Theater of spies, p.50
Theater of Spies, page 50
Ciara spoke up: “And I’m from South Boston, I am!”
“Jesus!” the voice said, and there was a murmur of conversation just too soft to catch behind the gaping hole where a window had been.
“What were you two broads doing on a German airship?” the Brooklynite called out suspiciously.
“We stole the airship in Berlin,” Luz said crisply. “We’re American secret agents, except for these French ladies we rescued.”
“And who’s da Kraut on dat sled? ’Cause that’s a Kraut uniform.”
“And actually . . . Sergeant, is it? I’m from Manhattan myself, and not Yorkville, either,” Cheine said in his best patrician drawl.
Yorkville was the city’s most heavily German district, though these days it was draped in enough starry flags and red-white-and-blue bunting that every day looked like the Fourth.
He went on: “Thirty-six Gramercy Park, to be precise—corner of Gramercy Park and East Twenty-first Street.”
“Well, fuck me,” the voice said wonderingly. “Yeah, Sergeant . . . ah, pardon my French, Sergeant Eddie Capra, 106th Regiment, 27th Division. Look, come forward, and keep your hands where we can see ’em.”
Luz called back over her shoulder in French, and the whole party came forward slowly. Sergeant Capra came out, a skinny dark young man in a U.S. Army parka and an improvised white cloth cover on his turtle helmet, with a Colt-Browning semiauto rifle in his hands and a mostly smoked Camel dangling from his lower lip.
“Well, f . . . foolish me,” he said wonderingly, after looking them over.
Following him out was another soldier, this one in a very tattered and very grubby French horizon-blue uniform with greatcoat and a dark beard spilling down his chest to show why the nickname for soldiers in this country was poilu—“hairy one.”
He began talking to Perrin and the others in French that was fluent but made it obvious his first language was Breton, and then turned to the American:
“Eet is . . . ’ow you say . . . de trut, Edeee,” he said, and noticing her, said in French: “I am a sailor before the war. Harponneur de baleines. I sail with men from New Bedford sometimes.”
Then in English of a sort again. “No shit!”
“There are actual Germans after us, Sergeant, and they’re coming on quickly,” Luz said. “And I don’t think they’re going to be at all pleased with what we’ve done.”
“Yeah, well, lady, misery loves company. Come on in; it ain’t much, but it ain’t home either. We just got here a couple hours ago.”
There were seven soldiers inside the ruined farmhouse, not counting the three dead laid out with their coats over their faces; two were French, ragged stragglers from a unit that had been retreating since the horror-gas attacks broke the old Western Front. Five were Americans, and all were lightly wounded in ways they would have taken more seriously in less desperate circumstances.
The American noncom was voluble but not very informative. That wasn’t a surprise; enlisted men often had no coherent idea of what was going on in a fight, outside what they could see for themselves. That went double when things were going badly.
“Divisional HQ’s down in Nevers,” he said. “That’s about fifteen miles. I think. We went into the line two weeks ago, right off the boats, and we hit the Krauts a good one, had ’em moving back fast . . . then, Christ, I don’t think even the brass knew what hit us. All of a sudden it was raining gas—regular gas, not horror-gas, our masks worked—and HE and den dey were all over us like flies on . . . manure. Behind us even, and we kept moving back. My squad got cut off on a forward patrol, two days ago, lost some men, and when we got back the company had pulled out. Hell, da whole battalion. I don’t know crap about what’s happening. We was going to keep going tonight and move back, try and find our lines.”
Then he turned his head. “Hey, miss, don’t touch—ah, da hell wid it, it’s busted bad anyway.”
Ciara was bent over a partly disassembled Lewis gun, with the maintenance manual and toolkit both open beside her. Her fingers began to move, while Capra explained:
“McGillicudy was our Lewis man, but he and his team”—he nodded toward the bodies farther back in the next roofless room—“didn’t make it. Caught some fragments from a mortar, same one dat f . . . fuddled up da gun. This was far as we could get them and they all croaked right after we stopped. Damn his Irish ass, I needed him, that’s better ’n half the squad’s firepower.”
