Final Impact (15 page)

She hadn’t been able to find her old minder, Sergeant Murphy, who’d apparently come through without any major injuries and was due some serious leave time. It might have been nice, she thought, to have split a few brews with Murph and Gadsden, but then she remembered someone had told her that Gadsden had caught an RPG round in the chest at Guines. No more brews for him, and no more barmaid sandwiches back in London.

She stretched, shook her head to clear the cobwebs, and looked around. The driver had dropped her in a small square on the outskirts of Calais. She thought she recalled it from the street fighting early in May. The war ran 24/7, so even at this hour the place was alive with jeeps and trucks, with hundreds of soldiers in different uniforms: American, British, and Free French mostly. Or maybe Canadians. Quebecois. They had a couple of battalions nearby.

A good number of civilians were also about, shopkeepers for the most part, doing business from wooden carts and stalls even if their stores had been destroyed. Trading by candlelight in windowless, pockmarked shop-fronts if they were comparatively lucky. The night sky was clear, but lit by the persistent flickering of artillery barrages, bombing raids, and a massive tank battle to the east. The rumble was constant, occasionally flaring into something even deeper and more profound, sounding like a quake down in the very core of the world.

She was eager to get back to work, but she also realized that she was starving. Her last energy bars were gone, shared with the Pole on the long, uncomfortable drive back. She hadn’t eaten a hot meal in days, and her eyes were watery with lack of sleep. A sit-down meal, some wine, a cup of coffee? She’d sell her fucking soul for less.

Julia hauled out her flexipad and checked for a Fleetnet link. Two small green lights in the rubberized casing told her she had power, and even a local connection. Her eyes flicked up, but she was too tired to actually gaze skyward for a drone. She’d never spot it, anyway.

The square was surprisingly festive for a place that had so recently hosted open combat. The tinkling of pianos came at her from two different directions. Somebody else was doing something cruel to an accordion, and rather than the harsh, hoarse bark of orders, or the animal screams of mortal combat, she could actually hear laughter and conversation. It was almost normal. A shifting breeze brought with it the smell of hot mulled wine and some sort of meat roasted with garlic and rosemary. Saliva filled her mouth, and her stomach growled as she smelled bread baking, too.

All right! I can take a fuckin’ hint.

It was such a mild night she decided to take advantage of the lull, track down some food, eat well, and see if a bed might be had somewhere in town. Or a couch. Or a pile of straw. A hundred meters or so from where she stood, a relatively well-lit stone cottage was rocking and rolling, with all sorts of officers coming and going. Some clearly were rear-echelon motherfuckers, and others were just as obviously back from the fight of their lives. Two knots of men and a few local women were gathered around a couple of steaming cauldrons sitting atop open fires on the flagstones in front of the building. That would be the mulled wine, if her sense of smell was right.

So Julia picked up her pack, shouldered her carbine, and wandered over.

The women were French girls, probably not in their twenties yet. She wondered idly whether they’d had German boyfriends a few weeks ago, but dismissed the thought as uncharitable. The collaborators would have all been shaved bald and run out of town by now. A fucking travesty in her opinion. These mademoiselles were staying close to the Americans they’d picked up. A couple of Rangers by the look of them. A smart move.

They stopped giggling abruptly as she approached, huddling in closer to their protectors.

“Vingt-et-un,”
one said in a stage whisper. Twenty-one.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Julia muttered.

She pushed her way through. The conversation around her didn’t stop, but she was aware that it had trailed off noticeably. Admittedly, she looked like shit. She’d managed a change of clothes since the air assault on the fourth, but that had been two weeks ago, and she was filthy again. Her body armor, helmet rig, and electronic gear also gave her away.

There were no female combatants in the European theater. That was strictly an AF gig out in the Pacific, with Kolhammer’s battle group.

“Une coupe, s’il vous plaît,”
she said to the wine seller.

He picked up a copper jug on the end of a long wooden handle, dipped it into the steaming brew, and swirled it around. A giant cinnamon stick bobbed to the surface as he withdrew the jug and poured her a generous serving. He handed over the drink, and as she was about to pay a Frenchman in a British uniform put his hand on Julia’s arm and shook his head. He spoke in accented but still perfectly understandable English. “Please, allow me.”

