Page 15 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
In a move even faster than the German’s knife thrust, Bell took hold of the hood and whipped the two-pound metal filter around the German’s neck.
He caught the book-sized tin in his left hand while smashing his foot into the German’s right knee.
The joint buckled with a slurping pop and the soldier spiraled to that side as he went down.
He was now facing away enough so that when Bell tightened the hose around his neck, the vulcanized rubber and canvas crushed in on the man’s airway.
By the time he tried to stab back at Bell, the veteran detective had placed a knee against the man’s spine to better control him and to exert even more force, ratcheting up the tension until the soldier was clutching at his throat with hands that grew weaker and weaker.
Bell didn’t ease up until the German had gone still for fifteen seconds.
He rolled off the man and lay on the trench floor, panting with exertion and raw emotion. He took only a second for himself before remembering Everly. He scrambled over to the short noncom just as the man groaned and pushed himself off the ground with his hands.
“Are you all right?” Bell asked, loading his last magazine.
Like Bell, Everly needed only a second to recall their dire situation. “Doesn’t matter if I’m not.”
He lurched to his feet, staggered a few steps until Bell steadied him with an arm.
Bell left behind his rifle because he was out of spare clips, and so with pistol in hand, he and Everly shuffled down the trench, following its zigzag course for what seemed an eternity.
The air was thick with the sound of constant gunfire and reeked of gunpowder, while overhead dozens of flares burned brilliantly as they drifted under their chutes.
Over the din of battle, Bell heard soldiers running up behind them. Everly heard them, too, and both men turned as an advance patrol of German soldiers appeared around a sharp bend in the trench. The three-man patrol was surprised by the unexpected encounter, but Bell and Everly were ready.
With Bell on the right and Everly to his left, they each fired at the man on their side of the trench, putting them down with a single shot, and then both men fired at the soldier in the middle, blowing him back in a swirl of his greatcoat.
The two men turned and ran on. A few hundred yards later, Everly began shouting “Pomegranate” over and over. Bell realized it was a recognition code to the men stationed at the central defensive line to warn them that friendlies were inbound and not advancing German troops.
Bullets suddenly peppered the sandbag wall over Bell’s shoulder, showering him with grit.
He dropped flat as the sound of two rifles firing at once crashed against his ears.
Everly had just rounded another tight bend and rushed back.
Two Germans were above them and were about to jump into the trench.
One was in the air when the sergeant major’s Webley roared.
The leaping soldier changed direction in midair when the heavy bullet hit him center mass, as though he were a rag doll in a terrier’s mouth.
He landed in a contorted lump. The second German didn’t look like he’d been hit at all, but struck the ground face-first without any attempt to protect himself.
He lay completely still, his spine severed by a lucky shot.
“Pomegranate,” Everly shouted again as he and Bell continued their race back toward a modicum of safety.
A hundred yards ahead, the earth began to erupt, great clots of mud soaring into the artificially lit sky to be joined by dazzling blooms of rolling fire.
The concussion knocked both men off their feet despite the distance and the protection of the trench walls.
Seconds later, clouds of dust boiled down the trench’s confines, a billowing malevolence that engulfed them in a filthy haze.
“Sapper charges,” Everly shouted and coughed at the same time. “They’re blowing the trench.”
Another pair of blasts shook the night, closer than the first, and then a third and fourth.
“Come on,” Everly said and began running back toward the advancing Germans.
Another blast jolted the earth out from under them, the biggest of the night, and once again they were sent sprawling.
Bell looked back to the west and saw the connecting ditch had been collapsed by the specifically laid charges in order to prevent German forces from using it as a means of breaching the second line of entrenched fortifications.
“We can’t stay here,” Everly told him as they got back onto their feet.
“What’s happening?” Bell asked. Despite all the action Bell had seen in his life, this was his first time in actual combat and he found the experience wholly bewildering.
“I’m not sure. This is too big of an attack for a simple probe, but not large enough yet to draw forces away from our main offensive in the north.” Everly gulped water from a canteen, using some of it to sluice blood off the side of his face from his ruined ear.
“What now?” Bell gulped from his own canteen.
