Sentimental Journey (8 page)

“Women are vital to the Third Reich. They are its backbone. We have women working in every facet of our government. There are women who are respected and given many opportunities that your government keeps strictly for men. It is a man’s world only in the
United States
.”

“Do you honestly believe if your
Führer
had a daughter that he would care more about her than about, say . . .
Poland
?”

“You equate the importance of your father’s research with our occupation of
Poland
?
Poland
will be much stronger under German Occupation.

“Tell us what your father is working on and then you may choose to go home or to work in a high position of the Third Reich. We can offer you the opportunity to be part of the future. Unlike in the
United States
, you will be important in
Germany
.”

“No, thank you. I know nothing about what my father is doing. I’ve not been home for over two years. “

There was a long moment of silence.

She sat there, unmoving.

“My advice is that you should think about this. If you choose to cooperate, you will have the chance to be on the winning side of this war.

“I have nothing to tell you. I don’t know anything about my father’s work. You can keep me locked up here until your
Führer
has gray hair.” She stood up. “Now you are wasting my time and your own.”

“Take Miss Kincaid back to her room,
Leutnant
. Let her contemplate which is the bigger waste of time: talking to me or being locked in that room.”

Adolf crossed the room and took her arm, but Kitty didn’t move because she had one more thing to say. “You forget something important, Herr Von Heidelmann. I am a
U.S.
citizen. We are not in your war.”

“And you forget that you are not safely tucked away in your home in the
U.S.
Your country has been shipping aid, aircraft, food, and arms to
Britain
, and has been for months. Your president meets regularly with
Britain
’s Churchill. Our U-boats are already in place to patrol your Atlantic coast in the same way we patrol and blockade the Channel. It is only a small matter of time.

“We
will
take
Great Britain
, Miss Kincaid, and there will be nothing between the
United States
and
Germany
except the
Atlantic Ocean
. A little water will not protect you. Before long the Luftwaffe will be bombing the
U.S.
every day in the same way we are bombing
England
. Imagine
New York
,
Washington
, D.C.,
Atlanta
,
Chicago
, and before long, your hometown in
California
, all under the control of the Third Reich. Technically, you are correct. Your country is not in the war. But trust me, it will be.”

“JEEPERS CREEPERS”

SIXTEEN THOUSAND FEET OVER THE DROP
ZONE
:

THE
DRAA
VALLEY
,
MOROCCO
,
NORTH AFRICA

The only thing J.R. hated about his choice of career was jumping out of a goddamn airplane. It wasn’t just that he was afraid. He was smart enough to know fear was a healthy thing in a soldier. It was fear that kept men alive.

He’d had a discussion with his granddad about it one time. When you weren’t scared, well, that was when bad things happened. A sniper’s bullet in a vital organ. A land mine under your boot. A mortar shell with your name on it.

Being scared sharpened your senses. You paid attention. You listened. You looked. Your sense of self-preservation was at its highest point.

Fear was an emotion, and emotions were just things you felt in your gut. If you let an emotion get into your head or, worse yet, into your heart, then you were a dead man.

So it wasn’t the fear that made him hate this part of his job. For all he knew, his phobia could have dated back to jump training in the wilds of
Georgia
, a surefire hell he didn’t want to relive again in this lifetime or any other.

During jumps they had landed in watermelon fields, in pine trees, and at night, between electrical and telephone poles, where the wires squeezed the shroud lines together and pushed the air from the canopy, something that sent you to the ground so fast and so blasted hard that anything in your jumpsuit pockets tore right though the bottom seams. On one hard, bone-ringing landing, J.R. had actually lost a filling from his back molar.

Another time they’d landed in a huge and muddy hog farm, where one five-hundred-pounder took offense when a lieutenant from
Mississippi
who never wore socks landed on the animal’s hairy back. The hog rolled over and broke the lieutenant’s leg, sending him to the local hospital where, while he recovered, he could contemplate the joy of going through jump-training hell all over again, after his leg healed.

From then on, whenever someone was busted up on a landing, the men called it “boarfooting.”

