Читать книгу Dead of Night - Майкл Грант - Страница 5

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SOMEWHERE IN WALES, DECEMBER 24, 1942

‘Help! Help, I’m sinking!’

Jillion Magraff is indeed sinking. She is up to her knees in mud and will in short order be up to her thighs.

How Magraff has managed to get quite so stuck is a mystery to Rio Richlin and everyone else in the squad with the possible exception of Sergeant Cole, and that’s only because Cole has a very low opinion of the green troops in his squad.

Luther Geer, a big twenty-year-old with a crushing brow beneath buzz-cut brown hair, slings his pack onto a lichen-scarred rock. ‘Best just to let her sink. Held up by a woman soldier. Again.’

‘Knock it off, Geer,’ Rio says, but without much conviction in her voice. Magraff is an embarrassment to all the women in the squad and the platoon. Cat Preeling carries her weight and then some; Jenou Castain . . . well, she has a way to go to become a soldier, but at least she’s not quite the whiny, helpless mess Magraff is.

The worst thing is that Rio intensely dislikes Geer, who for his part seems threatened by Rio. So Magraff giving Geer yet another opportunity to sneer at the women in the squad doubly irritates Rio – a sweet-tempered girl who until she joined the army had never had an unkind thought or cast a harsh look at anyone.

At least that’s her version.

Rio’s best friend Jenou would agree that Rio is essentially sweet, generous, kind and certainly innocent. But she would not agree that Rio is incapable of becoming annoyed. No, Rio, in Jenou’s estimation, has a stubborn streak a mile wide, and with it just a very slight hint of a temper. That temper came out back at basic training on one of the early occasions when Geer annoyed Rio. Rio marched after him into the men’s shower room and demanded his apology. Since then Geer has been just a bit leery of the sweet-tempered milkmaid from northern California, and the incident – Richlin’s Raid – has become legendary in the platoon, and Geer has not forgiven Rio.

‘Since time began, it was men that went to war,’ Geer says. ‘And that –’ He points at Magraff, then lets his accusing finger drift toward Rio – ‘is why.’

The squad are twelve American soldiers with a total of about six months of combat experience, and all that experience – one hundred percent of it – belongs to just one person: Buck Sergeant Jedron Cole. The rest of them are as green as a spring leaf, with a grand total of thirteen weeks basic training each. They are in the zone between civilian and soldier: too heavily armed to be civilians, too ignorant to really be soldiers.

At the moment they are a miserable, cranky bunch, filled with a righteous hatred for the United States Army and the brass hat who scheduled this training exercise for Christmas Eve. They are cold, wet and unless Rio is mistaken, after five hours slogging around in freezing rain followed now by dense fog, quite lost.

‘Anyone got any rope?’ Geer asks. ‘It’s not for Magraff, it’s for me in case I want to hang myself.’

No rope is to be found. But by tying their webbing belts together they get a line to Magraff who is hauled, weeping and minus one boot, onto dryer ground.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Jack Stafford joins Rio squatting on a rock while Magraff cleans herself off using a tuft of moss dipped in chilly rainwater as a sponge.

There’s a tear in the fog and for a moment it is indeed beautiful, though in a gloomy, oppressive and disturbing way. At least it feels that way to Rio who comes from Sonoma County where it rains seldom and snows never, though she’d have to admit to some fog, especially closer to the Pacific coast.

Steel-gray clouds hang low overhead, a big gray comforter pulled over a rugged country of well-sunken rocks and strange mushrooms, tiny streams, seemingly random stone walls and not a tree to be seen. Puzzled sheep stare from the side of a low hill.

Rio has good eyesight and spots a fantastically antlered deer of some variety a couple hundred yards off. They must not be too far from the coast, she reasons, because a pair of seagulls are riding the breeze overhead, looking down at the squad to estimate its potential for providing food.

‘Beautiful,’ Rio answers belatedly. ‘Bit damp.’ Rio’s feet are wet and freezing. Her fingers are numb. She can no longer feel her nose and both ears ache. And she’s angry at several members of the squad: Magraff for being a helpless nincompoop, Tilo Suarez because he cannot manage to turn off his tedious leering Lothario act and yes, Jenou for draining her own canteen and then begging sips off Rio. She’s even irritated at Kerwin Cassel, who she generally likes, because he insists on chewing gum and blowing bubbles and this is meant to be a patrol, not a party. But mostly, as usual, she’s angry at the big hillbilly, Luther Geer.

Christmas Eve? This is Christmas Eve? This foot-soaking, sweaty-cold march to nowhere in full battle dress?

‘Damp? Wales?’ Jack teases.

‘I don’t know how you people stand it.’

‘Well, we don’t . . . quite. The south, London, my country, is a veritable desert compared with Wales.’

