“That’s bad, Sarge?”
“It’s gas in the guts you’d trade a bayonet for in the same place.” He looked up and saw me and handed the can to Andrews. “Don’t you eat that till I say so,” he warned, and came out to join me. “Yes, sir?”
I moved a dozen yards away. He followed patiently, a hulking figure in his winter issue plus his own ingenious weather-defying arrangements, caparisoned with the armament he never moved without, a holstered .45 on each hip and an M-1 rifle slung across his back. I could think of no better lead-in than to parrot Major Harper’s. “The battalion’s going for a hike, first sergeant.”
“Fox Hill,” he stated rather than asked. I nodded. “Figured someone had to relieve it to stand a chance of us linkin’ up at Hagaru-ri, let alone Koto-ri an’ Chinhung-ni an’ the beach. Why not us?” He looked me up and down. “How you feel about it, College?”
Altobelli was from my home town. He had a brother who worked for Charley Risko. Altobelli was a seven-year marine. Within hearing of the men I was “sir” and “Lieutenant”; alone with him I was “College,” exactly as I’d been when we were on opposite sides of a sandlot scrimmage line during my vacations. “I was able to restrain my enthusiasm,” I said. “But the word almost defrosted me. Form ’em up on the right of the cave.”
A grin split his frost-blackened features. It was a measure of the man that on Korea’s spiny ridges he carried in his belt the same battered machete with which he’d hit the beach at Tinian. “Nice night for a hike,” he said.
If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget that hike. I never knew how many miles it was; surely as many up and down three thousand-foot mountains as straight ahead. Men climbed through the black night, and slipped, and rolled. They collapsed from fatigue, and rose to climb again through vicious, clinging scrub, up rocky draws, and across needlelike saddles, until a leaden numbness rose from icelike feet and spread through whole bodies. Men booted and boosted each other up unclimbable ridge-backs, and were in turn booted and boosted up. They pitched headlong into the snow covering the iron-hard earth and lay there in the merciless wind, to be seized, shaken, and kicked into movement again by Altobelli and myself bringing up the rear.
No one spoke. No one had the breath to waste, or the inclination to unwrap and expose mouth and throat. As I slogged along with an eye out for stragglers, I found myself wondering if cold alone could stop the heart. Then the major called a five-minute break, and Altobelli was everywhere. “Off wit’ those sweaty socks before they freeze in yer shoepacs,” I could hear him barking. “Put the ones you take off next to your chest so’s body heat ‘ll dry ’em up before the next change.” He tramped up and down the thin line. “I’ve chopped more’n one man out of his boots when his sweat turned to ice after he stopped movin’, an’ some of ‘em left toes in the boots.”
The hideous march started again, and when I had been putting one foot before the other in monotonous misery in the bone-wearying ascent and descent of mind-numbing ridges for what seemed forever, I ran into Altobelli’s arm across my chest. “Major’s settin’ up,” he husked at me. “Check in wit’ him while I deploy the men.”
I tried to focus my eyes. I could see the nearest snow-covered mound, and that was all. I stumbled forward in the direction of the first sergeant’s nod, and was relieved to discover the semicircle of heel-squatting, hard-breathing junior officers clustered around Major Harper’s lean figure. I crouched forward instead of sitting on my heels; I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back up again.
“ — gimme lotsa firepower on the way up so the boys on the crest ‘ll know enough to hold their fire,” the major was saying. “In case the scouts don’t get through. Ross, bring a platoon an’ come with me. All right, the rest of you. Let’s do this in one take while we still got steam in the boiler.”
Dawn was breaking when we climbed up Fox Hill in a steady tattoo of rifle and machine gun fire. The first Chinese I saw was dead, frozen stiff, bolt upright in his hacked-out hole. I barely restrained the pull of my mittened finger on the trigger. There were plenty of live ones, flitting shadows as they ran, surprised into open flight. We rooted them out in coveys and hunted them down, mopping up as we went. I was close enough to see the first silent handshakes on the crest of the hogback ridge as we joined forces. I turned and looked in the direction of Toktong Pass, but in the darkness below I could see only blurred shapes.
