Soldier of Gideon Page 4

  Then he roared in delight as he spotted their markings. "They're ours. Holy Star of David, they're Israeli Mysteres. Flying out of Egypt? What the hell is going on?"

  After a few minutes the trucks stopped and the men grouped around the armor. A few hundred yards ahead was a chain wire fence, barbed wire entanglements, antitank obstacles, and, Casca felt certain, mines.

  Beyond that a dozen or more tanks were burning, the fires being added to from moment to moment by enormous explosions from within the flames. A relentless artillery barrage was raining into the area. Beyond the fence, men in combat fatigues were running about in confusion. Fire tenders were uselessly circling the flames. A few Arabs were running toward the undamaged armored vehicles and the empty machine gun emplacements.

  A battalion of Israeli sappers were moving toward the fence, exploding mines as they advanced almost unimpeded. There was a tremendous noise as the entire squadron of Israeli aircraft came roaring back, skimming the desert back into Egypt where they unloaded a second plastering of bombs onto their target.

  Glennon shook his head. "If we're moving up ahead to fight in the Gaza Strip, what the hell are they bombing the Sinai over there for?"

  "Maybe they're taking out the Arab airfields first," Casca said.

  "Could be," Moynihan said. "There are three big airfields not far inside the Sinai. I wouldn't complain if they'd spare a few bombs for our benefit though."

  The Israeli cannon opened up again, blowing great holes in the Egyptian defenses, blasting the entanglements to bits and spreading panic and death among the confused Arab soldiery beyond the fence.

  Casca checked the action of his rifle. A round in the breech, ready to fire, he moved ahead quickly, waiting for a chance to use it. He caught a glimpse of Moynihan's face, alight with anticipation, all doubt and worry gone. They were about to fight. This was something the little Irishman understood completely.

  A hundred yards now to the fence, and still they had drawn no fire. Here and there inside the Arab perimeter officers and non-coms were waving their arras and shouting unheard orders to the wildly milling troops.

  At the fence they halted while the armor rolled ahead and flattened it, their machine guns cutting great gaps in the clumps of terrified men between them and the burning tanks. Casca knelt with the others, and at his leisure fired at the few officers who were trying to form some order out of the mess. They went down quickly, and the confusion turned to rout. In a few minutes there were no more targets to fire at. They advanced steadily beside their armor, weapons at the ready, but the frantically fleeing enemy gave them little chance to use them.

  Now they could see the blasted hulks of armored vehicles inside the conflagrations. The Egyptians were among the fires, cowering and turning back toward their attackers each time a new fuel tank or ammo magazine exploded. And each time they turned Israeli machine gun and rifle fire decimated their ranks. Only an occasional man or a small group attempted to shoot back, and these drew so much fire they were almost cut to pieces.

  The Israeli infantry and armor advanced in a long, inexorable line, scarcely able to keep up with the frenziedly fleeing Arabs. They passed the last of the destroyed armor and Casca counted sixteen burning tanks and maybe twenty smaller bonfires, APCs and field guns. On the perimeters of the area he could see other big fires, once fuel tanks. The fortress headquarters was now in front of them. Great chunks of the building disappeared as the cannon concentrated fire on the walls. The observation tower crashed to the ground, its supports blown completely away. There was no sign of any defending troops.

  Beyond the building the Egyptian Army was melting into the desert, the frantic soldiers throwing away their rifles in their frenzy to escape the bombardment.

  A dozen Egyptian tanks and some armored personnel carriers stood undamaged, abandoned by their crews. The machine gun emplacements by the headquarters had been abandoned, too, without firing a single shot.

  The Israeli troops moved on, spreading out to cover the whole of the area until they were approaching the farther fence of the fortress.

  Hundreds of screaming Egyptians were trying to scale the wire, clawing at each other, dragging one another down, climbing on each other's shoulders, falling in heaps to the rifle and machine gunfire.

  Gradually, without orders, the firing stopped. Casca, like the others, stood still, his smoking rifle in his hands, but not feeling inclined to shoot any more of the solid wall of backs that festooned the fence.

  Beyond the wire he could see a few hundred running Arabs who had succeeded in getting over the fence.

  Tommy Moynihan cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted after them: "Have a nice swim in the Med for me."

  "I don't know about a swim," Billy Glennon said as he gulped the last mouthful from his canteen, "but I sure could use some more water."

  As one man they looked around for some. Suddenly their throats were bone dry, burning with the raging thirst that always follows battle. With great relief they saw their truck approaching and ran toward it, clambering aboard before it stopped and crowding around the drums of water. Other soldiers came running with the same idea.

  Casca poured cup after cup of the delicious, refreshing liquid down his throat.

  Moynihan licked his lips. "Better than Dublin Guinness," he said grinning. "I think these Israelis have fought in the desert before."

  "You can say that again," Wardi said. "Look what's coming."

  A huge tanker truck was rolling toward them, and they could now see many others making their way through the battle wreckage, stopping here and there to distribute the precious liquid.

  Their sergeant approached them.

