"Andy Duncan - Fortitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

shell and blew up with a sound like a rifle-shot pumpkin. Flaming shards
twinkled down on us, and the heat seared my face. But we kept walking, and
the column kept rolling forward, detouring around the flaming wreck --
that tight turning radius was serving us well today -- rumbling ahead,
guns firing, bullets pinging off the sides and whining past.
Each time I glanced around, Private Angelo and the others were still in
line, though each time the line was a man or two fewer; and so I soon
stopped glancing around. I tried to refocus my thoughts enough to be proud
of those tank boys. I remembered my final orders to them:
Remember that you are the first American tanks. You must establish the
fact that AMERICAN TANKS DO NOT SURRENDER. As long as one tank is able to
move it must go forward. Its presence will save the lives of hundreds of
infantry and kill many Germans.
Surely I should have been shot by now. Had I changed my destiny? Merely by
walking on the right rather than the left? Was war that meaningless? I
refused to accept it. Suddenly I knew: I was going to be shot, no matter
what I did. But when?
"Strange clouds, Colonel," Private Angelo said. I looked up into that
roiling brown sea of dust, smoke, and gas that for days had been our sky
and saw ranks upon ranks of soldiers, their shapes outlined like those of
men standing a distance away in fog, their faces indistinct and
unreadable. Yet I knew who they were. They were my ancestors. They were my
grandfather, my granduncle, and all the soldiers in our line, and all the
soldiers who, at one time, I had enjoyed the honor of being.
They had looked down on me that other Sept. 26, moments before I was shot,
and they had given me a feeling of great satisfaction, a certainty that I
was doing as they would have done, and that whatever happened, I was a
true soldier, a man, a Patton. But now, looking up at those ghostly ranks,
I felt only a tautness in my gut, a parched mouth, and shame.
"Angelo," I barked.
"Sir?"
"Maintain the march." Without looking behind, I darted between two of the
tanks, emerged on the left side of the column. Head down and pistols
drawn, I sprinted alongside, outrunning the tanks, teeth bared, looking
only at the soupy, pockmarked, bone-and-metal-glinting mud beneath my
feet, refusing to look into the sky again until -- and then came the
bullet like a fist to my left leg, and though I staggered on another forty
feet I knew I was down. I managed to holster both pistols before my
wounded leg planted itself in the mud like a post and jerked me to a stop,
forcing me to pivot and topple in a slow spiral until I was face down in
the flesh-smelling sludge. No pain, not yet, not in the leg. I heaved
myself onto my back, spat dirt, and glared at the empty khaki sky.
"Hatred works, too," I said, and blacked out.
I came to just as a long white bone, a femur I think, moved past my eyes,
followed by a canteen, several rocks, a mound of something rotten, and a
brick-colored puddle that was rushing to refill itself, having just been
disturbed by something, perhaps a foot. I couldn't breathe. I was upside
down, bent double. Someone was carrying me on his shoulder. Then I
remembered.
"Angelo," I said.