As she approached the river she saw that the bridge was still standing, and knew with a sinking heart that Curel’s ambush had succeeded. The partisans were nowhere in sight. The car Kurt must have brought with him had vanished too, stolen no doubt by Vipère.
She ditched her bike by the side of the road in an unsettling silence. The earlier vehicle traffic had gone on ahead and the last of it was yet to come. She felt alone, and yet knew she couldn’t be.
She saw the bodies as she ran down the slope to the water. They were tossed under the trestle like dolls, the gray uniforms spattered with red.
It must have been a massacre.
Kurt was a little apart from the others and as she skidded to a stop on the slippery grass she fell across him. He groaned and stirred and she realized he was still alive.
Sobbing with gratitude, she pulled him into her lap and sat holding him against her shoulder, patting his cheeks. One of his arms hung crookedly, soaked with blood. His eyelids flickered.
“Wake up,” Brigitte said sternly.
His head lolled.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered, looking around for aid. Of course there was none.
He coughed.
“Open your eyes, soldier,” she barked in German.
He opened his eyes.
“Brigitte,” he said groggily.
“That’s right,” she said. “Can you stand up?”
He tried and managed to lurch shakily to his knees. “What…you doing here?”
“I figured out where you were and came after you. You must have been left for dead.”
“The others...” he began.
“I think they’re dead,” she said.
“See.”
Obediently she left him and futilely checked the other three men for signs of life.
“They’re gone, Kurt,” she said to him. She didn’t mention that so was the dynamite they must have been carrying. Vipère hadn’t missed a thing.
She sat next to him on the grass and supported him with her arm.
“They were waiting for us,” he gasped. “They knew...”
“They knew because I warned them,” she answered.
He looked at her, his blue eyes fogged with weakness and pain.
“You told me you wouldn’t be with the demolition detail,” she explained simply.
He sighed and shook his head. “You never...give up,” he whispered.
“Not so far,” she replied. “Do you think you can you walk?”
He tried to move and shook his head.
“Can’t,” he gasped.
“All right, all right,” she said soothingly. “Then we wait.”
“For what?”
“The rest of the garrison will be along sooner or later, won’t it?” she asked him.
He nodded wearily.
“They’ll help us,” she said, with more assurance than she felt.
It was entirely possible that Kurt would be dead by the time they got there, but she couldn’t move him and she couldn’t leave him. She had to wait.
Kurt slumped, and she saw that he had passed out again. She eased him to the ground and ripped out the hem of her uniform skirt. She unclipped her tape scissors from the holder at her waist and began to cut the material into strips for a tourniquet.
It was full dark before Brigitte saw the lights of the German convoy in the distance. She dragged and prodded a protesting Kurt up the hill, and by the time they reached the road the first car had stopped at the bridge, with the others slowing behind it.
“I have a wounded soldier here,” she said in German to the driver of the staff car, as he approached her. Kurt was leaning heavily on her shoulder. “Three others are dead.”
The corporal turned to look at the truck behind him. Becker emerged from the cab, his erect carriage unmistakable. The two Germans met and conferred quickly, then the corporal moved to Kurt’s other side and took his weight from Brigitte. Becker walked over to Brigitte and peered at her in the glow of the headlights, taking in his aide’s condition at the same time.
“Mademoiselle Duclos,” Becker said.
She looked back at him, waiting.
“How did you come to be here?”
Brigitte was silent.
“I see,” Becker said. “I don’t know how I could have missed it. You are Hesse’s ‘friend’, is that not so?”
Brigitte bit her lip. This unreadable man had Kurt’s fate, and hers, in the palm of his hand.
“Have you been struck dumb?” Becker said sarcastically. He turned and issued a couple of curt orders, telling the corporal to put Hesse in his car and then get others to help him retrieve the bodies. As the man ran to obey Becker added to Brigitte, “How very incestuous we have all become. Did you engineer this ambush?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Your efforts were in vain, Mademoiselle Duclos. I will simply report this unfortunate development and another detail will be sent out later to blow the bridge. A little less efficient, I grant you, a little more time consuming, but I don’t think Hesse’s life was worth the candle, do you?”
“He’s not dead yet,” she said hoarsely.
“No thanks to you and your assassins,” he answered harshly. He watched as the dead men were carried up the hill. “Does this look like it was a fair fight to you?”
“We fight fire with fire,” she replied, holding his gaze.
They both turned to look as Hesse was eased into the back seat of the corporal’s car.
“I could arrest you,” Becker said to her flatly. “I could bring you back to Germany in my custody.”
“And what would happen to Hesse then?” Brigitte challenged, remembering Kurt’s affection for his boss, which she assumed was returned. “He can’t go on with you, he’ll never make it to wherever you’re heading. There’s a clinic just down the road in Saint-Dizier. Let me take him there.”
“And why should I do that?” Becker asked.
“To help Kurt,” Brigitte replied.
“It will not help him to be taken prisoner when the Americans arrive,” Becker responded.
“I can handle that. I’ll tell them he was working with me, with the Résistance. The others in the organization will back me up.”
“Can you guarantee so much, little lady?” Becker asked archly.
