Chapter 2
It’s the smell he notices first. Not the medicinal smell of the lab they’d kept him in, but the smell of cold mud. He wakes up with an inward suck of air almost like a hoarse sob of relief; time spools backwards and here he is in a medical tent in the field, maybe near Salerno, which was rain-damp and smelled of rotten grapevines and blood - blood, which is a scent not unlike wet earth. He lies there for a moment with his eyes closed, taking inventory of his body. His spinal cord licks like flame. His head swarms with color. His back tooth aches where they forced his mouth open -
He opens his eyes and struggles up onto one elbow. He’s on the ground; the earth gives under him. There are soldiers he doesn’t recognize all around and a tarp ceiling on sticks up above and it’s dim but then he sees a face over him.
“Barnes?”
Bucky shakes his head. His throat’s raw. “Well, shit,” he says, “I’m not in Kansas, am I.”
Morita’s making that face Bucky remembers from the trenches, when he was trying to ignore a bad joke, but Jim can’t quite manage it. His lips press together instead and he nods. “Not that you’d know from Kansas,” he says. Bucky’s entire lack of geographical knowledge had been a running joke among the group of them in the factory prison. The rest of them reminisced about home and all Bucky could say was, Fresno? That’s near Los Angeles, right?
He sits up and rubs at the side of his jaw where a scruff of beard chafes his fingertips. One of his ears feels clogged; he puts his hand up and it comes away sticky with blood. His shirt’s gone. His chest and ribs are a landscape of scabs and bruises.
“No infections,” Morita says briefly, eyes tracking down over Bucky’s skin. He says just that, he doesn’t comment on the extent of the damage, the places the Germans decided to crush in ground glass for no particular reason Bucky could make out.
“That’s lucky,” Bucky says hollowly, passing a thumb lightly over the inside of his wrist.
“Well, I cleaned ‘em all out and put sulfa on anyway.” Morita shakes his head. “That’s about all we got; we ran out of morphine. Don’t think they expected there to be so many of us.”
He’s staring down at Bucky’s chest again. Bucky asks, “Where’s my shirt?”
Morita passes it to him silently, and after Bucky’s pulled his head through, he looks around. There’re about twenty of them spread out in this low-hanging tent. The shadows of black tree branches shine through through overhead, thick: someone’s covered it up with brush.
Twenty of them, when there were hundreds in the factory. Bucky tries to reassure himself by remembering that these are just the wounded. “How’re…” He pauses. He’s not going to ask who made it, not yet. “Did I hit my head or was there a real skinny guy around, maybe five-foot-nothing?”
Morita does smile then, scratching his head. “Yeah, sure was. And a lady spy. That’s who came to the rescue when we radioed out.”
“Oh!” Bucky smiles back, dazed. “You got it to work?”
“Bitch of a thing, but finally we did. They were using the British codes, so we had Monty transmit, and this is what we got. Kinda funny bunch.”
“But they did it,” Bucky says.
Morita shrugs. “Here,” he says, handing Bucky some water, which stings the inside of his lips and throat with cold. He gulps it and hears his stomach groan, hunger and thirst awakening along with the rest of him. “Say,” Jim continues, taking the cup back when Bucky’s done. “That skinny guy, who is he?”
“My friend,” Bucky says. “Well, Steve.”
He told Jim about Steve, back in the factory when he was sick and Jim got him water and Bucky thought he was gonna die. Now, remembering, he isn’t sure if he really did believe it - the depth of his belief that he was going to die, and his trust in that belief, have been shattered. Anyway, he told Jim, and Jim looked at him funny and asked if he wore dresses back home, and then showed him a locket with a picture of his girl. So long story short he knows about Steve.
“Huh.” Jim looks like he’s about to say something else, but shuts his mouth; the flap of the tarp has moved and Monty and Dernier come in. Dernier is smudged with soot, as always. Monty’s hair stands up in forlorn wisps around an encroaching bald spot.
“Thus far,” Monty says drily, settling in next to them on his haunches, “you Americans continue to live up to your reputation for indiscipline.” He looks to Dernier in the hope of support: while the Frenchman and the Englishman had little in common and twice came almost to blows over De Gaulle, Monty was one of the only ones in the prison with more than a smattering of French, and thus the de facto translator on more than one occasion. Like when he had to talk Dernier out of smuggling lignite out of the factory and into their cell. Now Dernier clears his throat and says something in French, then turns to Bucky, a grin lifting the drooping corners of his mouth.
