The Psycho Soldiers by John Cutter

Author:John Cutter [Cutter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2015-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

11: The Dawn Skirmish

“There are supposed to be two sentries,” Milner was saying. “One over there where he can watch the approach from the woods and the fields as well as the road…” He pointed through the washed-out dawn light to the first bend in the road, just up ahead. “He’ll be just around that bend, unless they’ve changed things. And one will be on the second floor, watching the prisoners — maybe camped out in the hall. Then there’s supposed to be a guy just inside the kitchen door watching the back. But the Swenson bunch are lazy and disorganized. They just might be slacking off.”

“Yeah,” Sullivan said. “Like sleeping rattlesnakes.”

They had parked the van behind a screen of brush ten yards off the gravel road that led to the farmhouse. It was a dead-end road, and there were no other houses on it.

Sullivan, Beth, and Milner stood just off the road in a stand of trees. Sullivan had the Heckler & Koch assault rifle slung over his shoulder. On his hip: the Colt .357. On the bandolier across his chest were two hand grenades. Milner and Beth each carried an M16. Milner also toted the Beretta and two grenades.

Birds chirped for the morning in the trees around them.

The ground mist was rising to its rendezvous with the sun, wreathing the tree trunks of the small deciduous woods on both sides of the road.

Sullivan tossed the smoking butt of a Lucky Strike onto the road and looked up at the top of a big, gnarled elm tree a few yards in front of him. “Dammit,” he muttered, “it looks like I’m going to have to climb that fucker.” After a night without sleep, he was in no mood to climb trees. He’d been climbing Beth’s limbs for hours already…

“What the hell,” he said more briskly, “maybe it’ll wake me up.”

He took off the bandolier — it wouldn’t be wise to get a hand grenade snagged on a branch — and laid the assault rifle aside. He grabbed the lowest branch that looked like it would hold his weight and, grunting, hauled himself up. After a few minutes of climbing, he “got into it.” He remembered the feel of the tree limbs, resilient and alive under his hands when he was a boy. He’d climbed trees like this one to plant his own improvised flag atop them so he could see it from a distance, and think: I planted that flag there. That’s my tree. That’s my mark on the world.

He remembered the photo of himself as a young man he’d seen in Beth’s copy of the SOF, and wondered again if there were anything left in him of that idealistic young man. That picture had been taken just before the young Jack Sullivan had gone off to Vietnam. And Vietnam had changed him forever. He’d found his vocation there — but sometimes he thought he’d left all his humanity there, too. And maybe that was part of the explanation

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