Normally David wouldn’t have shown such irritability. Maybe it was the bad weather, the overcast still so low, you could almost touch it, and the rubble from the Soviet rocket attacks still not cleared, partially covered by snow turned dirty from the coal fire pollution — or “bad ions in the air,” as his brother Ray would have said.
Whatever the reason for his mood, the Gallic shrug of the stationmaster at Ezemaal thirty miles east of Brussels bugged him. He suspected the man could speak English but was refusing to do so on principle, continuing to rattle away in either Flemish or French. As the unhelpful stationmaster walked on by them, a porter nearby told David slowly and clearly, “Un train est déraillé! Pres de Roosbeek.”
“Son of a bitch!” said David, turning and walking quickly back to the Humvee.
“Come on,” he yelled to his driver, Corporal Parkin, who had just started to relax with a cigarette. “Let’s go! They say a train’s been derailed.”
“Ours?”
“Don’t know — at Roosbeek. You know it?”
“Not to worry, chief. Got a Michelin in the glove box. Has to be on the line ‘tween here and Brussels, doesn’t it?”
“Right,” said David, with more optimism than he felt.
“Why don’t we just go on to Liege, guv?” suggested Parkin. “It’s not too far. Wait there. Nothing much we—”
“No!” said David. “Train’s full of wounded. Need all the help they can get. Besides, I know some people on it.”
“Oh. Yeah — well, that’s different, in’t?”
The stationmaster was coming back down the platform. Glancing quickly at them, his mood changed. “Be careful,” he told David. “You must have your identification ready. There will be many people there by now.”
“What you mean, guv?” put in the corporal, calling out over the rattle of the Humvee engine. “Lots of people?”
The stationmaster shrugged, as if the answer were surely obvious to all. “Police, the army — they might still be around, you see.”
“Why?” asked Parkin.
“The SPETS, of course. It was they who attacked—”
Before the Belgian could finish, Parkin had unclipped his seat belt, reaching down into the backseat. He produced a red light, its magnetic base thudding on the roof over him as he plugged its adapter into the dashboard lug.
As they sped back from where they’d come, having to use several detours because of rocket damage to the main Brussels road, David told himself it probably wasn’t Lili’s train anyway. There were dozens — goods trains, troop trains, passenger — every day. Had to be one of the busiest lines in all Europe.
The red light swishing in the mist produced a surreal pink glow. David wasn’t sure an illegal MP light was a good idea. It’d get them there faster, but if there were SPETS around, it could draw fire. Momentarily he was ashamed he was thinking about his safety rather than Lili’s, but then again, his marine training had conditioned him against drawing undue attention to himself in any battle zone.
“Don’t worry, sir,” Parkin assured him. “SPETS would’ve been after them for the front — the troops. Wouldn’t bother with anyone else on board. Anyway, this bird of yours — she’s a noncombatant. Right?”
As if that made any difference, David thought. “More non-combatants are killed than soldiers, corporal. Besides, you obviously don’t know about the SPETS.” As he spoke, David instinctively felt for his.45 sidearm. “You carrying any weapons?” he asked Parkin.
The corporal was shocked by the suggestion. “Only my rifle — in the back. Haven’t fired it since me national service. That was two years—” He paused. “Ah, not to worry, sir. The SPETS’re hit-and-run types, right? Won’t bother us. Hardly gonna go runnin’ around in uniform, are they? Civilian garb, most likely.”
“Allied uniforms,” said David, not taking his eyes from the fields, dim outlines of farmhouses, and gaunt, stripped poplars racing by. “They’ve got nothing to lose. They’d be shot as spies either way, in civilian garb or military.”
There was another flashing red light ahead and Parkin started pumping the brake. The Humvee slowed and though visibility was poor, they could soon make out six or seven men, all with submachine guns, possibly in Belgian military uniform, waving them down. Off to the right ahead, David spotted at least fifteen more — spread out — the same number to his left — all in all, a U-shaped formation running down either side of the road, the road blocked by two 3-ton trucks parked so they overlapped each other in a tight V — so you’d be forced to drop to five kilometers per hour in order to negotiate the S-turn.
