Free First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Page B

to leave him behind, promising to return when they’d completed their mission.
    Burrowed down in the loamy soil, Lisk hid there in nervous silence as the troopers moved on toward their objective . . . but he wasn’t alone for long. Within minutes, he heard the sound of heavy, booted footsteps approaching the ditch. Then low German voices.
    Lisk held his breath, his body flat to the ground. The enemy foot patrol came close, closer, tramping past the ditch, kicking loose clods of soil into his face with the toes of their boots. He knew he’d be lucky to be taken prisoner if they discovered him—every member of the airborne was aware of Hitler’s threat to have paratroopers shot as spies.
    And that wasn’t the only thing weighing on his mind.
    He had the Eureka unit with him, a highly guarded piece of military technology. He couldn’t let it fall into enemy hands. His orders were to activate the explosive charge inside it before that happened. To blow it to smithereens. But that wouldn’t be possible with the Germans passing within an arm’s reach.
    Lisk knew that if he so much as twitched, they would see him. And if they saw him, they would never give him a chance to pull the det cord. He’d be captured or dead before he did it. The unit would fall into their hands. Even if they couldn’t figure out how to replicate it, they might be able to learn the frequencies the Allies were using for their beacons.
    His breath in his throat, his foot thudding with pain, Lisk watched and waited in the ditch, his only concealment the dark of night and the long moon shadows cast by the hedgerow behind him.
    20.
    About two miles south of DZ C, Drop Zone D was to be marked by a detachment of Pathfinders representing the 501st and 506th PIRs and occupying Planes 7, 8, and 9 of their serial.
    The Three Kings were aboard Plane 8, and it was no accident that they had flown in the same stick.
    T/5 Joseph Haller, Private David W. Hadley, and Private Lubimer Dejanovich had met back at Camp Mackall, South Carolina, in 1943, when they were teammates in the communications platoon of the 501 HQ’s 1st Battalion. Hitting it off big, they had stuck together like glue before, during, and after drills. They’d also gotten on their company commander’s nerves together, although for different reasons.
    â€œWe are the Three Kings . . . I am King ONE!” Haller had once stated.
    The name stuck, although as far as the CO, Captain John Simmons, was concerned, he was nothing but a royal headache. Of Austrian descent, Haller had a booming voice to match his rowdy personality and could be happily obnoxious when he’d razz the guys in his outfit with his I’m-a-member of-the-Master-Race routine.
    â€œWhy am I always so
right
?” he would ask himself aloud in the barracks. His answer? “It must be my Aryan blood!”
    While striking his best Nazi brownshirt pose, Haller also hammed it up by declaring he would someday rule the world, or by blurting out random German phrases just to aggravate people—and it worked, especially with an increasingly frustrated Simmons.
    Dejanovich had followed Haller’s lead by mining his Serbian origins for joke material. “Once we land in Europe, I’m going over the hill to join Tito!” he’d state, prompting the straitlaced Simmons to wonder if he was a Communist sympathizer.
    It didn’t help that Dejanovich, like Haller, would sometimes enjoy showing off that he was fluent in his ancestral tongue. Meanwhile, Hadley, a willing foil for his pals, got a kick out of their skewed senses of humor and didn’t seem to mind getting lumped in as a troublemaker with them.
    Simmons would eventually have his fill of all three. When the experimental Pathfinder units made a call for commo techs in the winter of ’44, he strongly suggested that he wanted them to move on.
    â€œWe’d like to have you in the