Sentimental Journey (28 page)

“True.”

“Unless there’s something lurid about your past you want to tell me.”

“No.”

“No, there’s nothing lurid in your past?” A few more yards. “Or no, you don’t want to tell me?”

“No. I’m not telling you anything.”

“Too bad. But if you want to hunt me down, well then, that’s fine with me. We can fan the flames of hell together.”

“Your dream, my nightmare.”

“Stay still.” He held up his hand, then realized she couldn’t see it so he let it drop. “I’m here, now . . . close, but don’t move. Let me check the ground around us.” There was a mine to her left, eight inches away and another a foot behind him at about
three o’clock
. The rest was clear.

He closed the distance between them and put his arms around her. “I gotcha.”

She exhaled and sagged against his shoulder.

“You’re safe.”

“I know.” She kept her arms around his neck.

“Are you crying? Don’t turn into Wimpy on me, Kincaid.”

“I feel like Wimpy,” she said into his neck. “I’m scared.”

“Enough slobbering. I won’t let anything happen to you. But we need to move fast.”

She dropped her hands from around his neck.

“The sun’s setting. We have to get out of here so I can find a way to signal that plane.”

“Okay, but couldn’t we set off the mines? Wouldn’t they see the explosions?”

“The signal is preplanned. A green flare. I’m going to carry you out on my back. I’ve turned around. My back’s to you. I want you to lean into me and slide your arms around my neck.” When she did, he said, “Now hang on.” He grabbed the backs of her legs and pulled her onto his back. He walked a few steps. He could feel her heart beating fast and a slight quiver, as if she were shaking some. He took another step and said, “Nice, soft thighs you got there, Kincaid.”

“I’d slap you for that, Cassidy, but my sense of self-preservation won’t let me.”

“I guess that means I can say what I want.”

“As if anything would stop you.”

“I don’t see any point in asking permission.”

“You’re too busy giving orders.”

He laughed. “I’m in the Army. Orders are everything. A few more yards and we’re home free.”

She held on to his neck more tightly.

It took less time to get back to the ridge, but it was late and quickly getting darker. He set her on her feet and took her hand. “We’re okay here. No more mines. But I need you to walk a few steps down this embankment with me. Give me your other hand, and I’ll lead you down.”

At the edge of the ridge, he stopped. “I’m going to turn around. I want you to stay close and keep your hands on my shoulders. We’ll use my body to keep you from falling.”

“No. Wait.” She shook her head. “Tell me how far we’re going. I can count it off.”

“Fifteen feet. But keep your hands on my shoulders as a guide. There’s scrub and rocks.” He was surprised how easy it was. She stayed right with him. Below, the valley was turning burnished gold from the setting sun.

“The sun is setting,” she said.

“I thought you were blind.”

“People aren’t usually completely blind. I see shadows, silhouettes, some vague misty shades of color.”

“I guess it’s hard to miss that sunset.”

The sky was a brilliant bright yellow and red.

“Stop here. I need to work on the flare gun.” He pulled the flare out again and shoved it back hard, then tried the trigger a third time. Still nothing.

“It’s so still and quiet here. I can’t hear anything. No birds. No wind. Nothing.” She had turned her face up as if she were looking at the air around her.

He jerked the cartridge out of the flare gun, then squatted down and broke it apart. The green powder poured out into a small pyre. He lit it, then moved back as green smoke spiraled up into the air.

He turned and looked off toward the distant foothills.
Come on, guys. Look over here.

“Something’s burning. What are you doing?”

“Lighting the flare powder.”

“Oh.”

He fanned the smoke upward and watched it.

“Cassidy?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“For what? Doing my job?”

“No. I couldn’t help you at all in that minefield. I just had to stand there.”

“Yeah, well, standing still in a minefield is a damn good idea.”

“I don’t like feeling helpless, but I would have never gotten out of that field alive. I was lucky to get across it in one piece the first time.”

“We both were lucky.” He straightened, pulled out his binoculars, and focused in the direction of the plane.

“Sabri wasn’t lucky,” she said in a vacant voice.

“No. He wasn’t. I’d say he was pretty unlucky, with all that gasoline in the back. Those mines wouldn’t have blown that truck to hell like it did. The gasoline was what sent it to
Timbuktu
.”

“It could have been us.”

“But it wasn’t.” He focused the binoculars again and slowly zeroed in on the landing site. “I don’t deal with could-have-beens. One of the things you learn in the Army is to not try to understand why you make it and someone else doesn’t. It would drive you nuts. It’s just luck, Kincaid. Just luck.”

“I thought it was your vast knowledge and huge ego.”

