by Nancy Holder
The door to the pub banged open and the bruiser re-entered, this time with a pistol. The man leaned in to shoot but Diana coolly grabbed his hand and disarmed him. He grunted; holding him by the waist, she flipped him and sent him flying across the pub. He crashed into scattering of empty chairs and tables. His so-called mates abandoned him, rushing out of the pub.
Astonished, Sammy bent down to help Charlie up. He nodded towards Diana and said, “I am both frightened and aroused.”
“When aren’t you?” Charlie shot back, rubbing his head. He nodded his bemused thanks at Diana as Steve took the gun from her and put it under his messenger bag. The reinforcements regarded her with newfound respect.
The pub door opened again and a flustered Etta rushed in. “There they are,” she said, a forced smile on her face.
A familiar-looking man walked in after her.
“Sir Patrick!” Diana exclaimed.
“That’s what I was going to mention,” Etta said.
Steve, Sammy, and Charlie stood to attention out of respect. Steve seemed put out with Etta, who must have told Sir Patrick where Steve had planned to meet up with Charlie and Sammy. Etta shrugged apologetically and made a calming be patient gesture with her hand.
“Sit, gentlemen,” Sir Patrick said. “Please sit.”
He pulled up a chair as the others got comfortable. “I assume you’re here planning something that’s either going to get you court-martialed or killed.”
“I assume you’re here to stop us,” Steve said.
The elderly man shook his head as he took his ease. “No. Not at all. In fact, I was a younger man once and had I been in better health, I’d like to think I would do the same. I think it’s a very honorable thing to do. Therefore, I am here to help. Unofficially, of course.’”
Diana smiled. It seemed there were more good men in this world than she had given credit for.
“What’s your plan?” Sir Patrick asked.
“If there is another weapons facility, find it and destroy it. Along with Ludendorff and Maru,” Steve said.
Sir Patrick nodded solemnly. “The charming Etta will run the mission out of my office to allay suspicion,” he said.
“Run the mission, sir?” Etta said, wide-eyed, a little faint.
Sir Patrick slid a fat envelope across the table to Steve. “It’s enough for a few days,” he told him.
Steve took the envelope. “Thank you, sir.”
Sir Patrick waved off Steve’s expression of gratitude. “You’re very welcome. Take great care, all of you. And good luck.”
We may need to make our own luck, Steve thought. Then he caught the pleased expression on Diana’s face. And I think we’re up to the task.
11
Diana and Steve walked under the ornate entry arch of Paddington Station and into a madhouse of random but purposeful motion. She had never seen so many people crammed into an enclosed space. Everyone seemed happy, even jubilant, which struck her as strange given that it was wartime. Men in turbans marched; others rode past them on bicycles, shouting to each other in Punjabi and laughing. Most people were tending stacks of baggage, and some were tending children as well. A small girl bolted from her mother or nanny, and the woman abandoned her luggage to give chase. There were many soldiers in khaki, presumably headed the same place she was: the Front.
Steve took her arm and they walked to a barred gate where a uniformed man checked their tickets, then let them pass. The air was sooty and the platform gritty underfoot. Diana had never seen a train before; their size and construction fascinated her. Steve had told her in America they were sometimes called the “Iron Horse.” A horse one rode on the inside instead of the outside.
The platform was lined with travelers; women dressed as healers and factory workers, Steve said. They served as replacements for the men who had gone to war. Most of the crowd were soldiers, but there were also older men and women who Diana assumed were their fathers and mothers. They were saying goodbye to sons bravely going off to war. Here and there, girlfriends were swept up into uniformed boyfriends’ arms and passionately kissed. Small dogs were scooped up and hugged goodbye.
Diana smiled as she watched the sweet farewells.
Ahead of them, a man and a young girl who appeared to be his daughter turned away from a quayside stand carrying curious, cone-shaped objects that they licked with delight. The ice cream seller called out for all to sample his wares.
