Light Ice
A Real Bastard
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2003
- Posts
- 5,397
It stunk inside the plane. Their jackets had been greased with some kind of compound, an oil meant to keep mustard and nerve gas from penetrating. Even with the jump door open and the clouds whipping past at two-hundred miles an hour there was no relief. Two men, Jackson and Greenman, were bent over toward the nose of the plane vomiting into the corner. Nobody thought any less of them. Air sickness had hit more than a few in training and he counted himself lucky to have escaped it. John Evans never even seen a plane up close until Jump School, let alone fly in one. The Douglas carriers weren't the elegant airliners he'd seen in the magazines. They were bread boxes with wings, stinking of gasoline and oil and loud as hell.
The sound had become so monotonous and so grinding that a few of the men had stuffed cigarette filters into their ears in a desperate attempt to soften the rumble of the twin engines a bit. He'd considered trying it himself but decided against it. Smokes, he knew, would be a valuable commodity on the ground. They'd been given in rations and, although he didn't smoke, he'd taken them. The Lucky Strikes were buried safely under his jump jacket. Better then cash.
Next to him, Corporal Kevin Longer was turning the cricket over in his hands. The little brass noisemaker had been wrapped in black tape to keep it from being reflective, make it easier to hold on to. He watched as a loose flap of tape flickered gently against the brass as Longer juggled it. Longer was a young man, barely nineteen. A good soldier with a round face and big blue eyes. He looked like the perfect son, even with his face painted in black and olive.
"How much longer, John?"
"Can't be much longer. Your gear straight?" John asked in reply, looking from Longer for a moment to the massive leg-bag beside him.
They all had to carry those awful bags, heavy little bastards designed to keep most the solid gear and ammunition safe so their hands were free for the drop. John had shouldered his rifle backwards, as they'd been trained. It'd keep his knee from striking the buttplate when he landed, and the impact from driving the rifle's muzzle into his face and breaking something as a result. He wondered if the others could tell he wanted it close, just for the comfort, and that it made him feel less afraid.
"Yeah, I'm set. Fuck, it feels like we're crawling up here, though. Some Hitler Youth is going to use his slingshot and take us down." Longer quipped, his line short and potent. John forced a smile.
"If we get shot down, Longer, I'd think we'd be lucky if that's what did it."
John Evans looked up past Lieutenant "Arch" and to the jump lights. They were dark. Outside the door the clouds trailed past, grey whispy lumps. For a moment John thought about Georgia and Dog Company's first night jump. Chip Reynolds had busted his leg and Evans had nearly knocked himself out when he'd lost his feet and gotten dragged by his chute across the field. It'd been a couple years since then, they'd all jumped quite a few training missions together. He'd been so confident of the group before. They'd worked like clockwork. But now, looking out that door and into the mass of darkness full of the shadowed hulls of the other planes? He felt a lump in his stomach. A hard knot of anxiety. John was scared.
The plane abruptly banked to its port side before leveling off. And then the flak came.
It was low at first. A carpet of black balls of smoke that appeared with the ominous "whump whump whump" sound of the guns hundreds of feet below them. Most were 88's, all-purpose artillery. A few were larger. Smaller ones thickened the air with tracers, glowing tails leading up with feeble hope toward the planes as they came in. The men had gone quiet now, stopped moving. Many were looking out the small windows to the darkened French skies, watching as the smoke gradually got closer and closer. The plane was diving, getting low enough for a jump. That meant it'd have to slow down, really slow down. They'd be sitting ducks.
A minute later and John felt the plane tremble, heard the guns more distinctly. Another minute and the Douglas was bouncing all over, tossed about by the compression of the air. The sound of flak bouncing off its skin sounded like a high-hat cymbal at the jazz club in Georgia. A metallic "tink tink" that accented the low, bass tremors of the exploding shells. The ride was getting hellish. His eyes looked out the window, watching as one of the C47's nearest theirs took a hit to the cockpit. Glass and steel peeled back to reveal the mortal wound while men spilled desperately out the jump door and down. They cartwheeled into the darkness. He counted seven chutes before it dropped out of sight. Seven out of twenty seven.
His stomach dropped.
