That was the last explosion. Aircraft engines droned into the distance. Gunfire thinned. Soldiers shouted at each other and vehicles raced. No one among the tents had been killed but in the town things were different. Someone said ‘bodies’. The word ‘bodies’ was repeated. Ray heard it. Bodies on the beach, apparently, and in the water. Smoke rose from one place in the town, thick and black, not like woodsmoke or cigarette smoke or anything but dense, full of matter, poisonous, chugging upwards.
Sergeant Carlson was right there, forming his men together. Floyd, Randall, George, Sorenson, Coyne, Dunphy, Wosniak, they were all there. Orders were to get the tents down and be ready to move out. Those not needed in town would be clearing the area. Either way, clear the camp. Carlson walked away to get further orders himself from higher up the chain.
Randall said, ‘Now I got good reason to kill some of them sons of bitches.’
‘Ready and willing,’ Floyd said. He spat hard, checked the backs of his hands a couple of times. ‘I wanna keep on invading. I wanna invade the hell out of those motherfuckers.’
George said, ‘Well, we have come all this way.’
Sorenson said, ‘Would you faggots actually shift and get this shit cleared up.’
‘Invasion time,’ Ray said, wanting to join in and convince himself. ‘You better believe it.’ And he did feel it inside, the havoc he wanted to wreak, maybe it was the fear thrashing away but it wanted out, it wanted action, even though the raid had left something in his mind he knew he wouldn’t get rid of. A small hard certainty was lodged in his brain that he’d just have to ignore. Ray knew that he wouldn’t live long. There was no way. Not against all that.
On the road into the desert, Ray knew his death had come. Planes tore down low over them and the whole column of men fell onto their faces, crawled under vehicles. Strafing fire chattered down, kicking up stones, whining off armour. Ray felt his back blown open in a ragged circle of heat. The planes angled up, turned, overflew again, firing, and flew away as guns chased them from the ground. Crying quietly, Ray felt for the wound. His fingers touched hot metal but it was loose. It was nothing, an empty shell case. He stood up, alive. Some other men weren’t. There was blood, stillness, twitching, moaning, running men. Wosniak was one of them, a red foam of blood around his mouth, eyes open and blank. Just let’s do it again. Another chance. Just go back a minute.
Artillery, guns bucking, jumping back, men feeding them, cringing away from the blast with hands to their ears, reloading, firing, volley after volley. The smell of it drifting back, the blasts felt in the soles of the men’s feet, the spasming light in darkness. And then, into the incoming fire, the tanks rolled forward with a high-pitched continuous mechanical noise. It was like the surface of another planet and a war between machines, like something from the alien adventure comics some of the boys had with them, death rays and strange technologies. Ray felt small, and human. A shell landed near, thumping some men to pieces, and his bowels opened warmly into his pants as the infantry squads jogged forward behind the tanks. Their task was to mop up, to catch any enemy fleeing their burning tanks or whatnot, when eventually they crossed their line. The squad jogged over the soft ground together, only eight of them now with no replacement yet for Wosniak. Sergeant Carlson set the pace. Dunphy bounced up and down with the big Browning at his hip. The tanks, whining, ground forwards, firing shells. It was like herding, Randall had said, pretending to be a cowboy. It was like. It was like. It was like nothing on earth.
One grey exhausted evening, George said to Ray, ‘You know what this is like?’
‘No.’
‘You ever look after a baby? Ever been out on the street with a stroller with a baby in it?’
‘I didn’t know you got kids.’
‘I don’t. My sister has a baby. You’re out there and this tiny thing is right there and you’re totally focused on it, totally preoccupied.’
‘I wanna eat something.’
‘So the whole world is a danger around you. Everything.’
‘I understand.’
‘Yeah, but it’s bigger than that, the feeling. I don’t know. The whole world and the little baby, little fingers, little eyes, you know?’
‘I think so, George. We should … I think we should find out if we can sleep.’
‘It’s everything. That’s what I’m saying.’
Mostly the infantry couldn’t do much, running among the machines. It kept them warm was one good thing. At night, cold space pressed down on them in the desert. The air was full of freezing stars. Heat came from the machines, from the fires, from their bodies. Ray ran past a burning tank once that pushed a furnace heat against him. It was hotter than a stove, so hot that red rivets were weeping out of the metal and sparks fizzed above the turret. Ray pictured white bones inside, luminescent, soldiers heated until they became ghosts. A good way to go, maybe. At least there’d be nothing left. They had passed tanks in the daytime that were loud with flies. They had passed bodies and parts of bodies. The artillery hacked into the distance. Tanks whirred forwards. They jogged after, looking for people loose on the other side. The landscape changed around them. Once they trotted through masses of paper that fluttered and blew around them, a silent storm. Some of the pages were scorched and black. They raced in spirals on the wind. They were letters. An enemy vehicle full of mail, presumably thinking the front line further forward, had been hit. It was a smoking hulk with exploded tyres, flapping shreds of canvas. The driver was still at the wheel, a harrowed figure of red and black. The way his teeth were exposed in his burned face made him look like a rat trying to gnaw at something. The squad was making good progress, covering ground. Ray was getting closer to his death.
4
Battle forms had broken up now. It was pure chasing at all hours. Through glassy morning air Ray and the boys set off in their quiet hunting party. Their uniforms were stiff with sweat and excrement but they’d been promised they were almost out of the desert and anyway they loosened as they moved. Ray felt thin and sinewy, light-headed, lucid, dumb. They were on some sort of rock shelf, the ground beneath them hard, rippled, glittering with tiny crystals. It lasted for hours. Ahead of them they could see mountains now, a greener world rearing up, toppling and fracturing in hard peaks and facets. Ray was looking up at them, dreaming them, when they were suddenly fired on from the right and all dived down. Dunphy let go with a wide swinging arc of automatic fire. Ray, ignoring the pain in his arms from throwing himself onto the rock, squirmed around to see what was what. Floyd was to his right and he was lying there moaning, in trouble, his legs obviously too relaxed like he couldn’t move them. Randall was crawling forwards as shots came chipping across. He pulled a grenade from his belt and threw it. Ray heard it skittering across the rock before it exploded.
‘Got ’em,’ Randall shouted. ‘They’re down in a hole.’