by Ian Slater
“Fred.”
“Well, Fred, would you think of pulling up a lieutenant for his ID?”
The cockney, finishing his cigarette, pulled out another and lit it from the first. “Suppose not, old cock — Jesus, they’re gonna cause one hell of a lot of confusion if they get inside the pocket.”
“Nothing to getting inside it,” said David. “Everything’s screwed up inside there anyway — units split up, some of our guys inside, most of us dropped outside. They won’t be checking ID. These bastards’ll get through, all right.”
Waite nodded. “Afraid you’re right, mate.” He paused, cigarette held meditatively down in front of his knees. “They’re after bloody Munster.” He turned to Brentwood, his tone infused with the urgency of delayed revelation. “That’s it, Yank!”
“David.”
“They’re after bloody Munster. Our prepo site! Christ, mate!” Waite was feeling beneath his poncho for his cigarettes, forgetting he had one on the go. “They blow that depot — it’ll be a fucking slaughter.”
“Unless our guys can get out first,” said David. “Evacuate.”
“Where to?” asked Waite, fidgeting with his lighter. “No fucking Dunkirk this time, matey — boats waiting. Last I heard was they got fucking armored all round us. Getting ready for a big push, they are — west of Hannover. Right down to the fucking Rhine and on to Bumsum.” He meant Brunssun, south in Belgium, where the German operating out of headquarters dug deep in the coal mines. “And once we start crossing the Rhine,” Waite added, “it’ll be absolute tucking chaos. Sitting ducks. That’s what our lot will be.”
“Maybe not if the evacuation’s orderly,” said David.
Waite turned to Brentwood, his movement revealing white, bony legs like those of some overgrown chicken. “Orderly? No such fucking thing, Davey boy. It’ll be a balls-up.” They could hear artillery rumbling like thunder southwest of them from about twenty miles inside the pocket.
“Doesn’t have to be a mess,” said David, adding, “I’ve been in a pull-out.”
“Where?” asked Waite, his tone that of an incredulous senior talking to a freshman.
“Pyongyang.”
Waite raised an eyebrow. “You were with Freeman?”
“Yeah.”
“Freeman! Well, me old son, hats off! You should know. What was it like getting out then?”
David didn’t answer — the remembrance of the bloody retreat so vivid in his memory that for the last twenty-four hours, from the moment he’d hit the Hercules’ slipstream, it had overwhelmed him, the reason he hadn’t moved from beyond the crater, curled up against the protective carcass of the dead man. Waite was probably right. When they had got out of Pyongyang, there had been only fifteen hundred men to think of. And while it had gone much better than expected, they’d lost a lot going in. Trying to get out a quarter million men trapped in the pocket by a ring of steel would be a different proposition altogether. What had his father always told the three of them, Lana, too? “When the going gets tough—” It was old hat, but it made him feel ashamed of his recent loss of nerve. “Least it won’t be an air withdrawal,” he told Waite. “We’ll have the bridges.”
“What?” asked Waite, and David Brentwood knew instantly from the cockney’s tone that some of the bridges must be blown.
“How many?” he asked Waite, who was now watching the Stasi guard shouting at a man in another group of prisoners for his dog tags.
“What — how many bridges blown?” It was another man’s voice, also a cockney, sitting behind them, an eye partially covered with a blood-congealed bandage, the compress having slipped down on the man’s cheek, revealing a pus-filled gash beneath the black-red swelling. “All of ‘em, mate. Right, Waite? The whole fucking lot.”
“Marvelous, in’t?” said Waite as they watched the other Russians coming in, taking off their jumpsuits and looping the appropriate — British or American — dog tags about their necks. The Stasi guard was handing one of the Russians who was wearing a U.S. Army corporal’s uniform — with a machine gunner’s flash patch — a St. Christopher medal, which the guard apparently thought was part of the American’s ID. There were guffaws from the prisoners and barely suppressed laughter from some of the Russians. Then the tall Russian, wearing the American airborne lieutenant’s uniform, quietly walked over to the young guard, took the St. Christopher medal, and put it on.
