Final Impact (16 page)

“Ah, the Negro tankers.”

“African American.”

Ronsard shrugged. “But of course.”

Four Sabers roared overhead, and Julia looked up. They were high, but she thought she could make out the bombs and rockets positioned under their wings. Ground attack craft.

“Do you think I could write up the story of what happened down at Donzenac?” she asked.

All she got was a sly, furtive grin.

“Well?”

“I know nothing about this Donzenac,” Ronsard answered. Then he finished the last of his roll and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee.

“Spare me, Marcel. Everyone knows about Donzenac. Or they
think
they know about it. There was a piece in the
Times,
but it was small, and they couldn’t get any details.”

As she spoke, she leaned over the cramped breakfast table, and he leaned back as much as was possible on the tiny balcony. He closed his eyes and seemed to enjoy taking his time, soaking up the rays.

“I am sure there would be no trouble in getting you to Scotland,” he said. “His Royal Highness has allowed one or two other reporters through before, and you are an embed, yes? So you have been cleared. What young Harry agrees to discuss with you once you are there, however, that would really be his business, would it not?”

Julia nodded, satisfied with half an answer. “Okay,” she said. “You get me into the regiment, and we can spend a bit of time together up there. But first I have this job with Prather. They’ve blocked out half a page for me back in New York. Can you work with that?”

Ronsard’s sleepy eyes opened slowly.

“But you do not have to meet this Prather until this afternoon, right?”

“Right,” Julia said, uncurling herself from her chair and walking back into the room.

12

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 1533 HOURS.
761ST TANK BATTALION, BRUGGE, BELGIUM.

Captain Prather was a believer.

Julia had met a lot of them, both here and uptime. There was a USAF major in Syria who wanted to air-drop billions of genetically engineered “attack” scorpions on Damascus, to paralyze the entire population before a coded gene sequence killed all the stingers two days later.

There was the CIA contractor who wanted to raise a private army of orphaned Arab children, to run as deep-penetration agents when they were old enough to send back into their parent societies. He thought that eleven or twelve years old would be just about right.

There was Manning Pope, of course, the scientist who’d marooned them all here. And there was an armored division colonel named MacMasters who came up with the idea of sewing jihadi insurgents into pigskins before burying them. Actually, he’d borrowed the idea from “Black Jack” Pershing, who’d done the same thing to Islamic guerrillas in the Philippines back in the 1900s.

She had no idea what happened to the scorpion guy, or the spook, or even to Pope. The colonel, however, had gone on to become the Republican senator for Kansas, where he’d made certain that his favorite tactic became a “sanctioned field punishment” available to U.S. commanders when dealing with Islamic extremists. Last Julia knew of him, he was still confounding the liberal press with his boyish enthusiasm for the never-ending war, back up in twenty-one.

Captain Chris Prather still had his boyish enthusiasms, too. She found him atop the reinforced turret of one of “his” Easy Eight Super Shermans, in a holding area about fifteen klicks back from the front—although the way Patton kept driving forward, “the front” wasn’t a stable concept. When she located him, after slopping through a muddy parking lot full of tanks, jeeps, and deuce-and-a-halves, he was bent over with his head buried inside the turret, talking to the crew. This gave her a wide-screen view of his butt.

“Hey,” she called out. “Does that big ass up yonder belong to a Captain Prather?”

Two African American tankers, members of the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, were standing by the treads. They favored her with flashing white smiles.

“Well picked, madam,” the taller one said with an incongruously polished Bostonian accent. “You clearly know your asses.”

He stepped forward and extended his hand. She returned the firm grip as Prather extracted himself from the turret. Snatching up an old rag, he called down to somebody inside the tank. “Take five, Robinson. We got company.”

Prather was a good-looking white boy with a southern accent. Kentucky, perhaps. He stood about five-eight with black hair and hazel eyes. He had broad shoulders and looked like he punched in around 180 pounds. He was a ’temp but seemed perfectly at ease surrounded by his black comrades. Not for the first time Julia had to remind herself to stop thinking of the ’temps as a nation of rednecked buttheads. You’d have thought she might have learned that from Dan, if nothing else.

“Miss Duffy, I guess?” Prather used the rag to wipe grease from his powerful hands.

“
Ms.
Duffy,” she replied, “but Julia or Jules will do.”

Prather jumped down from the body of the tank, landing softly but still splashing up a little mud. He nodded to the two other men. “You’ve met Lieutenant Burnett and Sergeant Turley.”

The noncom smiled shyly and dipped his head. “Ma’am,” he said softly.

“Hey, Sergeant.” Julia nodded toward the tank. “So what’s up with my ride?”

