The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  It had been four days since Cade and his battalion had embarked on barges to the ships awaiting them in the harbor. Four days since the HMS Amsterdam and dozens of other vessels had churned away under cover of darkness, to the fleet’s rendezvous point off the Isle of Wight.

  Adair turned a worried eye skyward, toward the starless heavens. Overcast weather had settled over England and the Atlantic coast of France, and the leaden clouds refused to budge. Eisenhower had already postponed the attack once, at the last possible moment the night before, on account of foul weather over the English Channel.

  Tonight, another stormhead had threatened to halt the invasion force—a disaster that would likely have exposed the Allies’ attack plans to the enemy. After Eisenhower was assured that the weather would break in the Allies’ favor—courtesy of Adair’s pact with MERCAEL—it had fallen to the general to decide whether to cast the die of Fate.

  With characteristic brevity he’d set history in motion: “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The concision of the order garnered Adair’s admiration.

  He stood now on the end of the quay, staring into the night toward Weymouth Harbor, imagining thousands of ships, more than 150,000 men, and a fleet of aircraft, all racing toward what he was certain would become a turning point in human history.

  And swept up in its inexorable tide was one young man whose success or failure would determine whether all this effort had been made in vain.

  God be with you, lad.

  JUNE 6, 1944

  D-DAY

  50

  There was sick, and there was two-days-of-stormy-seas-inside-a-tin-can-without-windows sick. It was worse than any illness Cade had ever known; he was cold sober but staggered like a drunk as decks, bulkheads, and overheads seemed to tumble around him. His head ached, his vision was blurry, and any food he dared send down to his stomach came right back up.

  The decks inside the Amsterdam were slick with vomitus. An hour earlier the Rangers had been fed pancakes and coffee, a meal intended to reduce the effects of seasickness. As far as Cade could tell, it hadn’t worked.

  Desperate for air and feeling another surge from his belly, Cade struggled up steep, puke-covered steps to a watertight door that opened onto the main deck. He lurched through it into a wall of bodies. At least half of the Rangers on board had crowded the deck in search of relief from the seasickness. Wind gusted through the ranks; sea spray crashed over the bow and doused the huddled men. The lucky ones had staked their claim to spots along the railings, so they could heave their guts into the ocean with some bit of their dignity intact. The rest, like Cade, were left to paint one another’s boots and apologize between hurls.

  Every time Cade thought he was done shouting his intestines onto the deck, someone else near him started to retch, and his misery began all over again.

  Above the roars of wind and engines, a deep and ominous droning permeated the night. Sleeving spittle from his lips, Cade looked up. Against a bank of clouds lit by moonlight, he saw the silhouettes of more aircraft than he could count. Bombers, fighter escorts, paratrooper transports, all lined up like great black serpents stretched across the sky, reaching from one end of the horizon to the other. If all went to plan, the bombers would soften up the coastal defenses while the paratroopers would strike inland, creating pockets of resistance behind enemy lines and cutting off the Germans’ avenues of retreat.

  As if they’d even think of falling back. We couldn’t be that lucky.

  A shift began in the bodies around him; some of the men abandoned their places on the railing to stagger belowdecks, perhaps in the hope of stealing a moment of sleep before the order came down to man the Higgins boats. Cade stole a spot near the bow. He was rewarded by a stinging mist of seawater in his face.

  He winced, then wiped the water from his eyes. It was cold at the bow, but it beat being cooped up belowdecks, mired in a swamp of stink. At least up here he could strain to see the horizon and recover his equilibrium. All around the Amsterdam, the Allied armada cut through the winedark sea, thousands of ships cruising in close formation. The HMS Ben-my-Chree, which carried the rest of the Second Ranger Battalion, was so close off the starboard side that Cade imagined he could leap across the divide.

  Pulses of red light in the sky, just beyond the horizon ahead of the armada. The bombers were doing their work. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Cade tried not to imagine what would happen if one of those bombs went astray and hit Kein’s trapped bunker on Pointe du Hoc. Instead he cast his thoughts backward, to the last time he had traveled the open sea on a steamship such as this: the night the Athenia had gone down, victim of a U-boat’s torpedo, its sinking a prelude to his parents’ demise and the start of his own mission of vengeance. He knew now he had grown beyond that shallow aim. For months he had brooded on his reaction to killing Siegmar—how empty it had felt. How pointless.

