Mark of the Lion (2 page)

Jade had started to drive off when Miss Lowther motioned her and Beverly to wait, then came alongside their cars. “Are either of you ladies game for a new assignment? I need someone to go to
poste de secours
tonight.”

“Ma’am?” Jade asked.

“I just received a follow-up message over the wireless. Seems they need an additional ambulance after yesterday’s shelling. African corps, but I can only spare one of you.”

Beverly grinned and urged Miss Lowther to send Jade. “Did you know she has Moors among her ancestors?”

“I do trust you and your flivver more than the others, Jade,” said the commandant, addressing her Ford Model T by its slang name. “Might be rough, and you’re a better mechanic if there are problems, you know. I was asked to send my most trusted driver.”

Jade nodded but said nothing. Her arms tingled in excitement. The
poste de secours
sat right behind the batteries, as close to the front lines as any ambulance driver ever got.

“This is a bit of a sensitive situation as well, and I’m not certain all of the girls would understand,” Lieutenant Lowther said.

“I appreciate your trust, ma’am. I won’t ruin it.”

“Very good. Don’t turn at the first ‘smell.’ Drive another kilometer beyond. There should be a rather large tank that was shelled in the road. An orderly will be there watching for you.” Their commandant patted Jade’s arm and smiled. “Good girl, Jade. I trust you’ll handle everything splendidly. You western Yanks have a way with situations like this.”

Jade’s mind returned to the present and her load of wounded Africans. She’d heard of the African corps and knew the French treated their wounded at the same hospitals as the other French soldiers. She admired that blatant disregard of traditional color barriers. Having a darker complexion herself, she knew real or implied discrimination firsthand and detested it. Hell, she thought, Beverly was probably right about the Moorish ancestry. She glanced at the wounded black corporal of the Chasseurs d’Afrique sleeping next to her. Before Corporal Gideon had succumbed to exhaustion, he had explained his motives for fighting.

“We
are
the front, mademoiselle. The Bosch, they are very afraid of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. And now I have proven my manhood. I can take a wife when I go home.”

Strange idea,
Jade thought,
having to kill someone before you can get married.
Jade mentally sorted through all the wounded she’d driven. Many were the Les Joyeux, convicts given a second chance at redemption and marked with a fleur-de-lis. To earn a Croix de Guerre medal carried a further reduction of sentence, so those men tended towards incredible recklessness. Jade understood why
they
fought, but she wondered what prompted a man to leave the warm climate of Africa for the harsh winters of Europe to fight in someone else’s war.

She peered again at the sleeping African corporal. Surely no one had to travel that far just to find someone to slay. Then again, since they lived in French colonies, maybe they had no choice. Whatever their motives, they deserved care and comfort, and Jade did her best to avoid jarring ruts. Speed was essential, but so was the well-being of her passengers. The rule was twenty-five kilometers per hour maximum with a load.

The first shell slammed into the ground about fifty yards from her, a 220, judging by the impact. The shock wave rocked her Model T ambulance and sprayed her face with gravel and mud. She heard a ping followed by a plop as something hard ricocheted off the top of her wobbly helmet and struck the dazed Somali corporal next to her. From her right, the French returned fire.

No point in driving slowly now. Jade pushed the lever of her trusty old vehicle forward, and gave it the gas. Someone in the back screamed, a high-pitched, gut-knifing wail. Whether he screamed from terror, a rude awakening to pain, or both didn’t matter, as she couldn’t stop and tend to him now. Corporal Gideon groaned next to her, his eyes masked by swaths of bandages.

Jade peered through the smoke and debris, searching for the bloated pile of horse carcasses. The “smell” marked her final turn toward the evac hospital. Finally she spied the pile of rotting horses stacked to one side of a caisson a hundred yards ahead. Naturally white, they’d been dyed red while alive to make them less visible. Now their color ran and bleached them to a sickening pink.

Another high-explosive shell exploded on impact to her right. “Damn!” she swore. “They’re firing whizbangs.” Jade felt a sudden longing for a good old, dependable howitzer shell. At least they had the decency to give you a little advance notice. She chanted her own personal fear-controlling mantra aloud.

“I only occupy one tiny space. The shells have all the rest of France to hit.”

