Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“All right,” he muttered to himself, determined to do a little SPETS number of his own, “it’s time we evened the score.” He tore off the guard’s dog tags, and inside thirty seconds he’d put on the guard’s sodden coat, stuffed the two grenades the guard was carrying into the coat pocket, put on the helmet, and started running to the last truck in the line. He could hear the colonel’s voice and the muffled thud of an oil drum and a guard shouting at the two men who had dropped it. His back to the other prisoners, now, he guessed, about fifty yards off, he lifted the collar of the guard’s coat high around his neck and fired a long burst across the ditch into the field, screaming, “Amerikaner! Hah!”

Behind him he heard prisoners dropping to the ground, the other guards running through the snowstorm to join him at the end of the line of trucks, and the oberst shouting orders. He moved quickly back down alongside the ditch to the first truck, unscrewed the gas tank cover, snapped the AKM’s swing butt hard on the stock, and using its bayonet, cut through the neck of his T-shirt to make a wick for the gas tank.

But the guards were closing faster than he’d thought, and he still wouldn’t have time to get into the truck. He stuffed half the T-shirt strip into the tank, lit the bottom of the taper, and slid down the embankment toward the ditch, running as fast as he could away from the line of trucks. He guessed it would be no more than five seconds before the truck would blow, and instinctively everyone around it would hit the road for a few minutes, afraid to go to any of the other vehicles behind it. He slipped on the ice, crashing headlong into the snow-covered side of the ditch, the blizzard swirling about him, and glanced back the fifty yards or so — the trucks dim blots in the rolling snow.

There was no explosion — maybe the taper had been too long and they’d seen it in time, or maybe it hadn’t been as dry as he thought. He kept running, and although hot from the effort, the sodden clothes turned his perspiration to ice. He paused to catch his breath. The unexpected, the DI had always told Thelma and Stumble-Ass — go for the unexpected.

Gasping, the icy air searing his lungs, he wondered how far he could get before they recaptured him. He heard shouts coming from the direction of the parked convoy and then an ominous silence, except for the howl of the blizzard. Crawling up to the top of the embankment, he looked for the trucks again, but they had vanished in the white-out, and though he knew the dump was opposite him, a hundred yards or so across the road, the loss of depth perception in the white-out created the dangerously comfortable illusion that because he couldn’t see his enemy, he was safe.

Then, beneath the wail of the blizzard, he heard a swishing noise, faint yet distinct — coming closer.

While, in the port of Brest, the convoy, minus one merchantman and one of its destroyer escorts, was docking, Gen. Douglas Freeman, beside himself with frustration, was raging against his immobility, which prevented him from being at the front during the attack. “Here I am trussed up like a mummy, and my boys are dying like flies.” Increasing his sense of failure, Freeman’s headquarters received a message via a ham operator, using an antiquated radio set that, operational because it used vacuum tubes instead of up-to-date printed microchip circuit boards, picked up a BBC broadcast of the nine-o’clock news reporting that a strike of dockworkers was under way in several of the French Ports, including Brest. Freeman ordered Norton to grab the nearest F-16 pilot at Krefeld to take a message to Brest that the French strikers were to be shot on the spot.

“You threaten that, General,” Major Norton advised him, “and we could have one hell of a problem with France. They’re allowing us to use—”

“Allowing us nothing,” snapped Freeman. “They’re allowing us and the British and Germans and every other poor son of a bitch in that pocket to die. Only dying they’ll do is to protect France. And if the NATO commander in Brest is too cowardly to do it — I’ll order air strikes on French forces and make it look like the Russians hit them. You see how quickly things’ll loosen up then. I want those supplies and I want them now.”

Norton was appalled, staring wide-eyed at the general, convinced that when Freeman had been thrown out of the Humvee, he’d lost some of his marbles as well. “We can’t do that, General. I mean, there’s no way—”

Freeman, his face contorted with pain, eyes smarting, nevertheless managed to fix Norton in his stare. “Watch me! If I’d had my way, I’d bomb the sons of bitches myself to get them into the righting. Now, are you going to transmit that order or do I have to shoot you!”

As the general’s Apache helicopter rose to ferry Norton to Krefeld, its rotor slap momentarily drowned the noise of battle, but he knew it was an illusion and that, like it or not, the general had a point. If they lost Western Europe, it was all over.

Freeman called for the doctor.

“Yes, General?”

“I want another shot of that painkiller.”

The doctor tried but couldn’t hide a smirk of satisfaction that said, So you’re human after all?

“I may be—” Freeman began, but for a moment he couldn’t go on. “I might be stubborn, Doc, but I’m not stupid.” He turned to his logistics aide. “Charlie — you got a manifest for the convoy that’s due in Brest?”

“No, sir, but—”

“Get one.”

“I know there are twenty-four merchantmen, all over twenty thousand tons. There’s a hell of a lot of stuff — if it got through.”

“Well, if it did get through, I don’t want any screw-ups down there. Ammunition and fuel, Charlie. Ammunition and fuel. Onto the Hercules and up here. At least we’ve still got fighter cover. Bring me a map of North Rhine-Westphalia.”

“Fox 1… Fox 1…” Shirer was calling, the nose of the MiG plainly visible in the flash of an exploding Tomcat, then he was falling. Gradually he became aware of someone holding his hand and a rush of sensations all at once, the stink of a boat’s diesel fumes and a stringent antiseptic smell and perfume, the hand holding his warm and reassuring, the woman’s face indistinct, warping in and out of focus as if through a glass tumbler, swaying to and fro with the motion of the boat. And somewhere in the distance, above the rhythmic throbbing of the marine engine, the chatter of machine-gun fire, and other wounded all around him. The perfume was a memory to him, and he couldn’t quite match the face in his mind, but it awakened a desire in him that transcended everything else around him.

“How’s he doing?” a man’s voice asked.

“He’ll be all right,” she said. “He was in a coma at first and we thought his arm was broken. But he was lucky. The marines who brought him in said his chute was a little twisted, but he came down all right, and the snow helped.”

“Can’t keep a good man down.”

“No,” she answered, smiling. Now Shirer could see her clearly.

“You know him?” the man asked.

She turned to look up at him as she answered, and Shirer knew the profile at once. “Lana?” He was grinning like a schoolboy.

“Well,” said the man, straightening up, arms akimbo, “I guess that cuts me out!” It was a tone of good-natured resignation. “And here I thought I’d hit pay dirt with a pretty navy nurse. If you’ll pardon me, I’m going to try my luck elsewhere — surely there’s one nurse who’d take pity on a lonely sailor.”

Lana laughed easily in reply, and in that moment Shirer knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if he did nothing else in this damned war, he’d take her, hold her, and never let go.