Page 20 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“What’s happening?” Bell asked. Despite all the action Bell had seen in his life, this was his first time in actual combat and he found the experience wholly bewildering.
“I’m not sure. This is too big of an attack for a simple probe, but not large enough yet to draw forces away from our main offensive in the north.” Everly gulped water from a canteen, using some of it to sluice blood off the side of his face from his ruined ear.
“What now?” Bell gulped from his own canteen.
“I need to get you the hell out of here, but to do that we need to get to our lines. Only way there now is on the surface.”
Bell immediately grasped the problem. “With Germans shooting at us from the rear and your boys shooting at us from the front.”
“You catch on fast. Might make a soldier out of you after all.”
There were no ladders to climb out of the trench, so they had to head back toward the British lines again and carefully scale the debris blown into the trench by the explosives. The ground was unstable, and acrid smoke from the blasts coiled up through the loose dirt like brimstone. As they neared ground level, the sound of rifle fire intensified because the Allied soldiers in the middle set of trenches were trying to stop the advancing Germans from reaching their goal.
Bell and Everly had a hundred-plus yards of open ground to cover that wasn’t exactly open. Like the no-man’s-land to their rear, the Allies had sown the ground between the trenches with barbed wire and other obstacles. Also the land still bore countless crater holes from the years it had been disputed over between the two sides. Some would serve as good cover, others were inescapable pits filled with diseased mud.
Random bullets zipped and pinged near them as they lay on their bellies and tried to acclimate to the surrounding chaos that seemed to draw closer with each passing second. Behind and below them came the sound of men’s voices, dozens of them. They were British soldiers making a break from the first trench to the second, running down the connecting dugout, not knowing it had already been blown. It was the headlong rush of panic and it turned out to be something the Germans had anticipated.
A new bloom of light appeared on the battlefield, a directed jet of fire that lanced down into the trench at the pack of running Tommies. They ran into the wall of fire from the German flamethrower and the screams of agony pierced the night. The German carrying the awful weapon raked the stream of flickering death back and forth until the trench was filled with burning men.
The range was too much for his pistol, so Bell took off at a sprint, running hard for the soldier and his flamethrower, heedless of the rest of the battle still raging around him. He needed to take out the shock trooper quickly in case there were more British soldiers trying to make it to their line. With the element of surprise on his side, he could chance getting closer than necessary.
Bell stopped at a hundred feet and raised his pistol. He was so focused on killing the flamethrower bearer he never saw the other one standing on the opposite side of the communications trench.
There was no warning before the roar of jellied oil shot from the flamethrower wand carried by a second team of soldiers. Bell saw the flare out of the corner of his eye, a streaking finger of flame reaching out for him at sickening speed. The merest brush by the wavering jet of fire would turn him into a human pyre.
He hadn’t paid attention to the ground around him as he’d charged the first flamethrower team, so he had no idea what wasbehind him when he launched himself backward. He expected to become entangled on a nest of barbed wire just as the flame reached him and so he closed his eyes and awaited his fate.
Bell didn’t hit the ground for a second and a half and he didn’t hit the ground at all. He’d thrown himself backward into a crater carved out the previous year by a French battleship cannon mounted on a reinforced railway carriage when this territory had been controlled by the German army.
He splashed into a body of stagnant water a dozen yards wide and sank below its surface just as the jet of flaming oil streaked over the crater like a comet with its tail on fire. Even with his eyes closed, Bell could sense the brightness of the flame overhead and feel its heat boiling the top inches of the fetid pool. He let himself sink a little deeper, dazzled by the light he could see through his closed eyes.
The flaming streak suddenly vanished. Bell swam to the surface and cautiously pulled himself from the water. A sniper from the Allied lines had hit the fuel canister carried on the German’s back. He’d vanished along with an assistant carrying a spare tank of fuel in a fiery spire that rose fifty feet.
A moment later another massive gush of fire lit up the night when the sniper found the original flamethrower team with a perfectly placed shot. That fiery blast took out an eight-man German patrol.
Bell dragged himself out of the crater and made his way back to where he’d left Everly.
“Are you mad?” the sergeant major asked.
“As a hatter, according to my wife,” Bell said.
“Joke aside, if you were one of my boys, I’d dress you down for half an hour, then put you in for a gong, maybe even the Vic Cross. Damned brave thing just then.”
“Futile, too. It wasn’t me who took them out, but one of your marksmen.”
“Then you can forget all about the VC,” Everly said with a gallows chuckle. “Let’s haul ourselves out of here. This is far from over.”
10
Crawling through the mud onelbows and hips, it took Everly and Bell twenty minutes to reach the approach to the second set of Allied trenches. Bullets cracked and whizzed over their heads the whole way as the Germans tried to press their advantage and overwhelm the sector. Both men were covered in mud, but at least Everly’s inner clothing was relatively dry. Bell was soaked to the skin and the chill night air was slowly freezing up his joints.
“Pomegranate,” Everly yelled in a sort of stage whisper when they were closing in on the line. He didn’t want the Germans to overhear the code word for a Brit caught in the open, but he also had to be heard over the sounds of war. When he got no answer, he abandoned stealth and bellowed the word at the top of his lungs.
The Tommies firing over them from the top of the second trench paused their murderous fusillade long enough for Everly to shout “Pomegranate” again and flash the silvery side of his canteen as a facsimile of a white flag.
“Oi!” shouted a Brit. “Who’s there?”
“Sergeant Major Everly and another man. We were ambushed on the first line.”