At night in the barracks, the men all made bets on whether the Army scouted out the worst possible places for them to land, then made those spots a required jump target.

One night before a graded jump, the instructor—a grizzled World War I sergeant and expert paratrooper plucked from the 501st
 
Parachute Battalion, who according to rumor had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen—caught J.R. leaning on a wall, talking and joking with some buddies when they were all supposed to be packing their chutes.

Every single one of them was an officer, some of them fresh out of the Point, like J.R. But the fact remained that every one of them outranked a sergeant. However, jump training was run by sergeants and Sergeant Wilford Rufus Huxley had the final word.

He was it.

He was god.

He was the be-all and end-all.

So J.R., a second lieu at the time, learned a hard lesson that night, when it was raining like a sonofabitch. With a nine-and-a-half-pound Garand caliber .30 MI rifle in his hands, his chest and back strapped heavily with ammo magazines, and packing full gear, J.R. ran double-time around the parachute packing shed singing:

“Sergeant Huxley is on the ball,

He caught me leaning against the wall.”

Every so often Huxley would stick his shiny bald head out of the shed and yell, “I can’t hear you, Cassidy!”

J.R. was screaming at the top of his lungs.

When it was over, he was hoarse for days, and no one else spoke a word to each other outside the barracks for a full week. From that day forward J.R. was the first one done packing his chute, then he would stand there, silent as a rock.

The disturbing thing about jumping was: It wasn’t normal human behavior to throw yourself out of a plane. Hell . . . you stood there, the door off the plane, being blasted by engine and wind noise and flying so high the air could never be anything but so icy cold you swore your balls were turning blue. The wind force was so strong it flattened your skin against your face bones until you looked like an old cow skull someone dug up in the desert.

You were stuck there, standing at that open plane door, chute buckled around your chest and waist and strapped around your precious nuts, with land thousands of feet below you and nothing between the two of you but clouds and air and enemy fire if they saw you.

No, this was not his favorite outdoor sport.

On his last assignment, he could still remember jumping out into the air and feeling like one of those metal ducks they had in the shooting galleries, one with a huge white silk canopy over his head that said, “Look! I’m dumber than dirt. I’m jumping out of a plane. Shoot here.”

And now he was back here once again, some sixteen thousand feet in the air, standing at the door of a USAAC C-33 transport, engine noise wailing back at him from its twin Pratt-Whitney Hornets, ready to jump out and drop to the earth below with his expertly self-packed, U.S. Army—issue parachute that better damn-well open.

He looked down at the targeted drop zone and felt his eyes tear from the wind. To cheer up, he told himself there would be no hog farms in
North Africa
.

The copilot leaned out and shouted, “Two minutes, sir!”

J.R. pulled down his goggles, then gripped the metal casing of the door opening. At least the flight was smooth. When there was turbulence, it was real hell. He looked down again at the approaching drop zone. To the north were the
Atlas Mountains
. Below him was nothing but miles and miles of rippling mounds he figured was sand.

The drop zone was the south side of the mountains, near nothing. He was to meet an operative who would take him the back way into the mountains, and from there, he was to infiltrate the Kasbah so he could play good guy and save Kincaid’s dishy daughter—the one who didn’t have the sense to go home.

He looked up again, then shifted his gaze to the red and green jump lights.

Nothing.

He waited.

A good four minutes had passed by.

The copilot stuck his head out and was frowning at him with a “you’re still here” expression. He turned back and hit a few switches. His head poked back out and he cupped a hand around his mouth and hollered, “The lights are out, Captain! Jump!” He gave him the thumbs-up sign.

J.R. turned back. His right foot was already over the threshold, and he slid his hands outside and put his palms against the outside of the plane.

He looked down, then took one deep breath. “Ah, what the hell . . . ”

He threw himself out of the plane.

A second later he was sailing into the air, arms crossed over his chest, and he began to count. “One one thousand . . . ”
Somebody’s got to come up with a better way of getting from a plane to earth.

“Two one thousand.”
Soon . . . real soon.

“Three one thousand.”
Hail Mary, Mother of God . . .

“Four one thousand.”
Open, open, open . . .