Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  Walsh added, “As long as nobody expects me to do some damn fool thing like capture an enemy gun, I should do all right.

  Caleb finished with the mule, slapping it on the hindquarters in friendly farewell before sending Will to bring him another animal. “Fetch the brown gelding that had the wire cut in his shoulder,” he said. “He’s about ready to go back to work.”

  “He’d better be.” Walsh started to roll a cigarette, but under Caleb’s glare, stopped before he struck a match, an unallowable act in a horse tent with dry hay all around. “I hear the brass are planning on another offensive soon. We’ll need every horse able to wear a harness and put one foot in front of the other.”

  Caleb’s jaw knotted in displeasure. “Waste of good horseflesh. I spend my time fixin’ them up, those I can fix, then some muck-a-muck orders another slaughter and they get shot to pieces again.”

  “Puts them right up in the same class with the men, don’t it? Anyway, what the hell? What else are they good for?” Walsh asked with callous disregard of horseflesh.

  Anger radiated through Caleb in waves I not only sensed, but somehow felt pushing against my mind. Anger at Walsh. Distaste for the corporal’s attitude and for the circumstances of war. And maybe, whether he was aware of it or not, I knew he was downright furious with me, his wrath beating through his mind, and in a secondary fashion in this connected state, also through mine.

  As if hit by a chill, Caleb grabbed his shirt off a peg driven into the tent’s framing and dragged it on over his head while he waited for Mueller to bring the next horse. His action revealed a Colt—the Colt— hanging from the same peg. My dream-enhanced vision saw power swirling around, over, and through the pistol’s metal, a marvel no one else appeared to see.

  Walsh may not have been aware of the power, but he was still drawn to the.45. He walked over and lifted it from the holster.

  “An officer’s gun,” he said, sighting down the barrel. “Wisht I had one. ’Course it ain’t regulation for a sergeant, let alone a corporal. “Where’d you get it?

  Caleb hesitated briefly before answering, as though debating the wisdom of giving anything away to Walsh.

  “Major Page,” he finally said. “For when I have to put an animal down. Works better than a rifle, especially in close quarters. Or if I’m in a hurry, since I keep it with me.” His tone indicated “hurry” was an all too common circumstance.

  Walsh took an imaginary shot at the horse Mueller was leading into the tent. “Sweet.” As he dropped the pistol back into the holster, the power eased off, letting itself be absorbed into the metal once more.

  A tenseness seemed to recede in Caleb.

  “Tell me what’s going on outside this tent, Walsh. I’d appreciate the forewarning. When’s this big offensive taking place? And where? I suppose it means we’ll have to knock down the tent and move again. I don’t know how you do it, but you always seem to know ahead of time what’s going to happen.”

  Walsh’s stained teeth showed in a grin. “You bet. Little birdies whistle me a merry tune. If I don’t watch out, next thing I’ll be an officer taking tea with the bigwigs, Haig and Pershing and Fout.”

  Caleb’s expression showed his skepticism. “I wasn’t implying they’d invite you in. I was thinking more along the lines of you skulking outside their door or listening beneath their window.”

  Walsh guffawed, apparently much amused by Caleb’s view. “Not dainty enough for the brass, eh? Well, but I know what I know, Ned, and was I you, I’d start looking toward St. Mihiel in the real near future. And you can take that to the bank.”

  My dreamland faltered, the boundaries weakening as though harried by a quickening wind. No, wait! I tried desperately to recapture the dream; hold on until I discovered everything I needed to lift Caleb from this place, but Walsh faded into nothing and Caleb’s dimension drew tighter around him.

  Who are you? I pushed the demand to the limit of my psychic reach, which wasn’t saying much. I spoke directly to him. Your name! Tell me your name.

  His head snapped back and forth in a questioning search. He didn’t answer, though his green eyes lit with awareness. From a far, far distance I heard Will Mueller and the whisper of a horse limping on the packed earthen floor of the tent-barn.

  “Here’s the brown, Sergeant Smith,” Will was saying, the sound no more than an echo of my wishful thinking. “He don’t look half fit to m . . .”

  “Wait!” I cried, but no matter what, I could not stay them. They fled my mind.

