Allies

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ALLIES: HISTORICO-GEOGRAPHIC BACKGROUNDS AND DISCLAIMERS

HISTORICAL & GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Just after midnight on June 6, 1944, the 82nd and 101st U.S. Airborne Divisions, along with the British 6th Airborne Division of the Allied Expeditionary Force began crossing the English Channel with the objective of breaking through and establishing a hold on what Adolf Hitler called "The Atlantic Wall"- the German Army’s line of defense stretching across the northern coast of France. The plan, codenamed Operation Overlord, called for a mass bombardment of the Normandy beaches; paratroopers, general infantry, special operations units, tanks, battleships, bombers, and fighter jets were all called upon to participate in the most ambitious landing operation in the history of warfare.

The main action of "Allies" takes place between 0100 and 0930 hours (one o’clock and nine-thirty a.m.) on D-Day. Chris, Buck, and J.D. are paratroopers, or infantry parachuted in from escort planes to land behind enemy lines. Because of the median age of World War 2 soldiers- and paratroopers in particular- I’ve had to play around with Chris and Buck’s ages a bit, so they’re around 26/27, instead of the hypothesized thirty-something. J.D. is around 18.

HISTORICAL LICENSE

As a caveat, please note that some historical license was taken in order to work Nathan into the story, as African-American units were not utilized in Operation Overlord until the beaches at Normandy were firmly established in Allied control (in the 1940s, the US Army was segregated.) Out of deference to history, the regiments, companies, and platoons to which Chris, Buck, Nathan, and J.D. belong are fictional.

Because of unsettled climactic conditions and the inexperience of their pilots, many paratroopers landed a good distance away from their designated drop zones; for Chris, J.D., and Buck, this means that they were dropped near the small village of Four Corners (again, a fictional construct- obviously <g>), which is located about three miles north of Pont l’Abbe and six miles west/northwest of Ste. Mere-Eglise on the Cotentin Peninsula.

As for the German Army, Colonel Johann Schwartzfeld, Lt. Konrad Meier and the members of the 79th Panzer Div. detachment are of my own creation. Field Marshal Runstedt, Gen. Dollmann, and Gen. Rommel are all historical figures. Vin’s dreams and Ezra’s depictions of Nazi war crimes are taken from the records of soldiers sent to liberate extermination camps, memoirs and testimony of Holocaust survivors, and official Nazi government correspondence. Rudolf Höss was the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp; the conversation Ezra recalls having with him is based on testimony Höss gave at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

REFERENCES

TONS of thanks to my beta readers, Jean Graham, Thalia, and Raquel! You guys are truly incredible, patient, and insightful. Special thanks to Jean for her fact-checking and extensive knowledge of WW2 terminology.

Ambrose, S.E. Citizen Soldiers. New York: Simon & Schuster Books, 1997.
------------------- Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. New York: Simon & Schuster Books, 1990.
------------------- D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster Books, 1994.

Browning, C. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Conot, R.E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1983.

Gilbert, M. The Boys. New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt & Co., 1996.

Rubenstein, R. The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Shirer, W. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Ballantine Books, 1950.

Weiss, J. The Ideology of Death. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.

ALLIES

CHAPTER ONE: JUNE 6, 1944

In gearing up for their dress rehearsal nearly a month earlier, nervousness had limited itself to a fitful flickering in the corners of their minds, but in the face of the real thing, that nervousness had become an almost unending rush of adrenaline, tempered only by the terrific pressure of their gear and the rapidly-failing airsickness pills that some had taken. The bitter, noxious aroma of the chemicals which impregnated their suits filled the jump bay, along with the acrid undertone of sweat and some poor guy’s vomit. Claustrophobia threatened, making the tight quarters shrink to unbearable proportions.

Hell, the third jumper on the stick thought.

Hell, I’m in hell.

The C-47s had come in far too low and fast, and the turbulence that had already made every man in the cargo bay sick only got worse as the pilots fought to keep their crafts free of the continuous strafing laid down by the German battlements entrenched on the French coast. In the small hours of the morning, just after midnight, the fleet began crossing the English Channel, flying over the vast assembly of gunboats and escort battleships that carried the Allied infantry to the Normandy shoreline. Sergeant Mark Wilder, who was the jump master and as such sat by the open door of the cargo bay, could see the whitecapped wakes belonging to the great ships of the Allied Expeditionary Force beneath them, and in the distance, the lightnings of German signal flares.

Lieutenant Chris Larabee of F Company, 512th regiment, 101st Airborne couldn’t see any of this, could only hear the terrific thundering of the engines of the plane he rode in, could only feel the sickening lurching and plunging of the machine as it fought against cannon fire and turbulence alike, the pilot at the controls very likely having gone crazy-mad with fear and wanting to get out of this as fast as he could. An icy fear of his own tried to work its cold fingers around Chris’s gut, but he fought it off, as much for himself as for the men who waited on the line with him.

"You think there’ll be ladies where we’re goin’?"

Chris turned a wolfish grin to his friend, guilty that the grin was somewhat forced.

"Imagine so..."

"That’ll be the one bonus to this whole shebang, huh?"

Buck Wilmington stood to his left, just after him on the jump line, and Chris noticed with something like humor that the man’s moustache had already made a good show of growing back after the last forced review before they loaded. The review had happened two days, two years, two centuries ago, in an airfield they’d left just a few hours back and a few worlds away. Talking was pointless, and Chris could see Buck- for once- wasn’t in a talking mood anyway.

Chris had been staring at the jump light more or less fixedly for the past eternity, as the rest of the men had done, when they weren’t busy puking in helmets or praying softly, unable to do anything to ease the anxiety of such interminable waiting. In the strange half-light of the bay, their faces glowed with a bizarre luminosity born of fearful anticipation, giving them the appearance of misshapen devils with their kit hanging off their bodies and intruding into the space of those on either side of them; the hooks on the jump lines looked like gallows.

He knew their hidden fear of course, having lived through it before in the invasions of Sicily and Italy. For many of the members of Falcon Company, however, this was their first jump into a real combat situation, and though they had trained long and hard for it, knew their comrades and their weapons as intimately as they had known any lovers they may have had, the knowledge that the guns beneath them were shooting to kill and cripple was an entirely new factor.

They must have come over the French coastline now, for Chris saw Private Parker tense, leaning forward in anticipation, eyes fixed on the unlit jump signal, even though Mark had not yet given the order to stand and hook up. Chris felt his own body quiver, ready for any action, but kept a firm lid on the adrenaline rush that threatened to overtake common sense and training. He heard Buck’s hoarse whisper in his ear.

"Don’t go runnin’ out on me all half-cocked, y’ hear?"

"Promise I won’t, ol’ war dog," Chris returned.

"That’s the spirit," said Buck, nudging Chris in the ribs. "Don’t wanta have ta save your sorry ass."

Chris managed to direct a menacing grin at his best friend, who returned it unabashedly.

"You scare the hell outta me sometimes, Larabee..."

"That’s what I’m here for, Bucklin. That’s what I’m here for."

At 0100, the order came.

"Hook ‘er up, y’all!" bellowed Wilder at the top of his Alabama-bred lungs, breaking regulations with an emphatic jab of his fist into the air as the jump light flickered to red and signaled standby. "Twenty minutes out!"

Even as the words left his mouth, the plane veered wildly, falling into a steep drop and then leveling out before climbing again. Curses echoed around the cabin.

"What the hell’s he doin’?" Chris bellowed. Buck shrugged, but the harsh pinging of 40mm artillery bouncing off the hull answered for him instead. The plane continued to yaw and slide, the pilot trying desperately to shake the antiaircraft fire directed at him. Instead of slowing down, as Chris half-expected, the plane lurched forward, its engines over-revving alarmingly as the pilot opened to full throttle. He wondered if maybe they were farther out than Mark had thought, and the twenty-minute countdown had been a mistake.

When the light switched to green it took Chris a minute to compute the fact. The repeated bellows of "Let’s go, God damn it!" and Buck’s war whoop finally spurred him into action, and he made for the bay door, seeing the two men in front of him jump through the open door and vanish into a blackness relieved only by the hellish glare of German tracers. Before he knew it, he himself descended into that madness, sensing and not seeing Buck behind him, and feeling the terrific jerk of his parachute deploying and catching the violent gust of hot air from the C-47’s prop.

The world oscillated brutally as eddies stirred up from the passing planes, the treacherous passage of German artillery, and the currents of the unsettled weather itself kicked him around, sending him plunging for the ground at a clip Chris knew would kill him. He remembered the extra kit attached to his body- that damn leg bag some British guy had recommended he carry, for one- and realized he had to weigh a good hundred pounds more than he normally would with just his regulation gear.

He could hear the shouts of his fellow paratroopers, but could not respond, the prop blast having kicked him far out of his own shouting range. One of them drifted past him, limp inside his chute rig. A smear of blood decorated Private Parker’s face. Desperate to look at something else, desperate to orient himself after being spun around like a child’s toy, Chris swung himself to look for the drop zone markers that would tell him where he had to land- or at least attempt to.
Chris saw the Pathfinders’ signals in the far distance, and thoughts of how much he weighed vanished in a split-second calculation that he would land, at best, ten miles from where he needed to be. And that was the last thought that came to him before he slammed into something hard and unyielding, and the staggered blackness of the French pre-dawn, relieved only by the lights of Allied and Axis firepower, gave way to something more complete.

When he came to, Chris started moving more out of instinct than training- or maybe his training had sunk so deep that it became instinct. He sought cover, finding it in an abandoned foxhole just to his right. He fell down into it, jerking his rifle out from its rigging as he did so and checking for the .38 "peacemaker"- an illicit gift from Buck- strapped to his boot. Quickly, he pulled some ammunition out of the carryall bag sewn into his pants; he felt for the leg bag tied to his chute harness and wasn’t surprised to find it gone, as one of the few things he remembered from that jump was the sharp jerk of the leg bag’s weight and then the absence of that same weight as it fell into the darkness below him. Not even allowing himself to curse at the thought of having all that ammunition somewhere where it couldn’t do him any good, he checked the chambers of his weapons and saw they were fully loaded.

"Good," he mumbled to himself.

The swift, sharp sounds of gunfire echoed behind him; he dropped down to his knees, spinning around to cover an assault from his rear. None came, and the staccato beat of machine-gun fire died off. Chris silently pulled himself out of the foxhole, senses crackling at high voltage, and darted through the forest, a great jungle cat stealing soundlessly through branches and undergrowth.

The cat paused at a sound that neither he nor the forest made- the sound of quick footsteps coming closer. He dropped to low cover and waited, index finger caressing the trigger of his sidearm. Guttural German voices cut through the silence, and he waited and watched as they drew closer, two black shadows moving against the dark curtain of the forest. As they drew even with him, Chris moved fluidly, soundlessly, breaking from cover like a cobra to deliver two quick and lethal shots.

Both now-lifeless soldiers crumpled to the ground at Chris’s feet, shock frozen forever across their faces.

Kids, thought Chris distantly. Just kids.

It took only a moment for Chris to relieve them of their weapons and ammunition- a German-issue light rifle that Chris knew almost as well as his own, plus a knife and a few grenades. Turning from the looted bodies, he faded once more into the blackness at the sound of another pair of booted feet coming through the forests far to the west of Utah Beach.

CHAPTER TWO

Buck Wilmington found himself in the latest of many compromising situations he’d been in; sadly, he reflected, this didn’t involve a pretty young woman and her overly-protective father, brother, or husband. Instead, he found himself dangling in a tree, strung up by the cords of his rig, and pissing mad. After a moment, he calmed himself and managed to retrieve his knife from his belt; a few minutes of concerted effort sent him crashing through tree branches and into the underbrush. He disentangled himself from the brambles, cursing softly, and after tripping over his feet and the bushes, stumbled into a small clearing and fell on his knees.

"Sweet holy mother on a cold cheese cracker..."

A silence descended around him, but it was not a calming one. It stretched, taut and tense in a darkness he didn’t like at all. He preferred warm darknesses, especially ones with a soft giggle and the scent of perfume. This one chilled him, and he could only hear the soft shushings of the forest- strike that; he could hear the boom of cannonades and the sharp, rapid cracking of tank fire, but those were distant and came more as an intrusion into the silence. Bad thing to begin with, Buck decided; the drop zone should’ve been floodplain.

Well, hell. One more snafu to add to the growing list. Buck pulled out his compass and tried to find the north.

Floodplains lay to the east of him, he figured, with fields and forests alternating to the south and west. He’d seen a fire in the eastern sky, and he guessed that had been St. Mere-Eglise, as he’d seen the almost straight line of the N13 causeway running through it.

Somewhere north or west of the DZ, then. He scoured his mind, trying to envision the map the entire squad had studied the night before. The tiny village of... what was it?

Quatre-something-or-other...

Ain’t no way Buck was ever gonna get the French name for it around his mouth, but he knew in English it translated roughly into Four Corners- good enough for him, he decided- and it probably lay closest to his present position, about four miles or so away.

He hoped. God, he hoped.

"Keep it cool, Wilmington. Keep it together," he reminded himself softly, if only to assure himself that hearing one human voice, and so what if it was his own, was a good thing. "Start goin’ west... village should be there. Dammit, boy, get your sidearm out..."

He pulled out and reassembled his M-1 rifle and .45, checked the magazines, and began to move through the thick forest growth, picking his way as quietly as he could. Minutes dragged by as he floundered in darkness, but he eventually broke out into low cover, and to his immense relief, saw a small village in the far distance, just a speck of light on the horizon, and only visible because he was hidden in a bit of forest perched on a tiny outcrop.

Whatever relief he felt drained away as he heard the distinctive click of a sidearm hammer go off just beside his right ear. Chancing a sideways glance, he looked into two green eyes that glared at him from the pits of hell, deeply shadowed by the brim of a helmet and surrounded by black paint, the eyes themselves bloodshot and staring out of crimson sockets. He knew the breathing, though, knew those eyes.

They’d stared out at him from hell before.

"Chris, Chris for God’s sake, it’s me. Buck," he managed to say over a sudden constriction in his throat.

A long, tense moment stretched between them, until the adrenaline-induced blankness drained from Chris Larabee’s face. Slowly, he lowered the gun, hands latched around the butt of the weapon in a death grip.

"Buck?" he repeated dully, as if not quite believing.

"Yeah, Chris o’ my heart."

"Dammit, Wilmington, quit callin’ me that," Larabee whispered hoarsely, hands shaking as he holstered his sidearm.

"Hey, Cowboy, you always let Sarah call you that." Buck felt something settle in him at their familiar joking, even though it came so perilously close to opening old wounds- wounds years old but not healing and festering still. Buck missed Sarah and Adam, and missed the calming influence they had on his mercurial friend. And on himself too, he supposed.

"You ain’t her, but if you were, I’d be a damn sight happier than I am now. And I wouldn’t be standin’ out here in the dark with half the damn world shootin’ at me." Chris couldn’t focus on Buck’s fooling around, even though he knew it helped the other man find his emotional bearings- twelve years of a friendship did a lot for that knowing, he figured, and Chris took some of his own comfort in it. "Gotta figure out where we are and where we’re going."

"Can help with that," responded Buck promptly. "That’s Four Corners yonder towards ten o’clock. Only village for a few miles around."

"What about St. Mere?"

"Burnin’ up."

"Hell," muttered Chris. "We’ll go for Four Corners, then... think it’s far out enough to not have any big movers hangin’ around, get a chance to collect ourselves an’ some others. Maybe. What you got with you?"

Buck grimaced. "That ain’t the best news of the night, I’m afraid. Lost my leg bag- prob’ly stuck up in a tree somewheres. Still have my rifle, all my ammo- wasn’t that dumb, Chris, so don’t lookit me like that!- knife, .45, an’ some demolitions stuff in my musette bag. Who needs clean underwear?"

Chris nodded, grinning. "Not you, I guess. That’s about what I have, minus the demolitions. Those went t’ hell along with my chute." He tensed, listening to the night around them. "Best get goin’."

"Good idea, pard. Sounds like the Pansies are movin’ to the drop zone off to th’ east a’ here."
Chris chuckled briefly at the nickname his friend had given the German tank divisions, and then nodded, digesting the more important information. "Okay then, we’ll get to the village, pick up strays along the way, see if we can’t form some kind of ad hoc squad ‘til we can loop around and get back to the beachhead. Remember your passcode?"

"Yup."

"Great, let’s get a move on." Chris jerked his head in the direction of the village, and the two soldiers made their way through darkness and chaos, looking for their own troops. They traveled in silence, crouched low and keeping close to whatever cover they could find, acutely aware of German troop movements in the distance.

As they went, a few men trickled in, appearing like wraiths in the darkness. The first materialized from behind a tree, looking like a savage with branches stuck in his helmet and greasepaint dripping off his face. "It’s startin’ to itch," mumbled Private Les Collins after introducing himself as a machine-gunner from the 82nd. "Lost my friend and the tripod in the drop, sir," he told Chris. "But I’ve got the gun an’ half the ammo we brought with us. Saw Larson myself, sir. He didn’t make it."

Michael Ingers’ appearance and story were the same- a phantom-like fading into resolution, his face battered and a little bloody after encounters with some brambles. "Managed to save my leg bag, sir. Have pretty much everything I started out with," he said after identifying himself as a mortarman from the 532nd, in Buck and Chris’s own division. Chris nodded with relief and motioned for both Collins and Ingers to follow.

"We’re making for Four Corners," he told them quietly, "and then see if we can work our way back to the beach from there."

Privates Gerald Waltham and Luke Travers from the 82nd joined up, eyes wild with the rush of combat and barely-suppressed fear. The four became six, and each time they stopped, counted weapons, and took stock of observations before pressing once more towards Four Corners. After Travers came in, Ingers and Waltham moved up to take point, Collins falling back to take the rear and Travers got the flank. Chris stayed central, not so much being guarded as guarding three backs simultaneously. He nodded for Buck to check their backtrail, and Wilmington silently responded, doubling back to do so.

He made the trail as obstructive as he possibly could, scattering branches and felling small trees with ruthless, near-silent efficiency, ears and eyes open all the time to the sounds and few sights around him. When a rustle not of his making broke through his screen, he froze and primed his handgun.

"Show yourself, whoever th’ hell you are," he growled.

Silence met that.

"Flash," he tried, remembering the passcode.

A nervous cough and then a voice sounded from above him.

"Don’t remember the rest of the phrase, sir."

Buck almost fell over, his head jerked up so fast. He brought his pistol to bear on the source of the voice and almost began to shout. "Dammit, kid! Where the hell’s your cricket?" Buck reached for his own device- a small metal instrument that, cricket-like, produced a sharp click-clack when pressed. "Where the hell’s your cricket?" he demanded again.

"Got lost in the drop, sir." Fear and defiant apology laced the young voice.

"Well, get your ass down here, kid. We’ve got a backtrail to redo, thanks to you, an’ some double-timin’ to catch up to the rest of the squad." He watched critically as the heretofore hidden figure shimmied down the tree, almost falling over his communications kit, and stumbled to stand in front of him.

"Private J.D. Dunne, sir, of the 82nd Airborne. Communications." The kid looked even younger than he sounded, face smeared by ridiculous streaks of paint and engine oil. Hazel eyes peered alertly at him, over-excited and somewhat manic.

"Sergeant Bucklin Wilmington, 101st" Buck nodded curtly and turned to head after Chris. "And kid, the rest of the phrase is ‘Thunder.’ Got it?"

"Yessir," mumbled J.D., and the two moved off in silence.

CHAPTER THREE

He couldn’t remember some of the past two years of his life, but the last year always recalled itself in lurid, almost frightening detail, as though a numbed and reeling brain attempted to make up for the time it spent denying a reality too horrible to acknowledge. The first six months, though, remained gray and obfuscate, an obscuring curtain drawn over events that he watched as though they were a play, and that curtain hid much of the stage as well.

What he could remember of the place was smoke and ash, a never-ending rain of it that coated skin and clothes and veiled even his bright hair with a dingy, defeated gray. The lightness of that ash weighed heavily as death, because that ash itself had come of death, and all the prisoners heard what that ash said.

You are mortal and you will die. You will die...
He shook his head and tried not to think about that, but then images of the past year intruded, always silent, like the old movies he’d seen with his mom when he was little, but not in grainy black-and-white or faded tans of the screen. They came in violent bursts of color- blood-red, fleshy peaches, bone-white, a rich purple-brown like the bruises on Nata-

NO.

He felt rage boil up briefly, a red-hot intrusion into the cold distance of his vigil. It licked at his soul, persuading him to abandon his post and take off to kill them, to make them pay as he had paid.

Vin Tanner shook his head, reminding himself of what he had come here to do. The dead German soldier lay back down at the bottom of the tower, neck broken, as the sharp snapping had indicated. It wouldn’t have mattered much to the man anyway, Vin reflected, as a bullet through the eye could kill much faster than a broken neck ever could. That man had been his only company, and unwelcome company at that, with Josiah Sanchez off to the east setting anti-tank mines.

Aside from that German soldier, Josiah was the only other person Vin had met who could carry a gun and blow things up. Now, after he had dispatched the soldiers, which had come more to keep a lookout than anything, only he and Josiah remained, although Josiah didn’t much look like a man who’d be good with a gun or explosives.

He was.

Meeting each other had been providential, as Josiah himself had put it- Vin chalked it up to good luck, and the preacher had laughingly decided not to argue. Over cold, divided rations and half a bottle of burgundy, they’d talked of both personal history and strategy; Josiah proved forthcoming on both, Vin still taciturn about the former, although he’d told the man far more than he normally ever did. How the San Francisco native managed to be so... so... no, happy couldn’t describe it, Vin decided. Optimistic, maybe. Faithful, certainly... enduring, definitely... Well, Vin didn’t know how he managed it.

"Was a demolitions officer and sometime liaison between the French and Allied armies in the Great War," Josiah’d told him around a mouthful of dried meat. "Spent my share of time blowing up French buildings that doubled as German fortifications and bombing out entrenchments near Ypres. When the war ended, I cut out of formation on the way home and went back to Paris instead. Found my way out here and started rebuilding what I could."

"Mighty nice of you." Vin’d had no idea what to say, and felt like an idiot for saying that.

"There’s a time to reap and a time to sow," Josiah had replied dismissively, taking a swig of wine before continuing. "And a time to build and a time to take down. Sadly, it seems these cycles have been coming with increasing frequency as of late."

"I’m thinkin’ you’re right," Vin agreed. "Ain’t much peace to be had in the world these days."

"Wasn’t much of it to begin with." Bitterness chased across the words as Josiah gazed out
toward the street lined by ruined houses and shops.

Sitting in the top of the clock tower, Vin had to agree with Josiah once more. He’d spent the better part of the night there, watching and waiting as the endless tide of Allied bomber and paratrooper planes came over the horizon, his soul thrilling in silence as he saw the hope of liberation coming. He breathed a sigh of relief and touched the brim of his hat in salute to the Americans as he heard the low growling of Panzer engines moving off into the distance.

A few hours passed in quiet, the few remaining residents of the village either hiding on farmsteads or in deep cellars beneath their houses. Vergil had come to check on him once and left after Vin’s confirmation that everything was fine, and obeyed his soft demand for Vergil to return to his house and Marie, the young widow staying with him. The old man nodded, turning around and heading back downstairs without comment or complaint. Marie had sent some food along with the old man who had once run the town’s grocery store, combined with the admonishment that Vin eat all of it.

Vergil and Marie.

He smiled thinking about them. An unlikely pair, but then the war forced strange combinations upon survivors- Vergil, wrinkled, old, and cantankerous took care of Marie as much as the young, blond, and high-spirited widow took care of him.

The pair had greeted him courteously when he’d arrived two days ago under the cover of night, and he felt deep gratitude for their willing sacrifice. Like many before them, they knew who both he was and what he did, which had frightened him at first- he’d left southern France for that reason, knowing a detachment of Das Reich had trailed him from Marseilles clear to Aix-en-Provence and left bloody destruction in their wake. He’d hidden in Coutances until a traitor smoked him out, and then he’d come to Four Corners as a final refuge, a little village in the middle of nowhere, avoided by German and resistance fighters alike. He’d done it so many times- running, finding shelter, finding help that his lines came almost automatically.

"Je m’appelle Vin Tanner, et-" he would whisper, half-blinded by the light pouring from some farmstead’s door.

"Ah, oui!"- and then in broken English, "Come! Come!" Often, he got no further than his name before the person silhouetted in the doorway would extend a hand to him and lead him inside.
He would follow, guilt and fear tearing at him even as the wife would settle him in front of the first warm fire he’d seen in two weeks and make up a plate of something. "C’est bon," she’d always say, smiling at him and joking about how skinny he was. After food and ersatz coffee, they would show him to the barn or a back room where he could hide from the SS, and he would always reply with one word, one single word to convey his gratitude.

"Merci."

A shrug usually answered his thanks. They were in mortal peril already, and most times, he didn’t even add to it.

The hours passed, and as the blackness of night warmed into pre-dawn, Vin saw several figures moving off to the southwest; the American offensive was well and truly underway, he realized, and that meant those figures were either Allies coming to block the road--

Wouldn’t they be surprised when they learned Josiah would have taken care of that already...

--or they were Germans, retreating to the most fortified position in the area. Would be a nasty fight, a fight won by snipers and luck and no small amount of cunning. He could win that war if there were a few of them, but no more. Vin listened closely to the sounds of the night, weeding out from the blare and crack of gunfire the sound of human voices.

American voices. About four of them, he reckoned- no, now another joined them, and he recognized Josiah’s voice. The footsteps of a few silent companions approached, and Vin mentally brought the total up to eight or nine.

"Sirs? My name is Josiah Sanchez, and I’m unarmed." Josiah’s deep voice resonated in the darkness.

"You’re also American," observed a frigid, controlled voice. Vin heard the click of a handgun being cocked, and the voice replied to that, "Put that goddamned thing away, J.D." A split second later, Vin heard that same handgun being reholstered.

"My apologies," the cold voice said. "I’m Chris Larabee, Lieutenant in the 101st Airborne. This is Sergeant Buck Wilmington. You here alone?"

"Just me, a few villagers, and an associate," Josiah replied.

"An associate?" Vin could almost sense Larabee’s eyes narrowing. "Where is he?"

"Oh, he’s around here somewhere," Josiah said expansively, and Vin had to smile at that.

"What do you mean, ‘somewhere’?" retorted Larabee.

"I don’t think he would appreciate having attention called to him at the moment," Josiah returned, that deep, sonorous calm never wavering. "When he’s ready to show himself, he’ll show himself, but I believe he’s seen you already. Fear not, though- he knows you’re Allied soldiers," he reassured, and Vin had a feeling that his reassurance grated on the egos of the men he spoke to.

"There are anti-tank devices stretched across the east side of town," Josiah continued. "We were fully prepared to have Germans mobilizing through here and set up a little trap accordingly. I should go and reposition them, before any of your men end up hurt by something intended for someone else. That is, if that’s all right with you."

"Perfectly fine, Mr. Sanchez." Vin heard Josiah move off, as well as Larabee’s muttered, "Resistance, probably." Upon Josiah’s exit, the cold voice immediately began issuing orders in a clipped, rapid-fire tone. "Buck, Collins, and Ingers go patrol the houses. Set up a perimeter, see if we can’t get a bead on where the Germans are comin’ from. They were projected to move back to the interior, somewhere near the drop zone, but they’ll be moving back when they don’t find much in the way of targets."

"You got it, Chris. C’mon, Collins. Ingers, get your ass in gear." The tone of Buck’s voice spoke of familiarity with the man who was obviously the leader, and three pairs of feet broke into a quick shuffle, heading east.

"J.D., get some kind of communications going. You got your gear?"

"Yes, sir!" responded an absurdly young and enthusiastic voice.

"Good. Stay central to the town. I want a radio network up by 0430 hours. Got that?"

"Yes, sir." The enthusiasm shifted to confused alarm, but a vein of confidence ran through the young man’s voice. Another pair of footsteps moved away, back across the street to the former bakery. Vin watched the rest of the exchange, watched as a few more men were given assignments and left to carry them out, leaving Chris Larabee standing alone. He stood so for a minute only when a figure jogged down the street; by Larabee’s quick reach for his weapon and the subsequent, yet wary, relaxation that the figure was a friendly one.

"Sir!" The running figure skidded to a halt.

"Yes, Soldier..."

"Jackson, sir. Private Nathan Jackson. Medic... God... thought I’d never get here."

"Calm down, Jackson." Cold comfort filtered through the words. "What’s going on?"

"Plane crashed a few miles back," gasped Jackson. "Only one left outta all of us." He took a deep breath. "Mind if I hook up with you guys for a while?"

Little explanation needed to be given in wartime, Vin knew- ironic, really, when so much of warfare depended on trust between yourself and your companions. Time prevented the giving of reasons, though- he knew that too, to his bitter regret- and it forged men who could judge character after a few words, and sometimes even less.

Larabee had judged this man to be trustworthy, and said, "Help’s always welcome, Jackson. We need a field hos-"

The words died on his lips as a shadow hurtled out of a nearby store, shouting incoherently. Vin surged to his feet, barely keeping his cover, watching as the sidearm fell from Larabee’s grip and both he and Jackson staggered back under the unexpected onslaught. Something flashed in the attacker’s hand.

Vin moved into the protective shadows of the tower, body low and hunched over like the gargoyles on a Gothic church, arm reaching soundlessly for his rifle. As the great crash of distant anti-aircraft batteries went off,  Vin didn’t hesitate. Like clockwork, like fluid, he brought the butt of his rifle tight against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.

CHAPTER FOUR

Chris Larabee knew, on some instinctual level, that he could trust the young man who leaned on the crooked pedestal just beside his left shoulder. He had caught sight of the sniper emerging from atop the skeleton of a blown-out building, rifle slung over his shoulder and moving with deceptive ease over the rubble. Almost silently, the young man had leaned against the remains of that Baroque pedestal standing next to Chris, and although Chris was not a poetic or religious man by any stretch of the imagination, he felt the young man’s presence as somewhat miraculous, like a guardian angel hovering behind him just in the periphery of his vision.

"New in town?" he asked.

"Just two days ago," the other replied as he bent down to inspect something more closely. "You got a name, soldier?"

Chris knew the young man- Josiah’s "associate"- was already aware of his identity, but gave his name anyway: "Lieutenant Chris Larabee."

"Vin Tanner."

The abrupt exchange left Chris slightly disoriented, and he thought for a brief moment that maybe he was in some bizarre dream.

Whatever Vin Tanner thought, though, Chris couldn’t tell. The few times he’d glanced at Tanner revealed only a shuttered face and blue eyes closed off under a thatch of decidedly against-regulations brown hair and, curiously enough, an antique cavalry hat. Tanner’s painfully slender body, clad in shades of flat gray and brown, seemed to disappear into the framework of the building by which both he and Larabee stood.

Now, the young man leaned forward on his heels, contorted in a casual hunch to scrutinize the dead German officer, his arms cradling an old Winchester across his thighs with his long fingers resting on the barrel. A stolen MG and a few clips were strapped across his back, the flat black metal incongruous against the dull clothing and the somewhat controlled, savage air that surrounded Tanner.

Both he and Larabee had examined the body for the better part of a couple minutes, and now watched as the tall black man who’d just finished checking- rather pointlessly- for a pulse, stood and stretched.

He turned to the two men, shaking his head in amazement and smiling in relief. "Right through the heart," he said disbelievingly and gazing in open admiration at Tanner, who straightened up and shrugged dismissively, as if to say ‘Nothing big.’ Seeing this, the black man snorted. "How’d you get that shot off with him liable to go either way like that?" He pointed to Chris, who wondered the same thing.

Again, Tanner offered them his careless, lazy shrug, accompanied this time by a soft drawl. "Soldier had a knife in his left hand. Forced you back over to his left, an’ made Lieutenant Larabee here get over to the right, backed him up a little an’ gave me the space I needed."

"The space you needed," Chris managed to say, "was about two feet. At the most."

"Took what I could get," Tanner said. "Coulda made it in eighteen, maybe fifteen, inches, but I didn’t want to chance it too much. Thanks for readin’ my mind there, pard." A quick, reassuring grip on Chris’s forearm sealed the compliment.

"Any time," Chris mumbled, slightly stunned, and wondered why he felt so- as a member of the 101st Airborne, he’d seen some of the best crack riflers in action around the European theatre, and some of the heaviest fighting as well. One of those soldiers, Buck Wilmington, was his best friend, and Chris had never seen a better aim with a rifle or a more caressive hand with the grenades they got as standard issue. Buck was also close to his age, though, and they’d cut their teeth under Eisenhower in Italy before requesting detachment to England and finding their true home as officers in the 101st.

On the other hand, Tanner looked like he might have been not much more than a passing thought in his mother’s mind at the close of the Great War, and by his clothes, hadn’t even spoken to the drafters or recruiters.

"Why, six years ago, you were just a glimmer in my eye," Sarah had told Adam once.

The black man stepped forward to take Tanner’s hand in his own. "Much obliged to you, sir. Name’s Nathan Jackson, medic in HQ Company, 513th, 101st."

Chris wondered if the shock would never end. A black medic in the 101st Airborne? Jackson must have seen the question on Chris’s face because he responded with a quick, genial grin and the answer to what remained unspoken.

The threat had died, and explanations could be given now.

"Weird twist of fate, sir. Was passing through Uppottery on assignment when a Doc Samuel Ayers pulled me aside, just said t’ get myself strapped in, never mind about my corps and he’d take care of it. Said he needed an equipment supervisor, that he’d heard of me an’ wanted me along. Just got my medic’s clearance a few months before volunteers started, got into an artillery division," he explained quickly at seeing the confused looks crossing Chris and Vin’s faces. "Doc Ayers pulled me onto a plane instead."

"You got any field experience?"

"Some. Know the technique, never got much of a chance to practice, outside of boot camp."

"You got your chance now, Private Jackson. Find what you can, let’s see if we can’t get something set up here. Gonna be plenty of wounded comin’ in at some point tonight." Chris felt elated- a medic! Thank God. Jackson nodded enthusiastically and, dismissed, turned away with a salute, leaving him and Tanner alone.

"Nice shot, pard," Chris said, feeling slightly more at ease.

"Ohio?" Tanner asked in return, deciding not to acknowledge the praise at all- something, Chris realized, he himself would have done.

"Bloomington, Indiana."

"Close enough," Vin laughed. "Spent a coupla years here, so I can pick out Breton and Provençal from Parisian pretty good, but seem to’ve lost my American."

"Texas?"

"Yup. San Antonio."

"Didn’t see you at the big party in England," Chris commented, slanting an amused glance at Tanner, who returned the look with yet another careless shrug.

"Got the word in from Allied lines just after Ike decided to hold up one more time- communications got pretty sticky down to the south, an’ we weren’t really near any main com lines. Ended up hearin’ about it when a coupla civilians came down from Cherbourg with the news. Almost couldn’t believe it myself, hearin’ somethin’ big was in the works." Wonder flickered across Tanner’s face, and he grinned- a surprisingly unreserved smile of delight brightening the shadows cast by the brim of that outsized hat. "Got my ass up here from Coutances faster’n you can spit ‘crost a slide rule."

"Civilian?"

Tanner shook his head, the grin remaining but becoming faintly mocking. "Ain’t no expatriate in France that don’t have a gun on ‘im, for one side or th’ other."

Chris took a moment to digest that, and then the significance of the long hair and battered Winchester rifle hit him. "Maquis, then?"

"Yup." The single word contained enough information, and Tanner didn’t seem to want to divulge any more. Instead, the young man glanced at the older and merely said, "That church yonder has a pretty stable bell tower. Reckon we might use it for recon, just to get an idea of what’s comin’ when it comes."

The two men moved off, Chris not even taking time to wonder about Tanner’s casual inclusion of himself in whatever plans were waiting to be worked out.

CHAPTER FIVE

Four Corners- Chris couldn’t think of it by its French name for some reason- looked like any other tiny remnant of a medieval village- one main street cut due east and west, with the bell tower of the small church rising to a prominent position against the otherwise flat land. Much of the attached church fell in ruins now, done in by German and Allied shells alike. Most of the inhabitants had long since evacuated, but a few remained with their homes out of sheer stubbornness. He briefly met Vergil and Marie, the latter of whom had considered him challengingly for a moment before heeding Vin’s advice and ducking back into her house. He had tried out his admittedly awful French on her, and didn’t even make it past a cursory introduction when she broke in.

"I studied English in Paris, Lieutenant," she told him coolly, gray-green eyes flashing in irritation, "and my husband ran the newspaper here before he died." Marie folded her arms underneath her breasts and stared hard at him, as if those remarkable eyes (stop that, Larabee...) could drill that truth into him if her words alone failed.

Vin stood by for the extremely short length of their conversation, barely hiding a half-grin, but those blue eyes shone with delight. Chris scowled at him, beginning to feel himself fall into a pattern of something like friendship, and demanded to meet the rest of the townsfolk. Vin agreed, slanting him a look that spoke volumes. Chris merely frowned in return, which earned a soft laugh from the younger man.

A few minutes later, Chris met Louis Marchon, who had been an officer in the Great War and was now the rector of the church. Louis said bitterly in broken English that both of the German occupations and the subsequent Allied invasions had done what six hundred years of weather and war with muskets and powder-shot cannons had not; however, he sighed as he led Chris and Vin down the street, the years after the Great War had seen that bell tower rebuilt so that it was half again as tall as it had been- more conspicuous, surely, the rector said, but a man could see for miles around.

The small, improvised squad needed that; Panzers could give themselves away just by that bass rumbling of their engines and treads, but the German infantry, entrenched as it was, knew the area and could get in and out of hedgerows without detection. Chris and Vin scaled the ladder, bringing with them their equipment and a bottle of communion wine the rector insisted that they take.

Both men sat in the bell tower, oblivious to the rustling of the comings and goings of the bats that inhabited it. Vin had an old-fashioned Navy spyglass out, it being the only long-range reconnaissance tool they had, aside from his rifle scope. Unasked, Vin explained that he’d gotten it from an old Frenchman in Marseilles, who’d had it in his family since the Napoleonic Wars- gotten it off an officer from the USS Constitution, he said. Chris sensed that, in volunteering that information, Vin had crossed some wall he usually kept up between himself and others. Knowing something about walls himself, Chris accepted Vin’s explanation gladly, and for more than the simple words were worth.

Still, it bothered Chris a little to be so dependent on two people- Vin and Josiah had almost unconsciously made themselves indispensable to the defense of the town, with Josiah rearranging mines now, but something in both the younger and older man evoked his trust. A common well of stability seemed to unite the two men, even though they had met just nights ago, and their shared calm gave Chris a tranquillity of his own.

Tanner’s keen blue eyes returned from their surveillance of the surrounding countryside and redirected their scrutiny to Chris’s face.

"Be interested to know what an American’s doing fighting for the French resistance," Chris said by way of deflection, not wanting those eyes to see any further into him than they already were, all the while sensing that Tanner’s own silent inquiries were not going unanswered.

"I was in Paris durin’ the Occupation in ‘41," Vin responded absently, setting down the spyglass and turning to more fully face Chris. "Got caught runnin’ coded messages between other Resistance cells n’ London. I got put on trial, got declared guilty... but they didn’t kill me; they took me off in a transport one night, not sayin’ where I was goin’, when we would get there... I sat in a cell in Alsace-Lorraine an’ rotted for a few months, then they shipped me off to someplace else. I... I don’t rightly remember much of it."

Chris read the tumult of emotions concealed behind Vin’s careful mask, the reluctance there to speak of what Chris knew to be unspeakable. The rumors from German dissenters pointed towards some horror lurking in eastern Europe, and the words of Jewish escapees to Switzerland or England more or less confirmed them; if the brass in England or Washington knew, they didn’t say. He saw that same deep-seated fear, anger, and revulsion in Vin, even though that face gave so little away.

Surprisingly, Vin continued on, half in a whisper and as much to himself as to Chris. "I stayed in that hell for four months... four God-awful months," he rasped, staggering over that a little so Chris didn’t press him. "Don’t know how I did it, but I got out... stowed away on a ship out of Danzig and got to Norway. Some people there helped me get back to England, and I asked the French government there to get me back somewheres so I could fight."

"Why didn’t they send you back to the States?"

"Didn’t much want to go back, end up some grunt in a uniform, carryin’ a bad rifle." Vin managed a teasing grin, and Chris found himself returning it.

Something to the west caught Vin’s eye, and he turned to train his telescope on it. His body tensed, and Chris’s muscles tightened in sympathetic response. A moment later, Vin relaxed and that grin teased at his lips again although he did not remove the spyglass from his eye. "Heh... what’d he do? Raid some rich guy’s closet?" he mused aloud before speaking to Chris. "Looks to be one man... gesturin’ that he’s unarmed. Should get someone to go an’ bring him in. Civilian, maybe."

Before Vin had finished speaking, Chris radioed down to base with instructions to pick up the idiot wandering around their hot zone. Buck, who had since gotten back from perimeter search, snickered and said he’d do it before cutting the transmission.

By the time Chris got down to the street with Vin on his heels, the man had attracted quite a crowd. J.D., damn fool kid, ridiculously young behind his war paint and fatigues, had his sidearm out and attempted to give the appearance of merely covering the man, who ignored him completely.

Chris broke through the circle and stood directly in front of the man, who returned Chris’s own searching look with interest. He had to look up a bit to do it, and Chris felt the calculating study of those pale green eyes as they roved over his face in silent appraisal. It discomfited him a little but he refused to show it, and instead examined the man in a silence of his own. At length, he broke the quiet between them and, for the thousandth time that day, introduced himself.
"Lieutenant Chris Larabee of the 101st Airborne. Who’re you?"

Indecision lurked in the man’s pale green eyes, but nothing crossed his face. "Ezra Standish," he said after a moment. A gold-capped incisor gleamed dully in the early morning light.

"You got a rank with that, Mr. Standish?" Unless Standish had raided a closet somewhere to replace his uniform, the man’s clothing shouted ‘civilian.’ Chris studied the torn silk vest and shirt that, a few days ago, would have been freshly starched. Blood spattered his legs, lining a jagged tear in a pair of very fine, dark wool pants.

"No rank that would count with any of the men here," Standish replied, undisturbed by Chris’s examination. "At least, I have no rank in the Airborne, the United States Army- or any other nation’s army- for that matter." He paused, eyes weighing and measuring the men a moment before he proceeded. "I am an OSS agent," he said softly, the words meant for Chris and Vin’s ears alone.

Chris nodded, wondering what had led a Strategic Services agent here, of all places. "I’ll want a debriefing on how you got here, Mr. Standish," he told the man.

"I fully expected such a thing, Lieutenant," Standish said unconcernedly. "However, I would greatly appreciate something in the way of food and a bath. Hot is preferable for both."

"You’ll get K rations," growled Chris, slightly put off. "Debriefing in a half hour. Collins!" Private Collins materialized immediately at the summons. "Get Mr. Standish here something to eat," Chris ordered.

"And a bath," added Standish stubbornly, glaring at Collins, who glanced at Chris in silent questioning.

"Any water we have here is for drinking, Mr. Standish," Chris said slowly, words dripping with irritation that rapidly turned into menace. "We will get you evacuated to England as soon as possible, but that ain’t happenin’ at the moment."

"Then pray tell me, sir, when will it be happening?" If Standish felt threatened in any way, he didn’t show it.

