This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Fernando Gamboa
Translation copyright © 2016 Alex Woodend
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Capitán Riley by Fernando Gamboa and Kindle Direct Publishing in 2014 in Spain. Translated from Spanish by Alexander Woodend. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503951488
ISBN-10: 1503951480
Cover design by Mark Ecob
CONTENTS
Start Reading
Pingarrón
1
2
The Banker and the Admiral
3
Högel
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Agent
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Wilhelm and Heinrich
37
38
Wilhelm and Juan
39
40
41
42
43
44
C and Winston
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
The Assault
64
65
The Pact
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
“All of our lauded technological progress [. . .] is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.”
Albert Einstein
“But the end of all things is at hand.”
1 Peter 4:7
Pingarrón
Jarama River Valley
Madrid, Spain
February 23, 1937
The sun set behind the hills fortifying the horizon. The bloody day of fierce combat in the mountains of Madrid was finally over.
The first stars sparkled in the indigo sky, peering out from the twilight, forced to witness once again the absurd and violent world of men. Sergeant Alexander M. Riley saw that world from his trench. Over the years, he’d seen it hundreds of times while setting a course from the deck of a ship on the high seas.
Now he wasn’t thinking of bearings, dials, or drifts, but of the fantasy that commanders on both sides, looking over a map of Spain, could civilly divide the mountain passes and bridges with square and bevel. Then the soldiers could stay home with their families instead of fertilizing the ungrateful, barren land with their blood.
With a grin caked in dirt and grime, Riley imagined the commanders settling disagreements over a game of cards. Deciding the outcome of this brutal Cainite civil war with aces of clubs and kings of diamonds would be funny in a way—two generals with their hands: “Two pair, I get Santander.”
The result couldn’t possibly be worse than what was already happening; Riley was sure he wouldn’t be the only one who thought so.
But no.
They had to do it the hard way.
“Sons of bitches . . .” he muttered.
“Did you say something, Sergeant?”
“No, Captain.” Riley turned around with a start, realizing he’d spoken aloud. “Just . . . I don’t like snitches.”
Sitting next to him in the shadows of the trench was Captain John Scout, a good, tired-looking man of few words who had led the International Brigade since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He glanced at Riley, now his second-in-command. He’d been promoted a few hours earlier, when a grenade sent Lieutenant Warner’s guts flying and left a position open. Riley was bundled up in the leather jacket that distinguished the members of the Lincoln Battalion. He clung with both hands to the Mauser rifle leaning on the ground.
“Of course,” Scout grumbled.
Three hundred yards behind and above them was the so-called summit of Pingarrón Hill. The only thing the pathetic hill, littered with charred olives, had going for it was that it was on the road from Morata to Arganda. According to the high command, that route was crucial to supplying Madrid, the capital of the Republic. If lost, the city would be unable to withstand a siege by the fascist rebel army. Of course, as tended to happen in such cases, the problem was the enemy had exactly the same opinion about the position’s strategic importance, so both sides fought fiercely for control of Pingarrón like it was the pass of Thermopylae, the storied spot the Spartans and Persians fought over centuries before.
During the day, Pingarrón Hill had changed hands three times at the cost of more than one thousand soldiers, who were now fly-ridden cadavers strewn across the hill. The blood of fascists and Republicans mixed together, staining the dry, acrid soil.
In the early evening, the two sides took a break from butchering each other to collect the wounded. No one bothered collecting the dead, or even counting them. When the ferocious roar of the fighter planes finally stopped, the chilling rattle of machine guns fell silent, and the steadily falling shells hushed, they could hear the screams. Wounded, mutilated, dying men used their last breaths to call for God or their mothers as they cried like lost children.
Riley tried to ignore the sounds as he looked at what was left of the first company of the battalion, made up exclusively of young American volunteers. They had traveled to Spain to sign up for this first war against fascism, but now would have gladly traded their ideals for some eggs and bacon, a hot coffee, and a blanket.
Those barefaced boys—most of them virgins but with dozens of kills under their belts—couldn’t have looked more pathetic. Almost all of them were injured with varying degrees of severity. They were covered in their own blood or someone else’s and stank of sweat, urine, and fear. The vapor of their breath formed clouds as they huddled together like lambs at the gates of the slaughterhouse. They numbered just half of what they had that same morning, and their eyes were heavy with the losses of comrades and friends. In one day, they had killed many men and seen many others die. They would never be the same.
