The Defiant Hero (11 page)
It didn’t seem right to treat her with such disrespect, to make her rest those old bones on the floor. If they were going to kill them, they should do it now, forget the inconvenience. But even though Maram had been his sister-in-law, back a long time ago, before his brother Yusef had been taken to prison and tortured to death, she didn’t always listen to him.
“Nana, tell me again about Dunkirk,” the little one whispered. Amy was her name. It was a good name for her—it fit her long, curly hair and her heart-shaped face. She was a pretty little thing.
“Even though I was an American,” the old lady whispered back, “I was living in England in 1940, when Hitler’s army attacked France.”
Hitler. The Bear knew all about Hitler and his Nazis. His Yugoslavian grandfather, gone from this world for ten years now, had spoken of Hitler often, always spitting after saying his name. Hitler had been the devil on earth.
“Months earlier, England had sent her army, the British Expeditionary Force, to help defend France from a German invasion. But when Germany finally attacked, it was like nothing the French or English soldiers had ever seen before. It was called Blitzkrieg. Lightning war. The German panzers—their tanks—moved at impossible speeds, covering dozens of miles of battleground in a single day. At the time, this was quite remarkable. It was terrifying for those of us listening to the radio reports, hearing of town after town that had fallen in what seemed like the blink of an eye.”
This was clearly a story the old woman had told little Amy countless times.
“The German air force,” she continued, “was called the Luftwaffe, and those planes rained bombs and bullets down on the British and French soldiers, most of whom were horribly unprepared to deal with any kind of battle, let alone this blitz of destruction. The French army was believed to be the best fighting force in all of the world, but they quickly crumbled. And they and the BEF were pushed back, all the way to the north of France, to the beaches of a little French town called—”
“Dunkirk,” the little girl finished for her. But then she lowered her voice, leaning closer to the old lady. “Mommy’s probably really worried about us, isn’t she?”
The old lady just held her tightly. She didn’t try to lie to her. “Yes, I’m sure she is.”
Amy glanced across the room at Maram and Umar, fear in her eyes, then whispered even more softly. “Is she going to come for us and save us?”
“I know she would if she could. But I don’t know if she can.” The old lady looked directly at him, obviously aware that he was listening to everything they were saying. “Do you want me to tell more of the story?”
Amy nodded, her head tucked close to her greatgrandmother’s skinny breast.
“So there they were,” the old lady continued, a little bit louder now. He didn’t have to strain quite so much to hear her. “Over a quarter of a million British soldiers. Stranded in Dunkirk, France. Separated from their homeland by the English Channel.”
A quarter of a million . . . He translated the expression into his own language and . . . A quarter of a million was a lot of men.
“Now, the British navy was in something of a bind,” she said, “because no one had anticipated France would fall to the Germans so quickly. There weren’t enough ships to move all those men back to safety across that channel of water. And it didn’t take long for the Luftwaffe to completely bomb all of the piers in Dunkirk’s harbor. The water was shallow there, and the few large naval ships that were available couldn’t get close enough to fetch the men. So the navy began appropriating all sorts of small boats. Ferries and fishing vessels. Navy officials came knocking on doors all up and down the coast of England, informing people that their boats were now a part of the British navy.
“Once the word got out, all across England anyone who owned a small boat—pleasure yachts, dinghies, rowboats, truly anything that could float—gathered in Ramsgate Harbor to help save our boys in the BEF from certain death. That harbor was right down the lane from where I lived. So I went, too. I was only sixteen, and I was a girl to boot, but I took my stepmother’s yacht—she was called the Daisy Chain and she could fit twenty-five people comfortably, fifty squeezed in tight and low in the water. I took the Daisy Chain into Ramsgate with all the others.
“It was remarkable, Amy. I’d never seen so many boats—the little ships, they called us—in one place before. We were an amazing motley armada. But we were determined to bring our boys home.
“I’d really only meant to bring the Daisy Chain into Ramsgate and turn her over to the navy, but there were no extra men to take her across to France, so . . .”
“You tucked your hair up under your hat.” Amy gazed up into her great-grandmother’s eyes.
Maram must have lost the fight to lazy Umar because she stomped up the stairs. He could hear her slam a door shut.
Amy and her Nana would live at least until tomorrow.
Amy’s Nana heard the door slam, too, but she only glanced briefly at him before returning her attention to the little girl. “Good thing I didn’t have hair like yours.” She tugged gently on one of Amy’s curls.
“Your hair was blond and so beautiful. Mommy says you used to look like a movie star.”
The old lady batted her eyelashes. “Don’t I still?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there it was. Now she knew for sure he was listening.
She didn’t seem to mind. Instead she gave him another one of those dignified smiles. “Thank you, sir.”
Sir. He could count the number of times anyone had ever called him sir on the fingers of one hand.
“I’m Eve,” she told him, as if they were meeting at a party. “And this is Amy, my great-granddaughter.”
He glanced over, but Umar, Khatib, and Gulzar had gone into the kitchen and turned on the TV.
It was starting to drive him mad, the incessant yapping of the commercials and talk shows. “Turn it down,” he bellowed.
Umar shouted back, telling him to attempt the anatomically impossible. But the volume went down a little—no doubt thanks to Khatib.
“What’s your name?” the old lady, Eve, asked him.
He looked toward the kitchen, but he was definitely alone in the room. He knew he shouldn’t be talking to them. He should keep them silent. But with the TV on, Umar, Khatib, and Gulzar would never hear.
