Читать книгу Silver Stars - Майкл Грант - Страница 11

Several miles away there is a different scream. This scream comes and goes, rises, falls, lapses into silence, then starts up again.

It’s a battlefield sound, but they are not on the battlefield, they are in a camp very much like Rio’s. Tents stretch away toward the west in long green lines across the dried mud and gravel. Austere, lifeless hills rise in the far distance, like red waves rushing toward a shore, but frozen in time. The only immediately noticeable difference between this encampment and the one where Rio and Jenou sunbathe is that here all the soldiers—except for the officers—are black. It is a colored artillery battalion, its 105 and 155 howitzers parked in a well-spaced, random arrangement so as to make air attack a bit more difficult for the Krauts.

There is a Sherman tank ahead. It weighs 66,800 pounds.

Corporal Frangie Marr, army medic, does not know this fact, but it doesn’t matter much because she’s spent some time in close proximity to tanks and she does not need to be convinced that they are large and terrifying and very, very substantial.

The Sherman, the 66,800-pound Sherman, is oddly perched with its nose pointed up at about a seventy-degree angle, which aims its 75-millimeter main gun almost straight up in the air, as if someone has decided to use the tank to shoot at airplanes.

“Gotta help him, Doc, get him some happy juice. Poor bastard, he’s in a bad way!” The staff sergeant takes Frangie’s arm—not bullying, just urgent—as he pulls her along, practically lifting her off her feet as they leap over a half-dug latrine ditch.

“What happened?” Frangie asks, panting a little. She is mentally inventorying the medical supplies she has in her bag and the extras stuffed into the ammo pouches in a belt hastily slung over her shoulder.

“Green kid sacked out in a bomb crater beside the road, and the Sherman pulled off to check something, a bad bearing, or maybe the driver just needed a piss.” The sergeant takes a beat and says, “Sorry, I meant maybe he had to answer nature’s call. Anyway, side of the crater collapses, tank slips, and that’s all she wrote.”

As they hustle along the scream grows louder and the tank larger. Several dozen men are gathered around, including the tankers, distinguished by their leather helmets and white faces. The tankers stand a little apart and smoke and ignore the angry muttering of the gathered troops, who naturally blame them for crashing their tank.

“Make a hole, make a hole,” the sergeant says. He releases Frangie’s arm and uses both hands to pry men apart. At last Frangie—far and away the smallest person of either race—sees the tank up close and has the distinct impression that it is in a very precarious, certainly temporary, position. All 66,800 pounds of it is held in place only by the bite of the treads into soft, crumbling earth. With a good firm push it could even topple onto its back like an upended turtle. But the more likely scenario is that it will slide down onto the still-unseen screaming man.

Frangie squats beneath the shade of the tank’s sky-tilted prow and tilts her head sideways, but she cannot see the man trapped beneath. She goes counterclockwise around the tank to the back, and the once-muffled moans of pain are now more clearly audible. She has to lower herself onto her belly and stick her head over the lip of the crater to see a man’s helmeted head a few feet away. He is facedown with his head and shoulders free but is pinned at the bottom of his shoulder blades by some—but surely not all—of that massive weight.

The sergeant squats beside her and says, “Hang on, Williams, Doc’s here.” Then more quietly he says to Frangie, “We were going to dig him out, but we’re worried the damned thing could slip back farther. We called for a tractor but that could take a while, nearest engineers are twenty miles away.”

“He could go into shock,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “Hey, Williams, are you bleeding?”

The answer is a scream of pain that rises, rises, and then stops. Followed by a twisted, barely comprehensible voice saying, “I don’t know. Give me a shot, Doc. I can’t . . . Oh, Jesus!”

“I’m going to help you,” Frangie says, and twists her head sideways to see the sergeant looking at her skeptically. She understands his skepticism. In fact, she is pretty sure she has just told a lie.

“Can’t you run chains or rope to the front of the tank and pull it forward?”

“That could make it settle deeper.”

“What am I supposed to do, crawl down there?” It’s a rhetorical question that the sergeant answers with a blank look.

Why am I doing this? I could be killed.

Several curses come to Frangie’s mind, but as the words form she sees her mother’s face, and worse still, Pastor M’Dale’s disappointed look, and she swallows the curses. She tosses the belt with the medicine-stuffed cartridge pockets aside. Then she buttons her uniform to the top button hoping to avoid pushing ten pounds of Tunisian red dirt down her front. She pulls a morphine ampule from her breast pocket and clutches it in her left hand.