He gave the man a couple of coins.

“There you are, mademoiselle. However, you should be careful,” he said. “Gaston, here, he makes a heady brew. I doubt an American woman would be able to stand up after drinking even half a cup of it.”

The small crowd burst into laughter, not all of it good-natured.

Julia took the drink and said nothing, cocking an eyebrow at the French officer, a captain, before draining the cup in one long swallow. The young women gasped, and one of the Rangers hooted with laughter.

“Ha! Give ’em hell, lady!”

She handed the empty mug back to Gaston and smiled, waiting for the hubbub to die down before nodding and smiling politely to the Frenchman.
“La réalité et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n’est-ce pas?”
Reality and you don’t get on, do they?

This time the laughter came as a roar, and she felt a meaty hand slap her on the shoulder as she made her way toward the front door of the makeshift bistro. She knew, however, that on an empty stomach the wine would go right to her head if she didn’t get something solid inside her in the next few minutes.

As she stepped into the street she heard her name mentioned in an American accent, but ignored it. It wasn’t like someone was calling after her.

But the French captain suddenly appeared beside her again. “Please,” he said. “Let me buy you dinner. That was a stupid jest, and you showed me up for a fool. I should not have tried to embarrass you. It was—”

“Okay,” Julia said in French that was as good as his English. “Look, whatever. I’m tired and hungry, and I’m only carrying greenbacks. I’d probably end up paying fifty bucks for some fucking prewar pickled escargot. So yes, Captain…?”

“Ronsard,” he answered.

“Okay, Captain Ronsard, you may buy me dinner. Or rather you may order, and I will pay, and that way there shall be no misunderstanding about copping an easy fuck from the future.”

“But of course!” Ronsard protested, in English again. “The very idea of it!”

“Yeah,” Julia replied.
“Quoi que.”

“Whatever?”

“No. What
ever.
Get the inflection right,
mon capitaine.
”

She woke up next to him in a narrow bed, in the loft of a two-story cottage a few minutes’ walk from the square. Light was streaming in through the shattered windows, and for a moment she had the unsettling experience of not knowing where she was, or
when
she was.

She’d spent a year studying in France as a postgrad, and stayed on for two more freelancing for a couple of magazines in Paris. The first Intifada hadn’t been enough to drive her away. Indeed, that simply meant more work, as she began to file copy for a couple of the metro dailies and the blog portals back stateside. But after the bomb went off in Marseilles, Julia decided enough was enough. She’d joined thousands of other expatriates streaming out of Continental Europe, which was looking increasingly medieval with each new atrocity in the war.

She’d missed it, though, for a long time thereafter. She’d dated a young editor at
Vogue
for a while, and his family owned a cottage in the Pas de Calais, near Oignies, at the other end of the province. Waking next to Ronsard, she’d experienced a state of free fall, dropping through the years and thinking she had fallen back into the life she’d lived in her midtwenties. It was a delicious sensation, in a way, like half waking from a dream of immense wealth, but it dissolved as she blinked away the sleep and saw the bullet holes and scorch marks in the ceiling.

Her boyfriend had been young and thin and blond. A nonthreatening, floppy-haired romantic. Ronsard was shorter, more powerfully built, and coarsened—most likely by a much harder life. He’d been a better fuck, though. No question of that.

He’d screwed her insensible and she’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep from which she had not woken, not even once. He was only now stirring beside her. She regarded him dispassionately. However ardent their lovemaking had been—and it was pretty fucking ardent—she awoke as always these days, disconnected and keen to be elsewhere. It had been that way with every man since Dan. A small pang penetrated the scar tissue she’d built up around his memory and, to her own surprise, tears began to well.

She slipped out of bed, naked, and hurriedly pulled on her pants and filthy gray T-shirt. Ronsard yawned and rolled over.

“Julia? Would you like to make some coffee?” he mumbled. “I have a sachet somewhere.”

“De quoi est mort votre dernière esclave?”
she asked as lightly as she could manage. What did your last slave die of?

