by J. F. Holmes
“German,” the colonel corrected automatically. “Now I just have to get a thousand ounces of gold.”
“Not my problem,” said the Tylwyth Teg, and she, too, vanished. More like she moved faster than the eye could see, but he knew she would be back if the Allies needed help again. Say one thing about the supernatural, they didn’t break their word. Just interpreted it to their best advantage.
“Colonel, Sir, I’ve got a BLACK ROCK priority situation south of Caen,” said his RTO, handing over a scrap of muddied paper. It had come as a call from their liaison with the British 5th Parachute Brigade. “Says here an 82nd trooper showed up at their lines around half an hour ago, claiming that his squad had run into a troll at a bridge south of Caen.”
The commander of Task Force 13 shook his head. They’d been getting reports like that all day long, and ninety-nine percent of them were complete bullshit. Tired men in combat saw all kinds of strange crap, but this might have to be checked out. “That must have been a hell of an off-course drop,” said Archer, looking at the map. “Did they send us coordinates?”
“No, but the paratrooper says it’s about here,” answered his RTO, putting his finger on a bend in the Orne River. “Should we let the Brits check it out?”
His boss pondered, turned to a gunnery sergeant who was talking into a field phone, and said, “Who do we have back here, Jack?”
“Sir, Captain Miller just brought this team in from tangling with a Morvarc’h that took out a landing craft. They’re pretty wet and tired; lost one man, two wounded. They’re in a shell hole over that way,” said the enlisted Marine, pointing over his shoulder.
“They’ll do.” He scrambled out of the hole, glad to get away from the blaring radios, trying hard to avoid the dead that were slowly being collected from the sands of Omaha Beach. He thought about calling in the Tylwyth to get information, but dealing with them was exhausting. How hard could killing a troll be, after all?
Captain Miller was sitting with his men, ten of them sleeping or eating. He looked up from the cold C-ration he was spooning into his mouth to see Colonel Archer crouching over him. Miller started to get up, but Archer slid down into the hole next to him.
“John,” said his commander, “I want your team to catch a high-speed boat back to Portsmouth, get a plane, and drop south of Caen to take out a troll holding an important bridge on the Panzer Lehr Division reinforcement route. Take ten more minutes, and then go see Gunny Jones, he’ll give you the necessary orders and passes. Have your men refit, but I expect you to be crossing the channel before dawn, and at the site within twenty-four hours.” Archer then stood up and scrabbled back up the sides, slipping on the sand. Before he disappeared into the growing darkness, he stopped, turned, and said, “Good job with that water horse.” Then he left.
“Well, doesn’t that beat all,” said Miller. “You heard the man, mount up, we’ve got a boat to catch.”
There were a few grumbles, one “Aye, aye, Sir,” and men were shaken awake. It had been a very tiring twenty-four hours, but hopefully they could sleep on the boat. Or on the truck ride to the airfield. Or on the plane. Hell, hanging from the risers on the way down. After all, how tough could a troll be? Yet here they were, caught between Heaven and Hell, as usual. “Gunny McCoy,” he said, fighting the fatigue, “go steal another BAR, and did you get that Lewis unjammed?”
The twenty-three-year-old Marine NCO just looked at him with that solid, West Virginia coal miner silence, then spit some tobacco juice to mix with the blood on the sand. Then he nodded once and turned away. In a regular Marine unit Miller would have had his stripes for his insubordinate manner, but this was Task Force 13. You needed men who would spit in the face of an officer AND the face of the Devil himself. Miller sat down and started scanning a map of the area to their south, looking for drop zones close to the bridge and analyzing the terrain.
“You heard the man,” McCoy said to the rest of the squad, making it almost sound like a series of grunts. “GIT!” And they did, two men climbing out of the shell hole to look for another BAR among the dead littering the beach.
****
“Jesus, look at that. Goddamn crabs are out already,” muttered Private Thorson. He and Corporal Bodi were walking among the dead, looking for another of the powerful .30 caliber automatic rifles. Small clawed creatures moved in the glow off the red flashlights, ripping pieces of flesh from the bodies.
Bodi shrugged and said in his relaxed California accent, “Nothing we can do about it, and I don’t think they care,” meaning the dead. Still, each man took delight in stomping on the shelled creatures as they looked through equipment. They were both big men, as Task Force 13 members usually were. Firepower and ammo, and lots of it, was the creed of the men who dealt with the spooky shit, as they called it. “Surf’s different here, you know,” he continued. “Different than Cali. Lot longer, the water stays shallower further out.”
“OK, got one,” said Thorson, lifting a complete BAR, still wrapped in its protective waterproof covering. “Thank God it’s only been a day, no time for this bitch to rust out on us.”
“This ain’t Guadalcanal, Thorson, and everything isn’t going to rust on us in two minutes. That seawater, though…” He stopped. Overhead was the howl of night fighters going after targets, and above that the drone of the heavy British Lancasters going to bomb German positions. Flashes from the Navy ships offshore lit the beach, a ripping sound as the heavy rounds passed overhead, and the crash of the surf all combined to create a wall of sound and light that seemed to deaden the senses. That and the fact both men had fired hundreds of rounds that day, pouring lead into both Nazis and demons alike, made hearing almost impossible. Though they didn’t know it, they’d been shouting.
