Chapter 8
When they meet up with the fighter planes that will be escorting the carrier that will be dropping them in France, Gabe finds himself shaking hands with four black pilots, lieutenants, from the 99th Fighter Squadron. They’ve been flying over Cassino on recon and assault missions. The planes have a vivid red insignia; they are known as the Red Tails or the Red-Tailed Angels.
“These fighters are the best you’re gonna find,” says the corporal who drives with them to the airfield. “Don’t care if they’re red, green, or polka dotted.” Gabe pinches his mouth shut, because he’s heard that one before. “They sure know how to fly a plane. Brought down five German fighters in four minutes.”
One of the fighters, Lt. Lester, says they may have to shoot down some bombers. “But that’s our job. Don’t worry about that,” he says.
“Who’s worried?” Dum Dum grumbles.
Gabe says, “Thanks.”
Monty says, “These fellows haven’t yet earned their wings.”
“They’ll be fine,” Lester says, “If we can do it, so can they.”
Gabe looks at him in surprise, and Lester smiles at him - he’s a gentle-looking, long-lashed fellow. Later he explains, while they’re alone in the roar of the airfield, engines getting ready, and Gabe is checking the straps on his parachute. He says, “Three times as much training as the white fellas. Why? Because they wanted to prove we couldn’t do it. Only of course now we’re three times as good.” He grins again, a little slyly. “Or at least twice as good.”
Gabe smiles back.
Lester sighs. “‘Course, now there are some boys who say we needed three times as much training. Rather than having to take three times as long to prove ourselves.”
Gabe nods. “So it goes,” he says.
“Anyhow. We’re the best,” Lester says, without real ego.
“One in the eye for the krauts, I guess,” Gabe says quietly, though of course they both know the sad irony, which is of course that the krauts can’t see who’s shot them down, nor will they care afterwards. It’s not really one in the eye for the krauts; it’s one in the eye for Jim Crow, only of course they don’t say that, because as far as they are concerned the Army is Jim Crow and Jim Crow is the Army.
He can tell Lester wants to ask a whole lot of question about the passengers: between Steve and Barnes in his Captain America gear and not to mention him and Jim and then Jacques with his accent, they’re a funny sight; and too they’ve got their rubber ducks all packed up on pallets and loaded into the big bomber. It’s got to raise questions for everyone.
But one of the things the Red Tailed Angels must have learned in all that training is not to ask questions.
-
No one shoots at them during the crossing, but the landing isn’t easy. They all practiced a few times, on a safe clear airfield in England, but this time it’s night, in a countryside that’s been getting shelled since 1940 at least. They come in low and fast, and by the time they’ve all dropped out of the carrier they wind up scattered at least a hundred yards away from each other across a wet churned-up field. It stinks of cattle dung and grass. Gabe finally comes to rest fetched up against a tree, covered in mud and with one arm totally numb where he’s banged his funny bone. He has to somersault away pretty quickly when one of the stacks of decoys tries to roll up against the same tree, nearly crushing him. In bundles of ten, tied with cord, the false tanks weigh almost a thousand pounds. They have planned it so they’ll get them with a tractor later.
When they all reconnoiter, Bucky’s holding Steve up with an arm around his shoulder. Dugan’s got a bloody nose. Monty is fine; he’s done tens of parachute drops already. Twenty-three, as he’ll inform anyone who asks. This will make it an even two dozen. He’s helping Jacques take off his rig and they are in a spirited argument that they began while still in the plane, over the fact that De Gaulle has taken over the Free French as of a few days ago. In Gabe’s view the whole problem is that the rest of the Allies don’t trust De Gaulle and if they did things would be all right. Peggy’s told him some of the Americans still deal with the Vichy government, which isn’t right. He doesn’t say anything about it this time, though, because Steve needs help.
Being Steve, he won’t say anything, but he looks like he’s in pain. He’s limping, one foot not touching the ground. Gabe goes to get him by the other arm and Steve lets him, though his shoulders are hiked up tense. Really, Bucky could carry Steve himself. Hell - back home he’d often enough picked Gabe up on the dance floor and swung him around; he’s pretty strong. He’d held Gabe up against a wall one time, just with the force of his legs, and Gabe’s wrapped around his waist.
