Sniper Elite: Memoirs of Africa
Being surrounded by men groaning in agony; the stench of blood, piss and puss; the exhausted nurses and scant few doctors hovering around anxiously; ah, the joys of the sick tent.
Karl hated every second of being in that tent.
He was well enough to keep going on missions, he'd said that much to the captain, but the officer just shook his head and replied: "Son, you were throwing up not an hour ago and you look like you look like you're about to faint on your feet. We're stopping by another patrol with a doctor, and you're staying there until we've made sure that you don't have malaria."
After narrow victories on vital missions, dodging bullets, kissing the reaper on the cheek one day after the other, he was knocked out of action by the damned flu of all things. It pissed him off.
Karl didn't bother silencing, or even translating into English, the stream of muttered German curses working their way out of his mouth when a nurse stopped at his bed.
She was a rosy-cheeked young woman, but her eyes were hard and only chilled when Karl refused to allow her to take his temperature.
"Take the bloody thermometer in your mouth or its going up the other end." She warned.
Deciding that he didn't feel well enough to pick a fight with the nurse (especially since the look in her eyes suggested that she was willing to make good on her threat), he relented and held the cold tube of glass under his tongue. The nurse checked in with a man next to him with second-degree burns from a vehicle fire. She met Karl's glare when she turned back to him and looked at the thermometer reading. She scowled,
"Thirty-nine degrees Celsius." She looked back at Karl, frown softening, and he knew how bad he looked: bags under his eyes, sweat coating every inch of his body, pale except for a flush on his cheeks, heartbeat noticeably fast. "Your temperature has gone up since we last checked. You're staying here."
Karl sighed in aggravation as she left, his temples pounding.
The groaning man next to Karl quieted down after the sun set. It was a relief; the man's pain was only a reminder that he was here, taking up space. The fever and headache made it impossible to sleep, and he tossed and turned, annoyed at how he felt too hot despite how cold the night air was, and how the thin sheet under him stuck to his sweaty skin. When he heard feet sinking into the sand near his cot, he assumed it was a nurse doing the graveyard shift.
"Mr. Fairburne."
He opened his eyes. This man definitely wasn't one of the nurses.
The dim light from a few scattered lamps and the way his head swam made it harder to see, but he could make out the features of a bandaged man in uniform standing at the foot of his cot.
He was 5'9" and stocky, with sun-browned skin, with plain features, brown hair that was combed back, brown eyes that were creased at the edges, a mustache trimmed in a style Karl had seen on too many working men to count and bandages wrapped his chest, visible through his half-unbuttoned, dusty, shirt.
His appearance was so completely average that he could've been lost in a crowd of three, but Karl recognized his face and voice all the same.
"Benjamin Brauer, right?"
The man he'd rescued from Fort Rifugio two months ago chuckled. "Nice to see that you haven't forgotten about me."
"I don't forget faces."
"Hard to believe you're here now. Malaria?"
"It's only the flu." Karl tried not to grumble.
"No offense but you look like shit. You probably shouldn't be out doing suicide missions like you normally do...or so I hear." Brauer shrugged. "I listen, and it seems you've built up quite a reputation."
Brauer looked much better than the bloody, slumped, limping man Karl covered during the mission. His unkempt mustache and hair were both trimmed, his bandages a pristine white, his uniform clean, if a little sandy, and his eyes bright and sharp.
"You look better than me." Karl mentioned.
"I think so too, but I'm still under observation. I had to wait until Nurse Frightengale was off-duty to see you at least. She's got a worse temper than my torturer did." Brauer chuckled and smiled at Karl as he sat down on the low cot, careful to avoid Karl's legs. "Thank you. It's small, but it occurred to me that I never said it to you."
"You don't have to. I was doing my job."
Brauer raised his hand to his chest in mock hurt. "Markson wasn't joking when he said you were colder than an ice box."
"Markson is full of shit."
"Oh? It seems he was correct about you though."
"Did you expect me to weep with relief?"
"No. 'Glad to see that you're still alive' you have sufficed."
