Once an Eagle (113 page)

De Luca said: “Message for you, General.”

Damon turned and took it, read it softly aloud. “
CONDOR to CUTLASS. Phase Line Orange must be held at all costs. Any further withdrawal expressly forbidden. Am confident you can hold on. 629th RCT embarking Dalomo for Blue Beachhead at once.
Sent it in clear, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ain't that fine. So the Japs could monitor it and know just what to expect, I suppose.”

No one said anything for a bit and Brand asked, “Where's Phase Line Orange?”

“First two days' objective. Right where we are now, as a matter of fact.” He handed the radio to Dickinson and glared at the jungle wall. “
Any further withdrawal.
What does he think—I'm going to try to set up a line out in the water?” His lips curled mirthlessly. “Jesus, it's good to know he's got confidence in us, isn't it? If we don't hold here we might as well start swimming back to Benapei … ”

“That's a long swim,” Brand murmured.

“Isn't it, though.” The General's face was working.

“What did he do,” Dickinson said, “—get cold feet?”

“Maybe. Wants to cover himself with Army. Get it on the books in case the roof falls in.”

“They can't possibly get here in time, can they?”

“Sixty-five miles by water? Not a chance. But pass the word on this one that help is on the way.”

“But why, General? If they can't even—”

“Because men have got to have things to hold on to,” Damon snapped at him, his face tight with exasperation. “Especially at miserable, fucked-up, rotten times like this one …” Cuddles' sober Yankee face looked blank and startled. The Old Man smiled wearily. “I'm sorry, Dick. It's been a long night.” He slapped the Chief of Staff on the shoulder. “Take it easy, now. Go on back to the novelties counter. We'll get out of this yet, you'll see.”

It's Krisler, Brand thought. That's what's got to him. Old Paprika Ben. He's afraid Krisler's packed it in, along with the rest of them, up there. God, he'll take it hard if Krisler's stopped one: it'll cut him to the heart.

“Win?” the General was saying over the phone in even, level tones. “No matter how hard they hit on the right,
don't
pull over there. It will be a feint. What he wants is the trail … Yes. That's right … No, they're steady: they'll hold. I'll be in touch …”

Brand smiled softly, listening. By God, there wasn't a thing the Old Man couldn't cope with: artillery, demolitions, tactics, first aid—he knew his trade from muzzle to butt plate. How many of the rajahs could make that claim? Brand remembered during a lull last night, some kid yelling from a nearby hole, “She won't work! My rifle—the operating rod won't move …” And Damon roaring at him: “Piss on it!” and then the kid's voice, thin and incredulous: “—on my
rifle?
” By Jesus, he was the kind of general to serve under, they could say anything they wanted to. Even now, exhausted and outgunned, there he was, loading magazines and sending off runners, figuring how to beat the bastards … Watching the iron gray face Brand was swept with a surge of affection that seeped, warm and pervasive, into the hard center of his heart and made his hands tremble.

… If you hurt the Old Man, he said silently, traversing the gun a few degrees, peering through the thin screen of guava bushes and vines, if you so much as touch a hair of his head I'll kill you myself, all of you. With my hands. Till the black end of time. “And that's a promise.”

“What?” Whelan, a headquarters company casual who was serving as his loader, was gazing at him in surprise.

“Nothing.”

The high, haranguing voice was louder now; or there were others. Mortar shells began to fall in the groves to the right, moving nearer like approaching thunder. He picked up his M1 and checked the clip and bayonet studs, then the row of grenades in the shelf at the forward edge of the emplacement, thinking vaguely of the evening back at Dizzy playing cards with several other NCOs and Goethals saying to Enright, “Of course he's shacking with her. What do you think they're doing—playing cribbage? Santosky saw them at the beach near Tafua swimming one afternoon.” Goethals' narrow little eyes had rolled around to him. “How about it, Joe-Joe? Isn't he humping that gash?”

He'd looked at the thick, low forehead, the cunning grin. He'd never liked Goethals much. “What gives you that idea?” he'd countered.

“Ah, come off it, buddy-ro. What is he—some kind of a sacred bull or something? How about it? Give us the skinnay.”

He knew it was a lie but he couldn't help it. Goethals' tone, the intimation that it was nothing more than a cheap-and-easy roll in the hay, had forced his hand. “As a matter of fact there isn't anything there,” he said. “And I ought to know if anybody does.”

