The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 171

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Then the mine exploded under his right foot. It felt as though someone had hit him with a full swing of a crow-bat under the sole.

There was no pain, just that stunning slam of shock into his foot, driven up his spine until his jaws clashed and he felt his tongue split between his teeth, bitten clean through.

No pain, just the deafening implosion of the shock-wave into his eardrums, as though somebody had held a double-barrelled shotgun, close to his head and fired both barrels together.

No pain, just the blinding rush of dust and smoke past his face, and then he was flung into the air as though he were the plaything of a callous giant, and he came down again on his belly. The wind driven from his lungs, so he wheezed for breath, his mouth filled with blood from his bitten tongue. His eyes were stinging from flying grit and smoke. He wiped them clear and Roland's face was in front of his, hazy and wavering like a heat mirage. Roland's lips were moving, but Craig could not hear the words. His ears buzzed viciously from the blast.

"It's all right, Roly," he said, and his own voice was almost lost in the singing memory of the explosion. "I'm all right," Craig repeated.

He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position. His left leg stuck straight out ahead of him, the inside of the calf was lacerated and discoloured purple black from the explosion, and blood oozed from out of the opening of his short khaki pants, shrapnel must have flown up into his buttocks and lower belly, but the velskoen was still on his left foot. He tried to move his foot and it responded immediately, waggling at him reassuringly.

But there was something wrong. He was dazed and groggy, his ears still dinning, yet through it he realized there was something dreadfully wrong and then gradually it dawned on him.

There was no right leg, just the short fat stump of it sticking out of the leg of his pants. The heat of the explosion had cauterized the raw end of the stump, and seared it white-, the dead bloodless white of frostbite. He stared at it, and knew it was a trick of his eyesight, because he could feel his leg was still there. He tried to move the missing foot, and he felt it move, but there was nothing there.

"Roly." Even through the din in his ears, he heard the high hysterical tone of his own voice. "Roly, my leg. Oh God, my leg!

It's gone!" Then at last the blood came, bursting through the hear seared flesh in bright arterial spurts.

"Roly, help me!" Roland stepped over him, squatting with a foot on each side of Craig's body, his back to Craig, screening him from his own mutilated lower body. Roland unrolled the canvas wallet that contained his field medical kit, and strapped the tourniquet from it around the stump. The haemorrhage shrivelled and he bound the field-dressing over the stump. He worked quickly, with the dexterity of practice and experience, and the second that he finished, he swivelled to look into Craig's pale dusty sweat-streaked face.

"Sonny, the Claymores. Can you do the Claymores? For her sake, Sonny, try!" Craig stared at him. "Sonny for Janine," Roland whispered, and pulled him up into a sitting position. "Try! For her sake, try!" "Side-cutters!" Craig mumbled, staring with great hurt eyes at the blood-soaked turban that wrapped his stump. "Find my side-cutters!" Roland pressed the tool into his hand. "Turn me onto my belly, "Craig said.

Roland rolled him carefully, and Craig began to slide himself forward, walking his elbows in the torn dusty earth, he dragged his one remaining leg over the shallow crater left by the exploding AP mine, and then stopped and reached forward. There was the guitar twang, as the first trip-wire parted in the jaws of the cutter, and, laboriously as a maimed insect squashed under a gardener's heel, Craig dragged himself onto the very edge of the minefield. For the last time he reached out. His hand was shaking wildly, and he seized his own wrist with his left hand to steady it, sobbing with the effort he guided the open jaws of the cutter over the hair-thin steel wire, and bore down.

It went with a ping, and Craig dropped the tool.

"Okay, it's open," he sobbed, and Roland pulled the lanyard out of the vee of his shirt, and lifted the whistle to his lips. He blew a single crisp blast, and pumped his arm over his head.

"Let's go!" The Scouts came through the minefield at a run, keeping their rigid ten-pace separation, following the zigzag of the tape that Craig had laid down the corridor to guide them. As each one of them came to where Craig still lay on his belly, they jumped lightly over his back and melted away into the open bush, beyond the minefield, spreading out into their running formation. Roland lingered a second longer at Craig's side.

"I can't spare anyone to stay with you, Sonny." He laid the medical kit beside his head. "There is morphine for when it gets too bad." He laid something else beside the medical kit. It was a hand-grenade. "The terrs may get to you before our boys do. Don't let them take you. A grenade is messy, but effective." Then Roland leaned forward and kissed Craig on the forehead. "Bless you, Sonny!" he said, and then he was on his feet going forward again at a run ". Within seconds, the thick riverine Zambezi bush had swallowed him, and slowly Craig lowered his face into the crook of his arm.

Then, at last, the pain came at him like a ravening lion.

Commissar Tungata Zebiwe crouched in the bottom of the slit trench, and listened to the husky voice speaking from the portable radio.

"They are through the minefield, coming down to the river.

His observers were on the north bank of the Zambezi, in carefully prepared positions from which they could sweep the opposite bank and the small heavily wooded islands that split the shallows of the wide river-course.

"How many?"Tungata asked into the microphone. "No count yet." Of course, they would be mere flickers of movement in the darkening bush, impossible to get a head count, as they came forward in overlapping covering rushes. Tungata looked up at the sky, there was less than an hour before dark, he estimated, and felt a fresh onslaught of the doubts that had beset him ever since he had brought his cadre through the drifts almost three hours before.

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