From the Heart of Darkness by David Drake Read Free Book Online

telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?”
    â€œSergeant!” Richmond shouted. “You drunken—”
    â€œOh, calm down, Captain,” Morzek interrupted bleakly. “The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don’t they?”
    â€œYes.” There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski’s mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quite appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room’s only door.
    With perfect nonchalance, Sgt. Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees. “Well,” he said, “there was quite a report on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to boobytrap a white phosphorous grenade—fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed.”
    Mrs. Lunkowski’s breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added, “He burned. A couple pounds of willie pete going blooie, well … it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin’s full of gravel.”
    â€œMy god, Morzek,” the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant’s savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis.
    â€œThe grenade, that was real,” Morzek concluded. “The rest of the report was a lie.”
    Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, sergeant?” she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. “There is much we would like to know before you are gone.”
    â€œSure,” Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. “Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start.”
    â€œWhat’s all this about?” Richmond complained. “If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—”
    â€œSilence!” The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.
    Sgt. Morzek nodded. “Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn’t know the bullets didn’t hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn’t have and it didn’t. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he’d had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about.”
    Morzek paused to glance around his audience. “All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building.”
    â€œYou won’t be long,” the girl hissed in reply.
    Morzek grinned. “They broke up the squadron, then,” he rasped on, “gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There’s more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.
    â€œThree nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six … Christ, the names don’t matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?” Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular.