Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

A set of headlights, narrowed into cat’s eyes by the special blinkers used by vehicles in the front line, streamed into the room as a jeep pulled up outside.

Only now did Carter get a good look at Wharton. In the glaring light, which carved out monstrous shadows in the room, it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.

The major’s arms were resting on the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, and he appeared to be staring at his own reflection in the highly polished wood. But the wood was not polished. Carter could see that now. It was slick and heavy and so dark it seemed like motor oil. And then Carter realised it was blood. He saw the deep-carved gashes running from the wrist towards the elbow of each arm. The blood had seeped across the table and poured down the other side and it had pooled by his feet and sunk into the brown wool of his trousers. Carter had never seen so much blood in his life, not even in the men whose bullet-constellationed corpses he had pulled from the trunks of abandoned cars or the low-tide Hudson mud, criminals dispatched by other criminals before the law could ever track them down.

Somebody stepped into the front hall and then a voice called out for Carter.

It was Riveira. ‘Lieutenant!’ he shouted above the deafening sound of detonations, which seemed to be coming from all around the house. ‘We’re leaving! Now!’

‘I’m in here!’ answered Carter.

Riveira stepped into the room and gasped at the sight of Major Wharton. ‘Holy crap,’ he said. With fumbling hands, Riveira took the metal first aid packet from its canvas pouch on his belt, opened it and tore the bandage in half.

He and Carter laid Major Wharton on the floor, sprinkled the wounds with the packet of white sulfanilamide powder that came in the medical packets, then bandaged them as tightly as they could. By now, Wharton had lost consciousness.

‘Where is the nearest hospital?’ asked Carter. ‘If we don’t get him to one soon, he isn’t going to make it.’

‘There’s a medical aid post in a farmhouse just outside of town,’ said Riveira, ‘although God knows what it’s like there now.’

The two men carried him outside and laid him in the back of the jeep.

Riveira got behind the wheel. ‘Why the hell did he do it?’ he asked.

‘Just drive,’ Carter told him.

They had cleared the last cluster of houses in the centre of town and were travelling between two open fields with shallow ditches and barbed wire fences on either side, when a flickering Morse code of light raced out of the woods at the edge of one of the fields. At the same moment, Carter heard a rapid clattering sound, as if someone had thrown a handful of small stones against the side of the jeep. Riveira shouted something and the next thing Carter knew, the jeep had skidded off the road and slammed into the ditch. The impact threw Carter sideways out of the jeep and he ended up on the other side of the road from the vehicle, lying up against the fence, tangled in the claws of barbed wire. In the same moment as Carter realised that they had just been shot at, a deafening roar erupted from only a few paces away. In the shuddering light of muzzle flashes, he caught sight of several American helmets hunched down behind a Browning machine gun. In the woods across the field, he saw more flashes, pulsing manically, and then blue sparks showered down on him as bullets tore through the wire just above his head. As Carter rolled down into the ditch, tearing his sleeve which had become tangled in the barbs, he spotted the rear of the jeep silhouetted against the night sky, one wheel off the ground and its front out of sight in the ditch across the road. There was no sign of Riveira.

Carter lay face down in the gruel of water and half-frozen mud. Bullets snapped past above him and he felt the thudding impacts as they slammed into the dirt all along the edge of the ditch. The next sound he heard was a metallic thump and then a hollow whistle, like someone blowing sharply into the mouth of a bottle. A dusty red flash burst in the forest and someone in the distance shrieked in pain. Carter raised his head, his face cast in mud, in time to see an American soldier dropping a mortar shell down a tube, then twist away, hands covering his ears. The same hard thump filled his ears and a wall of concussion swept past. Once more, the woods beyond exploded into fire.

How long the mortaring continued, Carter had no idea. Time seemed to be expanding and contracting all around him, moving sideways through his brain so that he noticed tiny details, like the way the light of the machine gun fire reflected off his fingernails, and then nothing at all for what seemed like minutes on end.

The firing from the woods died away. Trails of smoke rose from among the trees.

A voice nearby shouted, ‘Cease fire!’

Then Carter heard the slap of running footsteps in the mud. He looked up to see a soldier crouching over him. ‘Are you all right?’ asked the man.

It was only as Carter lifted himself up that he felt the cold in his soaked clothes. He looked around blearily. ‘My driver,’ he mumbled.

‘Are you all right?’ the soldier asked again. He reached out and shook him by the arm. ‘Are you hit?’

‘No,’ Carter managed to say.

Two more soldiers darted across the road towards the jeep. A moment later they lifted a man to his feet, one on each side, his arms around their shoulders. They carried him, limping, out of the ditch.

One of the soldiers got behind the wheel of the jeep, restarted the engine and slowly backed it up onto the road.

‘There’s another guy here!’ shouted one of the soldiers. ‘He’s hurt. It looks like he’s hurt pretty bad. Jesus, it’s Major Wharton!’

‘We were taking him to the field hospital just outside of town,’ said Carter.

‘Too late for that,’ said the soldier who crouched beside him. He pointed to a glow in the distance, capped by shreds of flame. ‘The hospital got taken out almost as soon as the Germans started shelling us.’

‘Record players my ass!’ said another soldier.

Now Carter became aware again of the gunfire over by the Wahlerscheid road, an almost constant roar and crackle, and the skyline shuddering light into darkness and back into light, as if a lightning storm were passing through the woods. Mixed in with the coughing rumble of artillery was the rapid snap of Garand rifle fire and the zipper-like noise of German machine guns, firing so fast that the sound of the bullets merged, one indistinguishable from another. Ever since he had caught sight of the German tracer fire streaming out of the woods, the scope of his senses had shrunk to the tiny space he occupied in the ditch. Now, slowly◦– too slowly◦– they were reaching out again.

‘They’re gone for now,’ said the soldier, ‘but they’ll counter attack as soon as they can get some reinforcements. That’s one damned thing you can always count on. They’ll be coming back, even if it costs them every man they’ve got.’

Carter could not see the man’s face or any details of the man’s clothing. It was as if the darkness itself were speaking to him.

The major was lying in the road.

Another soldier was kneeling over him. ‘He’s still alive,’ said the man, ‘but he doesn’t look too good.’

Riveira hobbled over to Carter. ‘I twisted my ankle,’ he said. ‘I think you’re going to have to drive.’

‘Is there another hospital?’ he asked.

‘There’s a big one over in Stavelot,’ said the man who had become the darkness, ‘but you had better get out of here now, or you won’t be getting out of here at all.’

‘How’s the jeep?’ asked Carter.

‘I think you’re fine,’ said the man. ‘They didn’t hit the engine.’