Once an Eagle (45 page)

Just the question in that odd British accent; and the faint smile that disconcerting gaze belied. Damon had glanced at him, and then grinned—perhaps the man was awkward socially, perhaps it was a nervous affliction, perhaps he himself was imagining things—and said: “Yes, sir—hugely. As a matter of fact I met my wife there.”

“Did you? I rather thought it had been earlier.”

“No, sir—Tommy wouldn't have looked at me earlier!” But Townsend did not smile at all, much less chuckle, and his heart sank. The man had no sense of humor: it was going to be a long tour.

“I guess it must have been quite a lark,” Townsend was saying; it was the first time Damon had seen that irate, incredulous glare. He thought with a rude little shock: Why, the man doesn't like me! He doesn't like me at all …

He said quietly: “I was sent to Cannes on convalescent leave, Captain.”

But Townsend had got to his feet and was glaring at a section drawing on the wall of a steel truss bridge wired for demolition. “I'm afraid you won't find it much like the Riviera here, Damon.” His voice was level, but there was a curious little current of tension running along its under edge. “No tales of glory around the glowing fireside, no singing of grand old refrains, no ceremonies and awards on Thursday afternoons …” Ah, that's it, Sam thought. He said nothing. “We are concerned with the practical things, the bread-and-butter side of warfare. The things that, ultimately, turn out to be the most important ones.” He turned and faced Damon again, and now there wasn't even the trace of a smile on the flat, heavy-jawed face; the British intonation, too, had faded. “Explosives and demolitions are an exact science, to be computed exactly and rapidly. There is a great deal to learn, and it must be mastered in its entirety. I shall expect attention to the most minute detail, and immediate responses. Not quick, not prompt—immediate. Do I make myself clear?”

Now the Captain had reached him. His eyes were wide and baleful; they looked almost white in the flat, dusty light. In a thin, hoarse voice he said: “Lieutenant, I gave that man an order.”

“I am in charge of this detail, Captain.”

Townsend's body gave a curious little tremor. He raised the swagger stick as though to salute with it, then began drumming on his breeches leg with it again. The rest of the detail were staring at them like men in a trance. Damon thought, If through some immense mistake on the part of fate I ever become Chief of Staff I personally am going to break every God damned swagger stick in the American Army over the head of every God damned officer carrying one.

“Damon,” Townsend said tensely, “—I order you to remove that charge!”

“Sir, I refuse to carry out that order.”

Townsend took out his watch and studied its face. A muscle in his fleshy cheek flickered once above the wing of the mustache. “I will give you that order once more, and you will have one hundred and twenty seconds to carry it out. Exactly—”

Lowering his voice, Damon said as rapidly as he could: “Captain, you know very well in the event of a misfire a blasting detail should wait a minimum of thirty minutes before even—”

“That's enough!” Townsend shouted. His head shook and he jerked at the brim of his hat. “Now let me get this straight, Damon. For the record. I have given you a direct order in connection with a blasting problem and you have refused to execute that order—repeatedly refused. Is that correct?”

“Captain, a misfire such—”

“Is that correct!”
Townsend screamed.

Damon gripped his belt with both hands. It was fantastic. Stupid and murderous and fantastic. What sense was there in staying up till all hours with a wet towel wrapped around one's head studying the Vertical Radius of Rupture and overcharged craters and the combustible properties of trinitrotoluene, committing to memory N=R
³
KC + 10 for breaching charges and N=D
²
\20 for shattering charges for timber—what good was all that arduous and unpleasant effort if some Anglophiliac idiot with a swagger stick and an untraceable thirst for vengeance couldn't even remember the primary precaution for a time-fuse misfire?

But Townsend knew: of course he knew. His lips were working under the flaring cavalryman's mustache, and his features were marked with an almost desperate eagerness. The rest of the detail were watching in awed fascination, all except Sergeant Torrey, who had turned his back to this pleasant little scene.

But to read a man off in front of troops—!

“Yes, sir,” he said evenly. “That is correct.”

