Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon (14 page)

"What a crazy damn war," Moynihan cursed, and Casca was relieved to see that he had recovered his customary ill-temper.

A runner came to the hut to summon Casca to his headquarters. Moynihan hurried with him to the ornate Moorish building that had been the pride of the Arab Legion in Bethlehem.

Orders awaited him that he was to airlift his troops to the West Bank of the Jordan River and besiege the city of Jericho. Airplanes and helicopters were waiting on the nearby airstrip. His orders said that tanks and artillery were already moving into position from Jerusalem and Ramallah and that he was to use these, leaving his own armor and big guns in Bethlehem.

Case and Epstein studied the battle map while the transfer got underway. To the south of Bethlehem was the Jordanian city of Hebron, still in Arab hands, but surrounded since 1948 by Israeli territory and separated from Jordan proper by the Dead Sea. Hebron and Jericho were the only remaining Jordanian
strongposts west of the Jordan River.

"Do you think our guns will be much use here without us?" Casca asked Epstein.

The Dutchman divined his thinking. "I'd rather we had them with us at Jericho. It's less than thirty miles. We could get back here fast enough if the Arabs pushed from Hebron and I can't see them doing it anyway."

Casca nodded. "Mount up. Take everything that will roll."

Half an hour later Casca was flying over Jericho. The city was entirely surrounded by Israeli troops, armor, and artillery, and more was moving into place every minute.

As soon as his plane landed he summoned Epstein and was pacing up and down before a large scale map when the major arrived. A pretty Sabra lieutenant was standing by the map wearing headphones and marking up positions as she received the coordinates on the arrival of each new company.

Casca led Epstein to the map. "What do you think?" The major studied the map carefully for a few seconds, then he pointed a stubby forefinger at the inner circle of symbols. "Mortars?"

Casca nodded.

The forger traced the next circle. "Seventy-five millimeter howitzers?"

Casca nodded again.

Epstein's finger traced a third circle. "Tanks?" A nod.

Another circle.
"One-oh-fives?"

"Right."

"And one-fifty-fives in the outer ring?"

"Yeah."

A pleased smirk lit the Dutchman's face. "We're going to use proximity fuses!"

"Will it work?" Casca asked.

"Just like Joshua." Epstein roared laughing. "When do we fire?"

"That's up to you. But make it damn soon."

"I'm on my way."

Epstein was already running from the room shouting, "A motorbike! I want a motorbike."

Twenty minutes later he was back by Casca's side, his face florid, panting with exertion, his hair and eyebrows full of sand.

"Every damn gun we've got," he exulted, "is aimed into a box only one hundred yards square. Proximity fuses are set to explode at somewhere around twenty feet up, some a bit more, some less, some on the ground. But, oh Jesus, will it be one big bang."

Casca nodded. "Go to it."

"Yes sir." Epstein started to hurry from the room, then turned and pointed to a slight elevation marked on the map. "This is where I've set up my command post. I will be
honored if you would watch with me."

"And I would be
honored to do so" Casca smiled "but I must attend to the infantry attack."

Epstein snapped to attention like a
stormtrooper. "The infantry will not be needed, Colonel."

"I am sure you're right, Major, but overconfidence is an expensive luxury, and one we cannot afford. We're up against the British General
Glubb Pasha's Arab Legion, and they may well prove a force to be reckoned with. I trust our men have been warned what to expect?"

"And provided with every possible protection."

The two shook hands as they left the building. Epstein kicked his motorcycle into action as Casca climbed into his jeep. From the floor he picked up a Galil assault rifle and slammed a fresh 5.56 mm magazine into place.

"Let's go, Billy."

They made a quick tour of the battle lines, starting from the outermost ring of 155s, the devastating American built Long Toms, and spiraled inward circle by circle until they came to the tanks and infantry waiting just behind the 75 mm howitzers.

From the walls of the ancient city there came an occasional round of exploratory artillery fire. The inner rings of troops were suffering a few casualties, but holding their fire on Casca's orders. Deprived of their air force, the Jordanians had only the slightest idea that they were surrounded, and no impression at all of the mass of arms arrayed against them.

Once more Casca cautioned his commanders what to expect, stressing that neither armor nor infantry were to move until they saw his command jeep go forward.

He put Moynihan and
Glennon out of the jeep and moved it on through the inner ring of mortars and then another hundred yards. He placed the protectors over his ears and stood behind the wheel, counting down the seconds.

Expecting it as he was, the gigantic explosion nonetheless shocked him, almost knocking him from his feet
, something like two thousand guns had all fired at once.

He threw up his arm to shield his eyes from an enormou
s fireball that appeared above the city walls and grew and grew, becoming brighter and brighter, shining like lightning even against the brilliance of the sun.

