Sentimental Journey by Jill Barnett

him was nothing but miles and miles of rippling mounds he figured was sand.
    The drop zone was the south side of the mountains, near nothing. He was to meet an operative who would take him the back way into the mountains, and from there, he was to infiltrate the Kasbah so he could play good guy and save Kincaid’s dishy daughter—the one who didn’t have the sense to go home.
    He looked up again, then shifted his gaze to the red and green jump lights.
    Nothing.
    He waited.
    A good four minutes had passed by.
    The copilot stuck his head out and was frowning at him with a “you’re still here” expression. He turned back and hit a few switches. His head poked back out and he cupped a hand around his mouth and hollered, “The lights are out, Captain! Jump!” He gave him the thumbs-up sign.
    J.R. turned back. His right foot was already over the threshold, and he slid his hands outside and put his palms against the outside of the plane.
    He looked down, then took one deep breath. “Ah, what the hell . . . ”
    He threw himself out of the plane.
    A second later he was sailing into the air, arms crossed over his chest, and he began to count. “One one thousand . . . ” Somebody’s got to come up with a better way of getting from a plane to earth.
    “Two one thousand.” Soon . . . real soon.
    “Three one thousand.” Hail Mary, Mother of God . . .
    “Four one thousand.” Open, open, open . . .
    “Five one thousand . . .” He pulled the rip cord—his favorite part—and got the crap jerked out of him by the chute, which was far better than watching the canopy collapse above him as he fell to earth at a few thousand feet a minute.
    He spun for a moment or two as his risers unwound; then he floated in that great silence, the one that always followed the chute’s opening jerk.
    He gripped the lines and looked above him.
    Off in the distance, the plane had banked to the northeast and was moving away. Back to base. For the briefest of moments it looked like a metal crucifix hanging sideways in the sky.
    By the time the plane was nothing but a flea speck in the distance, J.R. was floating through the air above the desert, some four minutes, at the very least, and God-knew-how-many-odd seconds outside the designated drop zone.

“PAPER DOLL”
     
    Another five days had gone by, and every single one of them had been more difficult than the last. The morning after her cheery little talk with Von Heidelmann, Adolf got her up early and took her outside to walk in the courtyard.
    It had been raining. She was soaked to the bone, but instead of taking her back to her room afterward, he took her directly to Von Heidelmann, who talked to her for hours. All she could do was sit in that hard wooden chair and tell herself it didn’t matter that she was wet and cold and miserable.
    At first she tuned Von Heidelmann out the way she had tuned out her brothers when they would pester her to death. She answered only when she wanted to. But some nights she swore she could hear him in her sleep, that trapped inside her head was a constant drone of Nazi jargon.
    A few days ago she had started her period in the middle of the night and had to tear strips from her one towel to use as menstrual rags. She tried to hide the rags. But there was no place to hide anything in her room. When she was at her weakest point, cramping and tired and drained, Von Heidelmann had battered her with propaganda all night long.
    Some days there had been no dinner. Some days there had been too much food like before, but when they piled the food high on her plate, it turned out to be something that she couldn’t wrap in a napkin and save under her cot for later; it was always a type of food that would spoil easily.
    Some nights, when she was sound asleep, they came and got her up, making her rush down to Von Heidelmann’s office, dazed, barefooted, and half asleep, only to spend the rest of the night listening to him drone on. He would ask her