Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  Aside from my fear for Caleb, what I was thinking hardly seemed possible. If the tale he told was true, and given the hints of horses, dicey state of medical care, and the proof of the artifacts displayed, this man could very well be over a hundred years old. Not unnaturally, my first inclination was to laugh such an unlikely premise away. But power can do wondrous things. No one knew that better than I, and maybe he had attained nirvana and perennial youth.

  My eyes drifted once more to the grouping of items on his wall. As a gunsmith specializing in antique firearms, it was my business to know something of military history, and as a consequence, of the accoutrements of war as well as the guns. Mr. Will Mueller was underestimating me.

  “You’re telling me you served in World War I, aren’t you?”

  “Sure, sis, what else? Scary, ain’t it?” he asked, the slang making him sound more like a twenty-year-old than a centenarian.

  I wouldn’t say so out loud, but yes, it was. Especially since he didn’t look a day over seventy. Surely he was too robust to be anywhere near as old as he was letting on. One more thing nagged at the edge of my perceptions.

  “Which side were you on?” I asked with growing suspicion.

  He looked at me strangely, one grizzled eyebrow lifting with taunting hauteur. “Why, the side of right, sis. The side of right.”

  Did I mention I hate being called sis?

  “Don’t lie to me, old man,” I said, dropping any pretense of liking or respecting him. I didn’t trust him and he scared me spitless, but I couldn’t let that stop me. With Caleb’s whole existence at stake, I had time neither for Will Mueller’s crap nor for the leisure of fooling around. He’d better not be feeding me a line. I needed proof. So I clutched his arm until my fingers ached, and let the power take us.

  CHAPTER 7

  Somehow, and rather to his own surprise, Caleb survived the night. It turned out to be a comparatively quiet night, with machine guns rather than cannon spitting death over the uneven ground of no-man’s land, their bright tracer bullets glimpsed zipping through the lightless void like rocketing fireflies. The artillery barrage had stopped.

  Yet he longed for darkness again when daylight broke through the pall of sulfurous smoke lying over the battlefield, illuminating the detritus of war with harsh clarity.

  Sights unfit for a man to hear about, let alone see, made him appreciate the relatively ordinary spectacle of a population of rats infesting the trench in which he stood. Throughout the night the animals had kept him and Walsh and the dead man company, their feral red eyes glowing in the dark.

  “Trench rabbits,” Walsh said. Instead of shooting the monster specimen that snarled at him when it should have been backing away, he drew out his knife and flung it toward the rat, pinning the animal to the trench floor. “Had to eat one yet? This one’s big enough to feed a family of four.”

  He walked over to pick up his prize, still struggling in its death throes, squeaking on the point of his blade.

  Caleb’s stomach churned as he shook his head. “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.” He didn’t think he’d be hungry for a while either. Probably not for quite a while.

  God in heaven! The only way rats could grow to such a size was by eating a solid protein diet. In a word—meat. And there was no lack of meat around, be it animal or human. He didn’t suppose the source made much difference to the rats.

  Walsh frowned. “You ain’t getting sick, are you? You look a little pukey.”

  “Just tired,” Caleb said. “Ready for a break.”

  “Ain’t we all.” Walsh whacked the head off his rat with his knife and slit open the belly, gutting it with a quick flick of his hand. “Thought maybe you was getting the in-flew-insa that’s going around. Heard three men died of it last week in B Company. Hell, might as well get shot as go out that way.”

  Caleb watched Walsh’s activities in fascinated horror. “Um,” he said. He hoped he wasn’t about to disgrace himself by barfing all over his puttees. Puttees! The sight of the most ridiculous article of a soldier’s uniform, either past or present, wiped out any remaining doubts of the where and when he’d been shifted to.

  Right in the middle of World War I—the Great War—that much was obvious. But where exactly was he? He was still shocked at finding himself in such a predicament. France or Germany or . . . what was the other country? Belgium, yeah. Some place in Europe, for sure. And when was he? 1917? 1918? He couldn’t bring himself to ask Walsh.