“Au moins,” Dernier says, “they know how to set a fire.”
Morita shakes his head but says nothing, turning instead to check on a man who’s started to make gurgling groaning sounds. A throat wound, Bucky thinks, and shuts his eyes, trying not to think of the time he saw a Greek soldier in the field take shrapnel just under the jaw. They’d been stuck up a hill behind a pile of rocks and under heavy fire, and Bucky had waited there, listening to the whizz and thrum of shells - from close to the sound they made was peculiar, a plink-plink-plink, a sound you didn’t get to hear at other distances. It had taken the Greek soldier four hours to die, and he’d talked in a low mumble with just this gurgling undertone for three.
Sulfa has no smell or taste. Bucky nonetheless remembers the feel of it sprinkled into a wound: a grittiness that dissolves. He watches Morita dress the soldier, a guy he doesn’t recognize, who lies there just as complacent as if they had morphine after all. “Did you hear anything?” Morita asks Monty.
“They still haven’t said,” Monty says.
“What?” Bucky asks, distracted. He thinks maybe he does recognize the injured soldier, or maybe he doesn’t. What is true is that all wounded men look alike, white or Negro or Japanese, and he has noticed this throughout the war: that something about the uniforms and the ground-in dirt and the gauntness of their faces, the expression that is halfway childish yearning and halfway deep emptiness: that is the same.
“We’re still quite close to the factory,” Monty says. “We haven’t yet heard when we’re moving out. Frankly, I don’t know if we haven’t gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
Dernier’s smile fades, but Bucky gathers his feet underneath himself. “Don’t worry,” he tells them, “Steve’s got a plan.”
-
“We need a new plan,” Dugan says, ducking under the canvas flap. It’s not much, just a bit of tarp from a Hydra truck that had come out of last night mostly intact, barely enough to keep the rain off their shoulders.
“Why’s that,” Steve says, eyes on the map spread out across the makeshift table they’ve set up. “There a problem?”
“A big one,” Dugan says. “About two hundred and forty three big.”
Steve looks up, takes in Dugan’s grim expression. Gabe whistles, low. “Well,” Peggy says. “Well. I’d say this was quite a successful mission.”
“Fifty nine wounded,” Dugan continues, remorseless. He settles in on his haunches. “Twelve bad enough they ain’t going anywhere on their own steam. Three that the uh, medic thinks won’t last more’n a few hours. Just about everyone half starved. Squid bastards were set on working ‘em all to death, seems like.”
Steve sighs. He flicks an eye over to Gabe, who straightens, rolling out his shoulders. “One tank,” he reports. “Six working half tracks, but only two with fuel worth mentioning. No rations except what we brought with us.”
“There’s a stream about half a kilometer away,” Peggy says. “We should send some men that way with the truck before it’s full light. I believe I saw a cistern near the - what’s left of the south wall of the facility.”
Steve nods, and Dugan groans up to his feet without a word, vanishing back into the mist. Steve traces a fingertip over the map. It’s unmarked, like everything else they carry. It’s only in Steve’s head that the thin, tenuous ribbon of the Allied front line marks home.
“Thirty five miles,” Steve says, staring down at it. “Defensive positions as of three days ago here -” he touches the map, shifts one finger just barely to the left, a little further, “ - here and here.”
“No sign on the radio they realized we’ve hit the factory,” Gabe says, but he sounds unsure. The dummy codes they’d sent had been enough to lure nearly the full Hydra battalion away from the factory, but without the fake radio chatter of Allied forces on the move that usually accompanies this sort of performance, it was only a matter of time before the Germans guessed what was going on.
“I’ll scout ahead,” Peggy says. She’s bent close over the map as well, and he can feel the warmth of her shoulder against his own. “Dugan and Steve can follow with the equipment.”
“We need Dugan with the rescuees,” Gabe says, and Peggy sighs, frustrated.
“We might’ve planned a bit better,” she admits. “Brought at least one other person they might actually take orders from.”
“No one to guard the rear either,” Gabe says, shaking his head. “And we can’t keep them massed together. We’d be sitting ducks out here, trying to move all these people at once. We gotta split ‘em up.”
“That’s the problem,” Steve says, “we need more - ”
He looks over his shoulder. Still some yards off, Bucky’s head goes up. He meets Steve’s eyes square, not pausing as he picks his way through the trees and the knots of soldiers huddled listlessly around. He’s bearded and dirty, his hair standing up in clumps. Mentally Steve starts to sketch him: the slash of his mouth, the rangy, bony look of his torso, the breadth of his forearms. Shoulders back, chest out. He’s never seen Buck move like this. He watches, fascinated.
