Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon

  This is a book of fiction. All the names, characters and events portrayed in this book are Fictional and any resemblance to real people and incidents are purely coincidental.

  CASCA: #20 Soldier of Gideon

  Casca Ebooks are published by arrangement with the copyright holder

  Copyright © 1988 by Barry Sadler

  Cover: Greg Brantley

  All Rights Reserved

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  Table of Contents

  UNDER ATTACK!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Continuing Casca’s adventures, book 21 Trench Soldier

  UNDER ATTACK!

  The overall speed of the convoy had not changed. Glennon swerved again from the road to skirt a crippled APC, and Casca slammed his fist on the cabin wall.

  "Stop, stop!" he screamed, and was leaping from the tailgate into the sand before Glennon could halt the truck. He picked himself up and ran to the APC. Half a dozen corpses were sprawled about the tripod mounted Browning. The .50 caliber machine gun was smeared all over with blood and brains and meat, but it hadn't been damaged. Casca yanked it around to point down the road where the MiG had disappeared.

  Casca sighted down the barrel of the Browning, pointing ahead of the plane as the pilot flew straight along the line of the road.

  Casca was aware of the shots all around him as men filled the air with lead. He also heard explosions, gunfire, and screams as the MiG took out truck after truck.

  He watched the tracers and lowered their path until he was pouring a stream of lead just ahead of the plane's nose.

  Then he saw the tracers spraying the underside of the plane and knew that some of his rounds had homed. The MiG howled over their heads in its dying rush, its pilot splattered all over his cockpit by the stream of slugs that had plowed upward through his seat...

  CHAPTER ONE

  "If I was in Nasser's boots today" the belligerent little Irishman struck the battered wood of the bar counter with his fist. “I'd put an end to these diplomatic maneuverings and shenanigans. I'd take some direct action. I'd close the bloody Suez Canal."

  "He's done more than that, Moynihan," the big Paddy alongside him said quietly. "Egypt has blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba."

  "He can't do that," a nearby seaman said. "The gulf is international waters."

  "Right enough, Britain and France have protested."

  "Nasser's not going to be concerned about Britain and France," Moynihan shouted. "Didn't they try to use the Israelis to take the canal away from him in fifty-six?"

  "Well, I guess they're going to try again," his friend replied mildly.

  The little man struck the counter again. "If I was in Nasser's boots today–"

  "And thank all the gods ye're not," his friend interrupted. "The poor bloody Gyppos is likely to be in enough trouble as it is."

  "And without any help from a scalpeen like ye, Tommy Moynihan," the giant bartender added, and there was a chorus of laughter from several drinkers in the public bar of the House of Glee, officially Gleeson's Auckland Family Hotel.

  "And who the hell asked for your opinion, I'd like to know," Moynihan ranted, "you useless Belfast git."

  Gleeson laughed so heartily that all 220 pounds of fat and muscle shook. "And which side might you be thinking of honoring with your services anyway?" he asked the irascible little man. "The Egyptians or the Israelis?"

  "And what business might that be of yours?"

  "Well" Gleeson shrugged "you might say I have a commercial interest in the matter."

  "And how might that be?"

  "Well" Gleeson shrugged again "if you happen, for a change, to pick the winning side and survive long enough to collect some pay I might manage to get a little something off your tab."

  Moynihan slapped the counter in exasperation. "Isn't that just like a greedy Protestant bastard?" he demanded of the drinkers in the bar. Then to Gleeson, "Here we are talking about going off to fight a war to save the world for democracy, and all you can think about is your bloody money."

  He emptied his pint pot and slammed it on the bar. "And fill that bloody glass up, before I think about taking me business elsewhere." .

  "I don't expect to get that lucky today," Gleeson said as he drew black Guinness stout from the beer pump.

  "The fat fella might have a point at that," Moynihan's drinking companion said mildly. "The Arabs might pay better than the Jews, you know."

  "If they settle at all." Moynihan buried his nose in the foam of his beer. "And one for Harry Russell too, for Christ's sake," he shouted at the bartender. "D'ye think I've taken to drinkin' by meself?"

  "Now ye're getting to the point," said Billy Glennon, another Paddy, built like a blacksmith the trade he had been apprenticed to, until at sixteen his Catholic religion had prompted him to raise his age and volunteer to save Korea from the rotten Red atheist Communists. By the time Vietnam came around he was no longer a Catholic. "Indade I was an atheist and damned near a Communist too." But there was fighting to be done, and it was a trade he'd come to prefer to blacksmithing. "The Jews'll drive a hard bargain like enough, but they'll settle up all right when the job is done."

  "If ever it is done," Harry Russell said as he picked up his glass. "There's one hell of a lot of them Egyptians. They say there's a quarter of a million foot soldiers. And the radio said Algerian troops are heading for the Sinai too."

  "I hear you can't get a seat on any sort of plane for anywhere in the Middle East," said Billy Glennon, "for all the Arabs and Jews who are rushing for the place."

