Disclaimer: Enjoying their company, again! All for fun, not for profit of any pecuniary kind.
Solo Mission
by tallsunshine12
Chapter 1 The Stream
A/N: I've rewritten several parts of this story and added chapter links. Hope you enjoy it!
Moving behind a tree hugging the shore, he caught a few ragged breaths and emerged again as bullets plinked the sand and skimmed off the rocks in the river. Yanking off his helmet, he tossed it along with his tommy gun into the grasses, then dived into the water and started swimming for the river's churning center.
Each round from the machine gun on the hill behind him made the water dance in the swimmer's face as the bullets followed him deeper and deeper in. One nicked his arm and it began reddening, bleeding right into the stream. He quickened his pace.
He had to be captured, but he couldn't make it look too easy.
One of the Krauts ran down the hill to the shore and pulled the cord of a potato masher, slang for a German hand grenade, and hurled it at the fleeing swimmer. It sailed through the air and hit the water in front of him, blowing up a geyser of water as high as six feet in the air.
In its pressure wave, he tumbled over and over and crashed into a rock, bruising one of his eyes on its sharp, granite edge, but even battered he wasn't out yet. The water was too cold for that.
In his enemy's hands, he glanced up at the opposite hill and wondered how his men had reacted to seeing him shot at and nearly blown to bits. But he couldn't make them out. Caje, now acting squad leader, had hidden them too well.
No one could match Caje, the Cajun scout who took the 'point' on the squad's marches, for stealth. As the grenade exploded at the stream, the well-built, ruggedly handsome Louisianian of about twenty-eight raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes.
Crouching in the brush beside him, Kirby hissed, "What's goin' on! Let me see those things, Caje!" He tried to jerk the glasses out of Caje's viselike grip and succeeded only in getting his hand slapped away.
Limp as a rag doll, Saunders hugged the rock with his good arm and turned to see the Kraut on shore shed his greatcoat and wade in, sloshing his way towards him, while two others slipped down the wet, grassy hill towards the beach.
He was trapped. He had nowhere to go as the three men caught up with him. Dragged off the rock, his head busting, one eye bloody, and his legs feeling as substantial as jelly, he couldn't have put up much more than a token fight anyway.
Besides, he had his orders. He was on a mission. A solo mission.
A mission to deliver false information to the Krauts. Under questioning, the plan was for him to 'break down' and confess to an Allied push to the south, when the actual push was to be to the north. If the Germans believed him, it was hoped they'd be inclined to shift men and materiel south. He was the tool to send the Krauts out of the way, at least temporarily, of the true Allied offensive. Such at any rate was the plan.
"He's alive," Caje noted, still watching the scene through the binoculars. "Three Krauts, no, make that four with the man on the ridge at the machine gun, they have him."
"Ain't we goin' down there?" asked Littlejohn, breathing down Caje's neck with worry.
Neither he nor Kirby understood the game being played out before their eyes. After a long march to this sector, one that was in enemy territory and fraught with danger, Sarge had taken Caje aside to a tree and told him something that Kirby and Littlejohn couldn't catch. Something that had involved a lot of hand waving and even some strong looks on Caje's part.
When Caje didn't answer, the 6'6" farmer kept his voice low and asked, "Look, what did Sarge tell you? What's he doin' down there? I knew he shouldn't have gone."
Surveying the scene below, Caje remembered how Sarge had explained that in the event of their capture, it was best if he, Kirby and Littlejohn, all from 1st Squad, King Company, didn't know any more about it.
Caje passed the binoculars to Kirby, who took them readily. Pulling the strap against Caje's fingers, he swore an apology. Placing them up to his sharpshooter's eyes, he pulled them quickly away again and rubbed the slight dampness out of one eye. It wasn't sweat, but fury.
Never had Pvt. William G. Kirby been so confounded by Caje's actions as he was just then. How could he remain so calm, act so efficiently? The MG 42, the hilltop machine gun, would strike a nerve in a stone. But not in Caje.
He shook his head to clear it and put the glasses back to his eyes, not realizing that a futile mania to help Sarge was ripping through Caje too right then. The Louisianian scout could barely control his own urge to go, guns firing, into the fray at the river below.
Kirby provided a play-by-play. "They're draggin' him up the hill." He readjusted the magnification. "They're at the point where the gun is." He pulled the glasses away. "I'm going crazy, Caje. What's goin' on!"
"I promised Sarge not to tell what he told me," was Caje's honest, but dark answer, "and not to go down there and try to rescue him."
Astonished at what he was hearing, Kirby was now more than ever determined to find out what had been said between them. His voice rose in pitch, but because of German ears, even across the water, not in volume.
"Rescue him! Sarge's down there getting shot up, hell—blown up! We gotta help him. Try to flank 'em," he said, "that maneuver Sarge's so fond of."
BAR in hand, he started to move forward. It was hard to rise from a crouch with the twenty-pound weapon, but even harder when Littlejohn's beefy hand clamped down on Kirby's much smaller shoulder.
While holding Kirby down, Littlejohn turned to Caje on his left. "Give us some idea," the big man intoned. "I want to help him, too. Why can't we?"
