by Bob Mayer
She’d been beautiful once, Mac thought.
“Besides, Papa would never leave. And now, he won’t. This land has been in our family as long we can trace back. There is a Bible in the house with pages and pages of the family tree. Sometimes, I think my family were here when the Romans came through. The Germans are only the latest of armies to come and go. And now, the Americans and the British and the Canadians will come. And they will go, and the land will still be here, and now Papa and Charles and Louis will always be here.”
Suddenly, Maurice made a strangled noise, and his front legs gave out. He went to his knees as Mac and Brigit jumped to their feet and ran to him. His back gave, and he was lying in the mud.
“Oh!” Brigit cried out as she sat next to her mule, putting his large head on her lap.
What else could go wrong? Mac wondered.
Brigit stroked the soft spot between his ears, humming something to him. Maurice was looking up at her with big eyes full of sadness and regret for leaving her alone. His breathing grew quicker and shorter, and then he died.
Mac was surprised to feel a tear on his cheek. “I’m sorry.”
She spoke in the monotone the bereaved often reverted to. “Maurice was a good mule. I raised him. I used to braid flowers and make a wreath for his sweet head. Before.”
A quick barrage of artillery thundered to the west. Mac assumed they were German guns firing at planes and the main airborne assault.
“Surely, your father had the demolitions?”
He expected her to get angry, but instead, she carefully laid Maurice’s head on the ground then stood. “We must bury Maurice.”
Mac blinked. Maurice might have been starving, but he was still a mule.
“Yes,” Brigit said, as if finally registering his question. “My father had the pod he recovered from the airdrop three weeks ago. And we already had explosives from earlier drops. We’ve plenty of explosives.”
“Blasting caps? Where are the caps? Did the Germans get them?”
She started to walk toward the barn. “I must wash up.”
Mac was having trouble following her thinking. “You’ve got water?”
“No. I wash in mud.” She smiled just a bit, looking over her shoulder to let him know she was joking.
Mac followed her. “How can you live here? Where do you sleep?”
She pointed at the barn. “I live there.”
As they got closer, all Mac could see were rocks, splintered wood, and rusted, old farm gear.
She paused as she reached the edge of the barn, where stones from the old wall had collapsed in a large pile. “We must bury Maurice.”
You’re going to end up having to eat Maurice, Mac thought, but he didn’t say it.
Brigit grabbed a shaft of rusting metal attached to a mule-drawn plow then pulled. A trap door, covered with rocks, easily lifted up, revealing a set of stairs descending into the ground. It reminded him of the entrance to the Den underneath the decrepit filling station at the Ranch outside Area 51.
“How did you do that?” Mac asked.
“Not real rocks, of course.”
Mac touched one, and he could feel that it was hollow. “They look real.”
“I was a theater designer before the war. In Paris. I got away from here when I was seventeen.”
“Why did you come back?” Mac asked as she began to take the stairs. He followed her into the darkness.
“Family. Close the door, please.”
Mac saw a lever on the inside and pulled it. The door was not only expertly camouflaged, it was perfectly balanced. It shut with a slight thud.
A match flared, and Brigit lit an oil lamp. “I won awards for my sets in Paris. But this is my greatest achievement. My home for four years, ever since the German tanks destroyed the house in 1940. I did manage to talk my father out of rebuilding it. I knew it would only get destroyed again since the war was not over.”
The space was surprisingly large, twenty feet long by fifteen wide. Old wood beams crossed the ceiling.
“It was a root cellar,” Brigit said, “but it had stopped being used many, many years ago. It was full of rocks and dirt. When we were children, my brother Charles and I would hide in here, and my father would get very, very angry. He told us it was dangerous. He did not understand what real danger is.”
There were wood shelves along all the sides. Some held glass jars and cans and sacks of potatoes and onions. Not much, but the result of careful rationing of sparse harvests.
“I knew the war was coming long before my friends,” Brigit said. She went to a tin tub, which looked like a trough for animals, then turned on a spigot. A trickle of clear water flowed, and she filled a pitcher, and then turned the spigot off. She poured two glasses, and offered one to Mac, who took it gratefully.
“When I came back home each year to visit, I began working on clearing this out, and fixing it up.” She frowned. “I started in ‘35.”
“You did see the future,” Mac said.
“It was not hard if one was open to the reality.” She drank the entire glass. “I made this place because I knew my family would need it. I, myself, made plans to go to London. I had friends in the theater. They told me I could easily get a job. All I had to do was get on the ferry and go across the Channel. I did, several times, but I always came back to France.”
“Why?”
“I am French.” She nodded at the space around them. “My father thought I was foolish to spend so much time working down here. That there were other things I could do that would be more useful.” She pointed at the spigot. “I dug the water line and laid the pipe from the stream.” She pointed up. “I put in ventilation, spreading it so the smoke would not be seen in daytime. When the war came, I returned home. Papa and my brothers hid in here with me when the Germans came. They were mad at me because I brought Maurice down here with us. They were not so mad when we went back up after the Germans had passed, and there were no cows or goats or chickens left. They were all taken. All we had was Maurice.