There are many ways Frangie does not want to die, and being crushed face-first in the dirt by a tank rates high on her list. But it’s too late now to say, “This is not my problem.”

Keep me strong, Lord.

“Grab my ankles,” Frangie says.

The sergeant summons two beefy soldiers and each takes a leg.

Using her elbows, Frangie moves like a half-crippled insect down the slope of the crater. The tank blocks the sun, and she can feel its mass poised above her, inch-thick steel plates, mud-clogged treads to left and right. The rear of the tank is a louvered grille that radiates the stifling heat of the engine, which, added to the hundred-degree air temperature makes the crater a place where you could bake a biscuit.

Frangie imagines her body being squeezed through those louvers, like so much meat in a sausage grinder, cooking even as she . . .

Fear. It’s been creeping in, little by little, tingling and twisting her stomach, but now it is beginning to seem that she is actually going to do this, and at that point the fear sets aside all subtlety and comes rushing up within her.

Lord, help me to help this man.

And don’t let that tank slip!

She should add a prudent and humble “Thy will be done,” but if God’s will is to crush her with a tank, she doesn’t want to make it any easier on Him.

Frangie has known fear in her life. Fear of destitution when her father was injured and lost his job. Fear of hostile whites, a fear made very real by the history of her home state and city. Just twenty-two years have passed since white rioters burned down all of the Greenwood district, once known as the black Wall Street, blocks from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And since enlisting she has felt fear (mixed with anger) as she endured various threats by white men who hated the very idea of a black soldier. Then, too, there were the dark mutterings of many of her fellow colored soldiers, who equally despised the idea of a woman in uniform.

But right now her fear is focused on the fact that her head and now shoulders too are right in line to be crushed if the tank slips.

I’m a roach beneath a shoe.

She is far enough down that Williams can look at her and she can see his face, though it is so transformed by pain and terror that she doubts his own mother would recognize him.

Don’t cry, don’t cry or it will scare him.

But I want to cry.

“I think we best get him out of here,” Frangie calls back to the men holding her ankles. She tries to keep panic out of her voice—Williams doesn’t need to be reminded that he’s in danger—but fear raises her tone an octave and she sounds like a child. A scared child.

“Just give me the shot, Doc! Oh God!”

“Just hang on, Williams, hang on.”

The problem is clear and insoluble. If she can dig out enough dirt beneath Williams she may be able to pull him free, or at least do so with some help. But with every spadeful she will increase the odds of the tank sliding.

“The tractor will get here sooner or later,” the sergeant says. “It’s the later that’s a problem,” Frangie says. Her voice is strained, she is very nearly talking upside down, and grit has already found its way to her mouth, sucked in with each breath. She tries to spit, but her mouth is as dry as the dust she inhales. “I can scoop the dirt that’s just right under him.”

There’s a moment’s pause as the sergeant confers in low tones with someone else, perhaps an officer.

“Give it a try, Doc,” comes the verdict.

“Pass me an entrenching tool,” she says. She is fully, blazingly aware of the possibilities. She’s always had a good imagination, and imagination is not a help at times like this. She can imagine the sounds. She can imagine the cries of warning from the men watching her. She can imagine them yanking her back, but too slowly, too slowly to stop that hot louvered grill from turning her head into thick, sizzling slices of salami.

An entrenching tool—a foldable shovel—is passed down to her, blade open and locked in place by its adjustable nut. She is head down, hardly the best position for digging.

Williams lets loose another scream.

“Listen, Williams, I can’t have you unconscious or flaking out. So you can either die in a morphine haze or maybe get out of here. Hang on. Just hang on.”

She draws the shovel to her, turns it awkwardly, and stabs it weakly into the dirt beneath Williams’s face. It is immediately apparent that this will never do because she has nowhere to put the dirt she digs out. It will pile up but then tumble right back down.

The sergeant, looking down from what feels like a very distant height, sees the problem and says, “Get me a poncho. Now!”

In less than a minute the sergeant has flapped the poncho down, like a housewife making a bed, to cover the ground to Frangie’s left.

Frangie digs out another spadeful, and Williams screams.

