Silence.
It was the one word that catapulted through her mind as she jumped, the wind whooshing up to meet her ears almost instantly, making her dizzy for a moment as she squinted at the field below. Her fingers itched to hold her camera, but it was fixed safely to her body along with as many flashbulbs and rolls of film as she could carry, and there was no way she could have taken a shot with the ground racing up to meet her so quickly and the light far too dim. She would have to rely instead upon Andy’s articulate words to capture the feeling of falling through the sky from a plane, with paratroopers like a sparse flock of birds floating around her as they too rushed toward the ground, being battered by the elements as they spiraled down.
The moonlight was the most beautiful crescent in the sky, but there was barely a moment to admire it before it was time to prepare for landing, as the relentless wind tore at her eyes and skin and sent her into a spin. Oh no. Instead of landing on a bare patch of ground, a tree seemed to be racing up to meet her and she struggled to get out of its way, lurching to the side as she wrapped her arms around her chest to protect her camera, but to no avail.
Crash. Danni groaned as she immediately tangled in the branches, with no amount of kicking or flailing doing her any good. She was properly stuck, but at least she hadn’t whacked into the ground and smashed all her bulbs.
Damn it! She decided to stay still, dangling less than three feet off the ground, but it may as well have been twenty for all the good it did her. Danni was acutely aware of the danger they faced, that she’d ended up in a tree that could soon be surrounded by the enemy, and she doubted they’d care about her correspondent badge, which was supposed to spare her from being killed. She clenched her jaw, refusing to be drowned in her own dark thoughts.
“Andy!” she whispered, her voice sounding hoarse as she tried to clear her throat. “Andy! ” she gasped again, more frantically this time as tendrils of panic began to rise in her throat.
She should never have laughed at him. God. He’d probably leave her to be shot down by a sniper just to spite her now. Danni gulped. So much for being brave; it wouldn’t do her any good if she were taken out before she’d even put her boots on the ground.
Then voices whispered near her, carried on the breeze, and she breathed a sigh of relief. American voices. It was a beautiful melody to her ears.
“Andy!” she hissed again.
And suddenly, as she wriggled and flailed some more, he was there, his eyes glinting in the moonlight, barely visible.
“You called?” he asked.
“Just hurry up and get me down, would you?” she muttered, wishing she hadn’t been quite so forthright in threatening any man who laid a hand on her. She could do with more than one pair of hands right now to help her down.
Andy tugged at the branches and lifted something over his head, and within seconds Danni dropped to the ground with an animal-sounding grunt. He was the one man who was never afraid to manhandle her, or tell her exactly how stupid some of her ideas were. She loved Andy to pieces, in a completely brotherly way, although she’d never admit to him just how much she’d come to rely on him.
Oomph.
“Sorry, I should have been more gentle,” Andy said dryly.
Danni would have thumped him on the arm for being smart, but she was more interested in making sure her camera had survived the jump. She had it attached to her body and wrapped tightly in a spare shirt like the precious parcel it was; the one piece of equipment she needed to do her job, she protected it as fiercely as a lioness would her cub. She instinctively touched her side, too, checking the bag that was also strapped carefully to her body, and was relieved not to hear the crunch of broken glass.
“You okay?” she asked Andy, once she’d done her checks. “Tell me you didn’t enjoy it just a little bit?”
Andy nudged his shoulder into her. “I’ll admit, it was kind of beautiful, but it’s not something I’m planning on doing again any time soon, especially with a bloody typewriter strapped to me. Next time you come up with a harebrained idea, I’m not buying into it.”
She didn’t reply, not about to tell him that he always said yes to her. Eventually. Although this time she did almost feel sorry for him, given that he’d confessed a fear of heights to her, not to mention the fact that his Remington typewriter was a lot more cumbersome than her camera.
They’d been working together for nearly four years, and they had an unwritten rule that they always traveled together, no matter what, and after so long working side by side, she couldn’t imagine it any other way. They could talk about anything and nothing, depending on their mood, and there was no one else she’d trust with her life.
“Tell me again why this was such a great idea?” Andy muttered as they huddled close, walking shoulder to shoulder as they searched for the rest of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
“Because we’re the first to land here,” she whispered back. “Which means you have the biggest story to send back to London, and I’m going to have photos that no one else does.”
She heard his resigned sigh. “If it makes it past the censor.”
Danni patted his back, understanding his frustration at not being able to write what he saw and send it back without it being doctored. Sometimes she’d seen them delete information that was readily available to all, and it made his articles almost impossible to decipher at times.
Over the course of the hour, a small group of them assembled, and Danni was careful to listen and do as she was told. In the past, she’d managed to get away with defying orders and sailing very close to the wind, but this time she needed to toe the line. Not only was she closer to the conflict than she’d ever been before, but she was also the only woman to ever be this close to the front line or to parachute with troops, and she wasn’t about to blow it. As far as she was concerned, she’d already pushed her luck as far as it might go.
They’d landed in an egg-shaped area behind enemy lines in Gela, Sicily, and from the briefing they’d received, the troops were expected to close off all roads leading to beaches and secure the drop zone, but Mother Nature was not playing her part. The wind howled around them, the worst possible conditions for landing other than if lashing rain had been paired with it, and she knew that things could turn bad. Fast. Their survival certainly wasn’t a given.
“My estimates are that less than a quarter of us have landed where we were supposed to, and that’s including these two,” the commanding officer said. “The other companies must have scattered all around us.”
Danni absently fingered the stitched “C” on her armband that marked her as a war correspondent, wishing that she were holding her camera. But it was no use; it was dark and she wasn’t allowed to create any light with her flashbulbs.
“The rest of the 505th have landed outside our drop zone, but our mission remains. We will complete the operation and continue to fight in small groups. We can only hope that the others have banded together where possible, so we can secure Sicily and keep the landings on the beachhead clear.”
Excitement rippled through Danni as she surveyed the brave men crouched in a semicircle to her left. She’d spent months in North Africa alongside the troops, and was well used to listening to briefings and being up close and personal with soldiers, but there was something different about being on the ground with them like this, to see them thinking on their feet and adapting. She knew from earlier briefings that Operation Husky was a plan to secure the concrete pillboxes from where the German gunners controlled movement on the roads.