First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Read Free Book Online

camo-smeared face, Lillyman peered across the field and turned his M-1 toward the sound.
    Then whatever he’d heard parted with the shadows and moved toward him—a slow, lumbering shape much too large and bulky to be human.
    Lillyman slid his finger over his rifle’s trigger . . . and then suddenly heard a low, deep
moo
. His windpipe unlocking, the breath streaming from his mouth, he lowered the weapon and grinned. The cow trudged slowly over to where he stood, stuck out her big, moist, fleshy nose, and snuffled the sleeve of his jump jacket.
    He looked at the beast, flushed with relief. Thanks to her, he felt about five years older than he had a few minutes ago.
    When the newspapers and radios blare out the news, remember that your pappy led the way
. He’d written those words to Jane in mid-May, right after he was briefed about his Pathfinders’ role in the coming invasion, but hadn’t supposed his first encounter on enemy-held soil would be with a cow. It would be a story worth telling her sometime.
    Right now, though, Lillyman had to find his men. If he was going to do that, he’d have to retrace Crouch’s flight path. They would have been scattered along that line.
    With a silent good-bye to this bovine welcomer, he checked his wrist compass and went sprinting across the pasture toward an opening in the hedges, as alone as he’d felt in his entire life.
    10.
    At about half past midnight, Captain Basil T. Jones, the skipper of the HMS
Tartar
, found himself staring straight into the jaws of a major conundrum. Assigned picket duty off the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, his 377-foot Tribal-class destroyer was the flagship of the British Royal Navy’s 10 Destroyer Flotilla, a group on patrol against enemy vessels that might be attempting to intercept the Allied landing forces or resupply German troops on the beachhead.
    Jones’s orders were to stop for nothing unless it was to engage the enemy. The admiralty had been clear about that. They wanted to ensure that his group was undistracted, and to minimize any chance of Nazi vessels slipping through its line of defense.
    But just minutes ago, every sailor on
Tartar
’s deck had spotted an aircraft plunging out of the sky within yards of the destroyer, its left wing engulfed in ragged orange flames. Her lookouts had almost immediately witnessed men bailing out of the plane into the Channel. Notified over the ship’s telephone, Captain Jones had instructed his steersmen to investigate and hurried topside for a firsthand look. When he reached the upper deck, the destroyer’s searchlights were beaming through the misty darkness toward the downed, sinking aircraft. Several men were hollering over the gunwales and waving toward a nearby lifeboat in the water. A relatively new crew that had come on board following a major refit in January, the sailors had seen little combat to this point and were excited and anxious.
    â€œThey’re Jerries!”
    â€œShoot the bastards!”
    Raising his binoculars to his eyes, Jones heard shouts coming back at them across the heaving water: “Ship ahoy! We’re American paratroopers!
American paratroopers!
”
    Jones knew he had a decision to make. Obviously, the men clinging to that raft could not be friend and foe at the same time.
    He peered through the goggles, shifting his focus between the survivors and their sinking plane. The aircraft’s nose and wings were almost submerged, but he was able to see its rear section projecting out of the water like the tail of a breaching whale. Steadying the binoculars on that part of the fuselage, the skipper identified horizontal white bands near its tail wings—the distinct markings of an Allied invasion plane.
    Jones thought hard now. He was a veteran forty-three-year-old officer and nobody’s fool. In the weeks leading up to D-Day, SHAEF had issued repeated warnings about German efforts at deception and