Under Attack: A World War II Novel (Sgt. Hawk Book 3), page 1
UNDER ATTACK
SGT. HAWK BOOK THREE
PATRICK CLAY
Under Attack
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2022 (As Revised) Patrick Clay
Rough Edges Press
An Imprint of Wolfpack Publishing
5130 S. Fort Apache Rd. 215-380
Las Vegas, NV 89148
roughedgespress.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.
eBook ISBN 978-1-68549-116-1
Paperback ISBN 978-1-68549-117-8
CONTENTS
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Flames of Death
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
A Look at Book Four:
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About the Author
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To Mr. and Mrs. N.B. Clay
UNDER ATTACK
FLAMES OF DEATH
Hawk stared wildly into the eyes of one of the Japanese gunners. The machine gun sputtered blinding flashes that registered deep within his retinas. A violent concussion filled his helmet, brilliant red oozed down over his eyes. He was deafened by a powerful ringing. He didn’t realize it, but a slug had landed in his helmet and rolled around inside it, taking pieces of flesh with it. He pulled one of the flamethrower’s triggers.
The world instantly divided in two. A red-orange world roared in front of the nozzle, and behind it was the only slightly less uncomfortable world that Hawk stood upon. The concussion of the ignition and the steady cushion of threatening heat caused Hawk to stagger back. He rallied his waning energy and pointed the nozzle higher. The machine gun stopped. He lapped the flame repeatedly across the mouth of the cave. Popping explosions came out of the volcanic gunpit as the ammunition went up. Cries screeched from within the hissing flame. Nine seconds of hell, and then it was over. Nine seconds was enough.
1
Fog swirled around the tops of the mountains, and between them. Stark red explosions pulsated through the haze. Yellow smoke shimmered off the edges of the explosions. The grey fog inhaled the smoke, making it part of itself.
“I know I can’t do it,” said the tight-lipped young man. He shook his head. “No.” His eyes were closed. Beside him crouched a second boy hugging his rifle and gently rocking himself. This one could say nothing. His eyes were open.
Sgt. Hawk slumped down with a tired groan. He didn’t tell them that they had to go on. He didn’t belittle them or plead with them. It was too serious for that. Either you would do it or you would not. He unsnapped his canteen and took a slow drink, staring all the while into the eyes of Joe Canlon below him on the slope. Joe’s eyes were narrowed and twitching on each side of his warped nose. The nervous charges of energy that filled his body caused perpetual motion across his features. He wanted to stay here on the slope with the others. He would go on, if Hawk did.
Between Hawk and Canlon lay Pharmacist’s Mate George Simpson. He had felt the same way. His neck had taken an oversized, L-shaped piece of shrapnel. The L was still there, folding his head back on one blood-blackened shoulder. Joe Canlon turned away from this, looking over his own shoulder and back down the mountainside. Ray Neal with a bullet through his head. John Romano in several glistening pieces, scattered in a circle around Neal. He had known all these men. They had drunk coffee together this morning. They weren’t ordinary men. They had all volunteered to do this. Some found out that they weren’t up to the task. Most of them didn’t live that long.
It was a little island off of the coast of New Guinea and World War II was only a year or so old. The island had a name but that would soon be forgotten. It was the island of the here and now. They were told to clear the cave-riddled hills of the Japanese invaders. Eventually, they—or someone—would. It was the type of assignment that took away all your friends, everyone you knew, all within a matter of minutes. It was a quick reorganization of the world as you knew it.
Hawk was fresh from a campaign of a different sort. It had been a long and costly affair, with the men disappearing at a slow and inevitable rate. It was grinding, demoralizing, easily capable of driving the best of men mad by the sheer length of time involved. This was different. This took your mind and spirit and hammered them flat, making it as difficult to function as it would be to play the piano with a mashed thumb. You were no longer human, no longer capable of being demoralized, no longer possessed of anything that could go mad. You had gone beyond all of that. Hawk replaced his canteen. Facts registered within his brain as he coldly filtered out the confusing run of feelings.
He ran his calloused hand along the sharp edge of his submachine gun’s burnished surface. He attached a fifty-round drum to the Thompson. This was one of the times he would need that many rounds.
“You going, Joe?” he asked under his breath. He didn’t look back at his friend.
“For a ways, I guess.”
“Let’s go.”
They scrambled over the rocks, grabbing the wiry grass to steady themselves. The grass had a residue of smoke and ash sticking to it that blackened their hands. Hawk’s shirt hung open as he climbed. An unbroken chain of funnel-shaped ricochets squealed between them. Canlon flattened and waited for the machine gun fire to subside. Hawk kept going. Bent at the waist, panting and climbing, he squinted at the gun-pits above him and held his fire. He thrust his heavy boot over the corpse of a marine and lay in the gravelly soil beside it. He would wait for Joe to catch up. He looked over at the face of the dead man. He had known him well. He too had been a veteran of Guadalcanal. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken with the man, but it couldn’t have been very long ago—probably about nothing important. He looked away and out to the sea behind him. The vision of the soulless face stayed with him.