Another spadeful, and another, and Williams screams as the sergeant carefully draws the poncho and the dirt up the slope. He empties it and returns the poncho.

This process is repeated a dozen times. The blood is rushing to Frangie’s head and hands, making her eyes tear up and her nose run and causing her legs to go numb. The heat is appalling, and she can smell her own hair singeing. After twenty minutes Frangie has herself pulled back up just long enough to clear her head.

“Water,” she gasps. She upends a proffered canteen and some sensible fellow drains a second canteen over her head. Then she slithers back down and the slow, slow digging proceeds anew.

Finally she notices that Williams is screaming less. She asks for and is passed a flashlight. In the light she can peer ahead and see that a small gap has opened between Williams’s back and the bottom of the tank. His shirt is soaked red.

With infinite care despite the trembling in her hand she walks her fingers down his back until she finds the place where a shattered rib sticks out. She feels around the hole, there shouldn’t be an artery there, but she has to be sure. Has he lost so much blood he’ll go into shock?

“Pass me a rope. Put a loop in it!” Frangie calls, spitting dirt. “All right, Williams, I’m giving you the shot now.” She stabs down into his shoulder and squeezes the blessed pain relief into him. “Before you flake out, try to raise your hands together.”

This brings a fresh cry of agony, but Williams can sense the possibility of life now, and he does it. He has big hands, the calloused hands of a man who has picked cotton since the age of five. Frangie passes the rope over them and tugs to tighten the knot.

“Okay, Sarge, pull me up first,” she yells.

She is yanked up like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne.

The sergeant takes over. “Okay, boys, on the rope and pull, but slow and easy.”

They pull and Williams slides up the side of the ditch and is dragged several feet away to cries of relief from his comrades, followed quickly by relieved insults and hectoring. Frangie leaps to kneel beside him. She tries not to think about the fact that within five seconds the tank slips with a muffled but earth-rumbling sound to crush the narrow gap beneath its thirty tons of steel.

Thank you, Lord.

She uses scissors to cut Williams’s shirt from tail to collar and examines his broad back. The rib is a mess and the exit wound is gruesome, but that alone won’t kill him. But that says nothing about internal bleeding and possibly fatal damage to internal organs. And she counts at least three other broken ribs, though not extruding.

“Turn him over, gently,” she instructs the attentive soldiers around her.

This time William’s scream of agony is cut off abruptly as he faints. Morphine only does so much.

She pulls away the cut uniform and sees that a piece of root or perhaps a branch has been shoved into his belly. The wood is still in place, a bung in a barrel, limiting the bleeding.

“We have to get him to a field hospital right now,” Frangie snaps.

“Shouldn’t you pull out that stick?” the sergeant asks, much more deferential than he had been earlier.

“No. It may be acting as a plug, in which case we’d need whole blood and plasma and an operating theater.”

“Right,” the sergeant admits.

“And a surgeon,” Frangie adds. “Move him to a jeep while he’s out—he’s better off not feeling it.”

In less than five minutes Williams is on a stretcher tied to the hood of a jeep.

“That was good work, Doc,” the sergeant says. “You okay?”

“I’m going to throw up.”

The sergeant grins. “You go right ahead, honey, you deserve a good puke. Hell, you deserve a damn Silver Star, although they aren’t handing those out to colored soldiers much.”

Frangie vomits into a shallow depression, and a soldier solicitously shovels dirt over the mess as the sergeant hands her a hip flask.

“It’s some French brandy we liberated from an A-rab shop.”

Frangie has never before tasted any form of alcohol. Her church does not approve, not at all, and she has sat through many of Pastor M’Dale’s sermons on the subject of demon rum. But it would be rude not to accept, and she wants something more than water to wash away the vile taste of her own bile. Maybe it will stop the trembling in her hands. She takes a careful swig and gasps.

The brandy burns its way down her throat to form a small ball of liquid fire in her stomach. She’s a small person and inexperienced at drinking, so even this small draught is enough to spread a strange but comforting warmth out through her limbs.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You saved that boy’s life.”

She has no answer to that. She’s broken the prohibition against alcohol, but she’s not ready to abandon the humility she’s been taught. “It’s my job, I suppose,” Frangie says.

She walks away on legs shaking from the aftereffects of adrenaline and notices that the alcohol has done its job of pushing fear back just a little. Just a little, but enough for now.