The two Frenchmen had Lebel rifles, slow-loading and slow-firing anachronisms, and not much ammunition for them. Capra and the remains of his squad had Colt-Browning rifles, five or six magazines each, and some grenades, and not much else including food, having eaten their iron rations; the Frenchwomen had taken everything edible from the HL-22 and were moving around so that the soldiers could eat at their positions, to emphatic gratitude.
“You know how to use that Sharpshooter, ma’am?” Capra said, nodding at the rifle over her back.
Cheine laughed. “Sergeant,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Yeah, if there’s . . . fifteen, you said, miss?”
“Fifteen or sixteen including their commander, who is very bad news,” Luz said crisply.
“Fifteen, maybe sixteen bad Boche coming, we ought to get set up, and I’ll be glad to have ya. Christ and His Mother—”
He crossed himself.
“—I’d take Teddy with his fff . . . full-bore cowboy six-shooters right now. Or Carrie Nation and her ax!”
“There!” Ciara said with satisfaction, coming out of her brown study of concentration. “It was the return spring, Sergeant Capra. There’s a spare here in the tool case . . . there . . .”
There were a series of snicks and snacks. “There, it ought to be working right and proper now. Just like the manual says!”
Capra glanced at the newcomers again; the Frenchwomen had a small fire of wood scraps going already and were heating soup in a battered sooty pot they’d salvaged from the shattered kitchen.
“Youse guys is strange,” he said.
Cheine laughed again. “Sergeant,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”
* * *
• • •
Luz carefully scanned across the field through the telescopic sight. “Sergeant,” she called downstairs . . .
Not that there was much of the second-story floor left, just a piece of the wall that supported the remains of the staircase and about twelve feet of joists and floorboards that still clung to the wall.
“Ma’am?”
“I make it eight of them coming at us across that field to the east. That means half of them missing, and they’ll be infiltrating through those woods to the north and trying to get around us. They’re making very good use of cover and they’re carrying some new type of rifle I don’t recognize, definitely not Mausers.”
“Right you are, ma’am,” he said, then raised his voice. “Winock, Yannik—”
Evidently the Frenchmen were both Bretons; the French army had always been regionally recruited.
“Youse guys get back where da kitchen used to be, but careful dat nobody sneaks up using what’s left of the barn for cover.”
Winock looked doubtful, and Luz called a translation, at which point Capra blew out his cheeks and their thick black stubble in a gesture of relief and waved a hand in thanks.
“Miss,” he went on to Ciara, “you take that Lewis back wid ’em.”
Luz gave a quick nod when Ciara looked up at her; that was the right tactical decision. The enemy could get closer there under cover and so it was the right spot for a mass of portable firepower.
Capra went on: “One of youse tell them French broads to get low and stay dat way. All of youse back there in the kitchen hold fire until they’re close, right? Everyone else, we got trouble knocking at the front door. Lefkowitz, how many rifle grenades you got left?”
“Two, Sarge.”
“Ahhhh, shit. Make ’em count. Look, you get your ass back there in the kitchen too with the frogs and the Lewis—I swear to God they’re gonna use the wrecked barn for cover, you can pop ’em behind it, maybe catch a bunch. Got it?”
“Right, Sarge,” Lefkowitz said, pushing his helmet down on kinky reddish hair and folding his gangly length as he moved, careful not to let anything show over the remains of the walls.
“Short bursts, sweetie,” Luz called down to Ciara. “Keep the butt tight against your shoulder and aim low.”
“I read the manual, darling,” she replied with calm cheerfulness in her voice, carefully laying the spare barrel on her right by its carrying handle.
¡Dios mío, but I love that woman! I wish I could say so.
