Milo never was to know just what Jethro did or said during his three weeks in Washington, but whatever it was, it worked with a vengeance. Upon their return to South Carolina and the unit, things began to move. The slow, sporadic trickles of supplies and equipment became a steady stream and then a veritable flood. Empty slots were quickly filled as missing and badly needed specialists — commissioned, warranted and enlisted — were transferred in from other units, not a few of them from nearly the width of a continent away. Enough men soon were on hand to allow them the freedom to start weeding out the misfits and troublemakers with which they had initially been cursed.
An episode that was to haunt Milo for many years to come occurred on the day that the former battalion supply sergeant, Luigi Moffa, was brought up from the post stockade for sentencing on the multitude of charges of which he stood convicted.
With a clanking of his sets of manacles, the man in the faded, baggy, blue-denim fatigues (with a prominent bull’s-eye painted in white on the back of the shirt) dropped down from the back of the weapons carrier and shuffled awkwardly up the steps into one of the buildings housing battalion headquarters. Milo’s glimpse of the prisoner and his two beefy, well-armed, grim-faced guards showed him a drastic change from the Moffa he first had met. It was not simply the lack of tailored uniforms and patent-leather field shoes, nor was it the loss of at least thirty pounds. It was not even the face that showed still-pinkish scars, fresh bruises and a barely closed cut above one eye. It was the eyes themselves and the general demeanor of the once-arrogant and abusive man—they contained no spark of life or any vitality, Moffa resembled nothing so much as an ambulatory corpse.
Milo sighed and went back to his work. He hated to think of any man being so thoroughly broken, but then reflected that if any man deserved it for his many misdeeds, it was certainly Moffa; that much had come to light during Captain Potter’s very thorough investigations.
He had been back at work for a good quarter hour when the entire building reverberated to a booming pistol shot, followed rapidly by four more, then, after a pause, a man’s scream ended by a fifth shot.
Suddenly, a wild-eyed major in a class-A uniform caked with dirty snow, his face and hands bleeding from a profusion of cuts and gashes, stumbled through the entry of the building.
“The prisoner!” he gasped to no one and everyone. “That Guinea bastard! He heard his sentence, then got a gun away from one of the guards and shot the other one. Then he started after us! I jumped through the window.”
Just then, a soldier came pounding down the long central corridor and was narrowly missed by the pistol ball that tore its splintery way through the closed door of the room in which the board had sat for Moffa’s sentencing.
“Goddam!” swore Milo, then turned to one of the clerks. “Turner, go outside to the other end of the building and tell those fuckers not to try to use the corridor until we can get this fuckin’ mess sorted out.” To another, he saidj “Dubois, you and my driver get the major here up to the regimental surgeon on the double. Those cuts look bad, and he’s bleeding like a stuck pig.”
Before the adjutant, Captain John Saxon, and a bevy of men and officers had tramped through the snow around the safe side of the long building, Milo and a few of his men had conducted a cautious reconnaissance of the distinctly unsafe side to find two officers safe, though gashed and shivering in the bitter cold, each crouched low under one of the two smashed-out windows. A third officer lay in the snow on his face, his head at such an impossible angle to the body that he could not possibly have been alive.-A fourth officer hung backward out of one of the windows; he had a big blue-black mark on his forehead, and that head no longer possessed a back to it.
Working along the sides of the building, as much as possible out of the murderous prisoner’s sight and line of fire, Milo got up to first one, then the other of the two living officers and dragged them back to where other men could take charge of them. He saw no point in risking anyone’s life to retrieve the two dead men, officers or no.
Back in the environs of his office, he rendered John Saxon a report through still-chattering teeth. The old soldier nodded brusquely, then gripped his shoulder. “You done good, Milo, but then, you a Reg’lar.”
“Sargint majer!” he then roared. “Take you some bodies and git ovuh to the arms room and tell Jacoby I said to issue you three Thompsons, a hunnert rounds of ball for each one, a half a dozen smoke grenades and a coupla Mark Two pineapples. Git!”
Milo grasped Saxon’s arm, hard. “John, you can’t just pitch hand grenades into that room. Moffa may not have killed all of them—some could be lying wounded in there still.”
“You got a better ideer, Milo?” demanded the grizzled officer. “Besides just leavin’ the fucker in there till he grows him a long gray beard?”
Milo cudgeled his brain frantically. “John … how about tear gas? That ought to get him out.”
“Where we gonna get any quick, Milo, huh? It ain’t none in the arms room, I can tell you that.”
“Then how about letting me try to talk him out, John?” Milo was shocked to hear himself say the words.
“Moray, you off your fuckin’ gourd, man. That fuckin’ Moffa he’s sure to be plumb mad-dog crazy to’ve done all he’s done. You think he won’t kill you too, you just as loony as he is,” Saxon snapped.
Moffa used his jaw teeth—he no longer had any front ones adequate to the job—to draw the cork of the bottle of bourbon, all the while keeping his eyes and the muzzle of the automatic pistol locked unwaveringly upon Milo. After a long, gulping swallow of the alcohol, he lowered the bottle and spoke sadly.
“You shouldn’ of come in here, top. You know I’m gonna have to kill you, too, now. You know that, don’ you? And you dint never do nuthin’ to me, but I gotta kill you enyhow.”
He took another pull at the bottle then, impatiently waggling the pistol when Milo started to speak.
“See, top, them fuckers over there”—he jerked his head at the overturned table and the bodies that lay behind it—“they was gonna send me to break rocks in Leavenworth for the nex’ thirty years. Top, ain’ no fucker gonna send me to Leavenworth, and not back to that fuckin’ stockade, neither, you hear me. The fuckin’ bastids in that stockade, they done beat me and starved me and made me crawl for the lastes’ time. Naw, I’m gon’ make some fucker kill me, top, that’s what I’m gon’ do. I druther be dead and burnin’ in hell than in Leavenworth or back in that fuckin’ shithole stockade, top. So, like I done said a’ready, I’m sorry.”
There was a half-heard roar, a dimly seen flash of fire-streak from the muzzle of the heavy pistol, and, with unbearable pain, some irresistible force flung Milo backward to bounce off a wall and land, face down, in a heap beside the gory body of one of the dead military policemen.
He knew that he was dead. He knew that it would only be a matter of a very short amount of time before all sensation, all pain ceased. But he wished that before his mind stopped functioning forever, he could remember just who and what he had been before his awakening in Chicago, years ago.
But the pain did not stop. It got worse, if anything. He heard shouts from outside the room, heard them clearly. He even heard the wet gurglings as Moffa worked at the bottle of whiskey. Those wet gurglings it was that awakened in him a sudden, raging thirst for-whiskey, water, anything wet; his entire body was insistently clamoring for fluids.
Slowly, more than a little surprised that his arms and legs still would function, Milo gained first to hands and knees, then to his feet, swaying like a tree in a gale, groaning and biting his lips and tongue against the fireball of superheated pain lodged in his chest and back.
He did not see Moffa, who just stared at the blood-soaked apparition, wide-eyed, the pistol dangling from one hand and the near-emptied whiskey bottle from the other.