Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought.
    And then, turning in exasperation, he saw what he had come for. The sole of a boot at the end of the brambles.
    The village was just outside Cambridge, the land flat for miles, flat and wet, the soil reclaimed from the sea. All that late fall, since October when he'd arrived, he'd taken a bicycle and ridden the roads and lanes of the countryside, where one could see in the distance, if it was clear, the next village and the next, their steeples rising, an uneventful landscape, a perfect landing field.
    They'd taken the village, a massive invasion, farmers’ fields now lined precisely with Nissen huts, pneumonia tubes, everyone coughing in the night, from smoke or cold, it seemed to matter little. That night, the night before the twelfth mission, he and Case had lain across from each other in their bunks, each propped up on an elbow, each smoking, talking edgily, wondering, speculating, endlessly speculating on the target, the weather, how deep the penetration, how thick the cloud cover. Case was nervous, high-strung. He sometimes boasted of his pitching arm, claimed that before the war he'd been tapped by the Boston Braves, but there was something in the way he said this, the eyes a bit evasive, that made Ted doubt his story. After missions, Case would get debilitating headaches that left him nearly lifeless in his bunk. Ted thought it more difficult for Case than for himself. Less to do as copilot, more time to think about what might be headed their way. Case could not sleep, and that night neither could he. They smoked, and Case talked about his girlfriend back home, and about the Braves. Case never slept before a mission, and Ted had lost his navigator. Ted sometimes thought that if ever they had to bail out over Germany, Case might, with luck, pass for a German—with his high flat brow and his pale, almost colorless hair. In the dark the two men could hear the coughing. One man moaned, cried out in his sleep. Case looked at Ted, said,
Shulman.
The pilot nodded. In the morning, between them on the floor, there was a pile of butts a foot wide.
    Earlier that evening, after word had come down about the mission, Ted had gone to look for Mason, the only member of the crew he'd been unable to locate easily. He'd looked in the aeroclub, the post exchange, the mess hall, even the chapel, then given up the search, thinking the navigator would return before the briefing at three A.M.
    Each night before a mission, Ted took a shower in the outdoor stall, the water brutal, ice below his feet. It was a ritual, a superstition, a down payment on thinning luck, in the same way that Tripp wore his torn scarf, and McNulty carried a deck of cards with five aces. Returning to the hut, shivering from the icy water and still wet inside his long Johns, Ted heard Case say, within his hearing, almost but not quite taunting him, that Mason had gone to Cambridge. Ted dressed, then got on his bicycle and rode in the winter dark to the hotel where he knew Mason often met his English girl. The pilot's hair froze along the way and melted in the lobby. The man at the front desk deferred to the aviator's wings and, against the rules, let him up the stairs. Ted knocked on the door and opened it. In the bed, a woman was naked. He remembered thin red hair, a mottled color to her skin. There was gin on the table, the real stuff, not GI alcohol. Mason was drunk, but the pilot knew it was fatigue that had brought him to the hotel. They called it fatigue, a gentle name for blowing all your circuits, an inability to get back into.your plane when your chances of coming home alive were only one in three. When Mason had heard about the impending mission, he'd left the base. In the hotel room, he told Ted he knew he'd be court-martialed, stripped of his wings, but he added drunkenly from the bed that he didn't give a flying fuck, and then he laughed. Ted began a protest, stopped. You couldn't crew with a navigator who had fatigue, who was drunk.
    He'd