The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [147]
“Sarge …”
“You call me that again up here and I’ll break your glasses and your teeth. Dark in an hour. Nobody sleeps.”
The sergeant looked at Adams now, studied his shirt, the blood crusted thick on Adams’s sleeve.
“Damn, son, you okay?”
Welty seemed to notice the gory mess all over Adams now, said, “What the hell happened to you? You wounded?”
“Just a knife fight.”
“I bet you won. Good for you. You sure you’re not wounded?”
Adams shook his head, and Welty said, “A few wounded made it up here, but I haven’t seen any medical bags.”
Mortensen glanced around, called out a single word as a question.
“Corpsman?”
Faces looked his way, but no one answered. Close by, Gridley was wiping down his BAR, said, “Saw two get hit. Ain’t seen no more.”
Mortensen shook his head.
“Too damn easy a target for these bastards. Anybody gets hit up here, we’ll have to make our own aid station.” Mortensen stared beyond the trench, toward the crest of the hill. “The top, huh? Well, that’s where they wanted us to be. I guess somebody back there will call this a victory.”
Welty led Adams along the ridgeline, the crest of the hill not more than a few yards above them. The Japanese works had simply faded away, the hillside now cut up by deeper holes, some of them made by American artillery. The mud was as it had been all across the hill, thick black pools gathered in the low places, most of those places now occupied by Marines. Welty moved quickly, appraising the position, men looking up at him as though appreciating his authority, even though almost none of them had ever seen him before. They moved past a thicket of brush, more burned stubble, a deep pocket, sharp rocks that opened into a miniature valley that was cut several feet deep into the hillside. In the bottom was a cluster of Marines, a thirty caliber, metal ammo boxes scattered around them. The tripod of the machine gun was broken, one leg supported by a well-placed rock. Welty stopped, the men staring up at them with dull, tired eyes. Welty said, “You’re not the thirty I sent down here. Where’d you boys come from?”
The men looked up at him with puzzled glances toward each other, and one man said, “We come from down the damn hill. Where you come from? Mars?”
The smell of the men reached Adams now, sour, filthy, the wetness around them thick with the same horror that seemed to fill every low place. Adams nudged Welty, said, “They’ve been here awhile.”
“Yeah, we’ve been here awhile. You think we can just go marching up and down this damn place like we own it?”
Welty glanced toward the ridge above them, stepped down into the depression, and Adams followed, the smells growing, could see how the hole could hold these men in good protection. The machine gun was tilted to one side, the rock not quite level for the tripod, and Adams could see a carpet of spent shells, spread all past the muddy bog the men seemed anchored to. Close beside him, Adams flinched, saw two corpses, men wrapped in ponchos, boots sticking out toward him. Marines. Welty said, “What’s your unit?”
“You got the password, Captain Four-Eyes?”
“Hell no. Ain’t had one for a couple days. How about ‘Lala palooza’?”
“Close enough. Zeke here’s been waiting to stick somebody who can’t get the l’s right. Ran out of grenades last night. You got some you can spare?”
Welty fumbled through the baggy pockets on his jacket, Adams doing the same, each man pulling out a pair.
“Here. Take these. We got a few more. There’s a few dozen of us up to the right, a Jap trench, or something like it.”
The closest man took the grenades from Welty’s hand, passed them to the others, spoke for the first time, a low, hard whisper.
“These won’t last long. Full dark, the rain will come. After that, they’ll come for us. Not much we can do.”
The man’s voice was different, and even through the whisper, Adams could hear his words distinctly, clear, the telltale sound of an education. Welty focused on that man as well, said again, “What unit?”
“Doesn’t matter now. We’re Marines.”
Welty glanced back at Adams, then said, “Twenty-ninth? You been