"Your guess is as good as mine. Until then, Collins here will get you some rations and-"

"I can take care of myself, Lieutenant," Standish cut in coldly. "One would hardly make it out of Germany if one were not able to do so. If you will excuse me..." Without waiting for a dismissal, Standish brushed past Chris and Vin, the former of the two staring at Standish’s retreating back and cursing softly.

CHAPTER SIX

0521 hours saw Chris, Buck, Vin, J.D., and Josiah sitting in J.D.’s jury-rigged communications center, which was really nothing more than a tent with a couple SCR-300s the boy had actually pulled off a fallen radioman on his trek through the woods, a good three miles or so from where Buck found him. The SCRs weighed a ton, and Chris had no idea how the kid managed to lug two of them through the dark, by himself, and then climb up a tree. In addition to the larger radios, some SCR-100 radios- also known as walkie-talkies- received signals and status checks from the men still working the perimeter of the town.

"I can milk some extra mileage outta these babies," J.D. had told Chris. "Normal range is only five miles ‘r so... can probably get six or seven, I figure."

"Hell, Chris, the boy’s a damn genius," Buck told Chris when they’d gotten out of the kid’s earshot just a few minutes later. He sounded as proud as if he were the kid’s own father, and Chris hid a grin- and the sadness he felt at remembering when Adam had done something he was so sure had been the most intelligent thing he’d ever seen...

Now, though. He had to think about the now.

The newcomer studied the five men across from him- four, he refigured after a moment, as the young communications officer technically did not count. The cold-eyed Lieutenant unnerved him, and Ezra found that keeping his "poker face", as a fellow agent once called it, was very difficult- especially when the equally and clinically assessing stare belonging to Vin Tanner combined with that of Larabee’s into a formidable, silent onslaught. Sergeant Wilmington and Josiah Sanchez appeared relaxed, although Standish himself knew enough about deception to know the two men were anything but relaxed. A certain tension crackled around their table, a tension almost unnoticed by Private Dunne, who perched on a bar stool and kept an ear on the radios.

"I’d like you to take your story from the top, please," Larabee said coolly.

Ezra raised an eyebrow and shrugged, dropping his fork into the unappetizing mix of dried beef and water. Standish fiddled with a piece of paper for a moment, a nervous gesture if his face were not so neutral and unconcerned. "I was operating in deep cover in Cologne," Ezra said, "deep enough that, when British bombers decided to start making house calls, I found myself in the unenviable position of either staying and dying from the weapons of those I presumed to call my allies, or just leaving and dying at the hands of the enemy which I had spent the last three years attempting to thwart."

As he told the story, he felt his gut clench up in remembered fear- how the silence of his nights shattered under the shrieking of air raid sirens, and then how even the intolerable blaring of the sirens disappeared under the unceasing pounding of bombs. He fought for calm, trying not to think of the one night he spent trapped in a tent made of two heavy concrete slabs pressed against each other, with a dead young woman for company.

"Just before I made my decision, I discovered that the man who’d been sent to inform me of the bombing runs had been captured, and under torture, gave away my cover. That banished whatever reservations I had about leaving; I conjectured that, either way, the Germans would find and kill me, as my face is now plastered on some rather tacky posters pinned up all over the Reich. As," he turned to Vin, who watched him expressionlessly, "is yours, Mr. Tanner. I must say that the reward on your head might be enough to make any staunch maquisard rethink his occupation- and his loyalties, for that matter."

"You’re wanted by the Reich?" Buck fairly shouted at Tanner, who turned to gaze calmly at the sergeant. A quelling look from Larabee silenced Wilmington, but outrage seethed beneath the surface.

"All of us are," retorted Vin coolly, gesturing to the table in general.

"Well, we don’t all have prices on our heads. How much?" demanded Wilmington, half-leaning across the table. Vin didn’t lean away, merely stared back at Buck, unafraid and unruffled as he gave his answer.

"One million Reichsmarks."

Vin’s announcement echoed around the table.

J.D. gaped unapologetically from his chair in the corner of the tent. "One million Reichsmarks?" he repeated, the words almost a squeak.

"Yeah, kid," Vin snorted, but a slow, lopsided grin softened any criticism. "Nazis don’t get too happy when you blow ‘em up." He leaned forward, his face becoming serious. "Just in case you ain’t remembered, government here’s controlled by Nazis. Laval, he goes ‘long with ‘em, helps the S.S. round up resistance members- probably contributes to the bounty, too. Bounty... heh. Like we’re back in th’ Wild West ‘r somethin’." There was no mirth in the words.

"Agreed, Mr. Tanner." Standish nodded respectfully toward the young man, who returned the gesture with a slight tilt of his own head.

"So how’d you come to be here?" Chris asked, trying to divert the conversation from Vin and his one million Reichsmarks, although he wondered what exactly Tanner had done to deserve such an astounding amount placed on his head.

Ezra saw this, saw Tanner’s slight discomfiture, and had mercy on the Texan. "Well, I do happen to have a rather convincing Bavarian accent to my German, and I was able to talk my way past the guards surrounding the ci-"

"Hey!" J.D. broke in excitedly, before calming down and shooting a concerned look at his superior officers. "I mean, sir, we’re getting a signal in Allied code. It’s from the 82nd’s 543rd HQ- they’re back to the east of us, sir, I’m pretty sure... At least, that’s what the drop plan was..." Chris came to stand over J.D., who pressed a few buttons and waited expectantly. A few seconds later, a series of quick beeps emanated over the transceiver.

"I can respond, sir," J.D. said after the transmission finished. "I know the response code, an’ we can probably figure out what’s goin’ on."

"You’re from the 82nd, Private Dunne?"

"Yes, sir," J.D. said immediately. "My C.O.’s Captain Robert Thorberg, sir."

"By all means, Mr. Dunne, let’s see what the Captain has to say."

J.D. nodded and tapped out the correct response, index finger rapidly punching out the code. Static answered for a minute, before a voice filtered through. "This is company HQ at Canquigny to unidentified remote officer, over."

"Yes, HQ, this is the 82nd at Four Corners," replied J.D., sounding absurdly official. "Have an officer of the 101st who’s wantin’ to speak with Captain Thorberg, over."

"Confirm that, but he ain’t here. I’m just a radioman in the 101st, got lost. Got Colonel DeHayes, here, though."

"Put him on, then," ordered Chris.

Static crackled for a moment before a querulous Boston accent filtered through. "DeHayes here."
"Yes, sir, this is Lieutenant Chris Larabee of the 101st, out of Four Corners."

"Good," responded DeHayes before Chris could say ‘over’ and confirm the completion of his message. "Orders from Division command at St. Antoine-du-Pierre- hold Four Corners at all costs. I can’t get there- only have about ten men, most wounded, coupla intelligence officers who can’t fight. You’ll have to hold it until we get reinforcements."

"Any more to that?" Chris’s eyebrow raised in puzzlement and felt his heart beat faster, thundering in his chest.

Empty crackling answered before it terminated.

The men looked at each other in silence before Chris fixed J.D. with a glare, an unspoken command to re-establish contact. J.D. flushed and fumbled with the jury-rigged equipment before shaking his head in despair. "I came down awful hard last night, sir," he apologized, and Chris felt badly for upsetting the kid. "There’s something loose in there... maybe a wire ‘r somethin’."

"Can it be fixed?"

"I’ll need time, sir," J.D. said honestly, knowing that lying to the man would prove impossible. Chris merely nodded, placed a reassuring hand on the kid’s shoulder and turned back to the others. "Was kinda surprised this didn’t get banged up more’n it did..."

"Gonna have to get some defenses up, figure out where they’re comin’ from," Tanner said softly.
That echoed the thought in Chris’s own mind with uncanny accuracy. "Agreed," Chris said and turned to J.D. once more. "J.D, radio the others back in. Buck, grab those maps we got stashed up in the bell tower- we’re going to have to figure something out."

"You got it," Buck said and moved to obey orders.

"Excuse me, sir," Standish interjected, "What about me? I have... I have information crucial to Allied success in Germany, specifically concerning Hitler’s plans for the manufacture of new aircraft for the Luftwaffe."

"How important is this information?" asked Chris, sensing the man was hiding something behind that smooth face of his.

Ezra looked down at his hands before replying slowly, "I have very good reason to believe that he has moved the main manufacturing processes out of the Ruhr valleys and into Austria. At present, the Allied bombings of current factories is something of a useless gesture, and has been for quite a while. There is a new plane in construction- a new fighter jet with the capability to help restore Hitler to air supremacy within a fairly short time. I’m sure that, as a paratrooper, you would prefer this did not happen." He stared steadily at Larabee, green eyes revealing nothing.
Chris nodded, torn between the desire to throttle the man and knowing that bigger things than him went on in this war. What if Standish was right? The thought of a restored Luftwaffe wreaking havoc over France worried Chris, and he forced himself to concede to Standish’s request.

"Okay," he said finally. "I’ll get an escort for you to 82nd HQ, and we’ll get you evacuated to England from there. Okay?" Larabee’s tone indicated that, regardless of what Ezra thought, the plan would be okay.

Relieved, Ezra nodded. "Understood."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next hour proved eerily uneventful, and Chris wondered if the whole operation would end up being a waste of time. Four Corners sat in the backwater of northern Normandy, and Josiah said that the road running through there would tax even a Tiger tank. As it was, they’d failed to meet any more American soldiers, and Chris asked Vin and Josiah if they wouldn’t mind staying on. Both men agreed almost instantaneously, and Vin strode confidently alongside Chris, his long and loose strides contrasting with the tightly disciplined marching of the men behind them. Standish straggled near the back of the formation, guarded by Ingers and Collins, both of whom miraculously refrained from shooting the Southern agent.

Finally, they found an abandoned truck, sitting on flat tires in the middle of an abandoned lot.

"Think we can get this working?" Chris asked the company in general.

"Should be able to," Collins said slowly. "I was a mechanic before, uh.. before now." He moved closer to the ancient vehicle, inspecting it carefully and hauling open the rusty hood. "Yeah... doesn’t look too bad."

Vergil emerged from his house with Marie at his side, and they made their way over to the soldiers. He whispered something to the young woman, who asked, "You are planning on taking this truck?"

"If it works," said Chris shortly, wondering why she got on his nerves. He caught sight of Tanner and his maddening half-smile. "You’ll get a receipt for it- just keep a hold of it and when HQ comes around, you’ll get reimbursed."

She frowned. "Very well."

"Think I’ll go do some more recon," Vin said after a dangerously silent moment. "Last I heard, not much more’n a company should be around here, but best make sure..." He wandered back toward the bell tower, ever-present rifle slung over his shoulder.

"No, you don’t," snapped Chris, and Tanner stopped in his tracks. "We’re getting Standish here back to St. Antoine-du-Pierre under escort- J.D. figures it’s only six miles there, an’ that village is on our side of the Merderet, accordin’ to the maps. Collins, Ingers, Travers, Waltham- you take him. Drop him off, explain the situation, request reinforcements and get the hell back here. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," responded four voices as one.

"Great. Collins, get to work and then get gone. You three, help the man if he needs it. The rest of you, with me."

Chris spun back toward their temporary headquarters, leaving Standish standing amid the four young men, bewildered and with an unspoken apology on his lips.

"Okay," Chris said at length, once they reached the tent and gathered around the maps. "We’re here- just northwest of Pont l’Abbe, I think. HQ’s at Canquigny, up to the northeast. Buck, you weren’t too far off when we were stuck in them woods back there..."

"That’s good to know," Buck grunted.

Chris’s finger traced a path through Four Corners, a direct east-west line through the center of the village. "This is the road in question; about three miles to the west of here, a gravel path intersects the road. Good tank territory back that way, intelligence says. They’ll be coming from the west, then."

"South, too, maybe," J.D. said after a second, and flushed before adding, "sir."
Larabee looked up sharply, almost impaling the younger man with his eyes. "Why do you think that, Private?"

"Because," J.D. took a steadying breath, mentally cursing himself for speaking up in front of not only a superior officer but Chris Larabee. "The rivers’re flooded out- I landed in the Merderet, except I wasn’t s’posed to. The Douve-" he pointed to the river lying away to their south- "is probably flooded out, too."

"Damn good thinkin’, kid," Buck said, and that unmistakable note of pride welled up in him. "Except," he added, "82nd’s supposed t’ blow up the bridge near Pont l’Abbe. The way things look right now, they ain’t got much of a chance to do that yet."

"Bridge might be washed out," interjected Josiah. "Old Norman bridges- they’ll last for centuries but give out at the damndest things. Germans might figure that the bridge is weakened an’ not cross it, but I honestly can’t see them doin’ that. Bridge ain’t burnt yet... they ain’t ones for burnin’ bridges they don’t got to."

Chris nodded- sensible, intuitive advice from all corners. He felt a slight surging of hope in his chest, looking at the men who surrounded and studied him silently.

"We’re going to have to fortify this place somehow. Vin, I want you to find some cover for yourself, where you can scope out as many vantages of the village as possible. Buck and Josiah, see if you can’t demolish some walls, clog up the alleys a little and narrow the entrances at the ends of the town; we’ll have to keep them coming from where we can see them and make sure they’re going slowly when they do. You got those mines done?"

Josiah nodded. "They’re set right outside the town, on the far end. I have Molotovs stashed all along the main road, so we can disable them as soon as they get inside the village limits. Can’t alert them to the fact we know they’re coming- have to suck them in."

"Oh, I think they know we’re here, or are at least countin’ on it," Vin said calmly.

Chris turned to the young man. "How do you figure?"

Despite his outward calm, a troubled look crossed Vin’s face as he stood up and strode out of the tent. Curious, Chris followed him and the others trailed behind in equally inquisitive silence.

Vin walked over to the telephone and electricity poles that lined the street. The expatriate glanced at the young communications officer before walking over to where a wire snaked across the ground, and gestured for J.D. to join him. J.D. did, hunkering down beside Tanner, who engaged him in whispered conversation for a few moments. At length, Vin looked up at Chris from under the brim of his hat.

"Lines’re dead," he said simply.

The hope in Chris died at Tanner’s announcement. Vin, seeing the expression on the lieutenant’s face, kept on with his explanation.

"Wire cuts ‘re fresh," he said, "an’ the wires themselves were cut off at the ports, which is why they’re dead- wires were cut where they met the transformers. You gotta have time t’ do that- hasslin’ with climbin’ up a ladder ‘n all. If’n the Wehrmacht got out of here in a hurry, they probably would’ve just up an’ run, with no time to take the wires down, or they’d take what they could by just cuttin’ through the wire at the handiest places. Means they had to have time t’ do this- that they’d be expectin’ someone to come through here."

"Why?" asked Chris.

A shrug answered him. "Got some ideas, but I’m not sure I like ‘em," Vin said. "Could be that some troops cleared outta here, figuring they’d just sabotage the lines real good, not bother with securin’ the place, or maybe a contingent got around here an’ cut the wires, anticipatin’ that any lost Allies would funnel back n’ forth through this town, use it as an outpost to watch the western shores. Or maybe we ain’t supposed to watch this place at all, an’ DeHayes got screwed up- towns can have almost the same name up here. Maybe they meant another town... maybe the Resistance did this..."

"But you don’t think so?" Something told Chris that Vin was not entirely convinced of his reasons, and a small voice inside him voiced its own, growing doubt.

"This is recent work," Vin said, suddenly uncomfortable and J.D. long forgotten. "No oxidation on the wires at all... I’d say they’ve been cut for a few days or so at most. I got here two days ago, an’ I didn’t think nothin’ of it- thought it was Resistance work." His blue eyes tried to drill his thoughts into Chris’s brain, so that maybe Chris would voice them instead. Larabee, sensing that Vin didn’t want to talk about this in front of the others and almost feeling his thoughts as a physical entity, pulled the younger man aside for a brief, private conference.

"Ambush?" Chris asked softly, bending close to Vin’s ear. "You’re sayin’ they’re waitin’ out there?"

Vin nodded, visibly relieved. "Yeah. They’d have gotten here a while ago. Don’t really matter if ground troops got up here- ain’t no way an infantry company can take on German tanks.

"Don’t really matter now, though," he continued after a brief pause. "We’re stuck here."

"What do you mean, ‘stuck here’?"

"Road’s still open- Germans can still come back soon’s they get reinforcements set up. Last we heard, some Panzer divisions in the Seventh Army were waitin’ back to the south- they can come up here, take the beach from behind, crack the Allies between them an’ the shoreline. They’ve probably mobilized by now- would’ve been smart to send a small detachment ahead to secure Four Corners, lock up any road communications, no matter how bad they were."

The implications of what Vin just said dawned on Chris.

"The road’s still open," he repeated, almost whispering, realizing that the Allied infantry would just now be- hopefully- breaching the Axis gun installations on the Normandy cliffs. If they’d gotten off the beaches, any grip they had on the German line would be a precarious one. Four Corners, isolated as it was, held the key to an encirclement; lying well westward of the major points of contention, the German army would have the opportunity to get a good head of steam going, without the chance of Allied infantry lying in wait along the way.

"Let’s get ready," he said simply, and an answering flash of something feral in Vin’s eyes echoed his own feelings.

Again that bright smile came, but sadness was more strongly in it. "He knew the risks," she said, "and so did I. But I feel... I feel that sometimes I have cheated death, that I had gotten lucky because I had just decided that morning to go to my friend’s... that I had left him to die alone..." She studied the bubbling surface of the water for several intent moments, her shoulders shaking with repressed sobs.

Nathan wanted to go to her and comfort her, but sensed that her pride would not allow such familiarities. She proved him right, for her back straightened and she blinked her tears away. "I’m doing this for my son, I suppose- he’s in England with relatives now, but he needs a home to come back to. His own home, not one that’s run by Hitler... by that thing." She fairly spat the last word, the French accent making the word sound even harsher.

"He will," Nathan said confidently.

"I know," she replied, her eyes brightening. "When M. Tanner came a few nights ago, he told us that he’d received word from Cherbourg and then again on someone’s wireless during a BBC broadcast. We haven’t had any radio here, or telephones or anything, since some German soldiers came through... hearing what was happening made me want to dance, and we did." She smiled once more, and this time, nothing of sadness remained- only a fierce joy. "I banged the lids of some pots together, and went stomping through the house like an elephant."

"Must’ve been somethin’," he remarked.

"Looking back on it, it was," she confided. "But now... now it seems like we’re still so far away."

Nathan nodded thoughtfully. "You know, when I was volunteerin’ for the army down in Georgia, I heard that there weren’t a whole lotta black nurses on the lists. Talked to a friend of mine, he said that he’d tried to sign up, but they turned him down. Said somethin’ about a quota. Doc Ayers... he didn’t much believe in those, I guess, but he’s just one man. Still, maybe one man’s all it’ll take to get people to change."

"I hope so," she said solemnly.

The heavy tramping of boots on the outside steps broke into their conversation, and the bulky shadow of Josiah Sanchez loomed in the doorway, illuminated only by the lights Nathan had set up.

"Lieutenant Larabee wants me to tell ya ‘bout what we’ve been figuring out," Josiah told them, and then proceeded to fill them in on what Chris had told him after that mysterious, half-silent exchange with Vin. Marie’s eyes went wide with shock and her hand drifted toward her mouth as if to smother a cry. Nathan’s lips thinned, and he merely nodded.

"We’ll move some mats down from the houses," he told Marie before turning back to Josiah. "How many Germans, do they think?"

Josiah shrugged. "Chris and Vin are guessing at maybe a small detachment- mostly infantry, with maybe a couple tanks backing them. I’m inclined to agree. Actually," he paused consideringly, "I’m inclined to hope. I moved the mines to near the far side of town, so they’ll have gone all the way through by the time some of them get blown to kingdom come... hopefully, that’ll block ‘em in, but there’ll be some nasty fighting. Madame, you’d best find cover soon."

"I’m staying here," Marie said firmly.

Sanchez looked like he wanted to argue, but something on Marie’s face kept him from doing so. "You got everything you need, Nathan?" he asked instead.

"Think so," Nathan said slowly. "There’s only eleven of us, so I’ll be out patrolling with my gear on me. Once this thing is over, we’ll move any wounded back here for better treatment."

"Only six at the outset, I’m afraid- Chris had to get that OSS agent back to wherever an Airborne encampment is so he can be evacuated back to England. The four men he’s sending should return with reinforcements. That’s the plan anyway."

"Plans ain’t much good, past the drawin’ table," Nathan said slowly, recalling his own crash landing, which put a swift end to any further plans Ike had entertained about where Nathan and his company were going.

"I think a wise man once said ‘Man supposes, God disposes," Josiah remarked.

"Way to cheer a fella up," joked Nathan, trying to sound flip and failing utterly, but something in Josiah’s eyes sparkled, the pale blue lighting up with mirth.

"May God grant us victory, Brother Nathan," Josiah said at last. "Let’s hope this won’t be one of the phyrric sort, shall we?" With that, he turned on his heel and strode back into the half-light of dawn.

When he recalled events later on, Ezra wouldn’t remember the actual explosion, the sudden heaving of the truck underneath him, or even his own body flying through the air to slam against a tree. Memory disappeared in the bone-shattering contact of his back with something solid, a harsh scream escaping his lips as agony lanced up and down his body in a wave of jagged red. His own bitter screams of pain seemed to come through layers of cotton, muffled and somewhat pathetic until they ceased altogether for lack of breath.

Through slitted eyes, he dimly saw flames licking up the side of the truck, and even worse, the bodies of the men Larabee had assigned to get him to safety. He closed his eyes for a second to get a handle on the pain and overwhelming guilt, hovering in the limbo between awareness and unconsciousness. He didn’t feel steel-toed German boots nudging his body, but he could hear one man say to the other that Ezra was dead, and didn’t he look familiar somehow? Ezra’s heart almost stopped and he wanted to scream, to run away, to do anything except lie there, but his body refused to cooperate, and lay inert.

"No, sir," the man’s companion said calmly. "If you’re talking about Ezra Standish, he died in Austria. Il Duce’s agents got him, I heard."

