Ghosts of War (6 page)

H
e was in hell. He was sure it was hell.

Up there, hanging out of the cockpit of his plane, Gabriel had a view that stretched for miles and miles, right across the undulating landscape, from the rolling hills in the east to the lush farmland in the west. If he craned his neck, ignored the spiraling pillars of black smoke, the remorseless chatter and bark of gunfire from below, he could almost believe he was flying away toward those far-off hills, where the war was a distant concern and the landscape hadn't yet been marred by blood and bullets.

It should have been idyllic, peaceful. But instead, the ground far beneath him roiled with horror.

Muddy trenches had been carved methodically across fields that had once been green, but were now reduced to nothing but brown slurry, churned over and over by mortar fire and peppered with the remains of the dead. People buzzed around in these tunnels like ants navigating their way through a confusing maze, or neurons darting to and fro inside the workings of some ancient, arcane mind.

He wondered if they were, in fact, part of some enormous hive, if there wasn't some greater purpose at play. If that were true, none of those men were fully aware of it or knew exactly what part in it they were serving. All they did was follow orders, rushing headlong toward their deaths, because that was all they
could
do. That was all they knew, the only thing that gave them any purpose. The war had eclipsed everything, like an ink stain on a sheet of blotting paper. It had absorbed these men, turned them into drones for the hive, swallowed their identities and memories and reasons for being, and replaced them with orders and a desire to kill.

Gabriel knew that wasn't entirely true. Nor was it fair. Those men—his friends and comrades—had given their lives for a cause they believed in, to protect their loved ones, their freedom, and their country. That was entirely admirable, and it was brave.

Yet Gabriel had learned to hate the war, to hate everything it represented. The war had turned him into a murderer, and while he knew that if he survived this horror, he would return to his country to be heralded a hero, he would never
feel
like a hero. He would only ever feel like a killer, a man who had lost his way. He wondered if he would ever wake up from the numbness that had settled over him. He doubted it.

He'd never intended to be here, in an aircraft high above a killing field. He'd never wanted to see the things he'd seen. Those sights had changed him irreversibly, altered his fundamental view of the world. There was no going back. Even when it was over, for him, the war would last forever.

He looked down upon the battlefield.

Black smoke curled from the blazing wreckage of buildings and vehicles, and lights flashed orange and white as hulking weapons punched explosive round after explosive round toward the enemy encampments. Mud sprayed in massive plumes where the mortar rounds struck the earth, some of them sucking up and spitting out people, too, like miniature tornadoes, striking in a flash, wreaking devastation, and then disappearing again, only to be replaced moments later by another, and then another, and then another.

It was constant, relentless. It was a vast, mindless engine of death, with people as its fuel supply.

From up there, high above the battlefield, Gabriel couldn't tell the difference between the two sides in this terrible game of death, couldn't discern which side was which, so similar were the encampments, the weapons, the uniforms, the tactics.

That was the great irony of all this, he thought. If only they could see themselves from up here, they'd realize how ridiculous it all was, that in truth they were all the same, on the same side. But he knew they were blinded by rage and patriotism, and the killing would simply continue until there was no one left to die.

Gabriel snapped suddenly alert at the
rat-a-tat
of a machine gun and banked sharply to the left, narrowly missing a hail of bullets that had been intended to shred his right wing. He dipped and arced in a loop, spiraling around to face his attacker.

The other plane had come out of nowhere, zipping out from behind the cloud cover as Gabriel had approached. It was a German biplane, armed to the teeth with machine gun emplacements and hungry to bring him down.

Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.

Gabriel realized there were two people in the enemy aircraft: a gunman in the rear seat was taking potshots at him while the pilot tried to maneuver them closer for the kill. He was massively outgunned.

Gabriel went into a sharp dive, pushing the flight controls forward as far as they would go, sending the plane hurtling toward the muddy ground below. The propellers groaned and whined as he held his course until, at the last minute, he wrenched back on the controls, pulling the nose up sharply and bringing the plane back into a steady climb.