A gigantic slam of hot, roaring noise, as solid as a battering ram, struck him from above, it seemed, as a shock wave poured out from where all the shells had exploded within the city walls.

The walls bulged out as if inflated, then burst in a flying rain of stone that crashed to the sands ahead of him.

From every point of the compass brutal shock waves rebounded as the expanding air was bounced back from the still air that could not yield way fast enough. Wave after wave rebounded, and Casca stood as if paralyzed, wondering just what was happening.

The scorching desert air was suddenly much hotter, as if there were flamethrowers playing above his head. Casca panted like a dog as he struggled to breathe the heated air. Silence.

Then a horrible, ear piercing, soul shaking wail that burst from thousands of throats within the city walls as the last breath rushed from bodies that were dying where they stood, eardrums burst, eyes blown out, stomachs turned to solid balls of tripe, crushed lungs expelling their last breath through shattered larynxes.

And then another silence.

It took Casca a few moments to realize that he, at least, was alive, and another moment to act.

Mechanically, he reached for the starter button and was relieved to feel the vibration of the engine. But he couldn't hear it.

He put his hands to his ears.
To find the earmuffs. He dropped them to the seat beside him, engaged first gear, and, still standing, moved the jeep forward, one foot toeing the accelerator.

All four tires had been blown out by the shock waves, but he knew there was no need to hurry. He was not looking forward to what he expected to see within the ruined city walls. He steered the jeep around heaps of rubble and drove into the city.

Everywhere soldiers lay on their backs, empty black blooded eye sockets staring into the sun, black trickles of blood drying where it had oozed from ears and noses.

Here and there a ruin of a man stood, or stumbled vacantly about. These wrecks had been unfortunate enough to have been somehow protected from the full power of the percussive blast, and now were shuddering through their last sightless, soundless, mindless moments of life. One by one they were toppling to the ground.

Others, still less damaged, were now starting to appear, dazed and dying, bleeding profusely from what had once been their eyes.

Casca
maneuvered the jeep around these walking wrecks, heading for the military barracks in the eastern quarter of the city, which had been the target point for the blast.

Women and children now appeared in numbers, scrambling like bewildered rats from the cellars and basements where they had taken shelter when the city had first realized that an attack was imminent. They groped their way about blindly, gasping
for air with ruined lungs, trying vainly to wrestle with the horror with their shattered minds, wheezing pleas for help through crushed vocal cords.

As Casca sighted the barracks that had been the target point, he heard a lone motorcycle approaching from the opposite direction, and saw Epstein, his big mouth sagging open in horror as his head turned from side to side and his shocked eyes took in the devastation that his guns had wrought.

He shut off the throttle, let the bike fall, and shambled toward Casca, tearing at his hair.

"In the name of the God, Colonel, in the name of all the gods, what have I done?"

Casca stopped the jeep, got out, and walked to meet him. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. "Pull yourself together, Major, you did a good job."

"A good job?"
Epstein stared about uncomprehendingly.

Casca grimaced and struck him hard across the face with the flat of his hand, then grabbed him by the arms and restrained him.

"You did a good job. You carried out my orders to the letter."

"Orders?
I was following orders?"

"Yes.
My orders. And I have another order for you. You're not needed here now. Get back on that cycle and get yourself to the barracks and turn in."

Epstein muttered: "I don't think I'll be following any more orders."
He shrugged out of Casca's grip and shambled away.

Casca shook his head as he watched him go. "Hope he comes around all right. Good artillery officers are hard to find."

He turned the jeep around to meet his advancing troops, and signaled them to retire. Epstein had been right, the infantry would not be needed.

Casca radioed his report of the fall of Jericho to the Israeli High Command and requested that fresh troops be sent to garrison and administer the city while his troops were allowed a rest within secure Israeli territory. He did not explain that he wanted his own men to have as little contact as possible with the ruin that had been Jericho.

The request for relief was granted, but leave was denied. He was ordered a hundred miles north beyond the Sea of Galilee, to the Syrian border. The regiment was to
rejoin the Red general, to be kept in readiness for an escalation of the fighting with Syria, whose long range guns were harassing the Israeli kibbutzim along the border.

During the night Moynihan came to Casca's tent. "Would ye care to hear the world's view of the latest war news?"

"Sure I would. I'm not sleeping anyway."

Casca reached for the bottle of Jack Daniel's in his foot locker and set it on the small desk, which, with its two canvas chairs, were his only privileges of rank.

The level in the bottle dropped steadily while Tommy went through the motions of searching the short wave band for news reports.

Every few minutes there was the dull
crump of a distant explosion as the guns on the Syrian heights lobbed desultory fire onto the Israeli border settlements.

Neither man mentioned that they were drinking Harry Russell on his way. As good a wake as Harry might have wished for. But Moynihan did find some news, and it jolted both men erect in their chairs.