  I AWAKENED, jolted by the sound of my own voice. The threshing of my feet and arms had thrown aside the sweat-dampened sheets. Frustration tensed every muscle in my body. My breathing rasped in and out of my lungs. Staring up toward the ceiling, a vague dark shadow over my bed, I sought to capture the details of the dream.

  The instruction given in Mother’s grimoire had been dead on. And I was immediately aware that I’d had a true dream and not a visitation of mere imagination or of magic. Magic took me in and made me a character within a history. One who had actually lived, loved, sometimes hated and always, always partaken of high drama.

  Not this time. I had not truly been inside that barn. Not then and not now. Or not in any physical way. But I had dreamed and Caleb had dreamed, and somehow we’d met and he had spoken to me.

  So now I had a name, Ned Smith, and in a general way, a place where he might be. It may not have been much, but it was more than I’d had before. Enough, maybe, so when August von Fassnacht got up in the morning, he’d find me on his doorstep instead of The Spokesman-Review. And I’d use anything he had, all of his mementos, his memories, every tiny little thing he knew that might lead me to Caleb.

  Daylight seemed forever in coming.

  St. Mihiel. Ned Smith. It was a place to start.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Dad looked almost as haggard as I felt. He shook his head at my anxious expression as I bolted from my bedroom.

  “No sign of him,” he said. “His truck’s still in the lot.’

  I went over to the kitchen window and peered down at the south side parking area to see for myself. Caleb must have washed his truck before he came over yesterday, I noticed, for it gleamed a pristine, pearly white.

  “What are you going to do, Boothenay?” Dad demanded, once again breaking his own rule of asking about power. “How are you going to find him, when you don’t know where he’s gone? When you don’t even know his name?”

  I got sick to my stomach just thinking about the difficulties. “I do know his name, Dad. And I have a place to look—kind of.”

  Dad dragged a chair out from the kitchen table and motioned me to sit. He filled my favorite blue glass mug with coffee and put it in front of me before seating himself. “How did you discover that? I could’ve sworn you didn’t know squat when we went to bed last night.”

  Difficult, to explain the inexplicable.

  “Well,” I said, putting the mug to my mouth and deliberately muffling my words. “I didn’t then. I dreamed, and in the dream he—they—told me.”

  Dad’s own cup smashed hard onto the table top, coffee splashing over the rim. He stared at me, shaking his head as if he thought I must’ve lost my mind.

  “Say what? Did you say—

  “Yeah, I did.

  He snorted. “You dreamed! Jesus!

  Stung, I said, “For your information, I discovered his name is Ned

  Smith. A good, plain name.

  Dad shook his head. “Ned Smith, huh? Tell me, Boothenay, how can you trust a dream? How can you⏤oh, hell. What’s the use?” He fell silent

  The trouble with Dad is that he hadn’t the advantage of the power, had never experienced living outside his own self, never felt the total euphoria—sometimes—in learning of worlds beyond his own. He also lacked any confidence in me and totally mistrusted magic. He always had

  I took a sip of coffee and tried to forgive him. “Have you ever heard of a place called St. Mihiel, Dad?”

  Spoken out loud, the
name of the place nudged my memory. Von Fassnacht had mentioned St. Mihiel, too. What had he said? Oh, yeah. That’s where he’d killed his cousin. The blood seemed to curdle in my veins, and I barely heard Dad’s next words.

  “Sounds familiar,” he said. “I think I remember my dad telling me about a big battle there, way back in WWI, if we’re talking about the same place.” He breathed hard through his nose. “Is that where the dream told you Caleb is? Fairly logical, given the age of the Colt. I suppose the boy is in the thick of things?”

  “Uh-huh.” The scene of a big battle, huh? Good God, why did everything have to be so awful?

  “Not a good place to be.

  “No,” I said. “So I gathered.

  The phone rang then, both of us jumping as the shrill tone gritted along our overwrought nerves. Dad won the jump, since I had to go around the table.

  Unfortunately, it was only Scott.

  CHAPTER 11

  Caleb tried to think if the guns had been silent for as much as an hour in all the time he’d been in this place. Certainly the clamor was louder than ever tonight, with the reverberation of shells splitting the cloud-covered night sky a constant irritant. He only conceded to them as being an irritant. Fear was not an expression he allowed himself.