"Arch" slapped his shoulder, jolting him. He looked over, already reaching up to fasten his helmet's chinstrap.
"Make ready!" He said, and held his hand out.
Muscle memory. Automation. It felt as though he was governed to take his chute hook and lift it, displaying it with all the others besides him. Longer's face had regained some color, even as their plane bounced hard left against a burst of flak. The metal shards peppered the starboard side of the plane but didn't get through.
"Stand up!"
"Hook up!"
Two orders, one after another. John stood up, grunting as he latched onto the wire. The plane jostled, and the men swayed. Longer lost his balance and fell behind him, only to pop back up into a stand. The plane was tilting wildly. First one side. Then the other. Outside the sky was lit by the soft white flares and orange clouds of explosions. Below, whizzing by, the fields of France had a dark and ominous shape.
He could feel a tremor run through the entire unit, a subtle and shared chord of feeling. It was as though one single communal thought had passed down the line and touched all of them, threatening their courage. That's what John felt, what he told himself. There was no way he was the only one suddenly eager to get the fuck out of this plane. Around them the flak was murderous and angry, reaching out and swatting at the planes overhead like they were a cloud of flies. Out the windows every man could see planes that were burning, or winding their way down towards the fields and hedgerows below. He was almost certain that they were all scared. He was proud that he, and nobody else, lent that fear a voice.
When the light turned green he felt his guts clench. Arch went first, stepping through the door and into the dark. He was gone in an instant, his chute strap plastered against the side of the C47. John didn't wait at the door, he just took two big steps. The first brought him to the door and the next took him through it.
His chute opened and his entire body went rigid, snapped like a wet towel at the community pool. The shock of it took his helmet from his head, breaking the chin strap and leaving it to plummet off into the dark. He swayed, instinctively reaching for the lanyards for his chute. They fought the grip of his hands, their guidance, but he was able to level himself off and take control. The ground was rising up slowly below him. The sky was dark. There were hundreds of chutes, maybe thousands, near him. A man not so far away waved before a black cloud swallowed him.
:WHUMP!:
The explosion forced him to look away, and when he looked back the man was missing his lower half. The chute was in tatters and began to break down, leaving it to be nothing more than a pale silken streamer as the body disappeared.
A field rushed up to meet him, broken sporadically by large wheels of hay. They kept getting larger as he braced himself, aware that he wasn't going to be able to avoid them. His boots struck the top of one and he let his legs buckle, absorbing the impact by going slack and crumpling atop one. The parachute carried him forward, dragging him over the hay and dropping him off the wheel's top for another six foot drop to the grass below. John landed hard, felt the wind get knocked from his lungs, and took a moment to regain it.
His chest still ached but he got to his feet, unbuckling his jump harness. John bundled up the chute like he'd been taught, taking those precious seconds to gather in the silk mess of his chute and all the cords, the vest he quickly discarded, and the parachute he carried with him as he abandoned the field for the hedgerows.
They were thick in the summer, blocky partitions of thick ivy and smaller brambles. A silent series of giants standing sentinel to the drops, separating the fields form one another. He stashed his jump gear inside one of the hedges and unshouldered his rifle, feeling the Garand's weight in his hands. The leg bag was a memory, gone. He hadn't felt it go but he realized he'd lost it the moment he took his rifle off his shoulder. How many of his friends had lost their weapon during the drop? Countless, he imagined. Many of them. Once the prop blast hit them it was like the'd been thrown out of a moving race car. He felt lucky the only thing he'd lost was his helmet and the leg bag.
John pushed a stripper clip into the Garand and rode the bolt forward, listening to the first .30-06 round chamber with a satisfying clack of metal on metal. He took a moment to check the sight, looking down through the telescopic lens, feeling fortunate that he'd been issued the M1C instead of the 1903 Springfield so many others were issued. It made him feel safer, somehow. A kind of peace of mind.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carnier, the sign said. A big blackened arrow carved in the soft-wood sign that pointed up the road to the village ahead, dominated by a large church in its middle. It wasn't large. A couple hundred people, maybe, surrounded by the fields and gently rolling hills of France. A handsome place, Carnier was bisected by two roads that met in the middle of town. The kind of crossroads that was almost certainly an objective. It was also, certainly, about thirty or forty miles from where he was supposed to have been dropped.
