Under False Flags

by Steve Anderson

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “You know what? I was so . . . I was so scared that she was dead. And now? I so wish that she could be.”

  The heat behind Frings’ eyes blurred his sight. Tears rolled down his face, and he let them.

  Lett fell silent. Frings kept checking his pulse. He got another blanket from the jeep and lay it over Lett. He sat next to Lett and stayed there as night fell.

  Later, Lett began groaning, and moaning. He whispered something in the darkness. Frings leaned in close to listen. Lett said:

  “In Cologne, in your city, I killed . . . an old man . . . I killed a little girl. I had to. Don’t tell her. Don’t you tell Heloise.”

  Frings pulled back. His throat constricted again. For a moment he thought he might suffocate. He expected a fury to take over, the kind that had made him kill men, but his heart only ached.

  “Niemals,” he said. Never.

  “Tell her . . . She convinced me.”

  Frings nodded. “You convinced me.”

  In the middle of the night Frings sat alone, in a corner. His tears had left cold tracks on his cheeks. At one point he had pulled Lett’s dog tags from his pocket, still sticky with blood. He had gone out and cleaned them off in snow, wiped them dry, placed them around his neck. He didn’t touch the rations in the jeep. He would need them. Over in darkness, Lett lay on the floor. Many times Frings had thought of pulling off Lett’s blanket to wrap around himself. He would have to. He was shivering. He didn’t. He resisted the thought, the truth and the reality, that Lett’s odds had played out.

  He crept over to Lett and, aching in the hope that Lett had not gone cold, moved beneath the blanket with Lett. The man was still warm. Frings stretched the blanket tight over them. It was how they did it in foxholes, trench huts, boats if they had to. They were warmer together, at least for a time. Frings could feel Lett’s pulse throb, weakly. He closed his eyes to sleep.

  The jeep started up, somehow. It was just before dawn. Frings had lowered the windshield to help hide the shattered glass and MP markings on the lower frame. Ice and snow had piled up on the fenders and bumpers, covering other markings. He had flushed out and wiped down the starboard side, in and out, to remove any obvious blood. It was cold and gritty work, but he’d done worse on a boat in a North Sea winter.

  He lay the two blankets in the back seat. He hauled Lett out of the shack and loaded him in the back, facing up, and swathed him in the top blanket. He tied off the bottom blanket’s corners to handles and seats, forming a makeshift hammock to keep him steady and cradled. Lett’s lower legs hung over the side, bent at the knee, but it would have to do.

  Frings drove fast and as far west as he could, stopping often to listen for battles. He drove toward any combat he heard, trusting that the chaotic, ever-changing front lines made roadblocks pointless and too dangerous. He drove through two firefights. One raged in a forest, directly starboard. He zigzagged along it, ducking as low as he could while driving. Bullets and shrapnel clattered at tree trunks and metal, ricochets striking the hood, his helmet. The other was a battle for a crossroads. Frings steered right into the line of fire and gave it full throttle, passing anti-tank guns, mortar teams and covering grunts from both sides. GIs and Landser alike stopped and stared. A few rose even, shaking their heads. What they saw was a madman. And yet here was the only thing that had made them stop fighting, if even for a moment. Frings laughed at them, hugging the wheel as he sped onward, westward. If his odds ran out like this, then what better way?

  He passed a burning barn portside and saw a medic hovered over a howling wounded GI, the medic tearing open sulfa packets and ripping open clothing. Frings slid to a halt.

  The medic, seeing boots hanging out the back, gestured west and shouted, “Aid station ‘bout a kilometer!”

  Frings hit the accelerator. A pistol shot rang out, zinging close to his ear. He looked back.

  The medic was screaming, “Wait! Wait!”

  Frings slammed on the brakes, shoving up a wake of snow.

  Medics didn’t carry weapons, but this one had a Colt. The medic tossed the gun off into the snow, glaring at it like it was a grenade ready to blow and he stumbled over to Frings’ jeep, panting, smothered in blood, his hands steaming.

  “You gotta take this one, hear? I done all I can, just done all I can,” the medic said.