  "Good enough," he muttered from one side of his mouth, about as close as this man was likely to get to praise. "Any of you guys medics? And don't say: All of us. "

  "Yeah, I am," Casca said.

  "You're short of medics?" Moynihan's voice was incredulous. "We ain't got hardly a scratch."

  Brooklyn waved an expressive arm toward the piles of Arab bodies. If there had been any Egyptian medics they were now racing across the desert with the rest of the fleeing army.

  "Oh, yeah," Moynihan grunted. "Well, I can carry a stretcher anyways."

  The others nodded too, and they moved toward the Israeli ambulances that were now appearing in numbers. Only Atef Lufti shook his head. He had come here to kill Arabs, not nurse them. He turned and strode away.

  Casca drew some medic kits and the others grabbed stretchers and cans of water. They moved amongst the burned and mangled corpses, looking for signs of life.

  "Never did like this part of it," Moynihan grunted as he lifted what was left of a young boy onto his stretcher. Casca's deft scalpel had trimmed away the useless remnants of an arm and a leg.

  Harry Russell straightened his long back from bandaging the stumps and looked around. "Well, I don't see no town, nor bars, nor women. I guess there's not much else to do."

  He bent again to pick up his end of the stretcher.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Casca removed the needle from the Arab's arm and patted him on the head. "You'll be all right," he said softly in Arabic. "Your father is proud of you. Today you killed your man. Soon you will sire your man."

  The boy's rifle hadn't ever been fired. It lay on his belly amongst the blue and red coils of his intestines that Casca knew better than to touch. And he wouldn't live another hour. But the morphine would help him die, and a Muslim who had killed his man in Jihad, Holy War, went straight to Paradise.

  Casca checked his watch. It was right on noon. "The hell with it," he said. "There's not enough morphine or enough bandages in all the world to make a dent in this mess. Let's go see what those Sabra chicks have got for our lunch."

  The others were glad to agree. For the better part of three hours, about five times as long as the action had lasted, they had been patching and hauling mangled Arab carcasses. And there were still hundreds of groaning, moaning, shuddering, bleeding bodies strewn from
edge to edge of the battlefield.

  Tommy Moynihan looked all around him at the piles of bodies and the puddles of drying blood and shook his head. "What a stinking, bleeding mess. Let's get the hell out of here. If I see one more whimpering rag head I'll cut his stinking throat with me bare hands."

  "Or strangle him with your bayonet," Harry Russell ventured, and they all laughed at the attempted joke.

  "What about this stuff?" Wardi had hold of a stretcher and a roll of bandages.

  "Leave it," Casca said, dropping his medic kit to the sand, "for the Red Cross. They'll likely get here in a day or two."

  The mess tent was crowded but quiet. The food was excellent, but even Billy Glennon didn't take seconds. Men ate silently, as if in thought.

  Suddenly Moynihan raised his head from his plate. "It could have been worse," he said.

  "Yeah, how?" Glennon demanded.

  "We could have been with them."

  At 1300 hours there was a parade. A few men sported wound bandages, and in some squads a man or two was missing, either dead and already on the way back to the base camp near Jaffa, or in the field hospital that had grown as if by magic a few hundred yards from the battle site.

  "Privates Lonnergan and Russell, fall out," Brooklyn drawled, and the two stepped out of the ranks. The Brooklyn accent went on lazily: "Report to rav samal, that's RSM, for promotion to rank of samal, that's sergeant, and reassignment of duties. Dismiss."

  The puzzled Casca and Harry were still turning away when the twang went on: "Nathan and Moynihan fall out."

  When they caught up with each other, they found than these two had been promoted from turai to rav turai, corporals.

  "Dunn what the hell this is all about," said Moynihan, "but it means more pay, so I'm for it."

  "I never have managed to work out what promotion is about," Casca mused.

  Samal Case Lonnergan didn't get much time to think about his promotion. He now had his own truckload of soldiers to think about, which included Rav Turai Moynihan with Billy Glennon as driver and Atef Lufti alongside him. Samal Harry Russell and Rav Turai Wardi Nathan had their own truck to worry about.

  Within an hour almost the entire task force was moving out. The armor was reloaded onto the flat rack trucks, and once again the convoy was racing across the desert, this time bound southwest, along the length of the Gaza Strip.

  "It's got to be Suez we're heading for." Moynihan nudged Casca, who was riding alongside him in the back of the truck.

  "I guess so," he replied, "but you can bet your ass there'll be some heavy shit to get through between here and there."

  "Yeah, I guess so. This sort of walkover can't last too long."

  A few helicopters accompanied the convoy, but still no support airplanes. It seemed that the entire Israeli Air Force had been devoted to whatever was happening inside Egypt.

  Mysteres and Vautours came screaming out of Israel, flying at top speed, and so low Casca felt he could reach up and touch the rockets slung under the wings.

  After a few minutes these same planes came roaring back, again at maximum speed, flying slightly higher, but low enough to see that their bomb racks and rocket slings were empty.

  Other Israeli planes also appeared out of Egyptian air space, racing for their Israeli airfields, apparently returning from successful raids on Egyptian targets that they had reached by approaching from over the Mediterranean Sea. After an hour the convoy was approaching the smoking horizon. Once more a wave of jets poured out of the east, flying close to the ground as they roared across the desert.

