Page 16 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

C rawling through the mud on elbows and hips, it took Everly and Bell twenty minutes to reach the approach to the second set of Allied trenches.

Bullets cracked and whizzed over their heads the whole way as the Germans tried to press their advantage and overwhelm the sector.

Both men were covered in mud, but at least Everly’s inner clothing was relatively dry.

Bell was soaked to the skin and the chill night air was slowly freezing up his joints.

“Pomegranate,” Everly yelled in a sort of stage whisper when they were closing in on the line.

He didn’t want the Germans to overhear the code word for a Brit caught in the open, but he also had to be heard over the sounds of war.

When he got no answer, he abandoned stealth and bellowed the word at the top of his lungs.

The Tommies firing over them from the top of the second trench paused their murderous fusillade long enough for Everly to shout “Pomegranate” again and flash the silvery side of his canteen as a facsimile of a white flag.

“Oi!” shouted a Brit. “Who’s there?”

“Sergeant Major Everly and another man. We were ambushed on the first line.”

“Sir. Come through quick like.”

Mindful of gunfire still pouring in from the Germans, Bell and the English NCO slithered up to the line of sandbags at the rim of the second trench.

When they were close enough, helpful hands reached for them and dragged them over so that they nearly tumbled headlong into the trench.

No sooner had they reached safety, the men on the line opened up again with their Enfield rifles.

Bell and Everly were trying to get their breath back when mortar rounds started dropping out of the sky, exploding indiscriminately all around the British lines.

Bell had lost his helmet at some point in the night, he didn’t remember when, so he took one off a dead soldier lying on the floor of the trench where his friends had propped him up.

The explosions weren’t big, but the Germans had dialed in the accuracy, likely from the time they controlled these fortifications.

A direct hit in the trench connecting this one to the rearmost line of defense took out several men running up as reinforcements.

Another hit an ammo crate left open for convenience that caused rounds to cook off like firecrackers.

“Get out of here,” Everly ordered Bell. “Get to the rear. Find Major Fleming. He’ll see you stay safe.”

Before Bell could reply, a mortar shell hit behind a nearby firing platform where a machine gunner and his mate had been steadily crisscrossing the battlefield with streams of deadly fire.

The men took the brunt of the blast on their unprotected backs.

Both were propelled forward by the concussive burst and then dropped like fallen sacks into the trench.

Bell ignored Everly’s order and rushed for the wounded soldiers. He fell to his knees to check on them. One was clearly dead, his eyes open and fixed. The other man moaned and thrashed and tried to reach for the shrapnel that had riddled his back from waist to neck.

“Easy there,” Bell said to the man and restrained his hands so he couldn’t do any more damage to his back.

Everly was at his side a moment later, shouting for one of the overworked medics.

One arrived far quicker than expected, his thumb blackened with ink that he smeared in a cross on the wounded soldier’s forehead before jabbing him in the arm with a needle.

“What is that?”

“Greek god of sleep,” the medic replied, turning the soldier to examine the gashes in his back, some so deep the white of his ribs were visible at their bottom.

Morpheus, Bell recalled, from which the pain-relieving drug morphine’s name was derived. He guessed the cross on the soldier’s forehead was to prevent him from being overdosed at the next phase of his triage.

“He has a chance,” the medic said to himself as the wounded soldier’s eyes began to flutter closed with the medication flooding his system. “Stretcher-bearers!”

“Go with them when they arrive,” Everly told Bell.

“Forget that,” Bell spat back and clambered up to the abandoned Vickers machine gun.

It was a large and complicated weapon with its heavy barrel shrouded by a water jacket that was needed to cool it during sustained fire.

The jacket was attached to a one-gallon water can by a vulcanized hose.

The box for the self-feeding ammo belt was on a sandbag next to the machine gun.

In theory it worked automatically, but in the real world it needed a gunner’s mate to help guide the chain of .

303-caliber rounds into the receiver without causing a jam.

Everly joined him on the platform, but shoved him behind the weapon rather than the ammunition boxes.

“Loading one of these is more art than science. All you need to do is push the button between the handles.” As he spoke, Everly checked over the Vickers, making certain it was ready to fire after the mortar blast. “Short bursts only so we don’t overheat the gun.

Our sector is fifty yards wide. Don’t search for targets beyond that.

There are other machine-gun nests on the line for that, and for God’s sake if you’re not sure if a man running toward us is a German or one of ours, don’t fire.

Snipers will take care of them if it turns out to be a Hun. ”

Ready to face whatever horde was coming at them, Bell raised his head enough to look over the sandbag redoubt.

The first thing he realized was that the night was much darker than before.

There were far fewer flares burning in the sky with their phosphorus intensity.

The battle was entering its second hour, and the British were running low on flares.

They had to limit the number they launched.

The second thing he noticed were the flitting shadows advancing from cover to cover across the ground between the two trenches.

