The Coldest Night (14 page)

“Look what I got,” Lew said, waggling a cigar between his fingers.

“Where’d you get that?”

“The padre,” Lew said.

Lew cut the cigar, giving Henry half and keeping the other half for himself.

Chapter 19

T
HAT NIGHT, THE WIND-BLOWN
snow an impenetrable veil, they rigged out and stepped off again. Darkness now came at four thirty and would last for sixteen hours. They passed through the front line and disappeared, entering the wilderness on the coldest and blackest of nights. They moved slowly, step by step, their bodies low and compressed, heel to toe, separating themselves from the men, the guns, the engines, the iron. They stopped and waited and listened and moved again.

“It won’t be long now,” Lew whispered.

“Are you not afraid?”

“Don’t be afraid until there’s something to be afraid of.”

They occupied a rocky labyrinth of granite formations. Inside the frosted rocks it was smooth and cold and tomblike. Where they lay had never seen the sun or light or warmed on a summer day. Inside they found a sitting dead, his arms frozen in position to hold the rifle that someone had taken away from him. He wore a quilted coat and canvas rubber-soled shoes and was gray and rimed with frost and indistinguishable and like the rocks themselves.

“Last night,” Henry whispered, “I saw something.”

“What’d you see?” Lew said, feeding a stick of spearmint gum into his mouth.

“A deer. It was white.”

“I saw it too,” Lew said.

“What do you think it means?” Henry said.

“Don’t be that way. Get some sleep.”

Henry zipped his bag over his legs to his waist and flattened himself against the slant wall of their stone chamber. He tried to sleep a little and when he next looked at the luminous hands on his wristwatch he thought that he might have, but no time at all had passed. There was no sheltering from the cold and the frost so he gave up and crawled to where Lew was positioned overlooking the valley and the forested slope and the jagged black ridge beyond.

“About time,” Lew said. His breath was white puffs of steam. “I was wondering when you’d wake up.”

“I was dreaming about my mother’s peach cobbler.”

“How’s our friend doing?”

“Still dead,” Henry whispered.

Lew handed over his canteen and told him to take a drink. Henry gave it a slosh, uncapped it, and took a sip. The liquor burn went down his throat and was like a sun flaring in his belly. It was a concoction of grapefruit juice and 190 proof ethanol. He drank again and took a third drink and passed the canteen back to Lew.

“Feel them?” Lew whispered, his breath hanging in the air.

Henry could not make them out against the boulders and the brush, the snow mantling the earth, but they were there, he knew it. It was hard to look for long without blinking and blinking. Then he saw something moving through the underbrush.

“Yes,” he said, and he slid the .45 from inside his parka. He touched at his pocket where his letters were collected. He let his mouth to open, to hear better.

The radio crackled and wheezed.

“You half a motherfucker,” Lew hissed. He folded his body around the radio to muffle the sound and dropped to the bottom of their redoubt, scraping away a path of frost and shattering icicles that rained down on him where he collided with the dead soldier.

When Henry looked again there was a ghostly figure bent forward and crossing the traverse of their position. It was incredible to see the white silent phantom movement, dark and shadowy and obscure, the probing patrols come first to draw fire and test the strength of the front line. Then another appeared, as if conjured from the wind and the snow. Henry prodded for Lew with the toe of his boot. Another and then another appeared, the short barrels of machine guns jutting from their hips. He felt a shiver of fear sweep through him and could not breathe. He shrank as near to the rock as possible as they passed on both sides of the stony lair.

“What are the haps?” Lew whispered as he climbed back up the curved channel of stone.

Henry turned his head and put his finger to his lips, shushing him silent. The wind lifted a banner of snow, and the apparitions disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Then the wind dropped and they were there again, so many of them no wind could hide them.

Lew let go his hold and slid back down into the curved channel.

“They are slowly coming quick,” he repeated into the radio.

Still more were coming, wave after wave, as if erected from the earth and snow, sifting through the night, wearing quilted jackets, covering ground silently, their white shapes flickering and dynamic in the swirling snow banner.

The radio crackled and Lew cursed it.

“Beaucoup Chinese,” Lew hissed. “Beaucoup Chinese.”

The patrols kept coming, white and shrouded and silent, and were fantastic enough to make Henry’s jaw open.

“I miss you,” he whispered. “I miss you so much.” He ached with the pain of the thought as the shadowy figures kept coming. He began to pick up small gestures and the soft sounds they made as he watched the soldiers stream by below him. More came up, filling in behind the patrols and massing in their front, waiting for the order to commit.

He filled with fear and anguish for the men on line who would receive the brunt of this first attack. How long would it take these patrols to cross the ground between here and there? Had the word been received? Were they ready? Would their weapons fire on so cold a night as this? He could not bear how long this forever moment as he waited and waited for what he knew was coming.

“Breathe,” a voice whispered close to his ear. Lew had crawled up beside him. “Breathe,” he whispered again.

Then a star shell climbed slowly in the night’s black atmosphere, paused in apogee, and exploded tentacles of light. They looked away from the flame so not to candle their eyes. In the cast light the soldiers in the valley multiplied a thousand times over. They were above and below and around them in kneeling positions, ready to rise, ready to run into battle. He’d had little idea there were so many men under arms wanting to kill them.

At first was the faint sound of sporadic firing that came from the middle of the line to their rear. The enemy had arrived at isolated points. Men were shooting. Men were fighting hand to hand. Another shell split the sky, a fiery red tail sizzling behind, and when it passed overhead was a screeching in the night, but it did not explode.

Then more white-robed soldiers came over the parallel ridge and misjudging the angle of its slope, they fell and tumbled to the bottom, stacking up behind the kneeled ranks in the valley.

