Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  “Vingt-et-un,” one said in a stage whisper. Twenty-one.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Julia muttered.

  She pushed her way through. The conversation around her didn’t stop, but she was aware that it had trailed off noticeably. Admittedly, she looked like shit. She’d managed a change of clothes since the air assault on the fourth, but that had been two weeks ago, and she was filthy again. Her body armor, helmet rig, and electronic gear also gave her away.

  There were no female combatants in the European theater. That was strictly an AF gig out in the Pacific, with Kolhammer’s battle group.

  “Une coupe, s’il vous plaоt,” she said to the wine seller.

  He picked up a copper jug on the end of a long wooden handle, dipped it into the steaming brew, and swirled it around. A giant cinnamon stick bobbed to the surface as he withdrew the jug and poured her a generous serving. He handed over the drink, and as she was about to pay a Frenchman in a British uniform put his hand on Julia’s arm and shook his head. He spoke in accented but still perfectly understandable English. “Please, allow me.”

  He gave the man a couple of coins.

  “There you are, mademoiselle. However, you should be careful,” he said. “Gaston, here, he makes a heady brew. I doubt an American woman would be able to stand up after drinking even half a cup of it.”

  The small crowd burst into laughter, not all of it good-natured.

  Julia took the drink and said nothing, cocking an eyebrow at the French officer, a captain, before draining the cup in one long swallow. The young women gasped, and one of the Rangers hooted with laughter.

  “Ha! Give ’em hell, lady!”

  She handed the empty mug back to Gaston and smiled, waiting for the hubbub to die down before nodding and smiling politely to the Frenchman. “La rйalitй et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n’est-ce pas?” Reality and you don’t get on, do they?

  This time the laughter came as a roar, and she felt a meaty hand slap her on the shoulder as she made her way toward the front door of the makeshift bistro. She knew, however, that on an empty stomach the wine would go right to her head if she didn’t get something solid inside her in the next few minutes.

  As she stepped into the street she heard her name mentioned in an American accent, but ignored it. It wasn’t like someone was calling after her.

  But the French captain suddenly appeared beside her again. “Please,” he said. “Let me buy you dinner. That was a stupid jest, and you showed me up for a fool. I should not have tried to embarrass you. It was-”

  “Okay,” Julia said in French that was as good as his English. “Look, whatever. I’m tired and hungry, and I’m only carrying greenbacks. I’d probably end up paying fifty bucks for some fucking prewar pickled escargot. So yes, Captain…?”

  “Ronsard,” he answered.

  “Okay, Captain Ronsard, you may buy me dinner. Or rather you may order, and I will pay, and that way there shall be no misunderstanding about copping an easy fuck from the future.”

  “But of course!” Ronsard protested, in English again. “The very idea of it!”

  “Yeah,” Julia replied. “Quoi que.”

  “Whatever?”

  “No. Whatever. Get the inflection right, mon capitaine.”

  She woke up next to him in a narrow bed, in the loft of a two-story cottage a few minutes’ walk from the square. Light was streaming in through the shattered windows, and for a moment she had the unsettling experience of not knowing where she was, or when she was.

  She’d spent a year studying in France as a postgrad, and stayed on for two more freelancing for a couple of magazines in Paris. The first Intifada hadn’t been enough to drive her away. Indeed, that simply meant more work, as she began to file copy for a couple of the metro dailies and the blog portals back stateside. But after the bomb went off in Marseilles, Julia decided enough was enough. She’d joined thousands of other expatriates streaming out of Continental Europe, which was looking increasingly medieval with each new atrocity in the war.

  She’d missed it, though, for a long time thereafter. She’d dated a young editor at Vogue for a while, and his family owned a cottage in the Pas de Calais, near Oignies, at the other end of the province. Waking next to Ronsard, she’d experienced a state of free fall, dropping through the years and thinking she had fallen back into the life she’d lived in her midtwenties. It was a delicious sensation, in a way, like half waking from a dream of immense wealth, but it dissolved as she blinked away the sleep and saw the bullet holes and scorch marks in the ceiling.