Steve gave her an amused look. “Hungry?”
Diana nodded enthusiastically. She watched as the man handed them two cone-shaped objects topped with a little dome.
“Thank you,” she said.
She didn’t know how to approach eating it until she watched him lick at the white ball. She daintily touched it with her tongue and her eyes went wide. Cold. Creamy. Sweet. Delicious.
“What do you think?” Steve asked her.
“Wonderful,” Diana said.
There was a little wooden step set out in front of their rail car’s open door. Steve took her elbow as she climbed up. She didn’t need his help, but the pressure of his hand on her arm—the affection—pleased her.
As she glanced back at him something across the way caught her attention. A little portable stage had been set up and parents and children stood in front of it, mesmerized by a pair of puppets. One male, the other female. The dolls were shrieking and furiously hitting each other with sticks. The audience, young and old, laughed at the display of violence. Diana watched curiously, remembering a little Amazon so many years ago, watching the warriors learning to fight, not to inflict damage for sport or out of anger, but to protect every single person in this railroad station if the need arose. And the need had most certainly arisen.
* * *
The train ride was exhilarating. The landscape flashed past Diana’s window at rapid speed—hedges and fences, sheep, goats, villages. After the train screeched to a stop at the Dover docks, she, Steve, Charlie and Sammy climbed down to the platform. Engulfed by clouds of steam, they mingled with the hundreds of Allied soldiers who were also disembarking. The new recruits were jubilant, singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” as they marched toward the steam ship that would carry them to the Front. Since the team was traveling incognito, they had had to find a different way to get to there.
As they crossed a bridge, Steve checked his watch. “We’ve got to get a move on,” he said. “Chief won’t wait.”
“Chief?” Diana said.
“Smuggler,” Steve explained. “Very reputable.”
Diana glanced at the ragtag team Steve had assembled and her stomach tightened into a knot. Charlie was dressed in a kilt, knee socks, an old blue sweater, a battered Army jacket, and side cap. Sammy wore an overcoat with a fleece collar and a straw boater hat. They were not the kind of warriors she had grown up with, the kind she had modeled herself after. She shook her head and said, “A liar, murderer, and now a smuggler? Lovely.”
“Careful, I might get offended,” Steve said.
“I wasn’t referring to you.”
“Really? I went undercover and pretended to be something else. I shot people on your beach and I smuggled a notebook to London. Liar, murderer, smuggler.” He paused to let that sink in. “Still coming?”
She acquiesced and let him lead her away from the soldiers, down a different path—narrower, muddier. It wound away from the station to another set of docks. A white ship with a huge red cross on the side was disgorging its passengers. Diana recognized the healers’ uniforms—they were the same as the ones on the train. Except that they were soiled and stained with blood. And the healers themselves looked exhausted and wretched as they helped wounded young soldiers down the gangway to the dock. Some of the young men were carried on litters because they were too injured to walk, even with help. Some had faces completely covered with bandages. Some were missing limbs.
“It’s awful,” Diana murmured, hurting for these fallen warriors.
“That’s why we’re here,” S
teve said soberly.
Steve put his hand on her shoulder as she took in the horror, the despair, and the waste until she could look no longer. This is what must stop, she told herself. This is why I must stop it. She took a firm grip on Steve’s arm and they turned away from the hospital ship and towards the next dock.
They walked down the pier to a sixty-foot boat with a wooden pilothouse set high above the deck. There were bumpers on the sides and at the bow. It was flying a blue, yellow, and red flag. It was not the flag she had seen everywhere in London. The same colors were repeated on the vessel’s smoke stack that was puffing black exhaust.
“Romanian tug boat,” Steve said as they climbed aboard. “The favorite nation of spies and smugglers. Won’t draw attention when we dock on the other side of the Channel.”