  My parents don’t need me to avenge them. They need me to honor them.

  Piercing whistles shrilled. Staff Sergeant Sykes moved up the port side of the main deck, and Staff Sergeant Kelly shadowed him to starboard.

  “Everybody, get below!” Sykes barked. “Hustle, dammit!”

  Kelly shouted, “Back to your berthing compartments, on the double!”

  Sykes snapped, “Any Ranger on this deck in one minute gets my boot up his ass!”

  Cade followed the rest of the Rangers into the bowels of the ship. The sergeants hounded the men all the way to their quarters, where they bellowed new orders.

  “Grab your shit and get ready to roll!” Sykes said. “Buddies, check each other’s gear! Keep your weapons clear and your ammo dry!”

  Chatter dwindled as the Rangers rounded up their equipment, then tied condoms over the barrels of their rifles, carbines, and pistols to guard them from sand and seawater. Unlike most troops hitting the beach that day, the Rangers of Force A were traveling without heavy combat packs, to facilitate the scaling of the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. The unit’s best climbers, or “top monkeys,” weren’t even toting M1 rifles; they were armed only with pistols and carbines.

  Cade and Dutch checked each other’s gear, then found their places on the ready line.

  A soul-shaking boom rocked the ship, followed by another, and another. Within moments a devil’s drumbeat resonated through the hull—the Allied naval batteries had begun their bombardment of Normandy’s coastline.

  Sergeant Sykes moved down the line, checking each man’s gear, delivering slaps on the back, and telling each man some variation of, “Relax, those big guns are doing our work for us.” One blast dimmed the lights inside the berthing compartment. Sykes patted Cade’s shoulder as he passed. “Keep breathing, it’s supposed to do that.”

  Cade closed his eyes and tried not to let the tooth-rattling concussions of the artillery break his nerve. He drew a deep breath and pictured his parents smiling down upon him.

  Mom, Dad … give me the strength to make you proud.

  They seemed to go on forever, those bone-rattling cannonades, merciless godhammers from which no one could escape, endless salvos of deafening violence. They were overpowering. Cade found them impossible to block out; he couldn’t think of anything else. All he could sense was his own body shaking before the might of the navy’s big guns.

  Just before 0400, another shriek of the sergeant’s whistle. “We’re moving to the boats! Do it like we practiced! On me!” Sykes blew his whistle again and led Second Platoon out of its berthing area, through the passageways, and up the ladders to the ship’s main deck.

  With every step the Rangers took toward topside, the guns grew louder. When the men charged two-by-two onto the main deck, Cade couldn’t hear the sergeant’s orders anymore. All he could do was follow the men in front of him. Then he looked up.

  The sky was burning.

  Fire jetted from hundreds of naval guns on and around the Amsterdam. Gold and orange streaked across the dome of night, lighting up shredded veils of smoke through which the Allied
fleet surged. Each earsplitting blast of artillery lit up waves kicked into frothy peaks by the armada’s passage.

  Oiled tarps were pulled off of the LCAs, which had been made ready for troops to board while they were level with the main deck. British coxswains settled in at the controls of the assault craft, to conduct final equipment checks before deployment.

  Sykes stood next to LCA 862, barking Second Platoon over its gunwales and into position. “Pack ’em in! Nuts to butts! Move!” The boat was wide enough for four men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder if they held their breath. Cade and Dutch were in the middle of the LCA, next to Paddy and Chapeau. Ahead of them were Rooster, Bandit, T-Bone, and Hopalong. At their backs were NCOs—Sergeants Waldman, Sykes, and DeStefano, and Corporal Brett. Assault Section Two filed in behind them, followed by Lieutenant Leagans.

  The sergeants gave thumbs-up to Leagans, who relayed the signal to the boat’s coxswain. The Higgins boats were lowered into the black and choppy surf between the massive transport ships. Overhead, another fusillade of naval artillery rent the sky and shook the sea.

