Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon (9 page)

Casca offered a little prayer to Mars. He knew well that the very worst ideas could be just as contagious as the best ones. History was littered with graveyards to prove it with names like Balaclava, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, Arnhem, and he had personally experienced several of them.

They were now close to some Egyptian artillery and machine gun emplacements. The Vautours' bombs and the Mysteres' cannon had turned these bunkers to ruins in a few brief seconds. But the destruction had not been total. Casca could see men running about trying to haul guns back into firing positions.

He looked over his shoulder. They had far outdistanced the rest of the Israeli attack. Casca's company was out on its own.

Farther back the other trucks full of infantry were fanning out across the desert, and, way back were the slow moving armored vehicles. The Red colonel's armored car, its engine no doubt close to disintegration, was keeping pace with the second wave of infantry trucks.

As he watched, Casca saw the blond head as
Weintraub snatched off his red helmet and waved it in an unmistakable signal. "Let's go," Casca yelled, and again his troops took up the shout.

They raced forward, two hundred throats shouting: "Let's go. Let's go. Let's go."

They were still shouting as the Egyptian guns opened up and Casca brought the vehicles to a halt. Leaping from the jeep before it stopped, he ran forward, shouting into the guns, two hundred screaming devils with him, all yelling in a frenzy: "Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"

The sun was now a blazing disc on the edge of the desert. The Arabs were trying to collect themselves in the shadows, blundering about in the half dark amidst the broken guns and bodies, twisted steel and concrete. To their front, lit blood red by the setting
sun, came a host of screaming crazies armed with nothing but small assault rifles, but getting closer, terrifyingly closer, every second.

And behind these crazies there now were dozens of other trucks spilling hundreds more infantry onto the sand and they were all racing forward screaming.

And, farther back still, outlined against the darkening sky, the whole horizon was spread with the red silhouettes of Israeli tanks.

And, in the middle ground was a racing
armored car, turret open, a blond head and red helmet waving like a battle flag.

It was too much.

In fact, the Arab machine guns were killing a lot of Casca's men, and, in cooler hands, might have killed all of them. But, in the bunkers, among the groans of the dying, the screams of the wounded, the stench of blood and piss and shit and cordite and petrol, there were no cool heads. Every Egyptian had alongside him a corpse or a moaning, dying comrade. And from out of the desert more death was coming in an endless, blood red wave.

A few Arabs had second thoughts about their Jihad, and their hands faltered at the guns. Their rate of fire slackened. They couldn't see the numbers of the attackers who fell. The sun only lit the ones on their feet, getting closer and closer, and now pouring fire into the bunkers.

As the first of the attackers' bullets took effect, the defenders stopped firing. They stood and backed away from their smoking weapons and the screaming remains of their friends. Then more of them were falling to the hail of fire from Casca's men, and the Arabs broke and ran.

As in most armies, Egyptians officers led from the rear, only young boy subalterns being with the troops in the first line of fire.

Subaltern, NCO, or private, by now all the heroes were dead, and the wave of terrified humanity that was pouring back out of the gun emplacements was through with any idea of heroics.

The Jihad, the Holy War that guaranteed eternal Paradise for those who died in it, was no longer of interest to any of these men.

Having your testicles torn off, your guts ripped out, your own leg blown clear of your body to have your falling boot kick you in the head, to taste the bitterness of your own waste as you fell face down into the mess of your dangling intestines these were too high a price to pay for Paradise. There must be a better means to get there or else Paradise was going to be very sparsely populated.

The officers at the rear were overwhelmed by their retreating troops, and, no matter how they felt about it, were swept back in the retreating wave or simply trampled underfoot.

All along the line of the Egyptians defense, man's most powerful emotion spread like a brushfire. Sheer terror swept the line and mindless panic ensued.

Here and there among the defenders a cool head prevailed, and some of the Israelis met fierce resistance, but by the time darkness fell most of the outer
defenses of Al 'Arish had fallen.

