The Reincarnationist Papers

by Eric Maikranz

  "Two degrees down," shouted the captain, binoculars still held up to his eyes. The crew reloaded. The breech operator made four quick turns on the pitch crank and the barrel edged closer to the ground. "Ready!"

  "Fire!"

  The shell impacted after six long eerie seconds.

  "Everyone draw a bead on that burst and set for 21 degrees. High explosive rounds except for number two." Hoxa said climbing down off the #3 gun.

  "Ready," cried each of the crews in turn.

  "Fire."

  The five guns erupted as one. The muzzle flashes pushed at the darkness and lit up the entire camp as if it were day for a split second. The earth shuddered under the guns' collective recoil. The crews reloaded the guns as the first salvo of shells exploded in quick white flashes. Hoxa stood between the 2nd and 3rd guns and held his riding crop high in the air, signaling to hold. A dull flash followed by a low rumble came from the west side of the valley behind them. First company's shells sounded like whistling tea kettles as they crossed overhead. Another volley came from the east flank a second later.

  "They're in the game with us boys. Fire!" he shouted and swept the crop down like a race starter.

  The rain intensified with each barrage as though the shells were ripping holes in the bottom of the sky.

  "Fire! Fire! Fire!" shouted the captain at the end of each loading cycle.

  Shells rained down mercilessly from three sides on the French camp. The sky lit up time and time again as if the whole south end of the valley were exploding.

  The munitions handlers, loaders and breech operators danced a frenzied ballet as they fed the ever hungry guns. Each time a loader shoved a round into the gun the operator slammed the breech closed, missing the man's hand by a fraction of an inch.

  The cold driving rain screamed and sizzled on the hot gun barrels like sausages on a griddle. It was the kind of rain that drives creatures underground and demands submission. Multiple flashes of lightning exploded fiercely over their heads, belittling the petty rumblings of men.

  Oblivious to the elements, Hoxa continued to bark orders. "Fire! Reload! One degree up! Fire! Reload! Fire!"

  Vasili grabbed the smoking spent shell casings as fast as they were ejected onto the churned up mud behind the gun. His wet cotton gloves provided just enough protection to hold the casings for the second it took to throw them onto the growing pile down by the river. The five guns fired a salvo every ten seconds, just far enough apart for Vasili and the other handlers to pass the heavy rounds to the loaders and start the whole process again.

  "Fire! Reload! Fire!" The shelling, the lightning and the rain intensified as the night wore on. Vasili threw the hot casings over his shoulder one after another ignoring the weather as best he could until, between salvos, he heard the splash of a shell casing as it hit the water.

  'The water,' he thought, handing another shell to the loader. He grabbed another casing and threw it back behind him, watching this time. The shell splashed just before a bolt of lightning crashed to the left of #1 gun, lighting up the area behind the camp. The shallow swift moving Cherna had swollen into a raging torrent. The brown silty water moved like a giant undulating snake between the tops of the river banks. Vasili stood dumbfounded through two more close flashes and watched as the river seemed to rise before his very eyes.

  "Vasili! Vasili!" shouted the loader. "Shell! Shell!"

  He snapped to and rejoined the rhythm of the crew.

  "The river is flooding. I saw it when the lightning flashed!" Vasili shouted quickly to the loader when he handed him a round. The guns roared as one.

  "Those last three weren't lightning!" the loader screamed. "They're shooting back at us!"

  Vasili was reaching down to grab a spent shell casing when another flash and explosion hit thirty meters from #1, knocking him off balance.

  "Reload, reload, reload!" screamed Hoxa, flailing his riding crop in the charged air. "Fire at will!"

  The number one gun fell silent but the rest fired in unsynchronized disorder as soon as each breech locked closed. Night turned into day as flashes constantly broke around them. The explosions from the incoming shells, the lightning and the outgoing shells assaulted their senses as an indistinguishable chaotic chorus of destruction. It sounded like the earth was being dismantled.