"Damn shame," the first man sighed. "Let’s get a move on." The two men took off down the road- Ezra could hear the sharp crackling of their boots on loose gravel. The footsteps faded with distance and disappeared altogether after a while. Exhausted first with the pain of his injuries and then with helpless terror, Ezra passed out.

His entire frame ached violently when he came to, and his head felt inordinately heavy, as did his eyelids. Opening his eyes took almost all his strength out of him, but he managed it and took stock of his surroundings. The truck had long since finished burning, now gutted like a burnt fish, smoke wisping off its metal skeleton. He saw the bodies of Ingers, Travers, and Collins scattered around the vehicle, and they appeared small... so small underneath their uniform and helmets.

Standish wondered where Private Waltham had gotten to, and received his answer when he turned his head a little more towards the right, to look up the slight slope that he lay upon.

Private Waltham had landed near him, half his face covered in dirt and blood, and his foot missing, the leg terminating in a bloody stump just below the knee. Ezra didn’t see his helmet, and the grossly misshapen look to the back of Waltham’s skull almost made him sick. Waltham’s empty eyes stared at Ezra, no accusation in them, but Ezra felt it keenly.

"I’m sorry," he told Private Waltham softly.

Private Waltham didn’t answer.

Ezra forced himself to his feet, unable to sit still under that vacant scrutiny for a moment longer. Staggering away from the tree and Private Waltham, Ezra almost started to head down the road, until he realized that he would have to walk unarmed down that narrow lane, between the two hedgerows and completely open to enemy fire. Before he allowed himself to think twice about it, Ezra turned and stumbled back to Private Waltham, kneeling down slowly to take the young man’s sidearm and ammunition from him. As an afterthought, Ezra passed his hands over Private Waltham’s eyes and left as quickly as he could manage, crawling up the embankment on his side of the road and making his way through the slender strand of trees that separated the road from a large, bombed-out cornfield.

Good saints above, his entire body resounded with aches and darting pains that originated in his back and shot down to his left leg, red-hot agony all along the length of it. The pain built steadily into a fire that roared up and down his left side at every movement, and not a quarter mile passed before Ezra found himself resting against every other tree he passed. Sweat poured down his body, and the air felt cool and clammy against his skin. Within a few minutes, sweat had saturated his uniform shirt and caused the rough material to chafe fiercely, but Ezra feared he’d be too cold if he took it off, cringing as the wet fabric rubbed against his skin. He brushed a hand across his forehead, and it came away tinged with pink- blood, he thought dully, and supposed it would help explain the towering headache that had begun to manifest itself right behind his eyes.

Groaning softly, he kept on, knowing even as he did so that he’d never make it back to Four Corners alive, unless someone came and got him, and he had no idea how far the truck had gone from the village. A few miles perhaps, he estimated, but the sanctified dead would rise from their graves before he could even remotely consider making even one mile before he collapsed from exhaustion, shock, and blood loss. Ezra decided that, in the very least, he would die by the side of the road, heading back to Four Corners so that, if Chris found him, he’d at least say that Ezra Standish had the guts to turn around.

As he trudged and fell along the path in the hedgerows, Ezra’s mind wandered over his course of the past few years. Dangerous times, he decided happily (happily!), spent almost under the gun in industrial Germany, a well-camouflaged American shark schooling with the executives of I.G. Farben and the weapons manufacturers, the steel magnates and the bureaucrats who oversaw the running of the war industry. Ezra Standish hadn’t existed for three years, but Herr Nichol Hasse emerged as a key player in Nazi Germany’s industrial politics, a savvy financier who also covertly transmitted Nazi weapons design secrets to the Americans.

Herr Hasse had disappeared during the Allied bombings of Cologne, his respectability and shield of influence shattered by the one man who had been sent to save his life, and subsequently forcing him to become Ezra Standish again. Hasse/Standish fled in the midst of a particularly harsh strafing, stealing a car and making for the checkpoints at city limits. The functionary who checked his pass didn’t know what hit him, but a fist with considerable power behind it did indeed knock the young man unconscious and allow Ezra Standish a shot at making the French-German border.

Make it he did, and Standish now realized with something like gall that it had taken "guts" to flee Germany and run blindly across France, never mind that flight had been made with the prospect of torture and a horrible, prolonged death at the hands of the S.S snapping at his heels. "Get it together, Standish old boy," Ezra mumbled, "Goin’... back... goin’ back’s the same thing."

"Same what?" Vin Tanner and Sergeant Wilmington materialized out of nowhere.

A faint gasp, that in former times would have been a scream, escaped from Standish’s lips, and he collapsed at the sharpshooter’s feet. Tanner exchanged a quick, curious glance with Buck, shrugged, and bent down to pick up the wounded agent. In the near distance, they could see the burnt-out remains of the truck.

"Panzerfaust, looks like," Vin muttered, and Buck nodded confirmation. "Reckon we should look for the others?"

Indecision chased Buck’s features, a conflict between an unspoken loyalty to his fellow troops and knowing that Chris couldn’t spare the manpower for too long- they’d come out to investigate the source of a rolling explosion they’d heard back in the village, even though Larabee had already feared the worst. But then he saw what Tanner didn’t- the darker, dust-coated smudges of bodies lying on the track. The indecision vanished and Buck shook his head.

"We’ll have to be gettin’ back," he said finally, hating to leave his fellow soldiers in that lane where like as not they’d be crushed by oncoming tanks with all the indifference that a shoe might show to an insect. "Here, I’ll take ‘im back- you’re ‘bout ready to collapse on top of him, ‘pears to me." A slight smile worked its way across Tanner’s lips, although the sadness in his shadowed blue eyes made a mockery of it. Buck took Ezra’s limp body from Tanner’s arms and said, "You should go collect their weapons... I... I don’t feel right about it."

If Tanner took offense, he didn’t show it- instead of resentment or insult, Buck saw only understanding in those blue eyes. "Sure thing, Buck," Vin told him and moved off in the direction of the truck.

CHAPTER TEN

Colonel Johann Schwartzfeld found himself constantly annoyed by Field Marshal Runstedt, and always without a way to vent his frustration, except through calculated disobedience. It had earned him a place in the Normandy backwater, made him the butt of several jokes among the members of the Seventh Army, but Schwartzfeld didn’t really care about Dollmann snickering and calling him "the bad element." While Dollmann and Runstedt both wielded the power to have Schwartzfeld hauled from his post and brought before the military courts, they didn’t, for whatever obscure reason the High Command had fixed on.

Speaking for himself only, Schwartzfeld was glad. As for the twenty men with him, he couldn’t say. Maybe they considered themselves lucky, being far from the chaos around the beaches. Maybe not.

Schwartzfeld shared the Führer’s opinion that Normandy would bear the brunt of the Allied invasion, although Runstedt and everyone else insisted otherwise; as such, Schwartzfeld was under constant pressure to remove his men- a small detachment of the 79th Panzer, sent more as a guard force than anything else- back to the Pas-de-Calais. Somehow, Schwartzfeld managed to stall, and with Hitler’s authorization not forthcoming, he refused to budge.

"When the Führer tells me to pack up and go, I’ll pack up and go," he’d informed Runstedt in an official communiqué, more to defy Runstedt than to support Hitler. Runstedt, knowing Schwartzfeld’s stubbornness and his reputation among the men who’d survived the Wehrmacht’s near-destruction on the Eastern Front, let it go for a while, to Schwartzfeld’s relief.

For the past few months, ever since April, reports came in from intelligence that the Allies were planning something- something that ranged from a harmless naval sally against the Normandy coastline to a full-scale invasion. The reports intensified in May and the first days of June, with each one inevitably made obsolete by some announcement that the Allies had decided to hold off yet again.

After dozens of such communications, Schwartzfeld ordered his men to wait just west of Beauzville la Bastille, and with General Dollmann not saying anything- or Runstedt, for that matter- Schwartzfeld stayed put. He only sent a few men out a couple days ago to cut the telephone lines in Four Corners, but they had returned, leaving a couple sentries to send word by radio if any Allied troops showed up. Yesterday had passed quietly- nothing happened.

Nothing happened yesterday. The frustrated thought repeated itself over and over again.
June 5 had gone by silently, with only scattered reports of air raids from the Fatherland and occasional forays against communications lines, but now this- this, a single report down from Rennes about the Allied invasion. He thought of the men in the Four Corners, and desperately wished them back with him.

Now, with the general alarm having come down from the Seventh Army that one British and two American divisions were landing all along the Normandy coast, from Cherbourg to Caen, Schwartzfeld didn’t know whether to call Runstedt and gloat, or call and curse the man. Instead of doing either- both of which he badly wanted to do- Schwartzfeld called in Lt. Konrad Meier.

"Yessir?" asked Meier, poking his head through the tent. Anxiety further reddened his acne-blotched face, but despite his agitation, he appeared serene.

"Communications down from Cherbourg are being jammed," Schwartzfeld said slowly, toying with his compass and the maps spread out on his desk. "What’s that say to you, Konner?" The men, despite their difference in rank and years- Schwartzfeld an ancient thirty-seven and Meier a youngish twenty-five- had formed a steady friendship. Pulling off his cap, which was their signal that the conversation would remain a private one between friends, Schwartzfeld waved Konrad inside.

Konrad eased into the tent and, closing the flap behind him, sat down without orders.

"Schwartzy, I guess the Allies’re here, aren’t they?" His dark blue eyes widened and he pushed light brown hair back from his forehead. "By God! They’re coming?"

Schwartzfeld couldn’t keep anything from Konrad, so he nodded his head in affirmation. "They landed just past midnight, we got word at two... And there’s been no further word from Runstedt or Rommel on the subject. No further word from anybody, for that matter... all radio transmissions from the coast are being blocked." He sighed and leaned over the maps, staring blankly at the lines and blocks that marked off France into Panzer and infantry divisions.

"We should do something, Schwartzy," Konrad said after a minute. "Can’t sit here much longer, can we?"

"No," agreed Schwartzfeld, "we can’t." Those few words and Konrad’s question banished much uncertainty, and banished any thought that he could count on the people up top to help him out.

"With any luck, the Seventh will send a division up from the south, but we’ll have to make sure they can get to where they’re going."

"And how do we do that?"

Schwartzfeld beckoned Konrad over to the maps, and the younger man studied them avidly.

Quickly, Schwartzfeld marked off their position and then moved his fingers up the road to the south of the Douve River, narrating as he went. "We must assume that the bridge at the Douve is not yet blown, but that it remains an Allied objective." His finger stopped, covering Pont l’Abbe and its bridge. "They will expect us to take the more direct route just past the Pont l’Abbe fork and head right toward the N13 to clear out resistance and let the divisions come through relatively unharmed." His finger continued on its northward course and came to rest at last over Four Corners, and Konrad could see the slender, dashed line of a dirt road proceeding from the village toward the coast.

"Instead," he continued, gazing steadily at Konrad, whose face was rapt with concentration, "we should continue north, up to the Four Corners. The road through there is exceptionally bad, but a Tiger can handle it- the Allies might not be able to. If we can lock up that road, we can give the Seventh the back door it needs."

"What about the bridge? If that’s blown, Four Corners won’t do us much good, will it?" asked Konner, his brow creasing in concentration.

"It won’t," Schwartzfeld agreed, "but we need to trust in God for that, don’t we? And if the bridge is blown, there may still be alternate routes to let the Seventh up, even if the Douve is flooded."

Konrad nodded, brushing his hair out of his face again.

"You know," Schwartzfeld said, "you need to get your hair cut again, Konner."

"Hah!" Konner laughed, a bright and boyish laugh that never failed to lift Schwartzfeld’s heart. "I’m not sure it’ll matter in a few months, Schwartzy, but I’ll get Stryker to do it for me, if you want."

"Forget it." Schwartzfeld waved the casual offer away into oblivion. "If it won’t matter, don’t bother taking the time. Besides, what would Johanna think?" Little Johanna- Konrad’s daughter, born two years ago while Konrad was on furlough and so was named for his best friend. Schwartzfeld still had the photo Konrad had sent to him, a photo of a little girl clutching that blond forelock of Konrad’s, wearing her father’s uniform shirt and a big, Konner-like grin.
And Milla, his own wife, and their son... dead in an air raid. Schwartzfeld thought it bitterly ironic that he, the one who waged war, would remain alive while the two who remained behind in Munich would die by violence.

"I try not to fight for revenge, Konner," he said softly, looking up at his best friend guiltily. "Do you think I do?"

"Sir," Konrad said, "I don’t believe you do, but I wouldn’t blame you if you did."

Johann Schwartzfeld nodded and buried his face in his hands, not wishing for his friend to see him trying not to cry. "Thank you, Konner..." He coughed self-consciously and added, "Go and get the men ready to move out, will you?"

"Yes, sir," Konrad said, and stepped outside, leaving Schwartzfeld alone again for another half hour, when Konrad stepped back inside and told him everything was ready.

"Move out," ordered Schwartzfeld as he collected his maps and gear to toss into his truck. The dawn had begun to resolve itself into something more than an idea, the distant glare of antiaircraft fire fading in the light of the coming day.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He’d just gotten back with Buck and that Standish fellow, and had to reluctantly admit he was exhausted. Dawn still remained a gradually-realized idea, its half-light strange and nightmarish and unreal. A stray rooster crowed from his perch atop a stone wall.

Before he could even wonder why he was obeying Chris Larabee’s order to get some sleep before ‘whatever comes, comes’, Vin Tanner collapsed onto his blankets in the church’s bell tower and dreamed.

The train ride from Alsace-Lorraine is dark and noisome, an endless clanging of sound weighed down by the incredible humidity that rises from the breathing of a hundred people packed closely together, standing so closely that they seem to become one flesh. Miles pass as they travel through the Ukraine, picking up even more passengers along the way, and then turn north to Poland. He doesn’t know this as it happens, of course, being only aware of the horrible, cramped box and the people squirming against him like worms.

A young woman with dark, dirty hair and brown eyes stands next to him, and gives birth on the train; through her labor and finally her death agonies, she asks him in German what his name is.

"Vincent," he tells her, stroking her sweat-soaked and pale face, hoping she will find comfort in it.

She looks down to where the baby writhes and cries weakly on the floor, but cannot tell the sex of her own child, knowing that it does not matter for her anymore, and will not matter long enough for her baby to care. As the light goes out from her eyes, she whispers to him that she thinks Vincent is a nice name. He holds her up, not wanting her to join her baby and the excrement on the floor, but after two days discovers he can’t find the strength to do so. Her body slips from his grasp, disappearing into darkness.

"Don’t grieve for her, son," a kindly voice says next to him. "She has gone to a better place, and thank God for it."

He turns, squinting and searching for the source of the voice, finding it in an elderly woman who stands close by his right shoulder. She has curly white hair and keen blue eyes, and speaks German with a very heavy accent; he can barely understand her, but hears the kindness in her voice. He sees bruises on her face and moves to touch them.

"Stuff, boy!" she scolds, swatting his hand away. "I’ll see worse by the time this business is finished. My name is Natalia, and I suppose that you are Vincent?"

"Vin," he tells her.

"I didn’t think to see an American here," she says to him, her lips close to his ear so that he can hear her. "I am from Austria myself..."

He calls her Nettie, and she thinks that’s funny- they find comfort with each other for the rest of the journey. After uncounted days, they arrive in Poland, and stumble off the trains under cover of a starless night. Light music from the old Parisian operetta drifts through the air, starkly unreal against the spectacle of hundreds of broken, stained, and filthy human beings being herded off rail cars.

Not human, he thinks. No humans here...

He watches dully as officers yank crying wives and children away from their husbands, watches as the body of the young woman who’d stood next to him falls off the rail platform, watches as an officer effortlessly reaches around him to seize Nettie, watches her as she stumbles behind the man and sees the fearlessness of her.

"Nettie!" he tries to shout.

"Gott Mit Uns," she calls to him reassuringly before she blends into the herd of women driven in the opposite direction, and he whispers her admonishment in English:

"God is with us..."

A uniformed man shoves him into another line of mainly men and older boys, with a few women. His mind, fogged by lack of food and still reeling from the confines of the rail car, barely registers what is happening to him and those around him. A rifle in his back pushes him forward, but he moves more to get away from that pressure than out of fear the man holding the rifle will shoot.

They take away his clothes and his name, and give him a rough uniform and a tattoo to replace them. That tattoo burns into his flesh, the ink searing like a brand laid against the skin.

14985.

Then, as if that ignominy is not enough, they shave his hair with a dull razor, so that the brown strands terminate in jagged clumps. After they finish with him, the rifle directs him out the back door and to the prisoners’ barracks, and on the way he sees the looming presence of large buildings in the distance- the ones the officers moved the women towards- sees great smokestacks spewing gray smoke and a fine ash that settles on his shoulders and hair.

He wonders what that ash was, what they could be burning. Part of him knows, but refuses to respond, unable to even cope with the throat-choking stench of death that clings to him as though it were a shroud.

The answer to that dimly-asked question comes in less than half a year’s time. Time of working in a factory, of endless starvation and frigid nights, and then in the hospitals, comforting the dying and condemned in exchange for his life and food. Part of him screams at this cowardice, siding with the enemy, but another, desperate for survival and escape, forces him to the hospitals every day to watch the inmates die.

He meets Freiderich and Julian, two sixteen-year-olds with the bodies of creatures that looked trapped between those of children and crabbed, ancient men. In his first month there, they sleep together at night for warmth, even though Vin’s skin crawls at the feeling of cold, clammy flesh pressed against his. They eat together, although he often goes without, his body used to privation after life as a hunter.

He forgets that hunter, though, in living the life of a prey animal, working long days in the factory until his knees can’t lock and he falls down, only to be driven up again by the boot of an officer and a fear of death. He forgets that hunter as he wipes down a fevered brow with a bloody rag and murmurs empty assurances and listens to the damned plead for death.

One night, he comes to a realization.

He cannot say what leads him to it- it comes as a revelation, a spontaneous bursting of light within him. It comes as he lies awake with Freiderich and Julian cradled in his arms, the three of them half-naked and huddled under an insufficient blanket.

He can’t die here.

Not in this ash... the ash that chokes him and burns his eyes and has settled into every pore of his skin, into every crevice of his lungs. Not with the stench of death around him that fills his lungs and his soul with its corruption.

No, he can’t die here.

Incontrovertible, irrefutable fact.

So he plans to escape like any dangerous, intelligent creature escapes from its captors. He begins to study the patterns of the guards and the officers, the influx of new prisoners, the routines of life around the camp. He furtively stakes out possible escape points, looking for weaknesses in defenses, counting weapons and loops of barbed wire. The rough-hewn boards making up the floor of his cabin have warped with age, curling up at the edges to reveal hollow places where he can store stolen knives, rope, and even the sidearm of a drunken guard, and some ammunition.

He waits some more and watches, and in the meantime sabotages the war materiel he turns out at the factory, and a month later, when he works in the hospital, he whispers American tall tales to dying inmates.

And little less than half a year after he arrived at that hell, near-gone to steely will alone, he escapes.

Even his dream would not permit him to remember the nights of endless cold, what he did to stay alive, what remained of the creature that had escaped Hell as it staggered into Danzig. Hidden in a bombed-out building, he met a bearded young man named George, who gave him warm blankets and hot ersatz coffee, talked to him in English, and called him Tex. Humanity awoke in him, roused by simple companionship and the first hot drink he’d had in ages.

"Whatcha doin’ so far from home, Tex?" he’d asked after hearing Vin speak for the first time. Vin explained as briefly as he could, untrusting still of strangers, but George merely nodded and offered him some water and asked if he thought the sandwiches were okay.

"I’m a... or I was, rather, a Harvard student- linguistics and modern language," George said in a nasal upstate New York accent. "I came over here a while ago for a study program and ended up staying a little longer than I thought when the American embassy pulled out before I could get a ride home. Hey, you doin’ okay over there? Want some more coffee?"

"Please..."

George obligingly poured him some more coffee and plunked a slice of sandwich on Vin’s lap. "Listen, I’m running a small resistance cell here- not much, but I can get you out of the country. To England, maybe, but the ship I use goes to Norway. You can go home, just say the word and I’ll get you out."

Vin stared at him, absorbing the words and trying not to latch onto blind hope alone. "Why don’t you leave yourself, if’n you can do that?"

"Wondered that myself," George told him laughingly, pushing broken-bridged glasses up his nose and flicking black hair off his forehead. "But I’m in a position to help people- my Polish is okay, my German is better, my Russian so-so, and most people think I just help clerk in a shop down by the docks. Those who know otherwise are the ones who help me out and know enough to keep their mouths shut. I get some assistance from England; they send supplies every now and then, and there’s a pretty good network running between the British Isles and Norway, which is why I’d have to send you there first."

"What about the S.S.?" Vin had heard the talk around the camps, how Freiderich and Julian came to be there, along with the thousands of faceless others who came through at one point or another.

George shrugged. "They’re an accepted risk."

"Ya sound like a damned entrepreneur," Vin remarked.

"Maybe I am," George shrugged, "but the best enterprises are the most dangerous ones. So whaddaya say, Tex? You in to get out?"

After a moment, Vin nodded.

George proved his word to be good; two months spent getting Vin’s weight and strength back to some semblance of normalcy ended in George smuggling him aboard a Polish cargo ship bound for a port near Oslo. The last time Vin saw George, the young man was engaged in a bitter struggle with two S.S. officers along the docks, just as Vin’s ship pulled out of the slip. Vin’s throat constricted, choking back the shout of warning as a uniformed man arose from the shadows, wielding a revolver, and gunned the young man down.

As George’s body fell, Vin’s own body jerked convulsively and he awoke in a thin sheet of sweat, caught in the grip of a hatred and fear that terrified him. He remembered his mother’s words, how she had taught him to never hate, and felt a deep shame that he had to go against her. Trying to shake the feeling, he stood and almost fled down the stairs of the bell tower.

