1
JUNE 7, 1944
NEARLY TWO DAYS INTO the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach, newly promoted Army Ranger Major Garrett “Coop” Sinclair stood atop Pointe du Hoc with the sun setting behind an American flag snapping in the stiff breeze.
Coop’s youthful face was smeared with mud and camouflage on top of three days of beard stubble. His tired eyes stared into the horizon of the undulating Normandy Peninsula as a line of German prisoners, hands laced over their Stahlhelm helmets, walked under guard just beyond the casement Coop’s Rangers had captured.
Second Ranger Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder approached with a young Frenchman in tow.
“The 505th paras are having a hard go of it a few miles from here,” Rudder said. “This is Marius. He’s with a resistance group that was tasked with guiding us, but he says there’re some women and children in trouble up the road. Take five men and go see what’s happening. Then come back or we’ll come to you, whichever makes sense.”
The eager-eyed Frenchman was maybe sixteen years old. He was wearing a black beret and gray herringbone coat. His leather shoes looked ill-suited for the task of guiding Rangers through German defenses. When Marius pointed west, a rhombus-shaped black tattoo flashed inside the wrist of his right hand. It was the same insignia turned on its side, like an elongated baseball diamond, that Coop and the other Rangers wore on the sleeve of their uniforms. The Rangers had been briefed they would be linking up with resistance members and that they should look for the Ranger rhombus-shaped tattoos that signaled they were talking to bona fide allies.
“Rapide! Rapide!” the man said.
“Cool it, Frenchy,” Coop said, then to Rudder: “Sir, we’re barely hanging on here. If I take five of my men things will get even more dicey.”
As if to emphasize Coop’s point, machine-gun fire chattered nearby, snapping overhead with white arcs of German tracers etching against the muted purple hues of dusk. Waves of Allied troops continued to pour onto Utah and Omaha beaches below Coop’s position.
“We’ve got this, Coop. If we can’t save women and children, what’s the point? Now get moving,” Rudder said.
“Roger that, Colonel,” Coop replied. He’d made his protest and now would follow his commander’s orders.
Explosions from the naval artillery blanketing the coastline rumbled. The ground shook. Someone yelled, “Incoming!” and Coop grabbed Marius and dove to the ground, shrapnel whizzing like angry hornets.
“Can’t show us the way if you’re dead,” Coop grumbled.
“Je suis pierre-tranchant,” Marius said, holding up his wrist with the tattoo and pointing at the small black rhombus. “La pierre est tranchant.”
“Rudder said you’re good to go, but thanks for that. Yes, the stone is sharp,” Coop said in reply to Marius’ offering of bona fides. The planning in Titchfield, England, had called for French resistance members to etch a small Ranger rhombus henna tattoo on the inside of their right wrist and use the phrase “The stone is sharp” when linking up with the Rangers. The French liaison suggested this because the Ranger insignia looked like a “sharp stone.”
Coop pulled Marius by his trench coat the way a coach tugs a quarterback into a sideline huddle. He eyed his gaggle of twenty men and gathered his five nearest Rangers, who were cleaning their M1 Garand rifles and licking the inside of combat ration cans, commonly known as “c-rats.”
“Special mission, men, let’s go,” he said. They reassembled their weapons and grabbed their gear without complaint. They had survived the climb up Pointe du Hoc and most likely considered themselves invincible or lucky or both. Coop tucked in behind Marius, who hurried them along a trail that kept the assault on Utah Beach to their immediate rear and right flank. Marius’ shoes didn’t seem to be an impediment as Coop and his men began running to keep up with the worried Frenchman.
“Rapide! Rapide!” Marius whispered over his shoulder, loud enough for the men to hear.
It was the second night of the invasion. Coop and his men had been operating continuously. Artillery rained down. Naval ships bombed the coast without precision. Machine-gun fire chattered. Lead pinged off thousands of landing craft in Seine Bay, which fronted Normandy Beach, sounding like a symphony from hell.
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.
2
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.
“Warden, I don’t know what day it is, much less why I’m in your facility,” I replied.
