Sentimental Journey Page 5

  “Take Miss Kincaid back to her room, Leutnant. Let her contemplate which is the bigger waste of time: talking to me or being locked in that room.”

  Adolf crossed the room and took her arm, but Kitty didn’t move because she had one more thing to say. “You forget something important, Herr Von Heidelmann. I am a U.S. citizen. We are not in your war.”

  “And you forget that you are not safely tucked away in your home in the U.S. Your country has been shipping aid, aircraft, food, and arms to Britain, and has been for months. Your president meets regularly with Britain’s Churchill. Our U-boats are already in place to patrol your Atlantic coast in the same way we patrol and blockade the Channel. It is only a small matter of time.

  “We will take Great Britain, Miss Kincaid, and there will be nothing between the United States and Germany except the Atlantic Ocean. A little water will not protect you. Before long the Luftwaffe will be bombing the U.S. every day in the same way we are bombing England. Imagine New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, and before long, your hometown in California, all under the control of the Third Reich. Technically, you are correct. Your country is not in the war. But trust me, it will be.”

  “JEEPERS CREEPERS”

  SIXTEEN THOUSAND FEET OVER THE DROP ZONE:

  THE DRAA VALLEY, MOROCCO, NORTH AFRICA

  The only thing J.R. hated about his choice of career was jumping out of a goddamn airplane. It wasn’t just that he was afraid. He was smart enough to know fear was a healthy thing in a soldier. It was fear that kept men alive.

  He’d had a discussion with his granddad about it one time. When you weren’t scared, well, that was when bad things happened. A sniper’s bullet in a vital organ. A land mine under your boot. A mortar shell with your name on it.

  Being scared sharpened your senses. You paid attention. You listened. You looked. Your sense of self-preservation was at its highest point.

  Fear was an emotion, and emotions were just things you felt in your gut. If you let an emotion get into your head or, worse yet, into your heart, then you were a dead man.

  So it wasn’t the fear that made him hate this part of his job. For all he knew, his phobia could have dated back to jump training in the wilds of Georgia, a surefire hell he didn’t want to relive again in this lifetime or any other.

  During jumps they had landed in watermelon fields, in pine trees, and at night, between electrical and telephone poles, where the wires squeezed the shroud lines together and pushed the air from the canopy, something that sent you to the ground so fast and so blasted hard that anything in your jumpsuit pockets tore right though the bottom seams. On one hard, bone-ringing landing, J.R. had actually lost a filling from his back molar.

  Another time they’d landed in a huge and muddy hog farm, where one five-hundred-pounder took offense when a lieutenant from Mississippi who never wore socks landed on the animal’s hairy back. The hog rolled over and broke the lieutenant’s leg, sending him to the local hospital where, while he recovered, he could contemplate the joy of going through jump-training hell all over again, after his leg healed.

  From then on, whenever someone was busted up on a landing, the men called it “boarfooting.”

  At night in the barracks, the men all made bets on whether the Army scouted out the worst possible places for them to land, then made those spots a required jump target.

  One night before a graded jump, the instructor—a grizzled World War I sergeant and expert paratrooper plucked from the 501st Parachute Battalion, who according to rumor had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen—caught J.R. leaning on a wall, talking and joking with some buddies when they were all supposed to be packing their chutes.

  Every single one of them was an officer, some of them fresh out of the Point, like J.R. But the fact remained that every one of them outranked a sergeant. However, jump training was run by sergeants and Sergeant Wilford Rufus Huxley had the final word.

  He was it.

  He was god.

  He was the be-all and end-all.

  So J.R., a second lieu at the time, learned a hard lesson that night, when it was raining like a sonofabitch. With a nine-and-a-half-pound Garand caliber .30 MI rifle in his hands, his chest and back strapped heavily with ammo magazines, and packing full gear, J.R. ran double-time around the parachute packing shed singing:

  “Sergeant Huxley is on the ball,

  He caught me leaning against the wall.”