  Walsh set his eviscerated rat on the step-up and scrubbed his knife in the dirt to clean off the blood. “Well, suit yourself about breakfast. A lot of men don’t like eating the native wildlife. Myself, I ain’t so particular. But, Sarge, I know for a fact you ain’t et in two days, same as me. Damn! Wish headquarters would send up the soup wagon.”

  Caleb thought that depended on what they were putting in the soup besides turnips and potatoes. “I could sure use some coffee—and about a gallon of fresh water,” he added to Walsh’s wish list.

  Moving over to Palmer’s corpse, Walsh detached a canvas-covered canteen from the dead man’s belt and shook it. He handed the canteen to Caleb.

  “It’ll taste like ditch water, but at least it’s wet.”

  Caleb ducked as a German machine-gun burped bullets across the field separating the opposing forces, drawing the two men to peer gingerly over the edge of the trench. From this vantage point, he could see craters pockmarking the ground in front them, bodies scattered like tattered red rugs over the area between the hollows. On a hopeful note, at the edge of no-man’s land, a few rifle barrels moved within the shelter of foxholes. A fence of barbed wire marked the line between the American and German forces. Bodies were caught in both sides of the wire; the recently dead ones stiff in rictus. A few still moved. Some cried for their mothers, for water, for help too slow in coming.

  Low to the ground, a fog of greenish-colored vapor eddied with the movement of unseen air currents. Poison gas! Caleb swore aloud. He’d forgotten this was the war they’d fought with some of the most brutal weapons ever invented, though he supposed napalm might give some competition for highest honors.

  “Wish we had a fan,” he muttered, more to himself than to Walsh. “Run that shit back in their faces.”

  Walsh grinned. “That’s our shit, Sarge, in case you forgot.”

  Caleb glanced quickly at Walsh to see if he was joking, cringing inwardly when he saw the other man was serious. Forgot? He’d never known both sides had used gas, since he hadn’t exactly been a student of the first World War. Until this instant, he’d thought only the Germans had been guilty of such atrocious conduct. Boothenay could probably have told him, if he’d ever thought to ask.

  He’d as soon have gotten his education some way other than on the job. Uneasily, he examined the cumbersome object hanging from his belt, which he recognized as a gas mask. When donned, it would cover his entire face. Convex lenses protected a man’s eyes and a contraption that looked like a pig snout covered his mouth and nose, connecting to a pack he wore strapped to his chest. The artifact’s efficacy seemed doubtful to him.

  More bullets spewed across the open area, stilling at least one man’s cries at the eastern end of the fence. Caleb and Walsh put their heads down and jacked shells into their Springfields, sure an attack was in the offing. They held off returning fire, choosing to conserve their ammunition. None of the men hidden in the foxholes out front fired either, waiting instead for a clear sight of the enemy. They were a battle-tried company, not given to panic.

  After a while, Caleb ventured a look-see. A thin line of German troops was straggling out of their own trench to launch an assault. They wore their own version of gas masks and, with their archaic spiked helmets, looked like something out of a bad science fiction novel.

  But the men weren’t what caught his attention. He nudged Walsh. “See the smoke rising over there? Just inside that line of burned over tree stumps. That’s where they’ve got the machine gun.”

  The gun f
ired another belt of bullets, some whizzing over their heads like angry bees. Walsh jerked Caleb back from the edge of the trench. “I see it. Dammit, Sarge, keep your effing head down if you don’t want it blowed off your shoulders.”

  Caleb had already started along the trench, looking for the best place to skinny over the edge and into no-man’s land. “Keep down yourself,” he told Walsh, who ducked and trailed after him like a duenna after a Spanish senorita. “Somebody has to get rid of that machine gun nest before they kill the rest of us—or take out the next company that moves up. They aren’t going to be paying attention to this trench when their men close in on the open ground. I’ll go then.”

  “Major Page ain’t going to like you taking a chance like that.”

  Who the hell, Caleb wondered, is Major Page? Must be his commanding officer. “He’s probably dead,” he said, “and since he’s not here to tell me any different, I guess I’ll do what I feel is right. Why don’t you go on up to the other end of the trench and start shooting? Then the Huns won’t be looking for me. They’ll be too busy shooting at you.”

