Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon (5 page)

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, superbly 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?"

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.

"We had three hundred and eighty six planes in action, only twelve being kept in reserve for our own
defense. So far most of our pilots have flown two sorties, and several have flown three."

Hod
went on in breathless excitement: "Hey, Rab, it's still only 1115 hours. Let's put the whole bundle into the Sinai now."

"You think we can do that?"

"I'm sure. Look, at Luxor, five hundred miles away, they had sixteen Tupolevs, and we got all sixteen in two passes. Every last one of 'em. Caught them all on the ground and didn't lose one of ours.

"We hit them at all their Sinai fields Al 'Arish,
Bir Gifgafa, Ath Thamad, Gebel Libni. We hit Abu Suwayr, Deversoir, Fayid, Kabrit, Al Mansurah, Inchas, Gamil, Helwan, Bani Suwayf, Al Minya, Ras Banas, Al Ghurdaqah. And we took out Cairo West and Cairo International.

"There isn't a single airfield we haven't hit. There's hardly a plane of theirs left that will fly. There's nothing left that's worth worrying about."

"Well, we don't know what's going to happen with the other air forces Syria, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon," General Rabin mused. "I think we should keep some planes in reserve for defense."

Hod's
boyish face lit up in a mischievous grin. "Say twelve?"

Rabin roared laughing and clapped
Hod on the shoulder. "All right then, you son of a gun, keep twelve in reserve, and put the whole bundle over the Sinai."

Hod
was already climbing back into his cockpit, the ground crew unplugging leads and disconnecting hoses.

The engine whined up to peak,
then eased down to normal revs. Hod released the brakes and the Mystëre taxied away as he slammed the cockpit cover closed.

The whistle of the powerful jet engine rose again to a shriek, and the fighter raced across the airfield and soared up into the blue desert sky,
Hod twisting it gaily in a long, vertical victory roll as he climbed away.