  Every so often Huxley would stick his shiny bald head out of the shed and yell, “I can’t hear you, Cassidy!”

  J.R. was screaming at the top of his lungs.

  When it was over, he was hoarse for days, and no one else spoke a word to each other outside the barracks for a full week. From that day forward J.R. was the first one done packing his chute, then he would stand there, silent as a rock.

  The disturbing thing about jumping was: It wasn’t normal human behavior to throw yourself out of a plane. Hell . . . you stood there, the door off the plane, being blasted by engine and wind noise and flying so high the air could never be anything but so icy cold you swore your balls were turning blue. The wind force was so strong it flattened your skin against your face bones until you looked like an old cow skull someone dug up in the desert.

  You were stuck there, standing at that open plane door, chute buckled around your chest and waist and strapped around your precious nuts, with land thousands of feet below you and nothing between the two of you but clouds and air and enemy fire if they saw you.

  No, this was not his favorite outdoor sport.

  On his last assignment, he could still remember jumping out into the air and feeling like one of those metal ducks they had in the shooting galleries, one with a huge white silk canopy over his head that said, “Look! I’m dumber than dirt. I’m jumping out of a plane. Shoot here.”

  And now he was back here once again, some sixteen thousand feet in the air, standing at the door of a USAAC C-33 transport, engine noise wailing back at him from its twin Pratt-Whitney Hornets, ready to jump out and drop to the earth below with his expertly self-packed, U.S. Army—issue parachute that better damn-well open.

  He looked down at the targeted drop zone and felt his eyes tear from the wind. To cheer up, he told himself there would be no hog farms in North Africa.

  The copilot leaned out and shouted, “Two minutes, sir!”

  J.R. pulled down his goggles, then gripped the metal casing of the door opening. At least the flight was smooth. When there was turbulence, it was real hell. He looked down again at the approaching drop zone. To the north were the Atlas Mountains. Below him was nothing but miles and miles of rippling mounds he figured was sand.

  The drop zone was the south side of the mountains, near nothing. He was to meet an operative who would take him the back way into the mountains, and from there, he was to infiltrate the Kasbah so he could play good guy and save Kincaid’s dishy daughter—the one who didn’t have the sense to go home.

  He looked up again, then shifted his gaze to the red and green jump lights.

  Nothing.

  He waited.

  A good four minutes had passed by.

  The copilot stuck his head out and was frowning at him with a “you’re still here” expression. He turned back and hit a few switches. His head poked back out and he cupped a hand around his mouth and hollered, “The lights are out, Captain! Jump!” He gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  J.R. turned back. His right foot was already over the threshold, and he slid his hands outside and put his palms against the outside of the plane.

  He looked down, then took one deep breath. “Ah, what the hell . . . ”

  He threw himself out of the plane.

  A second later he was sailing into the air, arms crossed over his chest, and he began to count. “One one thousand . . . ” Somebody’s got to come up with a better way of getting from a plane to earth.

  “Two one thousand.” Soon . . . real soon.

  “Three one thousand.” Hail Mary, Mo
ther of God . . .

  “Four one thousand.” Open, open, open . . .

  “Five one thousand . . .” He pulled the rip cord—his favorite part—and got the crap jerked out of him by the chute, which was far better than watching the canopy collapse above him as he fell to earth at a few thousand feet a minute.

  He spun for a moment or two as his risers unwound; then he floated in that great silence, the one that always followed the chute’s opening jerk.

  He gripped the lines and looked above him.

  Off in the distance, the plane had banked to the northeast and was moving away. Back to base. For the briefest of moments it looked like a metal crucifix hanging sideways in the sky.

  By the time the plane was nothing but a flea speck in the distance, J.R. was floating through the air above the desert, some four minutes, at the very least, and God-knew-how-many-odd seconds outside the designated drop zone.