He snapped his head around. His mouth was closed and angry now. His fiery blue eyes counted the machine guns above him. To the right, to the left, they stretched into infinity. He could see maybe ten. Some were closer than the others so that they might protect each other. They formed a coughing meat grinder with interlocking blades. Sweat ran from beneath the domed shadow of his helmet and down the side of his face. He clenched his teeth and swallowed. His bronze skin was flushed Choctaw red. Canlon’s helmet bumped into the sole of his worn boot. He had finally made it up. Time to go on.
To the right he could see several other marines daring the climb. These were the bravest of the brave, the ones who would go on, no matter what. Two of them fell and rolled limply down the mountain. From where Hawk stood, it looked as if they had done so for no particular reason. He couldn’t see what had struck them. A third man knelt and clutched at his face. His scream was high-pitched at first and then deep and bellowing on the wind.
The pounding of the machine guns increased until the hammering staccato reports blended into a single vibrating roar. The men in the caves swung their weapons back and forth, blanketing the mountainside with exploding fountains of lead. It must have been a magnificent spectacle from the elevated perspective of the Japanese, but the beauty of it was lost on the men struggling up the middle of the slope. They saw only the deadly fog, pushing the gunsmoke down into their ranks in great rolling swells. Hawk had gone farther than this. He could see the enemy gunners. He could see the ring-coiled barrels of their automatic weapons, the conical flash-guards on the muzzles of the guns and even the shadows they cast upon the rocks as they glided to and fro. The Japanese were pointing out targets and talking to one another. He watched in fascination. They didn’t move like real men. The movements were quicker, more than real; the slightest gesture was dreadful and important. They were ghouls, insatiable monsters perched above him. His raging anger died. Anger no longer comforted him. Too many had died. His pupils shrank into his eyes as a dreamy daze overtook him. Sanity and the instinct of self-preservation evaporated from the remnants of his vicious spirit. Keep going. Get them. Kill them. That’s all you can do, now. Pay them back.
Behind the mountaintop, the sky was a deep, rich black. Neon reflections of slashing machine gun fire splashed against it like heat lightning. The filthy air was heavy with a burning chemical odor. It was hard to breathe. Down below, Canlon gave hand signals. Men began climbing up to him from somewhere. He waited. Hawk didn’t. He climbed on alone.
A snaking line of fire spewed down the slope in the direction of the sergeant. Hawk fell and let it dance over him. The burst of fire stopped, took a breath, and came after him again, pouncing on him and playing all around him. Chips of rock and metal splattered his face and rang off his helmet. When the fire ceased, he judged himself to still be in one piece. Holes like cigarette burns dotted his cloth helmet cover, where
Hawk lay behind a sheltering boulder and breathed deeply. His hairy chest heaved with exertion and flooding adrenalin. He muttered an obscenity and rummaged through his pockets for some chewing tobacco. Today they would get him. Soon. His time was up. Where in God’s name did all that lead come from? Fire chewed and slapped at the stone around his ears. The battle had started less than two hours ago, and already grime and tiredness had worn their way into the marrow of his bones. Canlon dropped beside him in a fear-exhausted heap.
“Third platoon got over the top,” Canlon shouted. “They say third platoon is on the other side of the mountain.”
“Can’t be,” Hawk said. His eyes were aimed at the ocean far behind him. Naval guns thundered in the distance. Landing craft, followed by white wakes, continued to congregate on the shore at the foot of the slope. Hawk’s eyes didn’t blink. He chewed slowly on a plug of tobacco. “They couldn’t get through this.”
“Japs let ‘em through.” Canlon held onto his helmet with both hands. “Bait, I guess.” Hawk nodded. Maybe it was true. The Japanese might have suckered them up there. They might be doing the same thing to Hawk. They certainly weren’t being obvious about it. But then he hadn’t run into any concentrations of artillery, or mortars. It could be true. Hawk spat.
“Wonder what them ships is shootin’ at?” he asked Canlon.
“I don’t know. Ain’t doin’ us no good.”
“That’s for goddam sure.” Smoke still simmered off the Cutts compensator and it wafted between their faces. “How many left in the squad?”
“Our squad? None, I don’t figure. There’s some fellas comin’ up behind me. They’re from McGuiness’s squad,” Canlon stuttered. He was shaking. The front of his dungarees were wet where he had urinated and dust caked the damp spot.
Hawk spat again. “Crazy. Just crazy,” he muttered in a strange tone. Where was McGuiness? McGuiness had told them that it was crazy. They didn’t know it, but McGuiness had been vaporized, two hundred yards down the slope. He had a wife and three children.