“I can,” Brigitte replied, raising her chin. “My reputation is very solid. They remember my brothers and they will do it for me.”
Becker studied her a moment, then made up his mind. “Bachman,” he said to the corporal, who had returned to stand at his side. “Take the car and bring Hesse and this woman where she directs you, then follow after us and catch up with the convoy. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the corporal said, obviously surprised.
Brigitte held her breath. Becker was taking an awful chance. For all he knew this could be a setup; she might be plotting to lead his man and his vehicle into a trap.
Becker turned back to her. “The boy means a lot to me,” he said. “I must be assured that he will receive the attention he needs if I leave him in your charge.”
“He means a lot to me, too. You have my word that I’ll take care of him, Colonel,” Brigitte replied.
Becker examined her once more. Then he said quietly, “I think your word will be good enough.”
He got back in the cab. “Adieu, Mademoiselle,” Becker said in farewell from the window, and gestured for the convoy to move on.
Brigitte climbed into the back seat of the car with Kurt and carefully lifted his head into her lap. He was semi-conscious, almost dazed, either from confusion at what was happening or loss of blood. She stroked his hair soothingly and he settled down, breathing more evenly.
Brigitte checked his bandage and was happy to see that the bleeding had slowed considerably. But he needed treatment immediately. As the driver turned away from the convoy and toward Saint-Dizier she tried to remember the name of the doctor she knew at the clinic.
He would help. His family had lived in Fains when he was small and he’d gone to school with Thierry.
Resnais, that was his name. Charles Resnais. He had brown hair and a mole on his cheek.
She would find him.
Brigitte planned her next move, settling back for the ride.
Chapter 14
Dan Harris shifted the position of his bad leg on its cushion and reached through the mosquito netting surrounding him like a diaphanous cloud. He groped in the dark for the cigarettes on the metal stand beside his hospital bed, trying to shift his weight silently as his fingers closed on the half empty packet.
Gotcha, he thought. He slipped a cigarette out of the wrapper and felt around under his pillow for the matches. At the same time he glanced down the aisle of sleeping patients, alert for the flash of white or the swish of a uniform skirt that would indicate the approach of the nurse. The rules here were worse than in boot camp and a guy had to be pretty ingenious to cop a smoke.
He shielded the flare of the match with his hand and lit up, sucking in a gray lungful, closing his eyes with pleasure. He rested back against the pillow and concentrated on the sounds coming through the screened window behind his head, the litany of the Pacific theater: the murmur of banyan trees soughing in the trade winds, waves pounding rhythmically on the distant beach, the parrots and macaws calling nocturnal messages to one another in shrill, staccato bird language. No one listening could guess that just beyond the soothing lullaby of surf and rustling palm fronds raged the ugly cacophony of war.
He’d been away from it for two months, ever since he’d been shot out of the sky over Okinawa like a clay target at a skeet match. He’d ended up here, in the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital on the island of Oahu in the U.S. Territory of Hawaii.
He’d never seen such a preposterously gorgeous place in his life. Before this assignment “Pearl” had just been a name to him, the place where an infamous Japanese attack began the American phase of the war. Descriptions had not prepared him for the reality. The ocean was a blinding, glittering gemstone, sometimes aquamarine, sometimes emerald, sometimes sapphire. The sand was sifted sugar, the sky a uniform, cloudless blue. And the temperature hovered between 75 and 85 all the time, like the perpetually controlled environment one imagined in paradise.
Not that he’d been in any shape to appreciate it right after he was wounded. He had vague memories of his leg on fire, both before surgery and after it. Then came long weeks of recuperation, during which he was able to do little besides sleep and pray for the next injection when he was awake. But gradually the pain faded and he could sit in the long, shimmering afternoons on the back lawn of the hospital, looking past the lush greenery to the endless expanse of the sea.
And now he was getting antsy. He wished they would release him. All right, maybe he wasn’t able to walk that well yet. But he could get around, and they’d told him he would have a limp anyway so what was the purpose of keeping him flat on his back? Even paradise could get boring after a while.
He took another deep drag on his cigarette and wondered how the rest of the men in his outfit were doing. He’d been brought to the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station at Mokapu early in the year for special training in the “Corsair” fighter planes, and then assigned to the Wildcats Squadron. It was the best job he’d ever had and he’d held it for all of about ninety days.
Harris had loved the trim, nifty Corsairs. They recalled to him his childhood dreams of flying, like thistledown, on the wings of the wind. In the Corsair he was alone in the cockpit, in total control of the plane. He much preferred the fighters to the Air Force bombers he had flown in Europe. In the B-25s he always had to consider the safety of his crew, afraid to take chances he would not have shirked alone. But the Corsair freed him of that restriction, which was one of the reasons he was currently planted in this hospital bed like a petunia. He’d gotten a little too creative and flown low on a run, caught some Japanese flak. The next thing he knew he was swimming.
He hoped he would be considered well enough soon to be reassigned to the base school. He’d been told that flying was out for a while (he refused to consider that the prohibition might be permanent), but he could certainly instruct the trainees. When he was last there the pilots had been learning the new techniques of close air support for beach landings. These lessons came in handy when they were all put on the alert for the Ryukyu Islands assault which began the first week in April.
