Once an Eagle (97 page)

“Chief!” Brand cried, “—Chief, he's hit! Chase …!”

“Load the gun,”
Damon answered. “Come on!”

Brand glanced at the General, who was peering intently through the scope, his big shoulder hunched against the traversing bar; let go the operating handle and groped behind him in a torment of admiration and despair thinking, Jesus God, it's like they say: the son of a bitch hasn't got any nerves at all. He snatched up a shell. The nose was slick with blood. Blood was everywhere now, soaking into the mattress pads and tentage, gliding over the brass casings. He dropped the shell, caught it up again in a tremor of haste and loaded it and locked the breech and cried, “Up!” in a falsetto croak, groped for another, and another, burying himself in the mesmeric fury of serving the gun, which crashed and crashed, and swallowed sound.
Get them, get the bastards,
he thought savagely—was mildly surprised to find he was speaking aloud. Cordite fumes stung his nose, and the acid-bright stench of raw gas. Gas tank. They'd hit the gas tank. Jesus, if she cooked off now—

He was swept by so many perils he felt nothing: he had moved beyond them, out of their orbit. Nothing could touch him, crouched here, snatching up cartridges, snapping the breech open smartly, lifting his hand away from the recoil. He was nothing, he was beyond everything: the gun was animate, he was the oiled and glistening machine, the servant serving. What the hell, he thought; go out this way as any other. But the thought did not penetrate beyond a certain point; it lay outside his rage, the desperate, sweating ritual he was performing.

The gun fired again. Damon cursed. There was a violent
clang!
against the gun shield, another—and then a searing rush of flame that boiled redly around him. On fire. All that raw gas. He jumped, caught his foot on something and fell in a heap, leaped to his feet again, saw the Old Man, inside the flames, reaching back struggling. Oh Jesus. Chase. He plunged back into the blast of heat, got his hands under the big man's arms and wrenched and tugged with all his might. His blouse, his sleeves were burning. Damon shouted something at him but he couldn't hear him. He gave one last terrible pull. Chase's body came loose and fell on top of him. He jerked free, rolling and writhing on a ragged mat of crushed bushes and leaves that scraped his face. Pain raced brightly along his arm. He unsnapped his belt, tore off his jacket and flung it away from him in a panic. Someone was hitting him. Damon. Beating at his legs—quick, smarting blows. Then the General was pulling him to his feet, shouting. He was on his feet, he was lurching through air like foul gray surf; they had fallen into a hole where a man with both hands clutched over his belly was staring at them numbly. He closed his eyes and opened them again. His right arm was charred and blackened and oozing like a great burst blister, and his neck burned. He was all right. He looked up, to see Damon peering at him. The Old Man's face was black and oily, like a stoker's, and a thread of blood had run down from his forehead, smearing the grease red.

“You all right, Joe?”

“Yeah.” He nodded solemnly.

“Wanted to get away from those shells. Before they start to go off.”

Brand gazed back apathetically at the jeep, which was all aflame now; the thirty-seven's barrel drooped ridiculously over the hood. My aching ass, he thought; oh my aching ass. The Old Man would check the frigging temperature gauge on the furnace they were shoveling him into, in the dead center of hell. He looked back with slow amazement to see Damon crouched at the edge of the hole with an M1 in his hands. He crawled forward and raised his head.

There was a tank near them; one tread was gone and it kept shuttling and beetling back and forth on the good one, its engines roaring. Another to the left was burning savagly, enveloped in flames, and two more sat perfectly still, with smoke seeping out through the drivers' and gunners' ports. Another one was crawling off into the jungle, its brush camouflage quivering. Jesus, he thought—or said—or thought, staring. They had done all that: he and the Old Man. And Chase. All that. While he sat there stupidly watching, the hatch of the tank with the shattered tread opened and a man hoisted himself out and hung there—a slender figure with a brown sweatband around his forehead, looking wildly down. Why doesn't he jump? Brand wondered; get the hell out of there? In the next second he doubled over and his body hung down from the tuna-can turret, his blood flowing in a smooth, silken skein over the iron. A man leaped up on the side of the broken tread, between the bogie wheels, up on the fender. A man with a bright yellow scarf around his neck. Brand saw his hand go to his mouth. The handle spun off into the air, glinting. Krisler stuffed the grenade into the aperture and slammed the hatch down on the man's body and jumped to the ground. There was a muffled thump, like a firecracker in a lard can. From inside a hand pushed up the hatch a foot or so, and then slid slowly back out of sight. The moving tank had vanished.

