2

The snap of the parachute, opening like a sail to catch the wind, made the straps cut into Two Hawks’ legs. Something popped in his neck, but there was no pain. If anything, he thought briefly, the jerk and the popping of vertebrae had probably been more like an osteopathic treatment and had released tension in his body and straightened out his skeleton.

Then he was examining the terrain swelling below him, the details getting larger but the field of view getting smaller His chute had opened only two hundred feet above the ground, so he did not have much time for study and very little time to get set for the drop.

The wind was carrying him at an estimated six miles an hour over a solid growth of trees. By the time he came to earth, he would be past it and in a field of cut wheat. Beyond the wheat field was a narrow dirt road running at right angles to him. Trees grew along the road, beyond which was a thatch-roofed cottage, a barnyard, and several small barns. Past the house was a garden surrounded by a log fence. Back of the garden, the trees grew in a single dense file a quarter of a mile wide. An opening in the trees permitted him to glimpse the darkness of a shadowy creek.

He came down closer to the trees than he had thought he would because there was an unexpected lull in the wind. His feet brushed the top of a tree on the edge of the woods, then he was on the ground and rolling. Immediately, he was up on his feet and going through the required procedure for disentangling himself. The trees stopped whatever wind there might be; the chute had collapsed on the ground.

He unsnapped the straps and began to roll his chute into a ball O’Brien was doing the same thing. Having collected the silk, Two Hawks picked it up and jogged towards O’Brien, who was running towards him. O’Brien said excitedly, ‘Did you see those soldiers over to the left?’

Two Hawks shook his head. ‘No. Were they coming our way?’

‘They were on a road at right angles to this one. Must be a main road, although it wasn’t paved. They were too far away for me to get many details. But they sure looked funny.’

‘Funny?’

O’Brien removed his helmet. He ran a thick stubby hand, freckled and covered with pale red hairs, through his orange mop. ‘Yeah. They had a lot of wagons drawn by oxen. There were a couple of cars at the head, but they didn’t look like any cars I ever seen. One was an armored car; reminded me of the pictures of cars like in that old book my dad had about World War I.’

O’Brien grinned toothily. ‘You know. The Great War. The Big War. The Real War.’

Two Hawks did not comment. He had heard O’Brien talk about his father’s attitude towards the present conflict.

‘Let’s get into the woods and bury this stuff,’ he said. ‘You get a chance to bring any survival stuff with you?’

Two Hawks led the way into the thick underbrush. O’Brien shook his head, ‘I was lucky to get out with my skin. Did any of the others make it?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Two Hawks said. ‘I didn’t see anybody.’

He pushed on into the woods. His legs and arms were shaking, and something inside him was trembling also. Reaction, he told himself. It was natural, and he would be all right as soon as he got a chance to get hold of himself. Only thing was, he might not get a chance. The Germans or the Rumanians would be sending out search parties now. Probably, the peasants living in the house on the other side of the road had seen them drop, although it was possible that no one had. But if they had watched the big American ship burning and falling, and had seen the two chutists, they might be phoning in now to the nearest garrison or the police post.

He had been on his hands and knees, covering his chute with dirt in a depression between two huge tree-roots. Abruptly, he straightened up, grunting as if hit in the pit of his stomach. It just occurred to him that he had not seen a single telephone wire during his drop. Nor had he seen any electrical transmission towers or wires. This was strange. The absence of these would not have been peculiar if the plane had gone down out in the sticks. Rumania was not a very well developed country. But the Hiawatha must not have been more than five miles from the refineries in Ploesti when it had encountered the German fighter.

Moreover, where were the suburbs that had been below him only a minute before he had experienced that twisting feeling? One moment they were there; the next, gone. And there was something peculiar also about the suddenness with which the German had appeared. He could swear that it had dropped out of the sky itself.

They finished covering up the chutes. Two Hawks stripped off his heavy suit and at once felt cooler. There was a slight breeze, which meant that the wind must have sprung up again outside the woods. O’Brien already had his suit off. He wiped his freckled forehead and said, ‘It sure is quiet, ain’t it? Hell of a lot quieter than it’s going to be, huh?’

