Kat's Rats

by Michael Beals

  The entire plateau rattled under their feet, a booming roar washing over them and drowning out the circling fighter/bombers.

  “For God’s sake, will someone come here!”

  Kat bolted for Capson’s foxhole, bumping shoulders with Dore as she popped her head over the ledge.

  Five hundred meters to their right, the ornate sandstone temple in the cliffside broke apart. The massive red columns parted down the middle and swung open on hidden hinges. Something clanked and rumbled inside the gaping pitch-black portal, fifty feet wide and forty high.

  A steel demon four stories tall clamored out in the open, scraping chunks of the faux temple’s ceiling off.

  The rebels on the cliffside shriveled into their holes as the forty-meter long beast roared into the canyon, belching deep black smoke out the back from the twin U-boat diesel engines. The turret, alone triple the size of even a Tiger tank, whined to the east and trained two gargantuan 11” battleship guns down the canyon.

  Four hexagonal armored cupolas, each with four muzzles peeking out, ran along each side. Two baby tank turrets, sporting only 128mm guns, were mounted on the rear as an afterthought. A man-sized Iron Cross and a red-stenciled LandKreuzer 1 - Ratte decorated the towering walls serving as the land cruiser’s hull.

  Kat chuckled through the gasping around her. “That’s cute. I wonder just what Herr Hitler is overcompensating for? What do you say we give him a little circumcision, fellas?”

  “Stay down, everyone. We got this.” The American propped his boot on a rock and balanced a map on his knee before clicking his mic. “Dragon 6, this is Snake Eye 3. I need a kiss of death at grid—”

  The Arkansas drawl pouring out of the microphone cut him off. “Roger, I’ve got eyes on. Hard to miss that sum’bitch. Get low in your holes, ya’ll. Danger close!”

  Five thousand feet above, both buzzing aircraft lined up on the canyon and leveled off. Just shy of the target, the bombers flipped over in a nigh vertical dive…

  Just as the eight armored bubbles lining the super tank’s sides tilted up 90 degrees and let their quad-mounted guns loose. The US Air Controller ground his teeth at the slow but massive muzzle flashes.

  “Abort! Those aren’t machine guns. It’s got a whole flak battery!”

  Neither bomber wavered as they raced through the crackling 20mm tornado. Large chunks of aluminum trailed behind the rugged warhorses. The self-sealing fuel tanks kept the flames at bay. A thousand feet before impaling in the sand, the lead Dauntless jerked upright at a skin-peeling 4-g’s, a stack of six massive iron bombs swinging into the target.

  The barrage slammed into the giant tank at the same instant the second wingless bomber pancaked into the ground at 500 mph.

  “See you in Valhalla, Dragon 6.” The Lieutenant shielded his face from the heatwave as the 250-pound bombs erupted, at least two striking the land ship’s oversized turret. He ground his teeth as the tail sheared off the surviving warbird, cartwheeling the bomber into the canyon’s cliff before either crewman could even open the canopy.

  “Sorry about your mates. It wasn’t in vain though.” Dore dropped his head and muttered a prayer. “They saved a lot of…”

  The swirling smoke and flame below sucked in everyone’s breath, especially as the Ratte clanked out of the inferno.

  Only the slightest of dents marred the mammoth turret, now swinging east. All fourteen onrushing Sherman tanks formed a tight line, their 75mm guns blazing in one perfect volley.

  “Get them out of there!” Kat clutched the Lieutenant’s arm. He gaped as the twin 280mm battleship guns on the Ratte bellowed. The shock-quake knocked his wobbly knees to the dirt as the entire canyon vanished in a dusty hurricane. The last clear sight was a loose turret from one of the Shermans shooting fifty meters high before crashing down on a half-track full of open-mouthed GI’s.

  Karsenty circled a finger over his head. “Get your gear; we’re extracting right now.” Dore tackled him as he stood, slamming them both into his foxhole as four of the flak guns raked the cliff with 20mm auto fire. Kat propped a liberated machine gun over the ledge and hosed the super tank down. Trufflefoot snagged her ankle and dragged the girl back to cover.