Not even David Levy, nor the most devout of the Orthodox Jews, paused for their nightly prayers. Nor did Casca hear anywhere the Muslim ritual call to prayer. What he mostly heard were the endless wails of the wounded, the despairing groans of the dying, incessant pleas of: "Water, water. In the name of Allah, give me water."

The adherents of two of the world's great religions were too busy killing and dying to pause to pay their respects to the god for whom they were doing it.

But at last the dying did get their water. The Israeli water wagons were right behind the ambulances, and men crowded around them gulping from their canteens, refilling them,
then gulping them empty to refill them again.

Compassionate Israeli medics moved among the mainly Arab wounded, distributing water as they went.

There never seemed to be enough water, Casca thought, to slake the raging thirst that tore at one's throat as soon as a battle ended.

Not that the battle had, in fact, ended.

Or even taken pause.

Once inside the outer perimeter of the Egyptian defense, General Tal scattered his armor and men out in the broadest possible line, presenting in the gathering darkness the most difficult of targets for the defending gunners.

The inner
defense positions, on the other hand, offered easy and concentrated, if well protected, targets for the Israeli guns.

Colonel
Weintraub set up his H.Q. in one of the Egyptian bunkers, and he held a brief conference of war with his field officers as they wolfed down their food.

The tactic he proposed for his sector of the line was simple enough, and Casca endorsed it readily.

Weintraub divided the defense line into ten sections. He proposed that every possible piece of artillery, howitzers, self-propelled guns, the tank cannons, and every possible captured gun and tank were to be concentrated in turn on each small section of the enemy line.

The concentrated fire
coming out of the darkness from dozens of different directions would be very difficult for the Arab gunners to answer. Large sections of the Egyptian line could momentarily be left unattacked as they would be wasting most of their firepower trying to find the widely scattered Israeli guns.

Once the artillery had sufficiently damaged one section and silenced its guns, the big guns could move on to concentrate on another section. In this way, one tenth of the Egyptian
defense would progressively come under attack from all of the Israeli guns.

Then, as one of these sections was silenced, the infantry's heavy weapons squads, recoilless rifles, machine guns, and mortars would move forward to complete the harassment of each section.

And, finally, as always, the PBI, poor bloody infantry, would storm the position, wrest it from its defenders, and eventually turn its firepower on the nearest defense position.

Weintraub
asked the ritualistic ``Any questions?" got none, and went on. "Let's see if we can raise the Star of David here for sunrise. Move 'em out."

He turned to lead the way out of the bunker and clapped his hand on Casca's shoulder as he passed him.
"Great show, Lonnergan. Your infantry breakthrough was an inspired move. You want to take the first section?"

He didn't wait for an answer, but waved his red helmet to his officers and was gone, sprinting through the darkness to where his
armored car waited. The gears grated briefly, the motor roared, and Weintraub was already charging back into battle. His field commanders hastened to catch up with him.

Casca hurried to where his officers and NCOs were eating together and quickly passed on the orders.

Before the last of the light had faded he had seen that the ridge of one great rolling sand dune swept up almost to the enemy walls, and it was here he decided to set up his heavy weapons. He had attached Sergeant Billy Glennon to the heavy weapons squad, which was commanded by an Israeli lieutenant.

There had not been a moment of silence since the first action in the afternoon, but now the noise of the guns reached a deafening crescendo. Hundreds of cannons were trading shells across the small expanse of desert between the inner
defenses of Al 'Arish and the perimeter, which was now entirely in Israeli hands. The night sky was lit by the red and orange that belched from gun barrels and exploded from shellbursts.

From one of the captured bunkers Casca directed fire onto his chosen section of the Egyptian
defenses. Every Israeli gun joined with him, and the deadly rain poured into the one section of the Arab defense from all over the area.

In a few minutes there were no more flashing muzzles in the selected area, and Casca rushed forward with his heavy weapons squad as the Israeli big guns shifted their attention to the other end of the Egyptian line.