  Her boyfriend had been young and thin and blond. A nonthreatening, floppy-haired romantic. Ronsard was shorter, more powerfully built, and coarsened-most likely by a much harder life. He’d been a better fuck, though. No question of that.

  He’d screwed her insensible and she’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep from which she had not woken, not even once. He was only now stirring beside her. She regarded him dispassionately. However ardent their lovemaking had been-and it was pretty fucking ardent-she awoke as always these days, disconnected and keen to be elsewhere. It had been that way with every man since Dan. A small pang penetrated the scar tissue she’d built up around his memory and, to her own surprise, tears began to well.

  She slipped out of bed, naked, and hurriedly pulled on her pants and filthy gray T-shirt. Ronsard yawned and rolled over.

  “Julia? Would you like to make some coffee?” he mumbled. “I have a sachet somewhere.”

  “De quoi est mort votre derniиre esclave?” she asked as lightly as she could manage. What did your last slave die of?

  Mercifully he rolled over and went back to sleep. She hurried across to the ancient narrow spiral staircase that led to the floor below. More tears came as she descended, and she slapped a hand across her mouth to smother any sounds that might escape. She could hear other people moving around the house, and wondered whether Ronsard’s colleagues were billeted here. They hadn’t discussed it last night in the hot drunken rush to be free of their clothes. She almost ran into the tiny bathroom at the end of the second-floor hallway. It was small and disgracefully dirty in the French fashion, but there was a latch on the back of the door that she fumbled into place just before a torrent of silent moans broke over her like a wave.

  She slumped to the floor, arms wrapped around herself, her whole body shuddering with spasms of violent grief to which she could give no voice. The effort of restraining herself, of staying silent while this emotional hurricane blew through her, felt like a crushing weight on her chest. But she refused to lose that last vestige of her control. She had to have something to hold on to, after losing everything else because of her own stupidity: her husband, their baby, a far, far better life than the one she was currently living.

  And so she curled into a tight fetal ball on the cramped floor of the bathroom, raking furrows in her own flesh and refusing to utter even the smallest squeak in protest over the desolation she could feel spreading inside her.

  D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 1014 HOURS.

  CALAIS.

  “Are you certain you cannot stop in Calais for a while?”

  Ronsard was preparing a toasted baguette as he spoke, spreading the rich yellow butter with such loving care that Julia suspected he hadn’t eaten real food in a long time, at least not until the previous evening’s meal. With knobs of melting butter still floating on the warm bread roll, he scooped strawberry jam out of a small stoneware pot and plopped a generous dollop at one end before closing his eyes and slowly biting into it.

  When she didn’t answer he opened his eyes as if from a very happy dream. “Not even a little while?”

  Julia smiled and shook her head. “I’ll get my ass kicked if I don’t get up to the front and file some copy soon. I got held up by the Turkey Shoot, and my editor’s convinced Patton’s gonna be in Berlin by the end of the week.”

  Ronsard curled his lips down in a very Gallic gesture. “That long, eh? And here it is only Wednesday.”


  They sat on the small balcony of Ronsard’s room, overlooking a park that was pockmarked with craters from multiple mortar rounds. All the trees had been stripped of their leaves, but a few birds still sang on the bare branches. It was a fine morning, and promised to be a glorious day.

  The Frenchman hadn’t asked her anything that indicated that he was aware of her little meltdown, but she was certain he knew. Still, people often went to pieces around combat zones, and each dealt with it in his or her own way. Julia didn’t give off a needy vibe-at least she hoped she didn’t-and Ronsard seemed happy to respect her privacy. Instead of pawing her and fussing about when she’d returned to the bedroom, he had simply busied himself with rustling up a marvelous breakfast. Fresh oranges, boiled eggs, the baguettes, butter and jam. And a pot of freshly ground coffee from fuck-knew-where. It was exactly what she needed.

  “Thank you, Marcel. You’ve been a dream. But we both have work to do. Or I assume you have work to do. The Brits don’t normally hand out those sandy berets to slackers.”

