Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  “Doing something worthwhile for a change.”

  Abel thought about the young captain as he slowly headed back to the field kitchen.

  For both men the war was over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The stretcher-bearers took the captain into a tent and laid him gently on an operating table. Captain William Kane of the 9th Armored Division could see a nurse looking sadly down at him, but he was unable to hear anything she was saying. He wasn’t sure if it was because his head was swathed in bandages or because he was now deaf. He watched her lips move but learned nothing. He shut his eye and thought. He thought a lot about the past; he thought a little about the future; he thought quickly in case he died. He knew that if he lived, there would be a long time for thinking. His mind turned to Kate in New York. The nurse could see a tear trickling out of the corner of the one eye.

  Kate had refused to accept his determination to enlist. He had known that she would never understand, and that he would never be able to justify his reasons to her, so he had stopped trying. The memory of her desperate face now haunted him. He had never really considered death—no man does—and now he wanted only to live and return to his family.

  William had left Lester’s under the joint control of Ted Leach and Tony Simmons until he returned. Until he returned … He had given no instructions for them to follow if he did not come home. Both of them had begged him not to go. Two more men who didn’t understand. When he had finally signed up, he couldn’t face the children. Richard, aged seven, had held back the tears until his father said that he could not go along with him to fight the Germans.

  They sent him first to an Officers’ Candidate School in Vermont. Last time he had seen Vermont, he had been skiing with Matthew, slowly up the hills and quickly down. The course lasted for three months and made him fit again for the first time since he had left Harvard.

  His first assignment was in a London full of Yanks, where he acted as a liaison officer between the Americans and the British. He was put up at the Dorchester, which the British War Office had taken over and seconded for use by the American Army. William had read somewhere that Abel Rosnovski had done the same thing with the Baron in New York and he had thoroughly approved. The blackouts, the doodlebugs and the air raid warnings all made him believe that he was involved in a war, but he felt strangely detached from what was going on only a few hundred miles south of Hyde Park Corner. Throughout his life he had always taken the initiative; he had never been an onlooker. Moving between Eisenhower’s staff headquarters in St. James’s and Churchill’s War Operations room in Storey’s Gate wasn’t William’s idea of initiative. It didn’t look as if he was going to meet a German face-to-face for the entire duration of the war unless Hitler invaded Trafalgar Square.

  When part of the First Army was posted to Scotland for training exercises with the Black Watch, William was sent along as an observer and told to report back with his findings. During the long, slow journey to Scotland by train he began to suspect that he was fast becoming a glorified messenger boy, and to wonder why he had ever signed up. But once in Scotland, William found everything different. There, at least the air held the excitement of preparing for war, and when he returned to London, he put in a request for an immediate transfer to the First Army. His commanding officer, who never believed in keeping behind a desk a man who wanted to see action, released him.

  Three days later William returned to Scotland to join his new regiment and began his training with the American troops at Inveraray for the invasion they all knew had to come soon. Training was hard and intense. Nights spent in the Scottish hills fighting mock battles with the Black Watch were a marked contrast to evenings at the Dorchester writing reports.

  Three months later they were parachuted into northern France to join Omar N. Bradley’s army, moving across Europe. The scent of victory was in the air and William wanted to be the first soldier in Berlin.

  The First Army advanced toward the Rhine, determined to cross any bridge they could find. Captain Kane received orders that morning that his division was to advance over the Ludendorff bridge ahead of them and engage the enemy a mile northeast of Remagen in a forest on the far side of the river. He stood on the crest of a hill and watched the 9th Armored cross the bridge, expecting it to be blown sky high at any moment.

  His colonel led his own division in behind them. William followed with the 120 men under his command, most of them, like William, going into action for the first time. No more exercises with wily Scots pretending to kill him with blank cartridges—followed by a meal together. Germans, with real bullets, death—and perhaps no meal afterward.

  When William reached the edge of the forest, he and his men met with no resistance, so they decided to press farther into the woods. The going was slow and without event and William was beginning to think the 9th must have done such a thorough job that his division would only have to follow them through, when from nowhere they were suddenly ambushed by a hail of bullets and mortars. Everything seemed to be coming at them at once. William’s men went down, trying to protect themselves among the trees, but he lost over half the platoon in a matter of seconds. The battle, if that’s what it could be called, had lasted for less than a minute and he hadn’t even seen a German. William crouched in the wet undergrowth for a few more seconds and then saw, to his horror, the next wave of the 9th Division coming through the forest. He ran from his shelter behind a tree to warn them of the ambush. The first bullet hit him in the head and, as he sank to his knees in the German mud and continued to wave and shout a frantic warning to his advancing comrades, the second hit him in the neck and a third in the chest. He lay still in the mud and waited to die not having ever seen the enemy—a dirty, unheroic death.

  The next thing William knew, he was being carried on a stretcher, but he couldn’t hear or see anything and he wondered if it was night or whether he was blind.

  It seemed a long journey, and then his eye opened, focusing on a colonel, limping out of the tent. There was something familiar about him, but he couldn’t think what. The stretcher-bearers took him into the operating tent and placed him on the table. He tried to fight off sleep for fear that it might be death.

  William woke. He was conscious that two people were trying to move him. They were turning him over as gently as they could and then they stuck a needle into him. William dreamed of seeing Kate, and then his mother, and then Matthew playing with his son Richard. He slept.

  He woke. He knew they had moved him to another bed; slight hope replaced the thought of inevitable death. He lay motionless, his one eye fixed on the canvas roof of the tent, unable to move his head. A nurse came over to study a chart and then him. He slept.

  He woke. How much time had passed? Another nurse. This time he could see a little more and—joy, oh joy!—he could move his head, if only with great pain. He lay awake as long as he possibly could; he wanted to live. He slept.

  He woke. Four doctors were studying him, deciding what? He could not hear them and so learned nothing. They moved him once again. He was able to watch as they put him in an ambulance. The doors closed behind him, the engine revved up and the ambulance began to move over rough ground while a new nurse sat by his side holding him steady. The journey felt like an hour, but he no longer could be sure of time. The ambulance reached smoother ground and then came to a halt. Once again they moved him. This time they were walking on a flat surface and then up some stairs into a dark room. They waited again and then the room began to move, another car perhaps. The room took off. The nurse stuck another needle into him and he remembered nothing until he felt the plane landing and taxiing to a halt. They moved him yet again. Another ambulance, another nurse, another smell, another city. New York, or at least America, he thought; no other smell like that in the world. The new ambulance took him over another smooth surface, continually stopping and starting, until it finally arrived at where it wanted to be. They carried him out once again and up more steps into a small white-walled