“Goddam you, top,” he finally gasped, “lay down! You dead, you fucker you! I put that slug clean th’ough your fuckin’ heart!”
Milo heard the words, though he did not see the speaker, not clearly. Later he was to remember those words. Nor did he see the fragmentation grenade that sailed through one of the shattered windows and bounced twice before it came to lie spinning in the middle of the floor.
But Moffa saw it. Dropping both pistol and bottle, he dived upon it, clasping it, his instrument of salvation, close against his chest and sobbing his relief, even while he used one foot to kick the nearest of Milo’s wobbly legs from under him.
Immediately in the wake of the searing explosion, the door came crashing inward and a burst of submachine-gun fire stuttered through the opening until a voice shouted and brought silence in place of the deadly noises.
In his second fall to the blood-slimed floor of the room, Milo had thumped his head hard enough to briefly take away his consciousness.
Captain John Saxon moved warily into the room, the still-smoking muzzle of his Ml Thompson at waist level, his horny forefinger on the trigger. One of the two men behind him took but a single look at what was left of Moffa, dropped his own Thompson with a clattering thud and was noisily sick.
“Somebody come in here and get Danforth,” said Saxon, in a quiet, gentle tone. “The poor li’l fucker and all the rest of you’s gonna see more and worse nor thishere when you gets in the trenches, over there.
“Somebody go ring up the medics and get some litters over here, on the double, seven … no, eight of ‘em. Sargint majer, have your men git all the weapons together and get ’em back to the arms room, then git back here, and don’t you swaller none of Jacoby’s shit ’bout ’em havin’ to be cleaned afore you can turn ’em in; allus remember, you outranks him.”
As he put the safety on his submachine gun and passed it to the waiting hands, he caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and spun about to see Milo, his uniform soaked in blood, his hands smeared and streaked with it, twitching feebly, his lips moving soundlessly.
“Sweet fuckin’ Christ,” Saxon whispered, then turned and roared out the doorway, “Git that big medical kit down here, fast, and tell the medical comp’ny to get a fuckin’ surgeon over here on the fuckin’ double. I think Moray’s still alive!”
By the time the medical officer arrived in the charnel house of a room, John Saxon was squatting beside the semiconscious Milo, an opened but unused medical kit behind him.
“The onlies’ thing I can figger happened, lootinant, is that the fuckin’ slug tore th’ough his shirt, in the front and out of the back—the holes is both there for to show for it. In dodgin’, someways he musta tripped over the MFs body and cracked his fuckin’ haid when he fell, and he fell right in a big puddle of the fuckin’ MP’s blood and Moffa just figgered he was dead meat. It ain’t no wounds on him, ‘cepting that goose egg on his fuckin’ knob. Don’t nobody but fools and Paddies mostly have that kind of luck.”
All of the injuries and deaths save only Moffa’s were determined to be L.O.D.—line-of-duty—and Milo found himself being accorded vast respect by officers and men alike for all that his personal choice of the real hero of that terrible day was old, combat-wise Captain Saxon.
“Now, goddam you, Milo,” Stiles had railed at him in private, “you’re not immortal, you know—you can bleed and die, too. You’re not paid to take that kind of stupid chance. That’s what we have eight hundred odd GIs in this battalion for. You’re too valuable to the unit. You’re too valuable to me, too, you fucker. I happen to know you’ve promised Martine to try to keep me alive through the rest of this war. How the bloody hell are you going to do that if you go and get yourself shot and killed for nothing?”
Then he had grinned. “By the way, even if our last trip up north had accomplished nothing for the division, at least it accomplished something positive for the future. Martine is pregnant again.”
Jethro Stiles had attested his belief in Milo’s mortality. But Milo himself was beginning to wonder about that subject, to entertain certain doubts. Much as he tried to rationalize these insanities away, still did they come back to haunt him.
Everyone else might believe Saxon’s assumption that the shot fired at him by Moffa had missed, but Milo knew them all to be wrong. What he had to face was that he had been shot in—or close enough not to matter—the heart with one of the most powerful and deadly combat pistols in existence and at a point-blank range of less than a dozen feet. He clearly recalled the force of being hit and flung against the wall, and he could still remember the agony of the heavy ball tearing through his body, though that particular bit of recall was slowly fading, he noted thankfully.
Moffa had known that his shot had been true to its mark—drunk or sober, his emotional state notwithstanding, the well-trained old soldier could hardly have missed at a range of four yards or less. Milo could still hear ringing in his ears the dead man’s admonition to “lay down! You dead!” And dead he should have been, well dead. So why was he not dead?
Careful examination of the back and the front of his torso, when once he got back to his quarters, had shown Milo only a slight indentation of about a half-inch diameter in the skin above his heart, this surrounded by discoloration that resembled a fast-fading bruise. On his back, a bit below the shoulder blade, was a larger, deeper dent—about an inch and a half—and a wider discoloration. However, when he showered the next morning, he had been hardly able to locate a trace of either of them, front or back. That he told no one of these oddities was partly because he hardly believed them himself and partly because his job just kept him far too busy for another visit to the surgeon.
IX
Like some vast herd of huge beasts grazing the restless waves of the North Atlantic Ocean, the convoy of troop transports, supply ships and naval vessels sailed a course that was deliberately erratic, lest that course be guessed out by the wolflike packs of German submarines, the bane of wartime shipping. On front and rear and along the flanks of this convoy of men, materiel and armaments, speedy, hardworking destroyers flitted back and forth, with every crewman’s eye, every technological device aboard on the alert for the slightest trace of one of the feared submersible raiders of the seas. Should such a trace be suspected, it was the mission of these flankers to interpose their own lightly armored cockleshells between the attackers and the lumbering quarry, while others of their kind steamed to the supposed location of the foe and let off salvos of depth charges—steel drums filled with powerful explosive charges designed to create sufficient concussion to rupture the hulls of the submarines, thus drowning the crews or forcing the craft to rise to the surface, where shells from deck guns could sink them easily. Because of the dangers presented by the U-boats, because of the fact that despite all precautions, submarine-launched torpedos still found their marks, sinking or heavily damaging ships, killing or injuring men and sending to the bottom billions of tons of valuable equipment and supplies, each cargo ship was packed to utter capacity, and so too were the troop carriers, to such a point that the only men aboard who made the passage in any degree of comfort were the sailors and the higher-ranking officers. The troops were packed like so many canned sardines in a ‘tween-decks hot and thick with the reek of humanity, with no room for organized calisthenics and few possibilities for the make-work details traditionally used to keep units and individual soldiers out of trouble, their principal activities consisting mainly of endless gambling and even more endless bull sessions, interspersed with the occasional fight—a welcomed relief from boredom—and noncoms were hard pressed to prevent their troops from becoming just so many slothful, dirty, vicious beasts. They were able to maintain order, discipline and at least a degree of cleanliness only by dint of near-brutality.