  She nodded in the direction of the light tan beret with a winged dagger badge, hanging from a bedknob behind him. The Special Air Service was recognized as an elite force, but it hadn’t yet become shrouded in myth and mystery, as was the case in her day.

  Ronsard didn’t bother looking back over his shoulder. He just spooned more jam onto his baguette.

  “I have another few days before I have to get back to England,” he said. “So I thought it might be nice to spend it with a beautiful woman.”

  “You know, Marcel, I think you’d be just as happy spending it with your baguette. Here, now, don’t Bogart the fucking jam.”

  He passed the small pot over with a grin. “It is good to have you making fun of me, again. You have your-what is the word-mojo back.”

  “Maybe if I were an Austin Powers fembot, but thanks. I’m feeling better.”

  “Would you stay if I could get you back to Scotland? To do a story on the regiment?”

  “On Harry’s Own?” she said, suddenly interested. “I might be. I’m supposed to link up with a Captain Prather this afternoon. He’s going to give me a ride up to the front on a Super Sherman. He helped design them, you know. I was going to cover the Seven Sixty-first.”

  “Ah, the Negro tankers.”

  “African American.”

  Ronsard shrugged. “But of course.”

  Four Sabers roared overhead, and Julia looked up. They were high, but she thought she could make out the bombs and rockets positioned under their wings. Ground attack craft.

  “Do you think I could write up the story of what happened down at Donzenac?” she asked.

  All she got was a sly, furtive grin.

  “Well?”

  “I know nothing about this Donzenac,” Ronsard answered. Then he finished the last of his roll and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee.

  “Spare me, Marcel. Everyone knows about Donzenac. Or they think they know about it. There was a piece in the Times, but it was small, and they couldn’t get any details.”

  As she spoke, she leaned over the cramped breakfast table, and he leaned back as much as was possible on the tiny balcony. He closed his eyes and seemed to enjoy taking his time, soaking up the rays.

  “I am sure there would be no trouble in getting you to Scotland,” he said. “His Royal Highness has allowed one or two other reporters through before, and you are an embed, yes? So you have been cleared. What young Harry agrees to discuss with you once you are there, however, that would really be his business, would it not?”

  Julia nodded, satisfied with half an answer. “Okay,” she said. “You get me into the regiment, and we can spend a bit of time together up there. But first I have this job with Prather. They’ve blocked out half a page for me back in New York. Can you work with that?”

  Ronsard’s sleepy eyes opened slowly.

  “But you do not have to meet this Prather until this afternoon, right?”

  “Right,” Julia said, uncurling herself from her chair and walking back into the room.

  12

  D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 1533 HOURS.

  761ST TANK BATTALION, BRUGGE, BELGIUM.

  Captain Prather was a believer.

  Julia had met a lot of them, both here and uptime. There was a USAF major in Syria who wanted to air-drop billions of genetically engineered “attack” scorpions on Damascus, to paralyze the entire population before a coded gene sequence killed all the stingers two days later.

  There was the CIA contractor who wanted to raise a private army of orphaned Arab children, to run as deep-penetration agents when they were old enough to send back into their parent societies. He thought that eleven or twelve years old would be just about right.

  There was Manning Pope, of course, the scientist who’d marooned them all here. And there was an armored division colonel named MacMasters who came up with the idea of sewing jihadi insurgents into pigskins before burying them. Actually, he’d borrowed the idea from “Black Jack” Pershing, who’d done the same thing to Islamic guerrillas in the Philippines back in the 1900s.

  She had no idea what happened to the scorpion guy, or the spook, or even to Pope. The colonel, however, had gone on to become the Republican senator for Kansas, where he’d made certain that his favorite tactic became a “sanctioned field punishment” available to U.S. commanders when dealing with Islamic extremists. Last Julia knew of him, he was still confounding the liberal press with his boyish enthusiasm for the never-ending war, back up in twenty-one.