“Then,” concluded David, “we’re going to have to swim across if all the damn bridges are blown.” They could hear the artillery, Soviet or American, they couldn’t tell, increasing.
Wake indicated the Stasi guards stationed around the edges of the pine wood. “Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, me old dallin’, but those Kraut goons ‘ave got a nasty habit of shooting people. My advice, old cock, is to sit tight for the duration. You’ve done your bit. ‘Sides, this lot’s only going to last a couple more months, then someone’s gonna threaten to push the big one and that’s going to get ‘em to the table.” Waite glanced back at his wounded comrade. “That right, Bill?”
“ ‘Ope so,” said Bill, his pallor like chalk, his arm, which he could hardly lift, making an unsuccessful attempt to keep the bloated flies away from his eye.
“I don’t think so,” said David, slowly, his gaze held captive by the curling twist of cigarette smoke disappearing into the mist that now shrouded the pines about the Russians’ mobile headquarters. “No one wants to use nuclear weapons — they’ll use up everything else first.” He flicked the cigarette away, the tiny red ember dying in the mud. “Anyway, no war’s finished when it was supposed to. Experts always get it wrong. After the second war, everyone said the next would be so high-tech, so mobile, it’d be over in no time. Hell, we’re bogged down in that pocket worse than—” He glanced across at Waite. “You know, World War Two wasn’t anything like as mobile as all the films make out. Soldiers dig in soon as they can. Then others try to root them out. Same old story. Look at our fighters — they can’t break through to Russia, and the Russians can’t break through to England. We’re in the middle. I heard bayonets last night.”
“Yeah,” said the Englishman with the bloodied eye patch. “So did I.”
“The Poles,” said Waite.
“Ivans,” put in someone else. “Shit — our sergeant told us bayonets were for museums and can openers. No one would ever use them again to—”
“Will you guys knock it off?” came a voice from the back. “Talking about the friggin’ war. Talk about women or something, for Christ’s sake. What I’d like now is a good lay.”
The Russians were ready to go — in all, sixty-two had captured Allied uniforms. The one in the American airborne lieutenant’s uniform was doing a last-minute check to see that none of the uniforms was too ill-fitting, making several men swap because sleeves were too short, pants too tight. Anything about the uniform that might draw undue attention was being weeded out. Next, he passed an American airborne Kevlar helmet along the line to collect their watches, followed by another in which prisoners’ watches had been collected, each man double-checking that there was nothing engraved on the watches that might arouse suspicion if they were questioned after being infiltrated behind enemy lines.
“We have to escape,” said Brentwood quietly. “Soon.”
“You daft?” asked Waite. “You’ve got no chance. Besides, why bust your gut, mate? You’ve done your bit.”
No I haven’t, thought Brentwood. If he’d done his bit, he wouldn’t have lain petrified most of the night; he would have moved down the lines, risking the deadly, albeit friendly fire, trying to get through to the pocket. Or had it been just common sense to stay put till the shelling was over? After all, no one would blame him for what he’d done. No one, that is, except himself — the man who’d won the Silver Star for bravery at Pyongyang. His father certainly wouldn’t forgive him.
Something had happened since Pyongyang. Strange, he’d always thought you could divide people into the brave and the not so b
rave, but an awful possibility began gnawing away at him — that it might just be how you felt on any given day. But there was another reason, beyond honor, beyond regaining his sense of self-esteem, that impelled him to think of escape. “We’ve all seen it,” he told Waite.
“He’s right,” said the man behind them, who, having lain down, was now propping himself up, trying to keep the head bandage on, grimacing in pain as the effects of the last morphine jab wore off. “Now we know what they’re up to, they’re not going to let us—” He didn’t have to finish it.
“Christ!” said someone else. Brentwood looked behind him. It was a British lance corporal, terrified. “Hey, wait a minute — I mean, they could have done us already. Right?”
David shook his head. “Not before they got our uniforms. Waite’s right. That would have got our uniforms all messy.”
“Aw, bullshit,” said another cockney. “They aren’t going to shoot us.”