Jack is the sole Briton in this American army company. Perhaps the only one in the entire US army. He was evacuated from England during the Blitz and in an excess of affection and caution his parents had sent him to live with American relatives in Montana. Sadly, his parents had later been killed by a German bomb and Jack’s only way home was to enlist in the US Army as soon as he reached legal age.

Now he is back in Britain and wearing, if not an enemy uniform, not exactly the uniform expected of a boy from Croydon.

He is not terribly tall, just a couple of inches taller than Rio, with ginger hair and the kind of blue eyes that are often amused, just as often devilish, and occasionally, when caught off-guard, touchingly sincere.

‘All right, people, off your rear ends, we got some distance to cover,’ Sergeant Cole says. ‘That is if everyone can manage not to stumble into quicksand, or break their legs on a rock, or who knows what else.’

They form up, a ragged, muddy, uninspiring bunch. Since arriving from the States, they’d been part of a division that was shuffled from overstuffed camps to rustic bivouacs, marched from borrowed barns to village school houses, on and off the eternal deuce-and-a-half trucks, moving as if the US army has no real idea where to put them or what to do with them. Which, as Cole knows and Rio is starting to figure out, is essentially the truth. The British have been at this war for two years already, but it is all still new to the Americans and they are making it up as they go along.

‘Okay, I’m going over this again in the forlorn hope that it may penetrate this time. This little walk in the rain is a squad tactical exercise,’ Cole lectures. The word ‘squad’ and indeed all words containing the letter ‘s’ come out a bit mangled because Sergeant Cole has a nice, fresh new cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. ‘The three elements of the squad are Able, Baker and Charlie.’

Jillion Magraff raises her hand. Like she’s in school. Rio knows for a fact that Cole has told Magraff, oh, at least a dozen times not to do that, but rather to simply state her question, but Magraff is not what anyone, anywhere, in any army since Hannibal crossed the Alps, would call a soldier.

‘Magraff,’ Cole says, rolling his eyes only a little and suppressing a weary sigh.

‘Why are they called that?’

‘A, B and C,’ Rio stage whispers. And adds a silent, Isn’t that obvious?

Cole says, ‘Oh, it’s just a matter of preference, Magraff. Would you like to make up some other names? Freddie, Joe and Carmelita, maybe?’

Cole is not usually sarcastic. He is a patient man, a good sergeant. But on this training exercise in a sodden, oppressive landscape in the ass-end of nowhere, with a dozen green soldiers he has already had to pull one soldier (Magraff) out of the mud, stopped another one (Geer) from attempting to shoot down a Merlin, had to backtrack to find a lost rifle (Suarez) and – though he refuses to admit it – become fairly well lost in fog so wet and penetrating he’s simultaneously clammy and freezing.

And Magraff only has one boot.

Jesus wept, Cole thinks.

The usual American army squad consists of twelve soldiers. The usual squad consists of a sergeant, a corporal, and ten privates, all men. This particular squad consists of eight men and four women, because for the first time in American history, thanks to a meddling (to Cole’s mind) Supreme Court, women have been made subject to the draft and eligible for enlistment. And because Cole has annoyed his captain by failing to get some paperwork filed in a timely manner, Cole has been given not one, not two, not even three, but four of them. Four women. And, to top it off, an Englishman and some sort of Asian who no one trusts because he sure looks Japanese.

‘Able, Baker, Charlie,’ Cole repeats. ‘A, B, C. It’s in the tactical manual which I know you’ve all committed to memory.’

Eight of the soldiers adopt eight similarly blank expressions meant to convey nothing, but in fact sending the very clear message that no, of course they have not read the manual. The exceptions are Corporal Millican, Sergeant Cole, a serious young man with a prominent widow’s peak named Dain Sticklin (inevitably called Stick) and Rio Richlin.

Rio is young and looks younger. She’s tall, willowy but strong, with the square shoulders and ropy arms of a hard-working farm girl used to slinging bales of hay, milking cows and shoveling manure. She’s pretty but not a beauty, with dark hair, blue eyes and pale skin dotted with freckles. And she has in fact read the manual on small unit tactics. Rio has had serious doubts about her hasty decision to enlist along with her friend, Jenou, but she figures her best chance of coming through it all in one piece is to learn her job.

In fact, she’s decided to become a good soldier, and is already a better soldier (in her own inexpert opinion) than anyone in the squad aside from Stick. And Cole, of course.

Rio is quite aware that the Tommies – the British – have a low opinion of American soldiers and are frankly appalled at the very notion of women in uniform. One of the more common snide remarks is that, ‘The only problem with the Americans is that they’re overpaid, over-sexed and over here.’

The other goes, ‘The Yanks are confused – the men fight like women and the women look like men.’