At odds with his own feelings as well right then, Caje echoed their sentiments. His mind was aflame with doubt. In his own sad, perceptive way, he said, "This is how Sarge wanted it."
"It?" asked Kirby and Littlejohn together. What was Sarge doing down there, facing who knew what in the hands of the enemy?
"it," said Caje. "The Germans must have an OP somewhere near here, or even a command post," he added.
"Caje, you gotta level with us," said Kirby, handing back the glasses.
"I wish I could, Kirby," said the slightly-accented scout, a soft, Gallic resonance in his voice from the Cajun bayous. "Sarge said in case we got captured, and interrogated, we wouldn't know about his mission."
"Mission?" asked Littlejohn. "What kind of mission gets him nearly blown to bits by a potato masher?"
"One that even Lt. Hanley disapproved of, but was forced to let him undertake." Caje raised the binoculars again and made a few adjustments. The river was now empty, all the action moving to the top of the hill. He sighed. "The big brass, Jampel and one major somebody or other—I don't know his name, just his rank—cooked it up."
The muddled look on Littlejohn's face matched Kirby's. "How much of it do you know?" the big farmer persisted.
"I know this, it's a mission within a mission. Sarge had to pass some false information on to the Krauts. It's Sarge's party. And we're not invited."
"Oh, no? Watch this!" Kirby tried to rise again. Littlejohn's hand clamped down with extra force. "Ouch!" whispered the irate Irishman.
"Kirby," said Caje, "don't try anything. If they suspect we're here, too, they may kill him."
Kirby groaned in frustration. "Did he plan on his own capture?"
"Yeah, Kirby, he did. Look, they're gone up over the brow of the hill. We won't see Sarge again, not for a while. And we're supposed to leave the Krauts alone."
Caje's voice drifted off, and each man sat back on the wet fall grass hunkered down in his thoughts. No one said anything, not even Kirby, who felt the most like shouting. In a few minutes, when the coast was clear, they left Saunders to his fate and found their way back to base to report to 2nd Platoon leader Lt. Gil Hanley, their CO.
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That morning, when the patrol consisting of Sgt. Chip Saunders, PFC Paul 'Caje' LeMay, and Pvts. Littlejohn and Kirby set out for the river, electricity was in the air. The men in camp could feel it. Not a storm, but something of a mystery without an exact cause.
No one talked much over rations at breakfast, but one man did pray, the words coming softly to his lips. Doc. He prayed again an hour later. On an errand to replenish his rucksack's first aid supplies, he stumbled onto a meeting between Sarge and Lt. Hanley. He caught the last words Hanley said, "Give 'em everything. Then get out!"
Saunders had nodded and waved—as if he'd never return—and the four-man patrol disappeared into the trees. That's when Doc found himself praying for the second time that day. He had asked to go along, but no medic would be 'necessary' on this trip. How could the lieutenant know that, Doc wondered, unless no one was returning to camp?
When they stopped to take five, the forest serene, Saunders refrained from talking. Taking a swig of his canteen, or a drag of his cigarette, he didn't look at the others. Something was afoot, but they didn't know what it was.
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Back at camp, Hanley felt more than a twinge of guilt. Knowing what he had sent Saunders into—a German-held sector—and that perhaps he'd never return, made the dark-haired, green-eyed second louie toss his pen onto his packing-crate desk.
Up to his ears in drafting condolence letters home, but too tired to think, Hanley rubbed his temples and wished Caje and Kirby and Littlejohn would return soon and bring him whatever news there was.
His and Saunders' friendship went back before D-Day, and Saunders meant the world to him. Not that he would have told that to anyone, not that he had to. It wasn't exactly a platoon secret that he favored 1st Squad, Saunders' squad.
He'd also been hauled on the carpet more than once by Captain Jampel for assigning 1st Squad much tougher duty than he had any of the other four squads in his platoon. But if he did give them harder assignments, it was because Saunders' squad worked harder than any other to bring the war to a swift end. Or something like that.
PFC Abel Brockmeyer, one of the few men in Hanley's platoon who spoke German, was just coming in from midday chow when Hanley caught his eye, and said, "Keep tabs on the radio while I step out, private."
Brockmeyer nodded. "Yes, sir." His eyes, clouded with worry, fastened on his CO's back as Hanley left the tent. He knew the lieutenant's doubts about this 'solo' mission of Saunders'.
Having been up most of the night before, helping Saunders plan the mission, Hanley hiked over to Officer's Country—a bigger tent—and found his cot for a few minutes of ragged sleep. Before nodding off, he himself prayed, prayed like Doc did, and just like him, quietly so no one else could hear.
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At the top of the hill, Saunders sank like a dead weight, forcing the three Kraut privates to struggle and curse to hold him up—curse words were about all the NCO understood of German. How many times had he wished to learn it? When an enemy holds your life in his hands, deciding whether you live or die, it's good to know what he's saying.