Riley put his rifle aside and zipped up his jacket. Night would drop below freezing again, taking the weakest with it. Rummaging through his pockets, he found a few crumbs that had been rationed out the day before. Herding them together in his dirty palm, he was about to eat them when he turned to Scout and offered him some.
“No thanks, Alex,” he s
aid, rubbing his belly. “I don’t think the apple pie from lunch is sitting with me very well.”
Riley, who knew Scout hadn’t eaten anything in two days, nodded. “They have no idea how to make them here,” he said. “They always overdo it on the glaze.”
A shadow appeared behind them. Zigzagging in a crouched position, it asked a soldier a question, then walked over to them. Riley got a bad feeling. When he realized it was a messenger, and saw him take a little letter from his pouch and hand it to the captain, the feeling turned to dread. Riley’s suspicion was confirmed by Scout’s disgruntled sigh and expression as he opened his mouth to speak.
“They ordered us to take the enemy positions,” Scout said.
“When?” Riley asked.
“Now.”
“But . . .”
“I know.”
“Shit,” Riley said.
“Prepare the men,” Scout ordered, brushing off his jacket and assuming the role of commanding officer again. “And for Christ’s sake change that face, we have to set an example.”
“As you wish, Captain,” Riley said after taking a deep breath of cold air to get his courage up. He had to approach his comrades and ask them for one final effort.
He got up from his seated position with difficulty and went over to the soldiers scattered about the trench, trying to keep his head below the parapet. “Comrades,” he said, raising his voice. “The high command just ordered us to retake the hill. So check your rifles, get your ammo, and put on clean panties. Tonight we’re sleeping in the fascist trenches.”
A string of scoffs, complaints, and veiled insults rang out from what was left of the battered company. Riley shared their feelings, knowing their lives were worth more than all the Pingarróns in the world put together, but they had been given an order. Even though they were volunteer soldiers being used as cannon fodder in an improvised army, led by incompetent generals they hated almost as much as the enemy, fighting a war that wasn’t theirs, in a country they didn’t understand, they had no choice but to obey and hope they lived to see another day.
“Not another word,” Riley said, hardening his tone. “We’ve come here to fight and die if necessary, so stop acting like little girls and get your rifles. The enemy’s up there,” he said, signaling to the hill, “only a few hundred yards away. They’re the ones who killed Lipton, Hicks, Paletti—all our brothers that are rotting out there, killed for defending freedom. Are you going to let them die in vain?” He looked across the haggard faces and added with a snarl, “Don’t you think they deserve some good revenge?”
That was the key word: revenge. At that point in the war, ideals were worth less than the paper they were written on. When death became a daily occurrence, real and palpable like hunger in the gut, friends dying one after another, soldiers stopped fighting for a cause, a flag, or a piece of land. They did it like the Spartans, Macedonians, or Romans had: for the man next to them. They fought for their lives and for the lives of those they knew would either die for them or avenge their deaths if need be. In the end it all came down to that, and Sergeant Riley, a merchant mariner who had been a soldier for less than a year, already knew it from personal experience.
“Let’s go! Up!” he insisted, seeing the first of them starting to stagger to their feet. “So no one can ever say there was a single coward in the Lincoln Battalion, let’s finish these fascist sons of bitches. For our fallen brothers!” He lifted his rifle above his head. “For freedom!”
“For our brothers!” the soldiers called together, filling with courage unthinkable minutes before. “For freedom!”
Captain Scout came over and exchanged a glance with Riley, then drew his Colt 45 and turned to his men. “First Company!” he shouted, climbing over the parapet. “March!” No sooner had he said the word than a burst of machine-gun fire swept the defenses and knocked him headfirst into the trench. With three bullet holes in his back, he was dead.
After a brief moment of confusion, Riley realized he’d just been promoted. The fate of the soldiers who looked in shock at Scout’s limp body was now in his hands. He listened for a second to the 9 mm Largo rounds buzzing over his head and considered disobeying the order to attack and saving his men. Knowing the line of succession and chain of command, they watched him with preoccupied interest, eager to see what his first decision would be.
Riley looked at Curtis from Seattle, who had enlisted to follow his older brother in his personal crusade against fascism; now Curtis was an only child. There was Hall from Vermont, so put-together with his blue beret and leather jacket that he looked like he’d come from a walk in the park, earning his nickname “the Dapper.” Then there was Corporal Joaquín “Jack” Alcántara, from Galicia, Spain. He had immigrated to the United States as a child and established roots in New York. Learning of the military coup in Spain, he’d left his job as a restaurant chef on 72nd and Amsterdam to enlist in the Lincoln Battalion. When Riley met him, Jack must have weighed about 280 pounds but still passed the physical exam somehow. In time he demonstrated incredible agility, strength, endurance, and, more importantly, courage and loyalty rarely seen.
