by Pat Frank
“Thanks, Kim,” said Couzens. He rested the butt of his rifle on the glazed dirt, and removed a glove, and fished in an inside pocket until he found two bars of chocolate. These he gave to the boy.
The boy said, “Thanks, Joe. I come.”
“Get the hell out of here!” said Couzens, smiling and aiming an imaginary kick at the boy, and the boy grinned and scuttled back into the house, where a woman’s face waited anxiously.
All this Mackenzie saw through his glasses, and while of course he could not hear the words, he interpreted the pantomime accurately. He could even reconstruct the dialogue. He chuckled, and explained it to Ekland.
Now that Couzens knew the strength and location and armament of the enemy, he could make a plan. He walked back to the jeep, and called in his flankers, and said, “They’re at the crossing—nine of ’em. They don’t have mortars. All they’ve got is burp guns. Now they’ve probably got three men out on sentry duty and the others are probably in the station shack at the crossing, keeping warm.” At a flag stop like this there was always a frame shack, built by the Japanese when they laid down the line, to serve as a freight and passenger depot.
“Now the thing to do,” Couzens went on, “is kill the six men in the shack first. Then pick up the strays. That calls for surprise.”
Couzens’ bazooka man, Jack Kavanaugh, said, “Well, if this jeep pokes its head outside the village, so they can see it from the crossing, there won’t be a helluva lot of surprise.”
“You win the eighteen thousand in cash and prizes, Jack,” said the lieutenant. “I was going to get to that. You and me and Cohen are going to hit the shack, and Seitner and Flynn are going to have the jeep behind the last house on the street—the two-story house. See it, Seitner?”
“I see it, sir,” Seitner said.
“Well, you and Flynn stay behind it until Kavanaugh opens up with the bazook. Then you two whip out and take care of the watch.”
“Yessir.”
“We go quietly, Jack,” Couzens said to Kavanaugh, the bazooka man. “You and me and Cohen. We go real quiet and we don’t do any shooting until you get that bazook on the shack.”
So Couzens and Kavanaugh and Cohen, a rifleman, stalked the shack. Smoke came out of the shack’s chimney. They were in there, all right. Couzens led, stalking the shack carefully as if he sought deer in Palm Valley. He never took a step until he was sure where that step would carry him.
On the slope five hundred yards behind, Mackenzie said, “Watch this. It’ll be wonderful.” And he passed the glasses to Ekland.
When Couzens was a hundred yards from the shack he eased to the ground, and took a prone position that was correct for a target range. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, and balanced it delicately, and then with a half wave of his arm, motioned to Kavanaugh to fire. A rocket left the bazook and the shack heaved and smoke poured out of it. One figure came out of the door, legs churning, and Couzens’ first bullet met him before he had taken two steps. The man writhed on the snow in front of the door and Couzens shot him again. Through the head. Couzens patted his rifle.
Couzens waited for others, but they did not come, and he motioned to Cohen and Cohen charged. He charged bent far over and with shoulders hunched as men do who do not want to get hit before they can use the bayonet. He looked awkward, but he moved fast. He went through the door like a sixteen-inch shell. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. There were no shots, and in seconds Cohen appeared again, beckoning.
Couzens ran to the shack. Inside were two dead from the bazook. One was dead outside. That left six. Where were they?
Five hundred yards back, on the slope above the road, Ekland stood up and screamed and shouted, for he had seen a disastrous thing. Tiny black objects had fallen from the second floor of the house on the far end of the street. They were grenades, and they had fallen upon the jeep hiding behind this house, and the jeep had exploded and was burning. Ekland and Mackenzie jumped down the slope and into the jeeps. Mackenzie yelled, “Let’s go!”
When the grenades exploded behind, in the village, Couzens guessed what had happened. His logic had been wrong, all wrong. The squad of Chinese assigned to guard the crossing had not maintained normal security. Instead of having three men out on watch, and six in the shack, which they should have done if they were good soldiers, they had assumed there was no enemy in the area. After all, had they not only to listen to the radio to know the Americans were defeated?
