Dark Full of Enemies(11)

“All right.” Stallings stared at the floor. McKay looked at him.

“Grove?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Stallings said, and sat up. “So what—if you’ll pardon the question—what’s in it for me?”

McKay nodded to the radios on the desk. “I know you. I don’t think toting that thing around for your CO is your idea of a good time, especially where y’all are fixing to head off to.”

Stallings listened.

“What I do is dangerous, and don’t you forget it for a minute,” McKay said, and he heard Keener speaking to him in a cold white hospital ward a year before. “It’ll get you out of this line of work and into something I think you’ll do good at. And you’ll have a chance to make a difference, to do something important. To raise the kind of hell you were born to in a place where you can. No more chickenshit.”

Stallings said nothing, but his face had brightened. He looked like he was ready to leap from his chair and go on the spot. But something held him back.

McKay sat back and took in the Quonset hut.

“Or you can stay here and bounce back and forth between private and sergeant for the duration.”

“How much—”

“We can talk about pay later.”

“No, uh,” Stallings bit his lip and looked at the floor. He flicked ash from his cigarette and ground it with the toe of his boot. “How much more dangerous?”

McKay blinked. This was the last question he had expected from Grover Stallings. Stallings went on.

“I know what you do is dangerous, and I respect you for it, Joe. I do. And I know what y’all did, fighting the Japs—that wasn’t no cake walk neither. But I—we ain’t exactly been laying around on the job, you know.”

McKay was stung, and regretted his condescension. He knew what Stallings’s division had been through in Sicily.

“Grove, I didn’t mean—”

“I know, I know you didn’t, and I wasn’t trying to say you did. I just—” Stallings looked McKay in the eye. His body was still. McKay thought he saw his eyes well up. That bothered him. “Will it be worse than Sicily?”

McKay thought a moment. He could only answer honestly.

“I don’t know.”

Stallings looked at the floor again, and McKay thought of the nighttime landing at Gela, the Army infantry huddled in landing craft ferried shivering and puking into a darkness full of enemies.

“I do know what y’all are preparing for, Grove, and that will be worse than Sicily. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be damned if I ever see the inside of a landing craft again.”

He waited. After a while, Stallings said, “You know, I seen this newsreel a while back about the Marines landing on some island somewhere. The Japs killed thousands. And the whole time I sat there watching it, I kept thinking—You know, I might see McKay up there. Dead, floating in the water. I don’t think I coulda handled that. Not now.”

McKay said nothing. Stallings rubbed his forehead and sat up.

“Okay. I’m in.”

“Just like that.”

Stallings waved his hand as if the desks and hut and the entire camp were smoke he wanted out of his face. “The hell with it. Sign me up.”

They laughed and stood and walked toward the outer office.

“You have ten minutes,” McKay said. “Get anything you don’t want to leave behind. You’ve got weapons and gear waiting for you.”

“All right. Can I bring my own sidearm?”

“You have one?”

“Of course.”

“All right, then, go get it.”

Stallings laughed, saluted Lieutenant Roberts as he passed—“Sir”—and stepped out into the dark. He was grinning and joking again, and McKay laughed with him. But the joking, or something beneath the joking, barely hidden, bothered him. Of all the responses he had expected and prepared for Stallings to give him, he had not planned for the one he actually got—fear.





When Stallings climbed into the jeep McKay inspected his pistol. It was a standard issue sidearm—a Colt .45, in a leather holster marked u.s. on a webbed belt, with a canvas snap pouch for two spare magazines. The pistol’s action was smooth, its parts clean and well-oiled, and the magazine and chamber both empty. McKay nodded, impressed. The Army had drilled some responsibility into Stallings.

An hour later, while wending back northward through the trucks and jeeps of the Allied Expeditionary Force, he realized the pistol belonged to Lieutenant Roberts.

Stallings laughed when McKay asked about it.

“It’s something for him to remember me by. Or the lack of something to remember me by, anyways.” McKay laughed despite himself, and Stallings said, “So when can you tell me what this is all about? You mind?” He held a cigarette forward so McKay could see it.

“Go ahead. We’re heading straight to the plane. Our gear and the rest of the team will already be there. I’ll brief all of you on the specifics later.”

“The hell with the specifics, just give me an idea what I stole the Lieutenant’s Colt for.”

McKay pulled the most recent photo of the dam out of his file and handed it back. Stallings flicked his lighter, lit his cigarette, and held the lighter up over the photo.