Black Cross. Greg Iles
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spattered the cobbled quads of the colleges, shrouded the Bodelian Library, and swelled the lazy Cherwell and Thames into torrents.
“This is the life,” David murmured. “This is exactly how we picture you eggheads when we’re on the flight line. Living the life of Reilly, canoeing around a goddamn college campus. We risk our asses every day while you bums sit up here, supposedly winning the war with your little gray cells.”
“You mean punting around a goddamn college campus.”
David opened one eye, looked back and snorted. “Jeez, you sound more like a limey every year. If you called Mom on a telephone, she wouldn’t even know you.”
Mark studied his younger brother’s face. It was good to see him again, and not merely because it provided an excuse to get out of the lab for an afternoon. Mark needed the human contact. In this place that offered so much comradeship, he had become a virtual outcast. Lately, he’d had to fight a wild impulse to simply turn to a sympathetic face on a bus and begin talking. Yet looking at his brother now—an Air Force captain who spent most days on white-knuckle bombing runs over Germany—he wondered if he had the right to add his own pressures to those already on David’s shoulders.
“I think my hands are frostbitten,” Mark grumbled, as the punt pushed on through the black water. “I’d give a hundred pounds for an outboard motor.”
Once already he had resolved to talk to David about his problem—three weeks ago, on Christmas Day—but a last-minute bombing assignment had scotched their plans to get together. Now another month had almost slipped by. It had been that way for the last four years. Time rushing past like a river in flood. Now another Christmas was gone, and another New Year. 1944. Mark could scarcely believe it. Four years in this sandstone haven of cloisters and spires while the world outside tore itself to pieces with unrelenting fury.
“Hey,” David called, his eyes still closed. “How are the girls down here?”
“What do you mean?”
David opened both eyes and craned his neck to stare back at his brother. “What do I mean? Has four years away from Susan pickled your pecker as well as your brain? I’m talking about English dames. We’ve got to live up to our billing, you know.”
“Our billing?”
“Overpaid, oversexed, and over here, remember? Hell, I know you love Susan. I know plenty of guys who are crazy about their wives. But four years. You can’t spend every waking moment holed up in that Frankenstein lab of yours.”
Mark shrugged. “I have, though.”
“Christ, I’d tell you about some of my adventures, only you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.”
Mark jabbed the pole into the river bottom. It had been a mistake to send Susan home, but any sane man would have done the same at the time, considering the danger of German invasion. He was getting tired of paying for that particular misjudgment, though. He’d been on the wrong side of the Atlantic longer than any American he knew.
“To hell with this,” he said. As they rounded the bend at St. Hilda’s College, he levered the punt into a sharp embankment near Christ Church Meadow. The impact of the bow against the shore practically catapulted David out of the boat, but he landed with an athlete’s natural grace.
“Let’s get a beer!” David said. “Don’t you eggheads ever drink around here? Whose dumbass idea was this, anyway?”
Mark found himself laughing as he climbed out of the punt. “As a matter of fact, I know a few chaps who’d be glad to take you on in the drinking contest of your choice.”
“Chaps?” David gaped at his brother. “Did I hear you say chaps, Mac? We gotta get you back to the States, old sport. Back to Georgia. You sound like the Great Gatsby.”
“I’m only playing to your Tom Buchanan.”
David groaned. “We’d better go straight to whiskey. A little Kentucky bourbon’ll wash that limey accent right out of your throat.”
“I’m afraid they don’t stock Kentucky’s finest here in Oxford, Slick.”
David grinned. “That’s why I brought a fifth in my muzette bag. Cost me thirty bucks on the black market, but I wouldn’t drink that high-toned limey swill if I was dying of thirst.”
They crossed Christ Church Meadow mostly in silence. David took several long pulls from the bottle stowed in his flight bag. Mark declined repeated offers to share the whiskey. He wanted his mind clear when he spoke about his dilemma. He would have preferred to have David’s mind clear as well, but there was nothing he could do about that.
Walking side by side, the differences between the brothers were more marked. Where David was compact and almost brawny, Mark was tall and lean, with the body of a distance runner. He moved with long, easy strides and a surefootedness acquired through years of running cross-country races. His hands were large, his fingers long and narrow. Surgeon’s hands, his father had boasted when he was only a boy. David had inherited their mother’s flashing blue eyes, but Mark’s were deep brown, another legacy from his father. And where David was quick to smile or throw a punch, Mark wore the contemplative gaze of a man who carefully weighed all sides of any issue before acting.
He chose the Welsh Pony, in George Street. The pub did a brisk evening trade, but privacy could be had if desired. Mark went up to one of the two central bars and ordered a beer to justify the use of the table, then led David to the rear of the pub. By the time he was half-way to the bottom of his mug, he realized that David had drunk quite a lot of bourbon, with English stout to chase it down. Yet David remained surprisingly lucid. He was like their father in that way, if in no other. The analogy was not comforting.
“What the hell’s eating you, Mac?” David asked sharply. “All day I’ve had the feeling you wanted to say something, but you keep backing off. You’re like an old possum circling a garbage can. You’re driving me nuts. Get it out in the open.”
Mark leaned back against the oak chair and took his first long swallow of the night. “David, what does it feel like to bomb a German city?”
“What do you mean?” David straightened up, looking puzzled. “You mean am I scared?”
“No, I mean actually dropping the bombs. How does it feel to drop stick after stick of five-hundred-pound bombs on a city you know is full of women and children?”
“Hell, I don’t drop ’em. The bombardier does that. I just fly the plane.”
“So that’s how you do it. You distance yourself from the act. Mentally, I mean.”
David squinted at his brother. “Jesus, let’s don’t start, okay? It’s not enough I had to listen to all that crap from Dad when I enlisted? Now that he’s gone, you’re going to take over?” He swung a heavy forearm to take in the pub and the snowy alley visible through a frosted window. “You sit up here in your little land of Oz, playing paper games with the other eggheads. You lose touch real quick. You start forgetting why we got into this war in the first place.”
Mark held up his hand. “I know we have to stop the Nazis, David. But we’re destroying so much more than that.”
“Wake up, Mac. It’s 1944. We’re talking Hitler here. The fucking Führer.”
“I realize that. But do you notice how Hitler is used to justify any Allied act, any Allied sacrifice? Area bombing. Suicide missions. The politicians act as if Hitler sprang fully formed from the brow of Jupiter. Men of conscience could have stopped that madman ten years ago.”
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” David muttered. “Welcome to the real world. Hitler asked for it, and now he’s gonna get it.”
“Yes, he did, and he is. But must we destroy an entire culture to destroy one man? Do we wipe out a whole country to cure one epidemic?”
David suddenly looked very angry indeed. “The