Holding his arm Brand gazed around him. Shells were still coming down on the near edge of the strip and back toward the beaches. A medic was kneeling out in the open, working on Chase. Damon was talking to a machine gun sergeant. The jeep was still blazing merrily, and so was the easternmost of the tanks. It was as though he had been asleep—or no, not so much asleep as under a spell, and had only just come out of it. His head ached fiercely, his ears were still ringing, his arm hurt so he could hardly flex it. But what he needed most was a drink of water. He reached back for one of his canteens, remembered he'd got rid of his belt, looked toward the jeep; but the thought of pulling himself erect and going over there was more than he could face. His trousers were still smoking just above the knee and he slapped idly at the scorched fabric and tried to moisten his cracked lips with his tongue.

“Here you go.” Damon was holding out a canteen. He nodded his thanks, tilted the fat metal canister and felt the cool liquid sluice his throat and mouth and slip in slow, even, pulsing bands to his stomach. Navy water: they wouldn't be getting any more of that for a long time. He handed the canteen back to the General, who took another few swallows and said: “Pretty rough.”

“You're telling me.” He had never in all his life been so utterly depleted. He felt as though all his fire and resolve had been bled out of him, like that Japanese tanker whose blood was still sliding richly down the side of the armored hull, obscuring the serial numbers.

“Jesus, Chief,” he said numbly, “I don't want to go through another day like this one.”

“Neither do I, Joe,” the Old Man answered; and Brand saw with surprise that the General's hands were shaking so he could hardly screw the top on the canteen.

 

Captain Bowcher signaled
once—his left hand, extended, fanning the air in little patting motions; and one of the soldiers crouched on the ridge above the cliff face moved a few paces. Sergeant Jackson, his BAR resting on the stone barrier, said something to Bowcher, but his voice was pitched so low Pritchard couldn't hear him. He wiped his face with his hand. The cliff swept around in a nice curve, so that the effect was that of an outdoor theater, with the stage raised in a series of small ridges. The stone was gray-white, blinding in the sun's glare, and the air was close with dust. Here and there shrubs like stunted, starved thorn trees struggled upward from the rock. The Salt Mines, they all called it. Nearly everyone was crouched behind the ridges and knobs of stone and staring intently up at the cliff, whose face was dotted with holes like misshapen dark mouths. For a time the only sound was the rumble of the fifty-five-gallon oil drums being rolled along the bed of the weapons carrier in the center of the stage.

“Animals,” a big man named Lubbock said. “All they are, animals. Dig holes in the ground and hide in them all the time. Jesus, they must love to swing a pickax.”

“It's not very resistant,” Bryce answered in his clear, precise voice. “Calciferous limestone. You can score it with your thumbnail, you know.”

“Do tell, Bryce.”

Pritchard squinted out into the glare of worn white rock laced with crevices. Nobody had stirred except the engineer detail, which was now manhandling the drums from the little truck's tailgate and easing them carefully along over the stone.

“It's very porous,” Bryce went on; sweat had gathered in a small greasy pendant at the point of his chin, which made his face look still thinner and more scholarly. “The whole area is probably honeycombed with elaborate vaults and passages.”

Corrazzo, kneeling on the other side of Lubbock, said: “You wouldn't snow me now, would you, Bryce?”

“Certainly not. There are whole cultures who still live as troglodytes.”

“As
what?
”

“Cave dwellers. Our ancestors all used to live in that way.”

“Keep your eyes on the God damn caves,” Sergeant Jackson told them.

Corrazzo regarded Bryce with tolerant amusement. “Well, I can tell you right now
my
ancestors didn't live in no caves.”

“Sure they did. Unless they were lake dwellers. But that's much less likely.”

Randall, a correspondent for the Associated Press, laughed pleasantly. “You're a kind of GI intellectual, aren't you, son?” He had a handsome chubby face and rimless glasses, and he craned his head past Pritchard's to watch Bryce a moment, his lips moving. “How'd you come by all that high-powered education?”

Bryce glanced at him once, coldly, then up at the cliff. “Yes, I made it all the way through grammar school,” he replied dryly. “Does that amaze you?”

Lubbock snorted and wiped his cheeks with his sleeve. “That's telling him, Bryce. Hell, Bryce got so God damn much education if they knew about it back in D. C. he'd put Marshall out of a job …”

“I said let's knock off the grab-ass and watch the caves,” Jackson said curtly, and they fell silent.