Luz forced fear for her partner out of her mind, along with the nagging pain in her side and the wish that there were time to strap it up. The only way they had a chance of coming out of this alive was to win, and to do that they had to concentrate on each doing her part of the job. Cheine murmured to Perrin and Simone, and they helped him crawl over to a position where he could see over a section of rubble where a window had been, tumbled ruin just high enough to give him cover. He lay there with a charred chair cushion under his stomach to take pressure off his leg and the two drums of ammunition ready to hand.
Luz looked down the section of second-story wall that remained intact; it was about twelve feet long, there were three good firing positions, and the wall’s stone construction would stop rifle rounds. Which made her thankful it wasn’t wood or brick—people tended to underestimate how much material bullets could punch through. She took out a strip of cloth that had started out as bedding in the HL-22, rubbed it on the charred surface of the wall to dirty it, and wrapped it around the barrel of the rifle to break the outline. Then she eased it over the edge of the stone and began scanning, alternating between her binoculars and the more powerful but narrower view through the scope. Some people preferred to work with a spotter, but she never had . . .
The field was about twelve hundred yards across from the forest to the farmhouse, with the little stream and its brush and trees about two-thirds of the way toward the house. The problem was that it was rolling land and had patches of dead ground. On the good side the Germans were all in standard field-gray, which was actually more like a dull gray-green, highly effective at any time except winter but only a little better than black against snow. She saw a flicker of movement, half glimpsed and then disappearing behind a ridge of snow piled up against a furrow. She worked her hands to limber them, then stripped off the right glove with her teeth. The .30-06 boattail could punch through several sandbags or a foot of hardwood quite a ways out . . .
Luz had to guess where a man might be lying behind that ridge. Arm in the loop, breathe in, ignore the pain from the sprung rib, let most of it out, squeeze—
Crack!
And fire stabbed through her side.
“¡Ay! That hurt!”
A perceptible fraction of a second later there was an upward spurt of dirt and snow from the ridge she’d fired at. Something heaved up and fell back behind it.
“Surprise, Fritzie!” she muttered. “It’s the worst day of your life.”
The bolt went snick-snack as she reloaded, fast and smooth, but in the interval seven or eight men picked themselves up, dashed forward, and went to ground behind good cover picked out in advance. They were down before she was ready to shoot again, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure where several of them were. And now they knew they were within the killing range of a good sniper.
“Oh, this is bad,” she murmured to herself.
Aloud: “Sergeant Capra! I got one but there are eight more out there, and they’ve all been to school. And they’re all carrying some sort of stubby rifle with a large-capacity magazine, twenty or thirty rounds. They’re all automatics. That leaves six or seven unaccounted for somewhere around us. The ones in front were waiting until their friends had time to come at us from the rear, behind the barn.”
“Ah, shit! Thanks, lady, dat’s what I figured.”
Capra was working his rosary as he lay and waited for naked-eye targets. Luz felt a certain sympathy for the young man pitchforked into responsibility in a situation where there weren’t any good answers. At least the weapons the Germans were carrying didn’t seem to be very long-range, which meant they couldn’t keep her head down with covering fire . . . not yet . . . but she suspected that they’d be difficult to . . .
Two more broke cover in a short zigzagging dash.
Crack!
A miss, though it kicked up snow and dirt not far from the feet of one man, making him leap aside; the rib was putting her off.
And those are Stoßtruppen, I think—I recognize the description of their tactics, and the Germans use them to deploy new weapons. Trust Horst to lay his hands on the best.
Another pair dashed forward. She worked the bolt, fast and smooth, readjusted . . .
Crack!
A wailing scream in the distance that faded quickly; everyone except possibly the Frenchwomen knew what that meant.
