Sentimental Journey (58 page)

Then silence.

“Surrender!” Someone shouted in accented English. “Come out! Now! Hands up!”

Red looked at the men. Dolan, the navigator, had passed out, and the tail gunner looked dead.

Another shot came in from the left.

Red ducked and pulled O’Malley back and under the protection of part of the fuselage and wing. Two of the crew crawled over.

“Stay here,” Red told them. “Watch the commander.”

“What are you doing?”

“Surrender and you will live!”

Of the
Mary’s
crew: three wounded, one possibly dead, and three others beside Red.

“Lieutenant?”

Red turned back.

“They’re going to shoot us if we don’t give up.”

“From what I hear, they might shoot us if we do. Besides, I’m not going to let them take me that easily, and not O’Malley either. This is war we’re here for. Let’s damn well fight it.” Red pulled his .45.

O’Malley fumbled to find his gun, winced, then pulled it out. Dolan already had his pistol drawn.

A second later a bullet took Dolan out with a shoulder wound. Red crawled under the wing, moving toward the nose. He drew no fire, so his position must not have been visible. He picked up a broken tree branch and squatted there a moment, took off his flight helmet and slipped it on the branch, then slowly raised it into view.

A bullet cut right through the branch; the helmet went flying.

Whoa . . . that was some shooting.

Another shot rang out from the trees across from them. They were moving in from east and west, trying to get them in cross fire.

Red shifted back and found a space between the plane, a crack that was about six inches of open view. He took aim and waited for the sure shot, the way his granddaddy had taught him.

He watched for the glint of the rifle in the trees beyond, watched until he saw it, fired, and moved on to another spot before he heard the man fall.

Two rifles fired back from similar positions. “Surrender! Or we will shoot you. All of you.”

Red picked off another one and rolled away, then another, and another. Shots began coming from all over the woods.

Crap . . . How many of them are there?

The crew members who could were exchanging fire. Pistols versus rifles gave the enemy the edge.

Red took aim, then heard a rifle report about a hundred feet away. A bullet slammed through the metal of the plane, a few inches from his head. He ducked away into the brush, pulled his knife from his boot, and waited, then slowly got up and moved through the trees.

A few minutes later, there was one less enemy. He had a German rifle along with a few rounds of Mauser ammo.

Things had evened up a bit: a handful of us and twenty some-odd of them? Hell, it was a cakewalk.

“PRAISE THE LORD
AND
PASS THE AMMUNITION”

Skip secured the explosive pack on the train car and set the timers. He looked over to the next railcar at Cassidy, who gave him the okay sign. His charges were set, too. They had been in Germany for almost sixty hours and were now just outside the last bend in the track near the train station where they had started.

Jean-Luc came up from his position near the engine and signaled to jump now. Skip stood as the train rattled down the tracks. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cassidy do the same. The train whistled as it turned the bend. All three jumped off the railroad cars simultaneously.

Skip hit hard, tucked and rolled down the embankment, over some hard rocks and into a ravine. He lay there as still as the stone that gouged him.

The train sped past. Not a shot was fired.

He stood and brushed off the grass and leaves as Cassidy came to his side, limping.

Skip glanced at his leg. “Are you hurt?”

“No. I pulled a muscle. I’m okay.”

“Too much time on your duff, old chap. We’ll fix you up fine. Just send you back to Achnacarry for a solid week on the assault course.”

Cassidy gave a low groan. “No. Please . . . shoot off my balls instead. It’s gotta be less painful.”

Jean-Luc climbed out of a clump of bushes nearby. He slung his gun strap over his shoulder and gave a sharp nod of his head. “Come. This way.”

They followed him down and out of the ravine, across an icy cold stream, and into the woods that sloped downward and covered a steep hillside thick with spindle-like birches that cracked and broke if you hit them wrong. It was a tricky exercise to get through quietly.

After a few hundred yards of damp, shoulder-high brush, they came to the edge of an open meadow, where the Frenchman stopped, crouched down, surveyed the area, then sat, leaning his rifle against a tree trunk. “It is not safe to cross. We will wait here.” He took out a knife, picked up a broken piece of a branch, and began to skin the bark off with his knife.

A quarter of an hour later they heard the distant, faint blasts of the charges they had planted on the train.

Cassidy checked his watch. “Right on time.”

Skip nodded, and from then on, all they did was wait. For two hours. He checked his watch about half as often as Cassidy did. After a while, even Jean-Luc was becoming edgy.

Then the Frenchman froze. Skip had heard it, too. The breaking of a twig from the west. Cassidy had crouched down and pulled his gun.