  “Okay.” Frings and the medic somehow piled the wounded man onto the front seat, his unconscious weight like a stack of sandbags. The poor bastard was a captain and older than Frings. The captain groaned. Lett groaned from the back.

  “Verdammt noch mal,” Frings muttered and drove on.

  He entered a village overrun with frantic, bustling American troops. He saw a red cross—the aid station tent stood in the courtyard for a bombed-out church, as if that was going to save them. Wounded had been massed under the end of the church still standing. Medics, make-do orderlies and civilians rushed in and out, handing off litters and hauling supplies from a truck. Frings pulled up as far as he could, only stopping before a line of bodies. Lett and the captain had gone silent. Frings jumped out and shouted, “Help! Help here!”

  No one came. Frings glared at those rushing past. He grabbed a medic by his sleeve but the guy shook it off, kept going. Frings took a deep breath, and went to check on Lett in back. His blanket cradle had held up. He had a musette bag for a pillow. His eyes had been closed so long a crust had formed between eyelids but his face wasn’t green, a good sign. Frings touched his neck splattered with dried blood—still warm, pulsing.

  A German POW came at him. A German medic? He wore the armband with red cross. Frings grabbed him by his leather belt as he passed. “You! You have to help these men,” he shouted in English.

  The German medic had swung around, eyes wild and cheeks sunken from exhaustion. He saw the jeep. He held up his palms.

  “So no English?” Frings said in German, lowering his voice. “Then you listen to me. All right? You hear me good now?”

  The German straightened up, and nodded.

  Frings whispered: “The one in back—promise me you’ll go get him help. If you do, good fortune will come your way. And, you never saw me. Clear?”

  “Clear. I promise. As ordered, sir!” the German said and ran off for the tent.

  Frings bent down to Lett. “Thank you,” he said, and kissed Lett on the forehead. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave you.”

  He turned, studying the scene. Beyond the church, to the West, he saw more treetops. So he headed around the church toward the woods, leaving the wheel of his craft for good.

  ***

  Wendell Lett’s eyes opened. He floated, was floating. He jolted, was jolted, but only knew it as such, as one would in a dream. He dreamed he was suspended on a litter, riding on a medical truck, and the cold stung at his face but he only recognized the sensation as a notion. He saw the sky, and it was blue, which made him know this had to be a dream. If this was real, the grayest clouds and blinding fog would be bearing down on him like iron and lead, ice and snow.

  With time, the dream grew surreal. He smelled salt in the air, as if he was near the sea, and the dream told him the truck waited at a port, lined up with many such trucks in the neatest file the Army could imagine. This made Lett giggle. He laughed out loud. Still he felt no pain. Of course this was one long dream. That was why he floated. No weight on him. Like this, nothing horrible had ever happened. It was like being on water, yet lighter, as if the water itself was flowing through him, carrying him along as it did so, he was the water flow. He could keep flowing like this forever. He would find Heloise in the flow and hold her hand and carry her along like this, forever. All he had to do was not mention his real name to them, or hers, and her hand would find his and flow into his. As they floated.

  ***

  The sky shined blue. American planes passed high above, roaring on to hunt down the enemy columns retreating farther back into Germany. Holger Frings, in full and sloppy American battle dress,
rode into a US Army transit depot in the back of a jeep. He had hitched another ride. The driver was a courier, which Frings noted with irony. Frings had perfected his GI costume with items he had picked off the dead he’d come across during his weeks on the lam, including an almost new field jacket, good leggings, a wool helmet beanie and another GI sweater. He had spent Christmas alone in a cellar, but the abandoned house above him had given him a gift: a portable typewriter, left out on a writing desk. His feet felt good and warm. He was wearing Lett’s spare socks.

  An MP was directing traffic. Frings saw lines of wall tents, including latrines and showers and a mess hall. The courier stopped for Frings to jump out onto a walkway of plywood over the mud and frost. “Thanks, mac,” Frings said. He found the check-in table in a heated tent that Frings could have warmed in for days. He waited on a bench. Someone had left the latest front-line edition of Stars and Stripes, dated January 17, 1945. “Nazi Spies Executed,” read a headline along with a photo of three enemy impostor American soldiers moments after being shot by an MP firing squad, tied to posts, their heads hanging far forward as if their necks had been snapped for good measure. Had Frings been able to see the faces he surely would have recognized at least one Stielau commando, and probably a comrade sailor. The story said that more caught spies awaited trial. He didn’t need a photo to tell him what it meant for them.

