II. "The Glorious Cause"

PART TEN

    There was smoke and the sound of the ocean.  The choking gray veil consumed the landscape in all directions.  He could barely see the dirt and the trampled brush beyond the tops of his boots, never mind the ghostly appearances of the soldiers nearby, an arm’s reach away at most.  At the same time, the disconnected wash of a swiftly flowing tide over sand and crushed bits of coral echoed strangely in his ears.  Gabriel Audaz blinked, a small, subtle effort to figure out if he was alive or dead.

    He turned his head, letting it list slightly, wearily to his right.  He breathed a startled gasp of the sultry smoke.  There should have been a soldier there, an American peer in dirt-stained fatigues braced against the scorched and scarred remains of an old car.  Instead, for the span of a haunting and heart-stopping second, Gabriel beheld the glowing, smiling face of his best friend Isabella.

    Gabriel shifted backward with a start, trying to catch his breath.  He was trying to keep himself from calling out her name.  In the blink of an eye, she was gone.  And then, Gabriel was reminded he was not dead, not yet.  If he had been asleep, he wasn’t anymore.  The ear-splitting crack of a bullet against the blackened metal skin of the useless automobile made Gabriel’s heart skip a beat.  The lightning fast shell had struck the lifeless car, pummeling through the thick door where his chest had been less than a moment before.

    The soldier closest to him turned around, feeling the vibrations traveling through the frame of the car.  Another shot grazed past the back of his helmet, missing his head by a hair.  There was a wordless exchange between the two young men.  It was a look lasting only a second, a silent expression only soldiers can understand.

    “They’re trying to outflank us,” the soldier yelled, overcoming the moment of terror that had brought his life within millimeters of its end.  Without another word, the soldier raised his rifle, pumping the wind-stirred streams of thick smoke with a fresh round of quick, deafening bursts of white-hot gunfire.  His shots were joined by a few others who pivoted around against their cover.

    Gabriel watched motionlessly as a fierce, semi-blind storm of bullets was unleashed into the choking, gray curtain.  He suddenly felt the warm metal of a rifle barrel under his sweaty, dirty fingertips.  Gabriel turned his head sharply, looking down between himself and the slouched, barely-conscious form of the sergeant he had carried through the valley.  He saw the older man’s hand subtly nudging the dust-covered weapon closer and away from himself.  His tired eyes, unable to stay locked on Gabriel’s for more than a dizzy moment, told the young corporal to pick it up.

    Gabriel nodded.  The harsh, nerve-splitting rattle of the powerful rifle filled Gabriel’s senses before he even realized the gun was firmly in his hands and his finger was on the trigger.  He was sitting upright, focusing past the sensation of the rifle’s butt recoiling mercilessly against his shoulder.  His eyes stared down the scratched and scathed barrel, past the instant flashes of the muzzle flare.  His aim was accurate but hardly precise.  It was too difficult to pick a specific target.  They were laying down a blanket, deterring the opportunity for their lives to be taken by those scurrying along the rising bluffs of the valley wall.

    Gabriel could see, first, one and the another figure stagger and collapse beyond the distance and smoke.  But where one fell or had turned and started retreating out of range, the corporal spotted another head pop up out of the sandy, bullet-riddled cover.  One blurry, distant face stayed visible too long, their moment of reconnaissance costing their life.  It was a long moment before Gabriel realized it was from his gun that fatal shot had sprung.

    The next squeeze of the trigger brought nothing.  The empty chamber clicked loudly.  Only a thin, silver trail of smoke emerged from the searing mouth of the rifle.  Out of instinct, Gabriel patted the pockets on the front of his uniform, searching for a fresh clip of ammunition.  It only tool a second for him to remember he had none.  His own spare magazines had been lost somewhere in the sandy brush and blood the previous night.  Gabriel looked down at the semi-conscious sergeant.  It took all of the wounded man’s strength to rotate his cold, heavy hand.

    A new bevy of bullets sprayed through the air from behind the scorched car.  The tortured metal rang out fiercely under the bloodthirsty maelstrom.  Gabriel ducked down closer to the sergeant while he felt the soldier to his right drop fearfully back against the car door.  A few of their peers grunted in pain, nearly not making it out of the changing fire line in time.

    “This is crazy,” the soldier braced against the car and Gabriel’s shoulder shouted.  “We’re not going to make it here!  There’s just too many of them!  We don’t have the ammo!”

    A young private stumbled out of the smoke, only to fall face first into the dirt a few dozen yards away.  Blood stains swelled on his flattened back.  Gabriel and the other soldier stared in numbed shock.  “Or the manpower,” the solider said gravely.

    Gabriel felt a small tug on the cuff of his dirty sleeve.  He turned his head, looking down toward the bloodstained fingers trying to tighten their grip about the dry and dusty hem of cloth.  The sergeant was trying to pull his arm, trying to bring Gabriel closer.  Gabriel leaned down.  He felt the hot air of the older man’s strained and raspy voice against his ear.  Gabriel couldn’t help that his skin felt like it was crawling around the sound of his scratchy, gravel-like words.  It wasn’t the sergeant’s fault.  He wasn’t trying to die.  It was just happening.