CHAPTER TWELVE

J.D. found himself paired with Sergeant Wilmington as the two went from house to house, strewing piles of rubble into the narrow alleyways between buildings and stringing old fencing wire across the tops of the small piles. They finished one side of the street and started up the other end of the other, setting homemade mines and regulation ones alike at random spots amid the hills of rubble, marking them off with small red flags. Buck set the mines and J.D. flagged them, and the two worked in something like a companionable silence, J.D. breaking it only to ask if something had been done correctly.

After a half hour of doing so, Sergeant Wilmington told him to quit with the sergeant stuff and to just call him Buck, and for Chrissakes, watch what he was doing with that entrenchment shovel.

"Yessir, ah... Buck," J.D. said obediently.

"You can quit with the ‘sir’ stuff, too," Buck sighed. "Ain’t never been real comfortable with it."
Well, J.D. could understand that, and the man seemed genuinely friendly, so he tried to strike up a conversation that didn’t have to do with the matter at hand.

"How long have you known Lieutenant Larabee?" he asked as he unwound some wire from its spindle, wrapping it around a toppled rafter.

"Oh, goin’ on twelve years now," Buck said. "We met in the unemployment line, believe it or not, durin’ the Depression, an’ ended up not finding any work, so we celebrated by stealin’ a couple beers an’ findin’ a quiet place to drink ‘em in. Been friends ever since. We... ah, we signed up for the Army together, just after Pearl Harbor." He turned to J.D. "When’d you sign on?"

"In ‘43," J.D. said. "I was s’pose ta start my junior year of high school and begin my college applications. My mom wanted me to graduate, so’s I could get the chance to go to college one day, but she died that January from tuberculosis an’ there really wasn’t much of a point waiting in Boston, living with my aunt and uncle. The Airborne just started callin’ for volunteers to sign up for the 82nd, so I got on a train and went to sign up."

"You reckon you’ll finish school someday?" Buck asked.

"Maybe." J.D. shrugged. "I guess I haven’t thought that far ahead yet."

"I never got to go to college," Buck said slowly. "Had to find work during the Depression. My mom died, too."

"How?" asked J.D., and immediately regretted the question, wishing he could call it back.
If the question bothered Buck, though, he didn’t show it. "Hey, wrap that a little tighter, will ya?" he instructed before answering, "She got hurt pretty bad, got hit in the head... Never did recover from it." The answer was evasive at best, and J.D. desperately wanted to ask how she’d gotten hurt, but kept himself from asking.

"I’m sorry," J.D. said sincerely, instead.

Buck shrugged it off. "Ain’t much to be done about it now, I reckon." He picked up a large piece of masonry and dumped it on top of the rubble they currently worked on, placing it right in the middle of the narrow passage and then placing two small mines to either side. J.D. set down two tiny pieces of red cloth tied to sticks- the secret marker indicating mined territory.

"Think this’ll fool ‘em?" J.D. asked.

"Oh, it’ll fool ‘em good, kid," Buck replied, grinning.

"Good," J.D. said and then asked the one question that had bothered him more or less constantly ever since he first saw Chris Larabee and the others in the darkness just outside of Four Corners. "Is Lieutenant Larabee really like the stories they tell about him?"

"Which stories?" asked Buck by way of reply, a slight smile on his face. "That he held half of Sicily hostage while Ike took over the other half?"

"No... um, the other ones, about boot camp..."

The smile vanished from Buck’s face; he walked over to a wall and pulled himself up to sit atop it before gesturing to J.D. to join him. J.D. did so, curious and half-regretting his curiosity already, working up a good litany of cuss words to ream himself out for letting his mouth run away with him again. If Buck shared J.D.’s sentiments, though, he didn’t show it. He merely bent close to J.D., with a look in his eyes that indicated their words would stay between them.

"Yeah, he did get busted down to private for fighting and drunkenness, an’ for burnin’ down half a barracks building there, but you gotta understand why. What I’m tellin’ ya is private, and if I hear that you’ve breathed a word of it to anyone, I’ll hand you over to the Germans myself. Got it?"

J.D. nodded, indicating that he got it.

Buck looked away and stared at the ground for a moment. "He was married once," he said finally. "Had a wife and son- Sarah and Adam. Sarah was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, so sweet and patient, but with a temper like a keg of dynamite with a real long fuse. She’d put up with Chris, but if he ever stepped outta line... Well! She let him know about it real quick. I think that’s why he loved her- only person ever really stood up to him, didn’t take any of his crap. Adam was two- Chris thought the sun rose an’ set on that baby boy. I was real glad for him, havin’ them." Buck smiled softly.

"We were in trainin’, gettin’ ready to ship out for Italy when Chris got offered furlough. He didn’t take it, insisted he’d be okay, that winnin’ the war was the most important thing. Chris was always like that- he wanted to see Sarah an’ Adam real bad, but he’d decided his country came first... A week after, he got word that Sarah an’ Adam died when their house burned down the day he was s’pose ta get home on the furlough he’d never accepted. Never did find out why. Just about tore him apart with guilt, figurin’ that if he’d been there, he’d’ve saved ‘em or maybe it wouldn’ta happened at all..."

J.D. stared silently at the ground.

"So that’s the reason why. But all’s you gotta know is that he’s a good man." Buck’s voice came low and fierce. "I been with him these three years, tryin’ to help him, and God knows it’s been a job and a half on top of this war. You understand, son?"

Nodding, J.D. half-whispered, "After my mom died, the first thing I did was get drunk. You read about people doin’ that, when their mothers or girlfriends die or whatever. Got into the estate’s wine cellar an’ probably drank half of it. When Mr. Summers found out... boy was he mad, but I think he understood a little. After that night, I never had another drop. Not even in training camp. Guess I figured I’d rather die over here than in my own puke, y’ know?"

"Chris didn’t figure it that way at first," Buck said, "but a bullet’s a more surefire way of dyin’ than a drink, that’s for sure." He stood abruptly, brushing dust off his uniform sleeves. "Now c’mon... enough of this lollygaggin’. We got ourselves some more alleys to obstruct."
"Yessir, Sergeant Wilmington," responded J.D. promptly, standing and following Buck to the next alleyway.

Buck halted and turned to J.D., a warning glint in his eye. J.D. caught his mistake and amended himself:

"You got it, Buck."

A comradely hand swiped at J.D.’s helmet, and he ducked to avoid the playful blow.

"Much better, kid."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Josiah Sanchez heard much of the conversation between the two men, having spent that time arranging some Molotov cocktails in the corner of the house that sat cheek-by-jowl to the wall on which Wilmington and Dunne sat. Sanchez, himself a former preacher, knew even without Buck saying it that the conversation was meant to be private. Fingering the wooden cross that hung at his neck, Josiah mentally stashed that conversation in the part of his mind that housed hundreds of other confessions he would not speak of.

He supposed the conversation he had with Vin two nights ago should also be included there.

Two nights? he thought. Was it just two nights ago we talked up in the bell tower?

Whenever it happened, he had sensed enough in Tanner’s silences to construct a tentative history of the young man. Young only covered Vin’s physical appearance- twenty-two or twenty-three, Josiah had hazarded when Vin first appeared in the darkness of Vergil’s barn, lowering a rifle that had been aimed right between Josiah’s eyes before Marie announced that Josiah was a friend.
 

"He’s a member of the resistance, just like you," she’d said, and Josiah heard the answering click of the hammer relaxing, saw the dull glint of metal in the light of the lamp Marie carried. He’d imagined a bearded, grizzled old mountaineer, like the few men from the Pyrenees he’d met shortly before Hitler captured Paris. When a young face with startling blue eyes emerged into the pool of light cast by the lamp, Josiah couldn’t stop himself from gaping.

Looking back on it, Josiah supposed that would only be the first in a series of surprises that would bombard him in the subsequent forty-eight hours.

The next up belonged, of course, to the invasion, and the wordless wonder he’d shared with Vin and the remaining inhabitants of Four Corners. He hadn’t seen Vin again until the Americans came, Tanner having secreted himself in the bell tower just past midnight, but could hazard a guess that the young man was just as exultant as Josiah himself. Close on the heels of those first lights of Allied firepower, Larabee and his men materialized in the village and just as unexpectedly, found themselves ordered to stay and defend it.

"Do you have plans to move elsewhere and fight?" Chris had asked just after communications cut out.

"I was plannin’ on staying here and seeing this thing through," Josiah had responded.

"You mind throwing in with us?"

"Not at all." Josiah hadn’t wanted to seem too eager, but the calm capability of Chris Larabee made it all but impossible for him to resist too long. He saw a hard glint in Chris’s eyes, and had figured he’d get browbeaten into helping if he had refused. The punishment for Resistance fighters knowingly aiding and abetting Allied troops usually ran between summary execution or a prolonged death in a concentration camp, but Josiah, in that instant, decided fighting alongside this man would compensate for the danger.

And it would help, knowing he wouldn’t die by himself.

He’d fought on his own for so long, and finding Vin meant finding an ally. He sensed that Tanner had found something more than an ally in Chris Larabee- something told him that those half-smiles that quirked Vin’s lips when he saw Larabee flirting (badly) with Marie had come but rarely in his life- and the two had joined to create a formidable pair of minds that just might save them.

A long time had passed since he’d found he had that much faith in anyone else. "Place your trust in the Lord," he murmured to himself, once again touching the cross that thudded softly against his chest as he rechecked the matchboxes next to the small oil-coated canister of gasoline- he wondered briefly who had gotten past gas rationing to obtain it. He stumped upstairs and examined the small cache of grenades stored in a corner. Satisfied that everything was as it should be, he went back down and made his way to the next house, where J.D. would wait. He’d double back across the street to make sure Buck had everything he needed. Then Chris after that, and that should do it.

He spotted Vin exiting the old church and waved the young man over. Vin caught the movement and turned toward Josiah.

"Hey, Sanchez."

"Hey yourself, Tanner. How goes it?"

"Pretty good. Just woke up." Meaning the man had probably slept for a grand total of half an hour before the sound of a mouse scurrying in an attic on the far end of street woke him up. Exhaustion shadowed Vin’s face, but his eyes remained alert and keen as ever.

Josiah knew Vin had no patience for small talk, so he steered away from it by keeping silent.

"You ready for this?" Vin asked.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre," murmured Josiah.

"What?" Tanner looked askance at Sanchez, who continued on, his voice still low.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Josiah stopped his recitation, concluding it with, "Yeats."

Vin nodded, knowing Josiah’s fondness for pulling poetic and Biblical quotations out of the air, then gestured to the house Josiah had been about to enter. "You need help?"

"No, I got it. Just rechecking our stash. How’re you doin’?"

"Pretty good..." Anticipation and something else crackled in the words, although Vin remained outwardly serene. Josiah smiled encouragingly at the young man, who returned it with a smile of his own, and Josiah felt somewhat more at ease.

What is it about him? he thought to himself.

Suddenly, Vin tensed, then muttered, "I gotta go." He took off for the building which he would use as a base of fire, vanishing through the open door. Josiah didn’t see him atop the building- Vin had hidden himself behind a triangular stone facade and would use the Romanesque sculpture that decorated it as firing holes. But a moment later, he heard a sound more ominous than the distant booming of Allied bombs.

A low whistle, the whistle of just an ordinary songbird, cut through the air. Instantly, Buck, J.D., and Chris appeared, darting down the street and taking up their places. Josiah briefly nodded to J.D., and saw the mix of excitement and fear in the kid’s eyes. J.D. handed him a walkie-talkie and disappeared into the building.

Josiah himself moved toward his own building and took up his position behind a large baking stone he’d dragged in from the bakery. He examined his small cache of grenades, his gun, and the various explosives he’d cobbled together from nails, rubble, and copper piping.
David fought Goliath with a slingshot and the Lord’s grace, he thought, and prayed for the same courage. He heard then what Vin had either heard or sensed- the low growling of Tiger tanks off to the west.

It was beginning.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nathan heard Vin’s whistle, and felt his entire body contract in anticipation. He squashed the sudden need to leap up and do something- to grab a gun, to run out screaming, to do anything- and instead focused on trying to get his patient comfortable, which had taken most of his effort.

Ezra’d been hit bad- that was his first thought when Buck had carried him into the med "tent" earlier and described what must have happened to the agent. Nathan didn’t exactly know what a panzerfaust was, but Buck’s description pretty much confirmed Nathan’s desire to never run into one. Seeing the results of it painted over Ezra’s face and body only hardened that resolve.

Standish had a concussion and a broken left arm, torn muscles, probably internal bruising. He’d sprained an ankle, and a mass of bruises covered his back. Fortunately for Standish’s prognosis, nothing aside from his head and left arm seemed to be broken- although, Nathan reflected bitterly, Ezra would not take that as a comfort in his present state. He had feeling all along his legs and lower torso, so no vertebrae were broken and Nathan felt reasonably sure that no major nerve damage existed, which made his future recovery more promising. Even with a diagnosis, though, Nathan found himself overwhelmed by impotence; he administered morphine and penicillin, cleaned up the flesh wounds with sulfa powder before bandaging them, and then set Ezra’s broken arm. Marie had made a hot kaolin poultice, and Nathan wrapped it around Ezra’s ankle, securing it with the tie Ezra had been wearing before Nathan cut it and his shirt off.

Now, he waited, watching helplessly as his patient slid in and out of delirium, his gaze alternating between the restless form on the bed and the door, which remained closed. Marie sat next to him, hands clasped on her lap, slim body leaning forward as she held a cool compress to Ezra’s forehead. The man moaned weakly and sought to escape from the cloth, but she merely shifted her position.

Deadly silence cloaked the building; Nathan wondered why he hadn’t heard anything yet- they’d been waiting for hours, it felt like. His watch said 0745. That early? It felt like afternoon.
"I saw them," croaked a hoarse southern voice, deafening in the stillness.

Nathan swiveled back toward the bed, standing up and moving to stand over Ezra, who had opened his eyes. Fever glazed the pale green eyes, which stared straight through Nathan to fix on some distant point outside the building they hid in.

"Shhh, Ezra," crooned Marie.

"I saw them," Ezra whispered. "Hundreds of them."

Nathan and Marie exchanged looks, both wondering the same thing- hundreds of what? Even as they wondered, it struck Jackson that no hallucination gripped Ezra, no matter how feverish he was; the words sounded wrenched, fearful- a confession.

"Rudolf invited me to ‘observe’ it one day," rasped Ezra. "... he said it would make me happy to see how... how my investments with Farben and Krupp paid off... I didn’t want to, oh God, I didn’t want to, but I had to... I would’ve blown my cover otherwise... had to go... oh, God, I didn’t want to..." The words trailed off into choked sobs punctuated by coughs.

Ezra ignored Marie’s requests and Nathan’s demands for him to stop talking and save his strength. He kept on with dogged determination, words tumbling almost as randomly as his thoughts.

"He told me the idiots at Treblinka had nothing on this new gas he’d come up with... said my money helped make it poss- possible... I said that Tesch made the tablets and I’d never invested in them... but... but Rudolf said they’d gotten the patent from Farben, and oh, God... God... I went and I didn’t want to...

"Never saw anythin’ like that in my life..." A harsh series of coughs interrupted him, but he continued. "Just hundreds of women an’ children... the officers stripped them naked, pushed them into this great, huge room... Looked just like a large bathin’ area, ‘cept with no drains... One woman noticed this and I could hear her ask why there weren’t any drains..."

Bright, fevered eyes stared up at the pair, strangely beseeching, as if Standish silently asked them to understand, or to maybe know what happened next.

"They started to panic," he whispered, seeming to become lucid as the story wore on, eyes wide with horror and not with fever. "They ran for the doors, tryin’ to get out, piling on top of one another, screaming... Oh, God, the screams... It seemed like forever until they stopped. And... and then men went in with hooks..."

Nathan couldn’t say anything to silence his patient; Ezra was in the grip of memory, the fixed, dazed glint in his eyes pleading for someone to just listen, to not interrupt him, and Nathan couldn’t find it in him to tell Ezra to calm himself and be quiet.

"I... I asked what was going to happen to them after that... but I knew... God, I knew because all the executives talked about were the bids for crematoria... An’, and Rudolf said they’d take them up on tracks, like little railroads he said... and then they’d burn them... and they’d scatter the ashes in the Sola or the Vistula... I saw those smokestacks and I knew... God, I knew... I didn’t want to go..."

Ezra’s narrative cut off as if by a knife. His mouth worked, but no sound came out; instead, he turned to Marie, uninjured hand reaching for hers, enveloping it in a grip of surprising strength. "Please give Lieutenant Larabee my most sincere apologies," he told her firmly. She nodded, stunned. A slight smile creased his face as he relaxed into the pallet, the tension draining from his body.

Marie turned a stricken face up to Nathan. "Is he..?"

Nathan quickly felt for a pulse at Ezra’s neck and breathed a sigh of relief when he found one.

"He’s alive- just passed out from pain an’ shock. Why don’t we get started with these bandages, make sure that sulfa powder’s holdin’ up?"

She nodded her agreement, and they set about their tasks, trying to find comfort in simply doing something.

Then they heard the explosion.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Chris ghosted out of the drug store, making for the decrepit old house that would serve as his hideout. He had booby-trapped the back entrances and the windows to the rear of him, ensuring that if an enemy soldier did get through, it would not happen without either physical pain or death- and the warning Chris would get from any cry of shock.

He had his walkie-talkie strapped to his belt but had it turned off for the moment, not wanting chance ears to pick up the crackling of static; once he got inside the building, he turned it on and flipped it to the frequency they’d decided upon. He crouched behind a piece of old masonry he and Josiah had lugged back from the church, his eyes running over the small stash of equipment at his disposal. Vin had returned with the weapons belonging to the four ill-fated privates, arriving just on the heels of Buck and the battered, bruised body of Ezra Standish. So, as it ended up, he got more weapons than he’d initially counted on- two extra Gammon grenades, a white phosphorus grenade, and another round for his M-1.

Would it be enough? He had no idea how many men marched on Four Corners; if they were lucky, maybe the men coming were really American or British paratroops, or maybe infantry that arrived early and got up the beach extra quick... Each thought threatened to take Chris into a fantasy world where they’d already beaten Germany, only Ike hadn’t realized it but now he did and this entire operation was pointless. The crackling of his walkie pulled him back to reality.
Vin, of course, with his assessment of the enemy.

"Undoo, undoo, doo-twa." Vin’s Texan accent stretched the Provençal French into near incomprehensibility, and if intercepted would sound like meaningless gibberish to the Germans, but Chris knew the prearranged code- twenty infantrymen, two tanks. He exhaled a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding; five men against twenty infantry. Five men hidden in decent fortifications but with mobility and the element of surprise, he tried to remind himself. Two seasoned paratroopers, a rookie communications kid, two resistance fighters.

He heard the crunch of Tiger treads working over the piles of rubble at the end of town, heard German voices shouting orders. The system of mirrors he’d set up in his ‘office’ gave him a slightly distorted view of the huge tank as it loomed over the small hill of debris, seeing the exposed underbelly of the machine and wishing a Mark IV mine was waiting right under those treads.

No Mark IV waited there, he knew, but there was one just past where he himself sat concealed, near a natural bottleneck in the town’s road, where the wider highway became slender to accommodate the traditionally narrow main streets of Norman villages. It had a Gammon grenade attached to it by a length of wire, as both were the only decent tank-damaging explosives they had. He held his breath once more, watching as the tank and a few infantrymen flanking the rear of it drew closer.

And closer.

With a deafening roar, the mine went off, enveloping the Tiger in flames. The tank heaved violently, the treads bucking off the ground and catching fire. Smoke began streaming from the seams in its armor and billowed out in gusts as the top hatch opened. The tank commander emerged screaming, uniform aflame, and reaching for his sidearm. The man’s boots hit the cobbled streets; he stumbled away, followed by another man. An instant later, the tank exploded.

Chris ducked behind his shield as a great chunk of shrapnel plowed through the wall of the building he hid in, landing with a crash on the floor and tumbling across it to crash into the piece of masonry, almost causing the tremendous rock to collapse on top of Chris, who cursed and pulled himself away from it before it fell on his legs.

Quickly, he picked up the rest of his stash and made for the stairs, seeking altitude. Before ascending to the roof, he set a trap he once remembered setting to catch a much-hated teacher by surprise- only this time, he had filled the bucket with rocks instead of water- he set it atop the door leading to the attic and, closing it carefully behind him, primed his rifle and prepared to fight head-on.

**********

Schwartzfeld didn’t even allow himself to breathe a sigh of relief at the absence of any enemy resistance- he had expected it, after all, but still knew enough to expect the unexpected. Konner rode next to him, silent, not offering much of anything. The ride passed in quiet, until they came up to the last half-mile before entering Four Corners. He could see the village had been relatively undisturbed- no smoke arose from it, no enemy activity around it, and the forward observers on the causeway found nothing except rabbits and a few cows.

He called the observers back, needing all the firepower with the main body of his men- twenty men and two tanks! His heart threatened to sink, until he remembered that often times history revolved on the small things and not the great. Fervently, Schwartzfeld hoped this would be one of those times. Quickly, he outlined the plan to the men, thinking bitterly that they deserved a better briefing before venturing into this, however trivial it might end up being.

"Kameranzt, you’ll lead the way inside. Squad One, follow up- cover each other. I want Schultz’s tank back to the rear; you’ll go through on my signal." Schwartzfeld desperately wished for ten more men so he could attempt an encirclement around the village, but with not knowing how many enemy soldiers lay in wait within, he had to keep his men with him. "Squad Two," he continued, "will wait just back of the town entrance, behind the cover of any wreckage. You’ll go in to provide backing support for Squad One. Understood?"

The twenty men on the ground and the men in the tanks indicated that they understood.
Schwartzfeld nodded and gave the signal to move out, and watched the small company turn about to head for the village. He waited behind in the truck with Konner, who watched silently. The earlier redness had faded, leaving his face deathly pale.

"This will work out," Schwartzfeld whispered to his friend.