There was the quiet call of a loon; the notes wavered in the air. Jean-Luc held up his hand, then made a similar sound. Like ciphers, three dark-clothed Frenchmen came out of the trees.

One was Jean-Luc’s youngest brother, Eduard. “There is trouble. The Germans found your plane and have tripled their patrols in the area. We were afraid to come here until we were certain they had gone past. But now they have moved to another target.”

“What target?” Jean-Luc asked.

“A bomber went down in the fields outside of the village.”

Skip looked at him. “An Allied bomber?”

Eduard nodded. “A B-17.”

Cassidy swore.

“Show us.
Vite, vite.”

They took off, running through more woods and down another hillside. Before long they could hear the distant gunfire. It grew louder and sharper the closer they got.

Still hidden by the trees, Eduard and Jean-Luc slowed, then signaled and stopped. Skip and the others took positions about a hundred feet away from the open field.

The bomber sat cracked apart in the middle of the field. But the crew was returning fire at the enemy hidden in another cluster of trees. There were shots from three positions. From the sound, he was certain one was a rifle and the other two were pistol fire.

Skip spotted some motion to the south. Two enemy soldiers were stealthily moving into position, maybe a hundred feet from sparks of fire coming from a spot under the plane’s belly.

Skip took aim. Cassidy did, too.

But a deadly shot dropped one man like a broken puppet before Skip could pull the trigger on his revolver. Two seconds later, the other enemy soldier went down.

Neither he nor Cassidy nor the Frenchman had fired a shot.

“Holy shit . . . That’s some shooting.” Cassidy scanned the perimeter, then nodded. “Over there. Near that rock. To the west of the tail. See?”

Skip saw the movement. Four, maybe five enemy soldiers.

“Looks like they’re bringing in a machine gun.” He grinned at Skip. “Let’s give those bomber boys some help.”

The rifleman under the bomber crawled a few feet, then inside the broken plane.

Jean-Luc and his men faded further back into the trees and began to circle around, while Skip and Cassidy crawled forward into better range.

The enemy never got that gun mounted.

From inside the bomber, the rifleman took out five men in less than a minute.

“So much for helping him out. Come on. Let’s let him know we’re here.” Cassidy started to move forward.

“Wait. I don’t fancy getting myself shot,” Skip told him.

Cassidy hesitated, then began to whistle “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight.”

There was one of those long, drawn-out moments; then someone near the downed plane began to whistle the same tune back.

The enemy, however, was firing straight at them.

A few minutes later Skip, Cassidy, and Jean-Luc were inside the bomber returning fire next to two crewmen and a pilot manned with a rifle and a sharpshooter’s dead-on aim. He was good. Awfully bloody good.

An hour later they were secure in a cellar room under a local barn used by the French Resistance. A local doctor had seen to the crew’s wounds and just left. The rest of them were eating some hot soup, cheese, and bread Eduard had brought them.

One man had died. The other crew members were okay. The pilot, a man named O’Malley, was wounded in the side and wasn’t mobile, but the doctor had tended the wounds and told them he could travel without danger.

Lieutenant Walker, the shooter, got up to check on O’Malley, then came back to sit down near Skip.

“That was some shooting.” Cassidy handed him a tin cup of hot coffee.

Walker
shrugged and replied, “Didn’t see that I had much of a choice, Major. I was damned glad to see you, though. The IOs always advise us to seek out the Resistance if we’re downed. The problem was, none of us ever quite knew how to go about it.” He laughed and took a long drink of his coffee.

“Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?”

“
Texas
.”

Cassidy laughed. “There’s a joke in that somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can think of it.”

The trapdoor opened and Jean-Luc came down the ladder. “We’ll move you out in an hour. There’s a barge that will take you down the river and then on to the coast. We’ve let them know you are coming. It will take two days. We have to be careful. They have checkpoints on the river.” He smiled. “But we know how to get by them. You will be picked up by your navy. You should all be safe.” He nodded at O’Malley. “Even the wounded.”

Two hours later, when they were safely on the barge, Cassidy came over and sat down next to Skip. “What do you think about that kid?”

“
Walker
?”

He nodded.

“I think he could shoot dead center into the eye of a needle.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. I’m going to talk to him. Think I’ll see if I can persuade him to transfer to something more . . . individual.”

Skip nodded. “Have at him, old boy.”

“You help me out if I need it. I’m depending on you to tell him how much fun we have.”

Skip laughed. “I got it. You want me to lie.”

“Yeah. Like he’s the fucking
SS.”