“It’s Thursday. President’s Day weekend is coming up. A holiday,” he said, as if that mattered to me. Finally, he turned and looked at me. “I’ve been instructed to give you two pieces of information.”
He paused, but I said nothing.
“First, your lawyer was found dead yesterday,” Smyth said.
My “lawyer” was Charles Green, a family friend of my late grandfather, General Garrett “Coop” Sinclair. Green was a garden-variety attorney who handled everything imaginable in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Before writing a dozen letters to the president and chief of staff of the army about my confinement, to no avail, his most important duty had been handling Coop’s estate when my grandfather had passed a few years ago. Coop was a genuine World War II legend, having scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day during the Normandy Invasion with the Second Ranger Battalion. Green had smuggled my grandfather’s combat diary inside a leather-bound Bible during his one and only visit a year ago.
I shrugged. I had liked Green and knew him mostly from when I was a kid helping Coop work on his cars.
“Our communications department tells me he sent a package for you, which you can have tomorrow,” Smyth said.
“Why can’t I have it today?” I didn’t really care, but I was mildly curious.
He coughed and said, “That’s the second piece of information. I’ve been instructed to release you. Tomorrow, you’ll be officially discharged from my facility and the army. The inspector general’s office has completed their investigation and made their recommendations to the secretary of defense, who has reported the findings to the president. The president, evidently, showed mercy and granted you a pardon, which allows you to maintain your rank. Your discharge is effective at noon tomorrow. Behave until then and you’re free, a retired three-star general. Give me one reason … one reason … to keep you here, and I will. Understand?”
I stood there motionless. His words were artificial. They didn’t resonate. They couldn’t be real.
“You’re gone tomorrow,” Smyth said again. “Discharged. Full pension. Not my choice, but the president is in charge.”
I remained motionless and said nothing.
“Sinclair. Do you hear me, inmate Sinclair?”
The volume of his voice cracked the veneer of my protective shield. In prison I felt nothing, believed very little, and said even less.
“One more time, Sinclair. Do you understand me?!”
I didn’t respond then, either, but a sense of sorrow washed over me. I’d had nearly a year to contemplate my situation and the likelihood that my career was over, but that didn’t make this news any easier to accept. I had never expected a gold watch or farewell party, not even before I’d been secreted to the shadowy confines of the DB. But I had thought this mistake would have been rectified, that they would have cleared my name when I was released. At the very least, I wanted the opportunity to thank my troops and say goodbye to a few friends. Instead, I was being shamefully ushered into the cold winter of Kansas. The finality was incomprehensible.
A year ago, the FBI had swarmed across the sand dunes of Figure Eight Island, North Carolina, and snatched Sergeants Major Joe Hobart, Randy Van Dreeves, and me when we were debriefing the Eye of Africa mission with President Campbell. Somehow my former team member Jake Mahegan had avoided capture. Last I saw, he had a federal agent in a hammerlock as they wrestled on the beach. My money had been on Mahegan, though I had never learned the outcome.
Once a college roommate of my wife and a theoretical friend to me, President Campbell was now trying to salvage what was left of her term and consolidate her political power. Her cabinet had secretly enhanced ties with the Chinese government and some tech moguls, but only she and her team knew their part in the endgame in that relationship. Once someone who had been read on to every special access, code word program in the United States government, I was now just another prisoner and, evidently, a soon-to-be discharged veteran. No charges filed. No trial date set. And now released and retired? I didn’t believe what Smyth was saying.
“I’m calling the guards unless you acknowledge that you understand what I just said, inmate Sinclair.”
“I do,” I said, but I didn’t. There was no way it was over, just like that. Either I was being ambushed when I left tomorrow, or I would find an untimely demise this evening in my cell.
“Nothing to say? Your career is over and you’re speechless?”
“No farewell party?” I quipped.
Smyth’s eyes got distant, and the faintest hint of a smirk turned on his lips.
“I’m sure your peers will think of something,” he said. “Golden handcuffs might be fitting, don’t you think?”
I caught the flash of a police strobe outside on Route 73, which bordered the military reservation. A gaggle of black-and-white police cars had gathered about a mile away. A spider of intuition crawled along my spine.
Copyright © 2024 by A. J. Tata