  "Not to mention," added Harry Russell, smiling, "a few of us Christian gentiles who seem to be heading there too.''

  "So the Israelis is going to need a hell of a lot of us boyohs," said Moynihan, "and for the longer the better, I reckon."

  "I don't know about that," came a quiet American accent. "You can get awful sick of a war."

  "All around the bar men nodded. Most of them knew Case Lonnergan, or knew of him. They knew that, like themselves, he had fought in Vietnam. How and why he had gotten out of that war was his own business, just as each of them had left it in his own way for his own reasons.

  What none of them would ever be able to guess was how many wars this man had found his way into, wearied of, and found his way out of.

  Years earlier the House of Glee had been the bar where departing New Zealanders had had their last beer before boarding ship for Korea and the United Nations forces. And they had naturally headed for it when they came back. Later, it became the watering hole and meeting place for those who had joined the Australian Army to fight in Vietnam. Other Commonwealth and American veterans in the country gravitated there too. Many of them hung out on the waterfront, picking up an odd day's stevedoring when it was going,
and holding up Gleeson's bar when it wasn't. The rest of the Auckland Family's clientele were merchant seamen, some of them veterans too. Like the stevedores, they were either spending the pay from their last boat, or waiting for the next one and spending the money in advance on Gleeson's slate. After dark they would usually move to the lounge bar and their tabs would grow rapidly as they bought drinks for the mainly pretty, or at least available, waterfront women who accounted for the hotel's unofficial name.

  The man who had called himself Case Lonnergan when he was in the U.S. Army had simply walked out of the Vietnam field hospital where he had been expected to die, and the U.S. Army had not heard of him since. Captain Goldman and Colonel Landries, the two doctors treating him, had found it easier to go along with his disappearance and lose his file rather than try to explain a near corpse that had walked away, or to try to solve the mystery of a man who recovered from mortal wounds and whose body showed the scars of having done so countless times before. And who, for good measure, had carried embedded in his flesh for almost two thousand years the bronze arrowhead they had removed from his thigh along with all the more recently acquired shrapnel.

  In Saigon Lonnergan had found it easy enough to buy a new passport and a ticket to Australia. But the round eyes of the Sydney sheilas were much harder, and their bodies, colder than he remembered from when he had been there on R and R with pockets full of money, and he soon crossed the Tasman Sea to take a look at New Zealand.

  In the Vietnam hospital Captain Goldman had heard some of this eternal mercenary's history and would not have been surprised to find him heading off to yet another war.

  For his part, the man who had been born Casca Rufio Longinus in the reign of Augustus Caesar had now wearied of the daily round of civilian life as he so often had before. He liked New Zealand and its people well enough but could not get enthusiastic about milking cows, butchering sheep, or felling trees, about the only jobs offered, apart from the waterfront the same occupations he had avoided centuries earlier by joining Caesar's legions.

  Casca knew the pugnacious little Moynihan and his big friend Harry Russell from Vietnam and knew they would be good company to be with in another war. Irishmen had been making their living by fighting other countries' battles for centuries, mainly those against their mortal enemy, England. If these two were going to accept the Israeli recruiter's offer, he was happy to go along with it too. And he said as much. Anyway, it was the only offer he had. There was no Arab recruiter around.

  "Me too," a Maori seaman next to him said. "I've been a month on the beach and I don't know when I might get another ship, so I figure it's time to go merc. I've got another reason to see the place too; one of my ancestors came from there."

  "We've all got our own reasons," said Billy Glennon, "and right welcome ye'll be along of us Wardi Nathan. I mind your ways from the 'Nam."

  Well, that was settled then. They were all going, Tommy Moynihan, Billy Glennon, Harry Russell, Wardi Nathan, and, naturally, Case Lonnergan. They all raised their pint pots and drank on it.

  Like every waterfront city in the world, Auckland had its rats, and a few blocks from the bar Tommy Moynihan came upon six of them. Burly Samoans, about half drunk and almost out of money, they were delighted to see the lone little white man lurching toward a late night Chinese restaurant.

  "Hey Kiwi, what's a little boy like you doing out so late at night?" they taunted as they surrounded him.

  "My mother felt hungry, and she sent me out looking for a juicy, fat Samoan for supper," Moynihan snapped as he glanced back to the corner where his drinking comrades should appear any moment.

  Official histories said that Samoans had abandoned cannibalism about 1914 when New Zealand took the islands away from Germany in the Great War. But it was the standard taunt between the races, and Samoans generally denied that they had given up the practice.

  Now there were many thousands of Samoans working in New Zealand, and they hated their white colonial masters even more than the brown natives, the Maoris, their historical enemies whom they had fought on and off for thousands of years whenever they encountered each other in the vast seas of the South Pacific. They assumed Tommy was a Kiwi, as New Zealanders called themselves after the rare flightless, native bird. They gave him no chance to say that he was Irish. He wouldn't have bothered anyway, and it wouldn't have made any difference. With odds of six to one, these rats would just as readily attack a Maori or another Samoan.

