Three Kingdoms (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 9) by Andy Maslen

Author:Andy Maslen [Maslen, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tyton Press
Published: 2019-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

“You! Private Wolfe! What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Pick up your rifle and fix bayonet. You heard what Captain Liu said. We’re going over the top in five minutes. When that whistle blows, all I want to see is your arse disappearing over the lip of this trench.”

Gabriel looked down. He’d been calculating his chances of surviving the first day of the Battle of the Somme on his abacus. It didn’t look good.

“Yes, sergeant,” he said, placing the abacus in the mud and picking up his short Lee-Enfield by its wooden fore-end and slotting home the foot-long bayonet.

Overhead, shells were whistling towards the German lines from the Royal Artillery battery five miles to the rear. The crumps from the two-hundred pounders shook the earth and sent vibrations running up his shins and into his belly. Machine guns chattered from the eastern end of the redoubt and men’s screams cut through the mechanical noises like the very demons of hell in their torments.

He looked left and right. At his mates. The young lads he’d joined up with from Suffolk. Dusty Rhodes. Daisy Cheaney. Smudge Smith, the only black man in their whole regiment. And Britta Falskog and Eli Schochat, faces smeared with mud, lips set in straight lines of grim determination, rifles gripped in white-knuckled hands. Odd that they allowed lasses to fight, rather than keeping them well back behind the lines as nurses or auxiliaries. Still, needs must.

Suddenly, all along the line, whistles starting blowing, their shrill calls to arms sending everyone clambering up the ladders and over the top.

“Come on, you Suffolks! Let’s give them a taste of British steel!”

This was Sar’nt Major Webster, striding along the duckboards, firing up his troops. They loved “The Boss,” as they called him. The officers were wet-behind-the-ears public schoolboys but The Boss had seen real action. In Afghanistan and South Africa. They trusted him.

Gabriel clutched his rifle in his right hand and mounted the ladder. Seconds later, heart racing faster than a runaway horse, he broached the lip of the trench and was rushing headlong into the smoke and the fire, weaving left and right, working the Lee-Enfield’s bolt back and forth and firing at the distant spot he hoped was the enemy.

The mud was the devil’s own work to traverse. Thick and sticky, like brown glue, punctuated with body parts, here a lower leg, its khaki puttee unwinding like a filthy bandage, there a bodyless head, its eyes staring upwards.

He heard a scream to his left. He turned, only to see Smudge falling, his lower jaw shot away. He pressed on, crouching to reload his rifle. But the bullets were the wrong calibre. Stupid little snub-nosed pistol rounds when he needed the long .303 rifle cartridges.

Another screech of agony. Dusty toppled backwards, a knife sticking out of his neck. The logo on the hilt – Beck – suggested to him it was of German manufacture.

Gabriel charged forward, yelling defiance at the enemy, squinting through the smoke in his frantic attempt to keep on track, running towards their position.

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