But Steve, he doesn’t like to be held like that. He doesn’t like to have his feet up off the ground. So they take him together over the rutted ground and toward the nearby barn. It’s big and vaulted. It smells… it’s a smell Gabe can just vaguely remember, maybe from when he was a really little kid. Country smell, hay and cotton; it brings up a lingering taste in the back of his throat like sawdust. He distracts himself by switching his brain over to French and naming all of the objects he can see around him.
Fourche à foin. Pitchfork.
There’s wood stacked in the corner.
“Is it safe to start a fire?” Gabe ventures, and Jacques laughs at him.
“Pas ici,” he says, and Gabe feels his face turn hot, because of course - they’re in a hay barn. It would go up in a second. He shakes his head at himself; his daddy would be ashamed to know he raised such a city slicker.
“We also don’t wanna get spotted,” Steve points out. He’s pale and lowering himself slowly onto a pallet. “Maybe later, when we know it’s safe.”
Morita kneels down next to Steve and is pulling off his boot, making that funny frown and grimace like he does sometimes. So is Bucky, like he’s feeling the pain Steve won’t let himself. Steve’s just got his teeth open a little, breathing tight between them.
“Radio to Carter?” Morita says under his breath, and Gabe nods.
“Righto,” Monty says. He’s the one who parachuted down with the radio equipment, because he could be trusted not to land on it and wreck it. They go outside and set up the flexible antenna while Dum Dum and Jacques busy themselves with the tractor: digging it out from the hay, calling over to Morita for help when it won’t start, then driving off through the dark, bumpy fields to round up all the rubber ducks that have gone astray in the drop. It’s nighttime, very dark. And it’s very, very quiet.
-
The thing about places where there’s been bombings is it’s not just the look of them, like they saw in films back home: it’s the smell. The smell of heavy burned metal lingers in the air for a long, long time. That must be what scared away the cows, or maybe the farmer who used to live here took them away. When dawn breaks and they explore the rest of the village - what little of it is still standing - they find that most of the edibles have disappeared apart from some sausages and cheese that have plenty of mold in them. There’s also a barrel of old flour. It has some weevils or something in it.
Gabe says, “I’m not cooking, I didn’t join the Army to cook,” which is a joke because that’s all they were taking black soldiers for, for the most part; it’s why they tried to 4-F him until he came back with a doctor’s note saying his heart was just fine, thanks, at which point they said, let’s level with you, son, you’re going to find yourself carrying trays for white officers down in Alabama. So then he and Steve had taken their shot at the artist’s outfit, and now here he is.
Jacques makes the fire, of course. He murmurs to Gabe, “Bois tordu fait feu droit.”
Gabe translates for the rest of them. “Crooked wood still makes a straight up fire.”
“I like that,” Steve says, and Bucky rolls his eyes and says, “Of course you do.” He hands Steve his tin cup of what the Army calls coffee, then gives one to Gabe. Monty still prefers tea, but it doesn’t go nearly as well with the liquor they found in dusty bottles in someone’s root cellar. Steve and Bucky add some to their coffee, making it Irish coffee, and Gabe tries it too. It’s a little strong for this early in the morning, but not unwelcome.
Morita uses more of it to wash out the cuts they’ve all gotten landing in the bracken. Gabe honestly hadn’t even noticed at the time, but they sting, and as Morita says, it would be dumb as hell for them to die of an infection now.
-
They’re waiting for Peggy and the group of French Resistance fighters she’s bringing to help them. Either the sausage Jacques added to last night’s soup had turned or they’re all nervous, because every one of them keeps jumping up with the trots all night, trekking across fields of dry cow shit to an outhouse that smells a lot worse. Cows, Gabe supposes, have relatively blameless digestive systems as compared to human beings.
It’s quiet for two days and nights. Or quiet in a relative way. By day they monitor German frequencies and track troop movement. At night they crouch in their ruined barn, made more ruined by judicious application of paint and canvas, and pray to pass unnoticed.
