Ian Slater - World in Flames

He stood still looking about for her, for any sign of movement, still having a gut feeling that as she was of slighter build than most, she could well be buried but alive under the crush of bodies. He heard something and motioned the ambulance men coming in behind him to be quiet, listening for the faintest sound of breathing — for anything. But all he could hear now was the sound of the boiler condensing, its melancholy sound still with them. Outside, more ambulances were arriving.

“Should check those who’ve been taken away,” suggested Parkin, reappearing, smelling of sick. He meant those who the Belgian had told him had been stacked earlier in the Roosbeek morgue.

“Damn it — she isn’t dead,” David said. “I just know it.” He turned, looking at Parkin. “Sorry. You don’t have to come. Wait back at the Humvee if you like.”

Parkin didn’t answer but followed Brentwood as he entered the last carriage.

She was the first one he saw — spread across a wounded youth, both his arms in casts, one eye bandaged, the bandage bloodied now and rust-colored. At the base of her head there was a small, ugly hole, the edge of her white sweater stained. David knelt down and felt her wrist. No pulse. Cold. He couldn’t breathe and tore at his collar. Parkin moved up behind him. “Oh Christ, Lieutenant! Oh, shit!”

David, biting his lip, bent over her, still clinging to hope, and saw a phantom breeze blow the soft baby hair on the nape of her neck. It was his own breath. He took her right hand in both of his, holding it gently, feeling for the faintest pulse. He doubled over, pulling her hands to his face, his head moving side to side, sobbing in desperate denial that it was Lili, that the bloody mush that had been her face was Lili. But the poppy of Flanders Field that she’d worn, like those poppies she had told him sprang form from the artillery-plowed earth after the 1914 war, was still there, crushed against her by the body of the soldier she’d been trying to protect.

David didn’t remember the walk back to the Humvee, nor much of the ride back to the convalescent military hospital in Liege where he was to await orders, possibly for light supply duties in France. Parkin had put the poppy, her ID bracelet, and a lock of her hair — he’d had to wash it first — in a white linen envelope marked “Lieutenant Brentwood — Personal” and left it at the front desk. He wanted to stay at Liege but couldn’t. In the morning he’d have to report back to Brussels as what supplies were making it through the renewed Russian sub attacks on the convoys had to be shipped up quickly to the front if Freeman’s army wasn’t to be halted, and a counterattack risked all along the line. NATO needed every driver it could get its hands on.

“You take care of yourself, Lieutenant,” Parkin enjoined.

David nodded. “Thanks for bringing me back, Corp.”

“Anything I can do, sir? I mean, if you’re not feeling up to it — someone should let your folks know.” Parkin was holding out a packet of cigarettes, momentarily forgetting that the American didn’t smoke.

“No,” said David. “They know nothing about her.” He looked up at the Englishman, his lip quivering. The corporal, embarrassed, offered him a light. Brentwood looked down, cleared his throat, and asked in a strained voice, “Can you fix me a ride to Bouillon? It’s in the Ardennes. Her parents live there. I’d like to — I mean I should—”

“No problem!” said Parkin, relieved he could do something, anything, to help. “I’ll go over to the motor pool right now.”

“Thanks,” said David.

Sitting on the edge of his bunk, eyes fixed on the drops of rain slowly making their way down the window of the Quonset hut, he felt a hollowness — a vast emptiness and the beginning of rage — that they could waste someone so young, so beautiful — so good — the best thing, he now realized too late, that had happened to him in the whole rotten war.

Parkin’s footsteps echoed on the highly polished linoleum. “Well, if you can put up with me, Lieutenant, they say I can drive you down. But I was thinking, maybe her folks wouldn’t — I mean, maybe we should wait a few days.”

“No,” said David. “I’d like to go now.”

“It’s about ninety miles. Good three hours, Lieutenant. Maybe you should rest awhile. Go in the morning.”

Parkin waited patiently for the lieutenant to reconsider, to at least put it off till the morning. Parkin knew he couldn’t appeal to the American’s convalescent status anymore either — the sister on the ward telling the Corporal that Brentwood was as fit as they could make him now and that he could certainly go to Bouillon if he wanted to. To cheer him up, the sister brought a pile of letters waiting for him from the United States. “And abroad,” she said, showing him one with a Scottish postmark.

“Thank you,” David said, looking at the bundle in his hand. He might as well have been looking at a relic from the ancient past. Right now nothing held any importance for him, not how Lana was faring in the Aleutians or Robert on the Roosevelt —if he was still on the Roosevelt —or even the state of Ray’s progress in the burn unit of San Diego Vet’s. The only thing that mattered was that Lili was gone. She had been a bright burst, a warmth in the winter of his recovery from Stadthagen. Only his anger at the Russians offered any salve for the emptiness that now engulfed him; he fed on it. On that anger and what he felt was his duty to go to Bouillon. He hoped they’d find each and every one of the SPETS and hang them. It hadn’t been a military action — what was military about hitting a train and murdering wounded in cold blood? It was butchery. He only hoped he could keep the worst of it from Lili’s father and mother.

“ ‘S all right with you, sir,” said Parkin. “I wouldn’t mind a kip before we go.”

“All right,” said Brentwood finally. “But I want to go down first thing in the morning.” It was the most dispirited voice Parkin had ever heard.

The December sun was weak in Khabarovsk, but its reflection off the snow dazzled the city, ice crystals sparkling in the pristine air. Apart from the massive underground supply depots and the munition factories on the city’s outskirts, where the wind kept most of the industrial pollution blowing west, the city, though shabby up close, nevertheless looked stunningly clean and peaceful. Gen. Kiril Marchenko had sensed the difference in the air the moment he’d deplaned following the long, four-thousand-mile trip from Moscow.

After having received greetings from the Khabarovsk’s KGB chief, Colonel Nefski, he went up the winding stone stairs of the jail. General Marchenko took off his greatcoat, cap, and gloves, and got right to it.

“Who put you up to this?” he asked the girl, Alexsandra Malof, the moment she was brought in.

She said nothing.

“It’s a very grave matter.”

It was worse than that, Nefski knew. Even suspected sabotage carried the death penalty. Several submarine captains from the Far Eastern Fleet out of Vladivostok had reported that some torpedoes were not detonating. A serial number check showed they all came from the munitions factory at Khabarovsk.

In a perverse way, Nefski admired the woman. Dark, in her late twenties, not much over five feet, she radiated defiance, her body stiffening the moment the two burly guards held her, one on each arm, when she looked as if she was about to spit at the general. The coarse woolen prison top could not hide her beauty, her breasts more alluring each time she resisted the pull of the guards, her eyes quick with rage, her whole body tense. Proud, too — wouldn’t even acknowledge the presence of Nefski’s subaltern near the window, overlooking the courtyard, whether from fear or contempt, he didn’t know. Of course, she’d just been in the prison for a day — brought straight from the munitions factory. Anyone could act tough for the first couple of hours, and amateurs were always profligate with their resistance.