  Vasili worked faster, keeping one eye on the dwindling rows of ammunition and one eye on the river that swallowed the empty casings as fast as he could heave them.

  Captain Hoxa made a quick circuit of the squads before climbing on top of the quiet #1 gun, binoculars in hand. The trigger man for the silent gun lay face down in the mud, the cord still wrapped around his lifeless hand.

  Vasili's ears, partially deafened and somewhat adjusted to the constant explosions, began to pick up a faint yet distinct sound, a sound that shouldn't have been there amidst the tumult. Pinging. He concentrated on the sound in an effort to block out the fear that clung to him like a shadow. 'Ping P-Ping Pingping Ping.' The ethereal sound got clearer and the chaos fuzzier, the harder he focused. Adrenalin coursed through his veins. He grabbed each shell tighter and threw each casing farther as the sound of the surreal scene around him slowly went silent. Flashes came with concussions but no sound. Vasili kept an eye out for the source of the pinging while he worked and the guns took on a comical feel as they silently bucked and blew fire. 'Ping ping P-ping.' Each time a trigger man jerked on his cord, another ping. 'Ping Ping Ping.' It was the spring activated, thumb sized firing pins striking the backs of the shells inside the guns. It didn't seem possible that he could hear them, but the striking pins rang out clearly, like a crew of blacksmiths working on an anvil at the edge of town.

  "They're coming for us!" Hoxa screamed. His voice jolted Vasili back to the pandemonium around him. "They're coming!" Hoxa jumped off the wet gun awkwardly and landed spread eagle in the mud next to the fallen trigger man. He got up, undaunted and slapped each remaining trigger man with his crop as he ran by. All four held fire, rubbed at stinging welts under their uniforms and watched the captain for orders.

  "Raise your pitch to forty degrees, load phosphorous and fire on my command."

  "What is it?!"

  Captain Hoxa screamed out one long word over the incoming explosions. "Infantry!!!"

  The breech operators cranked frantically on the elevator controls. The heavy steaming gun barrels edged slowly skyward and trained in on the approaching troops. "Ready," each operator shouted in turn.

  "Be ready to continue tracking them as we shoot!" Hoxa shouted. He raised his riding crop high. "Fire!"

  The phosphorous rounds weighed less than the shorter high explosive shells, allowing the handlers and loaders to shave a full second off their reloading cycle. Hoxa had given the other two companies orders to redirect fire any time they saw white phosphorous explosions, and as planned, larger white and yellow flashes sprang up around the first impacts.

  "Up two degrees! Reload, Fire! Up one! Fire! Up one!" It dragged on for what seemed hours as the tempest continued to rage in the valley. All the while Hoxa stood on a small mound between #2 and #3, looking out though his binoculars, raising and lowering his riding crop like a band leader each time a salvo screamed away.

  The pitch of the barrels rose steadily, heralding the approach of the French infantrymen. The Cherna river had risen even higher, eliminating any idea of retreat. The gun angle rose from fifty degrees through sixty to seventy five degrees. Each shell they fired exploded closer to their position. The white phosphorous trails jumped out from the center like a blooming flower. Three and four at a time, the ghostly patterns leapt to life in front of them like giant white spiders, devouring everything caught underneath them.

  Captain Hoxa continued to adjust fire while looking through the binoculars. "Up two degrees! Up one! Up one!" The operators raised the pitch until the guns were fully erect. Topped out, the shells arced a mile upward but landed a mere three-hundred yards away. Hoxa turned and looked up against the rain at the raised m
uzzles, disgusted that they would go no higher. He looked up to heaven as though he wished he could shoot the shells straight up.

  "Ready!" shouted the four breech men at once. The hair stood up on the back of Vasili's neck. His eyes locked with Hoxa's just as a flash hit the number three barrel behind the captain’s head, illuminating everything. Hoxa's face contorted as he mouthed the command to fire, his speech stolen. The deafening crash of thunder that immediately followed the lightning seemed to jump out of his open mouth. Vasili stood transfixed by the scene, studying every detail of Hoxa's menacing face; the caked mud on his unwavering brow, the lean jaw of determination, the steady eye of wrath.