“Bound to be our blokes, right?” proffered the corporal unconvincingly.
“Don’t know,” said David softly, watching the officer approaching him. “You any good at reversing this jalopy?”
“Not now,” said the corporal. “No way.” He was looking in the rearview mirror. The U-shape had closed to an O, with three men about twenty yards behind them advancing, submachine guns at the ready.
“Out!” shouted the officer ten yards in front of the Humvee. “With your hands up!”
“They’re not Belgians,” said the corporal. “English is too bloody good.”
“Don’t know,” answered David quietly.
“I could try a run,” said the corporal, his foot hovering above the accelerator. “We’d hit the ditch but take a few…”
“Out! Turn off the engine. This is an order! You!” The officer in a black beret was pointing the gun directly at Brentwood. “The holster. Take it off!”
Parkin switched off and David did as he was told, slowly, while trying to make out the insignia of the Belgian regiment. He became aware of a faint tinkling sound, like an old steam kettle all but boiled dry, its metal flexing, giving off the most mournful sound he’d ever heard.
It was only as the officer moved forward that he saw what it was. Beyond the roadblock, across the canal, the locomotive sat deserted, derailed, its boiler punctured, steam bleeding from it like vaporous ghosts floating this way and that until the white became absorbed by the gray of the mist.
There were small groups of men watching, further back behind the locomotive, their figures fading in and out of view in the mist, which, rising for a second, revealed a line of khaki trucks. Further beyond the train, on the canal’s north side, off to his right, David saw a line of other figures, the sticklike projections of their rifles visible now and then as a breeze flustered the mist, which continued to roll across from the canal.
“Looks like a bloody firing squad!” said Parkin, joking uneasily. “Ah — bound to be our blokes.”
“Taisez-vous!”—”Silence!”—said one of the soldiers on the road.
“Venez avec moi!”—”Come with me!”
“What’s your business here?” demanded the senior Belgian officer, a colonel, his military police checking David Brentwood’s ID as closely as the railway inspector had at Ezemaal. The other Belgian officer who’d escorted him and Parkin down the road had now turned back to the roadblock.
“I’ve got a friend on the train,” David told the colonel.
The Belgian looked at David’s face and back at the photograph. “All right, you may pass through,” he said, returning the ID cards. “But don’t get in the way of the ambulance teams. Wait until they tell you it’s all right.”
“The stationmaster at Ezemaal,” said David, “told me SPETS had hit the train. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
Neither in the fright-filled, bloody, and often confused fighting at Pyongyang nor the bone-chilling terror of Stadthagen— the bared teeth of the German shepherd at his throat near the ammunition dump — had David Brentwood felt as he did now, standing on the platform of the first carriage of the still mist-shrouded troop train. As David moved aside while the stretcher bearers negotiated the tight right-angle turn from the carriage down the steep steel-grate steps to the spongy turf, Parkin was standing by the nearest of the six ambulances, talking to one of the Belgian drivers. First aid attendants, who had at first swarmed over the train, were now poking carefully through the chaos on a second sweep. “How many survivors?” Parkin asked the driver.
“Don’t know. We were among the last ambulances to arrive. But not many, I expect. When the SPETS hit, my friend, it is total.” He offered Parkin a cigarette, which the Englishman eagerly accepted. “They leave no one,” continued the Belgian, flicking open his lighter, “who might be able to identify them, you see.”
“Course,” said Parkin, cupping his hand around the flame. “Silly bloody question really.”
“Ja,” said the Belgian with a distinct Flemish accent. “They are marksmen, those ones, believe me. They are the best those bastards have got.” The Belgian nodded toward the canals and poplar woods beyond. “Probably miles from here by now.”
