Authors: David Poyer
He faced forward again and stared up at the corner building as they edged around it, backing and filling to get past. He inspected each window, watching for movement, for shadows; and beside him the corporal did the same. Though no one stirred behind the dust-filled glass he still felt the coldness.
But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
By noon they were deep into the hills, and still had seen nothing and no one. The only sign of human life had been a crack-windowed Mercedes full of local militia, who hastily pulled onto the berm when the lead amtrac came barreling down the middle of the road toward them. The terrain became steeper after that. The ancient folding of the land grew more violent, less welcoming, if any of it was welcoming, until the left flank dropped back out of sight. The villages they clattered through became smaller, the buildings older, and then they were in the mountains and there were no more villages at all.
The road stayed good, though. It was a new-looking two-laner, and they could see at curves where the rock had been blasted away in white gouges and left to fall toward the river. From atop the 'track the view was dizzying. The elevation was no greater than he was used to back in Western Carolina, but here the hills were unrounded, unclothed with green; they fell precipitously, eroded faces of bare white rock, gullies with thin brown grass over what soil had not been leached away. To him it looked ancient, blasted, barren. The open sky blazed blue light down over them, shimmering the asphalt with heat, the breeze of their motion offering no coolness but only drying their eyes and parching their open mouths. The roar of their engines echoed back from the faces of the hills until it seemed that an army, not half a battalion, was winding its way upward into the highest passes of Lebanon.
It was a little after midday, and the feeling of danger, of threat, had worn thin. They were toiling in column up a long grade, the overheating engines whining. He was clutching his M-16 between his legs and sipping at his canteen between jolts, letting it swing with his arm so that not a drop of the hot fluid would be lost, when the first detonation sounded far off and faint beyond the top of the hill.
The mortarmen knew it instantly. Silkworth twisted round in the frozen instantaneity of surprise. Givens dropped his canteen, the water slopping warm over his thighs and crotch, leaving a dark streak down the dusty green hull of the track. It bounced once heavy off the roadway and then splintered, crushed, flattened by the rolling steel of the treads. Cutford slammed his riflebutt on the hull, swinging himself down to the roadway as the 'track began to slow.
“Incoming!”
The first round exploded below them, down along the drop of the ravine, blasting rock and dust outward through the clear air. The column slowed, 'tracks slewing sideways trying to stop in time, slamming into one another, crushing in the fenders of jeeps as officers scrambled out. Horns beeped and echoed from the hill. The distant thunking of several more rounds on their way precipitated a general dismount and a scramble for a shallow ditch against the upward slope.
“Mortars,” he said stupidly to Hernandez, whom he found beside him, leaning against the bare hot stone. “They sound just like our eighty-ones.”
“Man, we shoot back?”
“Can't see anybody to shoot at.”
“Well, let's get some fire out, man. Get their heads down maybe.”
He watched Hernandez pull a loaded magazine from his trou, and it was suddenly the obvious thing to do. They were shooting at you; you fired back. The click of the thirty-round magazine engaging, the slam of the bolt feeding the first cartridge sent stiffness into his spine. With a loaded weapon in his hand he felt like a marine and not like what he had been all that morningâhalf-tourist, half-target. Behind him one of the 'tracks loosed a burst from its turret machine gun. Craning his head back, he could see it tear puffs of stone from the upper curve of the hillside.
“They're on the far side.”
“Yeah. They got us in defilade. Nice setup.”
“For them.”
“That's what I meant. Wish we had the tube here.”
“Yeah, toss a few back⦔
“But we don't,” shouted Silkworth, just behind them, startling them so that Will almost dropped his rifle. “You two fuckups leave your brains on the ship? Spread out under fire! Christ! Hernandez, clamp that chinstrap, you're losing your helmet. Givensâ”
He ducked suddenly, the two privates half a second behind him to the ground, and the whoosh came down on them and exploded ahead of the lead 'track. Rocks rattled off the hull and skittered along the asphalt toward the stalled column. The shock patted his face and he raised his hand to it, coming a little out of the numbness and unreality that had begun the moment that first faint chug had come from the other side of the mountain.