Almost in answer to her words, a shell exploded directly in the road ahead. It landed far enough away to miss her, but close enough that she couldn’t avoid the crater at her current speed. Quickly she forced the wheel to the right to avoid the deepest part and felt the truck drop down on its left side with an agonizing shudder. A fresh scream exploded from the back.

“Come on, flivver. Hold together now,” she coaxed from the cab. She tried to climb out of the hole. The right front tire spun uselessly, spraying dirt. “Damn!”

Jade jumped out of the cab and ducked low beside the truck, scuttling crablike around the ambulance as she searched for the problem. She found it. The right tire was hung up on some lump instead of making contact with what remained of the road.
Probably a rock.
Jade opened the wooden toolbox on the side.

“I’m going to kill Beverly when I get back,” she muttered to the tools. She imitated her friend’s British drawl. “Madame Commandant, send Jade to fetch the African soldiers. She’s so swarthy herself that they’ll feel more comfortable.”
My aunt Fanny,
Jade thought. As if her coloring made her a better candidate to move African wounded. It was just another one of Beverly’s ideas of a joke. Almost funny, too, if it wasn’t for this accident. Her helmet, oversized to fit a thick roll of hair that she no longer had, slipped from her head and slapped her on the ear.

Jade extracted the crowbar from the box. Then she slid on her belly around the side and began leveraging the ambulance off the rock.

Only it wasn’t a rock. Rocks should be hard. This one wasn’t. The shell had landed on the “smell” and spewed horseflesh everywhere. Jade set the crowbar at the rear of the horse meat and pushed the carcass forward. It worked. The slab of meat slid out from under the axle, and the truck dropped back down onto four wheels.

Good! No broken axles.
Then she saw the small black spot on the crowbar. “Blast it.”
Probably a crack in the oil pan. That’s it! Beverly owes me now.
Best friend or not, she would pay. Maybe the next time Jade went on leave to visit David at the aerodrome, she’d tell on Bev to David’s friend, Lord Dunbury, whom Bev flirted with so shamelessly.

With the crowbar, Jade dragged the horse remains out of her way and inspected the rest of the huge crater. It was steeper in front than behind and would be difficult to climb out of, at least going forward with her low gas tank. No way to go around the crater either without risking a puncture on shrapnel. While she pondered her options, she heard a sound that made her flesh crawl. Above her head in the ambulance, one of the shell-shocked wounded reacted to the shelling with insane laughter. It started out as a low, tentative giggle and soon swelled into high-pitched, rolling cackles.

“Dear Lord, no,” Jade murmured. A cold sweat erupted on her skin. Of all the horrible sounds along this hellish front, that hideous laughter was the one she could not deal with.

The booming reverberations around her were deafening. Unfortunately they could not drown out the screams of terror from one passenger and the insane giggles from another. The giggling increased in intensity and volume. Jade shouted a few words of encouragement in French to the back as she climbed shivering into the cab. The corporal next to her was in a dead faint. “Lucky you,” she whispered as another shell slammed to her left. She turned the ambulance around in the crater to take the steep side in reverse.

Jade had started in the unit driving a Fiat, but after one week she’d decided she preferred the light maneuverability of the Model T. She also enjoyed being able to pilfer replacement parts from stranded Model Ts or rigging up make-do parts. The flivver was a rather accommodating vehicle for that sort of thing, and Jade took pride in the fact that it was as American as she was. Most drivers found the system of three foot pedals and a side lever maddening, which meant no one tried to pinch her car. But it had one problem. It could climb steep hills only in reverse.

A Model T worked with a gravity-fed gas tank under the driver’s seat. If a climb was too steep when the vehicle was going forward, fuel didn’t reach the engine. Jade refused to risk that even on this short climb. She heard the T groan in protest and shouted encouragement. “Come on, sweetheart. If you fall apart now, Beverly won’t let me hear the end of it.”

Slowly the durable machine heaved itself out of the crater. “Thataboy,” she coaxed. “Show them what a Yank can do.” Jade kept it in reverse until she found a level spot wide enough to turn in. Then she drove hell-bent for the second coming, as her father used to say. But no matter how fast she went, the maniacal laughter hung on behind her, like a dog with a can cruelly tied to its tail. It couldn’t be escaped. The creeping sensation crawled down her legs, and she felt them quiver.