He can feel that Gabe and Peggy are looking back and forth between him and Buck. Well, it’s different now, isn’t it? They have their orders. But - “It’s okay,” Steve says to them. “Someone else they’ll listen to, right?”
“He’s - trustworthy,” Gabe says to Peggy, a world of meaning in the little pause between the two words, and in the look they give each other before Peggy answers.
“All right,” she says. It’s a little unwilling, but she’s got even more to lose than the two of them. Immediate execution would be the very most she could hope for, should her work be compromised. Without looking away from Bucky, Steve reaches out and touches her hand. She turns it over and grips his tightly.
It takes Bucky a moment to see who else is crouched under the tarp with Steve. His jaw’s working in a way that always spelled trouble for Steve back home, but it goes slack when he sees Peggy, and his expression going from confused to downright dumbfounded when he catches sight of Gabe.
“You looking to catch flies?” Gabe says.
Bucky shuts his trap abruptly, scratching a hand over his hair. His fingertips come off shiny with oil, and he rubs them against his shirt, covered with grease and what Steve thinks is probably dried blood.
“Come on, sit down,” Steve says, and Bucky hesitates. He’s listing a little to the left, his eyes glassy. On his upended ammunition box, Gabe draws himself upright and that seems to decide it: Buck settles down onto the ground across the table from the three of them, rubbing both hands on his knees.
“You still ain’t dead, Buck,” Steve tells him, when Bucky doesn’t say anything else, just keeps looking up at Gabe, that dumb, cow-eyed look on his face.
“Thought that was you on the radio,” he says, and shakes his head. “Mab - Gabe. I’ll be damned.”
“Nice to see you too, Barnes,” Gabe says, smiling.
Steve clears his throat. “We got a problem,” he says, and Bucky’s focus sharpens on him.
“You didn’t think there were gonna be so many of us,” he says.
“Our best intelligence said no more than fifty,” Peggy says.
Bucky shrugs. “There was a group of about forty arrived about a week ago. British. They came from -“ He leans over the map, studies it for a second. Taps a finger along the back seam of Italy’s boot, on the coast. “They’d intercepted a shipment of munitions from the factory, but were overpowered.”
“Really?” Peggy asks, with interest. “Do you know where else they were moving weapons to?”
Bucky shakes his head. “They had me in the lab for the last - I dunno. Five, maybe six days. They were experimenting on prisoners, trying to replicate some formula. Didn’t say what for, just -”
Peggy looks intrigued. “A formula, you say?” she asks. “Was there a man there - short, balding? With glasses?”
Bucky looks back up, his expression blank, and Steve’s breath comes short. So that was who’d been standing behind Schmidt. He’d seen Arnim Zola through the flames, and hadn’t known. Had no idea that was who’d put Bucky on that slab and left him for dead - drugged out of his mind, in pain -
“Peg,” Steve says. They both look at him - Peggy’s mouth twisting, irritated. Bucky with hooded eyes. “Debrief him later, we need to get moving.”
“All right, Steve,” Peggy says after a moment, and folds her hands up in her lap.
Bucky’s still looking at him, unwavering. God, it’s good to see him. Steve feels bowled over by it. How long has it been? He’d stopped counting the days out of self preservation. “What’s the story?” Bucky asks.
Steve looks down at the map. Gabe and Peggy look down at it too. Outside of the tent and the meager protection it offers, he can hear the camp waking up, the sound of two hundred men muffled by the damp earth and his bad ear. The engine of a truck sputters a little, turns over, and rattles off into silence: Dugan and the cistern. Thirty five miles. Defensive positions here and here, a gap of about three miles between them, assuming -
They can’t assume.
“Split up the men into platoons, leave a half mile between each group,” he says. “It’ll take longer to travel that way, but I’ll take stealth over speed. Bucky and I’ll scout ahead. We’ll radio back our orders. Gabe, you and Dugan will go ahead of the first platoon, with our equipment. Lay down some tracks in case Hydra realizes what’s going on.”
Gabe’s already shaking his head. Peggy’s only looking at him, her mouth tight. Thinking exactly what Gabe is about to say. “Bucky,” Steve says. “The men you were held with. There’s someone that knows their way around a radio, right? We need more bodies,” he says to Gabe and Peggy. “We need radio chatter to keep them off our tail. We need men we can trust.”
