He was grateful she’d spoken in French. Now they could converse in private despite the prying eyes and ears of the operations staff.
“Are you joking?” he asked. “Forget you? How could I?”
“That is my question, too—how could you? Did you get my letters?”
“Yes. Surprisingly, I did. Did you get mine?”
She shook her head. “You replied, then?”
“Yes, of course! That explains it,” he said. “Maybe we ought to try carrier pigeons or something.”
“Yes, maybe so—” She was going to say more, but he’d figured out how to move again. He was kissing her full on the mouth.
They ignored the whistles and catcalls. Then, as if of one mind, they ended their long kiss, turned, and bowed theatrically to their audience. That display finished, they sauntered out of the operations shack arm in arm.
Once outside, he pointed to the bicycle and asked, in English, “You didn’t ride that thing all the—”
Her burst of laughter cut him off in mid-sentence. “No, silly boy. It’s nearly three hundred miles. I took a bus from Alençon. The bike is borrowed from a friend here in Toul.”
“Gee, you’ve got friends and family all over, don’t you?”
With the tip of her finger, she tapped the black beret on her head, the mark of the Resistance: the maquis.
“Even strangers are friends when you wear the beret,” she replied.
“But you’re finished with all that stuff now, right? I mean, the Germans are gone.”
“They are not completely gone from France, Tommy.”
‘But you are finished with the Resistance, aren’t you?”
“For God’s sake, lower your voice,” she pleaded.
“Oh, crap! You’re still playing soldier.”
“We are not playing, Tommy.” She pulled back a step, a kaleidoscope of emotions whirling across her face: defiance, anger, hurt, pain, desperation, need—and at last, a hopeful plea: “Can’t you be happy just to see me? Please?”
That didn’t seem like too much to ask. He pulled her into his arms, letting his tight embrace answer the question.
Another long kiss, and then he said, “Can we start again?”
“Yes, please.”
They found a place to sit that wasn’t wet from the rain, a just-delivered crate of aircraft parts. She explained that she was now a courier for the Free French, no longer a fighting member of the Resistance. Still, she might occasionally have to operate in German-held areas, not as a spy, femme fatale, assassin, or saboteur, but merely a messenger.
To emphasize the point, she said, “I don’t even carry my pistol anymore.”
Then she explained that she was on her way to Nancy, carrying urgent personal messages to soldiers in the French 2nd Armored Division. “La Poste works as poorly for the French as it does for you Yanks, I suppose.”
“You’re going to Nancy? I just passed through it. My brother’s up north of there.”
“Is he fighting at the forts of Metz?”
“Yeah. I am, too, actually.”
Her face saddened. “Those forts…they are a very bad business. For decades, they did nothing, not for the French, not for the Germans. They were useless, monuments to petrified thinking. And now, suddenly, against all reason, they are important and powerful.”
“You know about those forts?”
“They are part of our history. We studied them in school, Tommy.”
“Yeah, I guess you would.”
Desperate to change the subject, he asked, “How’s your papa?”
“He still hates you.”
A moment of stunned silence, and then her face broke into a mischievous smile. “But he hates all Americans. Not as much as he hates the Boche and communists, though.”
“At least I’m in good company,” Tommy replied with a smile of his own.
Then he got serious again. “And Bernard?”
“Our annulment will be announced eventually. The Church shall not be hurried. But I don’t need their piece of paper to know I am rid of him.”
A P-47’s engine roared to life. Sylvie asked, “Should you not be flying, too?”
“He’s not going to fly. That’s just a run-up for maintenance. The weather’s still too socked in. Besides, I’m not with—”
He’d stopped himself cold. He was about to let slip he was on a special project.
A secret project.
“You’re not with what, Tommy?”
He hesitated, stumbling through some evasive gestures before he said, very coldly, “I can’t talk about it.”
“Are you in some sort of trouble? Have you been grounded?”
“No, nothing like that, Syl.”
She watched him squirm for a few moments, at first confused that this sweet and guileless American she’d taken as a lover these last few months could seem so conflicted. There had never been anything terribly complicated about Lieutenant Tommy Moon. He was always open, honest, intelligent, and driven by duty.
And he speaks almost intelligible French! So rare for an American.
“Yet you can’t tell me,” she said.
He hung his head as if betraying her, but his lips remained sealed.
She allowed herself a brief interval to pity him. And then she broke into thunderous laughter.
“What the hell is so damn funny, Sylvie?”
It took her a minute to catch her breath before she could articulate an answer. Once she had, she threw her arms around him and said, “Oh, Tommy, this is so perfect. Forgive me for finding the irony in this so…so…what is the word you Ami use? When you laugh so much?”
“Hysterical?”
“Yes, yes! That’s it. It’s hysterical! Hystérique!”
“Sorry, but I don’t get the joke here.”
She wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes, took a deep breath, and began her explanation.
“Ever since we first met, Tommy, you never fully understood—maybe never fully respected, either—the need I had for absolute secrecy as a maquisard. But I just assumed all American men were like that, living in their perfect world where everything was black or white, regarding women as mere accessories to their very important lives.”