“I need to get you the hell out of here, but to do that we need to get to our lines. Only way there now is on the surface.”
Bell immediately grasped the problem. “With Germans shooting at us from the rear and your boys shooting at us from the front.”
“You catch on fast. Might make a soldier out of you after all.”
There were no ladders to climb out of the trench, so they had to head back toward the British lines again and carefully scale the debris blown into the trench by the explosives.
The ground was unstable, and acrid smoke from the blasts coiled up through the loose dirt like brimstone.
As they neared ground level, the sound of rifle fire intensified because the Allied soldiers in the middle set of trenches were trying to stop the advancing Germans from reaching their goal.
Bell and Everly had a hundred-plus yards of open ground to cover that wasn’t exactly open.
Like the no-man’s-land to their rear, the Allies had sown the ground between the trenches with barbed wire and other obstacles.
Also the land still bore countless crater holes from the years it had been disputed over between the two sides.
Some would serve as good cover, others were inescapable pits filled with diseased mud.
Random bullets zipped and pinged near them as they lay on their bellies and tried to acclimate to the surrounding chaos that seemed to draw closer with each passing second.
Behind and below them came the sound of men’s voices, dozens of them.
They were British soldiers making a break from the first trench to the second, running down the connecting dugout, not knowing it had already been blown.
It was the headlong rush of panic and it turned out to be something the Germans had anticipated.
A new bloom of light appeared on the battlefield, a directed jet of fire that lanced down into the trench at the pack of running Tommies.
They ran into the wall of fire from the German flamethrower and the screams of agony pierced the night.
The German carrying the awful weapon raked the stream of flickering death back and forth until the trench was filled with burning men.
The range was too much for his pistol, so Bell took off at a sprint, running hard for the soldier and his flamethrower, heedless of the rest of the battle still raging around him.
He needed to take out the shock trooper quickly in case there were more British soldiers trying to make it to their line.
With the element of surprise on his side, he could chance getting closer than necessary.
Bell stopped at a hundred feet and raised his pistol. He was so focused on killing the flamethrower bearer he never saw the other one standing on the opposite side of the communications trench.
There was no warning before the roar of jellied oil shot from the flamethrower wand carried by a second team of soldiers.
Bell saw the flare out of the corner of his eye, a streaking finger of flame reaching out for him at sickening speed.
The merest brush by the wavering jet of fire would turn him into a human pyre.
He hadn’t paid attention to the ground around him as he’d charged the first flamethrower team, so he had no idea what was behind him when he launched himself backward.
He expected to become entangled on a nest of barbed wire just as the flame reached him and so he closed his eyes and awaited his fate.
Bell didn’t hit the ground for a second and a half and he didn’t hit the ground at all. He’d thrown himself backward into a crater carved out the previous year by a French battleship cannon mounted on a reinforced railway carriage when this territory had been controlled by the German army.
He splashed into a body of stagnant water a dozen yards wide and sank below its surface just as the jet of flaming oil streaked over the crater like a comet with its tail on fire.
Even with his eyes closed, Bell could sense the brightness of the flame overhead and feel its heat boiling the top inches of the fetid pool.
He let himself sink a little deeper, dazzled by the light he could see through his closed eyes.
The flaming streak suddenly vanished. Bell swam to the surface and cautiously pulled himself from the water.
A sniper from the Allied lines had hit the fuel canister carried on the German’s back.
He’d vanished along with an assistant carrying a spare tank of fuel in a fiery spire that rose fifty feet.
A moment later another massive gush of fire lit up the night when the sniper found the original flamethrower team with a perfectly placed shot. That fiery blast took out an eight-man German patrol.
Bell dragged himself out of the crater and made his way back to where he’d left Everly.
“Are you mad?” the sergeant major asked.
“As a hatter, according to my wife,” Bell said.
“Joke aside, if you were one of my boys, I’d dress you down for half an hour, then put you in for a gong, maybe even the Vic Cross. Damned brave thing just then.”
“Futile, too. It wasn’t me who took them out, but one of your marksmen.”
“Then you can forget all about the VC,” Everly said with a gallows chuckle. “Let’s haul ourselves out of here. This is far from over.”