  “Relax. That thing has to weigh 1,000 tons, minimum. No way in hell it could scale the cliffs or move fast enough to outflank us. We’re safe up here as long as we stay under—”

  He dropped flat as those massive battleship guns belched again. Kat hugged the ground tight, even as the sand fell away from her grasp.

  With a soul-jarring crack even louder than the cannons, the entire ledge shifted twenty degrees. Then slid another fifty meters down the cliff. Kat swam against the sand as her head went under.

  Arms still swinging, she kicked off a boulder and clawed her way out into the sun. She flopped down on the bottom of the canyon and coughed up dust, not even enough strength left to give the lurching landslide barreling her way the middle finger.

  “No time for beauty sleep, Lassie.” A pair of furry arms swung her over a brown-coated man’s shoulder. Dore dashed out of the valley and into the open killing fields, mere seconds before the rest of the cliffside rumbled in.

  “Where’s… ugh… Trufflefoot!” Kat croaked as Dore plopped her down.

  Thirty-odd sand mummies shuffled out of the sprawling dust cloud — only half as many as went in. Trufflefoot hobbled over, propped up by Capson and Atkins on each side.

  “Wee got to movvve!” He tilted his bleeding nose back and wheezed some more. “I think it’s broken again.”

  Karsenty dashed their way and dumped a big cylinder tank at Dore’s feet. “Get down!” He dived as tracers from the German base 500 meters west stitched the dust storm. Dore pointed a knife-hand back towards the collapsed cliffside.

  “We have to fall back. Sitting ducks out here in the open…”

  His teeth chattered as the Earth shook again. A mammoth shadow rammed the avalanche pile and tipped up, blocking what little light came through the dust. The demon clanked backward and charged forward again, flattening a hundred tons of debris in one stroke.

  Dore clapped Karsenty’s hand through the swirling brownness. He coughed out a shout over the machine-gun fire from the west and engine growling from the east. “Sorry I got you into this, mate. You’re all civilians. If you surrender, they might go easy on you.”

  “Ha-gah!” Karsenty choked on his sandy laugh. “We’re Jews in occupied territory. We’ve been stuck between a rock and a hard place for years. SSDD, brother.”

  He hollered something in French-tinged Yiddish. All his men and a few women formed up by squads and then sections, whooping an exotic war cry in seconds. Karsenty hefted the flamethrower on Dore’s back and pointed at the farthest clump of shadows crouching in the cloud. “I’ll take the lead section, and you Command the second. Race ya to the fort!”

  Kat shoved Trufflefoot and the boys towards Dore, never taking her eyes off the monolith looming over her shoulder. “If he doesn’t beat us first.”

  “Bugger me.” Atkins dropped down between two stone-faced rebels and stopped chewing his parched lips long enough to growl. “That’s not a hard place. It’s a Goddamn suicide mission!”

  Capson hummed and shook the dust out of his ammo belt. “You’re always whining just as we’re about to whip the NAZIs. Relax. We’ve got ’em right where we want ’em—surrounded from the inside out!”

  “You blasted simpleton.” Atkins clutched his weapon tight as Dore flashed a thumbs-up along the firing line. “Use whatever butterflies are fluttering around that empty skull of yours. In what warped fantasy do you think we have the edge? The Huns have numbers, some fuckin’ huge super tank, and a goddamn fort. What do we have?”

 
; Capson tilted his chin up and thumped his chest. “The righteousness of our cause!”

  Atkins chuckled at the living recruitment poster for a second, then blinked when Capson frowned. “Wait… you’re bloody serious!”

  Karsenty popped a smoke grenade behind him and another in front of his two squads, his biting roar clear as God’s fury over the gunfire.

  “Acharai!”

  Karsenty’s tall frame led the charge forward fifty meters, then his whole team dropped and tossed out another line of smoke. Scores of orange tracer trails hammered back from the sand fortress in response. The first section disappeared in the smoke before the defenders tweaked the range.

  Dore’s section stayed in the prone and raised their weapons. He slapped the nearest man’s gun down. “No shootin’ until the last 100 meters! Keep ‘em guessing where we are.”

  Kat winked while Dore scratched his throbbing neck scar and barked those magic words.

