Battle Cry - Leon Uris [226]
“We broke through!” Wellman shouted from the phone. “Move the CP to the abandoned camp.”
“Break down the TBX on the double,” the Gunner shouted.
Before the words had left his lips a telephone man had cut the lines and moved up. We threw our sets into their clumsy cases and were besieged by native volunteers anxious to carry them.
“Sorry,” Keats said, “you can’t go up. Too close…bang, bang! You stay and get water and wounded, yes?”
We trotted up the road, panting under our loads, and cut into the camp where Fox Company had made its fight just a few moments before. Stumbling over the bodies, we struggled to the former Fox CP hut and set up the battalion command post. There wasn’t a single Marine lying in the open, only Japs. Our wounded had all been removed. All around us there was a constant crackle of gunfire and grenades as Easy and George Companies worked through the jungle flushing out the die-hards.
“Get that radio in with Sarah and the alligator!” the Gunner yelled.
A set was hooked up in less than two minutes and I signaled the Injun to spin the generator.
“Dammit,” Lighttower cried, “the generator conked!”
“Set up another one, quick.”
“Burnside,” I shouted, “rip the other two radios apart. We’ll have to try to piece one together that will work.”
“Hurry, dammit, hurry!”
“Lighttower, Levin, Andy, Danny…get out there and keep those snipers off our ass. Mary, lend a hand here.”
Burnside, Marion and I knocked the cases open and switched tubes, batteries and wiring desperately, trying to find a combination that would work out of the three radios. The Gunner raced from message center to the switchboard and back to us in a crazy circle, prodding us on. At last I signaled for a test and donned the earphones. I said a short prayer as Burnside cranked the generator furiously and beat out a test call to Seabags.
I moved the dials trying to catch something through the static hissing through the earphones. Then a faint flat set of sounds came through. I couldn’t read it but I could tell from the spacing that it was Seabags’ fist.
“I got them, spin her over again.” I repeated the message and asked for a long test call. I could barely make out the call letters.
“Gunner, I only read them one and one. I don’t know if we are getting through.”
“Hit the deck!”
I knocked the radio flat and threw my body over it just in time to get rocked by the splitting smash of a grenade.
“Get that radio out of here!” Huxley roared.
“We’re hitting for the lagoon,” I shouted, picking up the battery case. “I’ll send a runner back here when we are in contact. Come on men—shag ass.” The squad ripped the set from its moorings and packing it under their arms dashed after me through the sniper fire toward the rear of George Company.
At the water’s edge we slapped the radio together and made a test to the alligator. It was fairly close and we could read each other clearly. Doc Kyser ran up to me frantically.
“Mac, how close is the alligator?”
“I don’t know yet, Doc…we can’t see them.”
“If I don’t get the plasma here quick I won’t have a boy alive back there. We have nearly two hundred wounded.”
“We’re doing what we can,” I said.
“My hands are tied! I can’t just let them die!”
“Quiet, dammit!” I commanded. Levin, at the radio, had caught a call from Seabags.
“They want our position,” Levin shouted. “They’re only a couple miles south.”
“Lighttower!”
“Yo!”
“Get back to the CP and get our exact position.”
“Roger.” He dashed off.
Wellman sighted us and dashed over the road. “Any word from the alligator? We’ve got the Japs disorganized but we can’t follow through, we’re almost out of ammo.”
“They’ll be in in less than an hour.”
“No sooner?”
“I’ll have to have those medical supplies before that….”
“I’ll have to ask you men to leave the area,” I barked to Wellman and Kyser. “We are having radio troubles as it is and we can’t do a goddam thing with you poking us in the ass.” The two officers, stupefied at