‘You got a gun?’ Two Hawks asked.

O’Brien shook his head and pointed at the .32 automatic in the holster at Two Hawks’ side. ‘That isn’t much of a gun,’ he said. ‘How many bullets you got?’

‘Five loaded. Twenty more in my pocket,’ Two Hawks said. He did not mention the two-barreled derringer in the little holster on the inside of his belt in back nor the switchblade knife in his pocket.

‘Well, it’s better than nothing,’ O’Brien said.

‘Not much better.’ Two Hawks was silent for a moment, conscious that O’Brien was watching him with expectation. It was evident he was not going to offer any suggestions. That was as it should be, since Two Hawks was the officer. But Two Hawks doubted that O’Brien would have anything helpful to say even if he were asked to do so.

It struck Two Hawks then that he knew very little about O’Brien except that he was a steady man during a mission, had been born in Dublin, and had immigrated to America when he was eleven years old. Since then, he had lived in Chicago.

Finally, O’Brien said, ‘I’m sure glad you’re with me. You’re an Indian and you been raised in the country. I don’t know what the hell to do in all these trees. I’m lost.’

By then, Two Hawks had the map out of the pocket of his jacket. He did not think it would help O’Brien’s morale to tell him that his officer, the Indian, had been raised in the country and knew the woods there, but he did not know this country or these woods.

Two Hawks spread the map out and discussed the best routes of escape. After a half hour, during which they took off their jackets and unbuttoned their shirts because of the heat, they had picked several avenues of flight. Whichever one they took, they would travel at night and hole up during the day.

‘Let’s go back to the edge of the woods so we can watch the road,’ Two Hawks said. ‘And the farmhouse. If we’re lucky, we weren’t seen. But if some peasant has told the local constabulary, they’ll be searching these woods for us soon. Maybe we better get out of here. Just in case. In fact, we will if the coast looks clear.’

They sat behind a thick bush, in the shadows cast by a huge pine, and watched the road and the farmhouse. A half-hour passed while they swatted at mosquitoes and midges, handicapped by having to strike softly so they would not make slapping noises. They saw no human beings. The only sound was that of the wind shushing through the treetops, the distant barking of a dog, and the bellowing of a bull from beyond the farmhouse.

Two Hawks sat patiently, only moving to speed the circulation in his legs, cramped from sitting still. O’Brien fidgeted, coughed softly, and started to take a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Two Hawks said, ‘No smoking. Somebody might see the smoke. Or even smell the tobacco.’

‘From this distance?’ O’Brien said.

‘Not likely, but we don’t want to take any chances,’ Two Hawks replied. For another half-hour, he continued to watch. O’Brien groaned softly, whistled between his teeth, shifted back and forth, then began to rock on the base of his spine. ‘You’d make a hell of a poor hunter,’ Two Hawks said.

‘I ain’t an Indian,’ O’Brien said. ‘I’m just a city boy.’

‘We’re not in the city. So try practicing some patience.’

He sat for fifteen minutes more, then said, ‘Let’s get over to the house. Looks deserted. Maybe we could get some food and be on our way into the woods on the other side of the house.’

‘Whose getting ants in their pants now?’ O’Brien said.

Two Hawks did not reply. He rose and took the switchblade from his pocket and stuck it between the front of his belt and his belly. He walked on ahead of O’Brien, who seemed reluctant to leave the imagined safety of the woods. Before Two Hawks had gone ten yards, O’Brien had run up to him.

‘Take it easy,’ Two Hawks said. ‘Act as if you had every right to be here. Anybody seeing us from a long ways off might not think anything about it if we’re casual.’

There was a ditch between the edge of the field and the road. They leaped across the little stream in its bottom and walked across the dirt road. The ground was wet but not muddy, as if it had rained a few days ago. There were deep ruts, however, that looked like wagon tracks. And there were tracks of cattle and piles of excrement.

‘No horses,’ Two Hawks said to himself. O’Brien said, ‘What?’ But Two Hawks had opened the wooden gate and was ahead of him. He noticed that the hinges were also of wood, secured to the gate by wooden pins. The grass in the yard was short, kept so by several sheep with very fat tails. These raised their heads and then shied away but uttered no baas. Two Hawks wondered if they had vocal cords; it seemed unlikely that normal sheep would have been silent during the long time he had listened in the woods.