  The blast knocked the breech operator and trigger man back several feet. The loader and ordnance handler were miraculously unaffected. They stood stunned and confused about what hit them.

  "Reload and fire at will!" Hoxa shouted before turning to monitor the exploding shells. "Hurry boys! Hurry!" he shouted while looking through the field glasses. "It's going to be close!"

  The explosions held three hundred yards out for several minutes as the neighboring companies brought all guns to bear on those pitiful acres. The captain scanned the hellish horizon, slowly panning back and forth with the binoculars. Vasili looked up and noticed the captain's attention had fixed on something. Hoxa dropped the glasses, whipped out his pistol and took off running toward the curtain of fire, screaming and aiming with his pistol as he went. Vasili was the only one who noticed Hoxa leave. The other soldiers kept loading and unloading at the same feverish pace.

  The storm eased just as dawn broke over the ridge. The rate of fire slowed due to sheer exhaustion, then stopped altogether. The soldiers that still had their ear plugs in removed them. It was quiet and the scent of gunpowder lingered in the morning air. Survivors silently milled around the camp surveying the damage and the dead. Several minutes passed before anyone spoke. "Where's the captain?" asked a soldier. He was nowhere in sight.

  "I saw him run that way," Vasili said, pointing to the blasted heath in front of them. "About an hour ago."

  "We should look for him," the slumping corporal said. He pointed to Vasili first. "You, you, you and you, come with me."

  The five of them fanned out and waded through the wet knee high grass and bushes. Vasili retraced Hoxa's path as best he could. One hundred and fifty yards out the landscape began to change. The grass, where there was grass, was flattened and scorched. Large open craters littered the ground. The mud became too deep to walk through at one hundred seventy five yards. The shells had punctured the earth, pounding it into a soupy brown bog all the way to the smoldering French camp. A light grey haze hovered over the churned up ground. Upon closer examination they spotted and pointed out different body parts that lay in twisted unnatural positions, coated and camouflaged in mud. The only thing moving, the only sign of life on the entire ruined plain was a wet shivering dog hopelessly mired in the muck, licking at the blood and the mud on what remained of a severed back leg.

  Vasili turned away and slogged back through the mud towards the camp, leaving the other four to search for their leader. He stopped at the base of the small rise beneath the tired guns and picked up Hoxa's discarded binoculars. Wiping the mud off the lenses, he draped them around his neck and trudged up in into the remains of the encampment.

  14

  ...Wiping the mud off the lenses, he draped them around his neck and trudged back up into the remains of the encampment."

  I could tell my story had gotten their attention. No one wanted to speak and break the silence that punctuated the tale. I turned my head and saw Poppy looking at me with the same transfixed look on her face as the members of the panel. I continued.

  "We fell back on foot that morning. The company's draft horses that had been tied off by the river were gone. Unable to pull anything, we left the equipment and joined the first company. Luckily, news of the armistice came later that same day."

  "What became of Hoxa?" Ramsay asked.

  "The other four came back covered in mud. They had searched the blasted plain for over an hour. There was no trace of him. Hoxa became a legend after that, even into the Second World War. They used to say that whenever a Bulgarian unit was pinned down that Captain Hoxa's ghost would--"

  "I'm familiar with the ghost stories surrounding Captain Hoxa." Ramsay said, interrupting me.

  "What did you do right after you were deactivated?" asked the Egyptian, rubbing at his eyes.

  "Well, I was never the same after that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You have to understand my father was a church elder of an orthodox sect. I was brought up in a utopian world of Christian values. That world didn't exist for me any longer. I had seen what men created in God's own image could do to one another. It became obvious within a few weeks of my return that my father and I were going to be at odds. It seemed strange, even comical to me that I had ever been so naive as to have lived comfortably, even happily in that lost world my father had brought me into. After several heated arguments we fell into the habit of not speaking about anything that wasn't directly related to the operation of the farm. That's the point at which I tried to buy my own land, but he died before I could find anything suitable."