  “PAPER DOLL”

  Another five days had gone by, and every single one of them had been more difficult than the last. The morning after her cheery little talk with Von Heidelmann, Adolf got her up early and took her outside to walk in the courtyard.

  It had been raining. She was soaked to the bone, but instead of taking her back to her room afterward, he took her directly to Von Heidelmann, who talked to her for hours. All she could do was sit in that hard wooden chair and tell herself it didn’t matter that she was wet and cold and miserable.

  At first she tuned Von Heidelmann out the way she had tuned out her brothers when they would pester her to death. She answered only when she wanted to. But some nights she swore she could hear him in her sleep, that trapped inside her head was a constant drone of Nazi jargon.

  A few days ago she had started her period in the middle of the night and had to tear strips from her one towel to use as menstrual rags. She tried to hide the rags. But there was no place to hide anything in her room. When she was at her weakest point, cramping and tired and drained, Von Heidelmann had battered her with propaganda all night long.

  Some days there had been no dinner. Some days there had been too much food like before, but when they piled the food high on her plate, it turned out to be something that she couldn’t wrap in a napkin and save under her cot for later; it was always a type of food that would spoil easily.

  Some nights, when she was sound asleep, they came and got her up, making her rush down to Von Heidelmann’s office, dazed, barefooted, and half asleep, only to spend the rest of the night listening to him drone on. He would ask her questions. She would only sit there and cry. She understood the psychological games he was playing.

  She played the role of fragile female.

  Let Von Heidelmann think he was winning.

  She heard those familiar footsteps. A second later she was deep under the blankets and feigning sleep.

  Adolf came inside. “Wake up, Fraülein.” He shoved at her shoulder repeatedly. When she opened her eyes, he pulled her up. “You come with me now.” He took her by the arm but didn’t yank on it. She had noticed he was less gruff with her and did not jerk her around as he had before. Perhaps Adolf was half-human after all.

  “You must come now.” His voice was quieter, his actions softened, like her brothers’ response when they felt bad about something they had done to her.

  She hated pity . . . had fought it like crazy for years. But this time, she took advantage of his pity and stood there for a moment. She pretended to shake out her clothes, then brushed her tangled hair out of her face. She faced him. “Let me venture a wild guess, Adolf. Herr Von Heidelmann wants to talk with me.”

  “HELL’S BELLS”

  He landed in a fucking palm tree.

  When J.R. looked down, he was hanging some fifty feet off the ground—which was conveniently riddled with what appeared to be knife-sharp rocks. It was good to know some things never changed. Mr. Murphy came along for the ride.

  He checked the position of his chute; it was secure, or securely stuck, depending upon your outlook—optimist or pessimist.

  Apparently that single Hail Mary had done some good. Otherwise he might just haul down on the shroud lines and suddenly go smash! Right down on those rocks.

  He jerked the lines. Palm dust, dates, and other palm tree crap rained down on him. He swore, then brushed the dust off his face while a few more dates hit his shoulders and head.

  He gripped the lines tightly and kicked out, so he began to swing back and forth. He had the darkly amusing thought that he ought to hum carousel music.

  Back and forth he swung, building momentum, dodging dates and dust and more dates. A few more good swings and he was close enough to the tree trunk to clamp his legs and one arm around it.

  The damn thing was prickly as hell.

  He reached up with his free arm and released his chute.

  A second later he was swearing a blue streak and sliding down the rough tree trunk with all the finesse and comfort of a fireman sliding down a pole made of pineapples.

  As landings went, it wasn’t his best. He hit hard and bit his tongue. He could taste the saltiness of blood in his mouth. He spit, then pulled himself up and checked his gear. Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed around his head and bit him on the neck. He slapped it and pulled his hand away. He counted a dozen dead mosquitoes on his palm. They were everywhere. He waved them away, then gave up and let the little mothers bite him. He did the routine—patted his chest, his wrist, his crotch, and his pockets as he murmured, “Compass, watch . . . testicles, spectacles.”