“But after the fighting stopped, they went back up and lived in the house. Worked the farm. I stayed down here. Maurice and I.”
Mac realized that Maurice had been her companion, more than her father and brothers, for the entire war. And she’d sacrificed Maurice to get him out of a well. She wouldn’t be eating him, he knew that.
“Are you the only one they sent?” Brigit asked as she turned the spigot on once more then began filling the trough.
“Yes.”
“The explosives are there.” She pointed to a dark corner. She removed the kerchief from her head, revealing short, black hair, poorly cut.
Mac found the supplies. Enough C-4, det cord. Antique for him, but cutting edge for now. Enough to do the job. Almost.
“What about the fuses?”
“Papa said you were to bring them. Whoever parachuted in.”
Mac thought about all the field-expedient ways to detonate C-4.
Brigit interrupted. “But my other brother, Charles, had some from the other missions. He kept them with him all the time. Said they were important.”
“Where are they?”
“As I said. With him.”
Brigit began to pull off her clothes as if he weren’t there. He figured modesty was a trait that had also been blown away by the war. He could see the bones of her spine, and her hips jutted out. Her skin, though, was still toned, a smooth, light brown. Her breasts were flat above her narrow waist. She stepped into the tub then sat down in the water, which immediately turned dirty. She leaned forward, dipping her hair under the thin flow. She cleaned it as best she could, ignoring him as if she were completely alone, or he were just Maurice standing there.
He realized she’d probably prefer that he were Maurice, and that made him sad.
“There is soup on the grate,” she said, her voice partly muffled. “It is cold, but that is the way the fancy restaurants in Paris often served it. You can pretend you are in Paris.”
She lathered her hair. “This is the last of the soap.”
Mac opened the trapdoor and heard her yell “Light!” so he hustled up and quickly shut it behind him.
Mac walked to the mound of dirt. She hadn’t buried her brothers very deeply. Then again, she hadn’t had much time. He used his hands to pull the dirt off the bodies. He paused when he saw Louis’s young face, half of it blown away by the exit wound from the bullet to the back of the skull, his jaw and broken teeth exposed on one side.
“Sonofabitch,” Mac muttered. He’d seen so many bodies like this. Especially in Iraq: men, women, children, hands tied behind their backs, forced to kneel, then the bullet to the back of the head.
He cleared the dirt off Charles. He’d gone down fighting, his body torn by too many bullet holes to count. But the fuses were safe in an inside pocket, in a wooden case. Mac opened the case and checked. Enough.
He stood. Took a breath. Looked at the two boys. The old man. The mule.
He cursed in French, which sounded so much better than English. He took off his field jacket and laid it over Louis’ mangled face.
He grabbed the shovel and began to expand the grave. He ignored the pain from his two broken fingers.
Digging took precious time, but it was still dark. The bridge was only three kilometers away. Mac knew how quickly he could rig what was needed.
The old Mac would have been excited at the thought of blowing up a bridge, every demo man’s wet dream.
Right now, this was needed. He laid Papa next to his sons. Then he went over to Maurice. He unhooked his chute from the harness, then grabbed two of the leads and dragged the mule to the grave. Maurice wasn’t very heavy; the war had wasted him down. Mac laid the animal across the bodies. It was cheating, but it was a good metaphor for how Maurice had ranked in Brigit’s life and how much he had contributed. The dead weren’t going to complain. They’d all end up being the same.
As he shoveled dirt on top, Mac imagined Maurice with a garland of wild flowers on his head. As he tossed a shovel-full on top the mule’s head, covering the vacant eye, he said, “Thanks, Maurice. You were a good guy.”
The grave was inadequate, but there wasn’t time to do it right. There really wasn’t time to do it at all.
Mac assumed the Shadow had somehow tipped off the Germans about the drop zone, an easy enough task. The fact that Brigit had stayed hidden and not been killed with the rest of her family was the wild card. Along with Mac landing here, although that one might also be due to the Germans moving too soon. They should have allowed Papa and the boys to put out the marking lights and then rolled everyone up, but the other drops, the Pathfinders at the same time to mark the drop zones for the main airborne forces, must have rattled the Germans.
By now the 82nd, 101st, and British glider forces were on the ground. Mac knew the history, and Nada would have summed up what was developing in the dark succinctly: a cluster-frak. Few troops were arriving according to plan, but given that one of the primary missions of the Airborne was to wreak havoc, the scattering was actually achieving an important goal. It would confuse the Germans as much as if the plan had gone correctly.
This one-rail line was key, though, because in history, it had been blown, and that had delayed a Panzer division for ten days. Without those ten days—
Mac froze at the sound of a rifle bolt being worked. He reached for the .45.
“Please do not.” The voice had a German accent in French, which was weird, and even though he had the download, Mac took a moment to decipher what was said. It was amazing how much a bad accent could screw up a beautiful language.
Mac turned. A German officer and three soldiers stood there, spread out tactically. The officer had a field cap with the skull and crossbones, along with the lightning SS on the collar tab. Nothing subtle about that.
“You killed the boy,” Mac said.
“Unfortunately, I did not have the honor. That was my oberführer.”
