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The listeners returned to their lines before light, with reports of men coughing, swearing and giving quiet orders. Beck ordered his handful of claymores-mines that swept the ground before a position with bursts of dartlike fragments like an enormous shotgun shell-placed above where they were concentrating.
When dawn came the artillery started. The divisional artillery was on the other side of Park Hill; Valentine wished he had a few trained men and a radio somewhere with a view. If Southern Command saw fit to send him a company or two of Wolves and a Bear team-
Their shooting was poor, compared to the mortars across the river. Shells landed all over the hill, damaging little but the turf.
The besiegers were at the bottom of the hill in the predawn gloom. Valentine listened in to the field-phone chatter. Kessey had her guns set up so the observers and officers on the line called the mortar pits directly without going through her, trusting the individual mortar crews to prioritize the use of their shells. Styachowski had been relentlessly training the men on the system ever since. The mortars went into action first, dropping their shells all around the base of the hill.
The assault came. Hamm struck from two directions, the north and the east, both driving to cut off the men at the tip of the finger of the hill extending eastward, to get control of the road going up the hill Valentine had used on his first trip to Solon's Residence. Styachowski used her guns to form a curtain of steel along the north face of the hill. Valentine paced and waited, watching the trees along the top of the eastern finger for signs of the Quisling troops. He forced himself not to call every time the firing quieted, and the company commanders had enough on their hands without him calling for status reports in the middle of action.
"Danger close! Danger close!" the voice of one of the forward observers crackled over the phone. He was calling in fire just in front of his own position-that the Quislings were partway up the hill this soon was troubling.
"Post, take over here. I'm going forward," Valentine said.
"There's no trench, Maj-" Post objected as he left.
Valentine had a soldier's eye for ground. His route to Beck's command post was determined by cover rather than directness. He scrambled through the fallen scrub oaks, along foundations of old buildings and then up a little wash to Beck's position on the north face of the hill.
Beck was at a viewing slit in his wood-and-earth bunker, looking west down the ridge pointing toward the train station. He had a band of dirt across his face the same size as the slit, giving him a raccoonlike expression.
"They're not having any luck from the east," Beck said. "Too much fire from the notched hill by the war memorial. They're coming up hard on the north side. Jesus, there it goes again ... They're using flamethrowers. Sergeant, call in more mortar fire where that flame's coming from."
Valentine looked at the little gouts of flame as the sergeant spoke into his field phone, binoculars in his other hand. Beck passed his own glasses to Valentine. Valentine surveyed what he could of the north side of the hill; there were mottled TMCC uniforms all along it, all lying in the same direction like freshly cut hay.
Some gutsy company officer fired a signal flare, and the aligned figures stood and began to run up the hill. Beck tore the glasses from his face and flicked a switch on a fuse box. Explosions blossomed across the hill as the signal traveled the wire, little poofs of smoke shooting down the hill like colored sugar blown through a straw.
"The claymores," Valentine said. He saw the Abica brothers moving forward, great belts of ammunition about their necks like brass stoles.
"They're turning around."
"Lieutenant Zhao is back in the machine-gun post," a soldier reported. "He says they're heading back down the hill."
They tried again. According to Beck the second attack showed nothing like the patience and skill of the first. Hamm concentrated all his gunfire on the easternmost tip of the hill, until a permanent cloud of thrown-up smoke and dirt hung at the end of the hill, constantly renewed by further shellfire. But the men there held; the machine guns weren't silenced. As fast as they came up, they turned around and went down.
"We broke the second wave!" Beck's forward observer shouted. "They're running!"
"And the Third Division's bad luck continues," Valentine said. "Cease fire. Cease fire."
"Why?" Beck asked.
"Let 'em run. I want the others to get the idea. So next time they come, they have to start from scratch, not from halfway up."
* * * *
"Hurrah for the Razors!" a soldier shouted as Valentine surveyed the devastated ridge. Stretcher-bearers braved sniper fire to bring in the wounded, and Valentine had come forward to see to those wounded. Pickups converted to ambulances were bumping across the shell-holed road to take them back to the hospital building.
God, and there's only one doctor.
"Valentine, time for me to be moving on," he heard, as he knelt beside a wounded man.
Valentine glanced up at Duvalier. "Interested in lugging a radio up Park Hill tonight?"
"No, sorry. Suicide isn't my style. I've got another assignment. They think Solon's outside Hot Springs. The Cats are concentrating. Someone'll get him."
"Is he so important?"
"Wherever he goes the Quislings do better, for some reason. He's like a lucky charm."
Valentine went back to cleaning the soldier's face. The man's elbow was torn up, and the skin on his forearm and hand already had a gray look to it. He'd never use his right hand again. "They won't try that again, will they, sir?" the private said, smiling.
