First to Jump by Jerome Preisler

across the road. Flat against the pavement, he reached for a grenade and prepared to hurl it toward the source of the fire.
    Just then he heard planes flying overhead. Another group of transports had come in. The aircraft once again drew off the guns, buying him the seconds he desperately needed to wriggle out of his harness, orient himself east to west, and start crawling back along the line of flight. But he’d only gone a short distance when the fusillade resumed, bullets chewing up road around him.
    He flattened again. A new group of C-47s passed overhead, dropping its paratroopers a short distance to the west. As the machine gun rattled up at the aircraft, Cassidy continued to move toward the alighting troopers, staying off the middle of the road, stitching out an evasive path between the hedges and ditches at its margins.
    Then he heard a sound in the crossroads behind him—one that seemed jarringly out of context in his present surroundings. But there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was:
    Hoofbeats.
Galloping
hooves.
    Cassidy shot a quick glance backward and saw the spectral form of a man on horseback plunging across the intersection, the horse’s mane whipping over the sides of its long, muscular neck. He stared with nervous surprise as rider and mount vanished through a gap in the hedgerows, the drumming of hooves rapidly fading into the night. He didn’t pause to wonder if the horseman was German or French, would not let his mind deviate from the goal of uniting with the other paratroopers. He had to keep moving.
    He’d scurried a little farther along when he heard an artillery shell launch from behind the hedges. Diving to his belly, he felt the ground shudder beneath him as the mortar round detonated nearby with a crash, chunks of pavement flying in all directions. It was almost as if he were traversing an endless obstacle course, with every danger imaginable coming at him.
    He waited. A second mortar round
whumped
down to the ground several feet away. There was a third, a fourth. Then the next serial of planes flew overhead, leading to another break in the fire. He pushed up off the road and sprinted forward.
    About a hundred yards from where he’d started out, Colonel Cassidy heard a rustling noise on the other side of the hedges. It grew softer and more distant as he listened.
    Scrambling up the dirt embankment, he found an opening where he could see through into the adjacent field.
    Two men were moving away from him, walking briskly along the hedge toward the crossroads. With their backs turned, they were nothing more than shadows in the gloom.
    Cassidy got his clicker from where it hung around his neck and snapped it. They kept walking without response. Had they failed to recognize the signal and mistaken it for the sound of an insect, indicating they were likely enemy soldiers? Or could they be Americans who’d just failed to hear it?
    He’d no sooner asked himself these questions than somebody
did
respond—but it wasn’t one of the pair he’d spotted.
    Click-clack, click-clack!
    Squinting into the darkness, Cassidy saw a third man trailing behind the others, much closer to where he was hunkered on the embankment. Although the colonel didn’t recognize him at all, he immediately identified his American paratrooper’s uniform.
    â€œWhere are you going?” Cassidy asked from his side of the hedgerow.
    â€œWe’re looking for the colonel,” the trooper replied.
    Cassidy smiled thinly and told him they’d found their man. Pushing through the hedges, he realized he knew the soldiers who’d been walking with their backs to him. Both were staffers—his radioman, T/3 Leo Bogus, and his runner, Private Talmage New. The trooper who’d heard his click was a stranger who’d stumbled on the others while trying to locate his own platoon.
    Colonel Cassidy would now lead the group toward the paratroopers he’d seen