Moon Above, Moon Below

by William Peter Grasso

  Another dozen American tanks were damaged but capable of fighting. Eclipse fell into that category; the grenade explosion on her aft deck had damaged access plates and the engine’s air manifolds. She wouldn’t be drivable very far until repairs were made, but all her guns and radios still worked. “Don’t look like we’ll be doing much moving until we get gassed up, anyway,” Sean told his crew as the medic pulled metal fragments from his arm and shoulder. “Scrounge some of the dead Zippos and see what you can come up with in the way of parts.”

  Kowalski asked, “You gonna be okay, Sarge?”

  “Yeah, I’ll live. Now didn’t I just tell you to do something? Get your ass moving.”

  At his CP, Colonel Abrams was getting bad news from 4th Armored HQ at Alençon. “They’ve got some big change of plans they won’t talk about on the air,” he told his staff. “What it means to us, though, is our resupply convoy is being delayed. Again.”

  Dammit, Abrams thought, armor’s supposed to be able to shoot, move, and communicate. Until I get some gas, I can only do two out of three. Congratulations, Creighton—you’re the proud commander of sixty some-odd steel bunkers that are stuck in place at the moment. On second thought, bunkers my ass…they’re sitting ducks.

  It was 20 minutes past sunrise when the American bombers struck Sées. Two squadrons of B-26 Marauders at medium altitude unloaded 90 tons of high explosives on the town. Four miles south on the highway from Alençon to Sées, the lead elements of 4th Armored Division’s column felt the ground shake and watched as clouds of gray smoke and dust rose over the town. They were too far away to actually see the bombs as they fell but were grateful their distance from it all was, at least this time, keeping them safe. They knew those bombs were being dropped by young men every bit as terrified and prone to error as they were. And once released, errant bombs could never be recalled. They answered only to gravity and the wind, caring nothing for who or what might be beneath them.

  Even minus the units of Combat Command Fox, 4th Armored was a formidable fighting force. Despite their numbers being further depleted by combat casualties, they still numbered nearly 9000 men in tanks, half-tracks, and trucks stretching for miles along the highway, equal in tank strength to CCF but double its strength in infantry and artillery. They were encouraged to see most of the bombs had actually impacted within the town, not the usual off-target scattering ground troops were used to seeing from high-flying bombers. No flak had been hurled at the Marauders, just strings of tracers, representing futile attempts to hit out-of-range targets. None of the planes seemed to be in any sort of trouble as they turned back to the west after dumping their loads.

  “That’s a good sign,” General Wood said. “No flak means probably no eighty-eights left working in the town to tear up our armor. All we have to do now is deal with everything left alive in there.” Picking up the microphone of his command radio, he announced, “All units, execute Ops Order Able. Let’s roll, boys.”

  There had been no sleep for the citizens of Gacé, not since the brief, percussive discord of battle in the middle of the night had begun. Once the shooting stopped, the German survivors had spilled back into the town with the roar of vehicle engines and the frenzied shouting of men who were convinced their life and death struggle was not over, merely paused. The people of Gacé felt certain that struggle had, at long last, come to them, too. Those few not already in their cellars made their descent with great haste.

  In the ensuing hours, however, the guns remained silent. Wehrmacht soldiers and townspeople alike were expecting an attack which never came. Instead, like a cancer in remission, an uneasy stillness settled over the town, lessened not at all by the sunrise.

  In her grand-mère’s kitchen, Sylvie could find only spoiled milk. Determined to prepare the morning coffee as she knew the old woman preferred, she counted out some ration coupons and announced, “I’m going to the market. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Grand-mère replied, “Very well, but be careful, my dear girl. Very careful.”

  As Sylvie rode away on her bicycle, she didn’t notice two men in suits and ties on the street behind her. If she’d seen them, she’d have known one was the mayor of Gacé. She wouldn’t have known the other was Gestapo. Or that the mayor was pointing her out and whispering the word maquis to the German.

  Fifteen minutes later, Grand-mère looked out from her parlor window, wondering what was taking Sylvie so long to return. What she saw in the middle of the deserted street provided the answer: a toppled bicycle and a shattered milk bottle.

  When they removed her blindfold, Sylvie knew exactly where she was: I’m at the Gacé police station. I was only in that car for a few minutes. We couldn’t have gone very far. And now they’re going to lock me in a cell.

  As the cell door slammed behind her, she knew two things: someone had betrayed her, and the only reason she wasn’t already dead was they intended to torture information about the maquis from her.

  Tommy Moon looked over the briefing papers and aerial photos for the morning’s mission. His flight would be providing general support for Combat Command Fox once again. There was a specific mission requirement, too: photo recon had identified the building that housed the German HQ in Gacé. CCF didn’t have a clear view of that building from their hide two miles to the east and was under a directive not to shoot artillery into towns indiscriminately. Therefore, it would fall to the Air Force to take out the HQ with as little collateral damage to the town as possible.

  “According to our intel,” the briefing officer said, “the building functions as the barracks for the gendarmerie national.”

  Tommy asked, “You mean the police?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. The police station.”

  “Hmm…all these other buildings around it…are they all the same height?”