He stared them all down, but Goethals grinned his thick, lewd grin and said: “Who you conning, Joe-Joe—you expect us to believe that? Santosky
saw
them …”

“And anyway, his business is his business, when it isn't yours.”

“Hey, are we playing cards or what?” Higgins demanded; but Goethals went on, more loudly:

“What? It's everybody's business if anybody's there to see it. What's Damon that he's so special?”

Right then Brand knew he'd have to fight him. He was down nearly fifteen pounds, his arm was barely healed, he felt tired and defeated at the very idea; but if that was how it had to be, all right. “He's worth a dozen of you,” he said slowly.

Goethals laughed. “More than that—several hundred. He runs the Double Five: sergeants are a dime a dozen.”

“I mean he's ten times the man you are. Rank aside.”

The platoon sergeant's brows rose. “Maybe so, maybe no. He doesn't have to sit on his ass in the boondocks in the rain, take out patrols.”

“He'll do anything you will, twice. And do it better.”

“I wouldn't exactly say that.”

“Take it easy, Walt,” Tech Sergeant Luria said. “Damon's all right and you know it. Give me two cards.”

“Sure. I never said anything against him as a DC. I'll vote for him—if they allowed me to vote. We're talking about this other thing, that's all.”

“You're not talking about it,” Brand retorted, “you're making up a lot of crap about it.”

Goethals grinned again. “Hey, that shower you fixed up for him, Joe-Joe: has it got duckboards and handles? is it screened off, for playing—you know: drop the soap?”

The others all laughed. That was the trouble with Goethals: he had this sly way of saying things—you couldn't always be sure whether he was kidding or not. He'd
seemed
to be kidding—and then maybe he wasn't at all: it was hard to say.

“Have your fun,” he muttered.

“What's the matter, Joe-Joe? Your feelings hurt? You got that tired, mashed-down sensation? Hell, you'd think he was your father.”

“You'd be lucky to have a father like him.” And then, baffled and angry, he had a little inspiration. He added: “In fact, I don't even know if you
have
a father …”

It got quiet all at once in the tent. Goethals' face turned set and very hard. He ran his thumb along the edge of the deck of cards. “That's not so funny, Brand.”

He smiled now. “It isn't?”

“No. It isn't. Let's check this out: are you kidding or not kidding?”

Brand put down his hand and looked straight into Goethals' gray-green eyes. “It's up to you, buddy,” he said levelly. “If you're kidding about the Old Man I'm kidding about your father.”

Goethals said nothing for a moment. “You're not in very good shape, Joe-Joe. And you're spotting me twenty pounds.”

“I'll work that out.”

They locked eyes for another few seconds, and then Higgins said, “Let it alone, Walt. Don't you know better than to get going on that?” and at the same time Luria demanded:

“Look, are we playing cards or aren't we? What the frig is this all about? Or are we going to fight over something none of you knows anything about? Is that it?” And it had blown over; but neither Goethals nor any of the others had ever brought the matter up in his presence again.

The voices had subsided; there was only a sporadic yelling behind the tossing green sea of jungle. Braced tensely now, listening, Brand caught the ear-splitting crack of knee mortars just ahead and he shouted, “Here they come!” and ducked in the hole. He was showered with dirt and bits of débris. He pressed his helmeted head against the damp earth, watching the Old Man, already huddled against the forward edge of the pit, talking to the radio, his words coming in remote, disjointed snatches of phrase:

“—never mind that,
now is the time
… call for you, but you can't fire as separate … range one-eight-hundred, deflection as indicated … a big rush. Now lay it in as close as you can … until the tanks get—”