  “Follow me!”

  Like flipping a switch, the fear melted away. Both squads bolted out of the dust cloud to catch up with their leader. Karsenty’s team stayed put, ready to light up the fort if things went south while Dore’s section bounded past them and charged another fifty yards. Exactly on Dore’s 60th stride, he hit the dirt. “Down!”

  Each warrior dived to the ground and cozied up to the thickest scrub bush around. Every other fighter chucked a smoke grenade as far as he or she could.

  “Wait for my command!” Kat ground her teeth as Dore slapped her barrel away, for once she did as she was told. He kept counting to ten so the smokescreen could build up before signaling Karsenty’s team forward.

  Kat hopped back up and chucked a smoke round when it was their turn to run again. She bit her tongue through two more mad sprints until tripping over a rebel body from the first section. Skinning her wrists on the sand, she fumbled around for her weapon. “Here, now get…” Another rebel tossed her a rifle, then dropped his own as he crumbled over and clutched his spurting neck.

  “Verdammt!” Kat dug out a field dressing and slapped it against the man’s throat…only to fall back as another random machine-gun burst his melon open.

  “If we don’t suppress them now, we’ll never make it!”

  Dore couldn’t even grunt back. Anything more than a wheeze was too much for his shrapnel-riddled knees to handle as he raced to keep up with his young and lightly armed mates. With every footfall across the cracked ground, the flamethrower’s steel frame dropkicked his spine. After a few years of torture, he finally sprawled in the sand behind the last smoke screen.

  “Just… two hundred…meters to go.”

  One hundred and twenty paces… through God only knew how many tons of lead.

  The enemy base might be blanketed in smoke, but the thousands of incoming tracers lancing through the fog sure guided the way. Assuming the Krauts stuck to the standard 4 to 1 ratio between ball and tracer rounds, then by his calculations they were…

  “Screw the plan. If we die, we die fighting!” A rebel raised his bolt action rifle and popped out a shot. Four German machine guns zeroed in and quartered him before he finished racking the slide for a second.

  “You think it’s bad now?” Dore cranked out his last smoke round and roared. “Don’t engage until the final stretch, and some of us just might live!”

  Before anyone could argue, it was their section’s turn to bound forward. Or what was left of them. The fourth 100-meter sprint through the shredded remains of the lead section was easier than the others.

  There was nothing like skipping over the squealing body of a teenaged rebel girl, frantically stuffing her intestines back into her gut, to put Dore’s own aches and pains in perspective. By reflex, Dore slowed and dug out a pressure dressing from his thigh pocket.

  Kat swooped up behind him and dragged Dore forward. “You know you can’t do Scheiße for her until the shooting stops!”

  Dore snarled as he trudged ahead. This time he dropped beside the surviving first section members instead of bounding past them. He low-crawled over to Karsenty. Easy enough to pick him out even in the smoke, since he was the only living person around not screaming or burying their face in the dirt.

  “We’re here, Lieutenant. Is this the hundred-yard mark yet?”

  The Legionnaire hissed while setting down his rifle and unslinging a 12-gauge shotgun. “Get away from me with that bomb on your back!”

  Dore grinned and stuck up his middle finger. A burst of machine-gun fire plowed the ground between him and the Lieutenant. Dore spat out the dirt and slithered away without letting an inch of his body break contact with the Earth.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the rebel leader ramming a 30” wooden rod down the shotgun’s muzzle. “Clever bastards.” A large tin can, packed with ball bearings and one pound of their homespun fertilizer/fuel oil explosives, topped off the stick.

  “Three… two… one… fire!”

  Eight shotguns barked as the scattered line of militia fired back at the NAZIs for the first time all night. Dore muttered a prayer as he rose to his knees. He’d spotted a dozen grenadiers at the start of the assault. Worse than even the casualties, the crude grenade launchers were so inaccurate, it’d be a miracle if one in three hits somewhere inside the complex.

  Karsenty blew a whistle while the rest of the survivors poured out suppressive fire as if paid per shell. Kat cackled, joining in with a sub-machine gun in each hand and doing her best to mimic a whole army.