  “Some of the ones to the east are taller,” the briefing officer replied. “I guess that’s why CC Fox can’t see the three-story police station from where they’re at. The ones on the west side of the street, though, should be shorter. Two stories, tops.”

  Herb Clinchmore, Blue Flight’s number four, said, “You’re dying to try out those new rockets, aren’t you, Tommy?”

  “Yeah…but I don’t think the approach to this target will work for rockets. Too steep. We’ll have another look once we’re up there, but this looks like a low-level glide bombing job.”

  “Swell,” Clinchmore said, “so every Kraut with a pea-shooter gets a crack at us.”

  “Keep your shorts on, Herb. I’m going in first. One of you will have to follow up only if I miss.”

  “Then do us a favor, boss. Don’t miss.”

  Tommy gathered his three pilots at the big map on the wall. “We’ll fly direct to Gacé,” he told them. “There’ll probably be a lot of smoke and haze above Sées left over from the bomber boys. But they’re cleared out already and on the way home, so we won’t have to dodge them.”

  Handcuffed and blindfolded again, Sylvie was led from the cell to another room and placed in a chair. She knew she was still in the police station’s basement; they hadn’t climbed any stairs. Once the guards who’d brought her shuffled out, she could tell there were two men remaining in the room from the sound of their shoes scuffing along the concrete floor.

  Shoes, not boots, she told herself. Gestapo.

  In hushed tones, the two men conversed in German. She couldn’t understand much of what they were saying; it seemed to be some sort of code. One word she picked out clearly, though: baumein. She knew it meant dangle.

  Then, one on each side, they lifted her upward from the chair, pushing her against the wall, holding her aloft so her manacled hands slipped over what felt like a hook high on the wall. When they released her, she knew her translation had been correct. She was left dangling from her wrists, her feet barely able to touch the floor, the metal of the cuffs cutting painfully into her skin. With a tug that jerked her head roughly forward, the blindfold was removed. The room they were in was
little more than a large closet.

  Now that she could see them, Sylvie was surprised how small the two Gestapo men were. Most of the other agents she’d seen—like the one she’d once lured into a dark alley to be shot to death in an ambush—were large, sinister-looking men, who looked undoubtedly capable of the treachery they carried out. These two looked like bank clerks.

  She remembered the instructions all maquis had received: if captured, act terrified, proclaim your innocence, and, most importantly, admit nothing. Since being snatched off her bicycle, she had performed as told, with one exception: there was no need to pretend being terrified. Her fright was genuine and barely under control.

  The blond one held up her identification card and waved it in her face. In French, he said, “Tell us your real name, Madame Bergerac.” The Teutonic inflection of his words made his French sound like he was hocking up phlegm from his throat.

  Her voice trembling, Sylvie replied, “That is my real name—”

  She started to add messieurs but stopped herself. They weren’t deserving of even the modicum of respect the title implied.

  The dark-haired one stepped forward, producing a dagger from beneath his suit jacket. She recognized it immediately by the inscription on its blade: Mein Ehre Heisst Treue—My Honor is Loyalty. The motto of the Waffen-SS. He made a small ceremony of slicing the humid air in the cramped room with it, and then placed the cold, sharp blade beneath the hem of Sylvie’s skirt, sliding it slowly up the inside of her bare thigh. When he spoke, his French sounded no more refined than his partner’s.

  “It would be such a shame,” he said, “if one so young and so lovely should come to such unfortunate ruin.” As he spoke, the dagger’s slow ascent ended against the crotch of her panties, the flat of its blade sliding back and forth against her like a cold, cruel lover, its edges etching reddening lines on her inner thighs with machine-like precision.

  His mouth opened again as if to speak, but suddenly he was gone, lost in a ferocious upheaval she more felt than saw, as if a coarse, smothering blanket had been thrown over her. She was falling, and the world was tumbling down after her.

  And then, nothing.

  When she came to, she was lying on what must have been the basement floor, in the thick of a choking dust cloud she could taste and feel. An unnatural shaft of murky light streamed in from above, a distant spotlight trained on this netherworld, a beacon to guide her out.

  Struggling to her feet, she thought she could hear a siren, but then realized it was just the screaming of her distressed ears. She stumbled over a man’s leg protruding from beneath a pillar of concrete. A few feet away, another man’s head and torso lay crushed beneath a wooden beam, his arms and legs splayed like a frog pinned to a dissecting pan. Something shiny in the rubble beside him caught the dull light. She seized it, not knowing for sure what it was until she held it in her shackled hands: A key ring!

  Her lungs seemed ready to burst, like a diver down much too long. She scaled piles of rubble, struggling upward toward the salvation of the light, each step a gamble that its foothold wouldn’t crumble beneath her weight and send her tumbling back to the shattered hell below. Each inch of progress was paid for in pain and blood as sharp debris sliced her flesh. The key ring, with the promise of freedom it held, remained clenched between her teeth.

  Every upward grasp of her bound hands became more desperate, less agile. Those hands lunged for what she took to be a jagged beam—or perhaps a broken pipe—trying to slip the handcuffs over it to hold her fast. But she misjudged, and in that sickening second felt herself hanging between life and death— or maybe heaven and hell—waiting for gravity to celebrate its inevitable victory, pull her down, and end her battle to live once and for all.

