Frenzy Read Online Free PDF

for cover.
    The German Stuka dive bombers hadn’t gone away. He could see them as tiny dark specks in the sky out over the channel, wheeling in formation so they could take another strafing run at the beach.
    His heart raced and he began to run. Everyone on the beach was running.
    Tucker saw the Stukas, much closer now, awkward and dangerous looking even without the bombs slung beneath them. The planes went into a dive to come in low over the beach. Their “Jericho Horns” began to scream, scaring the hell out of people on the ground, which was their purpose. Tucker was sure as hell scared. He knew that any second machine gun bullets from the planes would start chewing up the beach, and anyone in the line of fire.
    Scared as a human being could get, that’s what Corporal Tucker was, and not too proud to admit it. From the east, German troops and tanks were closing in, and would soon push the BEF, including Corporal Henry Tucker, into the channel. Death by bullet or drowning waited there.
    Gathered at and around the damaged docks along the beach were boats of various kinds and sizes, not military ships, but private craft. Little by little, they were moving the British, and some of the French, troops across the channel to England. It was a terrible gamble. Those who didn’t die on the beach, or when the boats they were on were strafed, bombed, and sank, were the lucky ones who got out of France alive.
    Tucker prayed to be in their number.
    He saw sand kick up from the impact of bullets. Watched an abandoned troop truck shudder as heavy-caliber rounds tore into it. In the corner of his vision a woman was waving at him, frantically beckoning him.
    She was standing next to a small, damaged beach cottage with two stucco and concrete walls still standing in a crooked L-shape that provided some cover.
    The first trio of Stukas was past, flying almost wing to wing. A second grouping was on the way, flying even lower than the first.
    Tucker heard the scream of their approach as he sprinted toward the wrecked cottage. The woman, tall, with long brown hair, motioned for him to follow her behind the protective walls jutting from sand soil. There was no decision to be made by Tucker. What was left of the house was the only cover around.
    The Stukas’ screams reached a crescendo, then Tucker was around the corner and comparatively safe in the crook of the house. Sand flew as machine gun bullets from the Stukas raked the beach where he’d been only seconds ago.
    The woman was on her knees, yelling something Tucker couldn’t hear. Not that it mattered. She was speaking French.
    The planes were gone suddenly, reduced to a distant drone becoming fainter by the second.
    Then there was silence. At least for a while.
    Tucker, who’d dived for cover behind the chipped concrete walls, sat up and saw that he wasn’t alone with the woman. A dirty-faced blond child in her early teens was there, looking more dazed than frightened. And a sturdy man with a huge stomach and with dark hair and a darker mustache. He was wearing baggy gray trousers, with some kind of blue sash for a belt.
    â€œThey’ll come back,” the woman said, in English but with a French accent. She sounded terrified.
    Tucker nodded. “Don’t I know it, love.”
    The woman stared at him.
    â€œShe doesn’t understand English,” the rotund man said, “just speaks it.”
    That seemed odd to Tucker. The teenage girl observed him silently, her eyes huge.
    â€œI speak the English,” the man said.
    â€œAh!” Tucker said.
    The man grinned with very white teeth beneath his black mustache. “We need of you a favor.”
    â€œYou’ve already done me a favor,” Tucker said, looking at the woman, noticing for the first time that cleaned up, with her wild dark hair combed, she would be attractive. “Saved my bloody life, is all.”
    The man reached behind him and dragged a tan canvas backpack