extreme, they had to be loaded with morphine, some dead but as yet unnoticed. Nurses wandered what aisles were available, monitoring. Occasionally a doctor poked his head in. Occasionally a corpse was removed. The patient inflow and outflow seemed about right. It smelled of chloroform, alcohol, and blood.

Swagger checked with the head nurse and found his way to Private Archer, staring blankly at the canvas above him. Since it was warm, the sides were up; the drama outside of men coming and going supplied a steady roar of noise plus the continual traffic of patients in and out as the facility struggled with its duties.

“Archer.”

His words jolted the young soldier, who had at least four visible bandages, two on his neck, one on each arm.

“Sir,” said Archer.

“How are you?”

“If Gary were here, he’d say, ‘Holier than thou.’ ”

“How many?”

“Nineteen, sir. None too deep. All hurt, though. A few needed stitches. Also, I think they gave me at least as many penicillin shots. I’ll be okay soon enough.”

“Good man.”

“Sir, I heard you nominated Gary for a Silver Star.”

“I did. For his parents. He won’t get it, though. Maybe he’ll get a bronze. All the silvers are reserved for West Point grads or generals’ nephews. That’s the way it works.”

“I wanted to thank you. He would have liked that.”

“It felt right to me too. But, Archer, that isn’t why you asked to see me. I know that, you know that.”

“I wanted to set the record straight. If you have to put me on report, that’s your decis—”

“I don’t give a damn about report. Just tell me what you need to. It’s about the rifles, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I never heard of two men losing both rifles, all six grenades, and both bandoliers of ammo. I hope you traded them for whores and whiskey.”

“No, sir. We were, uh, ‘captured.’ The Germans threw them in a pond. Very strange tank crew. That Tiger we reported. But they didn’t shoot us. They, uh, gave us bananas.”

He told the story, Swagger listening hard, nodding here and there, concentrating so hard, you’d have thought his eyes would pop.

When Archer was done, Swagger said, “The Krauts pick up troops wherever they can. These guys weren’t German. Maybe Latvian, Estonian, maybe Ukrainian, I don’t know. But maybe their commitment to the cause was less pure. Getting you to a POW pickup point was off mission. They didn’t feel like executing you. They thought Goldberg was about nine. You caught a break, I’d say.”

“Yes, sir. I just thought—”

“One thing. Let’s go back. You said when they released you, they had a big joke that made them all laugh.”

“The guy that spoke English. He told us the joke. They thought it was so funny.”

“Can you focus on that?”

“Ahhh…” Archer made a show of concentrating, when the word at the center of funny had never really left his consciousness.

“He said, ‘Kurt says, beware of the’—well, that’s the odd part. He didn’t put it in English, though his English was good. Somehow, in his language, it was funny. It was something like nah-jez-nik-ee.”

“Sounds like he was warning you against the boogeyman. The ghost. The vampire. Some force that wasn’t part of routine army stuff.”

“I thought so too, sir.”

“Spell it out.”

“Ummm, mostly n’s and z’s with a big k and y at the end. I guess N-A, then J-E-Z, then N-I-K, then EE. Maybe Russian? Russian guys who hated Stalin and went over. NIK-EE sounds Russian.”

“My Russian’s a little weak, Archer. But I’ll find somebody who knows.”

“Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER 40 The 266th

Of course he had a name. Administrative protocols of the Waffen-SS demanded one, and so, appropriate to this time and place, he became Martin Tausend, that is, SS-Sturmbannführer Martin Tausend, of Sturmgruppe Tausend, attached to SS Das Reich, the armored division that supplied muscle in 88- and 75mm dosages to the German Normandy effort. Thus, as Sturmbannführer Tausend, he sat with a fellow officer at a table as the two picked over recent developments. Far off, small-arms fire stuttered, the occasional big one detonated, men fought and died, another day in the bocage, Wehrmacht-style. It was warm and friendly; birds sang, cheese ripened, wine aged, and professionals Sturmbannführer Tausend and Oberst Pfefferkorn worked things out.

“Herr Oberst,” he said, “Das Reich has lost a tank and eleven men killed. Worse, it failed in its objective to harass the Americans, who as we know are basically flighty troops anyhow. Such harassment was designed to make them flightier and destabilize them for any new assault formations.”

“I understand that, Tausend,” said Pfefferkorn, battalion commander of Grenadier Regiment 897 of 266th Infanterie, now attached to 353. Infanterie-Division of LXXXIV. Armeekorps especially for Bushkrieg. He was a hard-as-Krupp-steel professional, Feldgrau to the cellular level, a First War veteran who had stayed in the army after the betrayal of 1918, fought Bolsheviks in the streets of Munich in 1919, trained secretly using broomsticks for rifles in the Soviet Union when the two nations cooperated throughout the twenties, came into the light in the thirties during brazen rearmament, and had spent two years (three wounds) in Ukraine and eastward.