"I hope so," Konner whispered back.

Silence returned as the two men watched the tanks move ahead. Schwartzfeld watched as the first tank plowed its way over the rubble, uneasily thinking about how it narrowed an already tight passage into the village. The men followed behind the tank, each column watching the houses for any movement; Squad Two took up positions to the left and right of the village’s main street, weapons at the ready, and settled in to wait.

They didn’t have to wait long for the explosion of Kamerantz’s tank.

From afar, Schwartzfeld saw the ball of orange-black fury envelop the tank and heard the rolling boom of gasoline combusting. He saw the hatch open, saw Kamerantz climb out, aflame, and run for shelter, run for any hope of escaping the agony coming over him. He saw the men scatter, saw Squad Two leap into position.

Leap into position to be slaughtered.

"Konner," Schwartzfeld whispered, "Take us in."

Konner didn’t protest, didn’t turn to offer his commanding officer a questioning look or to give his best friend sensible advice. He merely nodded, said "Yes, sir," and put the truck in gear.

**********

Buck hadn’t expected the good luck of having the first tank actually explode; the way his night had gone, he expected the mine to be a dud, the Germans to pick up on the trap, or... hell, he didn’t know. Something would happen to ensure that the ambush wouldn’t work. So far- a whole three minutes into the operation, he thought dryly, things had gone according to plan.

Completely unlike the entire goddamn drop in the first place. Buck wanted to curse someone, but the sound of shouting in the street distracted him.

Yes, everything was going to plan, until it started to go to pot, when the fireball that had been a German tank officer burst into the house Buck was hiding in.

"Shit!" shouted Buck involuntarily, pulling out his pistol and firing desperately at the officer. The first bullet went astray, punching through a window and ricocheting off the tank. The second found its target, and the officer dropped. That eliminated one of many, but it also meant Buck was flushed out of his hiding place; already, two soldiers had turned toward his building, shouting something Buck couldn’t understand.

He understood the guns well enough, though, and having the business end of an MG aimed at you was part of a universal language, anyway. For now, he had some surprise, being behind stone walls, but he could only hear and not see the soldiers as one crouched under the window and the other’s covering fire.

So when a German helmet suddenly appeared, accompanied by a rifle barrel and the sharp report of a single gunshot, Buck was only partly surprised when he felt a stinging in his left shoulder, just below the collarbone. He buried the shock long enough to return fire with his .45. His bullet proved more effective, he hoped, for he saw the soldier’s left eye disappear in a flood of red, and the helmet and gun both dropped from view.

Boy, am I tired, Buck thought distantly, not aware of the front door opening and only dimly registering the German soldier aiming his sidearm. As unconsciousness threatened to claim him, he thought he saw a blur of movement through the window and a short figure pausing in the doorway to take aim and fire at his assailant.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

J.D. couldn’t believe it when that man ran into Buck’s hideout, and almost couldn’t believe it when he decided instantly that he had to do something when he saw two German soldiers make for the door just a few moments after a single bullet came through the window. Before he could think too much about it, J.D. got his .45 ready, took a deep breath, and charged out of his building at a dead run right past the flaming tank, past more surprised Germans, through the hail of bullets that peppered the ground around him, and finally bursting through the door of Buck’s fortification.

He took aim at the man standing over Buck and pulled the trigger.

A piteously brief shot rang out, and the man crumpled to the floor.

Somehow, J.D. thought that maybe a trumpet fanfare would accompany the death of the first man he’d ever killed. But like the targets on the practice range, the man fell without ceremony, the weapon slipping from his grasp to clatter on the floor next to him.

Oh, God.

He stared at the dead body, wondering if maybe it would vanish into dust, or maybe burst into flame. It didn’t, and he thought that Germans should die differently from Americans, shouldn’t die like the two men he’d pulled the SCRs from. J.D. still didn’t know how he managed that- actually touching a dead body- but he had.

Another one lay right in front of him, not much different than the two men he’d happened upon last night. The uniform, the equipment... they weren’t the same.

But he was still a man, and dead, and this time, J.D. had killed him.

"Kid..." A weak, raspy voice broke through the flood of exaltation, guilt, and confusion that threatened to overwhelm J.D. He jerked, as if coming awake, and saw Buck curled up on the floor, a bloody hand pressed to his collarbone.

"Kid," repeated Buck, "get outta the goddamned door before you get yourself shot. Hell, git t’ hell outta here."

"No, sir," said J.D. as respectfully as he could manage, moving to crouch down next to Buck. "I mean, I’ll get outta the door, sir, but I’m not going anywhere." Quickly, he pulled a bandage from his leg pouch. He managed to pry Buck’s hand away from the wound, watching with detached horror as fresh blood oozed out of the hole before he collected himself enough to slap the bandage over it.

"I toldja to git," Buck said through gritted teeth.

"I’m stayin’, sir," J.D. said firmly.

Buck opened his mouth to argue, but J.D. could see he didn’t have the energy for it. Instead, the sergeant’s head lolled against his good shoulder, and he muttered, "Damn fool kid, breakin’ cover like that. Askin’ t’ git yourself kilt..."

"Yessir," J.D. agreed. "Just lookin’ to get myself killed, an’ maybe keep you alive..."

**********

Josiah swore to himself as he saw J.D. dart across the street, but was not in a position to do anything about it except try to draw their fire away from the boy. He had his specialty in mines and demolitions, not guns, but he figured he was still a passable aim with a rifle and also the Molotov he held in his hands, the fuse lit.

From his hiding place behind the baking stone, he could see a German soldier prowling past his window, moving slowly and on guard for any attacks coming from inside the building. Moving with unexpected speed- a speed that surprised even him- Josiah burst from cover, hurling the bomb through the glass and dropping back to the ground in almost the same motion.

He didn’t see the man’s upper body explode, but he heard the wetness he’d always compared to the sound one gets when placing a firecracker inside a watermelon, and he felt the warm splash of blood against his back. Josiah tried not to think about the sight he’d see when he stood up, but knew he’d have to check his front before turning to ascend to the second story. The blast would attract attention; hopefully, it would distract the enemy from J.D., who had gotten to cover.

Josiah picked up the rucksack that held his stash of weapons and made for the upper levels, pausing only to pull out a fragmentation grenade. Scaling the steps, he burst into a small front bedroom and hunkered by the wall, just underneath a window. Chancing a glance through it, he saw a pair of soldiers breaking into the building atop which Vin hid.

Cursing inwardly, Josiah considered his options. The building didn’t have a trapdoor leading to the roof- Vin had scaled, monkeylike, up the wall of the building- but the soldiers may have figured that the sniper fire that had picked off a couple of their comrades came from that place, and would either set charges to take down the roof or fire machine-gun bursts through it.

That was, if Vin had even fired yet. Chris had warned the young man to hold fire until it became apparent that one of them was in direct danger. Vin hadn’t been happy, but he knew that a sniper taking out someone trying to blow out the front of a building was a useful sniper, as opposed to one that broke cover indiscriminately. He hadn’t shot either of the men in front of the building Buck hid in, but Josiah couldn’t see much other than the immediate street in front of him.
Impulsively, Josiah seized his walkie-talkie and flipped to the channel Vin was on.

"Vin- Vin, you copy?" he whispered loudly.

Silence broken only by the crackle of static followed, until a hoarse response broke through.

"Yeah. What?"

"Two of ‘em are downstairs in your building."

"Got it covered, pard."

The transmission broke, leaving Josiah in a welter of anxiety. He suppressed it as best he could, and settled down in the window with his rifle, hating long-distance fighting but knowing there was little he could do about it.

**********

Vin scowled at the lifeless radio in his hands, wanting to throw it somewhere out of sheer frustration and anger.

He wanted to be down there, not squirreled away atop a building. The cold, clinical Vin Tanner told him he would do the most good up here, even though he had picked off only two of them.

Two bodies each with one bullet hole through their necks, the distance between him and them being too great to allow the shells to penetrate helmets. One of them had tried to throw a potato-masher through the window of the building where they had Nathan and Ezra hidden, and another died while about to break into Chris’s place.

Only two more to add to the tally of lives he’d taken, and he reflected for a bitter moment that too many of his forays had gone against supply and communications lines instead of against those who had brought this hell down upon the heads of millions of innocent people. Rage twisted in his gut at the thought, and he didn’t want to throttle it back.

Instead, he wanted to destroy them, to make them suffer as he had. Slowly, excruciatingly, with a tattoo instead of a name and maggots on their plates instead of bread, however filled with sawdust it might have been. Fury built at each remembered instance of cruelty, and Vin found himself taking sharp, short breaths as if in actual pain.

Calm down, Tanner.... keep it together...

Forcing himself to steady his breathing also helped him find the calm he’d always sought after. Part of him still howled, wanting to inflict bloody death on all of them beneath him, but the other half recognized he had a possible problem brewing beneath his roof. He pressed up tight against the decorative frontispiece, remembering that the massive stoneworks which supported the front of the building and part of the roof had not been replaced by wood. They’d have a harder time firing on him, if they had to pick and guess where on the roof he might be- then try to sight on a blind angle and hope he’d be there. At any rate, their bullets wouldn’t penetrate the stone, even if they had found a decent angle to get him at.

Or, hell, they might have just decided to sweep the house and, with no sign of any human presence in it, just up and leave. If they made it to the attic, they wouldn’t find any doors or stairways leading to the roof- just a window that Vin had Chris close and lock once Vin himself had gotten onto the roof. They’d turn and leave, thinking that the sniper fire could have come from one of the houses on either side of his.

A dull roar beneath him, followed by the surging and buckling of the roof under his body dispelled all such thoughts. The roof dropped away from his feet, and Vin felt weightless, dangling in space for the breath of an instant before his weight returned to him all too suddenly, and he fell.

He clawed for purchase and didn’t find anything to hold onto other than the air, and saw the gutted ruins of the second floor as he fell past it. The world collapsed around him, and even as terror and dust threatened to choke him, Vin tried to cry out. No sound escaped his lips, but a violent gasp broke from him as he landed on the rubble, bouncing off it and rolling over reflexively. His rifle had disappeared into the chaos, its stock torn from his hand in the descent.
As he rolled slowly across the pile of wreckage, oblivious to the stabbing pain of broken glass and masonry embedding themselves in his skin and the screaming of his own body, Vin looked up and saw the shattered ruins of part of the great central beam that supported the roof.

He saw how it had partially broken off, distantly thought that the demolitions they had set would have first blown the beam upwards; as the loose segment of the beam didn’t break and fly into the distance, it now dangled from the rest of the structure, swaying uncertainly. Vin decided that the section had to weigh a good seven or eight hundred pounds, and he wondered what on earth could be keeping it attached.

The hand of God, maybe?

Distantly, he thought that it wouldn’t take much time for it to snap, and when it did, it would fall right on top of him, unless he moved.

Unless he moved. He tried to resume his roll, and couldn’t.

Move, dammit he willed himself.

Nothing doing, and above him, the beam creaked, wood splintered as if it were bone and the broken section dangled, shattered, like a half-amputated leg.

Author’s Note: The ** ** indicate dialogue in German.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

J.D.’s panicked voice filtered through the static of the walkie-talkie. "Buck’s hurt!" the young man whispered as loudly as he could. "You gotta get here fast! Yeah, yeah, Buck, I’m goin’ in a minute. You copy, Nathan?"

"I do, J.D. Keep cool- I’ll be there in a minute." Nathan tried to come across as soothing, but knew that his voice sounded just about as anxious as the boy’s did.

Nathan cut the connection and began to get ready, his heart thundering in his chest. The numerous field drills back in the states and in England couldn’t possibly have prepared him for this, he decided after numerous failed attempts to calm himself down. Scrambling around hill and dale stitching simulated sutures in simulated combat wounds... No- it was no preparation at all.
Nathan pulled on his Red Cross armband and rechecked his supplies, dispensing advice and caution to Marie as he did so. "Okay, I gotta go. Keep that poultice on him. Remember- you’re both civilians, so tell that to anyone who’s not one of us. You remember how to give him morphine if he needs it? I gave him a bit less than a sixteenth of a grain, so he should be okay, but you remember how, just in case?"

Marie gave him a gentle, tolerant smile and handed him his small carryall, saying, "Yes, Nathan. I remember well enough. Now go." She made gentle shooing motions in the direction of the door. Nathan smiled and did as she instructed, stepping cautiously out into the street.

An eruption of dirt and flame rocked an alleyway across from him, and Nathan ducked as shrapnel scattered across the street, holding an arm up to shield his eyes. He swallowed his revulsion along with bile when he realized that some unfortunate soldier had struck a mine. Josiah had given him a briefing on the defenses they’d set up, mostly so that Nathan would know which places to avoid if he found his services needed.

He made his way down the street to where Buck would be, mentally toting up the bodies he saw lying in the street. The one blown up by the mine, five in the street, another pair of legs without a body attached to them- that would be seven.

That’s all? he wondered.

As if in answer to his question, two German soldiers came running out of the building right in front of him. Nathan’s heart almost stopped, but the soldiers merely stared at him for a moment before shouting something Nathan couldn’t understand and gesturing. The hand motions seemed to indicate- run?

"Run!" bellowed one of the soldiers unexpectedly.

Nathan lurched into motion; the soldiers ran across the street and fell under gunfire that issued from Chris’s window, but Nathan continued to run straight down it. He had gotten a good fifty feet or so from the building when the concussion from a terrific explosion almost knocked him over. As it was, the noise blocked out all other sound, and the reflexive reach to protect his ears knocked Nathan off balance. He tumbled to the ground, ribs cracking against cobblestones. A startled gasp broke from his lips, followed by a short, sharp curse.

"Goddammit!" he hissed, and then absurdly thought of what his father would say.

"Don’t want you comin’ home from the Army cursin’, son," his father had said.

"Sorry, Daddy," whispered Nathan into a sudden silence. He looked up, blinking away dust and grit to see the ruined frontispiece of the building the Germans had come out of. The huge timber that supported the gently-sloped roof had snapped, Nathan noticed, and one end of it dangled off, the wood creaking and splintering with strain. After a second, he saw that a still figure lay on the heap of rubble, almost invisible to his eye.

Vin.

Reflex took over. Nathan surged forward, covering the ground between him and Vin in an instant. He skidded to a halt by the prone body of the man, pausing only to seize an unresisting hand and drag Tanner off the slag heap and to keep pulling, backing up and almost falling over his own feet.

The wood finally snapped with a resounding crack and tumbled into the wreckage below, right where Vin had lain helpless.

Nathan sat down heavily, breath coming shallow and swift through a throat choked with adrenaline. He shook his head to clear it and forced himself to the task at hand. A minute’s fumbling in his carryall and leg pouches produced a few bandages, forceps, and a packet of morphine.

"Hope you’re not plannin’ on givin’ me any of that," said a hoarse voice. A half-opened blue eye stared suspiciously at the morphine packet Nathan had poised above the sharpshooter’s arm.

"Vin? You okay?"

"Never better," Tanner rasped. A cough and grimace, followed by an involuntary hand drifting to protect his ribs belied the assertion. Nathan snorted and pulled out some medical tape.

"I’ll believe it when I see it," he informed Vin, who rolled his eyes.

"You mind waitin’ on tapin’ those up? Fight ain’t over yet."

"Hell yes, I mind!" Nathan half-exclaimed indignantly. "Soon’s I finish you, I’m going after Sergeant Wilmington."

"Take care of him first," Vin said firmly, his tone suffering no argument from the likes of Medic Nathan Jackson. "He’s one a’ your own, I’m just someone in this for free ‘cause he ain’t got nothin’ better t’ do. Go see to him- these ribs ain’t goin’ anywhere."

Nathan nodded his agreement, knowing Vin was right. He stood and pocketed his gear, then ran back across the street to see to Buck. Once across the seemingly vast expanse, he spun to look for Tanner, and wasn’t surprised when he saw the sharpshooter heading off down the street.

**********

"Is he gone?"

Marie jumped at the unexpected question- unexpected because the man on the bed should still be asleep, and she told him so.

"Nonsense, Madame... I am perfectly well. Now, is Private Jackson gone?"

"Yes, Monsieur Standish- he went to tend to Sergeant Wilmington."

Ezra knew this, of course, but knew he had to ask in order to allay any suspicion of hers that he had not truly been asleep. Life as an OSS agent taught one many things, especially the importance of feigning sleep during Farben or Krupp board meetings, when talk turned toward war production and Ezra knew he couldn’t betray too much interest- or revulsion- in the latest figures for slave labor production in munitions factories.

"Most excellent, Madame. While I believe it is impolite to leave a lady in such a cavalier manner, I’m afraid I must depart post-haste." Suiting actions to words, Ezra forced himself to sit upright and swung his leg over the bed. His head swam in protest, and he closed his eyes until the thundering in his temples ceased.

"No," Marie said firmly, seeing her patient’s distress even though the patient himself refused to acknowledge it. "You’re staying right here. Nathan will be back soon, and I will not see you hurt before then."

"Rest assured, Madame, getting hurt is not on my list of intentions," Ezra breathed out through gritted teeth. "I have already done that once today, and I have no desire to repeat it. Now, if you will, there is... there is a gun in an ankle holster on my right leg. My head, I fear will not take kindly to my bending down- nor will my ribs, for that matter."

"Monsieur Standish..." Marie crossed her arms over her chest, her gray-green eyes hardening for a fight, but Ezra merely looked at her, face empty of everything except determination. She saw this and sighed in capitulation, striding over to him and bending to pull his pants leg up. Gingerly, she pulled the weapon out of its holster and handed it to Ezra as if handling a dangerous animal.

"Thank you, ma cherie," Ezra murmured gratefully. "Now, perhaps a shirt? Heaven only knows what Private Jackson did with mine in his haste." He spied the ruins of the shirt heaped on a nearby chair and sighed. "Truly barbaric... war does indeed bring out the worst in people. That was a perfectly good shirt."

"Be glad the shirt got the worst of the bargain," Marie told him archly, handing him a spare shirt from a chest of drawers in the other room. After a few abortive attempts at raising his arms, Ezra admitted defeat and let her slip the shirt over his head.

"Indeed, Madame, the brightness of your generosity outshines that of the sun," he said, sketching a slight bow and wincing as his muscles protested the unwelcome movement.

Marie snorted. "Flattery won’t get you anywhere, Monsieur Standish," she informed him, lips quirking in a slight smile.

"Well, perhaps it will get me into a German camp, even though it has apparently failed in its assault upon the impregnable fortress of your good graces," Ezra returned. He sobered, though, taking her hand in his. "In all seriousness, Madame Travis, I must thank you- both for assisting Private Jackson in saving my life, and in assisting me at the present moment. I am deeply in your debt."

She eyed him consideringly and finally said, "Well, call me Marie, and we’ll call it even."

"Quid pro quo? Oh, I do so love a woman who drives a hard bargain." Ezra grinned at her and made his way outside.

He stuffed the revolver into the waistline of his pants, and pulled the hem of his shirt down to conceal the weapon. A quick glance to the left and right revealed a lone soldier keeping close to the corners of a small house; upon seeing Ezra, the man straightened and aimed a rifle dead at Standish’s chest.

Ezra raised his hands as high as he could to indicate he was unarmed; fortunately, the shirt was an old-fashioned one, almost long enough to be a nightshirt, and the gun remained hidden. Slowly, Ezra stepped out of the shadows and into the light, and as he did so, the German advanced towards him.

"**Identify yourself**," rasped the soldier.

"**Please... my name is Heinrich Eichoff, and I am unarmed.**" Ezra said as steadily as he could, tongue working its way around the suddenly unfamiliar Bavarian accent. He studied the soldier closely, watching for any reaction- or recognition.

"**Wehrmacht? SS?**" demanded the soldier suspiciously. The rifle didn’t waver once, and it was all Ezra could do to not eye it nervously.

"**Yes. A lieutenant in the Waffen SS.**" Ezra said. He almost breathed a sigh of relief, but caught himself just in time. Reluctant acceptance passed across the soldier’s face and he gestured for Ezra to come after him.

"**Follow me,**" he said. Ezra did so, trotting down the street behind the man. As they came upon the slag heaps that partially-blocked the road, Ezra could see another tank and about ten more men waiting just behind them. He swallowed some bile along with dread, and prayed that Chris and the others knew about the reserve force that waited undercover, and that they had the manpower- and firepower- to deal with them once Ezra got them to where they needed to be. His mind raced, covering every one of a thousand possible eventualities.

He could be leading the Germans straight to his incapacitated friends; once there, they would not hesitate to either kill or take prisoner the very people Ezra was trying to help. Or Lieutenant Larabee would think Ezra had betrayed them, that Ezra really was in league with the Germans after all- a double agent with a secret agenda and an exceptional talent for disregarding loyalty to one’s country. Or maybe... just maybe Lieutenant Larabee or one of the others would be alert enough to recognize the trap Ezra was setting up, and to act accordingly, even if it meant getting Standish himself killed.

The thought of relinquishing his life to protect a tiny village such as Four Corners made Ezra squirm for a second, but then the vision of Private Waltham and his three comrades swam before his eyes, a mute reminder that they had done more for their country than Ezra Standish ever would. That they were more trustworthy, more noble, more sacrificing than Ezra Standish, who couldn’t see past his own pathetic need for self-preservation... it galled. Anger clawed at him, and Ezra forced himself to channel that anger into the greatest deception he’d ever have to perpetrate.

At length, the soldier stopped in front of a truck parked a short distance from where the rest of the company gathered. The man gestured to Ezra and snapped a quick salute to a stocky man with thinning brown hair. The insignia of a colonel glittered on the collar of a dirty, rumpled uniform. Despite the colonel’s disheveled appearance, an unmistakable and powerful aura of command radiated from him, almost rendering invisible the skinny blond man in the driver’s seat next to him.

"He says his name’s Lieutenant Heinrich Eichoff, in the Waffen SS, sir," the soldier informed the man. "What should I do with him?"