  “Sound like a damn officer your own self,” Walsh grumbled, but he went. In a minute or two, Caleb heard the crack of Walsh’s rifle as he laid down covering fire.

  Caleb took a deep breath and went over the top, rolling as soon as he cleared the edge of the trench. Walsh’s shots, spaced to the speed at which he could lever shells into the Springfield’s chamber, drew a barrage of gunfire down on him. Caleb hoped the private was keeping his head low.

  In fact, Caleb was intent on doing exactly that—crawling close enough to the ground for his nose to nearly plow a furrow in the dirt. Nice and slow, he reminded himself every time the machine gun cut loose. Nice and slow. They aren’ t aiming at you. Never mind the logic and what he knew was true, every instinct he had yelled at him to get up and run.

  Or maybe that was Walsh doing the yelling, since he was the one taking the heat.

  CALEB DROPPED into a shell crater deep enough to screen him before cautiously raising his head. Looking back, he saw he’d crawled maybe three hundred feet, taking it inch by inch—all thirty-six hundred of them—until he cleared the end of a section of barbed wire. Close enough he might be able to destroy the machine gun from where he lay. On the other hand, his Springfield wasn’t exactly a fully automatic M-16. The men wouldn’t be standing around waiting for him to take a second shot, and he doubted his own ability to get every man before they took cover. If only one of the enemy succeeded in escaping, he would be pinned down ’til dark. Maybe until the end of the war—his war, at least. Caleb didn’t much favor either option.

  Off to his side and parallel with him, German ground troops had reached the barbed wire. Most of them knelt and fired shot after shot as fast as they could pull their triggers, while three men took out heavy wire cutters and quickly opened a hole in the wire. Sitting ducks, if not for the machine gun that spat a hail of bullets at the American soldiers, forcing them to stay down.

  Another hundred yards, Caleb told himself, as if that number was an encouragement. Halfway there.

  If he could make it to the edge of the woods unseen, he’d be near enough to lob one of his grenades at the gun. If he couldn’t, it looked like he was well and truly . . . well. He took a deep breath, alarmed at how the air going into his lungs seemed to shudder and jump. The next section he had to cross was full of gas, blown in since he began this odyssey. Luckily, he’d spotted the low-lying cloud before he’d started crawling again. With his head so near the ground, he might well have run right into it. Fried his lungs and boiled his eyes before he knew what hit him, as the gas tended to stay low.

  A man who’d been gassed was not a pretty sight. The chlorine, or worse, phosgene caused acid burns on exposed tissue, especially moist tissue. It attacked your eyes, invaded your nose and, at first breath, burned out your throat and lungs with caustic, blistering agony. Compared with that, the pain of your bubbling skin was nothing.

  Caleb took advantage of the German fire to fit the gas mask over his head and, without giving himself time to change his mind, crawled off once more through the blinding gas cloud.

  Time passed.

  His hands hurt, his knees hurt, his neck stiffened. The air coming through his mask smelled and tasted stale as old sweat. He kept his eyes narrowed to slits. Once he heard Boothenay, or thought he did, her voice shrill and raised in anger. Then he decided the sound echoing in his mind was a product of wishful thinking, and that if he didn’t want his head separated from his shoulders, he’d best quit imagining things. Christ! How he wanted away from here. He told people he’d seen war. Now he knew Afghanistan and Iraq were pussy little fistfights compared to this. And come to think of it, both actions, old and new, had started in the same part of the world.

  He composed a long list of reasons of why Boothenay should zap him back into his own time, and tried to think the list to her. She had the gun. She ought to be able to get him back. She was a magician, wasn’t she? What was the freaking hold-up? Had she decided he wasn’t worth the bother and simply abandoned him here? Didn’t she care?

  He crawled on and on, barely allowing himself to breathe—and tried not to think at all.