  As soon as the guide ropes were cleared, the pilot gunned the LCA’s motor, and the landing craft lurched and rolled through waves that seemed to batter its hull from every direction. Less than a minute after getting under way, every man in the boat was sopping wet and bailing water from the deck with his helmet.

  Hunkered down in the middle of the boat, his shoulder to its outer bulkhead, Cade caught only glimpses of the sea ahead, whenever the LCA’s nose dipped. Above its sides he watched the capital ships fall behind, their crew-served deck guns pummeling the coast with steel and fire.

  Then there were no more behemoths flanking the LCA. Just a dozen or so other small boats coursing through a terrifying yawn of open water.

  Someone at the front of Cade’s LCA threw up. In seconds half of the platoon was doubled over and painting the deck. Dry heaves left Cade coughing and spluttering—and grateful his stomach was already empty. The only man who seemed unaffected was Leagans.

  Cade sleeved the bile from his chin and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I guess Lou’s too good to hurl with the rest of us.”

  Dutch spit out bits of puke. “Must have gravel in his guts.”

  “Good for him. Ask if he can spare any.”

  The flotilla raced toward shore with the rising tide. A steady barrage of Allied naval artillery fire soared over and ahead of them, hammering enemy emplacements. Ever-present behind the shelling were the purr of the LCA’s engine, the gray roar of wind, and the sharp slapping of waves against the hull.

  Cade might have found the LCA’s slalom through the sea mesmerizing if it hadn’t been so jarring. He tried not to fixate on the dangers awaiting him and the others, but it was all he could think of—until a cry of alarm went up from the port side.

  Chapeau pointed: One of the supply boats had swamped. Before Cade could wonder what might be done, the craft sank. Staring at the empty space from which it had vanished, he hoped to see its crew surface, but none of them did.

  Haunted by the speed at which the supply boat had foundered and disappeared, Cade felt that the waves spewing over his LCA’s bow had taken on a new degree of menace.

  Minutes later another shout went up, and more fingers pointed, toward the starboard bow. This time one of the LCAs had swamped. Neither the lieutenant nor any of the NCOs in Cade’s boat acknowledged the sinking assault craft, or voiced any thought of stopping to render aid. Cade watched the commander of Dog Company and more than twenty of his men flail in the freezing water as the rest of the flotilla left them behind.

  Dutch nudged Cade. “What’s takin’ so long? Shouldn’t we be on the beach by now?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  A rifleman at the front of the boat peeked over the bow and complained to Sergeant Waldman, “That ain’t Pointe du Hoc.”

  Worried murmurs traveled through the ranks. One of the medics, Corporal Larry “Pow-Wow” Pawlikowski, leaned over the starboard gunwale just long enough to steal a look, then dropped back into ranks shaking his head. “Something’s fucked. That’s Pointe de la Percée.”

  Slick, one of the sergeants, sounded worried. “Force B’s target? Fuck, that’s three miles from du Hoc. Where are these Limey assholes taking us?”

  The men looked to Leagans for answers, but he was busy covering his conversation with one hand while he groused over the radio handset to someone—maybe fleet command, maybe Colonel Rudder in the lead boat, there was no way for Cade to know for sure. But while the lieutenant argued with the coxswain and whoever stood on the other end of the radio frequency, the predawn twilight that had been meant to cloak their landing at Pointe du Hoc gave way to the flat illumination of a gray dishwater dawn.

  So much for the element of surprise, Cade brooded.

  Less than a thousand yards from landing on the wrong beach, the nine LCAs, their remaining supply boat, and their four DUKWs, or “Ducks” in GI jargon, all made a sharp right turn and charged westward parallel to the Normandy coastline.

  “This ain’t good,” Rooster grumbled to Bandit.

  “No shit,” the corporal said.

  Immediately, Cade understood their trepidation. LCAs were sluggish and hard to maneuver under the best of conditions. The Ducks, heavy amphibious vehicles that had been fitted with turntable-mounted extendable ladders acquired from the London Fire Brigade—an innovation that the army hoped would be the Rangers’ secret weapon, by enabling a swift ascent of the cliffs—were even slower and harder to control in rough seas. Now they were all driving against the current, which would make them slower still. In other words, prime targets for German troops to harass with sniper fire and mortars from the cliffs above.

