Ben Carlton came up to Mantarakis. “Hey, Sarge, you want to come check the stew pot?”
“Sure.” Paul followed him down the line of trench. Carlton was the official company cook, and had a gift for scrounging from sources both official and unofficial. But Mantarakis really had been a cook back in Philadelphia, though getting stripes on his sleeve kept him from exercising his talents these days as often as he would have liked.
The pot smelled more savory than it often did. “Chickens and a couple rabbits,” Carlton said, “and potatoes and beets and onions and-all kinds of things. It’s downright-bountiful around here.” He laughed at his own joke.
“Yeah.” Mantarakis tasted the stew. “Not bad,” he said. “Just kind of bland, you know what I’m saying? You need some garlic and some basil, maybe, or oregano, to perk it up. Not too much,” he added hastily as Carlton started to pour most of a tin of garlic powder into the pot. “You want to make the stew taste better-you don’t want to just taste the spice, either.” Little by little, he was educating Carlton.
He suddenly stopped worrying about the stew, for U.S. artillery opened up on the adobe and the line it anchored. The noise was terrific, overpowering, enough to drive a man mad. To Mantarakis, it was also sweet as fine wine. Without artillery, his guess was that U.S. forces would still be bogged down somewhere south of Provo. It was the one thing government troops had in prodigal supply and the Mormon rebels largely lacked.
Captain Cecil Schneider hurried up into the frontmost trench. Schneider still wore single silver bars, not double; he’d won his promotion just after the ruins of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City passed into government hands. With him came Gordon McSweeney, who, like Mantarakis, had started the war a private and who, also like Mantarakis, now sported sergeant’s stripes.
“When the barrage lets up, we go after that farmhouse,” Schneider said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic-no one who’d been through the fall of Salt Lake City was apt to be enthusiastic about fighting ever again-but he sounded determined. Casualties had made him a company commander the same way they’d made Paul and McSweeney noncoms, but he’d turned out to be a pretty good one.
Because of that, the first thing out of Paul’s mouth was, “Yes, sir.” The second thing, though, was, “What the devil is he got up as, sir?” He pointed to Gordon McSweeney, who instead of a pack wore a big metal drum on his back and carried in his hands a hose attached to it.
McSweeney spoke for himself: “This is a device for sending the misbelievers into the fiery furnace.” As far as he was concerned, anyone less grimly Presbyterian than himself was heading straight for hell. That included papists and the Orthodox Paul Mantarakis, but it also most especially included Mormons, who, as far as he was concerned, were not Christians at all.
Captain Schneider amplified that, saying, “The gadget’s supposed to be able to deal with strongpoints that laugh at rifles and machine guns. If the artillery doesn’t punch the ticket on that farmhouse, we’ll send Gordon up to see what he can do. Only disadvantage is, it’s a short-range weapon.”
“I will bring it close enough to the farmhouse to be used,” McSweeney promised. Whatever the thing was, he sounded quiveringly eager to use it. Mantarakis had no idea what the Mormons felt about Gordon McSweeney, or even whether they knew he existed among the multitude of soldiers in the U.S. force. He knew McSweeney scared him to death.
Ever so warily, he peered up over the parapet. The rebels’ line was taking quite a pounding; through dust and smoke, it looked as if several large bites were gone from the farmhouse. Maybe it would be easy this time. It had been, once or twice. Some of the other times, though…
He would have liked to see the artillery go on for days, for weeks, killing all the Mormons without any need for the infantry to do their work. But, for one thing, there wasn’t enough ammunition for a bombardment like that, not on a secondary front like Utah. And, for another, he’d seen fighting the Confederates that even the longest, most savage barrages didn’t kill all or even most of the enemy soldiers at whom they were aimed.
After an hour or so, the guns fell silent. Captain Schneider blew a whistle. Up out of the trenches swarmed his company and several others. “Come on!” Mantarakis called to the men of his squad. “We don’t want to spend a lot of time in between the lines where they can shoot us down. We want to get right in there with ’em.”
The ground was chewed up from previous failed assaults on the Mormon position, and chewed worse by short rounds from the latest shelling. None, for once, seemed to have come down on the U.S. trenches, which Paul reckoned a small miracle. He dashed past stinking corpses and pieces of corpses, some still in green-gray often stained black with old blood. Flies rose in buzzing clouds.
Sure enough, some of the Mormon defenders remained alive and angry at the world, or at least at that portion of the United States Army attacking them. All along their line, flames showed riflemen shooting at the soldiers in green-gray heading their way. Somewhere not far from Paul, a man took a bullet and began shrieking for his mother.
And, sure enough, the machine gun in the adobe farmhouse started up, too. As he dove headlong into a shell crater, Mantarakis was convinced the racket a machine gun made was the most hateful noise in the world.
He looked toward the farmhouse. He and however many men still survived from his squad had come well past the high-water mark of earlier U.S. attacks. He was, he thought, within a hundred yards of that infernal device hammering out death up ahead. He was also damned if he knew how he was going to be able to get any nearer than that.
Somebody thudded down into the crater beside him: Gordon McSweeney. “I have to get closer,” the dour Scotsman said. “Twenty yards is best, though thirty may do: one for each piece of silver Judas took.”
Mantarakis sighed. He too knew they had to take out that machine gun. If McSweeney had a way-“I’ll go left. You go right a few seconds later. We’ll keep moving till you’re close enough.” Or until you get killed-or until I do. He wished he could take out his worry beads and work them.
They weren’t the only soldiers pushing up toward the adobe. The Mormons in there had even less idea than Paul did of what the strange contraption on McSweeney’s back was. Working his way to within twenty yards of the machine gun was slow and dangerous work, but he managed.
To Mantarakis’ horror, McSweeney stood up in the hole where he’d sheltered. He aimed the nozzle end of the hose he carried at the machine gun’s firing slit. Before the gun could cut him down, a spurt of flame burst from the nozzle, played over the front of the farmhouse, and went right through the narrow slit at the crew serving the machine gun.
Paul heard the lyingly cheerful sound of rounds cooking off inside the farmhouse. McSweeney dashed toward it. He stuck the nozzle right up against the slit and let loose another tongue of fire.
Along with the sound of cartridges prematurely ignited came another-the sound of screams. Gordon McSweeney’s face was transfigured with joy, as if he’d just taken Jerusalem from the pagans. And then something happened that Paul had never before seen in Utah: three or four men came stumbling out through a hole in the side of the adobe, their hands lifted high in surrender.
Joyfully smiling still, McSweeney turned the nozzle of the flamethrower hose on them. “No, Gordon!” Paul yelled. “Let ’em give up. Maybe we can break this rebellion yet.”
“I suppose it could be so,” McSweeney admitted reluctantly. The Mormons shambled off into captivity. Out from the adobe floated the strong stench of burnt meat. Mantarakis didn’t care. With its linchpin lost, this line wouldn’t hold. One fight fewer, he thought, till Utah was done.