There’s a stretch of water between England and France only twenty miles wide. It’d make a lot of sense to send a lot of soldiers through that twenty mile stretch, if you think about it logically. Good port on both sides, some nice roads and bridges on the French half, easy to move a whole army onto the continent from there and roll it up to Hitler’s doorstep.
While Captain America was storming churches in Italy, massive columns of Sherman tanks have been lining up along the white cliffs of Dover. Planes and trucks and camps full of men, too. As the Allies go, so too the Germans: pas de Calais is bristling with Nazi garrisons, staring patiently across the Channel, daring the Brits to make the first move, to fail here as they have at Dieppe, as they have failed at other beaches along northern France.
But that’s not their job. It’s not why they’ve been dropped into one of the most heavily fortified stretches of Europe. They’ve got the hard part, Captain America and his commandos. Sabotage isn’t as easy a detail as those yokels babysitting an army of rubber tanks over in Dover.
Gabe dozes off toward morning on the second night after their landing. It’s a dry kind of sleep, as uncomfortable and scratchy as the hay he lies on. Dry everywhere: dry on his back where he’s lying next to Jacques, all of them in a pile because even in April it’s fairly cool at night. Dry in his throat. Dry and sandy behind his eyes. His head buzzes with dehydration from the runs and with the sifting stuff of fatigue, so that at first he thinks the buzz might be merely the stuff in his brain roiling around.
But it gets louder.
Louder, this humming sort of clicking sound, and then he hears Morita jump up and shout something. Jacques jerks upright, too, snorting and smacking his way out of sleep. Dum Dum bellows; Morita has, only maybe by accident, stepped on him.
Bucky’s leapt up too, grabbing his gun, and Steve’s sitting upright and peering wildly around. It’s not even dawn. It’s all gray and fuzzy, all around them.
“Calmez, calmez!” Jacques shouts at last, and they stop. Steve hold up a hand and squints. Gabe freezes. He’s on his knees, he realizes, almost as if in prayer.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he asks.
“C’est pas les avions,” Jacques explains. He motions, a calming gesture. He knows from explosions, Gabe guesses, and now that he listens more closely, he can tell - yeah, it’s not bombs or shells or strafing they hear outside.
“Les cigales,” Jacques says.
“It’s crickets,” Gabe says. “Just crickets.”
Morita has actually jammed his hat into his mouth, and one of the ear flaps dangles like he’s a dog that’s bitten down on a rabbit. He looks funny, but he also looks scared. Finally, he takes the hat out and says, “They don’t sound like that in California.”
Bucky’s shaking his head, and so is Steve. Steve says, “Well, we don’t have them at all in New York.” They’re making excuses for getting so spooked, Gabe guesses; all of them are doing that. Gabe thinks to himself, and he is ashamed by this - to be relieved that even those who’ve seen real infantry combat, like Morita and Bucky, seem frightened. It’s not just him.
It’s funny. Somewhere, somehow, he can remember hearing this noise before. Crickets in summer making noise in the fields when his daddy was coming home, a long time ago, before they came up North.
Monty clears his throat and says, “Quite a ruckus.” He has this way of speaking, as if by pronouncing the oddness they encounter in his distinct way, he can somehow take ownership of it and make it less of a disaster. He talks about the Blitz like that: as if he’s proud of it, which he is, really, or rather he’s proud of being able to describe it as if it’s nothing.
They’re all relaxing by this point, and then someone farts loudly and they all break up laughing. Nervous laughter.
“Whew,” Dum Dum says. “I’m going to get some air.”
“Crickets, huh?” Bucky says, giving Steve a hand up off the straw. “Fucking crickets.”
The crickets have scared them all awake, so they go outside to eat breakfast, which is K-rations until they move on to their next base of operations. Gabe crumbles his crackers into a cup of tea he’s mixed with the powdered milk, copying from Monty. The tea Monty brought is better than the Army coffee and Dugan and Bucky are too stubborn to drink it, but Gabe has always been a flexible sort.
Gabe remembers where he’s heard the word “cigale” before. The things are quieter now, not much worse than 125th Street when you stumble out onto it after the bars have all closed. Their ruckus seems to have been confined to dawn, maybe aggravated by the dew. As mist rises off the grass, coaxed upwards by the sun, the noise is quieting down. Later they’ll find it tapers off into the afternoon as the temperature grows too warm for them, and begins again at dusk and near daybreak.