  The picketed animals weren’t happy either. Horses and mules stamped their feet and switched their tails. When one did stretch his neck to nibble on the good grass hay in front of him, he’d soon throw up his head again and stare around, the hay hanging forgotten from his mouth.

  As the man in charge of the artillery animal’s health and well-being for the battalion, Sergeant Ned Smith couldn’t help catching a bit of the horses’ unease as he walked among them. The two dogs he’d rescued from the German machine gun crew accompanied him, their dark coats blending with the night. Tonight must be the date set for the 91st to move up, and the animals, with an uncanny sensitivity drawn apparently out of thin air, somehow knew this. Caleb expected the official order to come at any moment.

  Pausing to rub the brown horse he’d been shoeing when Walsh brought warning of the battalion’s expected orders, he felt an urgent need to scratch the one unreachable place in the center of his own back. God, what an itch! Yet the sensation faded as he continued his inspection of the horses. It didn’t return until the sentry standing watch at the farthest end of the picket line snapped a challenge.

  The smell of tobacco smoke was strong, held in place by the rain- heavy air. By the light of the next exploding flare, Caleb detected a scuffed spot in the mud where the sentry, Mueller’s friend, Thomas, had hastily ground out his butt.

  “Damn it, Thomas.” Caleb used his best sergeant’s voice of authority. “How many times do I have to tell you about smoking on duty?”

  “Sorry, Sergeant Smith.” Thomas, the quietest man in Ned Smith’s outfit after Will Mueller, looked anywhere except at Caleb while he told his lie. “I forgot.”

  Caleb sighed. The kid’s New York accent grated on his own western ear, and he wasn’t sure if it was the accent or the way Thomas failed to follow orders that annoyed him so much. He knew the New Yorker wasn’t a dimwit, only undisciplined and bound to go his own way. Thomas never had talked much; he didn’t listen much either.

  “Forgot, my ass. Don’t try to feed me that, Thomas. Keep going, buddy, and I’ll promote you right into the infantry.” Caleb spoke softly, though with utter sincerity. He’d talked to Thomas before about the German snipers who made a practice of targeting sentries by the glow of their smokes. It had gotten to be a nightly occurrence and Caleb wondered uneasily if it was that causing the itch on his back.

  He tried to shrug the feeling aside and said, “I don’t want anyone on my watch with a death wish.”

  Thomas’ glance lifted at this. “Death wish, Sarge? Hell, what kind of a chance do we have anyways? The Huns target the artillery first ever time.”

  “Would you rather go over the top?”

  After a moment spent weighing the options, Thomas said, “No, Sergeant Smith. I guess not. But if I’m gonna take a bullet, I’d as soon it happened without me having to worry beforehand. Maybe I don’t want to see it coming.”

  Caleb shook his head, thinking Thomas might be right. He didn’t know that he wanted to see the one with his name on it either. Stuck here as he was, with the war to end all wars coming closer and closer every day, he sometimes forgot he’d ever known a different existence. Here he felt death’s passage like hot breath on a cold wind. Home grew constantly more unreal and distant.

  He sometimes thought Boothenay must have forgotten him by now.

  Accordingly, he delivered a short lecture on the evils of smoking which did more to remind him of his origins than it did to impress Thomas. Thomas only smiled, a slight quirk of his lips.

  “Begging your pardon, Sarge, but that isn’t what old Doc Meredith says. He told us we ought to smoke at least one cigarette every hour as it opens the passages to the lungs and helps calm our nerves. Some of the boys think it’ll cure you if you get caught by the mustard gas. I never heard of this lung cancer or emphaziemee you’re talking about, but I guess the doc ought to know what’s what.”

  It was the longest speech he’d ever heard out of Thomas.

  Having said his piece—and feeling a little foolish about delivering an unsolicited sermon —Caleb shrugged, called up the dogs and moved on. He had gotten no more than halfway to the next sentry before his sharp nose recognized that Thomas had “forgotten” again.

  Overhead, a shower of sparks marked the path of the next rocket. About the same time, Caleb’s back once more set up its annoying itch. As if to compete with the shrieking rocket, a heavily charged rifle cracked from somewhere to the right.