"The Waffen SS?" Disdain flickered through the colonel’s eyes. "Well, Private Eisenberg, leave him here. I’ll talk to him... I must admit I’m interested in learning what a member of the Waffen SS is doing here. The last I heard, they were waiting back to the northeast." A subtle threat filled the words, though they were calmly spoken, and Ezra felt the green eyes of the man bore into his soul.

Just like Lieutenant Larabee... he thought wryly.

"I was sent down here on orders from my superiors," Ezra said shortly, investing his words with as much scorn and mystery as he could; apparently, the colonel had no use for the fanatical Waffen SS, and very probably felt the same way about the rest of the SS, the SD, and the Hitler Youth. Many among the high brass shared those thoughts- such groups made their jobs more difficult, with their indiscriminate slaughter of war prisoners and unhesitating destruction of resources that the Wehrmacht- the "proper" army- could have turned to its own benefit. The SS returned the sentiments in kind, believing the Army was run by cowardly old men who would rather lie down for the Americans than defend the Fatherland, but no one questioned their loyalty to the Reich and to Hitler. Ezra knew he’d have to play on that.

"And what would those orders be?" the colonel inquired coolly.

"The destruction of a resistance outpost in Ste. Marie-du-Mont," Ezra replied, thinking fast and remembering that the small town lay somewhere near Four Corners.

"You are a bit past your destination, Lieutenant," observed the colonel, "and a bit underdressed."

"Our convoy was attacked in an RAF bombing run three days ago," Ezra said, allowing a hint of fury to creep into his words. "The British swine destroyed my equipment and killed my men, and the cowards of the Resistance harried me to this place- I had to remove my uniform to escape them. I took shelter in an abandoned storeroom and was plotting my revenge when the Americans came."

"I sent men to Four Corners three days ago," the colonel said. "Why did you not reveal yourself to them?"

Ezra wanted to kick himself- he’d forgotten about the cut wires and the two Germans Vin and Josiah had killed. Time to bring those men into the story. "Unfortunately, they’ve met their ends at the hands of Vin Tanner, notorious Resistance fighter and war criminal- the one Das Reich has been following. There are six Allies in the village right now, and they’ve set defenses up and down the streets. Mines, mostly, as your tank commander found out..." He trailed off, giving the colonel a significant look. "But I had the chance to see where they planted their demolitions, and also, where they’re hiding."

"Why should I trust a petty thug?" demanded the colonel. The tone was imperious, but Ezra sensed something in the man- a voice, he supposed, that urged the colonel to take this Waffen lieutenant at his word and go in to finish the Americans off. Ezra decided to capitalize on that.

"Because without me, your men will be cut to pieces without those bastards ever firing a shot." Ezra smiled benignly and as condescendingly as he dared. "I can take you straight to them."

The colonel leaned back and studied Ezra, face impassive.

"You look very much like an American agent I once saw," he said at last.

Ezra’s heart stopped, and it was all he could do to keep his face empty of everything except confidence and hauteur. "If you’re talking about Ezra Standish, he was killed trying to escape from Austria. Il Duce’s agents got him. I get that a lot from my associates, and it’s somewhat irritating." He silently thanked the two absent German soldiers who’d found him on the roadside and seen fit to tell him that Ezra Standish had died in Austria.

The colonel stared at him for one more long, considering moment and finally said, "Well, Lieutenant Eichoff, I am Colonel Schwartzfeld. If you would please act as scout, take my men in?"

Nodding, Ezra turned and gestured for the men to follow him. As the ten soldiers fell into step behind him, he heard them priming their weapons, and his heart froze a little at the sound.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

From his second-story window, Chris watched Ezra leading the ten men and the tank down the street, and wondered what in the hell the crazy bastard was doing. Ezra limped noticeably, right hand pressed to his side as he hunched over obviously aching ribs. A thousand thoughts flitted through Chris’s mind, foremost among them the wondering if Ezra was really trustworthy. If maybe he really was a German, and he wasn’t Ezra Standish.

Ezra said something to one of the men, but Chris couldn’t make it out. The agent gestured to a few buildings, and Chris’s breath caught as he realized Ezra was gesturing toward the one that J.D. hid in. A soldier made to go to the door, but Ezra forestalled him and kept on pointing methodically to their various hiding places.

Chris pulled out his- Private Travers’, he amended- tommy gun and checked the clip, hating to waste precious ammunition on a blind gamble. As he checked the chamber of the weapon and got into position just beneath the windowsill, it hit him.

Ezra wasn’t setting them up- he was setting the Germans up. Standish held the group together, explaining something to them, and therefore, giving Chris and the others enough time to set themselves up for one great assault.

And it meant that Standish himself would very likely die.

Chris got on the walkie-talkie, flicking it to their shared frequency and demanding everyone’s attention.

"Listen up, guys. Ezra’s down there distracting them. I want everyone in position- get guns, grenades, everything ready. Josiah, I want you working on that tank. Vin, you in a high spot?"

"Yup." Harsh breathing hissed in the radio’s microphone.

"Good. J.D.?"

"Yessir?"

"Keep Buck safe."

"I will, sir."

"Let’s do it, boys." Chris cut the transmission, broke out the window with his elbow, and began to fire into the mass of soldiers in the street beneath him.

**********

When the rapid-fire burst of the tommy gun began, Josiah primed one of his Holy Vengeance Specials, as he called them- a modified Gammon grenade with a regular fragmentation grenade attached to it by some trigger wire. It combined the punch of a true Gammon with some extra damage to take out escorting troops or any man foolish enough to ride on the back of a tank. Pulling the firing pin out of the fragmentation grenade, he heaved it through the window, and watched as the small package fell to earth in a perfect arc, its progress interrupted only by the tank it encountered on the way down.

The explosion, when it came, was satisfying. The entire tank couldn’t be destroyed, Josiah thought with some sadness, but it blew off a decent chunk of armor plating on the right side of the Tiger, along with the arm of a soldier standing next to it. Shrapnel scattered, as did the rest of the soldiers. Not stopping to reflect on his success, he pulled out a couple more Specials and heaved them at the treads of the tank as it stubbornly moved forward. Even as the grenades detonated against the treads and froze the tank in its tracks, the gun turret began to rotate, and Josiah’s breath froze.

A barrage of Gammons and thermite grenades rocked the gun turret, and it stopped rotating a second before the armored casing collapsed in a flare of orange. Josiah sighed audibly, feeling some terrible tension in him relax; he sagged against the wall, trying to think clearly.

Then Josiah heard footsteps on the floor beneath him and pulled his revolver out, aiming it directly at the door through which his as-yet-unseen adversary would come. The footsteps thundered swiftly up the stairs; Josiah could hear equipment clanging off the narrow walls of the stairwell. His breath shortened, flattening out into a shallow rasp, as if even the quiet hiss of his breathing could be heard through the thick wooden walls.

The door banged open, and the German staggered into the room, automatically sweeping the small space with his rifle. As his aim fell on Josiah, the young man’s eyes widened as they stared down the barrel of the revolver that Josiah had pointed squarely at his forehead.

"Drop it," Josiah ordered coolly, gesturing with his head for the soldier to unhand his rifle. The young man did so, weapon slipping from his grasp. Josiah nodded approvingly and advanced on the German, quickly kicking the rifle away to the far side of the room and divesting the soldier of his sidearm and knife. Gesturing with the revolver and his free hand, Josiah urged the young man over to a corner and directed him to sit. As if his knees had disappeared or could no longer support his weight, the captive slid down the wall to land in a boneless, hopeless heap on the wooden floor.

**********

Nathan had made it to Buck’s shelter after ‘tending’ to Vin, and winced as he saw the sergeant lying on the floor, his left side drenched in blood and his face pale. Swiftly, Nathan dropped his med kit by the inert man’s body and fell into a crouch, pulling out the packet of morphine he’d thought to use on Vin, along with fresh bandages, sulfa, and scissors.

He peeled back the pressure bandage as carefully as he could, automatically thinking that he wished J.D. would have put sulfa powder on the wound before bandaging it, but knowing the kid wouldn’t have had time to do that in a firefight. As he dusted sulfa over the bullet hole, ignoring

Buck’s weak protests, Nathan felt underneath Wilmington’s body, and almost exhaled with relief when he found an exit wound. Rolling the sergeant over on his side, Nathan applied sulfa to the exit wound as well.

"You doin’ okay, Sergeant?"

"Could... be doin’... better," whispered the big man. "An’ call me Buck, if’n y’ don’t mind."

"Okay, Buck," Nathan said softly. "I’m gonna give you some morphine for the pain, okay? Just enough to take the edge off."

"Sure thing, Doc."

"Ain’t no doc," Nathan said as he punctured the needle on the morphine packet and gave the injection in Buck’s upper arm. "Just a guy who got a little lucky and got to do something he liked."

"You’re talkin’ ‘bout it like it’s over," Buck said. A ghost of a laugh creaked through his lips, and converted to a muffled gasp of pain as Nathan pressed a bandage to the exit wound and taped it securely.

"Well, soon’s I find the rest of HQ, I guess they’ll probably ship me back to England, stick me back with my original division." Nathan’s gloomy thoughts broke off as a shadow covered him.
His head jerked up and his hand froze, hovering above Buck’s chest, scissors in hand and poised to cut a length of bandage.

A German soldier stood in the doorway, rifle aimed straight at Buck. He said something Nathan couldn’t understand, but it sounded heartfelt and venomous enough. Before Nathan even registered the movement, he flipped the scissors over so the blades dug into his palm, the metal stuck together by drying blood, and in the same motion, threw them.

The scissors whipped through the air, a brief flash of silver that winked and vanished as they buried themselves in the soldier’s neck. A few static seconds passed as the man wavered on his legs and crashed to the floor. Blood squirted out from the severed jugular, dripping down the man’s uniform and pooling on the wooden flooring around him. Blue eyes regarded Nathan almost calmly, death already beginning to glaze over any sign of life. The man convulsed, hands reaching up feebly for the scissors and falling away in defeat.

Nathan spun as he heard a clamor on the stairway, but Buck merely said, "J.D... damn the kid..." and closed his eyes again.

**********

J.D. saw the gun turret rotate to where Josiah hid, and his heart leapt up in his mouth as he thought about what that huge, God-awful gun could do to an old stone building at point-blank range.

"88-millimeter cannon," said a briefing officer from the recesses of J.D.’s mind. "Not the 75 millimeters our Shermans have- yeah, you’re thinking what the hell’s the big deal? It’s fucking thirteen millimeters, you say.

"It’s a big fucking deal, boys," he continued, answering his own question.

"The Krauts, they’ve got 88-millimeter cannon; they used to use those in just artillery emplacements, you know. Defilade coastlines and forests with them, send them against big ships and front line foxholes alike- size doesn’t make a difference to an 88. Nowadays," the briefing officer said serenely, "they move, and you’d best have your grenades, antitank mines, and Lady Luck with you."

Well, J.D. didn’t have any antitank mines and he didn’t know about Lady Luck, but he did have a whole bunch of grenades and handmade bombs with him. Buck had kept some upstairs, and all J.D. had to bring were the matches. He pulled the tiny packet out of his carryall, thinking it weird that the Army had these huge guns, tremendous ships, the very latest in technological advances at its beck and call... and they still issued matches in tiny paper booklets wrapped in a condom to keep them dry.

Fear and adrenaline made his fingers clumsy, and it took a few abortive attempts to get a fuse lit. Finally, the fuse caught fire and J.D. flung the bomb out the window, following it up with a Gammon and then a fragmentation grenade, praying that if he couldn’t knock that turret out, he could at least distract it long enough so that Josiah could get clear of the building before the harassed tank commander could fire at him.

The first Gammon hit true, as did a thermite grenade and many of the crude pipe bombs. One Gammon dented the barrel of the cannon, and shrapnel made short work of the navigator’s scope and then the machine gun. The tank stalled in the middle of the road, and the hatch atop the metal monstrosity popped open to disgorge the tank commander and his men. Almost immediately, they fell dead, bodies sliding down the side of the Tiger, killed even as they thought they’d reached freedom.

J.D. suppressed a whoop of victory. He’d killed a tank! A Tiger tank! He settled for jabbing a fist in the air and grinning wildly. He thought of Buck, and wondered if the sergeant knew it was Private J.D. Dunne’s grenades responsible for that tank giving up the ghost. Acting on impulse, he thundered downstairs.

And saw the lifeless body of a German soldier lying on the floor, surrounded by a small ocean of blood that trickled from a wound in his throat. A pair of medical scissors protruded from his neck, which had only served to partially stop geyser before the man’s heart gave out. J.D. swallowed and turned shamefacedly to Buck and Nathan; the medic stared at him blankly, as if about to fling his bandages at J.D., those being the only things the medic had in his hands that could serve as a weapon.

"Is... is he okay, Nathan?" J.D. asked after a moment.

"Didn’t get shot in the ears, kid," Buck groused. "Get your ass a gun and watch out for any more guests."

"Yessir," J.D. said obediently, grinning. From his recumbent position on the floor, Buck glared until J.D. amended his mistake with a grudging, "Buck.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Vin saw Ezra standing down below, speaking to the Germans about something- what he said, though, Vin couldn’t make out. He searched through possibilities, praying that their OSS agent wasn’t turning traitor- the very thought of it engulfed his mind, tying a sick knot of fear in his stomach. The explosions that engulfed the lone tank, though, jerked him back to reality, and the sight of the top hatch popping open drove away all thoughts except those of his gun and the streets and the men below him. Vin calmly began off each German solider as they scrambled from the disabled tank, finding it difficult to keep a tight rein on his exaltation.

He didn’t know how Ezra’d done it, but by God, the damn agent did it!

The first out had just gotten the hatch of the tank open before a bullet took him through the arm. Vin had swapped weapons with Lieutenant Larabee- Chris, Vin supposed, after a moment spent considering the possibility that the man could be a friend- and the M-1 packed a much more powerful punch than his old Winchester; the bullet tore through the man’s left arm and probably ended up lodged somewhere in his heart or lungs. Either way, it didn’t matter much.

One.

Vin felt joy rippling through his soul as each body around the tank fell lifeless, but forced himself to keep his sights on the tank’s unlucky occupants. Number Two came up, and Vin shot him right as the man got to the hatch and the possibility of freedom. That soldier, trapped behind the first man to die, had been desperate to escape, and pushed his friend’s body out of the way; it slid down the side of the tank to join the chaos on the street as the second man clambered out.

Two.

Climbing up to his new position had been a chore; his ribs had screamed in protest as muscles pulled across them and his head had clanged with the beginnings of a concussion headache. Part of him longed for pain relief- Nathan was sure to have something that would do the trick- but he firmly suppressed that mutinous voice. He had work to do, deaths to avenge, and maybe some
peace of his own to fine.

Maybe, if he got lucky enough.

A bullet, a fluke shot, got through the screening of Norman stonework, the shrill breeze of it whistling past his ear. Vin ignored it, concentrated on the men desperately climbing out of the burning tank.

Three.

The final one, the tank commander, appeared in the hatch just after the body of one of his subordinates slid untidily down the side. Vin slid his finger along the curved length of the trigger, the movement a delicate caressing of hot metal, and sighted down the barrel. The solider, oblivious to the death that lurked in the roofs above him, struggled to get out of the tank, the cloth of his uniform a trembling blot set squarely in the rifle’s sights.

**********

Ezra wondered distantly if the men around him could hear the hammering of his heart; surely by now the treacherous organ had risen well up his throat, and should be just as audible as Ezra’s own voice.

"You’ll find mines and booby traps in each alley marked by red cloths tied to stakes," Ezra explained, fighting to keep his voice calm and his face devoid of everything except clinical coldness as he pointed out Private Dunne’s hiding place. "I believe one of them may be hiding in there, although he proved exceptionally mobile during your last incurs- no! I hardly believe it would be a good idea, Private- Private Schliemann?" Ezra nailed a wayward young man with a commanding glare; the soldier froze in place. "Yes, Private Schliemann, he murmured. "Stay put for one more moment."

"Aye, sir," mumbled Private Schliemann, his fingers tightening around the stock of his rifle.

One more moment, Ezra thought to himself, sending out a silent prayer that Lieutenant Larabee would know what he was doing.

One more moment, he thought again, and pondered the amount of time that constituted a ‘moment.’ That amount, it seemed, had become flexible, had stretched out to encompass the eternity between Ezra’s thundering heartbeats.

When it happened, it happened with all the speed of an incendiary bomb falling on dry wood, possibly even faster.

The second the staccato report of Lieutenant Larabee’s submachine gun began, Ezra forced himself to twist left and hit the ground despite his broken arm. A grunt of pain tore from his lips, and for a second, pain was all Ezra knew. He forced his mind past the agony, past the horrible thought of wreaking further havoc on already-screaming nerves, muscles, and bones, and focused on the gun in the waistband of his pants.

As if in a dream, Ezra drew the weapon out, his eyes rapidly searching for targets.

Well, he supposed, the man in front of him with the rifle- to be precise, the man in front of him with the rifle aimed directly at his chest- would count.

He thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger almost before his mind could register the movement.

The soldier collapsed, surprise painted forever across his face, a shock that mirrored the expression on Standish’s own face as he watched the man fall to the ground before him. Ezra couldn’t move, frozen as much from pain as fear, could only watch as the dust settled slowly around the soldier’s body.

Ezra took in the young face, the freckles that made a ridiculously innocent dusting across the bridge of the nose and the cheeks, the dull glazing that had already started across bright blue eyes, and the wisps of blond hair peeking demurely from below the rim of the helmet. Blood spread from underneath the young man’s body, pooling around the lines of the rifle which the young man still held tightly in his hands.

"I’m sorry, Private Schliemann," he told the young man softly, who stared back at him with vacant eyes.

The sounds of battle raged on around them, but Ezra didn’t hear them, any more than the sudden silence registered, until gradually the intermittent cries of pain and sporadic gunfire filtered through to his consciousness.

**********

Disbelief, fear, and self-loathing combined to freeze Schwartzfeld in place.

He remained impervious to the pleading of Konrad next to him, the shouts of those of his men who remained alive, the smoking inferno that had his second tank had become, the men who crawled out of it only to be shot. Schwartzfeld didn’t see the man who’d posed as a Waffen lieutenant, didn’t see the body of the young man who died by that man’s hand, didn’t see the bullet that pierced Konner’s forehead.

Schwartzfeld saw instead his wife and his son dying in Munich, in a bombing raid he had avoided by riding to the Ukraine to collect his troops for the journey back to the Western Front. He saw the decisions he’d made that had forced him down to guard a pissant little backwater, the contempt he’d nursed for his superiors’ lack of action, the tangled web woven by Hitler to confound his generals and marshals, the webs those generals wove in turn to entangle those who lived on the lines, whose lives depended on so much on things which those webs could not- or would not- deliver.

Things like reinforcements. With each second, the dark reality that no reinforcements would make their way up over the bridge at the Douve became more stark, more forbidding, and more real.

Colonel Johann Schwartzfeld turned to Konrad.

Turned to see staring, empty eyes, open still as if pleading. Konner’s mouth had opened, perhaps to voice his final request, a request that Schwartzfeld didn’t hear because he’d heard the screams of his wife and child, heard the voice of the persuasive ‘Waffen lieutenant’ promising him so much... revenge, of a sort, for two wrongful deaths. Revenge, sweet honey, the man had seemed to say with his pale green eyes.

Milla...

Schwartzfeld stared back at Konrad, stared at the red-rimmed hole that glared at him from the middle of Konner’s forehead.

And then the screams started, soaring over the sound of gunfire. He heard a nameless soldier shout for God to help him, for Schwartzfeld to help him...

It was over. The thought was agonizing, so perfectly clear in the three painful words that comprised it.

Almost numb, moving automatically, Johann Schwartzfeld reached into the small tool compartment in the passenger’s seat and pulled out a white handkerchief, ridiculously clean in the midst of dirt and blood. He climbed stiffly out of the cab and made his way around to the antenna situated on the back of the vehicle; a couple good yanks got it detached from the truck, and Schwartzfeld tied the piece of white cloth to one end, noting with distaste that the dirt on his hands had smudged the handkerchief in places.

Didn’t matter much, though, so long as it was still white.

Schwartzfeld gripped the antenna tightly, just as he always imagined gripping a field marshal’s baton, and raised his arm up. He began to wave the white banner back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

**********

When the gunfire stopped, Buck still heard echoes of it in his skull.

It felt strange to hear silence once more, a silence broken by the cries of wounded men and distant explosions- not really silence at all, Buck decided. But it seemed so, with the disappearance of the omnipresent sound of gunfire.

He felt strange all of a sudden, a mixture of giddy relief and bone-deep exhaustion that left his mind whirling. Or was that the morphine? Had Nathan even given him morphine? Had Nathan given him anything at all? Buck heard Nathan rustling next to him, mumbling some medical malarkey Buck couldn’t understand.

"You doin’ okay, Sergeant Wilmington?" Nathan asked, his voice just audible over the unexpected rushing sound that filled Buck’s ears. His hands moved competently over the wound in Buck’s shoulder, carefully bandaging over the stitches he’d just finished inserting.

What the hell’s goin’ on? Buck wondered. He fought off the impulse to laugh at the concern on Nathan’s face.

"Never better, Doc," Buck assured the medic, trying not to giggle.

The medic mumbled something about shock and morphine, turned away to get something. Buck wanted to laugh at Nathan’s going way overboard with this ‘shock and morphine’ business- he felt fine. When Nathan turned back with a morphine syrette and a purposeful expression on his face, it hit Buck that things were very serious.

Very, very serious, Buck had time to think before one more shot rang out; he felt a slight pressure on his right arm, and then everything was still.

**********

The tank commander had just enough time between the sound of gunfire and the arrival of his death to look up. He never saw the bullet or the man who fired it, never even came close to it.