“Why?” asked Waite.
“Well — too — too fucking close to the front, mate. Might draw a chopper strike.”
The young German guard and the other guards began to “Raus!” them — getting everyone ready to move out.
“Where are we going?” demanded a British officer from a group on the other side of the clearing.
“Charing Cross!” came a Scottish voice.
One of the Stasi guards, an older man, waved them to their feet with his hand. The German had a weary look about him that worried David more than it might have comforted him. It was the look of a man who’d seen it all before, a man for whom nothing would be a surprise. A man who would follow orders to the letter, not because he hated Americans or British but because it was the easiest thing to do. “You will be taken back,” the German said in passable English, “for the interrogation.”
“See?” whispered a cockney triumphantly. “We’re going to be interrogated — that’s all.”
“Oh, lovely,” responded Waite. “That’s just ducky, that is. I love being interrogated. My favorite fucking pastime, that is. Eh, Brentwood?”
“I can think of better things to do,” answered David.
“So can I,” said the soldier with the bloodied eye, his voice tremulous with fear. “Jesus, I can’t see where the hell I’m— “
“Here,” said David, getting up. “Hold on to my arm.”
* * *
As the bedraggled column of poncho-clad prisoners started off through the gloomy wood, the wounded cockney asked his American friend what he thought their chances were.
“Watch it,” said David, steering him around a jagged stump that was almost invisible in the mist-shrouded pines.
“What do you think, Waitey?” the man asked.
“Waitey—?” pressed the soldier, David steering him about a long, ghostlike branch that, stripped of its bark, had served as a toilet seat for the cesspool trench.
“I think,” said Waite, “we’re in for the high jump.”
“What the hell’s that mean?” asked one of the Americans.
“It means,” said a Scottish voice, “he thinks they’re going to hang us, laddie. Or shoot us.”
“Jesus! Jesus — that’s against the—”
“Geneva Convention,” the Scot finished for him. “Aye.”
“Anybody got a Mars bar?” asked an English sapper who’d been captured two nights earlier by a Stasi patrol sweeping the pocket’s perimeter.
“Och,” said the Scot. “Rot your teeth, laddie, and tha’s a fact.”
“You’re mad,” said the American. “You’re all goddam mad.”
“It helps,” answered Waite wryly, adding, “Be careful now.” He nodded toward the young guard they’d dubbed “Asshole.” But for now the guard wasn’t saying anything, looking as miserable as the prisoners. Even so, David was surprised they had let the prisoners talk at all — not when they were all supposed to be going to be interrogated. He remembered his DI at Parris Island screaming at them, “Never fucking let your prisoners talk. Why, marine? Because the fuckers’ll make up the same fucking story. Are you listening, Brenda Brentwood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You listening, Thelma?”
David smiled at the memory of the DI yelling at him and Thelman — something David had once thought it would be impossible to smile about. Besides, he told himself, the Russians had probably already collected fairly reliable intelligence about the American, British, and German armies bottled up in the pocket. Hell, they were right there to pick up the airborne, or had they just been in the area anyway?
Try as he might, however, David could not help thinking of one of the great secrets of World War II: the massacre of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Slaughtered by the Russians, deep in Katyn Forest.
* * *
“Leave it on,” the corporal told Malle. She reclipped her brassiere. The way he’d said it only added to her sense of shame, as if she’d been caught wanting to exhibit herself and he doing her a favor — a small mercy — telling her to cover herself up. But now she guessed his real reason was the thick, raised scar of the mastectomy where they had taken off her left breast. At once she feared for Edouard, hoping, in spite of the revulsion she felt for the Russian, that the scar hadn’t turned him off.
Tossing his cap onto the bedside table, obscuring the photo of Malle and her late husband, and pulling off his shining black boots, dropping them with a thud, motioning for her to come closer and smiling as one would coax a shy, frightened puppy, he patted the bed, dragging the two pillows down so they lay flat on the multicolored quilt.
“Come on, Malle. ‘You’ve done this before, eh?”