“Help me please to understand,” asked Tausend, in SS camouflage, all brown spots — they looked like peas — and melancholy black waves. “As I see it, the whole escapade came about due to faulty intelligence. I was told there was no American patrol activity that night. As a consequence, I advised Das Reich no actions were necessary and his men should get a good night’s sleep before the morning’s fun. We were then raided, the panzer was destroyed, eleven men died.”

“I must therefore apologize but equally explain with regret that some things are at play here that I do not myself fully understand. I do appreciate the fact that you have not sent screaming, accusatory telegrams to Berlin demanding my return to the Eastern Front, which I have no desire to revisit. That shows a willingness to accommodate.”

“I prefer accommodation. It is my nature. And as you know, and since we are in private—”

They were in 266’s No. 3 Battalion’s HQ tent, twenty miles north of still defiant Saint-Lô, five miles east of the front, and between them on the table was not a Luger but a bottle of schnapps, nicely toasted, a little licorice bite to it, after the German fashion.

“—you know that I am purely military, and not the kind of political who spouts mad nonsense and worships little men in little mustaches.”

He was a mild enough specimen of Aryan features himself, blond though a bit pudgy, blue-eyed but reasonably calm. He had no appearance of craziness, malevolence, even turbulence. His slightly bulky body suggested prosperity, not strength.

“I admit there was a mistake, Herr Sturmbannführer. But there are always mistakes, you see?” said Pfefferkorn. He had a radical scar running from left eye to ear. A Russian chap at Stalingrad had tried to bayonet him in the head and not quite gotten the job done. Pfefferkorn had finished him with three bullets from his P-38 and continued to lead his men until he passed out from loss of blood. Even 133 stitches had not knit the wound sufficiently. It looked like an open sewer. As he said laughingly to his wife, “Such is war!” He was that kind of soldier.

“I have myself been assured that our source is extremely reliable,” he explained. “I do not even know who and what it is: radio intercepts, code-breaking, or possibly a wretched believer in our superheated Aryan master race pornography. Or someone with a weakness for Nietzsche. But whatever, however, whichever, his information can never be one hundred percent accurate. The complexity of modern organization sees to that.”

“You are saying, Herr Oberst, that the American war machine is rickety, feeble, occasionally stupid. Thus, one component may not know what the other component is doing and things never happen in coordination or even for a reason? In other words, just like our own?”

“Exactly. To require perfection, Tausend, is to court tragic disappointment. You are to be commended on your success so far. Their night patrolling has stopped. Kudos to Attack Group Tausend and to Operation Tausend — your creation, I understand. We are therefore able to maneuver and fortify almost at will. It is a great tactical advantage and it is one reason that, while our armies retreat everywhere else, they do not do so in the bocage, and Saint-Lô is still ours.”

“You would then recommend I view that day’s activities as an aberration?”

“Please do. As I have no authority over SS, I cannot insist. So I plead: do pursue your efforts aggressively. We of the regular army are in your attack group’s debt. Assure your men the intelligence blunder was a rare, statistically insignificant occurrence — an anomaly, if you will.”

“I am reassured and will return. To believe otherwise would not be healthy.”

“Meaning?”

“If those Americans were there by accident or coincidence or bureaucratic incompetence, then, yes, it can be dismissed. The other explanation is bad for morale. Mine especially.”

“And that is?”

“That they were there for me.”

CHAPTER 41 Old Man

The word reached them before they reached an airfield. Plans had changed. Now they would report ASAP to First Army headquarters at Vouilly, four miles southeast of Isigny-sur-Mer. Someone there wanted to talk with them.

It turned out to be the big guy himself, Major General Omar N. Bradley, commanding officer of First Army. Though it was late when they arrived after another stop-start adventure on the turnpike of American vehicles that ran behind the front lines, the general saw them immediately.

A lieutenant colonel of G-2 took them to his command trailer, knocked, and yelled in, “Sir, the OSS people are here.”

“Okay, show ’em in. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

Shock number one: general in old West Point bathrobe, smoking a cigarette.

Shock number two: no fire-breathing, boot-stomping, rah-rah, give ’em hell guy like some. Looked like a teacher: tall, thin, bald, lower jaw slightly oversize, eyes small but fiercely intelligent. No trace of gifted ballplayer he’d once been. Only a haggard elder with big problems. The circles under his eyes looked like monsoons, the newly cracked wrinkles like arroyos in the Mojave, the slight palsy suggesting soul-deep fatigue and tons of pressure. It had been a long time since the G.I.’s general had smiled, because too many of his G.I.s were corpses.