David overheard the conversation, but something, he couldn’t explain what, told him Lili was alive. The next stretcher he saw coming out had the military police sergeant on it — a neat hole above the left ear — the small hole and dark color of the blood telling David the sergeant had been killed by an expert shot, quickly and some time ago. It fueled David’s hope, for it meant the ambulance teams had probably left all the really hopeless cases till last, first having taken all the survivors, few though they may have been.
“Why aren’t they using body bags?” asked Parkin tactlessly but with the directness of natural curiosity. “Poor buggers can hardly get ‘round them corners with those frig-gin’ stretchers.” As if to underline his point, a swirl of thickening mist swept up against the carriage, momentarily hiding the ambulance team from view, the man carrying the front of the stretcher not having yet touched ground. The man stumbled for a moment, and had it not been for David helping the man at the rear of the stretcher to take the weight, the sharp angle of the stretcher would have caused the dead sergeant to slide forward beneath the restraining straps onto the sodden grass.
“Ran out of body bags,” explained the Belgian driver. “Used over sixty already. We’re running out of everything.”
“How come?” asked Parkin, surprised. “Thought ruddy Antwerp and Ostend were fair flowin’ over wiv supplies.”
“Some more trouble with the convoys from America, they say.”
“Blimey — I thought we’d fixed that lot.”
“So did everyone else,” shrugged the Belgian. “But apparently the Russians have something up their sleeve. New sonar, I guess.”
Parkin was watching the ambulance men bringing off more of the dead.
“Jesus!” said Parkin. “They wipe out all the reinforcements?”
“Ja. Shot every one of them. Train staff as well and the hospital cases — the wounded.”
Parkin could hear steam bubbling away, and he swung angrily toward the still locomotive. “Why the hell doesn’t somebody turn that friggin’ thing off?”
“The engineer is dead, too,” said the ambulance driver. “No one here, I think, knows how to shut it off.”
“I’ll have a go,” said the corporal.
A whey-faced ambulance man emerged from the end of the third carriage and began to negotiate the steep stairway.
“Excuse me,” began David.
“Je ne parte pas anglais,” said the stretcher bearer, using his head to indicate the driver who’d been talking with Parkin, who was now climbing aboard the engine whose mournful dying sound seemed to fill the forlorn field.
“Can I help you, sir?” the driver asked David.
“Is it all right if I go in now?” David told him. “Have a look around?” The driver spoke to one of the ambulance men, who managed to shrug despite the weight of the dead body — a marine, his arm in a cast, face jaundiced-looking and frozen in pain.
“They say you can have a look,” the driver told David. “But do not move anything. More ambulances are on the way. The police may want photographs.”
“What for?” put in Parkin, returning down the track. “Nothing to investigate, is there?”
The Belgian driver shrugged. “Regulations.”
Parkin drew heavily on the cigarette. “Regulations ain’t gonna help those poor bastards,” he said, looking at the ambulances filling up on this, their second trip, eight shrouds in each, dead laid out on the wet grass for the additional ambulances on the way.
David hesitated before going in as Parkin, heading on down to the other end of the carriage, called out, “Beg pardon, Lieutenant, but what’s she look like?”
“About five four,” said David, entering the second to last carriage, looking at the slumped bodies which the ambulance men still had to clear. “Blue eyes—” he told Parkin.
“Very good, sir, but I mean, what was she — is she— wearing?”
Brentwood tried to think, recoiling from the stench. “Well, she had a sort of yellow raincoat on — the kind fishermen wear over here—”
“Slicker,” said Parkin. “Right, but I mean, she wouldn’t be wearing a coat in the train — probably bit stuffy in here before— I mean, not when she was busy looking after the wounded—”
“Yes,” replied David, “I guess you’re right. I don’t know — a kind of floral patterned dress — skirt,” he said. “Red and yellow flowers — I think — white sweater. A bonnet. Blue.” David eased his way down the body-strewn aisle, each hand on the corner of one of the day-sitters, the upholstery torn here and there where the bullets had passed through, some of the beige-colored sponge rubber filler oozing from the seats speckled with blood. He remembered she was wearing a red poppy, too, for Remembrance Day, even though the actual day was weeks ago.