She was shocked at his use of her first name and for a moment stood holding her black slip protectively in front of her, suddenly frozen as she smelled the strong odor of camphor. No, she decided, of course he wouldn’t wonder about the new quilt — lots of people used camphor to protect their clothing.
“You should call me Mitya,” he told her, reaching out, hooking the slip’s spaghetti shoulder straps, taking it away from her. “It’s short for Dimitri.”
She forced a smile, walking haltingly toward him, her left hand in his. It was sweaty and warm — cloying — her other hand fidgeting at her throat. His grip became stronger as he pulled her closer. She fixed her eyes on the crazy pattern of the quilt, vibrant reds flowing into deep blues, men orange and speckled brown swirls that made no sense and which, normally pleasing to the eye, now panicked her — everything swirling out of control. She braced herself. He became suddenly angry, releasing her. “What’s the matter with you? You want me to pick up the boy? I can, you know. All I have to—”
“No, no,” she said, “no — I’m — I’m sorry.”
“You forgot something,” he said, his tone surly.
“I—” she began, hands on her forehead, her head shaking, trying to think of what it was. “I’m sorry, I—”
“All right—” he said, sitting up from his slouch, grabbing for a boot, obviously about to stalk out in a mad huff.
Quickly she sat down on the bed beside him, her hand touching his shoulder. “What did I forget — please?”
The corporal stared hard at her, his tone still angry, undershot with petulance. “My name—”
“Oh — Mitya. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I forgot.” He hesitated for a moment, the muscles in his face and neck so taut that his face took on a knotted yet strangely adolescent expression. “It’s very important you call me Mitya.”
She understood now — her saying “Mitya” would make it all right. She could feel his whole body relax, except his member, which now looked so big, she knew it would split her, make her bleed.
“It’s a nice name,” Malle said.
“Kiss me first,” he said, then pushed her away as her face neared his. “No,” he instructed her. “There.”
She hesitated, felt him tensing angrily again, and so, quickly, closing her eyes, she bent her head between his legs. He fell back onto the bed, bumping th
e headboard, but of this he was oblivious, his groan of pleasure filling the room. She almost gagged.
“Mokree!”— “Wetter!” he ordered her. “Much wetter!” Now his arms folded from him like wings, his hands grasping both sides of the bed, the quilt sliding beneath him. Above them somewhere there was a noise, a rustling sound. “What—” His eyes opened, They were glassy. He looked idiotlike. “What’s that—” he began.
Malle lifted her head, brushing her hair away nastily.’ “The heating vent,” she gasped. “Do you want me to stop, Mitya?”
“What — no, no. S’wonderful.” Her lips encased him again, her tongue pressing, curling and darting, her saliva in danger of drying up, driving herself on frantically to keep him under the spell. “I love you,” he said, his breath panting. “I love you, Raza… Raza…” Then, just when she thought it would be over, he told her to stop, kneel astride him, pushing her, shifting her as one would a piece of furniture for the best effect, telling her to sit on him, pulling her forward until her brassiere was so close, he could smell the perfume of violets mixing with the musky cinnamon odor of herself. His eyes were closed. “Raza…”
She heard another noise, like a scrabbling, above her, and she rose, then drove herself down upon him, harder and harder until he was in a reverie, his head lolling, then whipping from side to side, his tobacco-stained teeth plainly visible, his mouth open like an ugly fish, eyes half-closed, the idiot expression becoming more pronounced so that it seemed his eyes were going to roll back into his head, his grip on the crazy quilt so powerful, he was now holding it up either side of them like the sides of a canoe, his wrist veins bluish in sharp contrast to his pale white skin. He was trying to talk, but it only came out as a series of short, gurgling noises and grunts, then the quilt sides fell from his hands, his body arched, arms locked about her, pulling her down hard against him, his body smacking her hard as spasm after spasm racked him, his crying like a child running terrified from some huge beast but the cries of ecstasy. Eager to get off, Malle felt him pulling her back, and he kissed her tenderly on the earlobes, stroked her hair, whispering how wonderful she was, how beautiful, his voice cracked and dry. “Did you come?”
