Читать книгу Seeking Valhalla - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

She was the prettiest girl he had ever seen and Carson Napier struggled to keep his eyes off her. He was intensely aware that she was sitting in the jeep next to him; the tension grew so intense that he lurched out of the jeep and stood nearby, trying to glance at her furtively, but finding her eyes on him every time that he looked.

Napier searched for the right words to open a conversation. He was no good at chatting a girl up and all the lines that he had heard his friends brag about as being a surefire way to charm a lass didn’t seem to make much sense. Maybe he should just talk to her.

“I heard you speaking another language to the major,” Napier said. “He called it Gaelic?”

“Aye, it’s what I spoke at home.”

“I’m from Scotland myself. Or I should say, my parents were. Edinburgh. I was born there, but was taken to America when I was still a baby. I don’t remember anything of the old country.”

She smiled at him and he thought that his heart must be visibly pounding against his shirt, like a jackhammer out of control. “I have cousins in America. They live in Boston. Where did you live?”

“Price, Utah. That’s a long way from Boston.”

“What was in Price?”

“Coal mines. It’s hard work and dangerous. Kids even used to work in the mines, but new laws changed that so I didn’t start until I was fifteen. Worked with my dad and my older brothers. There was an Irish family in town, the O’Reillys. Good enough people. The father worked hard, but he only had daughters, no sons to help him in the mine, so they had to live on only his wages. That’s hard. They were always in debt to the company store. Of course, that’s how the company liked it, when you owed them so much money that you couldn’t quit your job. There were lots of different people there. Lots of Finns, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, even a couple of German families. There was only one other Scottish family—my Uncle Ian, Aunt Beth, and my cousins. It was like a little Europe, just a soup bowl full of immigrants. There were a lot of people I liked there, but the work was hard and I wanted to see more of the world than more tunnels of the mines. When Pearl Harbor happened, I was pretty happy. No, that doesn’t sound right. I felt bad for all those families that had lost sons and fathers. Something like twenty-five hundred Americans died. That was sad. I took a bus to Salt Lake two days later and joined the army. Best thing I ever did.”

He paused for breath. He felt like he was chattering mindlessly, dumping out information because he was terrified that he wouldn’t have anything to say. “Enough about me. What about you?”

“What about me?” she smiled widely as she watched him.

“Where’d you grow up?”

“On a farm. Not an estate, I’m no daughter of a lord. It was big enough for our dairy herd. I lived in town so that I could go to school. The nuns were strict, but I miss school.”

“I didn’t get enough schooling,” Napier said. “Just up to eighth grade. But I read a lot, mostly magazines and comic books. The major says that I’ve got a big vocabulary.”

“They gave us books and magazines at the camp. Mostly in German. It kept us distracted as girls were brought, and as girls were taken away, never to return.”

“It must have been hard to find a reason to survive,” he said. “You must have lost hope at times.”

“I prayed,” she said simply. “My faith in Jesus kept me alive.”

“I believe in Jesus Christ.”

“Are you Catholic?” she asked.

“Presbyterian.”

She looked disappointed. “My cousin Claire married a Protestant from Ulster. Our priest refused to give her communion and told her that she was damned to go to hell.”

“That’s not very friendly,” Napier said. “I know of a nice couple from Silver Ridge, back near my hometown. She was Catholic and he was a Baptist. Her priest let her keep going to mass as long as they both agreed to raise their kids as Catholics.”

Her smile crinkled her face, bunching up her freckles on her cheeks into two dimples in a manner that he found utterly charming. “That sounds more reasonable,” she said.

“Do not move!” The harsh voice with the obvious German accent startled Napier into obedience. His body tensed and he clenched his fingers into tight fists as his eyes searched frantically for who had spoken.

The German officer entered the edge of his vision, wearing a black uniform with the black swastika on a red armband. He was a small man, no taller than Napier, and on the slight side, barely able to fill out his uniform. His pistol was still in his holster, but the two SS troopers behind him, with their MP43 assault rifles pointed at Napier and the girl, gave weight to his command.

Napier felt a cold calm come over him. The first time that he had gone into battle, coming under fire in Sicily, he had frozen in panic, unable to move his weapon to return fire. None of his fellow Rangers had noticed, or perhaps they just never said anything, but that act of panic frightened him more profoundly than anything else he had ever experienced. He had resolved to never panic again, and surprisingly, the power of mind over action, he never had.

He did not panic now. Keeping his eyes on the Germans, so that they could not follow his thoughts by watching his eyes, he remembered where his carbine was—propped up between the two front seats, with the safety on, at least a good six feet away. Going for it would be almost certain suicide, since he respected those grease guns that the Germans carried, but the real problem was that Aoife was sitting right next to the carbine. She would certainly be caught in the crossfire. He couldn’t have her death on his conscience and so resigned himself to submission.

The officer walked around the jeep, taking care to not block the lines of fire of his soldiers. Napier watched him. The Nazi peered at the girl and spoke quickly in German. She paled and tears rolled down her cheeks.

“What’s going on, Aoife?” he asked. “What’d he say?”

Her voice quavered. “He knows who I am and he’s going to take me.”

“Over my dead body!” Napier exclaimed, taking a step towards the jeep.

His head exploded in pain.