One thunderous report echoed, seeming louder than all the others although at first, Vin couldn’t understand why. It dawned slowly on him that someone had run up a white flag on a stick of some kind, that someone had declared surrender, that all the guns- except for his- had fallen silent.

He watched the tank commander fall, the bullet hole a bright blossom of red on the man’s pale neck. As the soldier’s body hit the ground, Vin slumped back against the building’s stone façade, resting his head against the back of a gargoyle.

Four.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Colonel Johann Schwartzfeld sat in a comfortable arm chair, but could not find it within him to relax. He gave the appearance of it, leaning back into its cushioned depths, crossing one leg over the other and placing his folded hands atop his thigh, but he knew the young man across from him would see straight through his seeming indolence. Both young men, he amended; the long-haired one named Vin Tanner paced the length of the far wall, switching a fearsome-looking knife between both hands, darting glances at Schwartzfeld that would make a lesser man cringe in terror. Nothing of humanity shone in the blue eyes that raked Schwartzfeld with everything from hatred to contempt- nothing, save a naked ferocity that chilled the colonel to the bone.

At length, the lieutenant turned to Tanner and murmured, "You mind, Vin?"

The quiet, undemanding request stopped Tanner in his tracks, but unbridled menace continued to emanate from him. "Sorry, Chris," he said, sounding anything but contrite.

"I am given to understand this is supposed to be an interrogation," Schwartzfeld said as calmly as he could. Lieutenant Larabee speared him with a glare that warned Schwartzfeld to keep his mouth shut until bidden to open it.

Schwartzfeld merely nodded in acknowledgement; the glare flickered into something less fierce, and Lieutenant Larabee gave him a short, respectful nod.

He’s so much like me... Schwartzfeld thought, and almost cursed himself for thinking so.

Unbidden memories of his campaigns in Russia, just before the disasters at Stalingrad, came rushing at him- how he’d earned the respect of not only his men, but his superiors and carved out a battlefield commission for himself. Made a colonel at thirty-five! OB West had to have him, Runstedt said, and they pulled him and some handpicked troops back to the Western Front.

His family had been happy... Milla had been happy.

The Führer himself had come to see him one day, just before the Seventh Army set out for the Calvados region. Thinking on it, Schwartzfeld wondered why he hadn’t seen any signs of incipient madness in the man. If he had, he’d buried the recognition beneath the pride he felt in receiving a personal inspection and speech from his country’s leader- the same way the thousands of other soldiers had felt, he supposed.

When the influx of Ost battalions first started- battalions made up of men from Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Russia, and anywhere else the Wehrmacht had conquered or taken prisoners- things started going wrong in Schwartzfeld’s mind, but he stayed. The Geneva Convention had shattered under what his superiors had done in forcing men from defeated nations to fight against the Reich’s enemies, yet he stayed, caught between the rules of warfare and the rules of his superiors.

"Stay and fight to the last man," Hitler had ordered, even though in many cases, staying and fighting meant suicide. He obsessed with the beaches, insisting that Normandy not be abandoned no matter the cost in human life or ammunition. God, why hadn’t Schwartzfeld seen it? Or done anything?

He bitterly cursed his lack of action as he sat in the chair before the American lieutenant and a Resistance fighter.

Lieutenant Larabee asked for and got all of Schwartzfeld’s personal information: name, age, rank, place of birth. Then they got down to deeper questions, and Schwartzfeld found himself dodging arrows, running along a dangerous path with trip-roots for his feet hidden in Larabee’s questions.

"So you claim you have no knowledge of what Rommel will do to counterattack the invasion?" Schwartzfeld shook his head, keeping his face as neutral as possible. "I do."

"Your claim and the truth are two different things entirely," Lieutenant Larabee pointed out softly. "So let me rephrase: Do you have knowledge of what Rommel will do to counterattack the invasion."

Once more, Schwartzfeld shook his head.

"Can you give it your best guess, then?" Green eyes bored relentlessly into Schwartzfeld, who fought the impulse to squirm away from such a gaze.

"You shot my best friend, Lieutenant," he said softly instead. "You’ve captured me quite fairly, I must say, but I feel that I am under no... obligation to give any sort of information, guessed or otherwise, on the tactics Field Marshal Rommel would decide to use."

"Lines’re probably cut comin’ inland," Tanner said after a lengthy silence. "Ain’t no way he could know. He’d have to guess." Something in the Maquis’ voice said he would immensely enjoy making Schwartzfeld guess, and his following words confirmed it: "I once got to see a buddy of mine hacked to pieces by a coupla SS guys. Right before he died, he told ‘em where they could find a few SOE operatives in Grenoble. It was dark out, but I reckon I learned somethin’ of how to cut up a man."

"We are not the S.S.," Schwartzfeld replied defensively, thinking of the man who’d posed as the Waffen SS lieutenant.

Fury flickered through Tanner’s cold blue eyes. "Oh, you aren’t? What are ya, then?"

"An Army," Schwartzfeld maintained, setting his mouth in a firm, resolute line and matching

Tanner’s stare as squarely as he could. "The Armed Forces of the German Reich. We aren’t Waffen, aren’t S.D... We are the Wehrmacht."

"Bullshit," snorted Tanner. "There ain’t much of a difference, so far’s I can see."

"It’s the truth," Schwartzfeld insisted, glancing at Lieutenant Larabee, who opened his mouth to intervene- Tanner cut him off.

"It don’t matter what the hell you call yourselves," Tanner hissed. "It don’t matter who the hell it was, pulled me outta Paris n’ sent me to rot in Alsace, then sent me somewheres else to die."

"But I did not do that," Schwartzfeld pointed out, keeping his tone as calm as he could, sensing that Tanner hovered near the brink of a violence which even the presence of Lieutenant Larabee could not stop or deflect.

"You support the bastards who do," Tanner growled, pacing forward and evading Larabee’s restraining hand. "Ask folks around here about Night n’ Fog, about their friends n’ families disappearin’ to God only knows where- an’ they’ll say nothin’ because they figure someone’s watchin’- if it ain’t the SS, it’s the Army. Shit, could be anyone just willin’ to sell secrets to the Nazis for a few francs. Look me in the eye an’ tell me you ain’t never heard of any a’ this, tell me that if this was the first you’d heard of it, you’d quit fightin’."

"I’m sorry, Mr. Tanner, but I couldn’t, on either count."

Tanner’s face went blank, the eyes emptied of rage. The hand that held the knife quivered, a sharp spasming that spoke of an action forcibly checked.

"Vin..." Lieutenant Larabee’s voice sounded strangely loud and intrusive.

"Yeah," Vin Tanner said, the single word strangled and raspy.

"I’m doin’ the interrogation here. Go out n’ check for gliders."

A silent eternity passed, Tanner’s fingers working up and down the hilt of the knife in his hand. Schwartzfeld waited, trying to keep his breathing relaxed, his shoulders back.

Tanner nodded finally and slipped the knife back into its sheath, turned and stalked silently out the door. As the door shut behind him, Schwartzfeld let out a breath he never realized he’d been holding. Lieutenant Larabee watched Tanner go, his face still impassive even as the door closed and the tension in the room drained somewhat.

"Did you know about all that?" Chris asked the colonel.

"I’d heard of it," Schwartzfeld replied, his brows wrinkling in concentration. "But like I said, I did none of it."

"But you heard of it, and then did nothing?"

"I was under the impression I was being interrogated for strategy and tactical positions," Schwartzfeld said. Chris recognized the colonel’s attempt to throw him off-balance, to get him flustered, and dodged it neatly.

"Well, we can talk about that, too, if you’d like," Chris returned with false pleasantness. "Do you think Rommell will send reinforcements this way?"

"I would sincerely hope so," Schwartzfeld said, and Chris frowned at the glibness.

"Anyone would ‘hope so’, Colonel," he snapped, trying to control his frustration- the man refused to break. "I was askin’ if you’d think so; thinking and hoping are two different things. Now, I could always get Mr. Tanner back in here or you could tell me yourself, without coercion."

"You wouldn’t."

"Wouldn’t I? Seems like your Armed Forces n’ SS aren’t too upset about violatin’ international law," Chris said with deceptive mildness, and hid a grin of triumph as the colonel’s face contorted in fury and indignation.

"I have never violated the Geneva Convention," Schwartzfeld retorted. "I myself have never done so. I cannot vouch for the behavior of others, and do not intend to do so."

"Then answer my questions," Chris said, pressing his advantage. "All’s fair in love an’ war, I think they say, an’ Geneva’s a ways off from here."

Schwartzfeld appeared to consider this, and finally said, "I would ask that you guarantee the safety and well-treatment of my men. In return, I will make sure they cooperate fully with your demands and questions, myself included among them."

"I think I can agree to that," Chris replied after considering Schwartzfeld’s proposal for a moment.

The colonel’s face appeared to relax a little, his body melting into the embrace of the armchair.  "Panzer reserve divisions are held under the control of the Führer," he murmured, and Chris bent forward a little to catch the softly spoken words. "Until he gives the order, those divisions cannot be moved, even by the OB West commander or Rommel himself. These divisions are the ones I was counting on to reinforce my drive against this village..."

Chris listened as the man wove his story, explaining some of it, but always hedging, keeping back some information but not enough for Chris to do anything about it. An hour passed in that room, and at the end of it, both men felt a deep need to just sleep; Chris managed to pull himself to his feet and guide the colonel out of the small house to where Josiah had set up a prisoner’s dock. Schwartzfeld explained the conditions of their captivity to his men, and they all listened attentively, nodding their silent assent and then murmuring ‘Yes, sir.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: JUNE 6, 1944: 1700 HOURS

Smoke drifted from a thousand wounds in the village, but the ancient stones would be redressed or replaced, and the village would go on as it always had. When the Allied troops moved on from this place, it would return to the backwater it had been since some ancient Gaul or Roman first saw fit to pitch something more permanent than a camp on this ground. Already, the few cows in the fields beyond moved back and forth unconcernedly, as if the gunfire and explosions were mere facts of life, and so long as they did not disturb grazing, didn’t matter much. A strange serenity seemed to envelop the land surrounding Four Corners, a serenity which did not extend to the busy streets of the village itself.

The tight streets swarmed with activity. J.D. tore himself from Buck’s side long enough to cordon off the mined alleyways until the demining team could get in, and then went back to check on the radios. With the exits from the beachhead at Utah established and glider-borne supplies being dropped with regularity, the four uninjured men found their only release in ‘battening down’, as Josiah put it; Sanchez himself oversaw the eight prisoners and Buck, while Nathan kept watch over Ezra, with the agent insisting he’d be fine, and " for the love of all that is holy, Private Jackson, turn your medical affections upon Sergeant Wilmington."

"Hey, Ezra!"

Ezra looked up, squinting and wondering how the sun had come to be so bright, and why in the world Private Dunne felt he had to bellow. The young man jogged toward him, grinning.

"Yes, Mr. Dunne?" inquired Ezra.

"I just got word from Colonel DeHayes," J.D. said through deep breaths as he skidded to a halt in front of the agent. "They’ve got a gliderfield set up near Canquigny, an’ they’re anticipating evacuation planes’ll be arriving soon. They’ll either fly you out of there or get you to the beaches once they settle down some."

Somehow, Ezra couldn’t be heartened by the news, even though he knew he should be. "Well, that is excellent news, Mr. Dunne," he said as brightly as he could. "I can hear Claridge's calling from here."

"Cla-what?" the young private asked blankly.

"A fancy hotel in London," Ezra sighed.

"Oh, okay." J.D. nodded, satisfied with the clarification. "Well, I gotta get back to the radios- the 519th is comin’ to help us lock up the place, an’ they’ll be bringin’ an escort truck for you. The road between here and Canquigny is locked up, so uh... so we won’t have a repeat of last time."
Ezra flinched as, unbidden, the image of Private Waltham swam up before his eyes, face blank but accusing nonetheless. Standish swallowed the guilt and nodded, giving the young man as benign a smile as he could. "I’m sure that it won’t," he said softly.

J.D. grinned and turned to jog back to the communications tent. Halfway there, Buck accosted him, and the sergeant’s annoyed tone carried down the street, much to J.D.’s discomfiture.

"What the HELL did you think you were doin’ back there, boy?" Buck bellowed. He gestured back toward the building he had gotten shot in.

Shrinking back under the unexpected onslaught, J.D. frantically searched for any kind of plausible explanation. "I... I was savin’ your life!" he managed at last, with a little bit of indignation creeping into his tone. "An’ I was probably keepin’ you from being made a prisoner!"

The fury painted across Buck’s face didn’t dim in the least. "If there’s one thing you need to learn kid, it’s that you never break cover. What if they’d gotten a sniper up one of those buildings?

You’d be deader n’ a doornail two steps out of your hole! What if there’d been some Kraut waitin’ for you right outside the door? Huh?"

"Then I’d be dead an’ I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore," J.D. snapped.

A deathly stillness came over Wilmington, and J.D. immediately sensed that he’d given the wrong answer.

"You’d be dead," Buck said deliberately, "an’ we’d be down a man. If’n we had a thousand men here, you still wouldn’t’ve had an excuse to do what you did! It was the most damn fool thing I’ve ever seen! Shoulda stayed with you, fuckin’ nursemaided ya so you didn’t pull that damn stunt." Buck’s tirade halted as he sought to get himself back from the tangent he’d gone on. "Anyway, that ain’t the point. The point is that there was just five of us-"

"Seven," broke in J.D. "You forgot Nathan an’ Ezra."

"Medics are noncombatants, boy. Nathan wasn’t supposed to use his scissors as a lethal weapon- coulda gotten his ass shot for that, too, an’ Ezra didn’t count for most of the fight. Goddammit, boy! Quit distractin’ me. The point’s that there were only five of us, an’ when you’ve got five, you don’t risk one man on some damn-fool stunt like that. So, if this kinda situation ever comes up again, don’t save my life. Got it?"

"Got it, Buck," J.D. said somberly, now acutely embarrassed.

"Good," Buck returned. "Don’t let it happen again."

With that, he swiped at J.D.’s helmet, knocking it forward on the young man’s forehead. With an enraged curse, J.D. jumped forward, trying to tackle the older man, who eluded him effortlessly despite his wound and took off down the street, shouting over his shoulder for J.D. to get back to the radios.

Buck slowed to a walk and grinned to himself, happy in defiance of the pain that bounced up and down his body. He rejoined Josiah, who regarded him calmly and told him he should really be back with Nathan.

"Hell, Josiah, didn’t want to leave you here by yourself," Buck responded, an expression of mock hurt crossing his face at the Maquis’ apparent rejection.

"Well, the more the merrier," Josiah said, laughing softly.

"This bunch behaved okay?" Buck asked.

"Yup. Schwartzfeld’s holdin’ to his word." Josiah paused to answer a question from one of the prisoners, who nodded and leaned back with a slight smile on his face.

"What’d he ask? An’ what’d you tell him?"

"Oh, he wanted to know where he’d be goin’, and I told him that he’d be going to Canaan, the land of milk and honey," Josiah said. "I’m pretty sure he knows that he’s going to either America or England. Maybe Canada."

"They ain’t Canaan," Buck snorted.

"When you’ve spent the last few years of your life in a trench and the cold- Heinrich here fought at Stalingrad, by the way- any other place is heaven. He’s been telling me about conditions in Russian POW camps, and I think going to hell would be preferable to going there; the soldiers on the Western Front consider themselves pretty damn lucky that they got transferred here, instead of being made to stay on the Eastern lines with the Russians startin’ to come down on them. Powerful hatred there- goes back centuries. I don’t believe that the Russians would hesitate to get some of their own back for Brest-Litovsk and Barbarossa."

"Don’t seem right," Buck muttered. "They’re gettin’ to go to a cushy camp in the back lines, an’ we’re stuck up here."

"Their war’s over," Josiah said serenely, "ours is just beginning."

"Thank you for that bit of wisdom, Preacher-man."

"Oh, don’t thank me just yet," Josiah laughed. "I’m havin’ Nathan come over to tend some of the men here. He’ll probably be wantin’ to look at you, too."

"And I will, in just a minute." said Nathan as he walked up to the two men, striding past them to assess the various injuries among the prisoners. "Josiah, could you ask ‘em if they mind me checkin’ their bandages, fixin’ ‘em up a little?"

Josiah did, and a small chorus of responses ensued. "Don’t reckon they mind at all, Brother
Nathan," Sanchez said. Nathan nodded in response and began to move around the prisoners, softly and slowly explaining what he was going to do. As he cut and snipped, stitched and powdered, Nathan felt a little better, felt something mending in him that had been torn when his plane had crashed in the dead of night.

"You reckon this war’s almost over?" Nathan asked Josiah, who stared at his friend quizzically.

"Not by a long shot," Josiah replied. "I guess some of the brass in England think they’ll have Berlin wrapped up in fancy paper for Christmas." The dry twist of his mouth indicated his disbelief.

"It’s a nice thought," Nathan said, wishing it were reality.

"It sure is... But when the war is over, there’s still all that damned picking up to do." Josiah turned away briefly and examined the town before heaving a mock-exasperated sigh. "When this is over, I’ll have to go back to Chartres and see how my church is doing."

"Church?" Nathan glanced at the older man in puzzlement.

"I have a little church that I’ve been rebuilding in the shadow of the cathedral there, just outside the city," Josiah said. "The merciful Lord only knows what’s happened to it since I’ve been gone. I shudder to think of what’s happened to it; the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune don’t seem to be as powerful as those from .88-millimeter cannons and incendiary bombs."

"We’ll all patch our wounds, Josiah. Your church won’t be much different."

"Good words, Brother Nathan," Josiah said approvingly.

"Speakin’ of words- or lack of ‘em- where’d Lieutenant Larabee get off to?" Nathan asked, looking around the streets, not seeing the lieutenant anywhere.

"Oh, Vin’s watchin’ for gliders coming in," Josiah replied, gesturing toward the clock tower. "I think Chris went to check up on him."

**********

Vin didn’t acknowledge Chris’s presence, but Chris knew the resistance fighter had heard him coming. The brown-coated shoulders were thrown defiantly back, the spine ramrod-straight. Tanner’s blue eyes stared off into the distance, and Chris felt uncomfortable intruding into what was obviously a private silence. He crouched in the corner opposite Vin, and waited for the young man to say something, do something.

"My ma died when I was five," Vin said at length, "before she died, she told me that I was a Tanner... that I was a Tanner, and that I made her proud. Those were her last words." He tore his gaze from the horizon and redirected it to his hands, which turned the spyglass over and over nervously.

"When I was in that camp, I wasn’t Vin Tanner anymore... I was Number 14985." His right hand drifted to touch his biceps, fingers running over the thick ridges of the scars there. "An’ I think that was the worst thing... out of everythin’ that happened to me there, that happened to all’a the people I knew, not bein’ Vin Tanner was the worst.

"There ain’t any words for it," he continued, naked pain in his voice. "There just ain’t any words to say what it’s like to have t’ remind yourself over n’ over who you are... an’ then to remind yourself that you’re a human, that you ain’t some piece of shit t’ git stepped on whenever some guard feels like it...

"After I got to England, I’d lie awake thinking about what I’d do to those people, once I got back to the Continent. I knew that camp by heart- knew the coldest, most miserable corners of it; I’d make those people suffer the way I did... and then I’d kill them. An’... an’ it didn’t matter that my ma had always told me to not hate, to be good... Those people took away who I was... an’ that was all I had, for a long time... they just took it."

Chris listened in silent anguish for his friend, who stared at him now, his blue eyes flickering with two years of suppressed emotion. "I had two friends there... Freiderich an’ Julian. Chris, lookin’ at them, you’d never’ve guessed that they were human. Looked more like somethin’ outta a bad movie... like a pulp novel ‘r somethin’. But they were human, Chris, just as human as you n’ me, an’ a damn sight more human than the animals that ran that camp."

"Where are they now?"

Naked pain shone in Vin’s eyes. "Probably dead," he whispered. "I left them behind... It just got to where I couldn’t stay, an’ they couldn’t come with me. They was just skeletons by the time I got out- no way they coulda made it. Hell, they probably couldn’t even think of escapin’. I see ‘em sometimes, in my dreams... See ‘em standin’ there, accusin’ me of abandoning them."

"You did what you had to so you could survive, Vin," Chris told him quietly, knowing the words came as cold comfort, at best, and that Vin would take no solace in them.

"Animals survive, Chris," Vin ground out, hands tensing into fists, "Humans, they don’t abandon their friends. I weren’t much better’n an animal, I reckon."

"Vin, if you’d stayed there, you would’ve died," Chris insisted. "You’re doin’ a world of good here, even if it doesn’t seem like it, or if you think you’re doin’ it for the wrong reasons. You couldn’t do anything if you’d stayed there, if you died next to your friends." Chris paused, knowing something about sacrifice and also about guilt; he mulled over his words before offering them, because they were words that pained him to hear, even coming from his own mouth.

"My wife and son died in a house fire," he said, voice pitched low and a little raspy, "I had gotten furlough to go see them just before I went to Italy, but I didn’t take it- decided to train more, learn more... And they died. I hadn’t seen them since the Christmas before, and I never saw them again.

"I had the chance to say good-bye to them," he whispered past suppressed tears, "and I didn’t take it. I could have saved them, and I didn’t. Hated myself for a long time after that... and I still do, every time I think about them, how I wasn’t there for them."

Chris watched his friend in silence, seeing the tumult behind the expressionless face and wanting to help with more than words. He knew there could be no helping this, though, that Vin would have to work through it on his own, even if it took a lifetime to do so.

An endless minute passed, and at the end of it, Vin turned to gaze directly at Chris. His blue eyes had cleared a little, even though they still held that old pain and regret, and he offered an unexpected smile. Chris returned it, and he felt some easing between them. Something quiet and reassuring passed between the two men, a lifetime of words and reassurance, of solace and support. At length, the two of them turned back to study the eastern sky, breathing in the bitter odors of gunpowder and burnt wood and, improbably, the scent of summer clover.

THE END

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