A fourth Kraut, a feldwebel, or staff sergeant, one grade higher than Saunders', left the gun and barked an order that sent a private scurrying back to man it. He waved a blurry hand in front of the disoriented GI sergeant's face and Saunders blinked, trying to make sense of the image. Reaching inside his collar, the feldwebel grasped his set of dog tags. Pulling them out, reading them, he dropped the chain again.
Saunders kept his gaze level with the feldwebel's eyes—they were his lodestar, the point where the world stopped spinning if he stared at them hard enough.
"Take him to the farmhouse! We'll question him later," said the feldwebel, again in German.
As both of the privates holding his arms replied, "Jawohl!", Saunders was more muddled than ever.
It wasn't a long walk, about half a mile. He made some of it on his own, and some of it with the help of the gefreiters at his side. Entering the farmhouse by the kitchen, Saunders began almost at once to sink to the flagstone floor.
The privates kept him on his feet and removed his jacket, then helped him to a chair. He sank into it and wiped his face of sweat, all of it from exertion even though the day was cool.
A Kraut private, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, who wore a white armband with a red cross on it, and who was probably a Sani, or German medic, bent over and dabbed at the cut just above his eye—caused by the river rock—with a bit of alcohol.
The feldwebel searched his jacket and web belt, finding his lighter and cigarettes—Lucky Strikes—in one, and a field kit of bandage and sulfa packet in the other. In the belt's pouches were extra bullets to fit his Thompson box magazine. Everything was put back in that was taken out. He had a wristwatch on, but that wasn't taken, either.
But the feldwebel drew the line at Saunders' Thompson. It would be a valuable prize to show off, so he spared a quick word to two of the privates to go back to try to find his gun. They left immediately.
Saunders, breathing in and out, was not even thinking of saying anything. That too would change. His mission required him to relay information, false information, but it wasn't time yet.
He would have to make it look like he had been forced to yield, and then they might give more credence to the story he told them. In his questioning, he hazily gave his name, rank and serial number—three times in all. The exasperated feldwebel struck him once, but only once, and then there came a change in personnel.
From out of the darkened hall just beyond the kitchen, a captain, or Hauptmann, whose name would be revealed later on as Johann Frosch, joined the feldwebel, whose own name hadn't been revealed yet. Beet-red and slightly dyspeptic, Frosch held his stomach in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Saunders, his right eye swollen half-shut, his lip enflamed by the feldwebel's fist, looked up at him wonderingly.
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Caje, Kirby and Littlejohn reported back to Hanley late in the evening, appearing at the command tent hungry, dirty and bushed. Trying to avoid 'contact,' they had had to dodge two German patrols in the woods. Hanley looked up from his maps and overlays as Caje acknowledged him with a brief salute, which the eager second lieutenant quickly returned.
Hanley was indeed the first to speak, his voice grim. "What's the news about Saunders?"
Caje filled him in. "A handful of Krauts captured the Sarge, lieutenant."
"Where?" As Caje showed him on his own field map where the scene at the river happened to be, Hanley jotted down the coordinates of the machine gun nest on his own, larger map.
He was about to ask for more particulars about Saunders himself, when Kirby added something to the conversation.
"Shame good men like Sarge have to be used that way."
"What way?" Hanley asked, a suspicious eyebrow going up. "Caje, what did you tell him?"
Caje felt tired. It had been a long, trying day. He wanted to fold up and go off somewhere to be alone. Maybe go alligator hunting in one of the bayous back home with his Uncle Jean-Pierre.
For a short instant, he was back there, the 'gators slipping lazily into the water as he stood on the opposite bank with a three-pronged gig or pole in hand. With a hook and line secured to a tree, baited with chicken necks, he'd wait for the 'gator to surface and take the bait, then stab it with the trident. But that was only daydreaming.
As it was, he faced Hanley with a bit of flame in his own dark eyes, piercing the tall, middle-thirties man as if skewering a duck for dinner.
"Nothing more than they could see with their own eyes, lieutenant."
Hanley took the sting in good form. It was late, and it had been a long day all the way around. "You men go rest," he said, sympathetically. "Get some chow, too. You've told me everything you could, I know."
Caje and Kirby saluted, while Littlejohn followed them out under their salutes. He had wanted to say something himself, but didn't. He felt sorry for Hanley himself and knew how worried the lieutenant must have been about Saunders.
When the three men got to the muddy ground outside the command tent, dodging a fast-flying jeep along with other GIs on foot, Caje opened up.
"It's an Allied push. We're going north. Sarge had to tell them something else, maybe that the push would be to the south. When he did, the idea is they'll up stakes and move their men and machines that way. Whoever came up with such a plan? It could extend the war for another year!" He was only half-kidding about that extra year.
"The brass," Littlejohn glumly answered, with an eye-roll.
Kirby snorted in agreement. "If it were up to me," said the BAR man, either his wild Chicagoan or his wild Irishman talking, "I'd have this war over with in a heartbeat and us home."
No one answered him. Almost no one ever did but Sarge, and that only to say, "Shut up, Kirby."
Caje looked at his squad mates with a solemn, cheerless eye. "I wonder what's happenin' to Sarge right now."
Up next: Chapter 2 Interrogation