  He slid a stick of Wrigley’s gum in his mouth, and smacked it.

  When his time came, he approached the table and handed his temporary leave pass to the clerk, a frail-looking corporal. Reading the pass, the clerk gave Frings a sorry look. He handed back the pass. “I hear your outfit took a beating out there. Sergeant Lett?”

  “That’s right,” Frings said, swallowing the last “t” like Lett had taught him, for less of an accent.

  “Well, make the most of this, will ya?”

  “You bet I will.”

  ***

  All was white. Wendell Lett saw an eternal whiteness, cold and fixed. For a moment the overwhelming whiteness made Lett think he’d finally bought it. This didn’t scare him. It could only end this way for a dogface up on the line too long. Sergeant Lett of the Army of the United States had been used up and wrung out for all a man could give.

  Then the white he saw around him took on layers and textures. He saw rumpled white blankets and thick white gauzes, white walls with hard angles and protruding bolts. He saw white bunk frames. Men lay under the blankets and gauze, the blankets held down with straps, the gauze oozing reds and yellows.

  He was strapped in. He looked up. Another man lay above him, the mattress wanting to press through thin metal slats. He had a lower bunk. The stacks and rows of bunks went on like this down the aisle, unending as if mirrored.

  Something hit his nostrils. He smelled odors mixing together—sharp antiseptics and the fumes of cleaners, the sweetness of blood and sourness of urine, gangrene, a general rot.

  He couldn’t keep his head up. The fog inside it was too great, the weight on him heavy, and on his eyelids. It was how the morphine lingered in a man.

  His heart jolted, thumping. His eyes popped back open. Sweat poured out of him, cold and slimy.

  He remembered Heloise. He had almost made it back to her. He was so close, almost free.

  He remembered: The German Frings had helped him get away. The last thing he remembered after the MPs got a shot off was lying on a cold damp floor in a dark forest, and shivering. But Frings was there, too. Frings somehow had kept Lett warm.

  Lett did not forget that he must never, ever speak the German’s name. Yet nothing explained how he got here to this infirmary. The few small windows were high, between those bolts and buttresses. Was it some sort of armored hospital? A bunker maybe? If so he could still be in Belgium, near the line, still close to Heloise. He could hope.

  The medical gear was US issue, he could see that. He peeked his head out, and saw a nurse in white pass down the aisle. But Army nurses didn’t wear all white near the front. And his pajamas were white? This place was too damn white—too spic and span and all spruced up.

  At least he had nothing stuck in his arms. He pushed off his blanket down to the strap around his hips and tried to reach down and unbuckle the strap, but his back rippled with pain. Did he have broken ribs? Or could something be wrong with his spine?

  Then it hit him, sharper than any busted rib: What if they knew about him, and knew just who he was? He felt down under his pajamas, but couldn’t feel dog tags. They were still missing. Good. Did it mean Frings had done just like he promised? Had Holger made it to Heloise?

  His heart jumped again, like someone had punched it. What about Captain Selfer? Did that bastard know his location? If so the game was up. Or was Selfer still out hunting for him? A man like that would never rest until he nabbed the prize, but no reward would ever be enough. Lett felt a chill in his chest. He thought: What if Selfer had him sent to this place, to keep an eye on him, to heal him up for what Army intelligence had in store for him next?

  The patient across from Lett was out of it, mouth open, thick bandages covering his ears like kids muffs. Lett pulled himself to the edge of his bunk, looking out.

  A man came shuffling up the aisle wearing pajamas and one arm in a cast.

  “Hey, buddy,” Lett said, his voice creaky.

  The patient kept going, almost past Lett. Then he stopped and pivoted around, his slippers swishing on the metal floor. The man looked right through Lett. It wasn’t from a sedative. He had the look—this sorry case was a beaten-down GI.

