Today's Reading
Following a drainage gulley from north to south, Marius led Coop and his team to a small shelter. Stemming from the outbuilding was a worn path to the town. By now, Coop could hear shrieks louder than any artillery explosion or rifle fire. The plaintive cries of women and children became his beacon in the night.
Coop grabbed Marius by the shoulder and said, "We've got it from here."
Marius pointed at a group of German soldiers herding women and children into the basement of a French farmhouse situated on a sloping ridge. The box frame of the house fronted the high ground while the back side offered a generous bottom level dug into the terrain. One of the Germans near the cellar door was holding a jerry can filled with gasoline.
"Follow me, men," Coop said to his Rangers.
Coop and his men charged the German troops, who were shouting, "Tod durch feurer! Tod durch feurer!" Death by fire! Death by fire!
Coop fired his M1 Garand rifle until he ran out of ammunition. His teammates provided cover for one another as they took turns charging the Germans. Coop led the assault and stuck his bayonet in the man by the basement door. Another German soldier held the petrol can and a lighter, which he tossed into the doorway leading to the basement just as Coop rammed the butt of his rifle into the man's face.
The flame ignited, burning red and yellow against the angry black sky.
Screams pierced the night as Coop ran into the blazing inferno toward the prisoners inside.
PRESENT DAY
I closed my grandfather's World War II combat diary, the ink diffused by tears, the pages covered in dark stains I took to be blood. I ran my finger across the worn cover where he had drawn in pencil the Ranger patch rhombus, a square turned on a point. The pencil had traced and retraced the four sides, as if he had been deep in thought when sketching.
Holding the leather-bound tome in my manacled hands, as if in prayer, I looked up when the guard rattled her baton between the bars of my cell.
"Let's go Sinclair," Sergeant Robin Calles said. "Going to see the big guy."
I slid the diary beneath my mattress and walked with Calles' baton in my back through the byzantine maze of new and old construction until I was standing in the warden's office, looking through his panoptic window.
The winter sun hung low behind the khaki-colored cornfields, stalks severed and broken; a metaphor for something, I thought. Perhaps the state of the country or even the world. The warden's view looked down upon the prison yard, the razor wire stretching between the guard towers and the bluffs of the Missouri River. The sun's muted, fading hues cast a diminishing glow across the acres of frozen penitentiary land the inmates tended in the spring under the watchful eyes of snipers.
"Inmate Sinclair, why do you think you're still under my charge?" Warden Phillip Smyth asked me.
Smyth was an active-duty full bird colonel. His hair was gelled back Gordon Gekko style. His throwback Army olive-and-tan uniform bulged at all the seams. Tall and thickset, Smyth was a military police officer charged with operating the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks, known in the military as "the DB." The DB was a maximum-security prison that held everything from death row inmates who would receive lethal injections to felons who cheated the military supply system by stealing blankets. And then there was me with pending murder charges, among other lesser allegations, to the best of my knowledge. No one had told me. Normally a prisoner was afforded protections of due process but given the atmospherics around my arrest, I'd yet to be charged with a crime.
Smyth stood profile to me, gazing out the same window as if he were posing for a Grant Wood portrait. Instead of the pitchfork of American Gothic fame, he held a gnarled and lacquered walking stick in his fleshy right fist, its shiny tip appearing unblemished and pristine. I shifted my gaze from beyond the walls of the prison to Smyth's narrow eyes, which refused to meet mine. His typically arrogant countenance was replaced by something I hadn't seen before. Perhaps, worry?
I had been in this office only once before and that was a year ago when the FBI had delivered me here fresh from an FBI ambush on Figure Eight Island, North Carolina, perhaps baited by the president of the United States herself.
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