Street Boys Read Free Page B

wide smile that balanced out a hard edge. He had fought under Anders’s command for fourteen months, pounding and slashing his way from one blood-drenched beachhead to the next, always the first in line, always the first to fire. He had a street fighter’s instincts for battle and survival and was, as far as Captain Ed Anders was concerned, the best soldier for the task at hand.
    “It might just be a ghost town with two of our men in it,” Anders said. “We had a handful of G.I.s helping the Italian resistance—or whatever the hell was left of it. Most of them slipped out before the evacuation. Two didn’t. They could be dead. They could be hiding. They could be back in the States for all I know. But we’ve got to find out.”
    “I go in alone?” Connors asked.
    “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Anders said.
    “Very much, sir.”
    “I’d like a bowl of my wife’s white bean soup,” Anders said. “But that’s not going to happen, either. You’ll be part of a three-man team. You go in, as quiet as you can, check out the city and see if you can find our guys.”
    “Who else is on the team, sir?”
    “If our soldiers are still in there, they might be hurt. So you’ll take one of the medics, Willis. And then another good rifle to cover your back. That’ll be Scott Taylor.”
    Connors winced at the sound of Taylor’s name. “Every man out here has a rifle, sir,” he said. “Not just Taylor.”
    “But not every man’s going,” Anders said, raising his voice. “Taylor is. I know you two rub each other the hard way, but this ain’t the senior prom. If it gets tight, he’s somebody good to have on your side. Neither one of you has to like it. You just have to do it.”
    “Yes, sir,” Connors said. “Anything else I need to know?”
    “Not a damn thing.” Anders reached into the front flap of the younger soldier’s shirt and pulled a loose cigarette from his open pack. “Just radio back what you see. We’ll do the rest.”
    “And if we don’t find our men?” Connors asked. “What then, Cap?”
    “Enjoy your stay in Naples,” Captain Anders said as he turned and headed back up to his command post.

2
    16TH PANZER DIVISION HEADQUARTERS
FIFTEEN MILES OUTSIDE OF ROME, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
    The eighty Mark IV tanks sat in long silent rows. German soldiers were scattered about, searching out shade and a cool place to doze. Colonel Rudolph Von Klaus stood in the open pit of his tank and stared at the note in his hands. The words on the paper had been passed down directly from Adolf Hitler himself. They were as simple and direct as any order he had received in his twenty-five-year military career. “Allow no stone in Naples to stand” was all it said.
    To a precise and proud officer, the order read as nothing more than a complete waste—of a city once bold and beautiful, of a Panzer division that had fought too hard for too long to be reduced to a mop-up unit, and of time, of which there was precious little left before this wretched war would reach its ruinous conclusion. Naples had already been contained, its streets emptied. Aerial bombings had destroyed any buildings that could possibly be of future use to the enemy. It was a mission of madness. Just one more foolish request springing from the unhinged mind of a leader he found lacking in military logic.
    Von Klaus folded the order into sections and shoved it into his pant pocket. He gazed around at his troops and took some comfort from the fact that as inane as the order was, its simplicity would at least guarantee that he would not have to leave behind any more of his men, lying dead or wounded on a battlefield. After the Naples mission, Von Klaus was scheduled to head back home, to a wife he had not seen in two years, a daughter who would now be eight and a son too young to remember the last time his father cradled him in his arms. Von Klaus was only forty-six years old, but felt decades past that. Nothing, he believed, aged a