Gabe looks down at the map, his mouth drawn thin. Reluctantly, Peggy nods. “Good,” Steve says. “Five groups of soldiers. We’ll need one or two in charge of each group, and a couple to guard the rear. We’ll put your radioman with the front platoon, along with the wounded and the two halftracks. We’ll need -”
“We’ll need a guard,” Gabe says flatly. In the morning light, slanting sideways through their little tent, his eyes look gold and very clear. He’s a handsome man, Steve thinks, as he does quite often - and mostly these days without a touch of bitterness. “Dugan and I, we’ll need guards. The radio too.”
Steve nods. “Bucky,” he says, but how to put it? The words form themselves like little needles on his tongue. He feels like the glint of a sniper’s glass far off in the trees, a cowardly warning. Bucky had landed in Italy, was slogging through miles of muddy countryside in the last letter Steve got before he’d shipped out himself, fighting for every inch of it. A good soldier’s work. But that’s not what Steve’s business is, in the war.
“We need someone - very trustworthy,” Steve says, carefully. “The equipment that Gabe and Dugan carry can’t fall into Nazi hands. Gabe and Dugan can’t fall into Nazi hands. None of us can.”
Bucky looks up, surprise written in his eyebrows, the slackness of his jaw. He looks at Gabe, and at Peggy, his expression shifting. Steve rubs a thumb over his own fingers, soothing the itch. Outside the tent it’s getting lighter and colder, the drizzly rain slacking off. Might be a clear day for the march after all - threading two hundred men through some of the most fortified territory in Europe without even a damn cloud cover to grace them.
“I’ll do it,” Bucky says, and Steve flinches. “I know who else to ask.”
“Bucky,” he starts to say, but Bucky shakes his head.
“No. I’ll do it. But,” he says, and then holds up a finger, his head tilted towards Peggy, and Gabe, and then Steve himself - “What’s the story?”
-
They can tell Bucky only half the story, of course - not even that. First, Peggy asks him to find the men who engineered the rescue from inside the cells: Jim, Monty, and Dernier. A dull rattling hail has begun to fall onto the canopy of their tent while they all crouch to speak, and Steve sends up his thanks for this, at least.
Peggy asks for details of the men’s lives and experience.
“Farmer,” Morita says briefly. Dernier grunts and nods, then looks up with a hint of humor and says, “Mais j’ai déraciné tant de souches - ” He spits. “Tant de souches, des Boches, qui m’ont voulu déraciner autant.
Gabe smiles, to Dernier’s startlement; Gabe looks at him and offers, “En France, j’entends, le sol ne nourrisse pas bien les Boches.”
Dernier blinks twice and then smiles. “Le sol? Le mienne est pleine de mines. On espérerait qu’ils mangent à leur faim de cela.”
“He blew up some of the machinery in the factory. And he almost blew our cell,” Bucky says, and Steve nods.
“Oh, sorry,” Gabe says. He’s not sorry, still smiling at Dernier. Back in New York, he used to talk endlessly about Paris - the Paris of Négritude, of Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. He had some ambitions about going there himself, and when he talked to Steve about joining up, they had joked about liberating Paris. They have now liberated one French farmer, Steve supposes, which is a start. “He said he planted explosives on his farm,” Gabe says, in English, “for the Boche - the Germans.”
Dernier nods and says, “I know how to remake these mines or these objects the SOE drop for us.”
“Resistance, eh?” Dugan says. Steve knows where that’s going; Dugan doesn’t think much of the French. Or the Brits. Or anyone who isn’t American. “Didn’t put up much of a fight for old Par-ee, though.”
Dernier starts forward, glaring, and Peggy says, “Enough,” mildly - but Dugan settles down, because he’s been the target of her anger before. Steve catches Bucky and the Japanese man, Jim Morita, exchanging looks.
“His name ain’t Dum Dum for no reason,” Steve says.
“Fine, fine,” Dum Dum says.
Peggy raises an eyebrow. “Well, then,” she says, thoughtfully. “And you?” she says to Monty.
“I was an actor,” he says, and Dugan rolls his eyes before Steve skewers him with a glance: before the Army, Dugan was in the damn circus, and hardly in a position to judge.
“Interesting,” Peggy - who judges all she likes - says.
“He pretended to fall down on the assembly line so I could get the radio equipment,” Jim says.