  Captain Chris Prather still had his boyish enthusiasms, too. She found him atop the reinforced turret of one of “his” Easy Eight Super Shermans, in a holding area about fifteen klicks back from the front-although the way Patton kept driving forward, “the front” wasn’t a stable concept. When she located him, after slopping through a muddy parking lot full of tanks, jeeps, and deuce-and-a-halves, he was bent over with his head buried inside the turret, talking to the crew. This gave her a wide-screen view of his butt.

  “Hey,” she called out. “Does that big ass up yonder belong to a Captain Prather?”

  Two African American tankers, members of the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, were standing by the treads. They favored her with flashing white smiles.

  “Well picked, madam,” the taller one said with an incongruously polished Bostonian accent. “You clearly know your asses.”

  He stepped forward and extended his hand. She returned the firm grip as Prather extracted himself from the turret. Snatching up an old rag, he called down to somebody inside the tank. “Take five, Robinson. We got company.”

  Prather was a good-looking white boy with a southern accent. Kentucky, perhaps. He stood about five-eight with black hair and hazel eyes. He had broad shoulders and looked like he punched in around 180 pounds. He was a ’temp but seemed perfectly at ease surrounded by his black comrades. Not for the first time Julia had to remind herself to stop thinking of the ’temps as a nation of rednecked buttheads. You’d have thought she might have learned that from Dan, if nothing else.

  “Miss Duffy, I guess?” Prather used the rag to wipe grease from his powerful hands.

  “Ms. Duffy,” she replied, “but Julia or Jules will do.”

  Prather jumped down from the body of the tank, landing softly but still splashing up a little mud. He nodded to the two other men. “You’ve met Lieutenant Burnett and Sergeant Turley.”

  The noncom smiled shyly and dipped his head. “Ma’am,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Sergeant.” Julia nodded toward the tank. “So what’s up with my ride?”

  Prather looked a little surprised. “Oh, nothing. We’re just fixin’ a few things. I love to fix things. And anyway, this ain’t your ride-that’s over by Dog Company. But this baby’s a beauty anyway, don’t you think?”

  “Guess so,” she answered.

  Prather gestured theatrically. “Aw, come on. This is a work of art, Miz Duffy.” He turned back to his colleagu
es. “You guys gonna help Jackie with that wet storage sealant? I gotta take Ms. Duffy over to battalion. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  “Jackie? Jackie Robinson?” she wondered aloud as they headed away at a brisk pace. “The ballplayer?”

  “Will be, one day soon,” Prather confirmed. “They say he’s gonna play the majors. One of the first black guys ever. For now, though, he’s working for me. He’s a good guy, too.”

  A cold front was coming in from the Atlantic, ruining the perfect weather. The first cool gusts had whistled through the streets of Calais as Julia had said good-bye to Ronsard. She’d hopped a Huey that took her up to the staging area just outside Brugge, in Belgium, and it had seemed like they were running just ahead of the weather all the way up. Now a towering wall of dark gray clouds filled the sky to the west, behind them, while in front the sun still shone brightly down on the Belgian countryside. Along the way she had noticed that some villages and farms had been destroyed, but not others, reminding her of flying over Oklahoma twister country.

  Fifteen minutes before reaching the armored depot, they passed over a five-kilometer-wide tract of dead earth littered with the burned-out hulks of Shermans and Tigers. Almost every building in the area had been destroyed, except for one small farmhouse, which remained untouched.

  The fortunes of war.

  Julia was glad for her thermopliable combat jacket: there was a good chance the cold weather would intensify over the next few days. Bring on global warming, she thought. Prather talked excitedly as they walked along the lines of tanks.

  “It was a hell of a fight after you guys turned up,” he said. “There was a strong push in the army for scrapping the Sherman and going straight to the Pershing, which would have been a match for the krauts. But in the end, momentum won the argument.”

  “Momentum?”

  “Thirty thousand Sherman chassis already built by ’forty-three. All those plants already tooled up, Allied armies depending on them. It made more sense to go with what we had.”