Almost immediately the lone crewman cast off the mooring lines and the boat began to back away from the pier. The captain, a bearded man in a cloth cap, did not greet them or introduce himself. He seemed only interested in getting out of the harbor as quickly as he could. Once he turned the bow into the wind, an afternoon that was merely chilly became downright cold. The sky threatened rain. As strange as the vessel was, as strange as her new companions were, as dark as her future looked, Diana found comfort in the familiar motion and the smell of the sea.
* * *
Steve did not wake her up the next morning; she woke him, and Sammy, and Charlie. The crewman exited the tiny galley and handed them each a steaming mug of tea. They went up on deck to watch the sunrise and enjoy their spartan breakfast. The weather had calmed overnight but the skies were still gray and threatening.
After the tug was moored to the dock, Steve paid the captain out of the money Sir Patrick had given him. Diana brought up the rear as the team set off across the docks. A troopship was tied up on the pier opposite. Diana saw horses being unloaded. War horses. Some of the animals wore gas masks. It was a bizarre and disturbing sight; the implication chilled her to the bone. On Themyscira, she had been taught to revere the land and its animals, which had been placed under the protection of the Amazons by Zeus.
“The gas will kill everyone… everything,” she said.
Steve nodded in agreement.
“What kind of weapon kills innocents?” she asked, a rhetorical question. She was not naïve, but all this was new territory to her in so many ways.
“In this war?” Steve said. “Every kind.”
Charlie took out a tattered map, referred to it, then said, “We have a bit of walk ahead of us. Nice day for it, though.”
But the blue sky became a grim counterpoint to the horrors surrounding the quartet as they slogged through a sepia world of browns—mud-covered soldiers and fleeing civilians. Thin, exhausted mothers carrying clinging children, their wide, frightened eyes cutting Diana to the quick. This should not be the kind of world that any child saw. Men carrying bundles of possessions. Desperation, fear, flight. Men whipped a poor horse stuck in a muddy pond. Violently, urgently. The distressed creature whickered in protest; it couldn’t budge. Other horses were similarly maltreated, by men equally skittish.
“These animals. Why are they hurting them?” Diana protested.
“Because they need to move,” Charlie offered.
“This is not the way. I could help them.” Diana prepared to do just that, but Charlie shook his head.
“There’s no time. Come on, woman.”
They passed a maimed soldier lying in the mud, crying out in pain. “That man. He’s wounded.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Sammy said. “We must keep moving.”
The pervasiveness of the horrors all around them tore at her. Every instinct to stop, to help, warred with the urgency of finding Ares. Once he was dead, this hideous hell would cease to be. But in the meantime, she was an Amazon, sworn to protect all mankind, and these people needed her desperately. Each step she took past the suffering was bitter and hollow. The Great War had already claimed the lives of millions, and the hungry maw of death was eager to devour millions more.
* * *
The torturous trek led them into an oak forest; as the last of the daylight faded, they came upon a campfire near the crossing of two dirt roads. A man wearing a large, broad-brimmed hat, a buckskin jacket, and a choker of bone and beads tended a campfire.
“You’re late,” the man said as he rose to his feet. His rifle was decorated with brass studs in a series of unusual designs. He picked up a piece of wood from a small pile and threw it on the fire.
“Cowboy sneak attack, Chief,” Steve said.
The man embraced Steve, and nodded a greeting to Charlie and Sammy.
“It’s good to see you,” Sammy said.
“Aye,” Charlie added.
The Chief turned to Diana. “Who is this?” he said. “Niitangio, Napi.”
Diana understood. She replied in English. “I am Diana.”
Her response in his language surprised and pleased him. “Where did you find her?”
“She found me,” Steve replied.
“I plucked him from the sea,” Diana began.
Steve waved for her to stop. “It’s a long story,” he interjected. Sensing a need for discretion, Diana complied.
Beside the campfire, a tent had been pitched. In the firelight Diana saw a pile of packages of various sizes wrapped in oilcloth and several guns leaning up against them. One of the crates was open and it was neatly filled with tall brown bottles.