Rio isn’t having it. Lord knows she had never planned to be a soldier, but by all that is holy, if she’s going to be a soldier she’s going to do it well. With her thirteen weeks of basic training, plus two previous training patrols since arriving in Britain, she’s pretty confident that she is ready for whatever the army throws at her.

‘Able is the command element,’ Cole goes on. ‘That’s whoever is on point, then a rifleman to watch his back and keep track of where we’re going, and then the squad leader. That’d be me. Baker is the fire element, that’s Stick with his BAR and two others. Whatever is left is the maneuver element, Charlie, in the rear with Corporal Millican there, my assistant squad leader.’

Corporal Millican, in Rio’s estimation – and in the estimation of everyone, including Millican himself – is one of those who will never make a good soldier. He’s a timid soul with a body to match, though he means well.

Cole says, ‘Now, me, I like to mix that up a bit and move a fourth man – or woman, I guess – up front to have that extra rifle behind point, but today we’re doing it the O-fficial army way. So, that’s how we will proceed to our OB-jective.’

He always pronounces it OB-jective, which invariably makes Rio smile. But not today. Not when she can actually hear the squish of water in her boots. Even the real thing, even combat, can’t be any worse than this, she tells herself.

‘Our OB-jective,’ Cole repeats with a weary sigh, ‘which is probably that way. Unless it isn’t. Everyone clear?’

They all nod or make murmuring noises.

They move out with Geer on point and Rio just behind him, glancing down from time to time at a compass and a small map. She’s been taught basic map-reading skills but nothing on the map matches anything on the ground, and in any event nothing but the ground directly beneath her feet is even visible, because the fog has rolled back in, and it’s a fog you could lose an elephant in. She’s looking at a map but the closest thing to a landmark is a mossy stone that looks as if someone planted it there shortly after Noah’s flood.

Then, through the fog a hazy light.

‘Sarge,’ Rio calls. ‘Is that it?’

Cole joins her and follows the direction of her extended arm.

‘Right there,’ Rio says. ‘If the fog lightens a . . . there! That’s a building. It could be a barn, that’s what we’re looking for isn’t it?’

‘Can’t say it looks much like a barn, more likely a roadhouse, but we’re going to pretend it’s what we’re looking for. So, Stick? You and Baker element – that’s you, Pang and Preeling – set up the BAR to provide covering fire, over by that pile of bricks. Charlie element, now is when you come into it: the maneuver element. You’re going to head around to the right and turn toward the OB-jective, covering the side and back. Baker and Charlie, you might want to avoid ending up directly in each other’s line of fire. Folks tend to resent it when they get accidentally shot by their own buddies.’

The two groups scurry away noisily, bunching up like frightened sheep, tripping over every mound and depression, and Cole thinks, God help me if I ever have to lead this bunch of fools and schoolgirls into a fight.

‘What do we do?’ Geer asks.

Rio sees fog swirling around the tall young man’s helmet and indulges a momentary fantasy of a great bird descending out of the fog, lifting him up by his rucksack and carrying him away.

‘Well, Geer,’ Cole says, spitting a piece of tobacco, ‘we’re gonna wait a few minutes until Baker and Charlie elements are in place . . . and then we are gonna stroll on into that roadhouse and buy a beer.’

‘You’re sure it’s a roadhouse?’ Rio asks.

‘You got eyes and you got ears and you got fingers. Any other senses, Richlin?’

Rio swallows hard, suddenly back in high school (it’s only been a few months) hearing the teacher announce a snap quiz. ‘Uh . . . taste? And . . . Um . . .’

‘What’s in the middle of your face, Richlin?’

Rio, thinking she may have a hanging booger, reaches for her nose and says, ‘Oh, right. Smell, Sarge.’

‘Now, aside from mold and sheep droppings and Private Geer here, what do you smell?’

Rio inhales, eyes closed. Then opens her eyes. ‘Your cigar. And meat.’

‘Give the girl a Kewpie doll. Yes, Richlin, roasted mutton, at a guess. If some day, God forbid, you two nitwits end up at the shooting end of this war, remember you can sometimes smell what you can’t see. I have not fought me any Krauts yet, but they say you can smell them by their tobacco. Stronger stuff than ours.’ He stands up. ‘Let’s go.’

Within twenty yards it is clear. It is indeed a roadhouse or, as Rio has heard them called, a ‘pub’. A carved wooden sign hangs from a wrought iron post above the door.

‘The . . .’ Rio starts to read, but if the word is English she certainly has never seen its like before. For one thing, there’s a hat on the ‘w’. ‘G-l-y-n-d-w-r Inn. Established 1402. Wow. That’s old.’

‘As long as they can give us directions,’ Cole says, ‘I don’t care if they’re from the Garden of Eden.’