Battle Cry - Leon Uris [227]
“Look! There’s the alligator!”
I snatched Burnside’s field glasses and focused them on the lagoon. Bogged almost under the water, I caught a faint glimpse of a square gray object moving in slow motion through the water. I judged she was making three knots an hour and was two miles away.
“Runner!” Wellman shouted across the road, “get Major Pagan and have all remaining men in How Company stand by for a working party. I want half of them to unload and the other half to rush ammo up to the front. Have men stand ready to evacuate the wounded to the landing craft waiting at the reef. Kyser, prepare the critical cases for transfer to the destroyer…Mac!”
“Yes.”
“Contact the destroyer and have them prepare to receive the wounded. Have the landing craft get as close to shore as they can.”
“Aye aye, sir.” I scratched the message out and Levin transmitted it as Speedy and Marion whirled the generator for all they were worth.
“Quiet,” Levin demanded. He wrote a message and shouted up to me, “The alligator requests our position again.”
“Dammit, where is that Injun?”
In the haste to transfer from the CP and contact the alligator, I hadn’t surveyed the new position too well. The radio was set up on the beach near a small clump of brush. I had assumed that they were two hundred yards behind George Company and that the area was clear. I was wrong.
I was electrified by a cracking from the clump of brush. The radio transmitter case split in half and toppled over, then the generator crashed from its anchor on a tree. The Japs were blasting at the group with an automatic weapon, point-blank. We all fell flat and pumped slugs wildly and blindly into the thicket.
“Levin, get the hell out of there!” He sprinted back to cover. The radio was wrecked. I looked over the water. The alligator loomed closer and was making better speed than I had reckoned. Maybe the unpredictable tide was helping. Marion and me crouched behind cover and exchanged fire. I could see nothing…the Japs were completely hidden. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jake Levin up and running away. Yellow son of a bitch! Too busy to chase him now.
“Chief! Hit the deck!” Danny screamed as the Injun dashed toward us from the CP. He dropped in his tracks behind a fallen log.
“Don’t call me chief,” he yelled.
Burnside crawled over by me, reloading his carbine.
“They got the radio. The others are no good.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
“What we gonna do?”
“Maybe I should stick a tank up your ass and float you over them.”
“It’s not funny. We’re up the creek…I crap you not.”
“There can’t be more than a half dozen of them in there. We’ll just have to stand fast and keep them from breaking through to the wounded.”
Speedy Gray dived on top of us between bursts of Jap fire.
“What the hell is this, Grand Central Station?” I snapped.
“Had to see you, Mac. The alligator is going too far north. It’s heading right for the Jap lines.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Burnside, what are we going to do?”
“Close one eye and fart.”
“Heads down….”
“We’ve got to steer them in back of us.”
“I can see her now. She’s just a couple hundred yards out.”
“Quick, where are the semaphore flags?”
“Back in the CP.”
“Cover me. I’m going to make a run for the water,” I said peeling off my shirt. “I’ll try to wave at them.”
“It won’t work.”
“We’ve got to stop them! They’re heading right into Jap territory!”
“Cover me!” a voice screamed behind me. It was Levin. He had gone back to the CP for a blinker gun when the radio was wrecked. He had foreseen the trouble. I closed my eyes, terribly ashamed of what I had thought.
“Levin’s coming over the road!”
“Cover him.”
Levin hurdled the smashed radio and ducked low under the barrage we lay down for him. He knelt on the beach, pointed the blinker toward the alligator. His finger pulled dots and dashes desperately. He waved the gun back and forth to catch their attention and screamed to them as he did so.
Smoke arose from the brush as the Japs sighted him.
“Levin!