He folded the map up and stowed it in his jacket. It'd been almost an hour since he'd landed and he'd not seen anyone from his unit, not a single god damned chute.
John heard voices, and slipped off the road into the drainage ditch that ran beside it. Grass had grown down into it, and there was water at the bottom running south along the road. He kept his feet out of the wet, pressed himself to the edge, and waited. There was four, and two had flashlights. The beams of pale yellow light cut the darkness. Four men, a small patrol. He heard the distinctive and almost angry syllables of German.
They passed, so close that the gravel and stone from the road their boots displaced fell down the grass and touched his cheeks. He waited until they had before he rose up, shouldering the Garand's walnut stock and leveling the barrel on the one farthest from him. The length of the weapon's telescopic sight pointed between the man's shoulders. He squeezed the trigger, feeling the weapon buck against him as it barked sharply in the night, and quickly moved to recenter the rifle's barrel on the closest man as he turned and shouted in German.
And then the hedgerow on the other side of the drainage ditch opened fire, the sharp staccato beat of machine pistol fire as a tongue of orange and red flame licked through the ivy. Bullets and tracers tore into the men as he fired with the hedgerow, watching as his savior nearly cut one of the men in half. It was the kind of cold, calculated chaos he'd expected from a trooper. A man who'd somehow scavenged himself a Kraut weapon.
The last man fell, crumpled up as the soldier in the Hedgerow poured the last few rounds into his chest. Each impact opening a small scarlet hole in the German's uniform and splashing blood into the air. And then, abruptly, it was quiet. His rifle ejected its empty clip with a ringing "ching!".
"Thanks, Trooper." He said, turning into the hedgerow.
The ivy shook and shifted as a body came through, though far more quiet than he'd imagined. At first he looked upon the figure that emerged, unable to recognize it. His expectations suddenly shattered, his smile wiping itself away.
Standing infront of him was a woman, a sleek, stunningly beautiful woman with exotically sharp and elegant features. She was wearing a pair of simple brown trousers, boots, and a buttoned up blouse that modestly concealed ample and youthful breasts. Her lean arms were bare from the rolled up sleeves, and the collar was high and stiffly starched. Her hair was a dark and sultry and her eyes were piercing green, so sharp that he could see their color even in the dark. She was beautiful.
John Evans had just met the French Resistance.
This thread is closed.
The sound had become so monotonous and so grinding that a few of the men had stuffed cigarette filters into their ears in a desperate attempt to soften the rumble of the twin engines a bit. He'd considered trying it himself but decided against it. Smokes, he knew, would be a valuable commodity on the ground. They'd been given in rations and, although he didn't smoke, he'd taken them. The Lucky Strikes were buried safely under his jump jacket. Better then cash.
Next to him, Corporal Kevin Longer was turning the cricket over in his hands. The little brass noisemaker had been wrapped in black tape to keep it from being reflective, make it easier to hold on to. He watched as a loose flap of tape flickered gently against the brass as Longer juggled it. Longer was a young man, barely nineteen. A good soldier with a round face and big blue eyes. He looked like the perfect son, even with his face painted in black and olive.
"How much longer, John?"
"Can't be much longer. Your gear straight?" John asked in reply, looking from Longer for a moment to the massive leg-bag beside him.
They all had to carry those awful bags, heavy little bastards designed to keep most the solid gear and ammunition safe so their hands were free for the drop. John had shouldered his rifle backwards, as they'd been trained. It'd keep his knee from striking the buttplate when he landed, and the impact from driving the rifle's muzzle into his face and breaking something as a result. He wondered if the others could tell he wanted it close, just for the comfort, and that it made him feel less afraid.
"Yeah, I'm set. Fuck, it feels like we're crawling up here, though. Some Hitler Youth is going to use his slingshot and take us down." Longer quipped, his line short and potent. John forced a smile.
"If we get shot down, Longer, I'd think we'd be lucky if that's what did it."