  "We're hungry too." A two hundred pound Samoan chuckled as his great paw enclosed Moynihan's bicep. "But you're not much more than a mouthful for–"

  He got no further as Tommy lurched drunkenly, falling backward and pulling the big islander off balance. As they were falling, Tommy circled his arm out of the Samoan's grasp to bring it around behind his head so that their combined weights mashed the big man's nose into the concrete as they hit the sidewalk.

  Moynihan bounced up from the plump back that had comfortably broken his fall to catch another surprised Samoan in the balls with his boot. But then the other four were upon him. Which was a bad mistake. In their eagerness they didn't realize that Russell, Glennon, Casca, and the Maori seaman had rounded the corner. And the first they knew about it was from the pain of kicked in kidneys and hefty chops to their necks.

  Nathan and Casca drop kicked the closest two backs, and as the Samoans went down they obligingly knocked the other two off balance. Russell and Glennon were on them before they had a chance to recover, and they quickly joined the others on the ground.

  The first Samoan Moynihan had felled got back to his feet, blood streaming from his mashed nose, and got Moynihan by the throat. An instant later he found himself off the ground, one of Billy Glennon's great blacksmith arms between his legs and another under his armpit.

  And when he made the mistake of releasing Moynihan, he gave Glennon. just the edge he needed to smash him headfirst to the ground again.

  Wardi Nathan seized two of his hereditary enemies by their long, thick hair and enjoyed himself bashing their heads together until they collapsed.

  Moynihan scrambled up from where he had been dropped and looked about in disgust at three unconscious Samoans and another three running away torn and bleeding.

  "A fine lot of friends I've got," he complained. "Here I go to all the trouble of finding these gossoons to entertain ye, and ye don't even leave me one to deal with for meself."

  An unfortunate Samoan chose that moment to try to rise and was sped back into unconsciousness, by a number of swift kicks to the head accompanied by delighted whoops from the little Paddy.

  Harry Russell restrained him as blood started to seep from the islander's ears. "That's about enough, I reckon," he cautioned. "We don't want a night in jail. Come and have some chop suey."

  "Right enough." Moynihan desisted reluctantly. "But pay day first. Lean pickin's I reckon, but these boys has earned their penance. There might be enough here to get us a bit of glee when we get back to the bar."

  He was already emptying pockets and removing belts. "We mustn't be going about fighting for free and cheapening the business."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Israeli embassy was set in the low rent district and lacked frills of any sort. To Casca's eye the small, starkly functional building lacked almost everything except submachine guns. And these were in abundant supply everywhere he looked Russian made Kalashnikov assault rifles and Israel's copy, the Galil, and Israel's own development, the Uzi.

  On the sidewalk in front of the building two New Zealand policemen, one white, one black, stood guard, armed only with short wooden batons. But just inside the high steel fence stood half a dozen Israeli army men, Uzi submachine guns at the ready. The pretty receptionist had a revolver on her belt and an Uzi lying handy by her desk. The two ushers who conducted them to the office of the cultural liaison officer carried Uzis slung over their shoulders. The cultural liaison officer's secretary had her Galil in a clip on the wall behind her desk.

  Her offi
ce was liberally decorated with Maori wood carvings, spears, clubs, weavings, polished paua shells, and a huge greenstone tiki. The warrior god held an ornate club over his right shoulder, his tongue lolling greedily from his wide open mouth as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a cannibal feast and was happily looking forward to the next course.

  There were also paintings of the two unique New Zealand native birds. Neither the huge moa nor the small kiwi could fly and had been easy prey for anybody who had cared to hunt them. The beautiful giant moas had been completely consumed for their meat by the Moriori, the red haired, green eyed, brown skinned aboriginals of the New Zealand islands.

  In their turn, the Moriori had been massacred and eaten by the more warlike Maoris, for whom they had been no match. Hunting birds had not equipped them for war with maneaters. The Maoris had been pushed south to these cold islands from their own tropical paradise of Raratonga by the even more warlike Samoans, who, lacking any edible birds or any meat other than fish, had developed an appetite for the flesh of Maoris.

  Whereas the gigantic moa bird had perished, the small, shy, noctunral kiwi had survived to become the national symbol of the new race that was evolving near the South Pole of the planet from the stock of mainly Scots farmers and Norse seamen who had taken the islands from the Maoris during the nineteenth century, by dint of gunpowder, lead, and steel. The Maoris held them at bay for generations, but eventually their clubs of wood and jade had proven a woefully inadequate defense against the arrayed might of the armed troops of the British Empire.

  The cultural liaison officer was young, brusque, and aggressive. Casca took an instant disliking to him but was not put off his enlistment. He was not about to complain if he found that he was going into a war alongside people of this sort of combative personality. He could stand a little neurotic intensity, so long as it was on his side and working for him.

  The Israeli army doctor was even more aggressive and opened his interview with the naked Casca by pointing to the great vertical scar on his chest. "That's the clumsiest piece of suturing I've ever seen. You had an open heart job or what? We're not looking to recruit invalids you know."