“How can you say I didn’t take it seriously, Syl? Of course I did. You saved my life, for cryin’ out loud! That’s pretty damn serious. But every second I was terrified something would happen to you.”
“And you didn’t think I was just as terrified? For myself…as well as for you?”
“Well…I suppose so.”
“You’d better suppose so, Tommy Moon, because what I had to do was every bit as important as what you had to do.”
“Okay, fine. No argument there. But why do you find it so funny, Sylvie?”
“Because now you have a secret, Tommy. And all of a sudden, you expect me, without question, to respect it, to take it very, very seriously. But you’re so uncomfortable with this secret. You’re not used to living with them in your little black and white world, so it’s tearing you apart.”
She smiled coyly, and then added, “You’re dying to tell someone, aren’t you?”
The sheepish look on his face was the only answer she needed.
“Well, I know the importance of keeping secrets better than you, Tommy. So here’s my promise: I’ll never ask you to tell me what it is. Never. You have my word on that. So you can stop being so uncomfortable with it. At least around me.”
Nestled against each other, they fell quiet, relieved that the storm between them had passed, leaving no damage in its wake. She slipped a piece of paper into his hand. “This is where I’m staying. It’s not far from here.”
Chapter Seventeen
As far as Sean Moon was concerned, it had started like every other time they’d tried to attack Fort Driant: Just one damn SNAFU after another.
But then, the dozer tanks—Shermans with bulldozer blades rigged to their bows—made a startling discovery: although they couldn’t move ea
rth fast enough to fill in the deep, steep-sided ditch protecting the front—or west—side of the fort from tanks, they could certainly bury the pillbox at the end of that ditch in no time flat. The pillbox covered the ditch’s length with grazing machine gun fire, making it a deathtrap for infantry as well as armor. The bullets from inside the fort clanking off the dozers’ blades were no impediment to this improvised earth-moving project.
The pillbox silenced, infantrymen of 5th Division spilled through the narrow, suddenly undefended gap at the south end of the ditch. The barbed wire field they skirted was quickly found to be free of mines, so the four Shermans of Baker Company’s 2nd Platoon—the platoon Sean Moon led—were ordered to smash through it, enter the fort’s perimeter, and protect the infantry with roving cover and fire support. The infantry, in turn, was to protect the tanks from German sappers.
The constant ping of bullets off the tanks’ hulls and turrets kept them buttoned up. I’d give my eye teeth to be able to open this hatch and have a really good look around, Sean thought, but the view out this damn periscope will have to do. At least I can tell where we are—coming up on Bunkers 3 and 4. Beyond them are those two batteries—six guns total, three domed steel turrets each. They ain’t firing at nothing…they’re retracted into their concrete shells like turtles pulling themselves in and covering up.
Can’t see a friggin’ Kraut anywhere…not even the outline of a fucking helmet.
But somebody’s shooting out of them bunkers, that’s for damn sure. All those firing ports…they’re like windows without glass, and they ain’t that big. They can’t shoot anything out of them but rifles and MGs. If they got any anti-tank guns inside the perimeter, they would’ve been firing at us already.
We still gotta watch out for them fucking panzerfausts. But I’m betting the Krauts will have problems firing one of them things from inside those bunkers because they got two wrong ends, just like a bazooka. Try to fire it in a tight space and you cook yourself and everyone around you with the rocket blast.
And now that we’re inside, ain’t the other forts supposed to be laying down fire on us?
Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
Just so the dogfaces keep them jokers with grenades off our backs
Still, this is fucking nuts, driving around inside this place—or on top of it, or wherever the hell we are—being target practice for Krauts we can’t see and can’t touch. What’s that old saying? Try not to be conspicuous. It draws fire?
Gee, no shit.
And we sure as hell won’t be getting no help from the flyboys. Not with this overcast.
It was hard to keep track of where the GI infantry was through the limited view of the tank commander’s periscope. Usually, a squad or two would be bunched behind Lucky 7, desperate for the cover her hull provided. But sometimes, the infantry was nowhere to be seen.
At least my tankers are on the radio…and they’re doing what they’re told just like they’re supposed to.
But the dogfaces…their radios don’t talk to ours. Not directly, anyway. Sure, they can get a message to us through Battalion, but that takes too damn long. So when we gotta be buttoned up like this and we can’t yell at each other, I have no idea what they need unless one of them’s talking to me on the phone hanging off the ass end of the tank.
And right now, none of them corn plaster commandos are telling me a damn thing.
Sean led his tanks around the back side of Bunker 3, the one nearest the place they’d breached the wire. The tankers weren’t expecting the sight that met them.
“Holy shit,” Sean said. “Get a load of this!”
Although the bunker was built into a hill, its back side was completely exposed, as if a quarter of the hill had been scooped out and the structure built to fill the excavation. Viewed from this side, it was so much more than just the ground-level blockhouse atop the hill they’d been facing before turning the corner. In actuality, the bunker was a two-story monolith of concrete and stone, almost one hundred yards wide. Its back side faced a broad, sunken courtyard and featured dozens of firing ports. There were big steel doors at each corner of the facade. Even from two hundred yards away, those doors looked impenetrable.
Couldn’t tell it looked like this from them aerial photos.
