After his captain slept Ekland crawled into the front seat of the lead jeep, and found the walkie-talkie. The map told him there was no chance of his voice reaching anyone. His logic told him too. But one could never be certain with radio waves. There were skip waves. There was the Heaviside bounce. And anyway it was comforting to believe someone could hear him. “This is Lightning Four,” he said. “This is Lightning Four calling Lightning. Come in Lightning.”
He repeated this several times, but there was never any answer, and at last he gave up, and got out of the jeep, and found a place for himself against the cliff, and slept.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS DURING this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid.
And it was on the following morning that Mackenzie jogged himself, and his men, into movement with the promise of the bottle of Scotch. It was the morning they ate combat rations that Ekland found in the pockets of the dead. It was the morning they were shadowed by the Mongol horsemen watching them from the cone-shaped hills across the gorge, and the morning they were ambushed by mortars when they reached a place of danger where the road left the protection of the cliff, and ran out into the rock-strewn flatland to touch a frozen stream.
And now Ackerman, the quiet corporal from Pennsylvania, lay dead out on the flatland, and under Ackerman was Dog Company’s last bazooka. Mackenzie had told Nick Tinker, the youngest of them all, to go out and bring back the bazooka, for without the bazooka he didn’t think they had a chance for it.
As Tinker slid out into the open from the shelter of the rocks, and the defilade of the hill, Mackenzie disposed his forces. He backed out of his own point of vantage, and in it placed Ekland with the BAR. “You cover Tinker,” Mackenzie ordered, “but don’t open fire unless you get a definite target. Don’t want to expose our position unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
He brought up Beany Smith, with an M-1, to support Ekland. Four men, under Heinzerling, he stationed further along the road, so that if a fire fight developed Dog Company would not be taken from the rear. For the others he found a secure place, around a corner of the hill, where they would be safe from fragments if the enemy brought the position under mortar fire. Then he himself squirmed up beside Ekland and Smith to observe Tinker’s progress.
Tinker was trying to remember how a jackrabbit behaved in the sand hills. This place reminded him of a wild canyon where one winter his brothers had spread a trap line, and he had stalked jacks with his twenty-two. This place looked much the same, and was no colder.
A jack ran a little, and then stopped dead, and when he stopped he blended into the background, and you could not see him. So Tinker paid careful attention to his surroundings, and avoided placing himself between the drifts of snow and the hills opposite, where the enemy watched. And he ran a little and then froze, like a jack.
Tinker wished his brothers could see him now. Matt, Pike, and Bill had been much older than he, and bigger, and stronger, and wiser in the ways of the ranch and the wilderness, and they had held him in contempt. But they could not have contempt for him now, darting out under the guns of the Chinese with more wit, and speed, and guts than they had ever shown. Specially picked by his captain—picked above all the older men.
Nick was the runt of the family, a child of the depression. And whenever, at table, Old Matt spoke of the depression—from which the Tinkers had never fully recovered and upon which he blamed most of his troubles—he looked at Nick. Nick was given to understand that in the cruel days of the depression his birth had been one in a series of undeserved financial catastrophes his father had endured. And he was given to understand he was unwanted, and entirely the fault of a careless mother.
The mother shielded him from insult and brutality as best she could, but there was little she could do, because she herself was trapped and enslaved. Sometimes, when the others were gone, she surrounded him with her arms and wept, and said, “My poor little boy. My poor little Nick.”
On his seventeenth birthday Nick saw a Marine Corps recruiting advertisement in a magazine, and was fascinated by it. The sergeant in the advertisement wore a splendid blue uniform, his chest was bright with ribbons, and the girl on his arm was incredibly pretty. His three brothers, when they had money, drove to Hyannis for the weekly Saturday night dances. They came back smelling of beer and boasting of girls. But Nick in all his life had never had a girl, or a drink, although of course he never admitted this to Dog Company. So he took a bus to Omaha, with his father’s written blessing, and joined the Marines.
There were no girls, and no blue uniforms either, in his seven months as a Marine. There was hard training at Lejeune, and then a long ocean voyage, and at Inchon he found himself a replacement in the First Division. He was given the patch of Guadalcanal, with the design of the Southern Cross, to wear on his sleeve. He was proud of it.
Now Tinker was close to Ackerman’s body. He had not yet been shot at. He hoped the captain was watching, to see how correctly he behaved.
The captain watched through his glasses. The kid was doing a wonderful job, and had not drawn fire. Sometimes the kid snaked on his belly, and sometimes he ran, and sometimes he vanished into the terrain. He wondered how the kid had learned it. Then Tinker disappeared entirely, and the captain shifted his glasses to Ackerman, because he couldn’t tell how close Tinker might be to the bazook.
Something moved within Mackenzie’s focus. It did not move like a man. It seemed only that a clod of earth shifted, but Mackenzie knew it was Tinker. Then, definitely, he saw Tinker bend over Ackerman, or what was left of Ackerman.
The two figures were fused, and immobile, for long seconds. Mackenzie found he was talking to himself. He was whispering, “Get the hell out of there, you dope. Get out, you stupid kid!”
At last, he saw the two figures in his glasses separate, and in that moment Ekland shouted, “Here they come!” Ekland’s long-barreled automatic rifle began to speak, in short bursts.
Mackenzie watched three, then two, then three more Mongol cavalrymen debouch from a rent in the hills across the gorge. He said, quietly, “Aim low, sergeant. Get the horses.”
He saw Tinker running, but at this distance it seemed Tinker barely moved, but Tinker had the bazook, all right. And he saw the short-coupled, shaggy ponies eating up the distance like quarter horses, and he knew the boy could not make it. He shouted for his men, back of him, safe behind the shoulder of the hill. He shouted for them to come up. It would be all over, one way or another, in a minute, and he did not believe the Chinese mortars could zero in on him in that time, and he had to have more firepower if Tinker and the bazooka were to be saved.
At the strip of ice that was the stream the Mongol horsemen slowed, and it was there that Ekland’s BAR began to find targets. Two horses dropped. And Mackenzie was aware of the welcome bark of rifles behind him. His men were firing slowly and steadily, and he knew that it was aimed fire, and he hoped they had remembered to set their sights for range and windage. Often, in battle, men forgot. Often men forgot to fire at all. There was nothing he could do to instruct or guide them now. It was all a matter of their training.
Four cavalrymen got across the stream and bore down on Tinker, and the captain could see they’d be able to cut him off. Then another pony crashed, but its rider was uninjured, and bounced from the ground and continued his charge. Although the range was extreme, Mackenzie began shooting at this man with his carbine, and at the fifth shot the Mongol fell.
The captain saw that Tinker was on the ground now, crouched and firing. He had been run to earth, and three cavalrymen, dismounted, were closing in on him, and Mackenzie could faintly hear their cries, and the nasty snicker of their burp guns. Then two figures only were running, and the one in front must have been Tinker, because this figure was lugging a bazooka. Ekland’s BAR jumped and rattled, and the second figure sank to his knees, and then sprawled backwards, contorted, and did not move thereafter.