Shadows, стр. 38
“They are attacking!” someone cried. A quick glance showed enemy troops coming down all three streets at once.
“Pull ’em back, Sergeant,” he ordered, pointing to the eastern alley. “Get ’em back to the main road.”
Riidono barked orders as Cutter pulled back, climbing over corpses to find a good firing position. He crouched behind a smashed wagon and steadied the Thompson on its railing. He remembered doing the same at a farmhouse near Mortain, chickens squawking as German rounds ate into their coop, holding off a whole platoon long enough for four of his men to run to the safety of the farmhouse. Now he’d do it again.
Once the last of his men ran past, he waited three seconds for the enemy to enter the plaza. They all wore the dull mustard paint of Imsurmik’s poorer classes, except with the red stripe from the bridge of the nose down to its tip. Instead of spraying bullets like he’d done the first time, Cutter fired three-round-bursts to pin them down. He changed magazines again, and glanced behind him. He saw two of his men thirty feet down the street, kneeling with rifles up to cover his retreat, with two more thirty feet behind them. In full combat mode, thought became action, and he ran from behind the wagon, slowing to step over the dead body of an old man clutching a small animal under one arm, also dead.
When he was only halfway to the first of his men, they opened fire, but he didn’t look back. He put his head down and ran. He felt the ache of pounding on the unforgiving stone in his knees and feet, although that beat a bullet in the back. Only when he was past the second two-man team did he duck around a corner, sucking in the hot air and gagging on the fetid reek of an open sewer across the road. Half a minute later, Sergeant Riidono and two men ran back from the east in the direction where Moorefield’s men held the main road.
“We cannot get through that way, Captain. The enemy is forcing women and children to hold hands and block the road while they stand behind and shoot at us. We cannot fire back without hitting the innocents.”
“Human shields,” Cutter said. A genuine hate began to build in his gut, as it had in France. “Damn…” First Squad had already killed a lot of men, but there could be hundreds more, and while the enemy tactics were crude, they didn’t seem to shy away from dying for whatever cause they were fighting for.
He surveyed his surroundings again, looking for an option he’d overlooked. Even if he had been ruthless enough to gun down the human shields, it would slow them down enough for the red militiamen coming from the west to take them in the rear. The narrow southern street was impassable because part of a house blocked it like a landslide. That only left the north, and Cutter’s intuition told him that way had been left clear for an ambush, as he’d suspected earlier. Nor could he expect help from Moorefield’s thinly stretched men at the road; they were under strict orders not to leave their posts, no matter what they heard in the tightly packed warren of Outer City.
“We’re trapped, aren’t we, sir?” Riidono asked.
Cutter was about to answer “yes,” when he saw the answer. “No, Sergeant, we’re not trapped. But they might be.”
* * * * *
Chapter 17
The street leading north had tightly packed buildings on the western side, opposite a large open sewer pit. A long, wide oval, its surface was not recognizable as water, or anything else liquid. Discarded debris clogged the pit, and opportunistic vegetation grew among the clumps of garbage that, over the years, had solidified and composted into something fertile enough to allow plants to flourish.
Crouched low in the muck, Cutter counted the heads of the twelve surviving members of First Squad protruding from the foul muck, like so much flotsam, their weapons resting on the small islands of decayed garbage. The light color of their robes had stood out like a beacon against the mostly dark brown of the sewer, so the first thing he and his men had done upon wading into the thick slime was to dunk their heads. As nauseating as the experience was, it rendered them invisible to those on the street a mere forty feet away.
They’d heard the red militiamen coming and taken cover under the raw sewage. The people of Imsurmik, having been near it most of their lives, had gotten used to the sight, smell, vermin, and insects it attracted. The militiamen who weren’t from Imsurmik, and those with enough wealth or influence to live away from the sewers, considered being near them a disgusting circumstance, to be avoided as they would persons of the very lowest class. Nobody, however—not even the people forced to live beside them—would dream that someone would voluntarily immerse themselves in the horrific sludge, which is why Cutter did it. They’d trained for it, yes, but he’d never expected to actually do it in combat.
Red militiamen filtered into the area, wondering where their quarry could have gone. There weren’t as many as Cutter feared, maybe three dozen. After banging on a few nearby doors or rough analogs of them, and listening as the people cowering inside denied harboring outsiders, the man with the red face ordered several of the homes searched. Cutter watched as it happened.
Now, breathing through his nose and fighting the urge to vomit as sewage dripped into his eyes, he waited for the right moment to spring