So the Chinese had been lax. Their watch on the crossing consisted of three men, and these three Couzens had destroyed. But they kept six men back in the village, sleeping and resting and eating in comfort. The house in which they bivouacked was easy to spot, because the jeep, its spare gas cans alight, blazed under it, giving out many colors of smoke. Couzens knew that Seitner and Elynn were probably dead.
And he knew that his calculations had been wrong. He had failed again. He had failed Mackenzie.
At this point Couzens should have waited. He should have waited for Mackenzie to come up with the rest of the force, so that the house could be surrounded, and riddled and blown apart by cross-fires, and the enemy destroyed without loss. For of course Mackenzie had seen what had happened, and what had gone wrong, and would be streaking down the road to help him. But at this point Couzens’ cleft mind was not functioning rationally, and he called to Cohen and Kavanaugh. “We take that house,” he said. “We take it.” And he advanced upon it, and they followed him uncertainly.
This house had two windows on the second floor, and the flame of a burp gun flickered from one of these windows and Couzens’ M-1 snapped to his shoulder and he fired fast as if he swung on a single quail bursting from a palmetto clump. “Got him,” he said, but fire was returned from both windows. He waited for Kavanaugh to blow them apart with the bazook and when Kavanaugh didn’t fire he looked over to where Kavanaugh should be, and he saw Kavanaugh, but Kavanaugh’s face was flat on the ground, and he was hit. And he looked over to where Cohen should be and he was hit, too, and down on his side, his knees jerking.
Couzens went on. Whenever he saw the flash of a brown face or hand he fired.
Running down the road, with Ackerman and Ekland, Mackenzie saw this and he stopped and shouted, “Get back, Raleigh! Get the hell back!”
Couzens heard this shout, but he did not obey. He walked on.
Then Mackenzie saw his lieutenant bow his head and sink to his knees, as if to pray, and then slide forward on his face.
After his men had disposed of the survivors in the house, swiftly and efficiently, Mackenzie tried to evaluate his loss and reorganize the company and push on. He had little heart for it. Raleigh Couzens had five, maybe six, small calibre bullets through the stomach. He was unconscious, and his bazooka man and his rifleman, the one still alive, were badly hurt too. And the bazooka was riddled, so now there was only one bazooka. He and Ekland did what they could for the wounded, with sulfa and penicillin, and had them placed on litters.
The burning jeep was the jeep with the rations packed in its back seat, so now Dog Company had no rations except the combat rations the men carried in their pockets.
Mackenzie wished he could call a halt here, but he dared not. Now speed was essential. They must get out as quickly as possible. Another detachment of Chinese might enter the village, and anyway it was a place of ill luck. “Sergeant,” he told Ekland, “have the litters strapped to the hoods of the jeeps, and let’s get going.”
“Yes, sir, except—”
“Except what?”
“What are we going to do for rations, sir?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get hungry. Right now we’ve got to get out of here. The quicker we start moving the quicker we’ll get to some place where these men can be treated, and we can get rations.” He hoped this was true, but of course he had no way of knowing. It was the only thing to say.
And the column moved out of the unlucky village of Chungyang-ni, and crossed the railroad tracks, rusty under a veneer
of ice, and trudged uphill into the loneliness of the road.
The road ascended steadily and the men walked with bent heads, and there was no sound except the laboring motors of the jeeps, and the pain of the wounded. They were all unconscious now, and Mackenzie was grateful for this, but still they made noises when the jeeps jolted in the ruts.
At noon Mackenzie called a break, and the men ate what rations they had left. Mackenzie wondered how long men could endure, and march, without rations in this cold, but of course he said nothing of this to the men. He called Ekland, and together they went over the map.
“This place up here,” said Mackenzie, pointing to a black dot on the map which marked some sort of habitation, “this place is where we’ll spend the night. Then tomorrow we’ll make it to the perimeter, if there is a perimeter up there. How far ahead do you think that place is, sergeant?”
“This map is sort of crazy,” Ekland said. “You look at this map and you’d say four or five miles to that little place, but the map doesn’t show the ups and downs. I’d say four hours’ march, sir.”