In the rear the lights were opening up, the rifles and machine guns. The bows of .50-caliber and .30-caliber bullets banged the air, whip-cracked it, and broke it. Grenades were exploding. The heavies opened and the violent storm of the Quad .50s.

Then all went quiet and there was a lull and all action was suspended.

Time was interminable.

Distant trumpets called out from the high ground rising to the west and buglers beyond the ridges answered and it became an arc of eerie calls and countercalls, north, west, south, and back again. The stars seemed to multiply as if gathering to witness and then came the flowing threads of tracers and tongues of flame from mortar tubes.

“Jesus Christ,” Lew said as he watched them stand and hang on to each other and then rush past them and forward into battle.

Henry’s legs, hands, and arms began to shake with the excess energy pulsing through his veins. His heart beat faster and then he felt the blood drain from his face and he thought he would piss himself. In short order he felt disbelief, then fear, then anger. There were so many of them, an inexhaustible supply of men in quilted jackets, quilted pants. His heart beat so fast. If he could only sit for a moment. If only he could draw a deep breath and exhale a long sigh.

He swung his rifle up and pulled it into his shoulder. He tightened the sling and wrapped it around his forearm, but before he could fire Lew had him by the back of his neck and was dragging him from the edge of the stone embrasure. That wasn’t their job. They’d done their job.

Suddenly the opening went black, a white figure rising in front of them and the barrel of a machine gun was in Lew’s face.

Lew made a sound, as if his last, and dropped down the curved stone channel.

Henry raised and fired the .45 in a single motion. Weight, force, percussion, and the filled space emptied. A volley ripped the air over their heads, the bullets splatting into the rock around them and behind them, shards of granite flying past their eyes.

Henry looked down to see Lew was hit and he was licking off his fingers the blood he daubed from his chest. Henry crabbed down the stone channel and fell in next to him. Lew smiled and told him it was a tin of raspberry jam he’d crushed and not his heart was shot. He held out his dripping fingers that Henry might have a taste, but Henry declined.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and took another lick for himself.

There were explosions to the left and the right. There was a sharp zip in the air and a pinging sound and then the sound of drumfire. Splinters and concussions were coming closer with each round. Mortar fire was coming into their position.

Henry climbed back to the embrasure. Across the vast white terrain he could see a thin sharp tongue of white flame, the muzzle blast of a mortar tube and then another and shells marched up the heights and along the ridge closing on their position. Geysers of frozen earth and black smoke stalked in the air and collapsed back to the ground.

“We need to quit this place,” Lew said.

Then there was a horrible screaming in the air, and the earth shook with explosion as interdiction fire roared in from marine artillery miles to the east. They knew to scuttle from their stone chamber and retrace the route they followed in. They ran and flung themselves down and ran again. They crossed into the harbor of their own lines where they took up fighting positions.

When the attack came again, Henry was inside a world of consuming fire, blinding smoke, the unremitting shock waves of explosions. When they advanced they fired and ran and died, their destination deep inside the perimeter where no artillery, no mortar, no machine gun could strike them. They fired from the hip and dropped grenades in their wake and plunged on into their interior.

The men of the line fired methodically until their guns spanged empty. Then they reloaded and fired again. Rifle barrels heated and glowed red. The BARs caught fire, but there was no end to them. There were thousands upon thousands of them passing through the line without stopping, killing on their way with bullets, grenades, and bayonets. Henry fired to his front, and the dead and wounded fell at the muzzle of his rifle. His fear was hammer-striking at the walls of his heart and he was desperate to kill and not be killed. He could hear a cry pounding in his eardrums and realized it was his own screaming voice searing his throat. Then he was firing over his head and then behind him and then they came back through and did it all over again as he squeezed off round after round, the butt plate thumping his shoulder.

The sweeps of bullets scathed the frozen air. They tore frozen dirt from the earth and blasted shards of granite from the stones that slivered their way inside legs, arms, eyes. His right calf suddenly burned hot for what tore through his pant leg and into his flesh, lead or stone, he did not know.

The words kept coming, “Marine, you die. Marine, you die,” as they left more death in their shredding wake.

He could not know his unhope and his desperation, could not know it and still choose to live. He shot his rifle dry, reloaded, and again the rifle spanged empty. Lew ran for ammunition while Henry piled the white-robed bodies around their new position. He wanted to rest and wondered if they wanted to rest too.

Men were screaming in rage and fear. Men were weeping without restraint, their fierce sobs caving their chests. Somewhere someone was gibbering, his mind broken.

Someone called for the corpsman. Everyone was calling for the corpsman, but he did not come because the first call he’d answered was phony and now the corpsman was dead with his throat cut.

They came three more times that night and each time it was the same. Bugles blared and whistles shrilled. The explosions that tore through them left them dead and wounded from lead, from steel, from stone, from each other’s skull and teeth and bone fragments from the air it pushed. Henry listened to the cries and groans and convulsions of the men by his side, their eyes dim, half closed, and sunk to the place inside them where a remnant of heat and life still flickered. At first he did not understand their murmurings and then he did. They were praying and they were begging. They believed in the only thing that was left to them, but there was no hymn, no anthem, no incantation, no talisman to save them, only death and its awful plenitude of horrors.

Illumination fired throughout the night.

A marine with a flamethrower walked the ridge methodically dispatching the enemy wounded. He lashed out with roaring flames thirty feet long, burning to death anyone of them that still moved and each time was the splattering noise of napalm liquid from the nozzle fire and a cloud of black smoke. He did not stop until his tanks were empty and then he unharnessed them from his back and threw them down the ridge.