“La cigale et la fourmi,” Gabe says now.
“Ah ouai,” says Jacques, nodding thoughtfully. He blows on his tea and watches the fields, maybe thinking of his own farm and the harvest there.
“We read it in school,” Gabe explains to the others. “The grasshopper who sang all summer. Jean de la Fontaine. Aesop’s fables. You know, he got the story from an African. Anyway,” he tells Bucky, who’s looking interested. “The grasshopper - ”
“I thought it was a cricket,” says Dugan, who gives everyone a hard time like this.
Gabe shrugs.
“Anyway?” Steve says, curious now.
“The grasshopper sang all summer,” Gabe says, “And the ant worked, and then all the grasshoppers died when winter came.”
“C’est presque vrai,” Jacques says. “Quelques espèces de cigales ne se reveillent que chaque douzaine d’années… c’est pour qu’ils soient si nombreuses que les predateurs ne peuvent pas les manger.”
“I think I got that,” Steve says.
“I didn’t,” Morita mutters. He’s trying to smooth his hat back into shape. Amusingly, Dum Dum is doing something similar with his own.
“The strategy,” Monty translates airily, loosely, “is to fling large numbers of themselves at the enemy every so often, knowing that the enemy can only eat a certain number of them, and the rest will make it out.” He adds, “They sing to draw attention. They do it on purpose."
“Huh,” Bucky says. He’s exchanging a look with Morita behind Steve’s back. Steve, meanwhile, is staring down into his coffee, jaw tight; and then he looks up and smiles.
-
Peggy arrives just after moonrise on the third night, towing four ragged looking members of the French Resistance - three men and one woman. They shake hands with Bucky, stoic in his Captain America costume, and then with Jacques. They’ve blocked up the basement of a nearby farmhouse to take this meeting, to keep the faint light of a gas lamp from showing to any Germans passing by. There are two ways out of the place but they’re all itchy. It’s too easy to think about how it could turn into a shooting gallery, with them on the losing side.
They have Jim and Dum Dum on the perimeter, Steve upstairs peering out the windows. Every once in awhile Gabe can hear him thumping that twisted ankle across the bare wood floor. He’s never been what you’d call graceful, and though Jim assured them it would heal in a few days Steve hasn’t done much to speed the process.
Gabe is downstairs with Bucky and Peggy and Jacques and the French - ostensibly keeping guard at the cellar door, but mostly playing dumb, so they don’t know Cap has another French-speaker in his unit. It grates on him, though, his part. He stares blank and uncomprehending when one of them men says something uncomplimentary about Cap’s suit.
He stays blank while they pull out a map with markings all over it. German postings. Where the roads have been mined. There are scribbles all over the sides of it, and the paper’s much worn. Gabe wonders what their plan will be if they’re caught; whether they’d have time to burn the map. Jacques has told him that for the most part the Germans do not kill the French they capture unless they’re caught with a radio. Mostly they send them to the camps. They’d rather have workers than bodies; Jacques had escaped from one camp and been caught trying at two more before he’d wound up in Kreischberg.
Calais-Nord is the old town, encircled by canals flowing fast from the winter rains. There’s not a lot left of the town proper, which was bombed to hell and back by the Brits back in ‘40, just a lot of Germans who have taken up occupation in the rubble, filling themselves into the nooks and crannies like cockroaches. It’s the canals that they’re after, or rather the bridges running across them.
“The Germans run four trains a week from here,” says one of the men, Alain, stabbing his finger down at the map where a trainyard is sketched out. “They bring the concrete and the mines through our city, for their coastal defenses. Twice, we’ve tried to blow the terminal, but there are many collaborators.” He spits on the ground.
They know all of this, inside and out. Well enough that Captain America can settle back and speak confidently, even if Gabe knows Bucky has no idea what Alain actually said.
“This is our target,” he says, and taps the map in front of them, where one canal takes a long bend around the western wall of Calais-Nord and collides with another. “We’ll take your men and move on it tomorrow night.”