Now he could hear the clucking of hens from behind the house and the snort of some large animals in the barn. The house itself was built in the shape of an L with the long part of the leader facing the road. There was no porch. Big thick logs, the interstices between them chinked up by a whitish substance, formed the structure of the house. The roof was thatched.

On the smooth wood of the door was painted a crude representation of an eagle. Above it was painted a large open blue eye over which was a black X.

Two Hawks raised the wooden latch that locked the door and pushed in. He had no chance to follow his plan to walk boldly in. At that moment, a woman walked around the corner of the house. She gasped and stood still, staring at them with large brown eyes. Her brown skin turned pale.

Two Hawks smiled at her and greeted her in what he hoped was passable Rumanian. He had tried to gain some fluency in the language from a fellow officer of Rumanian descent while stationed in Tobruk, but he had not had time to master more than a few stock phrases and the names of some common items.

The woman looked puzzled, said something in an unfamiliar tongue, and then walked towards them. She had a rather pretty face, although her shape was a little too squat and her legs too thick for Two Hawks’ taste. Her hair was blue-black, parted in the middle and plastered down with some sort of oil. Two braided pigtails hung down her back. She wore a necklace of red and tightly coiled seashells, an open-necked blouse of blue cotton, a wide belt of leather with a copper clasp, and a skirt of bright red cotton. It reached to her ankles. Her feet were bare and smeared with dirt, mud, and what looked like chicken excrement. A real peasant, thought Two Hawks. But if she’s friendly, that’s all that counts.

He tried some more Rumanian, got nowhere, and switched to German. She replied in the same guttural language she had used before. Although it did not sound Slavic to him, he spoke in Bulgarian. His knowledge of this was even more limited than his Rumanian. She evidently did not understand this either. However, she spoke the third time in a different speech than her first. This resembled Slavic; he tried again with Bulgarian, then with Russian, and Hungarian. She only shrugged and repeated the phrase. After hearing several more repetitions, Two Hawks understood that she was doing as he was, that is, trying out a foreign language of which she knew very little.

But when she saw that Two Hawks did not understand a word of it, she seemed to be relieved. She even smiled at him and then fell back into the first tongue she had used.

Two Hawks frowned. There was something familiar about it, Almost, he could catch a word here and there. Almost, but not quite.

He said to O’Brien, ‘We’ll have to try sign language. I …’

He stopped; obviously alarmed, she was pointing past him. He turned just in time to catch the flash of sun from the metal of a vehicle through the trees. The forest was thin by the road, and he could see across another field, perhaps three hundred yards long, to a row of trees at right angles to him. This must line the road, which either turned there or was crossed by another road.

‘Somebody coming in a car,’ he said. ‘We’d better take off. We’ll have to trust this girl or else take her with us. And if we do that, we may have to kill her. In which case, we might as well do it now.’

‘No!’ O’Brien said. ‘What the hell…!’

‘Don’t worry,’ Two Hawks said. ‘If we’re captured, we might just end up in a prison camp. But if we kill the girl, we might get executed as common criminals.’

The woman placed a hand on his wrist and pulled him towards the corner of the house while she gestured with the other hand and talked swiftly. It was evident that she wanted to take them away from the approaching vehicle or perhaps hide them.

Two Hawks shrugged and decided that there was little else to do. If they took to the woods, they would soon be captured. There just was not enough forest in which to hide.

They followed the woman around the corner and to the back of the house. She led them inside, to the kitchen. There was a huge stone fireplace with a log fire and a large iron pot on a tripod above the fire. A savory odor rose from the simmering contents. Two Hawks had little time to examine the kitchen; the woman lifted a trapdoor from the middle of the bare wooden floor and gestured to them to go on down. Two Hawks did not like the idea of placing himself and O’Brien in a position from which he could not escape. But he either could do that or take to the woods, and he had already rejected that if something else was offered. He went down a flight of ten steps with the Irishman close behind him. The trapdoor was shut, and they were in complete darkness.