“Well, good, it’s good you’re okay.”
He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do anything. He kept having to remind himself: full out.
“Look, we need more help. Big help.”
He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat on his bed and looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired also.
“Two days from now — it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex, forty-eight hours is the dead minimum — a battalion of American airborne troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it — Anlage Elf, Repp, the whole shooting gallery. We’ll go in a little after midnight. I’ll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored division operating in the area.”
Leets paused.
“We’re going to try and kill Repp. That’s what it gets down to. But only one man has seen him. Sure, we’ve got that old picture. But we’ve got to be sure. So it would help if — if you came along.” He was troubled over all this.
“This is how I figure it. Nobody’s asking you to go into battle; you’re not a soldier, it’s what we get paid for. No, after we take the place, we’ll get a message out fast. You’ll be in a forward area with Roger, I suppose. We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or two. It’s our best shot at him, only way to be sure.” He paused again. “Well, that’s it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated risk. What do you think?” He looked up at Shmuel and had the discomfiting sensation the man hadn’t understood a word he’d said. “Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?”
“You’ll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And attack the camp?” Shmuel asked.
“Yeah,” said Leets. “It’s not so hard as it sounds. We’ve got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range, where you escaped. We make it three miles back to—” But again he saw Shmuel’s eyes glaze over, disinterested.
“Hey, you okay?” he said, and almost snapped his fingers.
“Take me,” Shmuel said suddenly.
“What? Take you? In the air—”
“You said you needed me there. Fine, I’ll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I’ll do it.”
“You got any idea what you’re letting yourself in for? I mean, there’ll be a battle, people getting blown up.”
“I don’t care. That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is — you’d never understand. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve never understood. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m clever, I can learn the techniques. Two days, you say? Plenty of time.”
Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally he just asked, “Why?”
“Old friends then. I’ll have the best chance to meet old friends.”
A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why, “All right.”
The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily eager, full of bravado and violence. They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons they’d learned in movie theaters. They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like minstrels with mad white eyes and pink tongues; they dangled junk from themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any junk: pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore, though non-regulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their shoulders. A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.
Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he’d wandered into someone’s high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer shitthinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not this festival of the locker room.
He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go. He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another — about the fiftieth — rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst, compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds; perhaps like a medieval knight he’d need a crane to get him off his ass when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.
Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I’m scared, he wondered, what about him?
Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him into carrying at least a pistol.
Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.
“How are you doing?” Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff pressing into his gut.
No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night, eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.
He nodded briskly in reply to the question. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Good, good,” Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, “Sir, Colonel says planes’ll be cranking up in five, we’ll be loading in ten.”
“Gotcha, thanks,” said Leets, and the trooper was gone.
Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they’d been organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most recently — March — an op named Varsity in which they’d jumped beyond the Rhine behind them. They’d been off the line a month, growing fat and sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hellraisers was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland, Second of the 501st got the word.