Pritchard turned and looked at Damon, but the General, standing behind a curious narrow alcove in the stone, was watching the working party beside the weapons carrier and talking to Lieutenant Hanida, asking him something. Hanida, a Nisei whose flat, bony face looked more Mexican than oriental, shrugged and squinted up at the caves. Far off beyond the ridge, near Dakmata Village, there came the
bump-ump-ump
of artillery, and somewhere out of sight a plane droned wearily. Sixteen men were killed here this morning, Pritchard thought, staring up at the cliffs, the ragged black maws of holes, the twisted, stunted bushes. My predecessor was killed on D-Day. He had never been a worrier. He'd done well enough on the beach the first two days; he'd straightened out some of the mess on Red Two after Major MacRae had been evacuated, and salvaged a lot of gear. To his surprise the interminable shelling from the ridge hadn't shaken him the way it had so many of the others; a dreamy, almost cheerful fatalism had taken hold of him: there was the job to do, supplies to be got ashore, an example to set before the men. But that had had nothing to do with this parched, silent place where enemy eyes—you could feel them on you—watched from some of those hundred caves. He wondered how many of them were directly below where they knelt—faces turned up toward the crevices, the matted fibers of roots, listening …

Captain Fulkes, in command of the engineer detail, a short block of a man with pure white hair, had walked up to where Damon was standing. “We're all set.”

“All right.” The General turned to Hanida. “Let's try it once more, Dan.”

Lieutenant Hanida raised the bull horn and blew into it; there was a sharp, dry roar. He began to read from a mimeographed sheet of paper. The words, so alien to Pritchard they were like sounds from some extraplanetary race, echoed and reechoed from the walls.

“What's he saying?” a kid with an Arkansas accent asked.

“Who won the fifth race at Aqueduct,” Corrazzo answered sharply. “How the hell should I know what he's saying? Ask Bryce—
he's
got all the five-alarm education … ”

The giant voice crashed on and on, the sounds tumbling over one another in the rock-borne echoes. Pritchard kept one eye on the General. He longed with all his heart and soul for a drink from his canteen but he didn't want Damon to see him; besides, God knew when they'd get back to the CP and that great, white, blessed, obscene udder of a Lister bag. Sweat was streaming down his back and chest, stinging in his eyes. Wait and rush, wait and rush. Life in the Army. He glanced crossly at Damon, wondering what he was thinking, what he was going to do. The General's face was drawn, the eyes and lips puffy with heat and fatigue; the cut around his eye from the tank battle had got infected, and Stofer the medic had cleaned it out and put a compress over it, and now the compress was twisted and dirty. Pritchard had been surprised when the General had asked for him as aide—surprised and immensely pleased. He'd imagined himself arriving at staff meetings, contacting Corps, fending off importunate colonels, furnishing a deferential, sympathetic audience to the ADC in the small hours of the night; he hadn't pictured a time like this, here in the Salt Mines, waiting in a glaring eternity of heat and uncertainty—

Lieutenant Hanida had finished. Very slowly he set the bull horn in the jeep and began to fold the mimeographed sheet of paper into smaller and smaller pieces. Nothing stirred. The engineers crouched in the shade under the tailgate of the weapons carrier stared at him apathetically.

“I don't see why they shouldn't come out and surrender,” Bryce said in his clear, cultured voice.

Sergeant Jackson, his eyes still riveted on the cliff, said: “Would you?”

“But after all, they must realize they—”

The shots were brutal in the white stillness.
Whack-ack!
—like the snapping of a colossal whip, and one of the engineers leaped up in a wild theatrical gesture, arms flung wide, and fell like a dropped sack. At almost the same instant there was the ripping blast from Jackson's BAR and bits of stone chipped away around one of the holes; then a chorus of gunfire. Pritchard realized he was gripping the rock in front of him with all his strength. He relaxed his hand and turned, encountered the somber, bronze face of Brand, the General's orderly. He grinned and rocked his head; Brand did not smile back, but he did wink—the slow, droll dropping of one eyelid. Pritchard was a little in awe of Brand. The Indian had been on that 37-millimeter gun with the General on the first day; his forearm had been badly burned and was still wrapped in gauze. Smoke was trailing blue from the barrel of his carbine. Pritchard wished he'd been there, with the gun, that day. But if he had been, he'd probably be dead. Hank Chase was dead …