"... at 3:20 Greenwich Mean Time a United Nations cease fire went into effect in the Middle East war between Israel and the Arab nations of the United Arab Republic, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran."

The radio report was punctuated by a number of explosions from the Syrian guns.

"Some cease fire," Moynihan scoffed. "Say, they didn't mention Syria, did they?"

Casca was on his feet.
"No, they didn't, and I think that fire is increasing. Let's see what's happening."

They were just entering the HQ tent as a runner emerged on his way to rouse Casca. The whole of the Red general's force had been put under the command of Brigadier General
Elazar to attack the gun positions on the Syrian border heights.

General
Elazar's detailed battle maps showed an elaborate system of fortifications. Israeli intelligence information revealed that these fortified positions had been substantially hardened with reinforced concrete through the advice and assistance of Soviet experts. The strengthening was such that they could withstand direct hits from either artillery or aerial bombardment. The steep approaches were heavily mined and saturated with antitank obstacles.

General
Elazar pointed out the strategic features of the situation. The Israel Syria border ran roughly north from the Sea of Galilee, along the same line as the Jordan River ran to the south of the sea. Only a frontal attack was therefore possible. An attempt at encirclement of the thirty mile front would require two fighting detours, each of more than a hundred miles through Jordan to the south and through Lebanon to the north. Neither was practicable, and, in any event, that option had been eliminated by the cease fire with those nations.

"I asked for your force, General
Weintraub," said Elazar, "because I have been mightily impressed with the night actions that you have already carried out. But, on further consideration and discussion with General Dayan, we have decided that such difficult ground can only be tackled by daylight.

"We will have no element of surprise on our side, so let's forget about that. Instead we're going to concentrate all our efforts on total preparedness. Nobody is to move at all until everybody is ready to move and then we'll all go together.

"We're up against the eighth, eleventh, and nineteenth brigades along the border, two more brigades around El Quneitra, and another two armored brigades, plus two mechanized brigades. I hardly need tell you that if all of these manage to spill down from the heights and into Israel, we stand to lose everything we have gained on all the other fronts.

"Syria is a formidable enemy for Israel. The Syrians have forgotten nothing the British taught them, and they have since learned a lot from the Russians. If we should lose here, we could lose all Israel."

The Red general was allocated the toughest nut of the whole thirty mile Syrian front, the fortress of Tel Faq'r. Tommy Moynihan dubbed it: "Tell 'em get lost."

All morning Israeli troops were moving into position along the whole of the thirty miles. By eleven o'clock,
Casca's regiment was as ready as it could ever be, and the order came to attack at 1130 hours.

Weintraub
elected to lead the armored attack while Casca led the infantry. At 1129 the two shook hands in front of their assembled troops.

Casca's grip tightened on his general's hand as he recognized in his eyes the look he had seen so often before.
Weintraub knew he was not coming back from this one alive. His lightly armored Bren gun carrier charged away to lead the armor at an oblique angle up the steep escarpment.

Casca waved an arm and started straight up the steep slope of the cliff face into the mouths of the Syrian guns as Israeli artillery opened fire on the defenders ensconced in their concrete fastness and in buried tanks.

The Syrians were having a field day. All around Casca men were falling, mainly officers who, like himself, were out in front of their troops.

He saw
Weintraub reach the end of his southern traverse of the slope and turn to lead the armor back to the north. The tanks would cross the face of the slope in front of Casca and his men, but he found scant comfort in this. The slight protection afforded by the armor would be more than offset by the extra fire they would attract.

And so it proved. As the tanks crossed the path of the climbing infantry they came under the fire of the guns that were tracking the
armor combined with the already devastating fire that was being poured onto the foot soldiers.

Directly ahead of Casca a Sherman had a track blown off, and the stationary tank was then hit by several high
explosive and armor piercing rounds. As he climbed Casca watched the steel coffin brew up.

Long tongues of flame darted from the gun ports and observation slits. Inside, Casca knew, any crew that were alive would be trying desperately to open the hatch, which had been jammed shut by the force of the explosions.

He heard the muffled crackle of the first few machinegun bullets exploding on their storage racks inside the tank. Then the louder bursts as the fire reached the cannon ammunition. There was a mighty, deafening blast as all the rest of the ammunition exploded, blowing the turret hatch high into the air, and with it the charred corpses of the two crewmen who had died struggling with it, their blackened arms, legs, trunks, and heads all flying in different directions. The engine melted in a trickle of aluminum tears that congealed into glistening puddles on the sand. A thick pall of stinking black smoke poured out as the machine died in a final retch of burning oil and rubber.

The following tanks
maneuvered around the wreck and moved on to the north. Casca hurried forward, waving his men to follow, hoping to be ahead of the tanks when their zigzag path up the steep cliff slope brought them back again.