He’d always loved the stories his grandfather had told—of fighting the Nazis with Tito in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he wanted to hear how this story ended. It wasn’t possible that a quarter of a million men had been taken across the English Channel by an armada of small boats. They might’ve saved a few thousand, sure, but . . .
“I’m called the Bear,” he told them, hoping he wouldn’t get onto Maram’s blacklist for admitting that.
“I’m afraid I can’t say pleased to meet you, Mr. Bear—for obvious reasons,” Eve told him. She looked down at Amy. “Where were we?”
“You tucked your hair up under your hat.”
“That’s right.” She gave the Bear another smile. “This is her very favorite part. I’d learned to navigate the Daisy Chain the summer before, so I gave her full throttle and made the crossing myself. Now, I’ve made that channel crossing many times, but—and I’m awfully glad to say it—I’ve never made a crossing quite like that, before or since then.
“There were mines in the channel—too deep to do any damage to the Daisy Chain, but that didn’t stop the larger ships from being blown to kingdom come. German U-boats—submarines—were out in force, as well. Again, they didn’t target us small potatoes. But the Luftwaffe—they were a different story. They bombed and strafed—shot at—the men waiting on the beaches, and us, as well, as we approached. But not one of the little ships around me turned back. Not a one.
“As we approached, we could see the smoke from the battle. Dunkirk was burning, and it looked as if all of France were on fire.”
He could picture her behind the wheel of a boat, chin held high as she sailed into a smoky storm of bullets and bombs.
“We worked for days. I ferried men from the beaches to the larger ships, until those ships were filled. And then I took on as many soldiers as I could and headed back toward Ramsgate. I can’t even tell you how many trips I took across the channel. The evacuation went on until the fourth of June—it’s all rather a noisy blur.”
“How many men were saved?” Bear couldn’t keep himself from asking.
The little girl spoke up. “Nana helped save at least five hundred of them herself.”
“Possibly as many as five hundred,” the old lady corrected her gently. “Do you remember the total number of Allied troops evacuated?”
“Three hundred and thirty-eight thousand,” Amy announced, “two hundred and twenty . . . seven?”
He snorted his disbelief. “No way.”
“Two twenty-six,” Eve said. “It’s true.” She sighed. “But what I wouldn’t have given for that number to have been higher.” She glanced at him before she looked down into Amy’s eyes. “True confession time. I didn’t really cross that channel because I wanted to save all those stranded British soldiers. At least not at first. I first crossed the channel because I wanted to save one soldier in particular. I never told you this before, Amy, but even though I was only sixteen, I was married—and I had been for a year. The man I wanted so desperately to save was the man I loved. He was my husband.”
Amy sat up, her eyes losing some of her fear. “You were married when you were sixteen?”
“Fifteen, actually,” Eve admitted.
“But . . . I’ve seen your wedding pictures. You told me you got married right after the war.”
“Well, I did,” Eve said calmly. “I was married—for the second time—right after the war, when I was twenty-one. My first marriage wasn’t exactly legal because I was so young at the time. And of course it was never consummated.”
“What’s consummated?”
He was unfamiliar with that English word, too, but he could guess what it meant from the context. He studied his boot, wondering how the old lady was going to handle the question.
“Do you know where babies come from?” she asked the girl. Good start.
“Of course I do,” she scoffed. “Girls can get pregnant if they have unprotected sex with boys. Mommy talks to me about it all the time because some of the sixth grade girls in my school tease the fifth grade girls about still being virgins.”
“Dear God,” Eve said. She swiftly collected herself. “Well, in that case you know, then, that when two people get married, part of their relationship as man and wife is a sexual one, right?”
Amy nodded.
“That’s what consummated means. It’s when two people who love each other enough to get married make love for the first time. In the olden days, it sealed the marriage, made it even more binding. When I was fifteen, I thought I was old enough to marry this man because I loved him so much. But when our wedding night came, well, some people might think I chickened out, but I like to look at it as being brave enough to admit I’d made a rather large mistake. Of course, when my new husband found out how old I truly was, that I’d basically tricked him into marrying me, he was furious and . . .” Eve laughed softly. “If I’m going to tell this story properly, I should start at the beginning, shouldn’t I?”
“But did you save him?” Amy asked. “Your first husband? At Dunkirk?”
The old woman sighed and shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “I didn’t.”
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Six
ENSIGN STARRETT WORE only a pair of shorts.
Alyssa Locke tried to focus on the video monitor, but the well-muscled, too-damned-handsome-for-his-own-good SEAL had positioned himself directly beyond it, right smack in her line of sight.
Of course the shorts were a big improvement over the barely there towel he’d had wrapped around his waist when he’d first come out of the bathroom.
If he’d been surprised to step out of the shower to find that the hotel suite he was supposed to be sharing with Lt. John Nilsson had become command central for this op within an op, he hadn’t let on. In fact, upon hearing the news that Meg Moore’s daughter and grandmother had been kidnapped by K-stani Extremists and that they had to keep all information about this from becoming public knowledge for their protection, Starrett had merely nodded and drawled, “Thought it had to be something like that.”
Locke was glad Nils had brought her over here. She was pleased to be part of this top secret operation, glad to be already in position when Max Bhagat was brought into the room and brought up to speed, glad to be working in a small team with Lt. Tom Paoletti again.
But she wasn’t glad that Sam Starrett was part of the team, with his bimboy body, his redneck prejudices, and his smart mouth.
Sweet thing.
As if she’d ever, in a million years, fall prey to his questionable charms. Sweet thing, pah. She wasn’t sweet and she was no man’s thing.
WildCard Karmody looked up from where he was figuring out how to create the equivalent of a digital tape loop with his computer.
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