“Eighty-one all right,” said Silkworth loudly into the aftersilence, pulling himself to his feet.
“Sargeâis it Syrians, or Lebanese?”
Silkworth stared at him as if he were crazy. “I don't know, and I don't give a shit. Do you?”
He had to admit it, the sergeant had a point. He pulled back his head and looked up toward the crest. Nothing showed on the ridgeline. He looked back along the road. Two of the 'tracks had maneuvered almost to the cliff-edge, cupola MGs at maximum elevation, and were firing tentative bursts into the blue. The foot marines, all disembarked except the men actually inside the 'tracks, leaned in the ditch next to the hill-slope, looking upward.
Another shell exploded into dusty life, still below them, but closer than any before it. Fragments whicked past. “Jesus Christ,” said Silkworth angrily, looking back along the column. “They're bracketing us. We just going to sit here? Sooner or later one of them motherfuckers is going to hurt somebody.”
A jeep edged around the firing amtracs, between them and the hillside. A man in back pointed a flexible 7.62 upward, his eyes white in a dust-smudged face. As it neared them, Will recognized the man beside the driver: the Colonel. He had seen him only a couple of times, but he had a face you didn't forget. At this moment he looked interested, but not excited. The jeep squeezed past their 'track, scraping metal to metal, and went fifty yards farther up the road; then stopped. Haynes stood up in the front seat, looking down into the ravine, and one of the officers ran up from the ditch, not saluting, and began pointing out where each shell had fallen.
The colonel pointed too, back up the hill, and then a flurry of faint thuds floated down to them and with no lag at all, as if the noses of the shells had distanced the sound of their firing; two flame-hearted tulips of smoke and dust leapt simultaneously out of the hillside fifty feet above their heads. The blue light of sky turned brown, dark, and dirt came down and rocks, flying free down among the crouching men, banging off the hulls of the tanks, which fired now steadily up into the dust. Will found himself firing too, blindly, and along the hill the other men lifted their weapons uncertainly.
“Knock it off,” shouted Silkworth. “Save ammo, fuck-heads. You can't see a thing. Hernandez! Put your safety back on.”
“What's wrong with shooting back, Sergeant?”
“I didn't say to, that's what.” Silkworth glanced toward the colonel, saw that he was still standing, still looking up at where the dust was settling toward the column. Anxiety came suddenly into the corners of his eyes. “Helos ⦠he ought to call for gunships. Where are they? I haven't seen one all day. Air support⦔
“Unless he know something you don't,” said Cutford, who had crawled up behind them while Silkworth was talking.
“What's that mean, Cutford?”
“I mean, they ain't gonna be no helos. No support. Why else they took away the mortars? No, manâthis another of those fucked-up political actions. We just here to die, man, just here to die.”
“Shut up,” said Silkworth. “Just shut that up now, Corporal.” He looked away.
The colonel sat down; the jeep's engine revved; the lieutenant ran back toward the lead 'track, his holster slapping, helmet bobbing. The mortarmen watched him run past them, watched as the colonel reached back to take a microphone that the gunner handed him.
“Into the 'tracks,” the junior officer shouted to Silkworth, not stopping. “Get 'em in.”
“We movin' on, Lieutenant?”
But he was gone, past, shouting and waving at the next knot of men huddled into the hillside. Silkworth looked back toward Haynes, then upward, squinting into the eye-clenching brilliance of the Mediterranean noon; hesitating, reaching out to hold Givens and Hernandez back as they started to stand up, so that they froze too, looking upward.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Jesus,” breathed Will Givens, deep in his chest. He recognized the sound, not of one mortar, but of a battery of them.
Far above them, high up in the brilliance, tiny blacknesses, like steel tears wept by the sky hung turning, deciding; and then winked out.