“That too.” He smiled and focused the binoculars in the direction of that far hillside. The sun glared at him and made it hard to see.

“Cassidy?”

He lowered the glasses and turned back to her. “What?”

“They didn’t tell you I was blind, did they?”

“No.” He looked back to the plane, adjusted the focus again.

“Is that because you wouldn’t have taken the job if they had?”

“Don’t go getting all mushy on me, now. I’m in the Army. This is my job. I do what they tell me.”

“I’m trying to thank you.”

“You know something, Kincaid?”

“What?”

“I’m thinking maybe it’s a good thing you can’t see.”

She faced him, a little stunned. “Why?”

He turned the binoculars toward the sunset. “Because our ride home just flew away.”

“MEIN VATER WAR EIN WANDERSMANN”

Rheinholdt’s men had finished three long days of hard work under the blistering sun, burying over five hundred canisters of petrol and ammunition in the sand at mapped points along the routes of the Panzer Divisions. Now, miles away from the last emergency supply point, they had bivouacked in the deep fold of a desert wadi, where campfires and smoke would be hidden from enemy sight during the black, clear nights when fires could easily give away a unit’s position.

Daylight hours here were different. The heat made the air wave and blur. There was natural camouflage in the desert that caused the human eye to see things that weren’t there; a huge and distant lake that was only sand; a camel caravan that turned out to be a line of tall scrubs; smoke that was really sand blown upward by random wind funnels.

It had been a difficult twenty-four hours for everyone. The day before he had lost two men. His unit’s latest assignment involved working close to the front. HQ had given them top priority and issued his men the new steel helmets that had just come from
Berlin
.

But the dark helmets stood out and shone in the sun, attracting gunfire twice. One soldier died, and the other had been seriously wounded and had to be sent back to the coast for medical treatment.

This from a piece of equipment that was supposed to protect them.

Rheinholdt stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he searched the broad horizon. Sunset looked to be two hours away. They were to wait in this vicinity for a rendezvous with the engineering corps before moving on to the next assignment. He turned back and observed the camp below from his position on a stony plateau just above them.

His men were listless. They lay like snakes baking in the sun. Desert war was a worse kind of hell. Logistically, a nightmare. After receiving no supplies or mail for over a month, the men were hungry for news, mail from home, and something decent to put in their stomachs.

But he could not blame this kind of lethargy solely on the heat, on days of blazing sun, on sand that stung your eyes or fleas that burrowed into your skin. Or on the fact that the supply convoy was more than a week late.

A comrade dies and death becomes suddenly concrete to every soldier in the unit. A hand with no lifeline right there before your eyes. The dead soldier could have been talking to you minutes before or joking around the fire the previous night, singing old beer-drinking songs along with a gramophone record and sharing a cigarette or a tin of fruit.

In one instant of war life can be gone. Standing face-to-face with mortality, a soldier must ask himself if the next bullet or scrap of shrapnel is marked for him. And when war becomes too real, confidence drops. Morale sinks faster than a rock in a cup of water.

Rheinholdt walked back down into the middle of the camp, unnoticed in the lassitude. He stood nearby and watched a soldier swat at flies while he used his bayonet to stab pieces of floating meat from a can of AM rations: the vile Italian meat packed in tins that were stamped “AM” for
Administrazione Militare.

Rheinholdt tilted his field cap back and rubbed his chin. “So, Dietrich. How does it taste?”

He looked up, surprised. “I believe, Herr Leutnant, that AM stands for Alter Mann.” He laughed at his own joke. “It tastes like old man.”

“You could be right, yet I always believed that the AM stood for Alter Maulesel . . . old mule.”

Every man within earshot laughed.

“Duce’s men call it
asino morto.
Dead donkey,” someone added.

He noticed that none of the men had stood to attention once they recognized him. He was their commanding officer, but military discipline faded on the front lines, where his concern was more about the well-being of his men, as well as their fighting preparedness . . . of which he saw little. It was time to remind them there was a war on.

Rheinholdt let them laugh, then nodded at the Kar98k lying beside Dietrich. “Hand me your rifle.”

Dietrich sat up straighter.

Rheinholdt examined the bolt-action weapon, then tossed it back on the ground. “Clean it.” He turned to the others. “The rest of you. Put your weapons here.” He gestured to the ground.

The men moved slowly, some of them groaning only because they had to sit up.

Five minutes later he had examined all the rifles, .08s, and two MP40S. “Every one of these weapons has sand in it.”

They looked at him from eyes that held no emotion. Their faces were sunburned to a deep red, in spite of their already tanned but filthy skin. They all needed a shave almost as badly as they needed a bath.