The blistering noon sun baked the infantrymen as they toiled up the slope. Casca pushed himself to move faster and faster, struggling to get ahead of the tanks. His breath came in short gasps. God, how he would love to just lie down and rest.

To his left a young lieutenant colonel did just that as the first burst of machine gun fire from the Syrian positions tore through his chest. Casca glanced to his right in time to see a major go the same way. In each case a captain raced forward to take over the lead position.

Casca gritted his teeth and forced his protesting legs to maintain their pace.

More and more men were falling all around him. The Syrians now had their range, and on the steep stone slope they could not run fast enough to confuse the gunners.

While Casca's body charged on, his mind surveyed the whole scene and considered the alternatives.

To left and right as far as he could see the escarpment was a mass of swarming troops, and with every yard they advanced more and more men fell. To move to either side would be pointless. The steepest part of the slope was now behind them. To stop would be absurd. To turn and retreat would provide the gunners above with the inviting targets of their slow moving backs as they ran down the steep slope. And to continue the advance was suicidal. He felt himself tiring, his pace slowing. Panting like a dog, he ran on up the slope as Weintraub's HGC passed behind him, followed by his tanks.

If the
armor drew away some action he didn't notice it. The hellfire that they were running into was intense beyond calculation. He was near to despair as he saw Weintraub turn again to lead the armor once more across the slope, this time to pass ahead of the struggling foot soldiers. Weintraub's car crossed only a few yards higher up the slope, and as he passed the Red general stood erect, his red helmet in his hand. He waved it like a flag, urging Casca's men on up the cliff.

A burst of machine gun fire scythed through his crew and he crumpled beside his dying driver.

From somewhere Casca's trembling legs found the extra strength to rush the few paces forward. As the driver died the BGC slowed and Casca managed to scramble aboard.

A single glance told him that nobody in this car had any further interest in this war.

He jerked the driver's body from behind the wheel, throwing him to the ground. The engine coughed, and he tramped his foot on the accelerator just in time to prevent a stall. But the unsteered car was now heading down the slope toward the advancing infantry who were rushing to get out of the way.

As they moved aside Casca gunned the motor and continued on down the slope. He snatched
Weintraub's red battle helmet from the seat and circled it above his head, signaling the tanks to follow him.

He raced slantwise down the slope, the line of
armor following, the Israeli infantry frantically scattering out of the way.

Once behind the advancing lines of foot soldiers, Casca turned and raced back across the slope behind the line. Glancing up the slope he could see that now most of the Syrian artillery fire was being wasted, pounding the empty area of the slope where the tanks would have been had they continued on their
path. The now dispersed infantry were also taking much less punishment.

A terrible clanking tumult from behind alerted him that the tanks were not as readily
maneuverable as his car. A Centurion had rolled ever and was tumbling sideways down the cliff, crushing dozens of climbing Israelis as it rolled. Casca gritted his teeth as he visualized the five men being tumbled about inside the steel shell. He modified his course and headed once more up the slope, coming around in a large circle that would bring him up behind the infantry. He chuckled in grim satisfaction as he saw shellbursts exploding uselessly all over the slope as the Syrian gunners sought to locate their enemy again.

By the time Casca's car had completed its pass across the slope behind his advancing
infantry, the Syrian guns were reaching for him, and getting closer with every shot.

Instead of turning back across the slope to pass in front of the foot soldiers, Casca drove almost directly up the cliff, his
maneuver aided by the now lessening degree of slope.

Once more the Syrian gunners wasted time and firepower pounding empty ground, and then had to search again for the Israeli
armor.

The gunners directly above were the first to get close, but, as soon as they did so, Casca changed course again, this time charging directly across the slope just in front of the infantry.

Now the close packed armor shielded the foot soldiers from some of the machine gun fire, and the confused artillery were still trying to realign their guns to follow the tanks, which were now moving fast as they were no longer trying to climb.

This time when he turned Casca resumed the oblique path up the slope, again confusing the Syrians, and now moving very fast as the slope flattened out toward the top of the escarpment.

From the bottom of the cliff the Israeli artillery stopped firing for fear of hitting their own tanks.

Now the tanks opened fire, and at almost point blank range some of their shells took effect on the massive fortifications.

Casca turned to drive directly at the enemy fort, halting his car right at the outermost concrete wall.

He clapped
Weintraub's helmet on his head and leaped from the car, working the action of his Galil as he moved.

Alongside him the first of the Israeli sappers were already placing explosive charges against the walls while others were cutting their way through the great sausages of barbed wire that protected the gaps in the concrete emplacements. In a few more moments there were holes being blasted through the concrete.

Waves of screaming infantrymen surged forward, suddenly recharged with fierce energy as they found themselves on flat terrain after the grinding climb and within reach of the enemy who had been plastering them with murderous fire.