He could see the enemy aircraft above him now, like a silvery boat hanging in the sky, its belly exposed beneath the water. He raced toward it, his thumbs depressing the buttons that set loose a hail of bullets from the nose-mounted weapons on his own plane.

There was a din of rending metal as the spray of bullets hit home, peppering the fuselage of the German plane with a series of ragged pockmarks. The pilot bucked wildly in his seat but managed to maintain his course.

Seconds later, Gabriel was forced to slew to the left to avoid colliding with the biplane, and he banked around trying desperately to gain height. The German gunman let loose with another shower of bullets, his machine gun roaring, its hot mouth spitting death. This time the gunner's aim was true and the shots caught Gabriel's plane along its left flank, opening a large rent in the thin metal fuselage.

Gabriel breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he realized his fuel tank was still intact and the bullets had narrowly missed his legs, puncturing the area around the cockpit. He could barely hear himself think over the sound of the rushing air and the whine of the rending metal where the side of the plane had been compromised.

He turned the plane in a wide circle, coming about above and behind the German aircraft. He depressed the triggers again, squeezing out another storm of bullets. The enemy biplane swung wildly from side to side, trying to avoid being hit.

For a few moments the two planes danced above the battlefield, ducking and weaving, slewing and banking, diving and looping. All the while, Gabriel maintained his target, mirroring the other pilot's maneuvers, keeping the biplane locked in his sights.

He fired again, roaring in rage and success as he saw the gunner jerk and go suddenly limp. Blood sprayed in a wide arc as the bullets ripped through the man's chest and throat.

Gabriel pressed on with the attack, trying to capitalize on the pilot's fear and disorientation. He swooped down, hovering just above the other plane. He could see the lolling head of the dead gunner as the biplane shook and darted from side to side, trying desperately to shake Gabriel's tail.

Gabriel, however, was too quick. He saw his chance. He took his aim, and fired.

The pilot bucked in his seat, his hands abandoning the controls as he clutched pointlessly at his chest, as if trying to plug the holes where the bullets had punched through his body. He coughed blood, spasmed, and was still.

Gabriel banked sharply and climbed away from the biplane, which, with no pilot at the controls, went into a long spiral as it nose-dived toward the muddy battlefield below.

Seconds later, leaning out of his cockpit to watch, he saw the German aircraft plummet into the ground, crumpling with an earth-shattering bang, sending dirt slewing in a tidal wave toward the enemy trenches. There was silence for a moment. Then it exploded with a whoosh of heat and light as the fuel tank went up, causing Gabriel to shield his eyes and look away.

For a moment he allowed himself to feel jubilant. He'd survived. He'd bettered an enemy pilot in a dogfight. Then he remembered the look on the gunner's face as Gabriel's bullets had shredded his torso, the sight of the blood spewing out of the pilot's mouth, the desperate way he had clutched at his chest as if trying to hold himself together.

This was nothing to feel jubilant about. There was no celebration here. He had killed two men.

Gabriel buried those images, suppressing them, locking them in that dark, private place in his mind, that place where all of those horrors resided. He wondered if that was how they all coped, all of the soldiers, locking those thoughts away deep inside their psyches. He wondered if that was why they were all so happy to blithely follow orders like they did. Because it gave them something to focus on, rather than the horrors they would have to face if they ever turned away.

Gabriel pulled back on the controls and the plane soared, rising up through the white, fluffy clouds, until all he could see was a blanket of white and the bright, formless blue of the horizon.

And there, watching him, were the eyes.

Gabriel woke with a start. He sat bolt upright in bed, his chest glistening with sweat. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling disorientated, out of sorts. Where was he? The place seemed unfamiliar.

The walls seemed to resolve around him. A stranger's room? No, the spare room. That was it. He was back in Long Island, back at the house, and he'd spent the night in the guest room because when he'd returned home late from the city, he'd found Ginny curled up asleep on his bed.