  Yep, all the important stuff’s here.

  He took a swig from his canteen, then swiped at his mouth with his sleeve and checked out the area’s perimeter. He was in some kind of oasis—a cluster of palm trees, rocks, every single mosquito in the continent of North Africa, and a stone well off to the west where some vegetation grew and a few ugly white flowers were poking out of a patch of sword like weeds.

  He refastened the canteen to his belt, shoved aside his rope-and-toggle hook, then unsnapped his jacket pocket. He pulled out his compass and his maps. He scanned them, then looked around him.

  The mountains were to the southeast. That was good. That’s where they were supposed to be.

  He knew he’d overshot the drop zone, but he didn’t know by how far. He studied the map for a minute or two. From what he could calculate, he was about fifteen klicks northwest of his rendezvous, if this spot was the well marked on his map as Robinet.

  The sun was late in the sky; it was still hotter than hell. He checked his watch, then turned and took off toward the southeast at an even run.

  He had only two hours to rendezvous.

  “DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES”

  The sand dunes rippled across the horizon, endless and golden like thousands of tanned backs bent down to hide from the hundred-and-twenty-degree sun. Standing in his armored halftrack SdKfz 250 Greif, Feldleutnant Frederich Rheinholdt took out his 6 X30 binoculars and searched that immutable horizon for a cloud of dust or a flea like speck in the distance. He searched for some sign of the 105th Panzer Regiment coming from the west, for reconnaissance, or the unit from the 900th Engineers Battalion.

  He checked his watch, a futile motion because time did not matter in the desert. Hours and minutes seemed as unchanging as the horizon. He took off his field cap and the British anti-dust goggles he’d captured at Halfaya Pass. He wiped the grit and sweat off his forehead with the dusty rolled cuff on his sweat-drenched tunic, then used the hem of his tunic to clean the dust and grime off the goggles.

  One of the first things you learned on the desert front was that sand was your constant comrade. It got into everything. You ate it. You drank it. You breathed it. And when you looked ahead, it was always there before you, inevitable, uncontrollable, like your destiny.

  He glanced down at his driver, Obergefreiter Veith, who had finally rid himself of the ridiculous army-issue tropical pith helmet some Dover Idiot in Berlin thought necessary if you were anywhere near the equa
tor. It might have been fine for hunting elephant on the plains of Africa at the turn of the century, but in the desert it was impractical and uncomfortable.

  Veith was finally wearing the lighter, cooler field cap as Rheinholdt had suggested when they had been two hours into the desert. Callow and young, the corporal was too much of a Neuling yet to veer far from military convention. He had been assigned as his driver only a week before, just days after fresh troops had landed in Tripoli, the newest divisions and regiments assigned to the Deutsches Afrika Korps.

  Rheinholdt had been with the DAK for a year, yet when he looked at Veith, he felt like it had been ten. The young blond soldier was staring at a map and sipping water from the aluminum cup of a new-issue brown felt canteen, his legs still in breeches and high boots, but stretched out into the depths of the floorboards. He looked for all the world as if he were sitting in a sidewalk cafe on Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, eating Kuchen, reading Signal, and sipping on coffee. Rheinholdt wondered how long it would take him to realize that the cup he was using was worthless in the desert because it would fill with sand and dust that turned the already vile-tasting, salty water to mud.

  Rheinholdt put his cap back on, then unclipped his own canteen and took a drink.

  “Can you find our location on the map?”

  Veith did not answer right away. He was frowning into his canteen cup.

  Rheinholdt smiled, then asked again.

  “Thirty kilometers, Herr Leutnant.”

  “Good. We have close to two hours until sunset.” Rheinholdt turned, signaled the rest of the motorized unit forward, slid on the British goggles, and sat down. “Keep heading southwest.”

  “CLING TO ME”

  Kitty awoke the moment a man’s hand clamped over her mouth. She struggled against him, drew back her left fist, and punched out at him as hard as she could.