John Evans looked up past Lieutenant "Arch" and to the jump lights. They were dark. Outside the door the clouds trailed past, grey whispy lumps. For a moment John thought about Georgia and Dog Company's first night jump. Chip Reynolds had busted his leg and Evans had nearly knocked himself out when he'd lost his feet and gotten dragged by his chute across the field. It'd been a couple years since then, they'd all jumped quite a few training missions together. He'd been so confident of the group before. They'd worked like clockwork. But now, looking out that door and into the mass of darkness full of the shadowed hulls of the other planes? He felt a lump in his stomach. A hard knot of anxiety. John was scared.
The plane abruptly banked to its port side before leveling off. And then the flak came.
It was low at first. A carpet of black balls of smoke that appeared with the ominous "whump whump whump" sound of the guns hundreds of feet below them. Most were 88's, all-purpose artillery. A few were larger. Smaller ones thickened the air with tracers, glowing tails leading up with feeble hope toward the planes as they came in. The men had gone quiet now, stopped moving. Many were looking out the small windows to the darkened French skies, watching as the smoke gradually got closer and closer. The plane was diving, getting low enough for a jump. That meant it'd have to slow down, really slow down. They'd be sitting ducks.
A minute later and John felt the plane tremble, heard the guns more distinctly. Another minute and the Douglas was bouncing all over, tossed about by the compression of the air. The sound of flak bouncing off its skin sounded like a high-hat cymbal at the jazz club in Georgia. A metallic "tink tink" that accented the low, bass tremors of the exploding shells. The ride was getting hellish. His eyes looked out the window, watching as one of the C47's nearest theirs took a hit to the cockpit. Glass and steel peeled back to reveal the mortal wound while men spilled desperately out the jump door and down. They cartwheeled into the darkness. He counted seven chutes before it dropped out of sight. Seven out of twenty seven.
His stomach dropped.
"Arch" slapped his shoulder, jolting him. He looked over, already reaching up to fasten his helmet's chinstrap.
"Make ready!" He said, and held his hand out.
Muscle memory. Automation. It felt as though he was governed to take his chute hook and lift it, displaying it with all the others besides him. Longer's face had regained some color, even as their plane bounced hard left against a burst of flak. The metal shards peppered the starboard side of the plane but didn't get through.
"Stand up!"
"Hook up!"
Two orders, one after another. John stood up, grunting as he latched onto the wire. The plane jostled, and the men swayed. Longer lost his balance and fell behind him, only to pop back up into a stand. The plane was tilting wildly. First one side. Then the other. Outside the sky was lit by the soft white flares and orange clouds of explosions. Below, whizzing by, the fields of France had a dark and ominous shape.
He could feel a tremor run through the entire unit, a subtle and shared chord of feeling. It was as though one single communal thought had passed down the line and touched all of them, threatening their courage. That's what John felt, what he told himself. There was no way he was the only one suddenly eager to get the fuck out of this plane. Around them the flak was murderous and angry, reaching out and swatting at the planes overhead like they were a cloud of flies. Out the windows every man could see planes that were burning, or winding their way down towards the fields and hedgerows below. He was almost certain that they were all scared. He was proud that he, and nobody else, lent that fear a voice.
When the light turned green he felt his guts clench. Arch went first, stepping through the door and into the dark. He was gone in an instant, his chute strap plastered against the side of the C47. John didn't wait at the door, he just took two big steps. The first brought him to the door and the next took him through it.
His chute opened and his entire body went rigid, snapped like a wet towel at the community pool. The shock of it took his helmet from his head, breaking the chin strap and leaving it to plummet off into the dark. He swayed, instinctively reaching for the lanyards for his chute. They fought the grip of his hands, their guidance, but he was able to level himself off and take control. The ground was rising up slowly below him. The sky was dark. There were hundreds of chutes, maybe thousands, near him. A man not so far away waved before a black cloud swallowed him.
:WHUMP!:
The explosion forced him to look away, and when he looked back the man was missing his lower half. The chute was in tatters and began to break down, leaving it to be nothing more than a pale silken streamer as the body disappeared.
A field rushed up to meet him, broken sporadically by large wheels of hay. They kept getting larger as he braced himself, aware that he wasn't going to be able to avoid them. His boots struck the top of one and he let his legs buckle, absorbing the impact by going slack and crumpling atop one. The parachute carried him forward, dragging him over the hay and dropping him off the wheel's top for another six foot drop to the grass below. John landed hard, felt the wind get knocked from his lungs, and took a moment to regain it.