The CCF’s gave us no time to rest on our laurels. Pinpoints of rifle fire sprang up below us as a counterattack was mounted. I led a group halfway back down the hill after a hasty realignment of platoons and officers; the rush up to the ridge had not gone unscathed. We fanned out in a thin skirmish line to intercept the Chinese Communists on the way up, setting ourselves up on a ledge that formed a natural barrier. I crawled along the line checking to see that the troops were taking the best possible advantage of the cover available. As the dawn light strengthened, rifles cracked all around me as the men fired steadily at running figures below.
I rounded a rocky outcrop to find Sergeant Altobelli rough-bandaging the shoulder of Slim Estes, our accordion player. “Keep your head down,” Altobelli growled at me with one end of a bandage in his teeth. “This’n came from above. Sniper between us ‘n the crest.” As though to punctuate his words a bullet spanged off the rock above our heads and screamed away in a shrieking ricochet. “See anything?” Altobelli wanted to know. I had been looking back up the hill.
“No,” I said. “Not many places he can be, though, in line with this end of the ledge. See that white-knobbed Joshua-treelike formation there? Let’s try that first.”
Altobelli zipped Estes back into his parka and thrust his rifle into his hands. “Where?” he said, joining me. I pointed. “Yeah. More’n likely.”
“I’ll take this side,” I said.
“I’ll circle ‘round,” he agreed. “Slim, you lay back here an’ put a shot on that white knob ‘bout every thirty seconds.” He wormed away on his belly between the rocks.
I started straight back up the hill, keeping the suspect white-knobbed rock formation on my right. I kept as much cover as I could manage between it and myself. At regular intervals I could hear the crack of Slim’s rifle and the whine of metal as his shots knocked splinters from the face of the knob. That should keep our sniper nailed down, I thought hopefully. I ran doubled over in case it didn’t.
I threw myself down behind a mound to retrieve lost breath and cursed as I banged a knee on rock hidden under the snow. In a minute I forced myself to get going again; I was at the sniper’s level now, if that was where he was, but I wanted to be higher. As I climbed I circled to the right, more careful of noise; I should be getting close. Then I edged through two massive rocky parapets, and there below me in a natural little snow-covered stony bowl was the sniper. The white knob was his front rampart.
He was standing with his rifle projecting through a crevice in the rock, but at the moment not aimed at anything. As I looked, Slim’s rifle snapped from below and stone chips flew from the top of the knob. The sniper wore a Chinese Communist fur hat with flaps that could be tied up or down over the ears. His were down, and I couldn’t see much of his face. I couldn’t see any sign of Altobelli, either, despite the height of my position; he must still be searching for the bowl level entrance the sniper had used.
I was twenty feet above him; I took a step forward and raised my rifle. The movement dislodged a stone under my foot, and it bounded down into the bowl. Before it was halfway to the bottom or before he knew where I was, the sniper turned around from his emplaced rifle with his hands folded together on top of his fur hat in a gesture of surrender. Placing my feet carefully, and keeping him covered with the rifle, I slithered my way down the steeply pitched incline to the bottom of the bowl, conscious of beady, slanted eyes on me every foot of the way.
At eye level I could see on one shoulder of his quilted uniform the clips of a Chinese Communist infantry captain. It was unusual to find one in such a role
, and I knew G-2 would be glad of the chance to interrogate him. He had a holster belt slung around his middle but the holster was empty. Ten yards away from him I stacked my rifle in a crevice of rock to have both hands free in case he decided to destroy any papers he might be carrying.
And the second I did it he snatched his right hand down from his fur cap and grabbed a revolver he had hidden under his left armpit. He drew down on me, dead center, and smiled. I’ll never forget that yellow, sneering smile. I know the old story that you see your whole life flash before you in the instant before you die; it didn’t happen to me. All I saw was a red ball of rage. Rage at the trickery; rage at my own stupidity in falling for it. I charged him — movement was a release, and what difference if he nailed me standing or moving forward? — and a gun snapped from across the bowl. The Chinese captain spun halfway around, wringing the wounded hand from which he’d lost his gun.
