Sentimental Journey (2 page)

U.S. Army Air Force
Captain Red Walker set the last charge on the supply bunker, grabbed his munitions pack and rifle, then slung each over a shoulder. He moved quietly along the concrete edges of the supply building. At the east corner he stopped before making a cold run for it. He’d seen men lay their charges, then act like jackrabbits and get their fool heads shot off.

A hundred feet of open space stood between him and the cover of a stack of Nazi oil drums. He had four minutes to get to the airfield before everything blew. Four minutes that could feel like a lifetime, or an instant.

A German officer stood in the middle of the yard, between him and those barrels. Red could try to take him out, but that was chancy. The guy was standing in the middle of the compound.

Red pulled back and checked the time, then leaned his head against the building and waited. Overhead was a clear night sky that sucked all the day’s heat from the loose desert sand. It was cold as ice. Twenty-two degrees had been predicted at the final briefing. Yet here he was sweating.

Nothing made much sense anymore. War changed things. Everything. The whole goddamn world felt upside-down, sideways, and jackass-backwards. For years all he’d wanted was to get out of Acme,
Texas
. But here he was in the middle of the desert, blowing up the compound of a man he’d never seen, an enemy from a place as far away from
Wilbarger
County
as a rattlesnake was from the North Pole.

He waited a few more minutes, then stared out past the perimeter at the desert beyond and mile after mile of nothing but sand dunes.

Hell . . . and people said
West Texas
was an armpit.

He checked his watch again, then wiped away the sweat that trickled into his eyes. His mouth was drier than week-old bread. For just an instant, he thought about a big old Texas-sized glass of tea, sweetened with a handful of white sugar and poured over two handfuls of ice . . . about bluebonnets growing beside the road and the clean smell of a woman who washed her hair with lemon.

He shook his head and shifted, then looked around the corner.

The officer hadn’t moved.

Three minutes.

Should he run? He eased back, chewed it over. He’d wait. Once his charges blew, it wouldn’t matter if he had to fire his rifle. It wouldn’t matter if he fired a two-ton ack-ack. It would be too late. The den of the Fox would be on fire.

Cassidy had been on a dozen of these missions. He claimed the difference between living and dying was in the timing. He’d said it to Red and others over and over. Time it exactly. If you rush, you die. If you wait too long, someone else dies.

Instinct screamed inside Red’s head,
Go, go, go! Get out of there!
He asked himself how much of that instinct was fueled by panic. Panic could kill you or make you a hero, depending on how the chips fell. But thinking clearly, well, Cassidy said that was what saved your sweet ass.

The soldier in him checked his watch again.

Thirty seconds more.

He began to mentally count it off.

Twenty-eight . . .

Twenty-five . . .

Twenty-two . . .

Twenty seconds.

“Halt!”

Sweet Jesus . . .

The order was distant, as if it came from the truck depot. But sound carried in the desert like it did over water.

Compound spotlights came on as white and blinding as the
Texas
sun in July. Enemy soldiers ran out from the shadows. One of them was heading right toward him.

Next to the compound,
a German bomber, a Junkers 88P, taxied down the narrow desert airstrip past a line of burning
Messerschmitts
,
ME
109s. A smoking Panzer tank blocked the end of the runway. Two more planes blew up, Stukas, now nothing but flames flaring into the air.

The JU turned sharply; it was the only aircraft on the field left in one piece, and it was moving toward the compound.

An armored car marked with the Deutsches Afrika Korps palm tree and mounted with a machine gun came speeding in from the road and raced by the plane, the soldiers inside the vehicle motioning to the pilot to follow them.

The car careened in front of the bomber, leading the way, so the pilot slowed the plane a notch and moved in directly behind the machine gunner; they both headed for an Allied half-track stalled a few hundred feet away.

The Junkers’ nose guns swiveled, sighting a target.

Too high.

The pilot shoved forward on the yoke, hit the brakes, and powered the tail; then he pressed down on the trigger and fired so many deadly rounds there was a gaping hole in the Korps vehicle where the palm tree and swastika had once been.

British Royal Air Force Pilot Commander George “Skip” Inskip released the trigger button and reduced power. The tail of the plane dropped back to the ground with a jar that would have rattled his teeth if they hadn’t been clenched so damned tight. He looked ahead of him and taxied the plane closer toward the fence, on solid ground between the airfield and the supply dump.

There was chaos in the compound. Smoke and fire.

Am I the only one left?