  "Boy, are those birds loaded," Moynihan gasped as they passed overhead. "It's amazing they can get off the ground."

  "Yeah," said a voice from somewhere in the truck, "all that TNT hanging under the wings, plus what's in the belly bomb bay."

  "Plus the rockets," another voice added, "cannons, and machine guns."

  "Shit," Moynihan muttered, "I'm sure glad it's all going thataway." He sat bolt upright at the thought. "Say, where the hell is the Egyptian Air Force?"

  "Yeah," wondered another merc, "we haven't seen a single plane."

  "You shouldn't have said that," Casca muttered, and, as if in answer to the thought, the truck swerved wildly from the blacktop as the chatter of machine guns accompanied the stitching of bullet holes in the hood and windshield of the truck behind them.

  As the truck slowed and pulled off the road, men tumbled from the tailgate clutching at wounds and yelling in pain. Two or three truck lengths farther back along the road, a truck disintegrated as the MiG 21's cannon blew it to pieces. And still farther back, six or eight trucks were turned to sizzling wreckage as two rockets roared through them. Glennon still had the truck moving fast, skidding and sliding in the dunes beside the road. Up ahead other trucks whose drivers had also seen the MiG coming were now moving back onto the bitumen. There was no sign of any more attacking Egyptian planes.

  Behind them Casca could see maybe a dozen stalled, damaged, or destroyed trucks. Wounded men were hobbling about; more were being lifted from the disabled trucks. Other trucks maneuvered to push the blazing wrecks clear. Two ambulances had arrived and medics were pouring out of them.

  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 a 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.

  There was a rattle of steel as every gun in the back of the truck was readied, and Moynihan muttered: "Ye don't s'pose he'll be stupid enough to come right back do ye?"

  A bolt clicked as a voice answered: "It's our day all right; that's just what he's doing."

  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 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.

  But all of this was happening on the periphery of his consciousness as he concentrated his aim, relaxed his mind, and squeezed the trigger as the plane rushed closer.

  He watched the tracers and lowered their path until he was pouring a stream of lead just ahead of the plane's nose. He prayed that the barrel wouldn't burn out, and that the pilot would hold to his track along the length of the road for just one more second.

  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, tearing off his balls, cutting through his spine, the spreading bullets finally lifting off the whole top of his head to spray his brains on the air.

  The plane shattered itself to pieces as it slammed into truck after truck after truck, each of the successive impacts of twenty tons of metal and men slowing the plane from five hundred miles an hour to three hundred to a hundred, to a slow motion seventy, to a sudden halt in a gigantic fireball that took out three Leyland trucks, a couple of motorcycles, about a hundred roasted Israelis, and a fifty yard stretch of pavement that turned into a bubbling bitumen lake on the surface of which a number of dying men danced about in the grotesque ballet of their last frying agony, to collapse gratefully at last into the boiling black mess.

  Casca ran to his truck and was helped aboard by willing hands as Glennon slammed his foot to the floor, and the Leyland hurtled on through the soft sand, past the conflagration, the continuing explosions and the ascending screams of the dying.

  Then they were back on the road and chasing after the tailgate of the truck ahead. Behind them, super
bly trained Israeli drivers were already maneuvering on the narrow road, pushing away the burning wrecks, clearing access for the arriving ambulances, while other trucks raced along beside the road at almost undiminished speed.

  Casca was admiring this efficiency when he heard Moynihan's amazed remark: "Boy, did that Gyppo take some Jews with him."

  "Yeah," Casca grunted, "I sure put that ole Browning to good use for them."

  "Well, it's one less Arab plane anyway."

  "Yeah. Wonder if they've got any more?"

  "They should have," Moynihan answered. "They're supposed to have over a hundred more than we have." "Yeah, not counting all the other Arab air forces Syria,

  Jordan, Lebanon, maybe Algeria too."

  "Well, where the hell are they?"

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Major General Itzhak Rabin's jeep raced across the tarmac to meet the landing Mystere fighter jet. The pilot, Brigadier General Mordecai Hod, threw back the cockpit canopy and, stood on the seat, his head and shoulders o out of the plane, both arms raised above his head in a victory salute.

  As he jumped from his jeep, General Rabin returned the salute, then ran to embrace Hod as he climbed to the ground. The two generals hugged each other and capered about like pleased schoolboys while mechanics, fitters, armorers, and refuelers swanned over the plane like the pit crew of a Grand Prix racer.

  Hod stepped back a pace, snapped to attention, and threw Rabin a brisk, military salute. "I have to report, sir, that the Egyptian Air Force is at least eighty percent destroyed.

  "According to your battle orders we concentrated entirely upon their Tupolev 16 bombers and MiG 21's, only attacking any other planes when all Tupolevs and MiGs had been eliminated. Almost all of the enemy aircraft were destroyed on the ground.

  "We left out radar, we left out missiles, all ack ack. We concentrated only on airplanes. We flew very, very low. We tried to go around areas covered by radars, or below the horizon of the radars.