I saw Altobelli without really focusing my eyes on him; all I could really see was the sniper. He straightened up and started to back away from me, his eyes darting from me to Altobelli and back again. From somewhere in his bulky quilted jacket, a knife appeared in his good left hand. “Don’t shoot; don’t shoot!” I yelled hoarsely at Altobelli.
Rage still shook me, literally. I reached Altobelli in three jumps and snatched the old machete that was always in his belt. The snowy bottom of the bowl was as slippery as a skating rink; I crossed it at a dead run. The sniper crouched, circled, feinted, and then upthrust viciously as I closed with him. I felt a searing pain in my fending left arm the same instant I felt a solid shock in my right as the machete caught him in the neck. He fell backwards, his legs scrabbling in the snow. It took me three more swings to cut his head off. The fur hat flew off on the first one. I was halfway back across the bowl carrying the head by the greasy hair before I realized what I was doing. I threw it up into the rocks.
I gave Altobelli back his machete. He cleaned it in the snow and stuck it back in his belt. “Reckon you’re about ready to go to work for Charley Risko when we get rotated out of here, Lieutenant,” he said to me, handing me my rifle.
I didn’t say anything.
We got back down to the ledge with the troops.
A corpsman bandaged my arm and shot me full of sulfa.
I didn’t feel too bad; I stayed in the line.
On the 4th of December, with Toktong Pass open, we made the link-up at Hagaru-ri.
On the 7th we joined the garrison at Koto-ri.
On the 10th we fought our way into Chinhung-ni.
And on the 15th we were evacuated from the beach at Hungnam in good order, and “the greatest fighting retreat in military history” was military history.
I wasn’t conscious of too much of the drudgery, the drama, or even the danger of those few days. I was too much aware of what had happened to me personally back on Fox Hill. Up to No-Name Ridge and the rifle butt in the mouth, I’d fought myself a what-the-hell war. Afterwards it hadn’t been the same. It had left me wondering about myself. Fox Hill had supplied the answer to something I needed to know.
And although it was a long time afterward before I realized it, never again after that morning in the stony bowl did Joe Altobelli call me “College.”
chapter VIII
The sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom woke me in the motel room. I opened my eyes reluctantly. The draperies were drawn, but daylight filtered in around the edges. I closed my eyes again and rolled over. I’d slept off the sleep of necessity; what I’d get now would be pure luxury. I was in no hurry at all to start the day.
My roll-over left me facing the connecting door between bedroom and bath. Behind closed eyelids I caught a quick flare of light; someone had opened the door. By the time my eyes opened it had closed again, but in the murk of the room I could make out a ghostly silhouette distinctly feminine in outline. Mentally I damned Lynn’s tendency to early-morning frolics; I was in no mood and poor condition for such activity.
The ghost padded soft-footedly around the end of my bed and silently opened my closet door. I snapped wide awake. By the time my feet quietly hit the carpet, my brain had sorted out my visual impressions. I was getting the message that the ghostly figure was too substantial to be Lynn’s. Cousin Gussie had invaded my bedroom.
The bag in the closet was moved with a slight scraping noise. The bag was locked, so I knew she couldn’t open it, but I still didn’t like the idea that she was trying. Although it was dark, from six feet away I could make out her figure bent over the bag. I opened the closet door wider to get it out of the way of my backswing, and delivered a smashing openhanded uppercut to the most prominent projection facing me from the closet. It lifted Gussie clear off the floor. As her strangled yelp assaulted my ears, my hand made an interesting discovery; between its salute and Gussie there hadn’t been so much as a thread.
I grabbed her by the arm as she backed out of the closet, holding onto herself. “That was a dirty t-trick!” she sniffled. I could see better now. I had slept in my shorts, and I had on all the clothes in the room. The girl was stark naked. It didn’t seem to faze her at all.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing in here?” I demanded, but I kept my voice down. Somehow I didn’t care to have Lynn walk in on the tableau.