“Good.” Townsend's lips closed neatly; yet he seemed at the same time curiously disappointed. “Good. We understand each other. You admit, then, to direct disobedience of orders in the execution of an important training exercise.”

“Captain, it's not—”

“
Do
you? Answer me!”

“Yes, sir.”

A figure jumped up and scrambled out of the ditch: Conte, a young soldier on his first hitch, with silky black hair and a gypsy face. “I'll go unhook the thing, Lieutenant.” He waved a hand. “What the hell—I don't mind.” He started off down the road.

“Conte, stay where you are,” Damon called.

“It's all right. Won't take a minute. I ain't scared to tackle it—”

“I said come back here!” Damon roared; the boy stopped in the middle of the road, his rifle hanging across his thighs, uncertain. Damon cursed; he realized the boy had offered out of some half-formed idea of absolving him, removing the obstacle to this ugly impasse. Glancing at Townsend he saw the Captain had already realized the boy's motive and decided to misinterpret it for his own purposes. Townsend's eyes were glittering now with malignant delight.

“You see?—even that boy's willing to do it, Damon.”

“It's not a question of whether he's willing or not.”

“Isn't it?”

“No. It's a matter of common sense.”

Townsend smiled the slow, almost dreamy smile. “I do believe you're a bit windy, Damon,” he said in his crispest British intonation. “Can it be that you're a bit windy?”

“Sure, I'm afraid. Any man with any brains would be.”

Townsend nodded several times slowly, as if this confirmed everything he had known. “And they said you were such a tough hombre. A killer.”

“I refuse to risk anybody's ass for no reason at all, I'll tell you that …”

“Interesting.” The swagger stick went rat-a-pa-
kan,
rat-a-pa-
kan
against the flare of his breeches. “Do you know what I think, Damon?” the Captain asked, in a husky whisper. “I think you're a four-flusher. A great, big, enormous fraud.”

Damon brought his teeth together. After Soissons and Malsainterre and Mont Noir and all those months lying on his back at Angers, after all the graves among the newly mown wheat, the ardor and remorse and desolation of spirit—after all that to have to stand here on the edge of a dusty ditch and take this kind of abuse from a criminally irresponsible, vindictive son of a bitch like Townsend was hard to bear. Very hard to bear. Sergeant Torrey had walked twenty feet down the culvert and was standing with his back to the officers. On the road near the bridge young Conte was swinging his rifle idly and digging a hole in the packed dirt with the toe of his shoe.

“A fraud,” Captain Townsend repeated with soft, implacable tones. “You're not fooling anybody, Damon. Not a blessed soul. All those medals—and with a mail-order brigadier for a father-in-law. What could be easier?”

Sam gripped his hands together and gave back a step. He wants that, the thought pierced his rage. He wants you to tell him off, hit him, lay him out—he wants that more than anything else in this world: then he'll have you where he wants you. Yes, and then he'll send Torrey—whom he doesn't like, either—to defuse the charge …

“Well, Damon. Haven't you got anything to say? Eh?”

You son of a bitch: you gutless, pitiful, homicidal son of a bitch. He shifted his feet and looked steadily at Townsend. “Perhaps the Captain is right,” he answered in his most toneless voice.

It was as if he had released a spring. Townsend reared back and thrashed the swagger stick against his legs. “All right!” he shouted, gesticulating. “You're in arrest! I'm placing you in arrest for direct disobedience of orders. You are confined to quarters until further notice. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good! Now, take off.” Damon made no move to go. “Did you hear what I said—! I told you to move out …”

“Very good, sir.” He faced the culvert and called: “Dee-taillll … fall in!”