“Corporal,” Riley said, pointing at Jack. “Now you’re second-in-command. If anything happens to me . . . Well, you know.”
“I know, Sergeant. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.”
“I hope so too, Jack. I hope so too.”
The heavy corporal, though already thirty or forty pounds lighter, was still round. He looked at his companions huddling in the trench and trembling with cold and fear, then back at Riley. “So . . . what are your orders?”
Riley took a deep breath and exhaled. He drew the bolt of his Mauser, loading the first round into the chamber. “We have a job to do,” he said, hiding the fear in his voice. “And for our honor and that of our dead”—he looked at Scout’s lifeless body—“I swear to God we’re gonna do it.”
On the morning of April 1, 1939, two years after the fight for Pingarrón Hill, the rebel general Francisco Franco declared on a brief radio segment that the war was over.
The conflict had resulted in more than three hundred thousand deaths, two-thirds of them civilians. More than half were victims of reprisals at the hands of the fascists, and the final victory of Franco and his troops was partly thanks to decisive military and economic aid from Mussolini and Hitler.
Five months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War II began.
In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and war broke out in Europe. Over the course of the next two years, Nazi armies conquered one objective after another. Seemingly unstoppable in their eastward advance, they forced Stalin to retreat to the very gates of Moscow. Meanwhile, on the Western Front, Belgium and Holland had been erased from the map. The Wehrmacht paraded through the streets of Paris with the support of General Pétain’s puppet government. Great Britain, the last Allied bastion on the Old Continent, resisted daily bombings. It survived thanks only to the fragile sustainment of convoys of weapons and supplies that dodged German U-boats on their way across the Atlantic.
Still, the United States, despite the enormous amount of material and financial aid it offered the Allies, continued to declare itself neutral. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed reluctant to confront Hitler and his seemingly invincible war machine.
Meanwhile, in Spain, General Franco’s dictatorship was openly sympathetic to the Nazi regime but also remained neutral. Spain was desolate. Under Franco’s brutal leadership, it remained oblivious to what was happening in the rest of Europe. For many, the postwar period was worse than the war itself. There was repression along with scarcity and poverty: the fascists exercised their control ruthlessly on all those suspected of sympathizing with the Republican side.
Long before the conflict in Spain had ended, however, the survivors of the Lincoln Battalion—defeated, dejected, and condemned by their government as communist sympathizers—returned to the United States with hopes of resuming their civilian lives.
&nb
sp; Well, almost all of them.
1
The Gulf of Asinara
North of Sardinia, Italy
November 21, 1941
A gentle breeze barely disturbed the sea. Though it made only a few little waves that splashed against the starboard side of the freighter, the breeze was cool enough for the two men leaning on the bulwark to wrap themselves in their coats. It was a moonless night, so the stars stretched to the invisible line of the horizon and further, reflected on the surface of the Mediterranean as if they didn’t have enough space in the sky and were trying to expand their domain to the seas. It was completely dark, since only the navigation lights of the ship were on.
Jack looked heavy in relation to his height. He wore a thick, battered blue coat and a goofy knit hat with a tassel. His thinning brown hair, sideburns, and thick beard surrounded a kind, gentle face with melancholy eyes and plump cheeks. There was a hint of ironic mockery on his lips, like he’d told a joke only he understood.
Beside him was the thinner, taller Riley. He was wearing a leather jacket covered in worn patches, whose logos, insignias, and stripes could still be made out. He rubbed his hands to get warm as his inquisitive, honey-colored eyes penetrated the darkness like a cat’s. His strong jaw was a reflection of his strong personality.
That personality had earned him the scar on his left cheek. Someone in a port tavern had cut his face with a broken bottle when he tried to defend the good name of a lady. Her good name turned out to be nothing to bother about, but she showed ample thanks for every drop of blood he’d spilled for her.
As if remembering that distant evening, he scratched the two-day stubble on his cheek and checked his watch. The light wind ruffled his curly black hair, inherited from his mom (the wide jaw was from his dad). He didn’t wear a hat like his friend, not even the captain’s hat he should’ve at least worn on deck. Why bother? It was, after all, his ship.
“They’re late,” Jack said, putting a pipe in his mouth and making the tobacco crackle in the chamber.
“They’re Italians,” Riley said. “You weren’t expecting them to arrive at exactly midnight, were you?”
Captain Riley (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 1) Page 1
