Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(82)
Lieutenant Penche, an impossibly young-looking white boy with a very deep-woods accent, comes running, a grin spoiling his attempt to look mature and officerly.
“Men, we have a live-fire mission!” he announces.
He’s written the coordinates in a small, spiral-bound notebook. Doon’s gun crew and the other five in the battery, having only just gotten into position, begin the backbreaking work of digging the tails back up, hefting them, and walking them to the right, bringing the cannon tube to the left. This is the crude aiming—the exacting work is setting elevation and traversing the gun with a hand crank and a wheel. As a soldier spins the wheel, Doon calls out, “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Almost. Hold it. Yeah. Now give me another two mils elevation.”
“Back up, Doc,” someone says to Frangie, “this girl kicks.”
Frangie backs away ten yards but wants to see the gun in action, up close. Best to get used to the noise now—she has not yet been exposed to close-up cannon fire. This changes with a shout of, “Ready,” followed by the high-pitched voice of the lieutenant yelling, “Fire one round.”
The explosion causes the entire howitzer to jump. It digs the tails into the gravel and bounces the cannon and its undercarriage on the two big tires. A jet of red flame shoots from the muzzle, lighting the crew like a lightning flash. Smoke billows from the muzzle, and already the crew has popped out the spent casing, hot and smoking. It rolls toward Frangie.
A runner comes from the command post, which has heard from the forward position by radio. “Two hundred short!”
A second round is fired, and after a few minutes comes word that it’s a hundred yards long. Frantic adjustments left and right, then from each of the six guns in the battery comes a shout of “Ready!”
“Fire for effect!” the young lieutenant yells, and the whole world becomes one big explosion as all six howitzers fire within a split second of each other.
Out slides the hot brass, in goes a new shell, and ka-boom! It makes the ground beneath Frangie’s feet bounce, and out slides a smoking shell and in goes its replacement, and another ka-boom!
The other batteries, spread in an arc across a quarter of a mile, watch with envy.
The battery fires off six rounds per gun, then stops. But within seconds a second battery opens up, its guns elevated higher. Again a total of eighteen rounds are fired. Red lightning, like camera bulbs from hell, a strobe of light now, up and down the line. The lingering smoke seems almost to hold on to that red light for a while.
Then, another target and a battery down the line opens up, getting their chance to rain death on the unseen Germans. The more distant batteries are loud, but Doon’s, right here, right on top of Frangie, is shattering as the battery fires again, and this time it runs on longer, and at such a rapid clip that it’s like some massive drum beating out a frantic rhythm.
Frangie is called to treat a burn, and then the shattered kneecap of an unwary soldier who stood too close as his gun fired. It means evacuating the soldier—Frangie is not a surgeon—but he’ll keep the leg and may even get sent home.
She’s feeling pretty good, really; nothing has occurred yet that is beyond the scope of her training. The noise is stunning, and she soon discovers that neither she nor the soldiers can really hear much, certainly not normal conversation, and the flashes shrink her pupils until the darkness between explosions is impenetrable. She’s treating men who can only point and wince, but it’s nothing terrible or overwhelming, and she breathes a tentative sigh of relief.
There’s a lull of a few minutes in Doon’s battery. He turns and shoots a grin at Frangie.
Then Frangie hears something she doesn’t understand. She yells, “What’s that?” But the high-pitched whine she hears is not audible to men who’ve been standing right up close to the firing guns, nor for that matter is her worried cry, so no one else hears the scream of incoming shells until they land.
The explosion of a German 88 that lands just a hundred fifty yards to their right between Bravo battery and Charlie battery. A fountain of dirt erupts into the air.
As the dust settles, men and women scramble, running and diving into the nearest foxhole, because if there’s one thing artillery men know, it’s that a ranging shot will be followed by total devastation.
It’s not long in coming.
Frangie has already located the nearest hole and dives into it just seconds before Doon Acey.
“See,” Doon says. “I told you the army was fun.”
“You said no such thing,” Frangie manages to say before the whole world explodes. The impacts are so powerful that the ground around them, the dirt and rock walls of their foxhole, punishes them, hammering their feet, their arms, their behinds when they fall to the bottom of the hole.
The noise is catastrophic. Frangie’s ears scream in pain from the noise but more from the sucking away and rushing in of air following each explosion. Her mind is scattered, unable to form a thought. Just a series of flashes, segments of thought. Scared. Tears. Terror. Like some mythical thunder god is beating the earth with a hammer the size of a house, hammering on her, her personally. A flash of flying dirt. Flash of foxhole collapsing. An incongruous image of her room back home. A flash of Doon’s terrified face, looking almost green.
She and Doon hold each other like frightened children in a thunderstorm, but this thunderstorm is unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. This thunderstorm has malice behind it. This thunder and lightning are bent on murder.