Casca had a clear mental picture of the likely scene in the bunkers beyond the dunes. He knew that the thick concrete and heavy steel would be mainly undamaged, but it was also clear, as the defenders had ceased firing, that the bombardment had penetrated the walls in a number of places. And he also knew, from bitter personal experience, that once high explosive shells did succeed in penetrating armor, their effect on personnel was heightened when fragments of exploding shells bounced around inside the bunker, ricocheting off the walls and the weaponry, inflicting severe wounds on any human flesh that might be encountered, while the confinement amplified the enormous noise and concussive effect, bursting eardrums and bulging eyes from their sockets.

It was not hard to guess why these Egyptian guns were no longer firing. But it was now Casca's task to ensure that they did not fire again.

Inside the bunker a few brave souls were, no doubt, lurching amongst the debris, sweating and swearing as they wrestled overturned guns back into position.

Fire showed through a breach in a bunker wall, and Casca directed all of his machine guns at this light, which betrayed where a section of concrete wall had been broken away.

From the distance he could not tell what he was shooting at, but knew that every round that entered through the hole would have at least some effect on the defenders, and none to their liking. At the very least, it would hamper their efforts to extinguish the fire.

The hole was not large enough to hope for entry with mortar fire, so Casca concentrated the firepower of the
Davidkas to the rear of the bunker, again counting on the bunker's own armor to multiply the effects of the mortars' shrapnel, noise, and concussive effect.

He devoted some of his machine guns to spraying the walls of the bunkers to either side of his selected target, hoping to diminish the fire that would otherwise come from those directions.

Even so, one Egyptian machine gun got their range, and, as the tracers started to cut into where they crouched behind the dune, Casca gave the prearranged order.

The heavy weapons stopped firing, their crews flattening into the sand. All the foot soldiers rushed forward in silence, the first men tugging the pins from grenades, nobody firing a shot.

They arrived by the broken bunker wall and hurled several grenades inside, crouching against the bunker wall for protection, hands over their ears as explosion after explosion reverberated within the concrete box.

Atef
Lufti, shotel in hand, was the first man through the hole, but he found only poor sport – half a dozen staggering wrecks, clutching at torn abdomens and faces, or with the glazed stare of idiocy, hands clapped in frozen horror over their ears.

Lufti
butchered them all anyway.

Casca saw quickly that there was nothing usable in the bunker, but by the time
Lufti was through it was quiet, if stinking, and it did at least afford them a breach in the Arab line.

They quickly extinguished the fine, which was dying anyway for lack of fuel.

The Egyptian machine gunners were no longer firing on Billy Glennon's squad as they had disappeared into the blackness of the night the instant they stopped firing. The squad now moved silently up to the bunker and manhandled their machine guns and mortars in through the shell hole. Belatedly the Egyptians realized what was happening and turned their guns on the moving shadows they could just make out in the starlight and the flashes of gunfire. A number of Israelis died, but the weapons were passed through the wall into the bunker.

Farther along the Egyptian
defenses the concentrated artillery bombardment had silenced another section of the line, and the barrage was moving on to another site while heavy weapons squads pinned down the surviving defenders. The rear wall of the bunker opened into a trench that communicated with the other bunkers to either side.

As the first of the alerted Egyptians came running along the trench, Tommy Moynihan opened fire with his Uzi, standing in the open and firing first to one side, then to the other, then leaping back into the bunker as the Arabs opened fire on each other.

The crossfire stopped abruptly, and Moynihan stepped out into the trench once more to spray his Uzi over the confused soldiery to either side.

Both groups of Arabs withdrew, but the respite could only last for seconds.

Over his shoulder Moynihan glanced back into the bunker.

"Go man," Casca shouted, "I'
ll take this side."

Before the Arabs could regroup, both their bunkers were under attack from the rear. And a couple of grenades quickly solved what was left of the problem. Casca now held all three bunkers and their communication trench.