David paused, wiping the sweat from the cap’s band before he could bring himself to move deeper into the carriage. He could still hear the heavy, muffled tinkling of the boiler, steam still rising, floating back past the carriages even though Parkin had shut down the main valve.
He moved farther into the carnage, having to step over the bodies gingerly, trying not to disturb anything, finding a footfall wherever he could and using the web of the overhead luggage racks to keep his balance, recoiling one moment from pinkish-gray ooze of brains sticking to one seat, the upholstery black with blood.
One of the American reinforcements was slumped in a corner, and from the pinkish-white pulp that David guessed must have been bone and flesh, David could tell the SPETS had probably used high-velocity mercury or depleted-uranium tips, which would penetrate the target like a white-hot rod, exploding through the other side with the force of a sledgehammer.
“Jesus!” said Parkin softly, now entering the carriage from the far end. “Get away, you bastard!” He was waving his hand ineffectually at a large blowfly crawling, bloated, through the mash of a GI’s eye dangling by a thread. Suddenly Parkin put his hand to his mouth, and rushed back toward the toilet door. As it flung open, David heard Parkin utter another half-choked oath and saw him reappear, rushing out the doors at the end of the carriage.
As David reached the washroom, he saw the reason— another GI, crumpled against the outer wall, one leg bent impossibly between the toilet stem and sink pipe, hands protectively over his face — the impact of two SPETS bullets having blown him clean off the seat even as he’d tried to cower in the corner. Or had he simply been too terrified to move? Again it had been a head shot, and David saw the splattered slug that had ricocheted, ending up, after smashing the cistern, embedded in the copper float. There were empty nine-millimeter brass jackets all over the place — same ammunition as used by NATO forces.
David pushed open the carriage’s end door and saw Parkin, head over the rail. Beyond him David could see through the doors of the fourth carriage, another carnage of khaki bodies strewn about, several of them clustered by the water fountain. “You okay?” he asked Parkin.
“No — Jesus, never seen anything like it. Bloody slaughter. The bastards.”
David passed by him, heading for the doors of the fourth carriage, and heard ambulance men behind him starting to clean out the remaining bodies now that more stretchers had arrived. As he opened the door, he saw several bodies that had fallen from upper bunks where the wounded had been. David felt his nostrils assaulted by a stringent mixture of spilled antiseptic, saline drip bottles, medications, and excrement.
He stood still looking about for her, for any sign of movement, still having a gut feeling that as she was of slighter build than most, she could well be buried but alive under the crush of bodies. He heard something and motioned the ambulance men coming in behind him to be quiet, listening for the faintest sound of breathing — for anything. But all he could hear now was the sound of the boiler condensing, its melancholy sound still with them. Outside, more ambulances were arriving.
“Should check those who’ve been taken away,” suggested Parkin, reappearing, smelling of sick. He meant those who the Belgian had told him had been stacked earlier in the Roosbeek morgue.
“Damn it — she isn’t dead,” David said. “I just know it.” He turned, looking at Parkin. “Sorry. You don’t have to come. Wait back at the Humvee if you like.”
Parkin didn’t answer but followed Brentwood as he entered the last carriage.
She was the first one he saw — spread across a wounded youth, both his arms in casts, one eye bandaged, the bandage bloodied now and rust-colored. At the base of her head there was a small, ugly hole, the edge of her white sweater stained. David knelt down and felt her wrist. No pulse. Cold. He couldn’t breathe and tore at his collar. Parkin moved up behind him. “Oh Christ, Lieutenant! Oh, shit!”