“Il est coullu,” Dernier allows.
“He’s great with strategy,” Bucky says.
Monty shrugs. “I’ve also come home from twenty three parachute drops,” he says, with elaborately false modesty. “I’m with her Majesty’s 1st Airborne Division.”
“So. We also have a sniper who’s been used as a scout before,” Steve says. This is true, as Bucky has told him: his track background meant he was often sent ahead of his platoon to scout the terrain. Bucky wrote Steve about this experience with some humor: me, a guy who still calls ‘north’ ‘uptown’.
“And we have a radio expert. Farming proves unexpectedly fertile ground for technologists,” Peggy muses. “Morita, you say you think you could rig a signal jammer?”
He shakes his head. “Our equipment didn’t make it out of the factory.”
Peggy looks at Steve. She nods, briefly, and turns back to the group Bucky’s assembled for them. “We have a few things you may be able to use,” she says carefully. “But first we should tell you a little bit about what we do. Officially, it’s known as called tactical deception. We impersonate other units to give the impression of a greater force, or to misdirect the location of actual troops. Our methods are top secret and cannot be divulged without great risk.”
It’s the same speech they give to officers who need to know what they’re doing on his battlefield, more or less. Sometimes they know about the sonic troops, sometimes they’ve heard of the camofleurs, but mostly not. We’re here to deceive the Germans. While your troops go left, we’ll make them think you went right. We will create a great multitude, a sound of many waters and peals of thunder, saying “Hallelujah, and death to fascism.”
Bucky looks skeptical, but he keeps his thoughts to himself, and his friends are eager to exact their revenge. Officially, they set off at 0745; Steve and Bucky leave camp while Dugan, Falsworth and Dernier rouse the prisoners and set them into groups. The noise is quick to fade in the misty, thin air, leaving just the soft sound of their footsteps and the plunk plunk of hail against Steve’s helmet.
It’s full light, and a miserable march; the hail has changed its mind and become rain again, and the path is muddy enough that their boots sink into the earth - but at least they still have boots. Some of the rescued soldiers salvaged some, Steve knows, off dead Hydra guards. He recognized the boot leather.
Bucky’s stumbling a little, trailing along behind Steve like they’re connected by an invisible string. He’s three steps behind whenever Steve looks back though - no more, no less. “They really did a number on you, huh,” Steve says, after they’ve been walking about a quarter mile.
Bucky doesn’t say anything. His fingers rasp over the rifle he’s carrying. Steve glances over his shoulder and sees Bucky three steps back shaking ice crystals out of his hair. Two steps and they stand together for a moment, just long enough that Steve can feel the heat of him before Bucky moves past, eyes flickering through the trees. It’s quiet. There won’t be any Germans for miles, if their defensive positions haven’t changed; if their patrols haven’t changed; if, if, if.
“You never were in Fort Wayne, were you?” Bucky asks suddenly, startling Steve almost as badly as plowing into him does a moment later.
Bucky takes a hasty step backwards, like he wasn’t expecting it either. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, as if a Nazi could have snuck up on them in that moment. He’s breathing like he just ran a mile.
Steve looks away, down the trail. Twelve letters stamped Fort Wayne, Indiana, pages describing wheat fields and land so flat and empty you could see for miles, more stars in the night sky than he’d ever dreamed about. Dumb stories about how dull it was to be a chaplain’s assistant, jokes he cobbled together from Dugan, who was the only one of them who really associated much with the real soldiers. Steve had been in New York the whole time, way the hell up north near the Canadian border.
“I read those letters every night since I been here,” Bucky says without looking, like he knows exactly what Steve’s thinking.
“Buck,” Steve says. It comes out softer than he means it to, and he clears his throat roughly, turns it into a cough.
He fumbles the tin out of his pack, and a little white pill into his numb hands. Bucky steps closer, hands him a canteen even as he looks curiously at what Steve’s taking. Neither of them really look at the other. Around the canteen, Steve’s hands are red and blotchy. He had gloves, but he’d forgotten all about them in the mad dash to the tent he shared with Gabe and Dugan, the scramble to gather as much equipment as they could before anyone cottoned on. God only knew what waited for them back behind the lines.
“We were lucky to get to write letters at all,” he says, and after the water and the pill his voice sounds mostly steady. “We don’t have the same rules, like the rest of the Army. It’s different for us. We’re an irregular unit.”
“You’d have to be,” Bucky says, his mouth twisted up.