“So what do you think of the Task Force? Seen enough to believe yet?” asked Bodi.
The private shrugged, picking up and then dropping a shattered weapon. He’d been a hasty assignment to the unit, added last week in preparation for the assault. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things on combat, some of them today, but you can’t tell me there isn’t an explanation for everything. World don’t work that way.”
“OK, Professor. I thought you Vikings were all about the supernatural; spirits, demons, heaven, hell, all that,” said Bodi.
“I’m an educated, modern man, Corporal. I’m going to be a science teacher when I get out of the Corps. Evolution and all that. There’s a scientific explanation to everything we saw today. Who knows, maybe the Nazis have been experimenting on people, like that super soldier stuff they always talk about. Like Captain America.”
“Wait,” said Bodi, holding up his hand, “can you hear that?” the corporal asked, turning toward the sea. Perhaps it was that he’d spent most of his life before the war on a fishing boat, plying the waters off San Diego, but Bodi could hear the soft singing that seemed to be everywhere around him. It rose early above the crash of the surf. “There’s music, and singing. My God, it’s beautiful!”
“I don’t hear anything!” said Killain. He was fairly new to the Task Force, transferring in from the fighting in the Pacific after being the sole survivor of a patrol that had tangled with a Tamangori, the legendary Polynesian giant maneater. He still wasn’t completely convinced he hadn’t imagined the whole thing, but some of what he’d seen since hitting the beach was making him question his sanity. Now his NCO was talking about music that just wasn’t there. His mind, focused as it was on science and the natural world, gave a ready explanation to everything around him, and he’d seen others crack from combat stress.
“Be right back,” said Bodi, dropping his rifle and splashing into the surf, vanishing into the darkness.
Thorson stood there, opened mouthed, tired and stunned. For a second his brain didn’t process what had just happened. Then he felt something touch his foot and looked down. A horribly wounded man, gasping and trailing his guts, was pulling himself across the sand toward the surf. The farm boy from Minnesota bent down to help, but then st
opped as he heard more moans, and he looked up as a naval barrage started. In the flashes he could see a half dozen men, all wounded in some way, staggering or crawling toward the surf. Several were already in it, and he looked for his NCO, but the gunfire flashes were intermittent, making it had to get anything but snapshots.
He stepped forward into the water, yelling, “Corporal Bodi!” but then stopped. As soon as his leather boot went from dry land to ocean, he heard it. Faintly, like it was coming from a far distance, a song in a strange language, but one that was haunting and beautiful. Though he didn’t recognize the words, he knew instinctively what they meant, and in the flashes the teenager saw…an impossibly beautiful woman, crouching atop one of the German anti-ship obstacles, almost as if it were a throne. At her feet huddled dark shapes, but he had no time for that, only her angelic song.
At that moment, one of the great battlewagons let loose with a full broadside, and the concussion made him step backward, stumbling, the guns going off less than a mile away. He fell almost comically, dropping onto the sand as the surf pulled away, and saw her again. This time, though, the beauty was gone, replaced by a hideous, scaled fish-like skin and razor-sharp teeth. One bare foot was pushing down on Corporal Bodi, shoving him down into the water, though he looked dazed and unresisting. A violent thought broke into his head, a remembered snippet from a briefing, and he knew he was seeing a Morgan, one of the sirens who haunted the coasts of Brittany.
All his doubts about the supernatural vanished, and a white-hot fury rose up in Thorson, an ancestral Norse hatred of the Fae who lured men to their deaths in the fields of the icy north. He bent down to the dead man crawling toward the surf, a sailor who must have been with the beach landing party. On the man’s equipment belt was the bulky shape of a signal flare pistol, and Killain ripped it off, took aim in the direction of the song, and fired. The flare arced out of the gun with a loud pop and a whoosh and landed on the water in front of the Morgan. Shrieking, it leaned down and extended long claws at Bodi, aiming to rip his throat out.
In the flare light, Thorson went through the motions of loading the BAR automatically, ripping at the cover enough to expose the magazine well and trigger housing. Another tear as he slammed the magazine home, and his hand found the bolt, racking it backward. It was all automatic to him now, drilled into muscle memory at Parris Island, and in combat on Guadalcanal, where a second could cost a life. He lined the front sight post up on the center of the V formed by the two steel posts of the obstacle, the Morgan a pale white glimmer, and squeezed the trigger. Leaning into the burst, he watched as the bullets impacted into her and sparked off the steel, the muzzle flashes illuminating the thing like a jerky motion picture. He let the barrel drop between each burst, and poured all twenty rounds out in quick succession. With an inhuman screech, pounded by heavy 30-06 rounds from less than twenty feet away, the Morgan was hammered off the obstacle and back into the sea, disappearing in welter of black blood.
Reloading, Killain stepped forward, but not far enough to touch the surf. “Bodi!” he yelled, “CORPORAL, GET OUT OF THE WATER!” The dazed Marine sat up, noticed the bodies floating all around him, and scrambled to shore.
