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his breath. There were two or three others on the dinghy with him, all shivering and drenched in briny water. A lifeline ran from inside the raft, the men in the water gripping every inch of its corded length, its slack fully paid out so it was taut as a bowstring. He felt a surge of relief when he saw Dutch Fenstermaker among them.
    Soaking wet from head to toe, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, Wright sat up and peered into the night. The little rubber dinghy couldn’t hold any more men than the few already aboard. The evacuees would have to take turns climbing onto it, or those hanging onto the rope would rapidly succumb to exposure.
    Time passed, no one knew how much for sure. The men were quiet, trying to conserve energy. Water whipping around it, their transport had reared in the waves like a great gray bird that had plunged seaward in its terminal spasms, then begun to spiral down toward the Channel’s shallow bottom.
    In the distance, the men heard the drone of planes, the rattle of antiaircraft fire . . . and closer, too close, the sound of the wavelets lapping at the edges of the dinghy. They saw no sign of approaching ships and weren’t certain if that was good or bad.
    Helpless and battered, drifting alone in enemy waters, they could do nothing but wait to find out.
    8.
    In the sky behind Taylor’s downed transport, the remaining two planes in Team C bore on toward the Hiesville drop zone. Their pilots could only hope and pray the lead flight had ditched without breaking up, and that its crew and passengers had managed to escape serious harm. With German flak guns thumping on the ground and tracers streaking the darkness around them, it was all their aircrews could do to safely deliver the Pathfinders to their target area.
    Commanded by Lieutenant Roy Kessler, the troopers on Plane 5 had now become the serial’s primary stick. Among that group was Red Wright’s buddy Private First Class Salty Harris, who’d gotten his nickname because he’d once attended the Naval Academy, leaving after a series of disciplinary infractions that he would mainly attribute to boredom. Strapping, good-humored, and exuberantly foul-mouthed, Harris had found the atmosphere at Annapolis far too passive for his disposition, and in the end had guessed he just wasn’t cut out to be a Navy man. Possessed of a raucous fighting spirit that he attributed to his Irish lineage, he’d wanted action and found it in the Army, where he’d started out with a mortar company and been one of the early volunteers for the paratrooper school in Toccoa, Georgia.
    While there with the 506th PIR’s Easy Company, Harris met Wright and many of his other closest friends—in fact, he’d sat next to Wright on the bus to Toccoa and they’d hit it off right away. At paratrooper school, he’d trained under Captain Herbert Sobel, known to the men as the “Black Swan,” a notorious disciplinarian whose methods were considered unnecessarily harsh by the majority of his recruits. Making staff sergeant in a hurry, Harris would become as respected among the troopers of Easy Company as Sobel was despised and resented—a kind of accessible, everyman yin to the Black Swan’s stiffly detached yang.
    Just weeks before Normandy, the men’s gaining frustration with the captain came to a boil with his revocation of their three-day passes over a minor incident. At the center of a protest against Sobel that got him busted in rank, Harris was transferred out of Easy without being allowed to pick up his bags. He hadn’t been inclined to complain; it was better than the court-martial for mutiny he’d barely dodged—and, on the flip side, also better than he would have felt if he’d stood by and done nothing about Sobel. No one would have denied that E Company was a crackerjack outfit, a model for the paratroop infantry—and that Sobel deserved credit for helping to whip it