  A short, agonized cry identified the bullet’s mark. Thomas.

  With the dogs beside him, Caleb raced back the way he’d come, almost blind in the dark after the rocket’s glare faded. He found Thomas by the simple expedient of stumbling over a prone body. The kid moaned.

  Ripping open the pouch that held the pitiful excuse for medical supplies every soldier carried, Caleb knelt beside the wounded boy. Dimly, he heard the sentries closest to Thomas sound the alarm. Troops stirred in the barracks nearest the horse line. Officers shouted orders.

  The next flare showed a gaping wound in Thomas’ chest running messily with blood. White edges of rib bones poked through the remains of uniform jacket and shattered flesh. With growing despair, Caleb realized he had nothing—absolutely nothing—with which to fight for the kid’s life. The medical kit contained a tourniquet, a few pads, some gauze, and—what the hell? Carbolic acid? A band-aid for a situation calling for the immediate attention of a trained trauma unit, blood transfusions and the services of a thoracic surgeon.

  The kid’s teeth chattered. “Cold,” he said, blood bubbling on his lips. “Cold.” He writhed with the effort to draw breath.

  “Hold on, Thomas. Stay still,” Caleb said. “You’ll be all right.”

  In a pig’s ass! His arms were already red to the elbow and blood continued to pour from the wound, unstaunched by his puny efforts.

  “Hurts.” The whisper was fainter.

  “Stretcher bearers,” Caleb yelled, knowing there wasn’t much time. He shrugged out of his jacket, throwing it over the kid although he feared shock was already too far advanced for the warmth to help. The light-colored undershirt Caleb wore stood out in the dark like a ghost in a cemetery at midnight.

  His instincts had been right on.

  In the moment he realized the itch on his back was still there, one more shot rang through the night. Pain stabbed with electric needles through every nerve in his body. Of these, the worst was in the calf of his leg.

  Not again, he remembered thinking, his senses swimming as he waited for the final bullet that would end his life. Not his damned leg again. This could not be happening. His vision kept flicking in and out. Pain rendered him immobile.

  Rain beat down harder. Thomas’ breath gurgled with th
e sucking sound of a plugged drain.

  Boothenay” Her name shot through Caleb’s mind like a prayer. “What are you waiting for? Get me home.”

  But she didn’t answer.

  WITHOUT GOING to all the trouble of opening his eyes, Ned Smith trusted his other senses to tell him his whereabouts

  A hospital, he guessed. Sounds of men in distress came to him—moans, whimpers, sobs. At times, someone called out in his sleep. There was one who must have been heavily dosed with a sedative, for his snoring had a leaden quality. Only gradually did he figure out the slow, choked sound was coming from him. He was warm, tucked in a narrow bed with a blanket pulled tight across his chest. His leg hurt to beat hell.

  Air stirred at his bedside. Cool fingers touched his brow, his cheek.

  Had she come for him then? Great joy swelled in his chest until the soft, feminine voice finally penetrated his consciousness.

  “Wake up, soldier. Tell me how you feel.

  It wasn’t the voice or the hand he’d been expecting

  Who had I been expecting? The question ran ’round and ’round, perplexing to his dazed mind until he heard water being poured. He dry swallowed in anticipation. A glass, beaded with drops of water, touched his mouth. He slurped, fearing if he failed to drink quickly enough she’d take it away from him. Some spilled down his neck, though as the liquid cooled his arid throat, he barely noticed the slight discomfort. He left the question unanswered, forgotten.

  “Easy,” the woman said. “There’s more where that came from.”

  Ned felt as if he might be able to lift the weight of his eyelids now. Accordingly, he made a supreme effort and willed his eyes open, focusing on the woman’s face. For a moment, he thought something had gone very wrong, but his vision was only blurred. A few blinks cleared it.

  One glimpse, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d ever thought to see anyone beyond this woman. Or want to for that matter.

  A few strands of blond hair had escaped from her nurse’s cap. Hazel eyes, more brown than green met his over a generous mouth and small, straight nose. She looked kind, and also tired, with half-moons as dark as bruises staining the delicate skin beneath her eyes.