  THE ELBOWS of his uniform jacket wore through, shredded by the mud and rubble, shrapnel and shell casings. Downed barbed wire littered the ground he crossed. Blood oozed from his abused flesh; his hands mainly, burned by the caustic gas, though he was pretty sure they weren’t harmed badly enough that he couldn’t shoot. God knows they hurt to beat hell. He thought the mud and filth coating his palms may have protected them from the worst blistering effect of the chlorine.

  When the ground beneath him changed from mud to ashes from the burned off forest, he risked raising his head for a spot of reconnaissance. Concealment was well nigh perfect here, under the jumble of fire-blackened stumps and shell-shattered tree trunks. Blessedly free of gas, too. Easing off the mask, he carefully clipped it back onto his belt to wear again.

  The Hun machine gun crew, consisting of three tall, young men, took their ease alongside the water-cooled Maxim while their infantry moved forward on the sparsely manned American line. All three were smoking and alternating swigs from a contraband bottle of wine, laughing as if they had no more care than a family group on a Sunday picnic. They wore their spiked helmets like conquering Viking raiders, the guttural sound of the harsh German tongue carrying to Caleb as he tried to think how to destroy them.

  He squinted, peering across forty-odd, smoke-filled yards. He saw the gun had a full belt of ammo in place—he’d hoped to find it empty. He might have known this wouldn’t be easy, but here he was anyway, playing the hero. It would be so simple for the Boche to simply turn the gun on him if they heard him coming. He sighed, detaching one of the two clumsy grenades he wore clipped to his belt with the wish that he’d kept his throwing arm in shape.

  Not so great a distance, he told himself, trying to instill a little stiffening into his backbone. Longer than first base to second base on a ball diamond maybe, but not as far as deep right field to second. He’d done that before. Thrown the ball right into the short stop’s mitt, as he remembered the play. This was a bigger target than that. Should be easy.

  He wouldn’t let himself remember his baseball playing days were in the distant past, and that he was older now, and more used to utilizing his small motor skills rather than the larger ones.

  Sweat poured down his face as he came out of the crater like a dirty gray ghost rising from the grave. Taking the grenade by the handle, he took three fast steps to set himself up, then hurled it end over end at the enemy’s gun. Sixteen ounces of explosive, shrapnel, a fuse and blasting cap thudded on the ground under the German gunners’ feet. Two of them gawked at the object for precious seconds, long enough for the fuse to run out. The other had the presence of mind to fling himself over the edge of the gun pit.

  Caleb was in motion when the grenade burst. Running forward like a fool, knowing he had to make c
ertain the gun was destroyed and that no enemy lived to come at him from the rear. He fired into smoke and dust, not aiming, immediately levering another shell into the chamber. He shot again, levered again. Thought he caught a glimpse of movement and fired from the hip. Levered a shell, the spent brass kicking out past his face.

  A bullet came out of nowhere, tugging at his jacket. Another clipped his leg, and at the quick fierce burn, his heart almost stopped. Not again. Hell! Not his leg again. He stumbled, caught himself, and ran on, limping.

  Then he was over the pit where the grenade had exploded. He’d missed the machine gun, more or less, he saw, but not the gunners. One of them must have thought he could catch the grenade and throw it back. He’d thought wrong. There wasn’t much left of him.

  A second man was still alive, though not for long, if Caleb was any judge. This soldier’s eyes were wide and blank with shock, his face dead white, and he was making a sorry kind of whoo-whoo noise. Intestines spilled from a jagged rip in his belly. Caleb turned away, sickened.

  In the same instant he heard the faint rustle of ash being crushed by a moving body. He was familiar with the sound, having spent the last hour listening to himself make it as he crawled.

  Throwing himself to the side, he hit the dirt in the same instant a revolver spat. Missed, by God! He came up, his finger on the trigger of the Springfield, tightened, then froze.

  What the hell? For a moment he couldn’t see, couldn’t sort out what was going on—couldn’t really trust his eyes. A confused tangle of bodies wrestled desperately on the other side of the gun pit. One of the wrestlers he knew was the German soldier who’d taken a shot at him. The reason he knew was because this particular wrestler was wearing a uniform. He had no idea what the other thing was. A black bear, maybe, if they had black bears in this part of...Jesus! He didn’t know for certain where he was!