The anxious voice of an infantry lieutenant at Lucky 7’s external phone crackled over her intercom. “Battalion wants us to take this bunker. Can you knock those doors down?”
“We can try, sir,” Sean replied. “But we can’t quiet down all those Krauts shooting at us. How the hell are you gonna get across that courtyard?”
“We’ll be behind you.”
“You’re gonna have to come out in the open at some point, Lieutenant. Then they’re gonna riddle your asses.”
“I’ve got that covered. Smoke’s on the way.”
The main guns of four tanks traversed to target the doors. But within seconds, smoke shells from the infantry’s mortars began to blanket the courtyard in a dense white cloud.
Fabiano, Sean’s gunner, banged his head against the gunsight in frustration. “Who turned on the fucking smoke? How the hell am I supposed to hit something I can’t see?” Over the radio, Sean’s other tanks were reporting that they, too, were suddenly blind.
“Take your best shot,” Sean told them. “That’s all you can do.”
The tanks fired. Just as fast as the loaders could shove in another round, they fired again.
The infantry lieutenant’s voice was back in Sean’s earphones. “Cease fire, cease fire. We’re moving in.”
Through his periscope, Sean could just make out the ghostly shapes of infantrymen running forward, only to disappear into the smoke in their dash to the bunker. By the time they reached its doors, the smoke screen was drifting away in the breeze. Seconds after that, they were sprinting back to the shelter of the tanks.
The doors stood fast. True, they were dented and scorched; a few of the tanks’ rounds had been direct hits. The rest had hit the concrete walls around them. They were chipped and scorched, too.
But those doors were still closed tighter than a bank vault. The walls were perfectly intact.
Sean told himself what he already knew too well: These damn seventy-five millimeters can’t punch through much more than a cardboard box. Ain’t got the muzzle velocity.
As the smoke cleared, withering fire from the bunker raked GI infantrymen who hadn’t yet reached the tanks. The suppressive fire from the Shermans couldn’t hope to deter every last German gunner.
They’d be lucky to silence half of them. Temporarily.
“We’re pulling back,” a terrified voice said over Lucky 7’s intercom. It could only be coming from one source, an infantryman on the tank’s external phone. Probably the same lieutenant from before, just more scared now.
“Not so damn fast, sir,” Sean replied. “My tanks are going to pull forward a little. Pick up your wounded and put them on the rear decks. We’ll carry them out.”
The four Shermans pulled forward, cutting the distance to the bunker down to less than a hundred yards. “Let me have another crack at ’em,” Fabiano said. “I can put a round right through one of those fucking windows, we’re so close.”
“Okay,” Sean replied, “bottom floor, third window from the left. Put that fucking MG out of its misery.”
“Got it,” Fabiano said. “On the way.”
The round struck with a thunderous SLAM and then a rippling shudder, like the tremors of an earthquake. Fist-sized chunks of concrete rained down like meteorites; thick gray dust shrouded the bunker’s façade.
But the dust settled quickly. When it did, the machine gun in that window began spewing its mechanized death all over again.
Fabiano smacked his gunsight in disgust. “Shit! I fucking missed.”
“You made their ears bleed, at least,” Sean said.
“Let me take another shot, Sarge.”
“No can do, Fab. We’re pulling back now.”
“Ahh,
c’mon, Sarge. Just one more.”
“I said no, dammit. How many times I gotta tell you…don’t waste rounds while we’re moving. You won’t hit nothing that way.”
The periscope view satisfied him that there were no GIs still huddled behind his tank, so he gave the order to Kowalski, his driver, to back away.
Through the periscope, Sean could see his other three tanks backing away, too, with GIs riding their hulls. Some were lying flat, probably wounded, while others crouched over them. There wasn’t anyone on Lucky 7’s deck.
I can’t tell how many they got wounded, but it sure looks like we took a shellacking.
As the tank rumbled backward, Sean kept up a panoramic sweep with the periscope, watching for threats from any direction:
I heard how them Krauts pop up out of nowhere in this place, like there’s hidey holes everywhere. That’s all I need right now—some clown with a panzerfaust appearing like magic—because I don’t see no GIs covering my ass.
But he wanted to make damned sure they didn’t accidentally run over any GIs, either.
Just because I can’t see ’em through this tiny little scope don’t mean they ain’t there.
“How long you want me to keep her in reverse, Sarge?” Kowalski’s voice.
“Until I tell you different.”
The other three tanks were pivoting and then shifting into forward gear to retrace their steps out of Fort Driant. Sean told Kowalski to do the same. They’d be the last tank in the exodus back to the assembly area, far behind the rest.
He swung the periscope for a view back to the bunker, now off the tank’s right side as she plowed forward.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing: Am I looking at GIs running for the wire? Or have Krauts come out of the woodwork to try and cut us off?
“Ski,” Sean called to his driver, “give me a quarter turn right.”
“That ain’t the way out, Sarge.”
“I ain’t asking for a map reading lesson, Corporal. Just do it.”
He pressed his face against the periscope, trying for a better look—an identifying look—at the soldiers they were fast closing on.
Dammit, I can’t see shit.
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 14