  The patient seemed to see the same in Lett, giving him the slightest nod. “Whatcha want, bud?” he said, sounding like he had sand in his throat.

  “You got to get me outta this fix. Help a Joe out?”

  The patient scanned the ward, casing the room as if it was a wood hiding a German flamethrower pillbox. “We got to go careful-like, but we keep it moving,” he whispered.

  “There’s no other way,” Lett whispered.

  The patient, grunting, undid Lett’s buckle with one hand and pulled Lett up to sit on the edge on his bunk, the blanket falling away. “You know there’s no flying this coop. You know that, right? There’s only one way out, and it’s a long way down.”

  Anger rose up in Lett, wrestling away the pain, and he let it take over. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he barked. “Huh? Just what?”

  “Ease up. Just giving you the lay of things. You should be happy as hell. You’re heading home, sure enough.”

  Home? What home? Lett’s rage had helped him stand, the patient hanging on to him, but now his chest burned and his legs ached, sapping his breath.

  “What day is it? Month?” he said.

  “Don’t know the day. It’s middle of January thereabouts. Nineteen forty-five.”

  Less than a month had passed. “All right. Sorry,” Lett said and pushed away from his bunk, one foot in front of the other, using other bunk frames for support. He had to catch his breath. A little nausea crept up his throat but as he steadied himself he realized it wasn’t his head gone spinning. They were moving—the whole damn ward was. Was this a hospital train? He couldn’t hear or feel the click-clack of tracks, and the room was too wide. And the floor wasn’t swaying like a train. It went up and down, it rose and fell.

  “Dear god, no,” he muttered. He moved on, grasping at bunk frames.

  “Go get em!” a patient yelled from a bunk. “All da way ta home base,” yelled another and raspy laughs echoed through the ward.

  He kept going, out a narrow doorway and down a corridor, passing under caged lights and more buttresses, then past doorways for narrow exposed metal stairways going up, down.

  Lett looked behind him. A nurse was coming after him, with two male orderlies jogging up behind her.

  “Stop there, soldier,” shouted the nurse, her voice hard.

  Lett charged forward, pushing off the cold iron walls. The nurse had caught up to him but slowed, her palms out as if ready to catch him. H
e wasn’t sure why she let him go on. Maybe it had something to do with the hot tears splashing at his forearms.

  An open door showed daylight. His legs jittered, sending jerks of pain up his torso, but he kept slogging. He’d been in far worse than this, sure he had.

  He stepped through the doorway. A blast of cold fresh air smacked his cheeks. The two orderlies were already outside, having flanked him from another door, their arms out ready for him. The nurse had fingertips on his shoulders, calming him, stroking him like a mother would a boy’s too-long hair before cutting it.

  “Can’t hurt to let him see?” one of them said. “What can it hurt?”

  Lett had to squint though it was barely light. Before him spread a vast sea, the dark shifting water soaring into peaks like mountain ranges, then descending into deepest canyons. Beyond the dim horizon, and all above, loomed a sky laden with impenetrable low clouds of the same dark gray as the metal on his M1 rifle.

  “What is this?” Lett said. “Just what the hell is this?”

  “English Channel, friend,” one orderly said, trying to sound chirpy but not pulling it off.

  The three stood around him, holding him up, hair whipping in their eyes.

  He had to test them. “Do you know my name? Do any of you?” he said.

  “You came with no tags,” the nurse said.

  So Frings really did it? Could he have made it to Heloise? Lett couldn’t help smiling.

  The three eyed each other. “But, we’ll get to that in due time,” the nurse added.

  Lett remembered: He had woken up like this before, as if it was the first time waking. Then he always adjusted. He knew his name, but acted like he couldn’t remember. Combat exhaustion taking its toll, they would assume. The missing dog tags helped and his wounds didn’t hurt either. The main thing was, he couldn’t open his mouth until he knew the play—until he knew just where Captain Selfer and his goddamn patron Lieutenant Colonel Archie Archibald lurked, looking to sink their claws back into him. Only when he was good and clear could he find his way back to Heloise.