Prather looked a little surprised. “Oh, nothing. We’re just fixin’ a few things. I love to fix things. And anyway, this ain’t your ride—that’s over by Dog Company. But this baby’s a beauty anyway, don’t you think?”

“Guess so,” she answered.

Prather gestured theatrically. “Aw, come on. This is a work of art,
Miz
Duffy.” He turned back to his colleagues. “You guys gonna help Jackie with that wet storage sealant? I gotta take Ms. Duffy over to battalion. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

“Jackie? Jackie
Robinson
?” she wondered aloud as they headed away at a brisk pace. “The ballplayer?”

“Will be, one day soon,” Prather confirmed. “They say he’s gonna play the majors. One of the first black guys ever. For now, though, he’s working for me. He’s a good guy, too.”

A cold front was coming in from the Atlantic, ruining the perfect weather. The first cool gusts had whistled through the streets of Calais as Julia had said good-bye to Ronsard. She’d hopped a Huey that took her up to the staging area just outside Brugge, in Belgium, and it had seemed like they were running just ahead of the weather all the way up. Now a towering wall of dark gray clouds filled the sky to the west, behind them, while in front the sun still shone brightly down on the Belgian countryside. Along the way she had noticed that some villages and farms had been destroyed, but not others, reminding her of flying over Oklahoma twister country.

Fifteen minutes before reaching the armored depot, they passed over a five-kilometer-wide tract of dead earth littered with the burned-out hulks of Shermans and Tigers. Almost every building in the area had been destroyed, except for one small farmhouse, which remained untouched.

The fortunes of war.

Julia was glad for her thermopliable combat jacket: there was a good chance the cold weather would intensify over the next few days.
Bring on global warming,
she thought. Prather talked excitedly as they walked along the lines of tanks.

“It was a hell of a fight after you guys turned up,” he said. “There was a strong push in the army for scrapping the Sherman and going straight to the Pershing, which would have been a match for the krauts. But in the end, momentum won the argument.”

“Momentum?”

“Thirty thousand Sherman chassis already built by ’forty-three. All those plants already tooled up, Allied armies depending on them. It made more sense to go with what we had.”

Julia stepped around a large pool of oily mud. “That was your argument, then.”

Prather smiled. “Yeah, well, mine and others’. Nobody really listens to me, though. I’m just an engineer. Anyway, the M-Four, your classic Sherman, she had a few problems. Even I have to admit that. A low-velocity seventy-five-millimeter popgun, wafer-thin armor, and a gasoline engine that just loved bursting into flames. In the long run I would have recommended discontinuing some of the Sherman production and switching over to the M-Twenty-nine Pershing heavies, with a ninety-millimeter high-velocity main gun. And that’s just what’s happening with some outfits. But there are quite a few mods that can be put in place on the Shermans, since we’ve been churning them out so fast.”

Julia wondered where he’d picked up the term
mod.
That was uptime gaming slang, as best she knew. But Prather was just a kid really—in a way he was a gamer, yet he was playing for life and death. She’d already decided she liked him.

He pulled up in front of a tank with a crude painting on the turret of a big-busted woman. She took a few still shots with her Sonycam.

“Check it out,” he enthused. “We got some slat armor. Simple, you know, but it really messes up the krauts’ RPG shots. We redesigned the turret to accommodate a high-velocity hundred-and-five-millimeter gun, and a lotta frame reinforcement went into that, but it means they can go toe-to-toe with old Fritz, although a lot of the time, you know, the Germans just use their tanks as pillboxes. They’re still a lot slower than the Easy Eights, even with all the changes we made, and we tend to get around in back of them, messing with the infantry, while the choppers hammer them with rocket fire.”

“So you do a lot of combined ops now, with airborne?”

“Been training for it from the day the first Cobras rolled off the line. Earlier, in fact, but that was just sandbox and theory.”

A chill wind blew wet leaves onto her legs as she studied the tank. She lined Prather up in the pop-out display window of the video recorder.

“What about armor? What happens if a shell gets through the cage? Those slats will stop shoulder-fired rockets—I saw that a lot in the Middle East—but I’m guessing they don’t stand up real well to an eighty-eight-millimeter round or worse.” She couldn’t help wondering what it’d be like, trapped in a big iron coffin with a shell bouncing around at the speed of sound, chopping everyone up into loose meat.

Prather patted the glacis plate at the front. “Whole hull’s been revamped with appliqué armor,” he said proudly. “There’s a more sharply angled forward slope, side skirts to defend against RPGs, and some composite shielding beneath that and at the rear—which was a real problem area. We switched over to a diesel engine, too. Much safer. Doesn’t brew up the same way.”

“I guess,” Julia conceded as they started walking again.

They reached the end of a long street formed by the row of dormant tanks, and Prather took them around to the left. A small clutch of tents lay ahead. Battalion headquarters. Prather narrowed his eyes and smiled gently.

