The Undaunted

The Detonation

Author's Note: The following chapter contains some scenes and descriptions which may be disturbing.

***

The next day the war floundered on, Jack hurrying back to his men at dawn, cursing at having to send them out on a patrol that none of them wanted to make. It would take just one sniper and the end of the war, so close, would become something unreachable: they'd be in heaven or hell instead.

Jenny returned to the press camp, keeping the incredible secret of her engagement to Jack more closely guarded than the papers in the Reichstag. She was unable to concentrate on anything, so she set out with Martha, driving through nearby towns, purposeless except that sometimes, they both knew, the best stories came from the most unexpected places.

In one tiny town, a German woman raced over to their jeep, calling out, "Soldier women! Help me! Please!"

Jenny stopped the jeep and both she and Martha jumped out. "Is someone hurt?" Jenny asked frantically, thinking they'd need an ambulance, or a medic, wondering how far they were from the nearest hospital.

Then the sound of a terrified scream tore through Jenny's ears and the woman pointed desperately at a locked door. Behind the door, a sharp American voice rang out.

"Stop clawing, you little bitch, or I'm going to break your fucking neck."

Jenny and Martha banged on the door in unison, their cries matching the intensity of those coming from behind the door. It flew open and a GI looked out, a girl sobbing on the bed behind him.

"You three can just move along. I got a gun. There ain't nobody going to stop me having her or any other German slut I want!" he said savagely.

He continued to rant, claiming the girl was simply the spoils of victory and Jenny know that she didn't have the stomach to photograph his foul mouth or his splenetic, hostile face because there was no humanity whatsoever in this moment and therefore nobody would ever be able to look upon it.

Instead, without thinking and working purely on instinct, Jenny withdrew the Colt Jack had given her and taught her to shoot. It sickened her to train it on an American soldier, but she asked herself what choice did she have?

"Oh yes, I'm going to stop you," she said in a low, lethal voice.

The soldier stared down the barrel of the gun as if he couldn't believe that one of his own was actually holding him at gunpoint. "What the fuck...?" He began to back into the room, away from Jenny. The girl on the bed, half naked, was holding the blanket to the lower half of face in fright, her large, round eyes staring over the top of it at the tableau playing out in front of her in sheer terror.

Jenny moved into the room, careful to keep the pistol trained on the soldier. "She's screaming for you to stop. No mean no," she said, arching a brow. "What do you think your CO would say about that?"

The soldier swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously, but there was also a smugness in his answer. "Major Thompson doesn't give a damn about this." He gestured in the direction of the frightened girl on the bed. "Why the hell should he? She's nothing but a damn Nazi cunt. Whose side are you on, theirs?"

"Get out," Jenny said bluntly, cocking the gun, taking note of the soldier's name patch for her records. PFC O'Neal.

Jenny continued to stare the soldier down, careful to keep her gun steady on him. Against her better judgment, she allowed him to retrieve his firearm and flee the house.

"Stay with her," Jenny said to Martha.

She ran to the jeep, speeding on until she found an officer. She filled him in through her panting breath, pointing to where he should go, in the direction the soldier had fled. The officer, whose rank identified him as a major, stared at her for a long moment, long enough for Jenny to start shouting, as if he were deaf and hadn't heard her.