Mercifully he rolled over and went back to sleep. She hurried across to the ancient narrow spiral staircase that led to the floor below. More tears came as she descended, and she slapped a hand across her mouth to smother any sounds that might escape. She could hear other people moving around the house, and wondered whether Ronsard’s colleagues were billeted here. They hadn’t discussed it last night in the hot drunken rush to be free of their clothes. She almost ran into the tiny bathroom at the end of the second-floor hallway. It was small and disgracefully dirty in the French fashion, but there was a latch on the back of the door that she fumbled into place just before a torrent of silent moans broke over her like a wave.

She slumped to the floor, arms wrapped around herself, her whole body shuddering with spasms of violent grief to which she could give no voice. The effort of restraining herself, of staying silent while this emotional hurricane blew through her, felt like a crushing weight on her chest. But she refused to lose that last vestige of her control. She
had
to have something to hold on to, after losing everything else because of her own stupidity: her husband, their baby, a far, far better life than the one she was currently living.

And so she curled into a tight fetal ball on the cramped floor of the bathroom, raking furrows in her own flesh and refusing to utter even the smallest squeak in protest over the desolation she could feel spreading inside her.

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 1014 HOURS.
CALAIS.

“Are you certain you cannot stop in Calais for a while?”

Ronsard was preparing a toasted baguette as he spoke, spreading the rich yellow butter with such loving care that Julia suspected he hadn’t eaten real food in a long time, at least not until the previous evening’s meal. With knobs of melting butter still floating on the warm bread roll, he scooped strawberry jam out of a small stoneware pot and plopped a generous dollop at one end before closing his eyes and slowly biting into it.

When she didn’t answer he opened his eyes as if from a very happy dream. “Not even a
little
while?”

Julia smiled and shook her head. “I’ll get my ass kicked if I don’t get up to the front and file some copy soon. I got held up by the Turkey Shoot, and my editor’s convinced Patton’s gonna be in Berlin by the end of the week.”

Ronsard curled his lips down in a very Gallic gesture. “That long, eh? And here it is only Wednesday.”

They sat on the small balcony of Ronsard’s room, overlooking a park that was pockmarked with craters from multiple mortar rounds. All the trees had been stripped of their leaves, but a few birds still sang on the bare branches. It was a fine morning, and promised to be a glorious day.

The Frenchman hadn’t asked her anything that indicated that he was aware of her little meltdown, but she was certain he knew. Still, people often went to pieces around combat zones, and each dealt with it in his or her own way. Julia didn’t give off a needy vibe—at least she
hoped
she didn’t—and Ronsard seemed happy to respect her privacy. Instead of pawing her and fussing about when she’d returned to the bedroom, he had simply busied himself with rustling up a marvelous breakfast. Fresh oranges, boiled eggs, the baguettes, butter and jam. And a pot of freshly ground coffee from fuck-knew-where. It was exactly what she needed.

“Thank you, Marcel. You’ve been a dream. But we both have work to do. Or I
assume
you have work to do. The Brits don’t normally hand out those sandy berets to slackers.”

She nodded in the direction of the light tan beret with a winged dagger badge, hanging from a bedknob behind him. The Special Air Service was recognized as an elite force, but it hadn’t yet become shrouded in myth and mystery, as was the case in her day.

Ronsard didn’t bother looking back over his shoulder. He just spooned more jam onto his baguette.

“I have another few days before I have to get back to England,” he said. “So I thought it might be nice to spend it with a beautiful woman.”

“You know, Marcel, I think you’d be just as happy spending it with your baguette. Here, now, don’t Bogart the fucking jam.”

He passed the small pot over with a grin. “It is good to have you making fun of me, again. You have your—what is the word—
mojo
back.”

“Maybe if I were an Austin Powers fembot, but thanks. I’m feeling better.”

“Would you stay if I could get you back to Scotland? To do a story on the regiment?”

“On Harry’s Own?” she said, suddenly interested. “I might be. I’m supposed to link up with a Captain Prather this afternoon. He’s going to give me a ride up to the front on a Super Sherman. He helped design them, you know. I was going to cover the Seven Sixty-first.”