  "There was something said earlier about you living in exile in Turkey. Tell me about the events that lead up to you leaving Bulgaria," the Egyptian ordered.

  "I stayed on the land with my wife through the Second World War until the Communists took over and nationalized everything. We were arrested after we refused to surrender our farm. I served a year and a half in prison. She died shortly after she started a similar sentence. I escaped to Turkey the same year I was released and lived in Istanbul until my death."

  "What was the name of the prison where you served?"

  "It didn't have a name. It had a number, State prison number four."

  "When were you interned exactly?"

  "December 1946 until June 1948."

  "Where was State prison number four located?"

  "On the outskirts of Sofia."

  "How did you escape to Turkey?"

  "I walked."

  "What did you do to earn money in Istanbul?"

  "I found work in the open air vegetable markets carrying crates."

  "What did Vanya die of?"

  "I don't know, I was in prison."

  Silence.

  "She was interned the same time as you?"

  "It was about the same time, within days probably. I can't be sure."

  The old man in the center leaned forward deliberately. The other members of the panel deferred their attention to him. "It's late," he said. "Let's stop here and take tomorrow night off. We'll pick it up the night after." The members of the gallery stood up and spoke softly among themselves as soon as the old man leaned back.

  Poppy walked ahead of me up the stairs. The smoke from the torches was slightly thicker at the top. "Why did they want to take tomorrow night off?" I asked.

  "They are probably using the break to verify the information you've given. It's to be expected."

  "How can they check all that information in one day?"

  "They can't. They will just get started on it tomorrow. The Cognomina keeps dozens of people at the ready to help with the legwork."

  "Is that how you had my medical records checked?"

  "Exactly."

  "What happens if someone goes to the police or calls a crime stoppers tip line once he learns about my arson activities?"

  "Evan," she said in a sigh. "Look around you. Do we look like individuals that would ever want the authorities involved in anything?"

  "I'm not doubting you, I'm just careful that's all."

  "Don't worry, your past is safe with us." She opened the door at the top of the stairs. I walked around her quickly as she closed it behind us.

  "I was wondering," I said cautiously, "if we could get together later, since we both have the night off. I miss you." I blurted out the last words.

&nbs
p; Her eyes showed a genuine warmth I hadn't seen before. "Yes let's get together later. Dinner is usually out on the town on off nights so I'll have to catch up with you after that. Why don't you come up to my room. I should be in by midnight. My room is number seventeen," she said stepping closer to me. "You were wonderful down there tonight." She sprung up on her toes and kissed me. "Get some rest Evan, you look tired. I'll see you later."

  "Good afternoon," Diltz said as I walked down the hall in search of breakfast.

  I smiled at him. "I'd like to get a ride to Lake Zurich, if there's a driver available."

  "There is, are you planning to take a day cruise?" he asked. I nodded. "You'd better hurry, the last day ship leaves at 3:00 p.m. It's a quarter till two now. You can just make it if you hurry. I'll prepare a quick breakfast to take with you."

  "Perfect. Tell the driver I'll be ready in five minutes."

  The same driver was waiting in the car at 11:00 p.m. by the ramp when the ship pulled up next to the dock. I arrived back at the hotel by 11:45.

  "How was it?" Diltz asked at the door.

  "Very scenic. Is Poppy here?"

  He hesitated. His eyes darted quickly and nervously as he searched to find an answer. "Yes," he said finally.

  "Great. I'm supposed to go up and see her," I said stepping to the side to move around him. He shadowed my movement, purposely blocking me with his arm. We were inches apart. I could sense his discomfort at being this close.

  "I don't think she should be disturbed right now," he said quickly, now unable to look at me.

  I looked at him sternly until his eyes caught mine. "Did she tell you to tell me that?"

  He hesitated again. "Well ah... I wouldn't... No, she didn't… it's just that... Well I think it would be a good idea if you waited until tomorrow to call on her sir."

  "I've been invited," I said losing my patience. I nudged my way around him.