“What are those?” Diana asked.
Steve looked at the stuff and did a running tally. “British tea for the Germans.” He showed her a packet. “German beer for the British. Edgar Rice Burroughs novels for both sides.”
“And guns,” Charlie said. He walked over to the stockpile and picked up a gun. It had a small metal tube on top, what in their private conversations Steve had referred to as an “Aldis Pattern three-power, telescopic sight.” She recognized the gun from his description: it was a British Lee–Enfield Model P14. Charlie shouldered the sniper weapon and looked through the sight, then gave the stock a big wet kiss, like a father reunited with a long lost child.
While Diana watched, the others helped themselves to guns. It pleased her that she could recognize them too. Sammy grabbed a Lee–Enfield Mark VII, .303 caliber. And Steve, the American, picked up an American gun, a Winchester 12-gauge repeating shotgun. Thanks to Steve, she also knew their magazine capacities and effective firing ranges.
Steve, Charlie, and Sammy helped themselves to bottles of beer from the crate. They stood in a circle with the man known as the Chief, holding up the bottles.
“May we get what we want,” Charlie said.
“May we get what we need,” Steve added.
“But may we never get what we deserve,” Sammy said.
“Bang,” they said, clinking the bottles together.
In less than ten minutes Charlie was snoring curled up by the fire. Steve and Sammy joined him a short while later. The Chief opened some cans of food and heated them in the fire.
There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. The sky was overcast, no visible stars, but it wasn’t stormy.
“Strange thunder,” Diana said.
“German seventy-sevens,” the Chief said. “Guns. Big ones.” He pointed in the direction of the rumbling sounds. “That’s the Front out there. The evening hate.”
The Front. So they were close. Diana’s heartbeat picked up. Soon she would battle Ares. And she would defeat him with the Godkiller. This misery would all end.
He handed her a can of beans and a spoon. She tried a bite and frowned. It tasted like bits of chalk in a disgustingly sweet sauce. She set the can aside. Not all the food here was good.
“So,” she said to the Chief, who was counting a thick wad of paper money bills, “who do you fight for?”
He stuffed the money into his pocket. “I don’t fight,” he said.
“You’re here for the profit, then?”
“No better place to be
.”
“Nowhere better to be than a war you don’t take a side in?”
“I have nowhere else and no side left. The last war took everything from my people. We have nothing left. At least here, I’m free.”
“Who took that from your people?”
The Chief gave her a puzzled look, as if questioning her seriousness, as if the answer was so obvious. But she really didn’t know, and he seemed to understand that. He motioned to Steve, who slept peacefully. “His people…”
Before Diana could follow up with more questions, Charlie stirred in his sleep. First he began to murmur, then whimper, then his limbs jerked as if he was having a terrible nightmare. She watched him with growing concern until he suddenly cried out, eyes popping wide open, mouth gaping. The cry echoed through the forest and awakened Steve and Sammy, who sat up.
Diana reached out to Charlie compassionately, gathering him up. “You’re safe,” she said. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged her away. “Get off me, woman. Stop making a fuss.”
He got up and helped himself to another beer. Diana noticed that his hand was shaking as he tipped the bottle back. She sat back down.
“He sees ghosts,” the Chief said. Diana could imagine that he must, fighting without honor as he had.
Steve got up and fetched her his coat. “You’re going to get cold. Here.”
She began to explain that she didn’t feel the cold as he died. Amazons were impervious. “No, I’m…”
And then she realized that he was extending her a kindness. The gesture, like his hand on her elbow helping her into the train car, were evidence of his thoughtfulness. The sign of affection warmed her far more than the coat.
“Don’t worry about Charlie,” he told her softly. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
This war. This terrible war.
12
Ludendorff fumed as he returned the salutes of a pair of sentries guarding a fortified bunker deep in German-occupied Belgium. It had been a long drive and he had been delayed several times. On one level that could be amusing, given who he was. But he was not amused.