It’s three klicks or so from the hated trainyard, and when Jacques translates this the Frenchmen look at Captain America with confusion, and then look to Peggy.
“Is he as stupid as he looks?” asks one of the other men, whose name is Louis. “What the hell good would blowing up this bridge do? It won’t stop the Nazis and their damn trains.”
Peggy smiles. She gleams even through the haze of cigarettes, her mouth deep red, perfect even though her boots and clothes are scuffed with travel. It’s a nice bit of theater, Gabe thinks, even as he aches a little just to see her. She lets Captain America speak again, and then tells them in French what he’s saying.
“Tell your soldiers that the plan is to blow the north bridge. Let someone pass along the word to the Germans. When they gather up here to find Captain America,” and Peggy taps the map again, looking in each of their eyes, “our men will be here, under the bridge above the trainyard, planting explosives. Voila - no more trains. No more mines. No more bunkers.”
The French turn their faces down towards the map in silent contemplation. Thump goes Steve across the floor upstairs, thump thump. Only Bucky looks up.
“Well done,” says Alain, and reaches out to shake Captain America’s hand. “It’s a good plan.”
The attack is set for the following night. Peggy goes with them; not even a war can spare them from propriety. She lingers just for a moment, her hands folded in front of her - near enough that Gabe can smell the last traces of perfume, hear the soft sound of her breath.
At the door, Alain turns to Jacques and leans in to speak. His compatriots have vanished into the darkness and it’s only the two of them and Gabe. Alain glances towards him regardless, and Gabe lets his eyes wander, go wide and vacant. Nobody here but us chickens.
“So your army will invade at pas de Calais,” Alain says, “this is where you will come to free us from the Nazis.”
Jacques lays a heavy hand on Alain’s shoulder. He looks this way and that, like he’s not supposed to tell. “They’re massing a force like you’ve never seen,” he says, low. “There will not be a German left alive in France.”
“You don’t mind lying to your people?” Gabe asks, once they’re alone, standing together in the door of the farmhouse. Thump comes from behind them, and they turn to see Steve making his grim, slow way down the stairs, Bucky’s rifle under his arm.
Jacques laughs. “It’s not a lie,” he says. “It’s my most fervent hope.”
“But we won’t be landing at pas de Calais,” Gabe says, even though Jacques knows this as well as he does - knows the dates that have been fixed, the scant months they have to wreak as much havoc as they can before the Channel fills with soldiers. To keep the Nazi’s eyes fixed on Calais, and not on Normandy.
Jacques shrugs. “When France free at least and every German dead - they won’t mind either.”
-
It rains all day and into the evening. They spend the gray hours preparing: Jacques putting together his bombs; Dugan checking and rechecking their equipment; Monty diligently stitching patches onto their uniform jackets, the red pentagram of the First United States Army Group, which is just as imaginary as their rubber tanks; Jim hunched over the radio, listening intently to every dot and dash to see if their operation has been made. There isn’t much for Gabe to do, so he climbs into the hayloft with Bucky and they sleep through most of the afternoon. He’s almost stopped smelling the hay by now, so when he dreams he gets tangled up in the smell of Bucky’s warm, broad body next to his, the memories fresher than he would have thought, with all the years between that wild summer and now.
When he wakes up Bucky is staring blankly up at the ceiling, one hand tucked behind his head and the other around Steve, who’s asleep on his chest. He shifts when he sees that Gabe is awake, and for a long moment they look at each other without speaking.
How strange a thing, Gabe thinks, still lost somewhere in misty dreams: to travel the world and find old friends at the other side. He’d had never once thought of being a soldier until he had, until the need to be counted had consumed him. Would it have been easier if the war had taken him the way it had eagerly taken Bucky - conscription, boot camp, infantry, killing? To be just one more body thrown into the grinder? Or is it easier to sing and call the enemy down upon them?
There’s a thump on the ladder. Dum Dum’s bowler precedes him, peering up the rim of the loft. “Cap?” he asks.
Steve rubs his face fitfully against Bucky’s chest. His face is flushed, hot enough that he leaves little damp marks on Bucky’s shirt. “Yeah,” he says. “Be there in a second.”