“I just wanted to borrow s-some underwear,” she said sulkily.
“Underwear? In my closet?”
“You wear shorts and jerseys, don’t you? I ran down on clothes. I don’t have any pants or bras.”
“Then why didn’t you borrow Lynn’s?”
I could hear more of her usual pertness is her voice. “You can’t have much of an eye for female architecture, Pete. I couldn’t get halfway into Lynn’s pants.”
Remembering the broad expanse to which my palm had done scant justice, I was inclined to agree with her. “Get decent with something and I’ll get you some out of my bag. And the next time you want something, you ask, you hear me?”
“Yes, Pete,” she said, so meekly I knew she was putting on an act. She moved away from the closet door, which was what I wanted. I found my pants on a chair and fumbled the key out of them, then opened the bag without putting on a light. I pulled out a pair of shorts and a jersey and relocked the bag. Gussie was standing about ten feet from me, looking like September Morn except for a pillow coyly held in front of her. “Thanks,” she said as I handed her the underwear. She walked over to my bureau mirror and planked herself in front of it, twisting and turning as she tried to see her butt. “I probably won’t carry the mark more than a month.”
All that nude girl flesh was making me nervous, or irritable, or something. She had the breasts and belly of a woman of thirty-five. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s customary to wear clothes in the presence of the opposite sex?”
“I was raised with six brothers,” she said matter-of-factly. “I used to wear their underwear, too.”
“Well, paddle on out of here and let me get my sleep,” I ordered.
“Okay, Pete,” she said, again in that tone of fake submissiveness. When she went back into the bathroom, I got a good look at her in the glare of light the instant the door was open. I was out of touch with the eighteen-year-olds of the country, but if half the female ones looked like Gussie the country was in good shape.
I locked the door on my side of the bathroom before climping back into bed. Despite the visitation, I had no trouble at all in getting back to sleep. The sun was high behind the draperies when I was awakened by a steady tapping on the bathroom door. I got out of bed and went over to it. “Yes?” I said.
“It’s me,” I heard Lynn say.
I opened the door. She was dressed, and looked flower-fresh. Just the sight of her made my beard stubble feel twice as long. “You’re the second visitor I’ve had this morning,” I said. I figured I’d better get in my two cents’ worth first.
“She showed me the print of your hand,” Lynn smiled.
“She’s not a bit bashful about showing
things, is she?”
“I’m four years older,” Lynn said, “but sometimes it seems like forty. I know she considers me hopelessly old-ladyish and prune-faced. Well, I just wanted to tell you we’re off to breakfast.”
“Bring me back a safety razor and some blades, will you? And afterward you’d better get the kid some clothes. What happened to hers?”
“She sold them.”
“Sold them? What the hell for?”
“Money, she informed me when I asked the same question. Cigarette money. Lipstick money.”
“And what was she planning on doing today when Mrs. Neville tossed her out on the bricks?”
Lynn shrugged. “She claims she wasn’t going home. It’s a terribly small town. She hates it with a passion.”
“More likely she hates the small town supervision with a passion.”
“She hardly fits the mold,” Lynn agreed. “Do you have the keys to the Buick? I’ll drop your shaving things off before we go.”
I got her the keys. “We’ll take it easy today,” I said. “Maybe just lie around here.” I watched her face as I said it. It didn’t light up. Well, Karma, would yours if you were offered an apple instead of the orchard you were wishing for? Lynn just nodded and went out.
I had a reason for saying it, of course. I’d been running so hard I hadn’t had time to think. Now that I’d shaken the chase, it was time I did some planning. If Charley Risko thought I was going to keep right on running, he was due for a surprise. If I could just stay out of police range, I’d be in good shape to see that he got it.
I got under the shower and soaked in the hot water. While I was still in it Lynn came in from the girls’ side and left my razor and blades. She started to say something, gave up competing with the noisy hiss of the shower, and went out again. I shaved carefully; with a two-day beard the law of multiples takes over with me. I’m four times as likely to cut myself. I considered it a good omen I didn’t.
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 9