Jade tore down the rutted road, riding higher on the passenger side in the ruts. She sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of her lungs to drown out the hideous whoops of laughter behind her. It didn’t help. Her shaking hands slipped from the steering wheel. The T lurched to the left. Jade clamped down harder on the wheel and brought the T back onto the road. She veered around a battered caisson and raced on towards the evacuation hospital. Another shell burst somewhere overhead. Shrapnel rained down to her right. The fringes of that shower pelted the top of the ambulance and her already loose helmet. The helmet slid off to one side.

Jade took turns muttering curses towards herself for cutting off her hair, for the lice that had made her cut her hair, and for the clear night that had kept her from lowering the canvas canopy over the cab in the first place.

On the plus side, the reverberation from the last shell had silenced the patients. In that welcome quiet, she heard the drone of an aircraft. Jade glanced up and saw rings within rings painted on the underside and knew it for one of theirs. Who was on the dawn reconnaissance run? Could it be David? The plane was a Sopwith Camel, and most of the experienced pilots preferred the Camel, with its agility in tight turns. She blew a kiss to the unknown pilot and pulled into evac as a bomb dropped in the center of the hospital base.

Shouts of fear and disbelief emanated from the makeshift hospital. Jade ducked behind the ambulance, but not quickly enough. She felt a hot, stabbing pain bite into her left knee. A wetness trickled down her leg. Her hand brushed aside her skirt and automatically grabbed her knee. Warm, sticky blood coated her palm. She prodded the area with her fingers and felt a hard chunk of metal stab back.

Jade bit back the pain and tugged. Her wet fingers slipped off the shrapnel. She wiped her hand on her skirt, placed her hand inside her shirtsleeve for a better grip, and pulled again. This time the chunk came out. Jade fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief and tied it around her bleeding knee just above her boots. Then she limped around the back, opened the ambulance doors, and helped the orderlies move the wounded. Another bomb slammed and detonated in the road, just missing the hospital. Screams exploded around her as a rain of debris clogged the air.
These aren’t whizbangs or howitzers. Who the blazes is firing on a hospital?

Jade looked up through the dirty haze and spotted the second airplane and the black Iron Cross on its fuselage. The pilot banked and came about for another run on the hospital, and the Camel raced in immediately on the German’s tail. Jade cheered an instant before she caught sight of a black horse painted behind the propeller.
David!

Her grimy olive face lit up in a broad smile, and she shouted with the orderlies.
“Vive l’Angleterre,”
they cried out. “Long live England.” The planes sped away from the hospital towards the front lines, the Camel biting the backside of the German plane with its machine gun. From a distance they saw black smoke belch out of the enemy plane. Its engine sputtered, and the plane began a death spin towards the earth. The Camel pulled away and proceeded on to its original scouting mission along the front lines. Jade watched with pride as it flew off and wondered if she should think more seriously of David’s recent marriage proposal.

One of the orderlies hugged Jade and kissed her on both cheeks. When he would do more, she pushed him away with a laugh and limped back to her ambulance. She was just pulling out when an additional droning hum to her right arrested her attention. David had been spotted and challenged. The two planes flew by, chasing each other with the aerial agility of dragonflies and the ferocity of hawks.

Jade shaded her eyes against the rising sun’s light and watched. The first plane was David’s Camel. The second was obviously German by the black cross on its tail, but she’d never seen one quite like it before. The Fokker E.III only had one wing. This one had two. She recalled David telling her the Germans had another Fokker called the D.VII. It was deadly.

The Camel came around and fired on the Fokker’s tail, but the German pilot looped up and over, neatly avoiding the machine-gun fire. Now he was behind David and returned fire. David banked left and then right, trying to avoid the barrage of gunfire.

Jade shouted encouragement. “Come on, David, shake him. Show him how a Camel really flies.”

The two orderlies joined Jade by her ambulance and gaped openmouthed at the intense aerial joust. The new Fokker was fast and every bit as maneuverable as the Camel. It hung on to David’s tail like it was tethered.