Steve says, “If I weren’t here, where would you be?”
At that, Bucky laughs - actually throws his head back and laughs, but he grins down like Steve’s part of the joke too, so Steve uncurls his fists and grins back. “Meshuggana,” he says, soft. “How’d you even get here?”
“On a boat, same as you,” Steve says, and Bucky rolls his eyes. Steve relents. “Agent Carter infiltrated a few days ago. She was able to get us into the factory undetected. They don’t keep a large force here … they can’t afford the men. But you probably knew that.”
Bucky nods and turns back to the path, slogging sightlessly through mud that Steve’s forced to pick a careful path through. “Yeah, we saw the same guards a lot. How - how’d you know to come?”
“We got a radio signal. It mentioned the names of some units.” Morita’s plan, Steve knows now - a tremulous band of hope just loud enough for Peggy to have stumbled upon, searching hopelessly for a double agent that was almost certainly dead.
Bucky doesn’t look back. The rifle’s braced against his shoulder, the barrel pointed up towards an invisible enemy. “You knew mine was one of ‘em?”
It’s a dumb question, and Steve lets it be, watches the shift of Bucky’s shoulders as he takes that in. “Guess all the stupid’s right here now, then,” he says finally.
“Guess so,” Steve says, and follows.
-
Steve calls a halt when night falls. Dugan and Falsworth take a halftrack and the radios, easing everyone’s mind. They’ll keep moving for another hour or two, transmitting on the German frequencies. All clear, nothing to worry about here: following what they can only hope is the normal patrol of the thin force stationed at the factory.
Back home Bucky always fell asleep quickly, had done ever since they were little. Steve’s expecting it, waiting for Bucky to slide into unconsciousness as soon as they rejoin the main group, or make a sad meal over whatever supplies they’d been able to scavenge from Hydra. But he doesn’t. He sits with his back against a tree and both hands on a rifle, and eventually Steve squeezes his shoulder and goes to find Peggy.
Bucky had talked, on their march - about the Skull and Zola, about the operating table Steve had found him strapped to. What they’d been doing to him on it. Bucky had rolled up his sleeves and showed Steve countless faded needle marks along his arms. He’d pulled away when Steve had reached to touch them, and rubbed fitfully at his ears. The sun had been high overhead by the time they’d stopped sluggishly leaking blood.
And he’d said -
Steve leads Peggy into the woods, until the camp is a distant murmur. This far behind the line they don’t have to worry about mines. She waits, and when he touches her wrist she lets him draw her close.
“Hydra doesn’t know Erskine’s dead,” Steve says into her ear. He hardly whispers it, but her spine stiffens. “They think we have him. They think the formula’s complete.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “That formula was a fantasy, you know that,” she says. “Steve, they can’t possibly believe …” She trails off, as if she can’t even think of a way to say it that won’t sound ridiculous: a magical serum. A soldier who could end the war for whichever side made him first.
“They would,” Steve says. “They already do.”
Her eyes glisten in the starlight, wet looking. “They were trying replicate it on your friend,” she says, and he nods.
“They think it worked,” Steve says. “They were surprised he was still alive.”
“Mmm,” Peggy says. “So am I.”
-
When he meets Gabriel Jones, Jacques tells him, “I love the jazz. Josephine Baker.”
Gabriel smiles at him. He says, “I like jazz, too,” in French. His accent is good for an American. They shake hands. He looks mildly disappointed to learn that Jacques has only been to Paris twice in his life.
“We’re just going to have to change that,” he says, still in Jacques’ own language, though the twang and upward lilt is pure American bravado.
Jacques regards him for a moment and then smiles. They get down to the business for which Gabriel and his team has approached Jacques: to plant mines for anyone who would like to come after them. In the mornings the pair of them sit and talk jazz and Paris while the caravan of rescued soldiers move out, and then they follow at an easy pace. Jacques explains how deep to bury the mines, and Gabe brings out scraps of camouflaged tarpaulin to cover the places they don’t have time to bury deeply enough. He’s an artist, he tells Jacques. He pronounces camouflage the French way, probably in deference to the company.
He asks a lot of questions about the explosive devices Jacques has improvised. He thinks of a way to link one to a tripwire, and they do so among some trees. In Jacques’ opinion it is very nice work, far superior to the factory, and pleasant to be able to speak in his own language. Kreischberg had not been friendly to Resistance fighters, and there had been few Frenchmen to survive the first few weeks there.