“What the hell,” said the NCO, staring at the BAR in the still burning flare light, “just happened?”
“Beats the shit out of me, but I ain’t gonna doubt you again, Corp. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Chapter 3
“What the hell happened to you two?” McCoy growled. In the light of the red shrouded flashlights in the shell hole, his craggy face looked demonic.
“Uh, we ran into a Siren or some shit,” said Bodi, somewhat sheepishly.
“Did you kill it? Was that all that BAR fire I heard?” asked Captain Miller. He was always listening, though he rarely commented.
“I don’t think so, Sir,” said Thorson. “I put a whole magazine into it and stabbed it with my K-bar, but it seemed like the knife hurt it more than the bullets.”
“Cold steel, boy, cold steel,” interjected McCoy. “Hurts the Fae more than lead and copper.”
“That reminds me, Gunny. Make sure we have some extra rounds for the anti-tank gun, if we can find them. Might still be lead and copper jacket, but it packs a hell of a punch.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.” The shell hole danced with the hooded lights as the ten-man squad opened up packing crates, oiled weapons, loaded magazines, sharpened knives, doing all the things soldiers have done to ensure survival over the millennia.
It was just before false dawn when they moved out, shuffling across the beach, past still burning tanks and landing craft. As the light grew, a breeze started to pick up off the ocean, clearing away the stench of death that was already rising from corpses less than twenty-four hours old. They were all conscious that the huddled forms, half buried by sand and tide, could had been themselves, but for the grace of God.
The ramp of an LCVP thundered down, and they waded through the small waves and up onto the boat. McCoy counted the men as they came on board, then gave a thumbs up to the captain, who was talking to the sailors operating the boat. With the thudding of overworked diesel engines, the craft pulled back and turned, churning over the waves toward a Destroyer Escort waiting offshore. Even though it was only a twenty-minute trip, and the small craft rocked as it lurched over the waves, all of the men sat tiredly on the floor, not minding the cool water sloshing around on the deck. They knew the Task Force rear detachment would have clean and dry paratrooper coveralls waiting for them, and rest was something the veterans grabbed every chance they could.
Only Thorson stood, trying to see the armada assembled offshore. Dawn had yet to actually break, and they were only massive darker shapes, sometimes lit by gouts of fire as their guns hurled heavy shells inland. As he watched, salt spray stinging his eyes, he thought he saw something just breaking the tops of the waves.
“Hey, Gunny, there’s a—” he started to exclaim, but then a voice spoke from the darkness next to him.
“A U-Boat, yep. Don’t worry about it,” said the gnarled West Virginian. “It’ll be taken care of.”
“But…” the private said, then stopped. His eyes grew wider as he saw why the German submarine had surfaced before making its torpedo run. The hull seemed to twist in the water, and the propeller thrashed, briefly stirring up a wild foam, and finally spinning clear of the water in a wild blur. In the growing light, Thorson and McCoy could see the conning tower hatch fly open and small figures spill out. Then they saw a set of tentacles like flexible telephone poles wave in the air, flailing wildly, and then the sub rolled over and disappeared beneath the waves.
Behind the two men, a voice spoke, reciting a poem, a deep, melodious voice that had been made harsh yelling orders during years of seafaring.
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
From the back of the ship, the sailor steering looked at them with a huge grin as he finished the last lines. “The wee beasties don’t particularly like the underwater boats, so we don’t send out subs down this way. Jerry hasn’t quite figured it out yet.”
The captain had come up behind them to watch the final death of the enemy ship, and Thorson turned to him. “Sir, what was that poem?”
“That, Privat
e, was Lord Alfred Tennyson, writing about a mythical creature called the Kraken. Sort of like a giant squid. More myth than reality, or so it was thought. Apparently not.”
“Why aren’t all the ships throwing depth charges or something?” the younger man asked.
McCoy made to shove him back toward the deck, growling, “You ask too many questions, kid.”
“It’s OK, Gunny,” said Captain Miller. “Thorson, you just came to the Task Force a week ago, so let me explain. What did you see this morning when you and Bodi had that encounter with the Morgan? What do you remember of it?”
“Uh, well, I remember the singing, and the guys crawling, and, and emptying the BAR. Not much else, I’m sorry, Sir.”
“Don’t apologize, son. That’s the way it is,” said his commander. “Hell, you’re a veteran of the Pacific, right? How much do you remember about that?”
Thorson thought for a moment, then said, “Well, some things are really clear, some fights. Others, not so much.”
“Well, that’s the way it is, fighting the supernatural. You did good today; a lot of men would have left their buddy in the surf and run screaming. Your mind tends to blank out the horror, and in combat, guys tend to write off what they see and blame it on the craziness going on around them.”
“Is that…” started Thorson, and continued on despite a growl from McCoy, “is that why it isn’t in the papers? Because I’ve almost finished my degree, and I never heard of anything like that in the modern world.”
“Boy,” said the first sergeant, “you think Ernie Pyle is gonna write about ghouls eatin’ the bodies of dead American GIs? They’d lock him in the loony bin. Now get your gear, we gotta climb up the nets into that boat.” To emphasize his command, he gave the younger man a shove toward the front of the landing craft.