The three soldiers had bolt-action rifles pointed at Mac. It occurred to him, one of many strange thoughts at strange times in his life, that Nada would have approved of those rifles. They would never waste ammunition firing on automatic. They had to make every shot count. The officer had a pistol in a holster. He wore a long, gray coat and gloves despite the warm June night.
Mac kept his hands at his sides, but far enough away from the pistol to not draw a nervous shot from one of the riflemen.
“Why did he kill the boy?” Mac asked. “He shot him in the back of the head, from the trajectory, while he was kneeling. That means he’d given up.”
The officer considered the question as if there were some hidden context to it he didn’t understand. “Why? He was a terrorist. Not a uniformed combatant. The Führer has ordered that terrorists be summarily executed. How does your country deal with terrorists?”
Mac sensed there was more to that question than the surface of it.
“My question,” the officer said, “is how did the bodies get here? We killed them two hundred meters from here. Your parachute is there.” He pointed. “We followed cart tracks back here once we finished a sweep of the immediate area. So, I must assume there was another party involved. Who else is here?”
“No one,” Mac said.
“Answered too quickly.” The officer took several steps closer, the soldiers flanking him. “I am Hauptsturmführer Procles. And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing? American, I assume.”
“Procles? That doesn’t sound German.”
“And your name?”
“Mac.”
“And your rank?”
“Sergeant First Class.”
“An enlisted man.” Procles nodded. “But I will treat you as an equal, given the nature of your mission. My oberführer would like to speak with you. He will not treat you as an equal.”
“I’d like to kill him,” Mac said. “And I will.” The download kicked in. “Procles. One of the Heracleidae, great-great-great-grandson of Hercules. Founder of the Eurypontid dynasty of the Kings of Sparta.”
“It is not an uncommon name in my”—Procles paused—“the area I come from. I would love to chat, truly I would, as I am sure you have some interesting stories, but those are for my oberführer.”
“How can you wear that uniform?” Mac asked. “Knowing what it represents.”
Procles indicated for the three riflemen to stay in place. He walked up to Mac, close enough so that his comrades couldn’t hear. “This army is one of the most efficient I’ve had the experience of serving in. If I am to fight, I prefer fighting with the best. I do as I’m ordered, Sergeant Mac. As I’m sure you do. I would highly recommend you tell my oberführer whatever he wishes to know. Your death will be much easier and pain-free.”
“I thought Spartans stood for something,” Mac said as he slipped the switchblade down from inside his sleeve into the palm of his hand. “You’re just whores for the Shadow.”
Procles stepped forward in anger, reaching for his pistol. As he flipped up the clasp on the holster for the Luger, Mac slammed his switchblade into the officer’s stomach, slashing upward.
Procles’s eyes went wide in surprise. Mac slapped Procles’s hand aside, then drew the Luger as he also jerked the blade to the side, gutting the SS officer-slash-timeline mercenary.
One of the privates realized something was wrong and yelled a question in German. Mac let go of the knife, wrapping that arm around Procles’s neck, keeping him as a shield while he fired the Luger.
His first round hit the rifleman who’d called out in the center of the forehead, snapping the head back and dropping him dead.
The other two fired, missing. Even bolt action didn’t help bad shooting, and a second soldier died with a headshot. The third threw down his rifle and tried to run. Mac shot him twice in the back.
Then he let go of Procles, letting him fall to the grou
nd. Mac wasn’t even breathing hard as he watched Procles crumble into himself, leaving only dust behind.
Sjaelland Island, Denmark, 6 June 452 A.D.
Every nail, claw-scale, and spur, every spike
and welt on the hand of that heathen brute
was like barbed steel. Everybody said
there was no honed iron hard enough
to pierce him through, no time-proofed blade
that could cut his brutal blood-caked claw
Roland was drenched in blood. He recognized the copper smell, and he could feel it all over his skin, soaking into his leather garments. There was no texture quite like it. He sat next to Jager, not sure of his next move. Jager was also saturated with Grendel’s blood.
“This is a fine blade.”
Roland looked to his left. Beowulf was holding the Naga staff in one hand. In the other, he had Grendel’s hand. The rest of the arm stretched to the floor, where the severed shoulder lay.
There was a shivering howl in the far distance, and Roland looked toward the sound, which echoed through the front entrance of Heorot.
“He ran,” Beowulf said. “It is a shame I could not finish him here.”
“He won’t last the wound,” Jager said. “There is too much blood.”
“This is true,” Beowulf said. “Still, I wanted to present the queen with the body.”
“You have a worthy trophy,” Jager added, indicating the arm.
Beowulf smiled. “True, also.”
Roland stood and held his hand out. Beowulf reluctantly passed the Naga staff to him. There were voices outside the hall, human voices, but they weren’t coming any closer.
Beowulf shook Grendel’s massive arm. “I must take this to the king and queen.”
He staggered toward the door, pulling his prize.
Roland watched him. Daylight was beginning to show outside. Beowulf was framed in the entrance as he posed there and once more held the trophy over his head.
A roar from a crowd greeted him, the locals having spent the night uncertain who or what would be coming out of Heorot this morning.