The rest of the Stoßtruppen had all made it farther forward. The four American riflemen below began firing, slamming out the contents of their twenty-round magazines, but at least six of the Germans made it to the banks of the little stream. A rasping stutter, and chips flew off the stonework ahead of her position in a peening, sparking clamor of high-velocity metal on stone. She ducked down; whatever the Germans were shooting could be used like a machine pistol, but it had a lot more range and those bullets were hitting much harder than nine-millimeter parabellum. They still had to be four hundred yards out at least, and now they were moving forward again with some firing to keep her head down while the rest moved.
A gurgling shriek came from below as one of the American soldiers was hit. She rolled onto her back and pushed herself along to her next firing position, wriggling like a snake to stay low with the rifle lying down her body, panting and curling her lips away from her teeth so she wouldn’t bite them as the movement made the injury worse. If the ends of the rib were severed, they might work their way into a lung . . .
So not good.
“Les Boches! Les Boches!”
A yell in French from the kitchen of the wrecked house, and the slow bang . . . bang . . . of the clumsy tube-magazine Lebel rifles firing. Then a whunk . . . BAM, as Lefkowitz expended one of his precious rifle grenades, and a chattering rattlesnake brrrttt-brrrrttt from the Lewis gun, precisely the short bursts the manual specified. The chance that Ciara would actually hit anything except the landscape in general was low; that wasn’t a skill you could get out of a book, but she wasn’t getting upset and burning out the barrel by keeping her finger clenched on the trigger either and the mere sound would make experienced soldiers wary. Everyone who’d been up against them hated and feared machine guns.
The firing was getting more intense on both sides. A man sprang up from the stream bank and began to run forward, a stick-grenade in his right hand with the priming button dangling on its string and the odd-looking rifle held at the balance in his left. She happened to be pointed in his direction when he jumped up.
Crack!
“¡Ay! ¡Coño!” she snarled; the pain from the recoil was definitely getting worse.
This time there wasn’t any doubt; through the scope she could see the round punch into the German’s chest just at the top of the breastbone, and his handsome smooth face flexed like a rubber mask as he pitched over backward. She ducked down again immediately, smelling her own sweat despite the damp cold as a storm of the automatic-rifle fire chewed into the stone above her head. It would chew her into bloody rags in an instant if she showed herself.
And I’ve got no cover at all from behind. Whatever those weapons are, they’re a menace!
It was time to get out of there, and the peening of the bullets seemed to be producing a clanking iron clamor in her head. She worked the bolt, slung the rifle again, let herself slide backward until her legs were over the place where the floor wasn’t anymore, then slid back and caught a beam that creaked ominously to break her fall.
Luz landed on the rubble, one foot slipping a little on the broken panels of a door, half a scream escaping her. White fire flashed across her vision for a second. She fell to her knees with clenched teeth bared, fighting against the nausea of agony that made her mouth fill with saliva, clutching at her side and hissing. Then she spat to one side—at least she couldn’t see or taste any blood in it.
Firing was a ceaseless hammer now and definitely from both sides of the ruined house: the Thompson firing burst after burst, the Lewis gun rattling, American egg grenades exploding in a vicious whine of cast-iron fragments, and German stick grenades going off with that distinctive bamp sound—fortunately they relied more on blast, and it hammered at her eardrums without anything biting her flesh. More automatic fire, like half a dozen machine guns firing at the same time. Bits and pieces of stone stung the back of her neck. Whatever weapon the Germans were using was a killer at close range, un verdadero asesino.
Her attention split, as if two moving pictures were playing in her mind at the same time:
Lefkowitz was cursing sulfurously in Yiddish, rising up to fire another rifle grenade and then falling backward, four exit wounds stitching across his back and flopping him down like a rag doll. Ciara lying white-faced, putting another drum on the Lewis behind the tumbled cast-iron stove, her breath panting and eyes wide but fingers steady with the complex task. One of the Breton soldiers slumped limply, the back of his head gone and leaking red and pink. In the front room of the ruined house Capra was yelling and clutching at his calf, blood welling between his fingers.
And Horst sprang over the ruined wall of the farmhouse, his one-eyed face not handsome at all as it contorted like a wolf.