Townsend cried, “You have no authority—”

“I'm taking my men back to camp,” Damon cut him off hotly. “That charge should not be touched for thirty minutes to three hours, and you know it and I know it and so does everybody else …”

Townsend's face was white. “Stay where you are, you people!” They paused, then came on up out of the ditch in groups of two and three at Torrey's urging. “Damon, I'm warning you!” Townsend shouted hoarsely. “If you march these men back from here—if you try to take—”

The explosion seemed to leap into being from inside Damon's head, so unprepared was he—an absurdly vast crepitation like the end of all worlds, that echoed and reechoed along the rocky bed of the ravine. Damon had just time to think with astonishing lucidity
open-hearth steel tears and may throw fragments in any direction
—then he had screamed
“Take-cover!”
—gripped the man nearest him around the shoulders and dragged him to earth beside him. In the next instant the concussion rolled up in a hot, tight wave and shook them like a great dog, and the earth quivered; and there came the whir and whine of steel fragments pattering down in a ragged shower. He raised his head. Voisselle, the boy he had pulled down, was gazing at him round-eyed.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Voisselle said, a little breathless. “I guess so.”

Damon jumped to his feet. Half of Wallace's squad, led by Sergeant Torrey, had dived back into the ditch; they were getting up now in a clumsy tangle, like the survivors of some wild, drunken brawl. “All right?” he called. “Everybody all right?”

Someone was shouting. He turned. Conte, sitting in the middle of the road like a child, his feet out straight, both hands clamped to his neck.
“Ow—ow—ow!”
he yelled. Damon ran down the road. As he got near the boy stopped crying and squinted up at him fearfully. He knelt down and said, “Take your hands away.”

“I can't,” Conte said.

“Of course you can. You want them to grow that way? Come on.” He pulled away his fingers: the old sight of torn flesh, milk-white around the lips of the wound, blood oozing down in a rich silky pattern. “Not bad,” he said. “Easy one.”

“What happened?” Conte said. He was panting as if he'd run a hard hundred yards, and his voice was dry and shrill. “What—happened?”

“Charge went off. A little behind schedule.” He plucked open the snaps on Conte's medical pouch—pulled out a pack of cigarettes, two packs of gum, and several gumdrops congealed into a sticky little mass. “For Christ sake, Conte,” he said irritably. “What kind of a soldier are you, anyway?”

Conte said, “I don't know,” in a faint yet querulous tone that made him want to laugh. Damon got a compress out of his own packet and tied the tapes around the boy's neck. Suddenly he felt light-headed, almost frivolous; the savage anger had vanished with the blast.

“Why didn't you throw yourself on the ground and cover your head and neck with your arms, the way you've been taught?” he asked.

“I … forgot.”

“You were lucky.”

“
Lucky
—!”

“Sure you were. Look at that son of a bitch over there.” He pointed to a jagged splinter the size of a table knife lying six or seven feet away. “That one could have got you here”—he pressed the rich black hair at the base of the boy's skull—“or here.” He touched the shoulder blade just over the lung.

Conte shivered and said: “I never saw it.”

“Of course not. You never do.”

“Jesus …” The boy turned with the slow, fearsome care of an invalid and looked at the bridge, where girders curled back from a void in warped and blackened ribbons. “I didn't know
that
would happen,” he protested, pointing at the splinter.

“What did you think would happen?”

“Well—I thought it would all just—disappear …”

“Nothing disappears. Or very little, anyway. Things turn into other things, but they go somewhere, they have to go somewhere …” Damon realized he was talking too much and took a deep breath. “There. This'll fix you up till we get back.”

“It—hurts,” Conte said.

“I imagine so.” The others had come up and were standing around, pleased at this diversion.

Sergeant Torrey said, “He all right, Lieutenant?”

“Sure. It's light. Come on, Conte. Get up.”

Conte looked at them all doubtfully. “I don't know as I should.”

“What? Don't be stupid,” Torrey said. “Get up, Conte.”

Everyone was talking at once, milling around.

“Did you see it blow?” Campbell said nervously. “All that stuff flying every which way—it's a wonder we weren't all killed …”

“What happened?”

“Hangfire.”

“Hangfire …”

“Jesus, Sarge, and you'd have been right up there trying to pull that fuse!” Campbell went on, his thin face a mask of apprehension. “You'd have been straddling that frigging I-beam, right about then …”

“Miss is as good as a mile,” the Sergeant answered, and shrugged; but he threw Damon a long, enigmatic glance.