His chest still ached but he got to his feet, unbuckling his jump harness. John bundled up the chute like he'd been taught, taking those precious seconds to gather in the silk mess of his chute and all the cords, the vest he quickly discarded, and the parachute he carried with him as he abandoned the field for the hedgerows.
They were thick in the summer, blocky partitions of thick ivy and smaller brambles. A silent series of giants standing sentinel to the drops, separating the fields form one another. He stashed his jump gear inside one of the hedges and unshouldered his rifle, feeling the Garand's weight in his hands. The leg bag was a memory, gone. He hadn't felt it go but he realized he'd lost it the moment he took his rifle off his shoulder. How many of his friends had lost their weapon during the drop? Countless, he imagined. Many of them. Once the prop blast hit them it was like the'd been thrown out of a moving race car. He felt lucky the only thing he'd lost was his helmet and the leg bag.
John pushed a stripper clip into the Garand and rode the bolt forward, listening to the first .30-06 round chamber with a satisfying clack of metal on metal. He took a moment to check the sight, looking down through the telescopic lens, feeling fortunate that he'd been issued the M1C instead of the 1903 Springfield so many others were issued. It made him feel safer, somehow. A kind of peace of mind.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carnier, the sign said. A big blackened arrow carved in the soft-wood sign that pointed up the road to the village ahead, dominated by a large church in its middle. It wasn't large. A couple hundred people, maybe, surrounded by the fields and gently rolling hills of France. A handsome place, Carnier was bisected by two roads that met in the middle of town. The kind of crossroads that was almost certainly an objective. It was also, certainly, about thirty or forty miles from where he was supposed to have been dropped.
He folded the map up and stowed it in his jacket. It'd been almost an hour since he'd landed and he'd not seen anyone from his unit, not a single god damned chute.
John heard voices, and slipped off the road into the drainage ditch that ran beside it. Grass had grown down into it, and there was water at the bottom running south along the road. He kept his feet out of the wet, pressed himself to the edge, and waited. There was four, and two had flashlights. The beams of pale yellow light cut the darkness. Four men, a small patrol. He heard the distinctive and almost angry syllables of German.
They passed, so close that the gravel and stone from the road their boots displaced fell down the grass and touched his cheeks. He waited until they had before he rose up, shouldering the Garand's walnut stock and leveling the barrel on the one farthest from him. The length of the weapon's telescopic sight pointed between the man's shoulders. He squeezed the trigger, feeling the weapon buck against him as it barked sharply in the night, and quickly moved to recenter the rifle's barrel on the closest man as he turned and shouted in German.
And then the hedgerow on the other side of the drainage ditch opened fire, the sharp staccato beat of machine pistol fire as a tongue of orange and red flame licked through the ivy. Bullets and tracers tore into the men as he fired with the hedgerow, watching as his savior nearly cut one of the men in half. It was the kind of cold, calculated chaos he'd expected from a trooper. A man who'd somehow scavenged himself a Kraut weapon.
The last man fell, crumpled up as the soldier in the Hedgerow poured the last few rounds into his chest. Each impact opening a small scarlet hole in the German's uniform and splashing blood into the air. And then, abruptly, it was quiet. His rifle ejected its empty clip with a ringing "ching!".
"Thanks, Trooper." He said, turning into the hedgerow.
The ivy shook and shifted as a body came through, though far more quiet than he'd imagined. At first he looked upon the figure that emerged, unable to recognize it. His expectations suddenly shattered, his smile wiping itself away.
Standing infront of him was a woman, a sleek, stunningly beautiful woman with exotically sharp and elegant features. She was wearing a pair of simple brown trousers, boots, and a buttoned up blouse that modestly concealed ample and youthful breasts. Her lean arms were bare from the rolled up sleeves, and the collar was high and stiffly starched. Her hair was a dark and sultry and her eyes were piercing green, so sharp that he could see their color even in the dark. She was beautiful.
John Evans had just met the French Resistance.
This thread is closed.
