Eureka by William Diehl Page B

reservation, where his father was a drunk and his mother the schoolmarm.
The Marines got the best of that deal
, Culhane had thought.
We got a great tracker and hunter, with the instincts of a mountain lion.
Eyes, ears, and nose were part of the combination. The tall, muscular man could smell a horse half a mile away with the wind at his back. His job: listen for the sounds of an advance and, as soon as possible, shoot the lead horse pulling the caissons with a clean front-on shot, two inches to the left of its foreleg and a little higher. A heart shot that would drop the horse in its tracks. Then pick off drivers, officers, whoever he felt was worthy of an old frontier Sharps .30-caliber shot to the head. Delay the line, cause chaos, and when it got too hot, run like hell. Culhane once asked why it was Redd’s favorite assignment even though it was the most dangerous. Redd’s answer:
Because
it was the most dangerous.
    The number-three suicide spot was reserved for Lenny Holtz, from Bend, Oregon. Son of a crippled lumberjack and his bitter wife. A born sharpshooter who, like Culhane, had lied himself into the Marines at fifteen. He was a sapper along with Danzig—first planting mines in the three trenches between the Marines and the Germans and, if he didn’t blow himself up, then acting as Redd’s backup. Anybody that got past the Indian’s Sharps rifle was meat for Holtz. His shooting eye was as flawless as Danzig’s ears.
    The three best men Culhane had were in the most vulnerable positions. The ten machine gunners were spread across a fifty-yard-wide perimeter. Max Brady was his lead gunner. Their job, once the charging Germans reached the farthest trench, was to lay down a deadly .30-caliber barrage, force the survivors of the gunfire to jump into the mined trenches, and create panic in the German front lines until Merrill charged with the rifle company. Newsmen had nicknamed the Marines “Hell Hounds” because they screamed like wounded dogs when they engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Throw in mud, fog, and barbed-wire fences, and in the red glow of sunrise it became a howling, bloody ballet of death. The American Marines aimed not only to kill the Germans but to break what fighting spirit was left in the war-weary German infantrymen. Culhane thought it would work, but, he knew, not without taking its toll . . .

    Max Brady orders the machine-gun barrage. The Germans fire back. In the first exchange, a sniper bullet rips through the bridge of Brady’s nose and takes out his eye. He stuffs a handkerchief in it and keeps firing.
    Red dawn. The fog turns pink in the sun’s early rays. Danzig hears it first. A hundred and fifty yards away, a horse snorts. At almost the same instant, Redd smells horse flesh. But before either can fire a flare, the German .88-millimeter howitzer barrage begins. Merrill was right. The Germans are shelling the no-man’s-land between the two enemies, gambling that the major has moved his forces into the trenches to await an attack. Danzig is caught in the middle of the deadly onslaught from the sky.
    â€œRusty, get outta there now. Run for it. Come in, come in!” Culhane yells. The beefy Bostonian jumps from the trench and zig-zags toward them, a chunky silhouette in the pink mist. He is yelling, “A hunnert-fifty yards, a hunnert-fifty yards,” as the howitzer barrage rains down around him. Ten yards from Culhane’s position, a bomb explodes. It is a few feet away from Rusty. He is knocked to his knees, clutching his throat. Blood spurts between his fingers.
    Culhane fires a red flare, signaling Merrill to attack, and then jumps out of the foxhole, runs to Danzig, and pulls him to his feet. He shoves Danzig into the foxhole a moment before another .88 goes off.

    At their posts, Redd and Lenny peer into the mist. They can hear the horses snorting and the wheels on the caissons squealing. They are getting too close for