Hawk’s dead eyes watched the green gathering of marines below Canlon. He had seen the eyes of so many dead men that his own had taken on that all-knowing look they had. His ears were deaf to the roaring machine guns. The senses could handle only so much. He heard the closer sounds of the thousands of metal slugs cutting through the wind. Each one carried its own vibrating buzz. Collide with one of those buzzes and you were dead. That invisible whir could turn your face into a broken ketchup bottle, or your bones into scattered talcum powder. He could see the bullets streaming down from above in a veritable cascade. They looked like molten rocks being thrown down in angry disarray. But when they struck, it was in a pattern, in a line on the ground or across a human being.
Sgt. Hawk told them again that they would have to keep going. He didn’t want to tell them that. It would have been easier to walk into a bullet and end his responsibilities. But he would fight to stay alive and make them do the same. He stood, and most of them followed his example, half standing, half crouching, nervously prepared to fall on the ground before being knocked onto it. He hoped that he was right and that it was all worth it. He was the sort of man who felt it was easier to die than to order another man to die. He would never be an officer. He never died, either. Or so it seemed. Everyone else did, and still he remained.
Then the first of the heavy mortar shelling began. Hawk’s gullet tightened to the size of a pencil. Everyone fell to the earth.
“Looks like the good times are over,” Hawk roared at Canlon. Little noises crawled out of Joe’s throat, though his lips were welded tightly together. His clinging fingers were buried up to their second joints in the rocky soil.
The island of New Guinea had been partially liberated, though the major portion as well as the surrounding waters were still hotly contested. The city of New Oss was one of the first freed of Japanese occupation by the U. S. Army. The Empire’s southern outpost, the stronghold at Rabaul, was so close that the town would always be subject to recapture. Nevertheless, Sir Richard St. Cyr considered it a safe place. Since the Battle of the Coral Sea, it was as safe as Australia—if you considered Australia safe. And he did. He had an interest in all of this, a personal interest.
Sir Richard adjusted his dinner jacket as he looked about the tables in the Cafe Aoflt Bonte. A local merchant was seated at his table and that irritated him, but he didn’t let on to his fiancée, Monica Asquith, that he was miffed. Sir
Richard allowed the maître d’ to seat them at another table, toying nonchalantly with the wine list as the maître d’ bowed and backed away. One would not have been able to tell from his outward appearance that he was upset. Miss Asquith certainly didn’t notice.
An assortment of Indonesian musicians played Continental music quietly on the far side of the room, where the better tables were located. The people dining here did not come for local color or to hear strange island compositions. Most of them lived here and had had all the local color that one lifetime can tolerate. They came for a touch of the old country. Chandeliers hung in swaying dignity from the ceiling, elegant drapes covered the windows, blocking out the miserable exterior of New Oss. Everyone was dressed. One had to dress to be allowed into the Aoflt Bonte.
“It’s lovely,” Miss Asquith said, adjusting the white lace at her throat. “Isn’t it exciting! It’s quite a civilized place after all, I think.”
“Of course, my dear,” said Sir Richard.
“Do you think that such a thing could be done? The concept is so appalling. Your own nation,” she laughed, shuddering with glee.
“Without a doubt. The empire passed away first and the commonwealth will follow, along with the colonies of its members. They’re all things of the past. The war will take care of such anachronisms. I’ve always been accused of being a conservative, but I think that I’m actually quite progressive. Independence is the politics of the future. And I’ll be there at the outset. I’ve already done it, in fact.” He leaned forward across the table and whispered this with mock confidentiality.
Sir Richard wanted his own country, not a humble ambition, even if the nation were to be Malang on the coast of New Guinea. The astounding thing was, he did already have it. The Americans had liberated the ex-Australian territory and subsequently abandoned it to the primitive natives. The U.S. didn’t really care if the Australians and the Dutch ever settled their endless squabbling over the worthless real estate, just so the Japanese didn’t try to reclaim it. Sir Richard had stepped into the loose organization set up and left by the Japanese, declaring himself to be interim administrator of the Malang territorial province. He gradually began calling himself governor, using the term interchangeably with administrator, but was becoming more stubborn about leaving the word “territory” off the official title of Malang. “Territory” would be dropped, and “governor” would be replaced by “prime minister”—or perhaps even something else. He didn’t need Australia. What had it ever done for the region? Private corporations had taken all this risk and made all the advances here. What could Australia do? Send a gunboat? Against white settlers? Preposterous.
“Friends in high places, being in the proper situation at an opportune moment—these are the things that history is made of.’’ He smiled across his wine glass at her. Despite an irrational vein of ambition, he was a dashing fellow, with sleepy hazel eyes and a sparkling smile. He had once been handsome, and egotistical enough to make a fair living as an actor before he got into politics. His companion was half his age. She didn’t seem to mind that as she touched her glass to his. The glasses clinked daintily. He poured some of his wine into her glass.