On the third day of their march, Jacques seeks Gabriel out when they’re roused at dawn, and they share a canteen of heated water and half of a dense, bitter bar of chocolate that is the end of Gabriel’s field rations. They are nearly out of material that can be made into improved mines; mostly they walk along in companionable silence, waiting until some irresistibly smooth path or well-placed tree catches Jacques’ eye. So it’s quiet, when Jacques hears a faint rattle of noise.
Jacques’ hand on his chest stops Gabriel dead. “Did you hear that?” he says, and Gabriel listens intently. He looks at Jacques and shrugs: nothing.
Jacques frowns up at the sky, turning his ear up to listen himself. The dull low sound of hail falling on trees. The crunch of leaves far off: a deer, maybe. And then -
“Merde,” Gabriel says, and fumbles the radio handset off the pack on Jacques’ shoulders. “Hey, everything alright up there? We’re hearing shots.”
Dim through the static, faint in the distance, comes the rapid fire of a machine gun.
“Radio, come in,” Gabriel says, urgently. “Come in, radio.”
Jim ducks as the tree over his head explodes into sharp, green-smelling fragments. He can hear Rogers’ man over the radio, stuck barely out of reach inside the half track he’s crouching behind. He looks up and sees men running hard through the woods, trying to escape the ambush. There’s not many of them that can run too fast after weeks or months of hard labor and the thin gruel Hydra called their food. About half of them fall down in their tracks, victim to the machine gun or slow starvation. The air is full of smoke and scattered gunshot as whoever can fire back does so. But there’s not many of those.
Jim hefts the gun in his hands, some Hydra pistol that shoots blue light instead of bullets. His hip and leg ache where he’d tumbled half onto the ground and half on top of Carter, who had yanked them both out of the cab when the Germans had started firing. She’s pressed against him shoulder to elbow, eyeing the radio. When a bullet cracks the glass and pings off the side mirror right above their heads, she doesn’t even flinch. “I’ll cover you,” Jim says to her, and hopes like hell that he knows how to shoot this thing.
The funny thing about German machine guns is how much faster they are than the American versions. Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. The sound had split the soft quiet of the forest, rattling like thunder through the trees. They’d turned and looked, both of them: Bucky with the rifle up against his shoulder, Steve with his empty, cold hands. “Lead platoon,” Bucky says, even though Steve can hear just fine from his good ear when there aren’t other noisy things competing for his attention.
Silence, and then again: ra-ta-ta-ta-ta. Then the sci-fi noise of the Hydra guns, returning fire. They’d put the wounded up front, spread whatever weapons they had scrounged from the factory among each platoon. Whatever the front platoon had, it wasn’t enough. Ra-ta-ta-ta, out-gunned.
Steve drops to his knees, fumbles the radio off his back. “Carter, report,” he says into it, and feels relief wash through him like a wave when it crackles and spits and a moment later admits Peggy’s voice.
“We’re pinned,” she says, as dry and unhurried as if he were teasing her out on the rifle range; only the thinnest edge of tension runs through her voice, like a single strand of hair out of place. A pistol cracks very close to her radio, and Steve winces as the sound of it bounces around his ear. “Could use some assistance.”
“The tank,” Bucky says. The ground is wet and cold under Steve’s knees, and Bucky towers over him, his face shadowed. “Send the tank up from the next platoon.”
Steve shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. The sound of a tank firing would bring every Nazi in the area down on their heads, if their attackers hadn’t radioed back already. They’d had - they always had weeks to prepare for their operations, everything choreographed to the littlest detail, known: terrain maps, radio codes, thin silver reels of recorded sounds -
The edge of the radio transmitter digs into his forehead, sharp under the comforting weight of his helmet. “Shut up,” he hisses, and the map unfurls in his mind: the little stream they passed about fifteen minutes ago, which was probably where Peggy and her platoon had been ambushed. The twist in the path behind it, where the trees grew thick and twisted and impossible to see around.
“We need to send a platoon up from the rear,” Steve says, and Bucky rears back.
“You nuts?” he says. “None of them have weapons. They’d all get killed.”
“I know,” Steve says, and hefts the radio in his hand. No overlap of competing automatic fire from the Nazis. (No automatic weapons on their side at all.) Non-combat patrol, then. Running supplies from one Nazi pillbox to another, maybe. Ten, fifteen shots at a time. Just one submachine gun. The others firing rifles, or sitting back and letting the M40 do all the work.
