“Did you ever sleep with a German for food?” Jessica asked, not quite wanting to hear the answer.
“I was never that hungry, although I came close on a few occasions.” She shook her head sadly. “I did have sex with the grocer a few times, though. He’s an old man and, except for him, it wasn’t very satisfying, but my son and I did have food.”
The mob had pushed the six women towards the city limits. “Now what will happen to them?” Jessica asked.
“They will be turned loose outside the city to fend for themselves.”
“How?”
Monique laughed. “Well, they are whores, aren’t they?”
Below the slow-flying Piper Cub, a German rear guard detachment was pulling out after once more stalling and mauling the 74th’s advance. The key position had been a two-story stone farmhouse. Artillery called in by Morgan had eventually obliterated it. The French had built well, and it had taken numerous hits before the burning roof had collapsed on the defenders.
A small column of German vehicles, several towing antitank guns, had then quickly limbered up and moved down the dirt road towards the west and the safety of another prepared position. They left behind two more burning Sherman tanks, along with dead and wounded crewmen. The continuing insolence and the success of the Germans infuriated the Americans and there had been a couple more incidents where Nazi prisoners had been shot. Morgan couldn’t blame the men on the ground. Like the sniper, it was hard to let a man who’d just shot and killed your friends get away with it by saying, “I surrender and would like now to go to a camp where I’ll be fed and warm while you go and try not to get killed by my buddies.”
Prisoner shooting, he concluded was an ugly but understandable fact of war, and one of those things nobody ever talked about.
Jack had called in artillery fire that had, as usual, missed the fleeing column by a wide margin. He’d then been informed that, as usual, no fighter-bombers were in the area. He’d sworn at the Germans’ good luck, and been willing to let the krauts depart until a machine gun in the tail-end truck opened fire on him, spitting a column of tracers in the air.
“Captain, that silly bastard’s shooting at us.”
“I can tell, Snyder.” He banked and twisted the Cub until the German gave up.
Enough of this shit, he thought. The tail vehicle was a Horch heavy all-terrain standard personnel vehicle. This one looked like it carried half a dozen German soldiers and was towing an antitank gun, although not one of the hated 88’s.
As he drew closer, the machine gun erupted again, but the Cub’s agility enabled Jack to evade the stream of bullets.
“Sir, what the hell are you doing?” Snyder yelled as Jack dropped even lower and lined up behind the Horch.
“I’m pissed off, Snyder.”
“Aw shit, Captain.”
“I had this little plane armed for a reason and this is it. Hang on.”
He dropped the plane to mere feet above the road, closing at more than twenty miles an hour faster than the big truck. Again, he juked and jigged while the gunner, in the front of the truck, futilely tried to swivel and find him.
At two hundred yards, he pulled the trigger and the twin thirties erupted, hitting the ground behind the Horch. He walked the bullets up to the truck and raked it. The truck swerved off the road and rolled down a ditch. Several men tumbled out and ran off. Jack was elated to see that not all the Germans had left the truck. He was about to make a second pass when the truck’s gas tank exploded. The other German vehicles had halted to protect their comrade and began to shoot at him. Jack decided it was time to go home.
“Jesus, sir, that was one helluva trick. Do me a favor though, and please don’t do it again. Mama Snyder wants me back home again.”
“Don’t worry, I think I’ve got it all out of my system. I like to think I’m brave, not suicidal. When we land, you’ve got one job to do?”
Snyder grinned. “Let me guess, sir. You want a silhouette of a truck painted on the side of the plane, don’t you?”
That evening, Levin and Carter went looking for Morgan and found him sitting against a tree. The expression on his face told them everything.
“So now you know what it’s like,” Carter said quietly. “You just went and killed your first man and it’s eating at you.”
“It could have been worse,” said Levin. “What if you were close enough to see their faces. I haven’t done either and I’m not looking forward to the experience. I just hope to hell I don’t flinch.”
“But I didn’t have to do it,” Jack protested. “I could’ve turned and flown away. I just got pissed off because they’d killed more of our people and they were shooting at me.”
Carter handed him a canteen. It contained a cheap cognac. “That’s right. They were shooting at you and they had killed some of our buddies. And don’t forget we’re in the army of a nation that’s at war with the most monstrous regime in the history of mankind. This isn’t a game, Jack. It ain’t football like you played at Michigan State. We were brought here to kill them, and that’s the plain and simple truth. If you had let them go, they would’ve set up shop and done it again and again. Look on the bright side, Bomber Morgan, Captain Jack-Off, you may have saved some lives in the future.”
“Doesn’t make it any easier to face, and I wish to hell you’d stop calling me ‘Bomber’ or that other thing. If anybody was alive in that truck, they burned to death. I can’t think of anything worse than burning to death.”
Carter sat beside him and lit a cigarette while Jack took another pull of the cognac. “Somebody once said that it isn’t that killing’s so awful, rather it’s so easy. I like to think it was Robert E. Lee because it’s such a worthwhile statement, but I don’t know.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” said Levin. “I’ve seen enough dead bodies to qualify as a wholesale funeral director. But Jack’s right, it’s different when you’re responsible for making them that way.”
Carter took a swallow. “Know what I did back at that last farmhouse? I stuck the barrel of my main gun into a basement window and fired. Anything in that house was obliterated, Jack, and I don’t give a shit who or what it was. I didn’t care if they were soldiers trying to kill me, wounded waiting to surrender, or civilians, or some nuns drinking beer and playing poker. There were Nazis in there and they were trying to kill me. Kill or be killed and fuck the rules of war, the Geneva Convention, and anybody else who thinks you can teach soldiers to play nice-nice in a game when the loser gets a decent funeral if they can find enough of him to bury.”
Jack looked at Carter and smiled. “Where’s your southern accent? You lost it again.”
“I’m bilingual” Carter said and burped. “I like to turn it on for the home folks and those officers here who think I’m just a dumb-ass cracker. When this war is over, I’m going into politics and sounding like a down home boy is just a good idea.”
“You’re deeper than I thought,” Jack said.
“Indeed I am that. And, by the way, I thought you might be lonely, so I took the liberty of giving my cousin your name and how to contact you. If you’re luckier than you deserve, she might write you a letter.”
Jack thought he’d like to hear from Jeb’s cousin. “Thanks.”
Levin grinned wickedly. “Jeb, you don’t have any Jewish cracker cousins do you?”
Varner was exhausted. He fell asleep in the staff car that took him to the outskirts of Berlin and the laboratory of the physicist, Werner Heisenberg. He had barely landed in Berlin after flying from the Seine in a ridiculous little plane called a Fieseler Storch.
The Storch’s pilot, a complete lunatic, was in his sixties and said he’d flown with von Richthofen in the First World War. He’d insisted on flying at treetop level to avoid being seen by American planes. When Varner wondered out loud if the Americans didn’t have better things to do than attack a plane as small as the Storch, the pilot had cackled and said planes like the Storch were the only German planes flying; therefore, they were a likely target. Varner thought that the comment did not bode well for the status of the Luftwaffe.