The Ryukyus were an imperial prefecture, just to the south of the Japanese mainland, and Okinawa was the largest and most important island in the chain. It took three months to conquer it and Harris had made it almost to the end of the campaign. He was shot down in the East China Sea after knocking out several oil storage tanks on the ground. He was rescued, drifting in his life jacket, two days later by an aircraft carrier with a sharp eyed second lieutenant in the conning tower.
He grimaced and moved his leg again, fitfully. The metal fragments taken from his thigh had left him with a purpled, horseshoe scar and a deteriorated femoral muscle, which he was assured could be partially restored with programmed exercise. So far he hadn’t seen any of it; they’d kept him nailed to his bed so long that his feet had almost forgotten the feel of the floor. Lately he was able to lurch to the john and so on, but waltzes would be a long time off in his future.
He looked up, startled, as the glare of a flashlight caught him full in the face.
“Just as I thought,” Lieutenant Cady whispered fiercely. “Major Harris, put out that cigarette.” She lowered the beam of her torch, leaving it just bright enough to see him.
He smiled at her charmingly.
“Don’t grin at me, my boy. I could smell that thing burning all the way down the hall at the station, and I knew right where to find the culprit. Put it out, I said.”
“Come on, Cady,” Harris said, wheedling. “Let me finish it. I’ve only got a couple of drags left.” He kept his voice low but his tone was vehement.
Grace Cady put her hands on her hips and shook her head, suppressing a smile. A career navy nurse old enough to be his mother, she had seen all kinds come and go and recognized this kid for the natural con artist he was. Yet she couldn’t help liking him. All summer she’d watched him conniving his way around the rules, but she found it hard to really resent the liberties he took with her staff. His Okinawa exploits had earned him a Purple Heart and the Silver Star, along with the Major’s gold leaf now pinned to the uniform jacket draped over a chair. And a leg that would plague him for the rest of his life.
“Finish it, then,” she said. “I’ll stand right here until you do. And where’s the rest of the pack?”
“This is the last one, I think,” he said innocently.
“Hmmph. ‘You think.’ A lie if I ever heard one. And if I find out who’s been smuggling them in to you there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Why don’t you sit down and keep me company for a while?” he said quickly, diverting her attention from his accomplice, a day orderly who bought him Camels at the PX.
“Don’t start that routine with me, Major,” Grace told him. “I know it works with the young nurses but I’m a little too old to be taken in by your baby blues or the fruit salad on your chest. Silver Stars have to obey regulations too. It’s 3:00 a.m. and the smoking lamp is not lit.”
Harris sighed and crushed out his cigarette in the bottom of his metal drinking cup. Lieutenant Cady pulled back the mosquito netting and took the cup from his hand.
“I’ll just rinse this or the butt will be floating in your morning coffee,” she said dryly. She set off smartly, shoes squishing on the tile floor, and returned to place the cup on his nightstand. He watched her, his pale eyes bright in the semi-darkness.
“What’s the matter, marine?” she asked him sympathetically, turning back to the bed. “Can’t sleep?”
“Guess not.”
“That leg bothering you?” Cady asked.
“The usual,” he said, shaking his head.
&
nbsp; “Do you want something for it?”
He gestured disgustedly. “No more happy juice, Cady. I’m just beginning to get that dope fog out of my head.”
She sat down in his visitor’s chair, deciding that she could take a break after all. The other patients were asleep and she’d already passed meds. The night breeze rattled the leaves of the chinaberry bush outside the window screen as she said firmly, “You ask for something if you still need it. You almost lost that leg, Major, and I know you feel it.”
“It’s a lot better than it was,” he replied, and she let the subject drop. She knew better than to try to get his type to admit a weakness.
“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. She felt he was lonely; he spent long intervals staring into space and he always seemed restless, on edge.
“A date with Betty Grable?” he suggested, folding his arms behind his head.
She made a wry face. “Sorry, Major. But I don’t know what you would need with her. A good looking flyboy like you must have a girl back home.”
“I’ve got a girl,” he said softly. “Not home but in France.”
“France?”
He nodded. “I met her when I was working with the Résistance before the States got into the war. She’s from Boston. She was married to a Frenchman killed right after the outbreak of fighting in Europe.”
“Pretty girl?” Cady asked, smiling.
He sighed. “A beauty. Creamy skin and green eyes. Red hair.”
“Red hair!” Cady said. “My, my.”
“Smart, too. And brave! When I was shot down over Germany in ‘42 she and her partisan friends hid me right in her house in a French village until they could get me out of the country.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Major, you seem to spend a lot of time getting shot down,” Cady said teasingly.
“Only twice,” he said, his lips twisting.
“I thought the object of the exercise was to stay up,” she replied.
“Stop ragging me, Cady. I’m an injured man,” he said, with exaggerated weariness.
She stood up. “Then I’ll let you get your rest. Maybe you’ll hear from the redhead soon.”
Clash by Night (A World War II Romantic Drama) Page 33