Free Behind Hitler's Lines by Thomas H. Taylor

move him to exfiltration. That was his apprehension now, as fear of a broken leg andconvalescing with the FFI had been on his first paymaster jump. This time he wanted in and out of France quickly, like a senior-class outing before high school graduation.
    It was another two-hour night flight, bobbing and weaving. In the blacked-out cabin the jumpers were shadows swaying against one another. Being the veteran among them was a peculiar feeling for Joe. They asked him nothing, said nothing. It occurred to Joe that maybe they weren't Screaming Eagles at all. Maybe they all had clandestine covers like his. Maybe they were supposed to test Joe's ability to keep his mouth shut. Things didn't add up, but he felt higher-ups were doing calculations that would work. Wolverton backed what he was doing, and that was good enough for Joe.
    The engine shook the fuselage, rattling the deck on which they sat with increasing pain. This time Joe was scheduled to jump last. At some signal Joe couldn't hear, the man nearest the cockpit pushed open the hatch. Joe slid closer for his second look at France. “Currahee!” Joe yelled to the first jumper; he received a nod in return, then the man was gone. Joe was more excited watching him than he had been when he first jumped a month before. He grew increasingly excited as his remaining comrade crouched in the door and disappeared into the rushing night. They leaped out about ten minutes apart. No aborts. That was encouraging—the RAF-FFI system was working smoothly.
    Then he was sitting alone as the slipstream screamed by that black hatch that seemed to suck at him like a whirlpool. It was the aloneness that troubled him. Yes, there were allies down there, but he wouldn't know any of them from before. Almost sentimentally Joe wished to be back with Jack and Orv as he fidgeted, waiting for the command to go.
    The pilot was an RAF sergeant with a regimental mustache curling at the ends. He flicked his hand up, and Joe wasn't sure if that meant to hook on to the anchor line. The pilot nodded but was more concerned with finding the pattern of lamps a thousand feet below. Quickly he reached back and gave Joe a rap on the shoulder.
    “Currahee!” he yelled into the wind that in seconds was hurling him a hundred miles per hour horizontally.
    The shout spit out any misgivings. Life at twenty could be no better than this. No matter that the night was even blacker than the first, without any horizon between an earth and sky that were equally dark. His chute blasted open for that moment of suspended animation when he was neither falling nor parachuting. It should take about three minutes to descend. Joe lost count on the way down, too eager to pick up a light source somewhere.
    There were a few, scattered and distant, probably isolated farmhouses. Normandy wasn't completely blacked out despite the German curfew. In England even little lights like those would have brought the police in minutes.
    Some murky colors emerged below him, the kind a scuba diver sees when approaching the bottom of an opaque sea. Joe steered for the palest patch within a spiky collage.
    At the last second he prepared for a tree landing by crossing his legs. Joe's children are glad he did. His feet crashed through twigs; the trunk swayed as he knocked off branches and hit it bruisingly hard. With all of that tree holding him back, touching the ground was soft. His jumpsuit was ripped as was his skin beneath it.
    In a spider's web of parachute cords, branches, and twigs, Joe noisily freed himself as leaves floated down like a light snow. He scrambled away more afraid than ever in his life. Another ten yards of slip would have missed the clutching tree and set him on a meadow. Silently, from the perimeter of the meadow, a dozen figures stepped out in silhouette like the chorus in an opera.
    “I'm off to see the wizard!” Joe yelled. The answer should have been, “The wonderful wizard of Oz.” But there was a quizzical silence.
    The