    Gabriel nodded his head when it seemed the words had stopped coming.  He straightened his torso upright again before leaning toward his right and the soldier at his side.  “Where’s the air support?  Has anyone called it in?”

    The soldier shook his head, “We cant’!  The com links are down!  Been that way since we jumped, I think!  There was a guy with a radio...a corporal, I think.  But, he went in with the first two squads!”
    “Went in where?”

    The soldier pointed to the left past Gabriel and the sergeant.  “Into the village, before the bombers showed up and cut our lines!”

    Gabriel’s eyes stared past the soldier’s stiff and outstretched arm.  He gazed uneasily at the evidence of the earlier fighting, the source of the noise and echoes that had rolled down the valley.  He imagined the scene of the brutal skirmish, spotting the bullet-dug holes in the village wall, sections of which were blackened or blown out altogether.  “Any chance he’s still in there?”

    The soldier shifted his gaze, peering at Gabriel for a moment as he considered the question.  “There’s always a chance for anything!  There’s a chance Santa Clause is in there, too!  But, that doesn’t mean he is, or that he’s alive even if he were!”

    Gabriel felt the sergeant tugging at his sleeve again.  Gabriel leaned down and listened carefully, patiently, to the slow and whispered voice that dragged itself out of the wounded man’s parched throat.  When the words stopped coming, Gabriel waited a moment to respond.  He understood what the older man was saying, not just the words used but the context, the meaning suggested and implied.

    Gabriel took a deep breath, finally nodding his head.  “Even if the operator is alive or dead, the radio is still in there!”

    “If it hasn’t been blasted into wall fragments or new bomb parts!”  The soldier at Gabriel’s side shook his head.  “That’s a big gamble, man!”

    “The biggest,” Gabriel said flatly, looking only at the ground in front of him.

    “Exactly!  And one I haven’t been willing to roll the dice on.  Not to risk what’s left of us out here making a mad dash for that gate!”

    “I’ll do it.”  The words were out of his mouth before he had fully thought it through, before Gabriel was even aware that he wanted to say it at all.  Not that it mattered.  What he wanted was of no consequence to what needed to be done.

    “What,” the soldier asked, surprised.  “You?”

    “Yeah,” Gabriel said, looking up at the young man for the first time in several minutes.  “Someone has to.  So I’ll do it.  I’ll go.  I’ll find the operator...or his radio.  And if our side’s is busted...well...they must have a way to communicate,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward the distant figures in the smoke and on the cliffs surrounding them beyond the car.

    “Do you even know how to work a radio?”

    Gabriel swallowed, staring into the dry and reddened eyes of the soldier next to him.  “Vaguely,” Gabriel answered.  “Enough to call for help, I think.”

    The soldier shook his head in disbelief.  “You’re crazy, man.  Bat-snot crazy!”

    Gabriel glanced down to his left.  The sergeant nodded his head once, subtly.  There was an air of approval, of respect about the dying man.  It was like that of a father, quietly proud of his son.  Gabriel smiled slightly, nodding his head in acknowledgement.

    “I may be crazy, but it’s time to try something other than sit here and wait to die!”

    Gabriel collected the last few clips of ammunition for the sergeant’s rifle out of the older man’s gear.  The soldier watched, realizing there was no changing Gabriel’s mind.  Suddenly, he didn’t want to change the corporal’s mind.  The young soldier was feeling something wash through him as he gazed at Gabriel, preparing to march off into the face of death.  It was a feeling that had been absent too long, missing for such a time he couldn’t know if he had ever truly felt it.  It was such a simple and pure sensation.  The soldier felt awake and alive again, rather than condemned to waiting for his turn to die.  The soldier was feeling hope.  He smiled, just a little and just for an instant.

    “We’ll provide covering fire while you make your sprint to the wall,” the soldier said to Gabriel.

    Gabriel nodded.  “Don’t waste too much ammo.  I can’t promise this will work.  I can only promise I will try.”

    The soldier nodded.  “I know.”

    Gabriel smiled warmly at him.  He glanced down at the sergeant while the soldier began to spread the word to their peers taking cover nearby.  The older man was nearly lost, his eyes no longer able to open past a thin sliver.  His breathing was quick and pained, each breath more shallow than the last.  Still, he was able to smile proudly, thankfully, at the corporal who had carried him over the rough terrain, who had never once given up on him.

    “Okay, friend,” the soldier said, tapping on Gabriel’s shoulder.  “We’ll fire when you’re ready.”

    Gabriel took a deep breath, his eyes lifting from the sergeant to fix in on the blasted wall.  He waited for only a moment.  Then, without any more hesitation, he said, “Ready.”