That was a balmy thought, and not bloody likely. Along for the ride today were the Long Range Desert Group, those Desert Rats who gave Rommel hell; the SIG, experts who made successes of suicide missions; and the Yanks, two of them, commando-trained and specially picked by the OSS. Cassidy was a miracle-working scrounger who had a reputation for doing the impossible, and Walker, an ex-Air Corps pilot, sharpshooter, and demolitions expert, a tall, quiet Texan who hated Skip with everything he had in him.

Perhaps
Walker
had already corked it.

On some level, Skip understood
Walker
’s hatred of him. He just didn’t care. Charley would say he had to feel something deep down inside, but then Charley still believed he was square and aboveboard.

Skip looked ahead. The compound was burning, the fuel depot destroyed. And they had a dog’s chance of getting out.

A moment later a man burst through an orange wall of fire and smoke. The soldier disappeared under the plane’s wing before Skip could get a look at him.

The belly door of the JU suddenly opened. Hot air and smoke blew into the cockpit.

Hell . . .

Skip pulled his revolver, an Enfield N0.2MK, and turned, one hand still on the controls.

“Don’t shoot, you limey son of a bitch, or you’ll have to explain to Charley that you were the one who killed me.” Red Walker pulled himself up and inside, then rolled into the cockpit and strapped into the copilot’s seat.

Skip shoved the gun back into his holster. “Where’s Cassidy?”

“Last time I spotted him he was crawling down into the bunker. But that was before the whole thing SNAFU’d.”
Walker
paused, looking around them. “Where are you taking this thing? The airfield is back that way.”

“Tanks are blocking the runway. The place is lit up like a parade ground. I’m heading for the macadam,” Skip said. “The airfield’s useless.” He gave the plane too much power and hit the road too fast. Beast of a machine was heavier than the fighters he was used to.

“Stop!”
Walker
was half turned in his seat looking out the glass. “I see Cassidy! He lost his helmet. I can see his blond head!”

“Most of the bloody Afrika Korps have blond heads.”

“It was him.”

“Did you plant the charges to blow both bunkers?” Skip kept going.

“Yes.”

“Did the command bunker blow?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see Cassidy get out?”

“No, but I was a little busy with about half a platoon of mad-as-hell Jerries. Cassidy got out. He always gets out.”

Skip checked the time and kept going. “We were supposed to be out of here five minutes ago. Cassidy isn’t here. The bunker’s gone. This mission has had it.” It looked like hell was coming up to meet them. Everything was burning. “Look!”

Walker
glanced back out the window.

“We’ve done what damage we can to this place. I’m taking this plane up now.” Skip reached for the throttle switch.

A pistol cocked next to his temple, the cold ring of the barrel pressed into his skin.

“No,”
Walker
said quietly. “You’re going to wait.”

“I could kill you for this.”

“By golly, you sure could.”

“If I report your actions, your army would have you court-martialed.”

Walker
shrugged. “I could pull this trigger and there wouldn’t be a report or a court-martial.”

Skip laughed bitterly. “Just a mess in the cockpit, right?”

“Right . . . as you Brits always say . . . a bloody mess.”
Walker
checked his watch. Tension hung between them,
second after second
after second. He looked out the window, but apparently saw no one, because he checked his watch again. He faced Skip but didn’t move the gun. “Three minutes more. If Cassidy isn’t here, you can hit the throttle for all she’s worth.”

Skip braked, then sat there, arms resting on the yoke, waiting.

Walker
didn’t drop the gun.

“I’ll give Cassidy three minutes, but pull the gun away from my head.”

“I was pretty darn young when my granddaddy taught me not to walk around the backside of a pissed-off mule, least not ’less I want to get my marbles kicked to hell and back. I’ll just keep this gun right where it is for now.”

From the compound, the sound of gunfire echoed back at them, ticking off time in sputtering rounds of ammo shells. It was quite amusing, really, him sitting there next to Red Walker, allies in spirit and duty, but enemies at heart, the barrel of a .32 caliber pistol against his head and the trigger held by the one man who truly wanted him dead.

He glanced at Walker, who wasn’t smiling, but then the Yanks and the British didn’t share the same sense of humor.
Walker
kept watching out the window for Cassidy. So Skip sat there, the smell of fuel and the taste of fire seeping slowly inside the cockpit until it was in every breath he took and his lungs felt tight and full.

He checked his watch. “Time’s up.”

Red swore one of those off-color
Texas
colloquialisms, but he kept his word and holstered the pistol.