Melissa sat down and switched on the TV, but the repairman’s presence made her feel uncomfortable. Although he seemed to be patching the leak, smoothing it off, Melissa felt he was watching her. She was starting to get annoyed, but it was really her own guilt for having requested base repairs in the fight with Stacy. She should have left it for Rick to do instead of being petty about it.
“Worse then I thought,” said Killerton. “Wood’s rotten in here. Wormed right through.”
“Oh?” said Melissa, uninterested, but adding politely, “Thought it’d be too cold for them.”
“Sure, now it is, but summertime it’s hotter’n a pistol out here. No, this is old damage. I’m gonna have to fill in more holes than I thought.”
Melissa said nothing and changed channels. A commercial for “Rocky Mountain Bottled Water” blurted out, with a jingle she despised.
“The war’s the best thing that ever happened to ‘em,” said Killerton.
Melissa looked over at him. He was reloading the caulking gun with a new tube, but did it with such dexterity and long experience, he didn’t even glance at it, looking at Melissa, explaining, “War’s kicked the ass out of all the Europeans. Destroyed fuckin’ Perrier, and now with most of our water poisoned — hell, Rocky Mountain can jerk us off any way they like.” He was still smiling and she was flustered. The bad language was nothing she hadn’t heard before, but he seemed to be throwing it down like a gauntlet — to see how she’d react.
“Feeling pretty thirsty myself,” he said.
“Would you like a Coke?” she asked, for want of anything better to say.
“Beer if you’ve got it.”
She went over to the kitchenette, took a Coors from the fridge, and passed it to him. Still looking at her, he tore the tab off with his teeth.
Revolting, she thought — a big, hairy adolescent right out of Animal House. It was the kind of comment David might have made. And Rick. It was about the only thing Rick and David had in common — a disdain for the gross macho bit. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t deny in her a sense of danger, of excitement, around Killerton. With a man like this, she knew you could let yourself go completely. Mind you, it could never be a permanent thing.
She heard the click of the toolbox.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When Parkin found him, David was all but unrecognizable, covered in the chalk dust from the direct hit on the castle high above the town. With only his eyes visible beneath the chalk, Brentwood would have looked comical had it not been for the broken child in his arms. He walked straight past Parkin and Monsieur Malmédy toward the first aid post set up by the Café Renoir, the child’s head, her spine snapped, lolling like a rag doll, apparently without a scratch on her, the muck and stench of body fluids causing the tiny dress to cling to her matted hair, her eyes wide open, fixed in horror. When David placed her down, taking off his tunic to cover her crumpled body, he tried to shut her eyes, but they wouldn’t. He drew the battle tunic up higher to cover her face. Old Malmédy, Parkin saw, was in tears as Brentwood lowered his head for a moment — to compose himself, to pray, or both— Parkin didn’t know which — only that when the American straightened up, he looked different. It wasn’t simply that now his tunic was off, the clean, pressed army shirt and lieutenant’s collar bars were in such sharp contrast to his bedraggled vaudevillian appearance moments before that they made him look fresher than others who had been in or near the shelter that had taken the side blast of a near hit. The difference in Brentwood’s appearance was in his eyes. They were the eyes of an old man in a young body, not wearied by age, but the determined steel blue of a man who had at one stroke lost all illusion about the fairness of life — a man who, to Parkin, looked resolved.
“What a bastard!” said Parkin, looking down helplessly at the tiny form covered by Brentwood’s tunic. Brentwood said nothing, his eyes not moving from the girl’s body, but if there was compassion in them, it had become subsumed, his look, Parkin thought, more that of a surgeon who, along with the recognition of the tragic, seemed to be standing in judgment not only of those who had done this terrible thing but of himself, of his own behavior, his competence, of how he might have prevented it. And now he had to tell the old man who was already in tears over the young girl that his daughter, too, was dead. He put his arm about the old man, and instantly Malmédy knew it was terrible news.
As Parkin watched them walking down the street, seeking a moment of quiet amid the cacophony of the rescue now near fever pitch, he saw the old man stop, burying his head in his hands, unable to go on, and Brentwood standing with him, holding him for Lili.
Before they left Bouillon, David tried to phone Captain Smythe, but all lines were down in Bouillon following the rocket attack, and he had to wait until he reached Namur.
While welcoming Brentwood’s change of heart, Smythe felt obliged to tell David that it was by no means a “foregone conclusion” that he would make it into SAS.
“Why not?” asked David. “I qualified as a marine, didn’t I?”
“Well, yes. But I think you’ll find our Special Air Service training is somewhat different. Tell you the truth, quite a few of our Red Berets and your Navy Seals have tried and failed. It’s a very concentrated training course for what we have in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“Can’t tell you that, old boy. ‘Need to know.’ If you pass the course, you’ll find out.”
Brentwood was irritated. Here he was volunteering, and now Smythe was telling him he mightn’t be good enough. And how, he wondered, could this joint British-U.S. force possibly be tougher than the U.S. Marines? What was so special about SAS training?
“Have you ever heard of Brecon Beacons?” Smythe asked him.
“No,” responded David. “What are they?”
“Mountains,” said Smythe. “In Wales.” The only thing David could remember about Wales, he told Smythe, was the Prince of Wales — and an old movie where coal miners, black with soot from head to toe, came home up a hill, singing.
“Ah!” said Smythe. “How Green was my Valley? Walter Pigeon. Well, I don’t think you’ll find there’ll be much time for singing.”
Smythe’s remark, David Brentwood was about to discover, was a classic case of British understatement.
It was Christmas Eve, snowing heavily in Washington, D.C., and Gen. Douglas Freeman’s plane at Andrews Air Force Base was delayed once again, the general standing impatiently inside the hangar as the de-icing trucks rolled out and sprayed the wings once more.
After his briefing with the president on the Korean situation, Freeman had immediately asked for the best pilot available to fly him to Honolulu, where they would have a brief refueling stopover, then on to Japan and Seoul. They had assigned a major from Andrews’ military air transport squadron, a man, they said, with more time on 747s than any other officer on duty that day. But at the last minute, Freeman, in his usually gruff and straightforward manner, asked his G-2, Colonel Norton, whether the major assigned had had any combat experience.
“General. These people are on the Air Force One flight crews. And they’re selected to fly the president. They can fly anything from a Tiger Moth to an F-18.”
“Norton,” Freeman said exasperatedly, his athlete’s bulk impressive even in his “incognito garb,” as he called the business suit and matching serge coat. “I took you on as my G-2 because you were smart enough to spot those Soviet T-90s in the reconnaissance photos didn’t have extra fuel tanks strapped to their backs. That gave me the opening to go full steam ahead for Warsaw even though we were low on gas and the fat was in the goddamned fire, Soviet artillery pounding us left, right, and center. I also hired you then because you gave me straight answers and were willing to risk my displeasure with bad news. Now, if we’re going to keep getting along, Jim, in Korea, from here on in, you’d better tell me everything I want to know without any farting about. Otherwise we’re never gonna get those Chinks’ asses back over the Yalu, where they belong.”