Return From the Inferno by Mack Maloney Read Free Book Online Page A

bottles of recently secured homemade wine beside him on this young, brutally hot night. The roar of the Wabash River now returning as the background noise for his solitary inebriation.
    He knew he was drinking too much-but what did it matter? Just about everything he'd ever considered valuable was gone. Long gone. His country. His businesses. His women. His comrades in arms.
    His friend. . . .
    Yes, even the nagging suspicion that somehow everything would be okay if only Hawk Hunter was still alive was slowly draining out of him. Hawk was gone. He was dead. He had to face it. And gone with him were General Jones, the Cobra Brothers, Ben Wa, JT Toomey, Catfish Johnson, Elvis. All of the brave men who had fought so hard, sacrificed so much to keep America free, were now little more than cosmic dust. The only irony was that he was the last one left.
    During all those years of fighting he was convinced that he would have been one of the first to go.
    Life was cruel, he thought, finishing the last of the second bottle of wine, and wiping his brow with a damp rag. And the universal joke was that few good intentions go unpunished. They had tried though. They had given it their best effort.
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    They had made history. But what good was that, if there was no one to tell the story to?
    He crawled up on his bunk, stared out at the brilliant sunset and heard the words of a long-ago poem drift across his mind: Other spirits having flown, • . / too will fly to the west some day.
    I hope it's damned soon, he thought.
    He located the third of his wine bottles, uncorked and took an unhealthy gulp.
    He hoped this one would put him to sleep. With everything else in his life lost, sleep is what he craved the most. He did a slow boozy scan of the shack.
    Even in his drunken state he made sure that he'd left no evidence of his stillborn sabotage plan lying around the hut. Not that it would make much difference. The fire was gone from his heart, extinguished by the overwhelming, invincible brutality of the Fourth Reich and too many bottles of bad wine. He was now a prisoner. A shepherd. A gravedigger. A teacher. A bridge tender. A lifeguard. A slave. A drunk.
    He had little opportunity then to be a saboteur.
    He took a longer slug of wine and caught a glimpse of himself in the cracked mirror across the room. He was startled by his puffy eyes, his thinning hair, his sagging belly. His once, tough as nails fireplug physique was nowhere in evidence. Flab, age, and indifference were quickly taking their toll.
    "My God," he whispered, studying the stranger in the mirror. "I'm beginning to look like a priest!"
    He rolled back over on his bunk, took three slobbering gulps of wine and closed his eyes. All he could see were the faces of the young girl and the old man he'd somehow pulled from the river. His overtaxed mind was now telling him the strange incident had been due to an alcoholic blackout, hardly a comforting thought.
    He took another long swig of wine and wiped the excess that ran down his cheek.
    Sleep, he prayed. His words hanging in the brutally humid night air, Please put me to sleep. . . .
    47
    Whether he ever actually drifted off, he didn't know.
    He was stretched out on the bunk, bathed in sweat; the bottle leaking wine at his side when a cry pierced his eardrums.
    "Help!"
    He was up in an instant. Was it a dream? Was he thinking back to the strange rescue earlier in the day?
    "Help!"
    He rolled off the bunk and scampered to the front door. It was the dead of night. He must have gone to sleep! Now he was wide awake. On the far bank he could just barely see the outline of a man, up to his waist in the water, trying to ford the rapid current and losing the battle.
    Fitz was out of the hut in a shot. He knew there'd be no replay of his miraculous rescue the day before.
    "Stop!" he yelled to the man. "I will lower the bridge!"
    Somehow the man heard him over the roar of the Wabash and managed to haul himself back up onto the shore. Fitz was