  Less than three minutes later, the Germans did exactly that.

  Precision shots from high-power rifles punched through two men at a time, spraying the other men in the LCA with their blood. T-Bone died before he hit the deck, but Hopalang, one of the platoon’s top monkeys, clasped his hand over his bloodied flank. “Medic! I need a patch-up!”

  Chapeau scrambled over with his medical kit as more enemy fire pinged off the LCA’s front ramp. The boat shook as mortar rounds detonated in the water close by. Then a boom rattled Cade’s teeth, and he looked over the side in time to see one of the Ducks belch fire and smoke before it vanished under the water.

  The gray ghost of Pointe du Hoc hove into view, a forbidding V-shaped mass jutting into the Channel. It was just as the landing plans had described: steep cliffs above an exposed strip of beach. Except now all of it was concealed by morning fog and a pall of smoke that made the surrounding terrain nearly unrecognizable.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Private William “Hillbilly” Hillman. “Look at those fucking cliffs. Three old ladies with brooms could knock us offa there.”

  Cade frowned. “Then we better hope the Jerries didn’t bring their grandmas.”

  On either side of the boat, mortar rounds and shells from inland artillery rained down like divine retribution. All Cade could do was watch Hell open up before him. One minute stretched into two, but time felt slow, almost elastic, stretched by his adrenaline and fear.

  German bullets raked his LCA.

  Machine-gun and small-arms fire pelted the boat’s hull with an unholy percussion, a staccato of pings and thuds. Ricochets pealed off the bulkheads, and passing shots buzzed like insects as they tore past over the Rangers’ heads.

  A stray round caromed off Bandit’s helmet, provoking a mumbled curse and a deeper bending of the boyish private’s knees. “That was close.”

  Paddy grinned. “’Swhat you get for not keeping your—”

  Paddy slumped to the deck at Cade’s feet, blood sheeting over his face. Cade knew at a glance the man was dead, just as he realized he’d never heard the shot that took him.

  Falling screeches followed by deep booms: mortar rounds. Shells slammed down amid the incoming boats. Explosions from inland artillery shot up geysers of water
between Cade’s LCA and the beach. Sykes marched forward and aft in the middle of the boat, shouting over the wind, waves, and engine. “Clear the ramp! When it drops, haul ass. Don’t bunch up! Scatter and go forward. Three men make a target. One man’s a waste of ammo. Don’t get pinned down! If you stop moving, you’re dead.”

  Bullets pattered against the LCA’s hull like lead popcorn. A mortar round kicked up a blast wave and a jet of water off the port side, dousing the sodden Rangers in numbing-cold salt water. Cade suppressed a shiver as the wind cut through his sopping-wet uniform.

  Beside him, Chapeau evacuated one last bit of bile from his stomach onto Cade’s boots. “Sorry,” he said with an abashed shrug.

  “It’s fine, I had to polish ’em later, anyway.”

  At the back of the boat, the coxswain lifted his fist. “One minute!”

  “Okay, boys,” Leagans said, doing his best to project confidence. “Look sharp!”

  The chatter of the Germans’ MG-42s and the roars of detonating mortar shells was overwhelming. Cade could barely hear the boat through the hellish clamor.

  An off-white flutter of motion—a blood-spattered seagull landed on one of the LCA’s bulkheads, opposite Cade. It looked him in the eye and shrieked like a banshee.

  The men around Cade noted the seabird’s arrival with confusion.

  Sykes muttered, “… the fuck?”

  Dutch squinted at the bloodied gull. “Does it have a death wish or something?”

  The others tried to shoo it, but the bird held firm, and never took its eyes off Cade as it loosed another bloodcurdling screech.

  Cade stared in wonder at the seagull—and remembered Adair’s raven familiar, Kutcha, trying to warn him of the attack on the Athenia, seconds before the torpedoes struck.

  The gull shrieked a third time, blood dripping from its curved beak.

  Cade abandoned his grenades. “Drop your gear! Get over the side!”

  Sykes grabbed Cade. “The fuck are you doing?”