  Tommy Moon finished his orbit over Gacé, pushed her throttle forward, and climbed to join the rest of his flight. He’d just done his job with brutal efficiency, dropping two bombs on the police station that served as German headquarters. But there would be no celebrating. The feeling it left him with was bittersweet: Maybe it’s the new name painted on her nose…or maybe I’ve gotten a whole lot better at low-level bombing. Either way, the odds are good I just killed a lot of Germans, maybe even decapitated one of their commands. But the odds are just as good I killed some French civilians, too. They didn’t have it coming.

  “You put ’em right down the ol’ pickle barrel, boss,” Jimmy Tuttle radioed. “Blew that building to shit. And it looks like there’s about zeeero collateral damage to the rest of the street.”

  The other pilots in Blue Flight couldn’t have agreed more: “Scratch one Kraut HQ,” Joe Rider said.

  “Yeah,” Herb Clinchmore added, “I knew you’d come through, boss.”

  “All right, guys,” Tommy replied. “Let’s knock off the chatter and see what else the guys on the ground need doing.”

  That one phrase Tuttle had used—collateral damage—was sticking in Tommy’s head like a stain that wouldn’t scrub out. He thought of his brother and wished their parting hadn’t been so contentious. But he knew he’d made it so: There I was on my high horse judging Sean for killing prisoners—something I’ll never be sure he even did—and here I am, killing God knows who. What a fucking hypocrite.

  He also knew he’d have to shake these distracting thoughts on the double. Combat flying demanded 110 percent of your attention. Sometimes more.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sylvie had no idea whose hands it had been that reached down and pulled her those last few feet to safety. By the time she’d coughed her lungs clear and wiped the caked dust from her eyes, the person was gone. Looking through jagged pickets of wood that were once part of the police station’s walls, she could see out onto Gacé’s grand-rue. Looking up, where the roof once was, she could see four fighter planes passing overhead in the bright morning sky.

  And then it all made sense: We were bombed. The Americans bombed us.

  The Americans saved me.

  She still had the key ring; it was clenched in one of her hands. Whether it was her doing or that of her disappearing savior, she had no idea. Wasting no time, she found the right key on the ring and opened the handcuffs, flinging them as far as she could once she’d gotten them off. A few cautious steps through the rubble and she was in the street.

  There would be no going back to Grand-mère’s house; those two might not have been the only Gestapo agents in town. And I have no idea who betrayed me in the first place. Wild-eyed German soldiers were everywhere, but she must have looked no different than the other dust-encrusted civilians who’d been too close when the bombs fell. The soldiers paid her no attention.

  One thing she was sure of: My only safety will be with the Americans now.

  But first she had to get out of Gacé. Walking south on the grand-rue, she saw how she’d do it. Scores of townspeople had decided to take their chances by fleeing the inevitable battle. They’d become refugees—piling their most precious possessions into wagons, prams, anything that rolled—and began to walk slowly south, toward what they hoped would be safety behind the American lines.

  I should have no trouble blending in with these people, Sylvie told herself.

  By 0800 hours, 4th Armored was in control of Sées. There would be pockets of resistance to clear out, even some concealed armor that might not have shown themselves yet, but the critical mass of this battle was decidedly in American hands. Even the distraught civilians—so caught by surprise by the early morning air raid they hadn’t had a chance to take to their cellars—could feel the Americans were clearly in control.

  An old man in the street pleaded with General Wood: “Our dead are your responsibility, mon général. Will you not have the decency to bury them?”

  “We have no time, sir,” Wood replied, his look of sympathy genuine but his refusal to help unbending. “We must mop up here and move on. If we don’t, there will be many more of my soldiers and your townspeople dead. It was the Germans who chose to make your town a battleground, not m
e and—”

  Wood’s radio operator interrupted. “Pardon me, General, but there’s an urgent call for you.”

  “Dammit, who is it?”

  “Sorry, sir, but it’s Third Army.”

  Wood nearly dropped the handset with shock when he heard the voice coming from it. It was not that of some Third Army staff jockey, as he’d expected. It was the unmistakably shrill voice of General George Patton himself.

  “Yes, sir,” Wood replied, “I wasn’t expecting you here. I can meet you in ten minutes.”

  “Make it nine, General,” Patton said.

  Wood’s driver made it in seven.

  Parked in a grove on the edge of town, General Patton had unfurled a tactical map on the hood of his jeep. As Wood leaned in close, Patton said, “I realize we sent you here to Sées on very short notice, John, and it looks like you’ve done an outstanding job, just like your boys are doing up at Gacé. Now I’m going to tell you what I want you to do next.”

  Looking at the map, he didn’t need Patton’s words to know what next was. Broad red arrows swept northward, beyond Sées—and even beyond Gacé. The look of surprise on Wood’s face must have been obvious.

  “That’s right, General,” Patton continued, “I want your division to regroup at Gacé like we planned all along. Then, you’ll press north, all the way to Orville and Vimoutiers.”

  “But sir, that’s a full ten miles beyond Monty’s stop line.”