But, he reasoned, it would quickly become too hot to hold. Then he thought,
by the teeth of Mars, I could use a few seconds to think. Nothing for it but to keep going
. They clambered out of the trench onto the sands behind the bunker and paused in a dune trough about fifty yards away.

Billy
Glennon had the machine gun ready. just as the first mortar shells landed in the trench they had just quit, but Casca's hand restrained Billy's from the trigger.

Casca did a rough count of the silent, crouching figures.
About half his company had made it this far. Not too bad. He knew some were still out with the heavy weapons behind the dune from where they had launched this attack.

From one of the bunkers bursts of submachine gunfire greeted the Arabs who followed their mortar shells into the trench, and Casca realized that he still had a few men in the bunkers. They had better come out pretty soon or they would be cut off by much larger Arab numbers.

Well, perhaps he had only lost about a quarter of his company. So be it. The ways of war. They couldn't be changed. Not by Casca. Not by Mars himself.

But if they all didn't move pretty soon, they would be cut off. Beyond the farther rise of the dune there was a large, square building, probably a store of some sort. He pointed it out to Billy and the big Paddy hefted his machine gun around and sprayed it liberally with lead.

To their astonishment there was no answer, but they were already rushing for it anyway, Uzis blazing from their hips. Casca saw a door and threw himself at it shoulder first. Wood splintered, a lock tore loose, and he tumbled inside. His Kalashnikov came up ready to fire, but there was no need to shoot. Or rather, there was great need not to shoot. Casca pointed the muzzle of his rifle to the floor, and motioned similarly to the others who were rushing through the door after him.

There was just enough light to see the racks of weapons and the crates of ammunition.

"Oh shit, Casca groaned, "what a target we make here."

Billy
Glennon arrived, bringing up the rear, toting the heavy Browning like a toy. "Well," he said with a chuckle, "we'll have something to hold it with anyway. I've got a dreadful dislike for running out of ammunition."

The rest of the company was now crowding into the building. Billy
Glennon opened a timber window flap and hastened to set up his machine gun to cover the direction they had come from. On the other side of the room Harry Russell was doing the same, and at the other walls soldiers were carefully easing open the wooden shutters.

They found that they enjoyed a clear field of fire in every direction. They were in possession, and, so far, they were not under attack.

"Could be a lot worse," Moynihan grunted, opening his canteen and swallowing thirstily.

Casca opened his canteen and swallowed too. Then a thought struck him as he saw others doing the same.
"Hey, we'd better take it easy on the water. It might be a while before we see that water wagon."

All around the room men reluctantly screwed the caps on their canteens as they realized that the battle was far from over, and a long way from won. Their eyes flickered about the room, but the only liquid in sight was in some fire extinguishers on the walls.

Casca promptly lost interest in the water situation. If they should get pinned down inside this cache of high explosive, all the water in the Aswan High Dam wouldn't save them. He knew well enough the raging thirst that follows every battle. His concerns were now outside thirst. The numberless campaigns that he had endured had forced him to think like a dispassionate general, regardless of how his tongue might be frying, or his wounds hurting.

He had learned in the hardest possible way how to ignore, or at worst suppress, the demands of his body so that he could keep that body alive through whatever demands battle might make upon it.

Doomed as he was to an eternity of soldiering, he had come to hate and fear death. He could confront it when necessary, as he had as a boy soldier in Caesar's legions, but the curse of Christ had deprived him of the luxury of welcoming his death in the very moment of that confrontation. For every death that he suffered now had to be endured over again as the endless curse took effect and his body agonizingly reknitted so that he might live again to die again.

Not dying had become a very high priority, and each time he succeeded in not dying he got better at avoiding death. His present situation, however, was making him wonder if two thousand years of soldiering had taught him anything after all.

The main thrust of the battle, as planned, had moved away from the sector that he had first brought under attack. And now he was in possession of a powder keg.