“That’s what I figure, too,” said Mackenzie. “Anyway, that’s where we’ll stop.”
As they marched, the character of the land changed. The paddy fields, and all sign of man, vanished, and there were no longer gentle slopes such as they had seen in the valley of the railroad. Sheer rock climbed at their right, and to their left the slope deepened and the jeep drivers became wary of the left, for if they skidded they could drop off three or four hundred feet. And this land was forbidding, and seemed to close them in. And it grew colder as they climbed, and in the narrow places between the walls of this gorge the wind screamed. This wind that had crossed the frozen steppes of Asia screamed like a live and fanatic enemy.
Just before dusk they came to a place where the road widened and the land grew more level, on the crest of a ridge, and Mackenzie said to Ekland, “This must be it,” and he looked about him for houses, but there were no houses.
“This was it, sir,” Ekland said. He pointed to blackened timbers not quite buried under the snow. If you looked closely, you could see that three or four houses had once been here, but they had all burned. How long ago, or for what reason, they could not figure out. It didn’t matter. They were gone.
“Well, let’s get on with it,” Mackenzie said. “We’ll find some other place ahead.” He knew this wasn’t true. He knew they would have no shelter in the night. But the further he could lead, or drive them, this day, the better chance they’d have of finding someone, or some place, the next day.
They moved on, slower. They moved even after darkness came. They moved until Mackenzie’s legs would move no more. The collapse of his men was immediate. He had to kick them to their feet to force them to change their sweat-soaked socks, which would surely freeze in the night. The litters, with the wounded, he ordered placed under the jeeps, where they would have some protection from the weather. Then Mackenzie, numb and exhausted utterly, collapsed too. His mind was so tired, and so concentrated on his men, that he forgot an important thing. His jeeps needed warmth in the night.
After his captain slept Ekland crawled into the front seat of the lead jeep, and found the walkie-talkie. The map told him there was no chance of his voice reaching anyone. His logic told him too. But one could never be certain with radio waves. There were skip waves. There was the Heaviside bounce. And anyway it was comforting to believe someone could hear him. “This is Lightning Four,” he said. “This is Lightning Four calling Lightning. Come in Lightning.”
He repeated this several times, but there was never any answer, and at last he gave up, and got out of the jeep, and found a place for himself against the cliff, and slept.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS DURING this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid.
And it was on the following morning that Mackenzie jogged himself, and his men, into movement with the promise of the bottle of Scotch. It was the morning they ate combat rations that Ekland found in the pockets of the dead. It was the morning they were shadowed by the Mongol horsemen watching them from the cone-shaped hills across the gorge, and the morning they were ambushed by mortars when they reached a place of danger where the road left the protection of the cliff, and ran out into the rock-strewn flatland to touch a frozen stream.
And now Ackerman, the quiet corporal from Pennsylvania, lay dead out on the flatland, and under Ackerman was Dog Company’s last bazooka. Mackenzie had told Nick Tinker, the youngest of them all, to go out and bring back the bazooka, for without the bazooka he didn’t think they had a chance for it.
As Tinker slid out into the open from the shelter of the rocks, and the defilade of the hill, Mackenzie disposed his forces. He backed out of his own point of vantage, and in it placed Ekland with the BAR. “You cover Tinker,” Mackenzie ordered, “but don’t open fire unless you get a definite target. Don’t want to expose our position unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
He brought up Beany Smith, with an M-1, to support Ekland. Four men, under Heinzerling, he stationed further along the road, so that if a fire fight developed Dog Company would not be taken from the rear. For the others he found a secure place, around a corner of the hill, where they would be safe from fragments if the enemy brought the position under mortar fire. Then he himself squirmed up beside Ekland and Smith to observe Tinker’s progress.
Tinker was trying to remember how a jackrabbit behaved in the sand hills. This place reminded him of a wild canyon where one winter his brothers had spread a trap line, and he had stalked jacks with his twenty-two. This place looked much the same, and was no colder.