Gabriel shook his head, attempting to dislodge the last, clinging vestiges of his dream. It had seemed so real, so vivid. It felt as if he'd actually been back there, in the skies above France, feeling the wind in his hair, his nostrils filled with the heady scent of the engines, hearing nothing above the roaring din of the propellers. And those eyes, those huge, disembodied eyes, staring at him across the void, taunting him, willing him on. Encouraging him to break away, to turn his plane around and soar off into the pale blue skies, to leave that wasteland of death and destruction far behind.

He'd wanted so much to do that, then, to flee from the barking guns, from the corpses of his dead comrades, from the promise of nothing but further death and destruction.

He had stayed, of course, and he had killed, and he had watched everyone he cared about die in those miserable trenches, eking out their last days up to their ankles in filthy rainwater, surrounded by shit and blood and rotting body parts, knowing that any day it might be their turn to die. That they would be next to fall, to become food for the ravens that flocked to the wastelands where their friends and brothers lay still and dead, their unseeing eyes staring all the way up to Heaven.

Constantly, those eyes had watched him, judging him, staring right through to his soul.

Gabriel shuddered. He had never told anyone about what he'd seen up there, in the skies over France. They'd probably tell him he was mad, or that the stress of the war had caused him to hallucinate, to imagine things that weren't really there: a representation of his subconscious mind as it tried to deal with the nightmarish things he had witnessed. That it was the guilt and the paranoia, the thought of being judged for the things he'd had to do, the lives he'd been forced to take. They might even have been right.

Gabriel knew, though, with a clarity that he had rarely known, that what he'd seen up there in the sky had been real. Those strange, shimmering eyes on the horizon, like golden orbs, had been there for him. He had no idea what they were, where they had come from, but nevertheless, he was sure of it. He had seen them time and again when he'd been up there, flying above the clouds.

At first, disturbed, he'd flown toward them, imagining they'd resolve into some feature of the distant landscape, or that he'd realize they were nothing but reflected light in the hazy distance, but no matter what he had done, how he had approached them, they had always remained the same, unblinking, unmoving, just hanging there, watching him, seeing right through him to the core of what he was. He'd never felt so exposed, so open and raw, as when he'd been confronted by those eyes. Not until he'd met Celeste. Celeste had looked at him the same way, as though she'd been able to read his innermost thoughts, as though she understood him better than he understood himself.

Sighing, Gabriel slid out from beneath the eiderdown and padded to the bathroom. He realized when he grabbed for the doorknob that his palms were bleeding from little sickle-shaped cuts where his nails had dug into his flesh. He must have been bunching his fists in his sleep whilst he relived the dogfight.

As he stood under the shower and let the steaming water play over his skin, Gabriel could still see the face of the dead gunner, the slack-jawed expression of surprise, the blood leaking from numerous bullet wounds in his throat.

He hung his head, pressing his palms against the tiled wall.

Gabriel's body was an atlas of scars. Each one told a different story, from the thick, ropy welts that ran all the way from his left breast to the soft flesh beneath his arm, to the gunshot wound in his abdomen, to the tiny puncture marks in his thighs. Women, over the years, had traced these scars with their fingertips, intrigued and appalled, fascinated to discover that this man who had taken them to his bed had more depth than they had ever imagined. Gabriel had
lived.
He had lived more than most people would ever live, and in the course of that life he had been to hell and back. He wasn't proud of what he had done—in fact, in his darker moments he abhorred himself for his actions—but he had learned to live with them. They were like a shadow that he couldn't shake, and the scars were his reminder.

Every day he would look upon his ravaged body in the mirror, and he would remember. Then he would dress and cover himself up. He would slip into the persona of Gabriel Cross and surround himself with people, and once again he would try to forget his past.

Yet Gabriel's mind was also a map of scars, and these were harder to discern, and harder still to disguise.