He looks up at Bucky. “How much time to do you need to run half a mile?”
Bucky’s head jerks to one side. Not questioning, exactly. Waiting for the rest. His breath blows white plumes into the air. Steve picks up the radio again, says into it low and urgent, “Pops, come in.” Hoping like hell Dugan was in range of the walkie talkie’s frequency. Dull shame in his chest that he never learned Morse for the radio, they all could have learned and not been relying on the company’s radioman for this. “Pops, do you copy?”
“I read you, Barber,” says the radio, cautious and quiet. Dum Dum transmits like the Nazis can’t hear him if he whispers.
The truck grumbles as the Limey steers it over to a break in the path, and kills the engine. In the silence, broken only by the ticking of the engine, they can hear machine gun fire.
Over the radio, Rogers says, “Lead platoon’s taking fire. We need a surprise. Give ‘em a wide berth and come up from south, south-west. Make as much noise as you can on approach - on the radio too, in case they’re listening.”
On the other side of the cab, the Limey’s eyes are hard. Two days stuck in a truck with the guy and all Dugan knows about him is he likes to throw himself out of perfectly good airplanes. “We don’t have any automatic weapons,” he says, not looking too bothered by it. Dugan glances down at the Trench gun at his side, trying to guess what Rogers is playing at. The pistol he’d grudgingly loaned to the Limey is tucked into the other man’s belt.
“Some kinda fake-out,” Dugan says.
The Limey’s only reaction is to blink; he’s a cold fish. “That is what you do, isn’t it?” he asks. “Deceptive operations?”
Dugan ruffles his own mustache with two fingers. What Dugan does is build the things he’s told to build, and carry the things he’s told to carry, and, up until two days ago, luxuriate in the knowledge that the artists’ outfit was too valuable to get sent places they could get shot at. Weren’t there real soldiers in that platoon, the one getting shot at?
“Pops,” Rogers says again, through the radio, and Dugan grits his teeth. When Rogers says jump, he can’t help himself: he asks how high.
“Wilco,” he says, his voice crackling. “Over and out.”
Steve looks up, meets Bucky’s eyes. “You’re a good shot with that,” he says, nodding his chin towards the rifle. “The best in your company, you said.”
“My letters were real,” Bucky says, “every goddamn word.”
Steve flushes, hot as if he’d been scalded: the shame of Fort Wayne, and the letters Bucky had sent before the Army censors could get ahold of them, full of words that burned the pages they were written on. He ignores it and says, doggedly, “There was a big pile of stones right near that river we passed, you remember it? About two hundred yards north of the river.”
Bucky’s jaw tightens, and he nods in understanding. “If that’s not where the Germans are,” Steve says, “take cover there.”
Bucky’s hand snakes out, and grabs Steve’s shoulder roughly. “Be careful,” he says, and gives Steve a shake - hard enough that Steve staggers a little under the force of it. Then he turns, adjusts his grip on the butt of the rifle, and takes off running.
The forest swallows up the sound of his footsteps.
Steve clenches his hand around the transmitter, staring sightlessly in the mist towards where Bucky no longer is. The hail is giving way to rain, wetting down the back of Steve’s coat, trickling into his shoes, but still pinging plunk plunk off his helmet.
He reaches up with his free hand to steady it and then leaves his hand there against the cold metal, the curve of it just the same shape as his palm.
He presses the receiver but doesn’t say anything, doesn’t transmit. His breath rasps in his lungs, cut tight by the muscles in his throat.
It’s the cold that does it for him, that makes it so hard to breathe.
Ra-ta-ttt -
The air blows out of Steve’s lungs like he’s been hit, and for a moment he feels like he has been: his muscles burn, his head swims, his ribs ache. The crack of rifle shot: once, twice, silence. Twice more: crack, crack, the sound lingering in the air like lighting.
Then silence, and the whining, whistling sound of Steve’s own breathing.
“Barber,” says the radio, in Falsworth’s crisp tones. “Worked like a charm; they thought we were another platoon. The Germans turned towards us, and Barnes got ‘em from behind. We’re all clear.”
“Jesus, Mary and all the saints,” Steve whispers, and lets his head fall into his chest. He hits the button for the radio. “Okay,” he says, and holds the transmitter away from his face so they can’t hear him wheezing. “Pass the word down the line and get everyone bunched up in one group. We’ve got about eight miles to go, let’s get back to Italy as quick as we can.”