“You don’t seem to be reassured, Ms. Duffy. What’s the matter? You’ve seen a lot more combat than me, after all. Doesn’t seem as if a ride in a tank would bother you at all.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but usually I go out with the infantry. I’ve never been in an armored battle before. Not a fair one, anyway. They just didn’t happen where I came from.”

Prather nodded. “Oh well, if you don’t want to go…”

“No—no, it’ll be cool. Can’t be a wuss, after all. So when do we head out?”

“Tonight. Twenty-two hundred hours.”

She’d been expecting a silver helmet and six-shooters, but Patton was dressed for the front. His fatigues were filthy, and he’d managed to acquire a prominent bloodstain on one trouser leg. Not his, though, apparently.

He moved around on the makeshift stage like a prizefighter in the opening seconds of a long bout. Cocky, full of energy, ready for a brawl. He was taller than she’d imagined, and much more tightly wrapped. He seemed almost like a nineteenth-century figure to Julia. His voice, higher than George C. Scott’s and not nearly as gruff, still carried out over the hundreds of men gathered before him. A sea of black faces, with a solitary moon-white exception here and there. Their eyes all stayed fixed on the general.

“Men, you’re the first Negro tankers ever to fight in the American army,” he said, his voice booming out. “I would never have asked for you if I didn’t think you were good. I will have nothing but the best in my army. I don’t care what color you are, as long as you go up there and kill those kraut sons-a-bitches.

“Everyone has their eyes on you, and they’re expecting great things from you. Most of all, your people are looking to you—and by that I mean the American people, people of all colors. Don’t let them down and damn you, don’t let me down!”

“We won’t, General!” somebody called out.

“That’s the goddamn spirit!” Patton cried back. “Give ’em hell, boys!”

Julia was sure she saw the walls of the giant tent billow out as the assembly roared back. All that muscle mass and testosterone squeezed into a confined space. The heady brew of confidence, tribal bonding, and barely contained bloodlust. She might as well have been on the vehicle deck of the
Kandahar
again. No matter how much you leavened the mix with female personnel, there was something inherently masculine about the business of war. As fucked up and wasteful and pathetic as it was, men secretly loved it. And so did she.

As Patton left the stage to the cheers of the 761st, Prather steered her over in his direction. She was well past her giggling-girl phase, and, having interviewed so many of the top players for the
Times
these last two years, she wasn’t at all intimidated by the general. But she wanted to grab a quick interview. He was a sure bet to give her a couple of profanely colorful quotes for the feature she was working up.

Patton seemed to notice her as he was descending the stairs, brushing off the hand of his intelligence chief, a Colonel Black—reminding her of Dan again. He flashed a smile, sizing her up like a dangerous mount, and extended a gloved hand. He had no trouble speaking over the noise of the crowd.

“I’ve read your work, Duffy. I like it,” he growled. “You get close to the fighting man and you tell his story like it is. Prather says you want to ride out with my boys tonight.”

“If you’re okay with that, sir.”

“Don’t
sir
me, girlie. I know you don’t mean it. And you’re a civilian, despite your uniform, which you’ll have to get scrubbed if you’re going to ‘embed’ with my army. Can’t have any sloppiness. Understand?”

“Uh-huh,” she smirked. “I’ll be sure to touch up my lip gloss when I’m doing my camouflage paint.”

“Excellent!” Patton cried. “Now you come with me, young lady, and I’ll make sure Colonel Black here briefs you in on tonight’s operation.”

“You
are
cleared, aren’t you?” Black asked anxiously.

Julia passed over her papers. Black wasn’t equipped with a flexipad. Indeed, she’d hardly met anyone in France who was. Even Patton seemed to do without one.

“I’m clear to Top Secret Absolute,” she said. “Renewed a month ago.”

Patton’s intelligence chief studied the paper as they walked through the crush of men, most of whom wanted to press forward and shake the general’s hand or pat him on the back. And Julia could see that that old dog was loving it. Black impatiently thrust the clearance forms back at her as they pushed out of the tent and into a starlit night.

Faint flickers of light and a rumble beyond the edge of the world spoke of an engagement somewhere, but nobody paid much attention. The fighting had been constant since the landings.

“Captain Prather said I’d be riding with D Company, General,” Julia said. “Don’t you think I should be heading over there soon?”

“No,” he said somewhat abruptly. “You’ll come out with us.” When she started to protest he cut in, “No! I don’t want to hear a word of it, madam! You won’t see anything buttoned up in an armored troop carrier and you’ll probably get yourself killed. That’s your ass, not mine, of course, but damn it, I want the story of this battle to be told, and I want it told properly.”