The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [112]
“Did you hear that? Somebody might be hit.”
Welty raised his head, his eyes peering out toward him from beneath the helmet.
“Yep. Artillery attack. That’s what happens. We’re safer right here than anyplace out there. You crawl out there and you’ll catch hell from the looey, I promise you. Just pray for luck. We’ll be okay unless a Jap shell comes down right on top of us. If that happens … well, it won’t matter much.”
Welty seemed resigned, his strange calm returning, and Adams said, “What do we do now? I’m cold. Damn! You smell that? What stinks so bad?”
Welty looked at him with a tilt of his head.
“Don’t think about that. No telling what’s in this mud. The cold’ll get worse. What we do now is … wait. They need us to move, they’ll let us know. That’s what officers are for. The looey’s as miserable as we are.”
Adams looked at the side of the foxhole, close to his face, the mud oozing downward, the smells engulfing him. The question rolled through his brain. What’s in the mud? Oh God. Dead Japs. He wanted to ask, felt stupid again, no, keep your mouth shut. If it’s dead Japs … maybe the rain will help. God, maybe it won’t.
He shivered again, felt the water deepening beneath him. He kept his stare on the mud close to his face, thought, blood? That stink … gotta be something dead. How long we gotta sit here and just do nothing? I’d rather be up there marching, maybe shooting at somebody than just sitting here. He clamped his arms in tight, trying to push heat through them, useless, the shivering growing worse, the smells sickening, images of dead bodies. He closed his eyes, tried to think of anything else, any distraction, but the first image he couldn’t erase was the dead sniper, and then the men with the flamethrowers, roasting the enemy in their caves. God, how much worse can this get, anyway? This place … who the hell picked this place to fight over? He opened his eyes, saw mud flowing onto his legs, slowly burying him. He jerked his knees toward him, wiped at the mud with his hands, looked at it, the shivering coming from fear, a stab of nausea. Across from him, Welty pulled at his backpack, said, “How ’bout some stew?”
They were on the move again, this time on foot, no truck able to navigate the deep mud of the trails, none daring to move across the open ground. Some had tried to use the primary roads, and Adams had passed by them, watching the engineers at work, bulldozers extricating mired vehicles from mud that seemed hip deep. In front of them the Japanese artillery was peppering another open hilltop, but the near side of the ridge was cut with limestone gullies, large rocks scattered about, thickets of brush. It was excellent cover, and Adams could see clearly that the river of mud led them straight toward that hillside.
There had been no briefing, no senior officer telling them where they were going, what the plan might be. The lieutenant knew more than they did, of course, whether through the walkie-talkie or word from a runner, one of the amazingly unfortunate men who had to move quickly across all kinds of open ground just to pass some command to the frontline officers. Runners were labeled the suicide squad, their life expectancy in battle as bad as the lieutenants who were supposed to lead their men into every assault. If the runners had one advantage, it came from a lack of a shovel. They rarely stayed in one place long enough to worry about digging a foxhole.
The march had begun with a hard shout from Porter to move up out of the soggy protection of their foxholes. Once the men had emerged, a sea of dull green shapes, Adams had seen the lieutenant hurry away toward a huddle of other men who were sheltered by the shadow of a tank. The tank had seemed unoccupied, quiet and still,