The Bullet Garden: An Earl Swagger Novel


 
 New York Times Bestselling Author
 Stephen Hunter
 An Earl Swagger Novel
 The Bullet Garden
 
 
 
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 To the novelists of The War, some great, some not so great, whose work illuminated my youth…
 Anton Myrer, The Big War
 Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea
 Edward L. Beach, Run Silent, Run Deep
 Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions
 James E. Bassett, Harm’s Way
 John Clagett, The Slot
 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
 John Hersey, The War Lover
 Joseph Heller, Catch-22
 Leon Uris, Battle Cry
 Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
 James Jones, The Thin Red Line
 George Mandel, The Wax Boom
 John Ashmead, The Mountain and the Feather
 Richard Matheson, The Beardless Warriors
 Robert Gaffney, A World of Good
 Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun
 James E. Ross, The Dead Are Mine
 Thomas Heggen, Mister Roberts
 Denys Raynor, The Enemy Below
 
 
 
 My! People come and go so quickly here!
 Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), The Wizard of Oz, 1939
 
 
 
 PRELUDE: CASEY
 6–8 June 1944
 
 
 Roger
 “No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply not feasible without Bren guns. Surely you understand?”
 Yes, Roger understood but he was nevertheless unwilling.
 “Our wealth is in our Bren guns. Without Bren guns, we are nothing. Pah, we are dust, we are cat shit, do you see? Nothing. NOTHING!”
 Of course he said “Rien,” for the language was French, as was the setting, the cellar of a farmhouse outside the rural burg of Tulle, Department of Corrèze, in the region of Limousin, 250 miles south and east of Paris. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with an American chum.
 “Do you not see,” Basil explained, “that the point in giving you Brens was to wage war upon the Germans, not to make you powerful politically in the postwar, after we have pushed Jerry out. FTP Communists, FFL Gaullists, we do not care, it does not matter, or matter now. What matters now is that you have to help us push Jerry out. That was the point of the Bren guns. We gave them to you for that reason, explicitly, and no other. You have had them eighteen months and you have never used them once.”
 “I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live the Comintern! Long live the Internationale! Long live the great Stalin, the bear, the man of steel! If you were in Spain, you would understand this principle. If you—”
 “Dear Roger, listen to the American lieutenant here. Do you think the Americans would have sent a fellow so far as they’ve sent this one just to tell you lies? This fellow is an actual son of the earth. His pater was a farmer. He raises wheat and cows and fights red Indians, as in the movies. He is tall, silent, noble. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”
 He turned to the American and then realized he had, once again, forgotten the name. It was nothing personal; he just was so busy being magnificent and British that he couldn’t be troubled by small details, such as American names.
 “I say, Lieutenant, what was the moniker again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall outside London for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but it kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of its disappearance.
 “My name is Leets,” said Leets, in English, accented in the tones of the middle plains of his vast homeland, the Minnesota part.
 “It’s so strange,” said Basil. “It just goes away. Poof, it’s gone, so bizarre. Anyhow, tell him.”
 Leets also spoke French with a Parisian accent, which was why Roger, of Group Roger, didn’t care for him, or for Basil. Roger thought all Parisians were traitors or bourgeoisie, equally culpable in any case, and that seemed to go twice for British or American Parisians. He didn’t know that Leets spoke with a Parisian accent because he’d lived there between the ages of seven and fourteen while his father managed 3M’s European accounts. No, Leets’s father was not a farmer, not hardly, and had certainly never fought red Indians; he was a rather wealthy business executive now retired, living in Sarasota, Florida, with one son, this one, in occupied France playing cowboys with the insane, another a naval aviator on a jeep carrier that had yet to reach the Pacific, and still a third 4-F and in medical school in Chicago.
 Roger, namesake and kingpin of Group Roger, turned his fetid little eyes upon Leets.
 “I can blow the bridge,” said Leets. “It’s not a problem. The bridge will go down; it’s only a matter of rigging the 808 in the right place and leaving a couple of time pencils stuck in the stuff.”
 But Basil interrupted, on the thrust of an epiphany.
 “It’s because you’re all so similar,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of right proper Oxonian thought. “It has to do with gene pools. In our country, or in Europe on the whole, the gene pool is much more diverse. You see that in the fantastic European faces. Really, go to any city in Europe and the variety