A jack ran a little, and then stopped dead, and when he stopped he blended into the background, and you could not see him. So Tinker paid careful attention to his surroundings, and avoided placing himself between the drifts of snow and the hills opposite, where the enemy watched. And he ran a little and then froze, like a jack.
Tinker wished his brothers could see him now. Matt, Pike, and Bill had been much older than he, and bigger, and stronger, and wiser in the ways of the ranch and the wilderness, and they had held him in contempt. But they could not have contempt for him now, darting out under the guns of the Chinese with more wit, and speed, and guts than they had ever shown. Specially picked by his captain—picked above all the older men.
Nick was the runt of the family, a child of the depression. And whenever, at table, Old Matt spoke of the depression—from which the Tinkers had never fully recovered and upon which he blamed most of his troubles—he looked at Nick. Nick was given to understand that in the cruel days of the depression his birth had been one in a series of undeserved financial catastrophes his father had endured. And he was given to understand he was unwanted, and entirely the fault of a careless mother.
The mother shielded him from insult and brutality as best she could, but there was little she could do, because she herself was trapped and enslaved. Sometimes, when the others were gone, she surrounded him with her arms and wept, and said, “My poor little boy. My poor little Nick.”
On his seventeenth birthday Nick saw a Marine Corps recruiting advertisement in a magazine, and was fascinated by it. The sergeant in the advertisement wore a splendid blue uniform, his chest was bright with ribbons, and the girl on his arm was incredibly pretty. His three brothers, when they had money, drove to Hyannis for the weekly Saturday night dances. They came back smelling of beer and boasting of girls. But Nick in all his life had never had a girl, or a drink, although of course he never admitted this to Dog Company. So he took a bus to Omaha, with his father’s written blessing, and joined the Marines.
There were no girls, and no blue uniforms either, in his seven months as a Marine. There was hard training at Lejeune, and then a long ocean voyage, and at Inchon he found himself a replacement in the First Division. He was given the patch of Guadalcanal, with the design of the Southern Cross, to wear on his sleeve. He was proud of it.
Now Tinker
was close to Ackerman’s body. He had not yet been shot at. He hoped the captain was watching, to see how correctly he behaved.
The captain watched through his glasses. The kid was doing a wonderful job, and had not drawn fire. Sometimes the kid snaked on his belly, and sometimes he ran, and sometimes he vanished into the terrain. He wondered how the kid had learned it. Then Tinker disappeared entirely, and the captain shifted his glasses to Ackerman, because he couldn’t tell how close Tinker might be to the bazook.
Something moved within Mackenzie’s focus. It did not move like a man. It seemed only that a clod of earth shifted, but Mackenzie knew it was Tinker. Then, definitely, he saw Tinker bend over Ackerman, or what was left of Ackerman.
The two figures were fused, and immobile, for long seconds. Mackenzie found he was talking to himself. He was whispering, “Get the hell out of there, you dope. Get out, you stupid kid!”
At last, he saw the two figures in his glasses separate, and in that moment Ekland shouted, “Here they come!” Ekland’s long-barreled automatic rifle began to speak, in short bursts.
Mackenzie watched three, then two, then three more Mongol cavalrymen debouch from a rent in the hills across the gorge. He said, quietly, “Aim low, sergeant. Get the horses.”
He saw Tinker running, but at this distance it seemed Tinker barely moved, but Tinker had the bazook, all right. And he saw the short-coupled, shaggy ponies eating up the distance like quarter horses, and he knew the boy could not make it. He shouted for his men, back of him, safe behind the shoulder of the hill. He shouted for them to come up. It would be all over, one way or another, in a minute, and he did not believe the Chinese mortars could zero in on him in that time, and he had to have more firepower if Tinker and the bazooka were to be saved.
At the strip of ice that was the stream the Mongol horsemen slowed, and it was there that Ekland’s BAR began to find targets. Two horses dropped. And Mackenzie was aware of the welcome bark of rifles behind him. His men were firing slowly and steadily, and he knew that it was aimed fire, and he hoped they had remembered to set their sights for range and windage. Often, in battle, men forgot. Often men forgot to fire at all. There was nothing he could do to instruct or guide them now. It was all a matter of their training.