David, biting his lip, bent over her, still clinging to hope, and saw a phantom breeze blow the soft baby hair on the nape of her neck. It was his own breath. He took her right hand in both of his, holding it gently, feeling for the faintest pulse. He doubled over, pulling her hands to his face, his head moving side to side, sobbing in desperate denial that it was Lili, that the bloody mush that had been her face was Lili. But the poppy of Flanders Field that she’d worn, like those poppies she had told him sprang form from the artillery-plowed earth after the 1914 war, was still there, crushed against her by the body of the soldier she’d been trying to protect.
David didn’t remember the walk back to the Humvee, nor much of the ride back to the convalescent military hospital in Liege where he was to await orders, possibly for light supply duties in France. Parkin had put the poppy, her ID bracelet, and a lock of her hair — he’d had to wash it first — in a white linen envelope marked “Lieutenant Brentwood — Personal” and left it at the front desk. He wanted to stay at Liege but couldn’t. In the morning he’d have to report back to Brussels as what supplies were making it through the renewed Russian sub attacks on the convoys had to be shipped up quickly to the front if Freeman’s army wasn’t to be halted, and a counterattack risked all along the line. NATO needed every driver it could get its hands on.
“You take care of yourself, Lieutenant,” Parkin enjoined.
David nodded. “Thanks for bringing me back, Corp.”
“Anything I can do, sir? I mean, if you’re not feeling up to it — someone should let your folks know.” Parkin was holding out a packet of cigarettes, momentarily forgetting that the American didn’t smoke.
“No,” said David. “They know nothing about her.” He looked up at the Englishman, his lip quivering. The corporal, embarrassed, offered him a light. Brentwood looked down, cleared his throat, and asked in a strained voice, “Can you fix me a ride to Bouillon? It’s in the Ardennes. Her parents live there. I’d like to — I mean I should—”
“No problem!” said Parkin, relieved he could do something, anything, to help. “I’ll go over to the motor pool right now.”
“Thanks,” said David.
Sitting on the edge of his bunk, eyes fixed on the drops of rain slowly making their way down the window of the Quonset hut, he felt a hollowness — a vast emptiness and the beginning of rage — that they could waste someone so young, so beautiful — so good — the best thing, he now realized too late, that had happened to him in the whole rotten war.
Parkin’s footsteps echoed on the highly polished linoleum. “Well, if you can put up with me, Lieutenant, they say I can drive you down. But I was thinking, maybe her folks wouldn’t — I mean, maybe we should wait a few days.”
“No,” said David. “I’d like to go now.”
“It’s about ninety miles. Good three hours, Lieutenant. Maybe you should rest awhile. Go in the morning.”
Parkin waited patiently for the lieutenant to reconsider, to at least put it off till the morning. Parkin knew he couldn’t appeal to the American’s convalescent status anymore either — the sister on the ward telling the Corporal that Brentwood was as fit as they could make him now and that he could certainly go to Bouillon if he wanted to. To cheer him up, the sister brought a pile of letters waiting for him from the United States. “And abroad,” she said, showing him one with a Scottish postmark.
“Thank you,” David said, looking at the bundle in his hand. He might as well have been looking at a relic from the ancient past. Right now nothing held any importance for him, not how Lana was faring in the Aleutians or Robert on the Roosevelt—if he was still on the Roosevelt—or even the state of Ray’s progress in the burn unit of San Diego Vet’s. The only thing that mattered was that Lili was gone. She had been a bright burst, a warmth in the winter of his recovery from Stadthagen. Only his anger at the Russians offered any salve for the emptiness that now engulfed him; he fed on it. On that anger and what he felt was his duty to go to Bouillon. He hoped they’d find each and every one of the SPETS and hang them. It hadn’t been a military action — what was military about hitting a train and murdering wounded in cold blood? It was butchery. He only hoped he could keep the worst of it from Lili’s father and mother.
“ ‘S all right with you, sir,” said Parkin. “I wouldn’t mind a kip before we go.”
“All right,” said Brentwood finally. “But I want to go down first thing in the morning.” It was the most dispirited voice Parkin had ever heard.