  With a primeval roar strong enough to rattle the walls of Jericho, Karsenty sprang up and led the remaining rebels forward in a final charge.

  The second Dore rocked to his feet and tried to follow, a random tracer from the fort flicked across his left shoulder. Something wet splashed his cheek while his arm caught fire. He dropped back to his knees and rolled to put out the flames, but the heat came from a nastier source… his suddenly exposed muscle tissue.

  He tried to rise again. The shock from the grazing flesh wound right over the old wound stung fiercer than the ripped skin. Dore rested against the oversized flamethrower, like a beetle on its back, his age kicking his ass for the first time in years. “Move yer lazy arse!” He screamed at his burned-out knees and forced himself and the gigantic fuel tank up… as the ground rumbled and something ruptured behind them.

  Even Kat stopped firing and clawed at the ground with her nails. “Incoming!”

  With a final heave, the Landkreuzer crushed/climbed the rubble pile and broke free of the canyon. It rumbled to the side, all four quad-mounted 20mm autocannons spinning up. Karsenty’s banzai charge disintegrated as the Ratte sanitized the field with 2,000 high-explosive rounds a minute.

  Kat dashed over to Dore and reloaded a fresh magazine. “I guess you’re in charge now, Wolfman. Probably five or six of us left. Tell me you have a plan?”

  His problems suddenly in focus, Dore howled and levitated to his feet. “Grab the bull by the bloody horns. Pop smoke and follow me!”

  Dore led the blind charge for only a few paces before Lieutenant Karsenty materialized out of the smoke and slid in front of him.

  “Get your giant ass out of the way!”

  Karsenty only grunted and jerked his shoulders back. Then again and again. Dore reached for him. The running mountain never wavered. By some miracle, Karsenty managed to stay on his feet, not even slowing as the meaty thwaps chewed him apart. Dore spit out the wet, iron-tasting splatter on his face as his Comrade somehow picked up his pace.

  “Karsenty, brother… don’t!”

  The towering Jew finally caved in and collapsed thirty meters short of the fort. Flailing his arms, he flung his seven-foot frame in a swan dive across t
he stacked rolls of razor wire ringing the compound.

  Dore pushed back the strangest moisture in his eyes and stomped over the lifeless human bridge, Kat and the few living, right on his heels. He covered the final stretch of no-man’s-land in a couple of leaps and hugged the sand-filled baskets tight. Beside him, Kat cooked off a frag grenade and squeezed his shoulder. After letting the fuse run for three seconds, she lobbed the grenade over the wall at the NAZI rifle muzzles trying to shoot straight down.

  “Ok, boost me up and I’ll…”

  With a wolf’s howl, Dore yanked Kat down as she clambered up the wall. He monkeyed up the sides of the dirt baskets in her place before she even hit the ground. The mesh wire sliced his hands as well as concertina wire. In two seconds, he rolled over the wall and into the swirling dust below. He landed on a young SS fighter, who was busy prying a chunk of shrapnel out of his mangled calf. Dore stomped on his windpipe without a word and rose like a demon out of the sulfur haze.

  A courtyard five yards wide, ran between the outer wall and the medieval keep in the middle of the redoubt. A faint red light from the central bunker’s entranceway beckoned through the dust only a few feet away. Dore skipped over to the bunker entrance and unfurled the spray nozzle attached to the cylinder tanks on his back.

  Someone inside rolled a giant potato masher grenade out the door. Dore hissed and chucked the nearest wounded, squirming Stormtrooper on top of the stick grenade. The small man was half the size of Karsenty. The shrieking sandbag served its purpose.

  With a deep wail, Dore jumped through the shower of bone shards and spongy red mist. He shoved the sprayer’s spout inside the bunker’s entrance and held the first trigger down. Dore gushed out napalm for a good two seconds before hitting the second trigger, this one attached to a lighter.

  The French manual claimed the tanks would spray out all ten gallons in twenty seconds. It seemed more like an hour that Dore stood in the doorway and cackled. The honeycomb complex was meticulously laid out so that every firing position could be reached from undercover, without any defender having to step outside. The flames erupting out of a machine gun nest on the second floor and fifty meters away was a testimony to the fort’s clever construction.