Shadows, стр. 27
With only fifteen men, including him, it would take days to conduct a thorough house-to-house search, and experience showed there was nothing more dangerous in urban fighting than entering a house without using explosives to clear the entry. If you couldn’t toss a grenade through the window or go in shooting, you ran the risk of the enemy cutting you down in the doorway. He’d lost more than one man that way in France.
They were almost a quarter of the way to the gate that led to the Inner City when automatic weapons opened up along a narrow street that was half-clogged with garbage and debris. Ahead, the men of First Squad moved toward a two-story building with a half-collapsed roof, returning fire while moving in stages from cover to cover. Cutter and his four men covered the doorways that might conceal enemies, following the advancing men in case an enemy waited for them to pass so he could shoot them in the back. It was standard procedure, drilled into his platoon over and over again on the hot fields during their training, and it paid off almost immediately. A man in a dirty robe wearing the mustard yellow paint of a commoner leaped out of a doorway, raised his rifle to aim between Sergeant Riidono’s shoulder blades…and then jerked as Cutter poured a burst of .45 rounds into his torso. Tumbling back, the weapon fell at his feet, and the man slid down the house’s exterior wall and slumped over. Screams came from inside the house.
A second, smaller figure rushed out, picked up the dropped rifle, and began firing in Cutter’s general direction. He knew right away it was a child, and tried to tell his men not to shoot, but, in the confusion of the firefight, they couldn’t hear him. Blossoms of red appeared on his little chest as the heavy bullets hammered him back into the dark from which he had emerged—just as a third person tried to exit. Much larger, this person tripped over the toppling body and fell face down in the street.
“Blue paint, blue paint!” yelled the man next to Cutter, pointing. On impulse, Cutter ran forward, his Thompson trained on the man wearing blue paint. Gunfire from a nearby building struck the stones behind him, ricocheting with angry whines. The figure in the doorway got to his knees as, continuing forward, Cutter lowered his shoulder and hit him under the chin, like he’d done to the tackling dummy back in high school. Driving him back, Cutter glimpsed a full beard and drove the man into the floor. Cutter swiped the butt of his rifle across the man’s cheek, then swiveled it down to cover a knot of people huddling in the shadows. Dust swirled in shafts of sunlight pouring through holes in the roof, and he saw several children cowering against their mother.
“You’ve killed two of my children!” she said with a half shriek, half sob. “Leave me the rest, master; leave me the rest!”
Panting, Cutter swallowed and licked his lips. He’d come close to firing first and identifying his target afterward, which was never a bad idea in enemy territory. At least, that’s what he’d told his men in France, where innocent victims were part of the price for liberation. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Cutter couldn’t think about how close he’d come to killing the woman and her children, not now and probably not ever. Instead, he grabbed the stunned man with the blue mask and dragged him to the doorway, where one of Cutter’s men stood guard as he’d been trained.
“Hitler’s Buzzsaw is knocked out,” the man said, sounding much like a GI in 1944, his M14 never wavering from the terrified family inside the hovel. After Cutter had described the German MG 42 machine gun around the campfire one night, his platoon referred to every automatic weapon as Hitler’s Buzzsaw.
“They’re harmless,” Cutter said, nodding backward at the mother and children.
“No offense, sir, but these are my people. None of them are harmless.”
“Who is this guy?” Cutter said, shoving the quaking man with the blue mask forward. “The blue means he’s a militia leader, right?”
Sergeant Riidono had come back to rejoin them and heard the question. His reply held a palpable level of contempt. “It means his village supports the F’ahdn and will report on people who speak out against him.”
“I get it,” Cutter said. He pulled the man close. The blue paint obscured the lines and creases that were emotional giveaways, but no amount of paint could hide the terror in the man’s brown eyes. Through clenched teeth, Cutter substituted English words for those he hadn’t yet learned in the local language. “We called scumbags like this ‘snitches,’ and I hate snitches. The Nazis had ’em all over the place.” His men all nodded, more at the vehemence of his voice than truly understanding his words. “And just like the cowards back on Earth, this bastard sends his children out to fight in his place. If I could kill you where you stand, mister, I’d do it and enjoy every second of it.”
“I’ll do it for you sir,” said Riidono, with an intensity uncharacteristic for the usually laconic non-com.
“His people are your enemies?”
Riidono nodded, never taking his eyes off their captive.
“No, Sergeant, like it or not, this piece of shit is the reason we’re here. Assign two men to get him to the rear, and hand him over to the assault team as a prisoner, then double-time it back. We’re pressing on.”
“Yes, sir!” Riidono said.
“A living prisoner, Sergeant.”
Riidono’s glee deflated into a scowl.
“Yes, sir.”
* *