The mortar bursts moved ponderously off left, toward the river. Brand raised his head quickly. Dirt snapped just beyond his eye, and he ducked again; he felt pummeled and feverish—and yet at the same time oddly alert and prescient, on the edge of anger. He swung up again and there they were, in clumps and clusters, their mustard-brown uniforms like dirty patches against the rich green of the jungle; and they were screaming. Last night they had seemed to make no sound at all, but now they were giving this high, unearthly cry, their mouths round and black and wide; leaping and stumbling over their own dead, waving rifles, swords, grenades, looking clumsy and ineffectual and as strange as creatures from some remote planet. Around him the firing rose to one solid, all-engulfing roar. He pumped the cocking handle twice and fired, the gun bucking against the heel of his hand, deafening him. He watched his tracers converge with others into the chests and bellies of the enemy who faltered, slid forward, sank weakly away or kept on running, full of savage purpose, releasing their grenades like little tin cans and then fell in their turn, transformed into headless, limbless, lumpy sacks. And still they came on, screaming at the top of their lungs, words or names or cries of pain that all merged into the one, unearthly, incantatory
aaaaiiiii—!
Whelan fell against him, one arm outflung, struck him in the head and face, and collapsed in the bottom of the hole. The belt shivered and buckled and he swung the gun left, right again, firing in short bursts, wherever the clumps were largest, cursing, panting, hating with all his might this stupid, blind bravery that cared for nothing, had no end, that was going to engulf them all. Too many. There were far too many. They weren't going to be able to hold them. They were at the lead foxholes now, shrieking and wailing, lofting more grenades—

There was a series of thunderclaps that seemed to strike at the base of his forehead: the air before him turned malignant and hard—hard as sheet iron, wreathed in towers of smoke and dust. The pressure waves beat him with the force of a piece of planking; his vision went dark, he sank into an eerie twilight of puny, cringing powerlessness. He found he was crouched under the gun, hands over his head, buffeted and gasping. “Too fast!” he heard himself cry—but his voice was as faint as an asthmatic old man's. He had no idea what he was saying.
“Too—fast!”
Still it came, in rolling walls, in vast shattering blows—a hand pressing on his skull, squeezing out of it sight and sound and all coherent thought. It could not last, could not go on like this. But it did. The tops of trees dissolved in dreamy, floating fragments like the petals of some monstrous flower unfolding underwater. A leg—part of a leg with its boot and wraparound puttee—lay against his arm. Someone screamed vividly and long, and a body slammed into the pit beside him, confronted him with a scarlet pulsing fruit that he dully realized was the man's face; from the center of the pulpy fruit the screams came, but lower now and hoarser, dwindling. His senses deserted him. No more of this; no more! In sudden importunate terror he looked for the Old Man—saw him doubled over, his hand against his ear, and realized, with stunned slow amazement, that he was talking on the phone.

“Oh my Jesus,” he panted. “Oh my good Jesus—”

Abruptly the crushing hand lifted, the belaboring plank vanished, sliding away. His sight cleared to a gray twilight flecked with drifting chains of blue. He reached up again, his hands shaking, and there they were still, unbelievably, unbearably, crawling, groping, stumbling over the high, careless windrows of their dead; moving like silly, deadly, drunken marionettes. He went on firing, watching them trip and falter. They were all around now, in among the foxholes, pressing on through sheer weight of numbers in a churned wilderness of mangled bodies and equipment and torn earth, slashing and firing. The gun stopped, shockingly. He snatched at the bolt, saw the belt had run out. A glance revealed the pit unmanned except for the Old Man, who was firing the BAR, his great shoulders shaking with the recoil, in perfect rolling bursts of four. Falk was down. So was De Luca. But they were nearer now, all at once, squat and bandy-legged, screaming their limbo battle cry: the hated, the enemy. He reached for a belt, saw there was no time, caught up his rifle instead and fired at two men running stride for stride, another, three more behind them, shouting himself, the numb fury of his rage astride him now, the dry white unreckoning rage that he could always trust, that never failed to carry him through when bone and muscle and nerve were gone. The empty clip whirled upward past his eye. He reached for another in his belt, and beheld in front of him an officer—a short, heavy man with a saber held at his shoulder, long and blue as ice in shadow. No time. He leaped forward out of the hole, slipped and went to one knee, flung up his rifle like a man on point signaling, watched angrily the sword come down and strike just below the stock ferrule with an impact that stung his hands. The officer, his face flat with exertion, terribly near, sweating, raised the sword again in his two hands, his thick body coiling with great celerity. Brand heaved upward with the bayonet, saw it go home, followed it right into the belly under a belt buckle adorned with the imperial chrysanthemum. Something struck him on the shoulder and back and drove him to his knees again. He looked up, thrusting. The officer was gripping the hand-guard of his rifle, his face flooded slowly with confusion, a kind of shame; and Brand saw he was an old man, sick and very frightened. A long jungle ulcer on his upper lip was oozing yellow mucus. Then he fell on Brand, his weight dragging the rifle down and away, and his body stank of fish and damp-rot and stale sweat.