Silver Stars. Майкл Грант
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to appear at the airfield, to take the flight to the Azores, there to rendezvous with a Royal Navy submarine, which is to take her to Italy. She is to deliver Cisco to his uncle and receive in return a map of enemy emplacements around Salerno. She is to deliver the packet to a certain person working at the Swedish Embassy in Rome.
And then?
Her orders are silent about then.
She swallows past a rising lump in her throat and barely stops herself reading through one more time. Nothing about then. Nothing about where she is to go, what she is to do, how she is to escape.
She wants to throw up. Her face feels like it’s burning. Surely this can’t be it. Surely even an amateur would have a plan? But of course there is a plan for getting what Corelli wants, just no plan for keeping her alive and out of the hands of the Gestapo or Italian counterintelligence.
The Swede. He must have the next set of instructions, the ones explaining how she is not simply being forgotten in the middle of enemy territory.
The Swede. Sure. That’s it. He’ll help her.
But try as she might, she cannot make herself believe it, not all the way.
There’s a difference between taking risks and committing suicide.
The six hours and twenty minutes pass in relative silence. Cisco leans back and dozes, eyes half-shut. Rainy’s mind races in circles. This isn’t a plan, this is a sketch. This is espionage through rose-colored lenses. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if she were an officer more attention would have been paid to her survival.
I’m a nobody, a buck sergeant, a GI. Expendable, like any other GI.
The Newfoundland base is a bare, scraped place beside dark water. There are rows of Nissan huts, the British version of a Quonset hut, a scattering of tin-sided administrative buildings, and a hangar. A bulldozer with a snow blade attached lies parked between two huts, but while it is chilly for summer, there is no snow.
A jeep fetches the two passengers and hustles them away to thaw out around an iron stove in a Nissan hut equipped with the usual military lack of comfort.
“Can a man get a drink at least?” Cisco asks a Canadian airman, who looks him up and down before walking away without a word. Cisco intertwines his fingers and cracks his knuckles and says, “That fellow needs a good punch in the neck.”
Rainy feels sleepiness steal over her and spends the hour’s break savoring the warmth of the stove. Then it’s back aboard the plane, another takeoff, and a rapid ascent into low clouds. They burst through into hazy, declining sunlight beneath a higher, thinner layer of cover, and take a big, sloping, rightward turn to the south. This leg of the trip is to take eight hours, a very long time to sit on what amounts to a hard bench contemplating the line between duty to the mission and the duty to stay alive.
Gestapo. That is the word that keeps pushing its way into her thoughts. Geheime Staatspolizei, the secret state police, Hitler’s enforcers, his torturers. Beatings. Beatings at the very least. The breaking of bones, the crushing of fingers, the gouging of eyes, rape, and . . .
She sucks air, feeling panic add volatile fuel to her misgivings, panic that seems to crush the air from her lungs. She licks her lips and glances at Cisco to make sure he isn’t watching her, isn’t seeing the sick fear she has not yet suppressed.
Rainy slips off her seat belt and stands, urgently needing to move. She explores the bare cylinder of the plane’s fuselage, locating the chemical toilet and . . . and nothing else. She uses the facility, sitting perched on the tiny seat, bent forward, face in her hands.
Soldiers die every day. Soldiers are sacrificed every day. She is a soldier.
She heads forward to the open cockpit door and looks inside at a confusing array of dials and switches. The pilot is head-back and mouth open, fast asleep, while the copilot keeps his hands on the yoke. Peering through the windshield, Rainy sees taller, darker clouds ahead.
“Boomers. Thunderstorm,” the copilot says over his shoulder, indicating the clouds with a jerk of his chin.
The piles of cloud are red in the light of the plunging sun. Darkness looms in the east beyond. Rainy returns to her seat and straps in.
Thunderstorm it is, and the C-47 is not able to rise above it and has no slack in its fuel supply to try an end around.
A flash, like the world’s biggest camera flashbulb going off and . . .
Craaaack!
Boom!
A massive fist punches the C-47 in its aluminum spine and drives it down a stomach-churning five hundred feet.
“Shit!” Rainy yelps as she is thrown against her seat belt.
Cisco looks at her, amused, and yells, “Nice language coming from a lady.”
Boom-bum-bum-bum-BOOM!
The thunderclap is louder than anything Rainy has ever even imagined hearing. The physical blow that follows shivers the thin skin of the fuselage. She’s amazed the small porthole hasn’t blown out.
The cockpit door is still open, and Rainy can see the pilots are both awake, engaged, and tense, but not so tense that one doesn’t take a moment to glance back and grin at what must be a look of terror on Rainy’s face. His face is illuminated by the sickly glow of instruments and then in blazing white as a bolt of lightning flashes and fractures and crawls across the cloud face ahead.
Wind buffets the plane, sends it slipping sideways and off-center, like a car sliding on an icy road. Thunder batters them again and again, each clap more violent than the one before. The lightning is so close and so wild it seems to pass right through the plane, turning every last rivet blazing white and leaving behind an afterimage on her retinas. Static electricity raises the hair on the back of her neck and arms.
Hour after hour. Rainy has never been one to get seasick or airsick, but she clutches the paper vomit bag close, just in case, because the lunatic elevator ride they are on kneads and shoves and twists her stomach as if determined to reduce her to shivering, puking helplessness.
But eventually the lightning comes from farther astern and the thunder falls away to a distant, disgruntled rumble. The wind, however, intensifies, and the plane is a very small piece of flotsam on a continent-wide river of turbulent air. Up . . . down . . . up . . . down, like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.
The loadmaster comes walking back, moving easily with the lurch, and carrying a small cooler and a thermos.
“Want to try to eat something?”
Rainy glares hatred at him and his sandwiches, but Cisco says, “Sure, whatcha got?”
“I got ham and cheese on rye, and I got tuna salad on white.”
The mention of tuna salad almost does it, almost has Rainy puking, and she would have but for the fact that her stomach is empty.
“Grab me a ham and cheese,” Cisco says. “And some coffee. Black.”
“Black it is, since we got no sugar and no milk,” the loadmaster says. “We’ll be landing in an hour. Might be a bit hairy.”
“Hairy?” Rainy asks.
The loadmaster holds his hand out flat, palm down, and simulates a plane trying to land in heavy wind. It is not reassuring.
And in fact the landing is not pretty. There is an unusual amount of bouncing and tail-skewing involved, but eventually the plane comes to a stop, the door opens, and Rainy piles out just as quickly as she is able. The ground is hard and it is wet and the sky is dark, but she barely restrains herself from falling to her knees and kissing it.
Cisco? Unaffected. “Now what?”
A jeep with its canvas cover up tears across the tarmac from the direction of a squat,