“Disappear,” shouted Silkworth, and Will hit the ground at his feet, scrabbling down into the deepest part of the ditch. More bodies slammed in on top of him. There was time only to hope desperately that the rest of the column had someone like Silkworth to warn them, and then the rounds went off, the sound not outside but within his head, like a train passing a foot away. The ground jolted and concussion cuffed at his chest. Things pattered and pinged above him, and in the middle of four explosions so close they were one explosion, someone began to scream. “Barrage,” someone yelled above him, and he thought
Barrages yes they're firing in salvos now, not like we do but then this way you get to spot your fire as a group, you don't get confused between tubes the way we would;
and he knew, too, they must have someone spotting for them, someone on the far side of the road, on some bare crest, with binoculars and a radioâthe radio probably just like theirs.
Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Jesus!
It all took about half a second, two seconds at the most, and then the roaring stopped and he was up and running for the 'tracks, stumbling over a fresh hole in the roadway, the stink of explosive cutting his lungs like one of Harner's Marlboros. The other men were running too, the ramps of the 'tracks were coming down. Two marines carried another between them, his feet dragging uselessly. He looked awake but dazed, and his boots left blood on the asphalt. At the head of the column, through the dust and smoke, he saw the colonel staring still upward, holding the handset absently away from him.
Will Givens hesitated on the ramp, looking back. He was looking at his first field of battle. He looked closely, seeing it all whole and clear; the men, the helpless vehicles, unable to turn on the narrow road, the striating clouds of blue smoke and white dust that tamped down the hot heavy air above the roadway.
The colonel stiffened and swung the handset toward his mouth, looking upward. Givens saw now, looking down at him from the ramp, that he held a map in the other hand. He leaned back, peering through the smoke. The amtracs had stopped firing. Whoever had been screaming stopped. In the sudden silence along the road all they could hear was the faint serial concussions of another volley beyond the hilltop, and a tinny voice quacking from the radio in the jeep.
“No, I can't spot,” the colonel was shouting back. “Area fire. Area. It's rock up there, so HE's just as good as VT. As long as it goes in right now.”
The tinny voice crackled back, and the marines waited, looking first at the man in the jeep, at his erect back, turned to the hillside, and then upward at the sky. Then the explosions came again, louder this time, and the ground shook and pieces of rock came loose from the cliff above them and slid downward.
“Get the
fuck
in here, Oreo, you idiot,” said Cutford, appearing beside him.
“Let go of me.”
“You want to catch a frag? Get your ass in here.”
“What's happening, Cutford? Does he want artillery?”
“You listen with those ears, numbnuts? We got no arty ashore.”
He understood then, and a shiver took him. He raised his eyes to the smoke that blew off the other side of the hill, from the hidden mouths of mortars, and felt suddenly how immense it all was, how vast was the machine that had put him here, deep in a ravine in Asia. Vast and unpredictable, vast and unknowable. Some distant decision-maker had placed a black private first-class here, like a checker nudged forward by an old man in the pine-smelling dimness of a lumberyard. But that anonymous counter was Will Givens, sometime guitar player, someday engineer. The machine used him. Would it stand behind him? Or did it even know, recognize, that the man inside this uniform felt and knew just like the ones who sent him, suffered fear and yearning and desire?
The last men came running from the ditch, bent low, aiming themselves for the amtracs. Will recognized Wash-man's tubby figure, his lowered head. He was heading for the next 'track back. He craned out. “Washout!” he yelled.
The private looked up, pimply face dirt-smudged, and saw him and changed his direction.
Will was craning around the hatch of the 'track, watching him, when the volley hit the column. Five, six shells, dead on in range and spaced along the road. The hull of the LVT behind them vanished and in disbelief he saw bodies in the air, smoke, flame; it must have been a dead hit. Another went off at the same instant directly in front of him. The shock was so close and hard he was unable to move, only watch, frozen, as twenty feet away Wash-man straightened, arched forward, like a clumsy diver from the side of a pool, and then rolled to a bloody stop on the roadway. One side of his head had been blown free, left behind on the asphalt like a discarded rag.
“Washout!” he screamed, starting forward.