Michael Grant - Dead of Night

‘Damp? Wales?’ Jack teases.

‘I don’t know how you people stand it.’

‘Well, we don’t . . . quite. The south, London, my country, is a veritable desert compared with Wales.’

Jack is the sole Briton in this American army company. Perhaps the only one in the entire US army. He was evacuated from England during the Blitz and in an excess of affection and caution his parents had sent him to live with American relatives in Montana. Sadly, his parents had later been killed by a German bomb and Jack’s only way home was to enlist in the US Army as soon as he reached legal age.

Now he is back in Britain and wearing, if not an enemy uniform, not exactly the uniform expected of a boy from Croydon.

He is not terribly tall, just a couple of inches taller than Rio, with ginger hair and the kind of blue eyes that are often amused, just as often devilish, and occasionally, when caught off-guard, touchingly sincere.

‘All right, people, off your rear ends, we got some distance to cover,’ Sergeant Cole says. ‘That is if everyone can manage not to stumble into quicksand, or break their legs on a rock, or who knows what else.’

They form up, a ragged, muddy, uninspiring bunch. Since arriving from the States, they’d been part of a division that was shuffled from overstuffed camps to rustic bivouacs, marched from borrowed barns to village school houses, on and off the eternal deuce-and-a-half trucks, moving as if the US army has no real idea where to put them or what to do with them. Which, as Cole knows and Rio is starting to figure out, is essentially the truth. The British have been at this war for two years already, but it is all still new to the Americans and they are making it up as they go along.

‘Okay, I’m going over this again in the forlorn hope that it may penetrate this time. This little walk in the rain is a squad tactical exercise,’ Cole lectures. The word ‘squad’ and indeed all words containing the letter ‘s’ come out a bit mangled because Sergeant Cole has a nice, fresh new cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. ‘The three elements of the squad are Able, Baker and Charlie.’

Jillion Magraff raises her hand. Like she’s in school. Rio knows for a fact that Cole has told Magraff, oh, at least a dozen times not to do that, but rather to simply state her question, but Magraff is not what anyone, anywhere, in any army since Hannibal crossed the Alps, would call a soldier.

‘Magraff,’ Cole says, rolling his eyes only a little and suppressing a weary sigh.

‘Why are they called that?’

‘A, B and C,’ Rio stage whispers. And adds a silent, Isn’t that obvious?

Cole says, ‘Oh, it’s just a matter of preference, Magraff. Would you like to make up some other names? Freddie, Joe and Carmelita, maybe?’

Cole is not usually sarcastic. He is a patient man, a good sergeant. But on this training exercise in a sodden, oppressive landscape in the ass-end of nowhere, with a dozen green soldiers he has already had to pull one soldier (Magraff) out of the mud, stopped another one (Geer) from attempting to shoot down a Merlin, had to backtrack to find a lost rifle (Suarez) and – though he refuses to admit it – become fairly well lost in fog so wet and penetrating he’s simultaneously clammy and freezing.

And Magraff only has one boot.

Jesus wept, Cole thinks.

The usual American army squad consists of twelve soldiers. The usual squad consists of a sergeant, a corporal, and ten privates, all men. This particular squad consists of eight men and four women, because for the first time in American history, thanks to a meddling (to Cole’s mind) Supreme Court, women have been made subject to the draft and eligible for enlistment. And because Cole has annoyed his captain by failing to get some paperwork filed in a timely manner, Cole has been given not one, not two, not even three, but four of them. Four women. And, to top it off, an Englishman and some sort of Asian who no one trusts because he sure looks Japanese.

‘Able, Baker, Charlie,’ Cole repeats. ‘A, B, C. It’s in the tactical manual which I know you’ve all committed to memory.’

Eight of the soldiers adopt eight similarly blank expressions meant to convey nothing, but in fact sending the very clear message that no, of course they have not read the manual. The exceptions are Corporal Millican, Sergeant Cole, a serious young man with a prominent widow’s peak named Dain Sticklin (inevitably called Stick) and Rio Richlin.

Rio is young and looks younger. She’s tall, willowy but strong, with the square shoulders and ropy arms of a hard-working farm girl used to slinging bales of hay, milking cows and shoveling manure. She’s pretty but not a beauty, with dark hair, blue eyes and pale skin dotted with freckles. And she has in fact read the manual on small unit tactics. Rio has had serious doubts about her hasty decision to enlist along with her friend, Jenou, but she figures her best chance of coming through it all in one piece is to learn her job.

In fact, she’s decided to become a good soldier, and is already a better soldier (in her own inexpert opinion) than anyone in the squad aside from Stick. And Cole, of course.

Rio is quite aware that the Tommies – the British – have a low opinion of American soldiers and are frankly appalled at the very notion of women in uniform. One of the more common snide remarks is that, ‘The only problem with the Americans is that they’re overpaid, over-sexed and over here.’

The other goes, ‘The Yanks are confused – the men fight like women and the women look like men.’

Rio isn’t having it. Lord knows she had never planned to be a soldier, but by all that is holy, if she’s going to be a soldier she’s going to do it well. With her thirteen weeks of basic training, plus two previous training patrols since arriving in Britain, she’s pretty confident that she is ready for whatever the army throws at her.

‘Able is the command element,’ Cole goes on. ‘That’s whoever is on point, then a rifleman to watch his back and keep track of where we’re going, and then the squad leader. That’d be me. Baker is the fire element, that’s Stick with his BAR and two others. Whatever is left is the maneuver element, Charlie, in the rear with Corporal Millican there, my assistant squad leader.’

Corporal Millican, in Rio’s estimation – and in the estimation of everyone, including Millican himself – is one of those who will never make a good soldier. He’s a timid soul with a body to match, though he means well.

Cole says, ‘Now, me, I like to mix that up a bit and move a fourth man – or woman, I guess – up front to have that extra rifle behind point, but today we’re doing it the O-fficial army way. So, that’s how we will proceed to our OB-jective.’

He always pronounces it OB-jective, which invariably makes Rio smile. But not today. Not when she can actually hear the squish of water in her boots. Even the real thing, even combat, can’t be any worse than this, she tells herself.

‘Our OB-jective,’ Cole repeats with a weary sigh, ‘which is probably that way. Unless it isn’t. Everyone clear?’

They all nod or make murmuring noises.

They move out with Geer on point and Rio just behind him, glancing down from time to time at a compass and a small map. She’s been taught basic map-reading skills but nothing on the map matches anything on the ground, and in any event nothing but the ground directly beneath her feet is even visible, because the fog has rolled back in, and it’s a fog you could lose an elephant in. She’s looking at a map but the closest thing to a landmark is a mossy stone that looks as if someone planted it there shortly after Noah’s flood.