He couldn’t tell who they belonged to, and yet Brits up and down the line were firing with abandon.

They were tired and scared and wanted to keep the enemy at bay for as long as possible, even if that meant killing some of their own with friendly fire.

Bell let his gun remain silent. He traversed the barrel back and forth, his eyes never resting on one spot for more than a second.

The cold turned his hands into claws clamped around the Vickers’ handles.

He watched three shapes emerge from a shallow crater, recognized their helmets were the distinctive German bucket style, and slammed his thumbs against the firing button.

Bell had fired machine guns before, but never like this.

It was like holding a live electrical cable or a thrashing animal.

The big Vickers jerked and bucked in his hand as the bolt ratcheted back in a juddering blur of mechanical precision.

Flame shot from the barrel and twenty rounds went downrange in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

The ground around the three German soldiers came alive with bullet impacts, rocks and mud shooting into the air.

Other rounds flew past them and dropped harmlessly to the earth many dozens of yards later.

However, the majority of the slugs hit their targets, blowing back the men like they’d been yanked by an Olympic tug-of-war team.

He spotted two more Germans leaping up from another crater, assuming the machine gunner wouldn’t notice them while his concentration was on the first group. They were wrong. He swiveled the Vickers a couple of degrees and let loose again, cutting them down with a far-shorter burst.

Heat washing off the gun’s barrel was a welcome feeling as it hit his face and neck.

“Good, Bell,” Everly said with enthusiasm. “Just like that.”

Bell nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off the battlefield. More and more soldiers were crawling toward the Allied position. Bell felt sure they were all Germans at this point, but held his fire until he was certain.

When he got confirmation he was savage in his action, shooting without remorse or regret at the men trying to kill him.

As much as he fired at the advancing Germans, he and Everly became their prime targets.

Bullets struck the sandbags with regular frequency, usually from an area outside their sector, since Bell was keeping the enemy pinned down under withering fire.

He and Everly had some protection in the form of a metal shield placed around the gun that rang like a bell every time a round slammed into it.

Still, being the target of so much gunfire made them feel conspicuously exposed.

—

N earby, British conscripts popped off with their bolt-action rifles, often not even bothering to aim or expose much of themselves to the German advance.

They were kids, their guts liquid with fear and their eyes clouded by tears they couldn’t stop from falling.

Terror made them shake as though in the throes of some terrible palsy.

Corporals and more-seasoned privates were trying to stiffen their resolve, and in many cases the lads found some courage.

In others, the fear paralyzed them as if they were already dead.

Before Bell realized it, they’d expended one belt of ammunition. Both men ducked low while Everly fed a new brass ribbon of bullets into the receiver, working the bolt twice to get the rounds to seat properly.

They were just about to start in again when the sky behind them flashed as though the entire horizon was ablaze with sheet lightning.

A moment later came a thunderous roar unlike anything Bell had ever experienced.

Seconds later came an even more fearsome sound; a thousand high-explosive shells landing one after the other on what had once been a no-man’s-land and was now the staging area for the continued German offensive.

The ranks of Allied cannons nestled safely behind the line had roared to life.

Bell had lived through the Great San Franscisco Earthquake of 1906 and thought it was a mild tremor compared to what the artillery shells were doing to the ground less than a half mile from where he crouched behind the Vickers machine gun.

Flashes of fire and smoke came with the suddenness of popping corn.

But these eruptions were building-sized and chewed apart the German advance before they could fully secure even a single Allied trench.

“About damn time,” Everly said with a mixture of frustration and pride.

The rolling artillery barrage went on for the best part of an hour, a tremendous pounding that reduced everything it touched into a sort of overworked loam made of earth and metal and men.

Multiple shells exploded every single second, shaking the land as though the gods above were meting out their punishment.

There was no pause, no lull. It was a slaughter on a scale Bell could barely wrap his mind around.

The Germans trapped between the current British defensive trench and the continuous pounding of artillery knew their war was over and broke from cover without their weapons and with their hands raised in the air, surrendering rather than face certain obliteration.

When it was over, Bell was left stunned, his ears aching from the sound and the increased air pressure caused by so many detonations in such a close area.

Everly recognized the dazed look on his American comrade’s face.

He’d seen it a thousand times when a new recruit got his first taste of battle.

Bell handled it better than most, but the look was still there.

The older Brit said, “When we go over the top for the spring offensive, the barrage will last days, not hours, and on a twenty-mile front, not this localized fracas. And for all the good it does, there are plenty of Huns left to bloody our noses when we launch the attack.”

“What was this all about? Why did they do it?”

“To make us divert forces here and delay or even cancel our main assault. We got lucky that our lines held for as long as they did, so the gunners in the rear were able to re-aim their cannons. Had this trench fallen, the artillery wouldn’t have been able to hit targets so close and we’d likely get routed. Good work with the Vickers.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been at this since 1914,” Bell said. “It’s inhuman.”

“It’s war.”