Brauer's words were joking, not accusing, but they stung in Karl's chest. He had been confident that the informer he rescued would live; his worst injuries had been broken ribs after all. Still, he should've gone to see if Brauer was alright, or at least asked the captain. In the back of his mind, he could almost see a half-memory and half-imagining image of his mother in her favorite patterned dress, shaking a wooden spoon at him and telling him that this wasn't how she raised him.
"I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to sneak out and risk the nurse's wrath to say that."
"And you should be. 'Shame, shame, shame' as mu mum used to say. She'd yell for hours if I ever did that."
Mine would just give me a watschen. Karl thought. He found himself relaxing and answering with, "Then I should be glad she and my mother aren't here."
"Our mums with us here! Can you imagine? They wouldn't let us out of the camp!" Brauer laughed and the man next to them groaned and turned over.
"Quiet! You want the nurse to find us?" He had to keep from smirking through the words.
Brauer caught his breath and stopped laughing. "Well except maybe Drew's. He said she had to be told by the recruiter that she couldn't sign up herself."
Doesn't surprise me. Karl thought. A woman would have to be tough in order to raise a son on her own.
"You can see where Drew got it from. He might not look it, but he's got better aim with a grenade than me, and he's not too bad with a scoped rifle. Made that Nazi who tried to hijack one of his trucks think twice."
Brauer smiled, than it fell off his face and he gave Karl an odd look.
"If you don't mind me asking, how did a German end up in the US army?"
Karl sat up as if hit with a pole-axe.
"Relax, I'm not accusing you of divided loyalties; you certainly didn't hesitate to shoot fifty Waffen-SS to help me escape. I just like to get to know my teammates, and I'll be joining your patrol as soon as you head out."
Karl fell completely silent. The only person in his patrol who knew, only of two people, now he supposed, was Captain Kelson. Karl had made the decision to be the silent American with an odd accent on the day of his deployment. As it was, he was treated with privacy and a distant respect and that was how he liked it. He wasn't going to risk staring and private jokes by throwing the closet door open and exposing all of his skeletons to the light of day.
"Why do you ask?" Karl asked in a tone that was more waspish than intended.
"I just said; I like getting to know my teammates. Also, I'm far too curious for my own good as you'll find. Comes with being an informant."
Karl raised an eyebrow at Brauer's honesty. No ulterior motives, he was sure, but he had plenty of memories he was perfectly content with them being locked away. "My past is mine. But I will say this: I'm no damned spy or defector. What I'm doing here, I'm doing for my country."
"America or Germany?"
"Both."
Brauer tapped his chin and stared at the ceiling above him, watching the waves in the canvas from the wind, as if they were inside a brown fabric ocean, looking up. "That's one way of looking at it. You can stop glaring now; I've already said that I'm not accusing you of anything. The French Resistance is fighting the Vichy agents because they love their country right?"
He looked down and meet Karl's glare. "Contrary to what you might think, you being German is not a secret. Drew told me that you were born in Berlin, the son of the Weimar Republic's ambassador to America, when he and Markson came by offering everybody moonshine and I asked about you."
"What?"
"Nobody holding it against you, mate. Except maybe Markson, but I think he holds everything against everybody. That one's blood runs a little hot for a sniper."
"Of course he does," Karl growled. Everyone knew? Everyone? He thought. He scoured his memories for anything that could've tipped him off.
"Lieutenant, the LRDG has everyone from New Zealanders to Rhodesians in it. Nobody cares that our dear American hanger-on is German."
"Your dear American hanger-on is going to win the war for you if you all don't stop drinking and chatting."
"Really? So we can all go home and have a pint? Thanks mate!"
Brauer laughed louder, prompting Karl to shush him. He clapped Karl on the back.
"Well, you've answered my question, so I'll take my leave before I make your headache worse." He stood up and turned and Karl remembered why he'd come here in the first place.
"Glad to see that you're still alive."
Brauer turned to look back at him with a smirk barely visible and tinged with yellow from the lamplight.
"Same to you, Karl."