Both Leets and Swagger came to, but the ceremony of courtesy was waved off by the old man, who had no interest in it. Behind him on the wall was an eight-foot-high map of southwestern Normandy, his army’s positions on it designated by pins. It looked as if it had been stared at so hard, its colors had faded.

“Gentlemen, sit, smoke if you want. Need coffee? Long, hard pull over here, I’m told.”

“We’re fine, sir,” said Swagger.

“I know your background, Major,” he said. “How many islands again?”

“Three, sir. Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Tarawa.”

“Hard fights out there. Clearly you know your business.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m told you men destroyed an enemy tank with improvised explosives on night patrol a few days ago. Decorations should be presented.”

“No need for us, sir. I’ve nominated the two enlisted men with us, one posthumous for Silver, the other for Bronze. I’d be most pleased to see those go through.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I like initiative. It’s lacking, alas, in the goddamned bocage. The first time I saw bocage, I couldn’t imagine it. Remind you of anything, Major?”

“Guadalcanal.”

“So I’m told. Anyhow, I wanted this face-to-face, not for an update or a mid-operation briefing, anything like that. I’ll let you do your job. I just want you to know how important it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s the bigger situation. Ike is furious. The Brits are furious. The President is furious. General Marshall is furious. No one anywhere anticipated being hung up the way we are and taking the casualties we are taking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Worst of all, in my view, is the toll it’s taking on our troops. One in four of our infantry casualties, First Army — wide, is neuropsychiatric. We have more than five hundred cases of self-inflicted wounds. Marines could take this pressure, as I’m sure you know, Major, and so could paratroopers and Rangers. But draftees who were behind a plow or a soda fountain six months ago are finding it difficult.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sniper fear is everywhere. There are many ways to die in battle, gentlemen, but for some reason the sniper causes particular terror, particularly among fresh troops. I almost issued an order to execute any enemy snipers on capture, that’s how serious I am and how badly they are hurting us. Did you hear of that?”

“I did, sir.”

“So I’m just saying to you, if you’ve been going one hundred miles an hour, now you have to go one hundred and fifty. If you’re working twenty hours a day, now you have to work twenty-two. If you need any logistics support — travel, firepower, cooperation from other commands, ours or the Brits’—let me know and I’ll see it happens fast. But I need some sort of sniper victory — not sure yet what form it’ll take — to give to my people.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I won’t trouble you with details, but we’ve got a big breakout operation coming, new strategy, new weapons, new cooperation with the Air Forces, a whole new ball game. But all that comes unglued unless the line troops believe they’re not about to be shot in the head by a mystery man who can see in the dark.”

“We’ll get it done, sir,” said Swagger.

As they walked to that night’s quarters, Swagger said, “Assuming we get back tomorrow on sked, you take that girl of yours out to dinner or something. Then, the next morning, have Sebastian drive you to Scotland Yard’s ballistics lab and see what they can tell you about the composition of the round we recovered.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have a friend in Brit intel? One of those fancy guys who’s a duke or a lord or something?”

“I know a lieutenant named Tony Outhwaithe. Another Jed. Smart guy. Trained with him. He’s back in London at MI6.”

“Good. Get him to take you to some kind of foreign language department in Oxford or that other one. I’ll have a word for you to translate. Not sure which language. Have to know what it means not just exactly but casually, in a joke, an old wives’ tale, a fairy tale, something like that. Can you do that?”

“The etymology. Yes, Major. Of course.”

“In private, drop the ‘Major’ bullshit. ‘Earl’ is fine. By the way, you did real good out there. You’re a good officer, Leets.”

“Thank you, Earl. But can I ask something?”

“Sure.”

“Here’s what I don’t understand. You could have told General Bradley about the business with Tyne, and Tyne would be on his way to India tomorrow at dawn. Yet you didn’t.”

“Because if I do that, then I’m Bradley’s boy. No idea how that plays. Maybe there’s a Patton faction that hates Bradley, wants him out, and so their cooperation with us goes away. Maybe his reputation scares people so much that they hide rather than risk screwing up. We’ll take care of Tyne ourselves when the time comes.”

The time had come. Upon reaching their quarters, a runner brought by three radioteletypes. At 2342 hours, Colonel Bruce had informed Swagger to report to his office at 10 a.m. two days hence. At 2117, Lieutenant Fenwick told Lieutenant Leets that Tyne had “photos” and was boasting they would doom his career. And at 1722, “Colonel” Sebastian told them not only what Fenwick and Bruce told them later but that Congressman Mulrooney had flown in as the enforcer.