THE LONG MARCH INTO LEGEND
Major Richard Blaine and his Spartans find themselves, not up against a brick wall, but facing a sheer, unclimbable cliff.
The Nazi reinforcements are soon to arrive. What will they do?
THE LONG MARCH INTO LEGEND
“Legends die hard. They surviveas truth rarely does.”
-Helen Hayes
Death is the only god that comeswhether you want her to or not.
I knew that because she was righton my and ’s heels.
No legend matters. But manforgets reality and remembers legend.
I wonder what legend would beborn of André’s photos of this day. Not that Life Magazine would publishhis photos of Sentient as the Angel of Death.
Too sensational. Toounbelievable.
‘No. They would not which is whyI have sent them to the McCord News Service and its attendant newspapers.’
‘But they have just been taken.’
“You have yet to learn? Time ismeaningless to me. I flit from age to age as a pollinating bee from flower toflower.’
‘Sounds like a disconcerting wayto experience life.’
‘And your way of experiencing itseem to me as static and frozen as a fly caught in amber.’
Sentient must have been playingher games with Time for André and I caught up with the other Spartans whilethey were still a third of the way to the cliffs.
We caught up with Stew Taylorfirst, of course. He did a double take when he saw André.
“That’s ….”
“That’s André Friedman. His truename. I will never tell you or any other Spartan a lie. I save that for theArmy and politicians.”
Nurse Reynolds slowed to get byhis side. “Mister, I can take my own clothes off. I don’t need any help fromyour eyes.”
Then, she sped up to run by Theo,who glared at our newest Spartan.
André flicked nervous eyes to me.“The sergeant is … dangerous, no?”
“Dangerous, yes,” surprisinglygrowled Porkins. “I’ve lost count of the men he killed right in front of me …and some of them had been too fresh with our nurse.”
Reese looked amused at his“brother.” “Yeah, and we don’t take too kindly to passes thrown at herneither.”
By that time, all of us had madeit to the sheer cliffs above which where smoked the ruins of the machine gunemplacements.
The ashy fingers of the flames reached up to the unfeelingcloudy skies as if in mute pleas for the slain souls of the German soldiers.
I could actually smell the stenchof burnt flesh and spent cordite on the breath of the beach breeze.
Speaking of heavenly pleas, I sawJohnny Knight and Jace Mercer of all people take one look at the sheer,unblemished cliff, seemingly impossible to scale, and bow their heads in briefprayer as they crossed themselves.
Does anyone have the foggiestidea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no onebelieve a word of it?
We are children playing on thefloor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to push back thedarkness of our doubts and fears.
We should proceed with uttercaution, for the God we think asleep may actually be awake and take offense, drawing us out to where we can never return.
Agent Cloverfield snorted,“Hell’s Teeth, I left my mountain scaling boots in Auckland.”
A screech as loud as a diving,burning bomber pierced our ears.
I glanced behind me and shouted, “Hit the dirt!”
All fifteen feet of the Angel ofDeath swept down upon us. Any atheist looking up at that sight would haveimmediately reconsidered his life options. I know I did.
The black wings, trimmed inflickering fingers of crackling fire, were thirty feet wide if they were an inch. Soriveting were they that I barely took in the high-cheek-boned face.
All I saw were the slanted lids,half-closed over twin pools of white-hot lava. Then, with a hot WHOOSH! she wasflying low over me and the others …
Straight into the sheer face ofthe cliff.
A massive explosion that Krakatoamight have envied vibrated the marrow of every bone in my body. All of us werecovered in a heavy shroud of white pulverized cliff stone.
We coughed heavily like three-packs-of-cigarettes-a-daysmokers. We probably would have enjoyed it more. At least we would have theboost of the inhaled nicotine.
From the shouts of all theSpartans, they felt much the same way.
I stiffened at what Sentientmurmured in my mind.
“All right, Spartans. On yourfeet and into the tunnel the Angel of Death has just made for us. And do nottouch the sides of this new tunnel. They are white-hot.”
Predictably, Stew Taylor asked aquestion: “How come the floor of it won’t melt our boots?”
“Ant” Vincent scoffed, “You everrun out of questions, Taylor?”
“Hey, it’s just who I am is all.”
Dusting himself off with a seriesof hacking coughs, Chuck Dickens said in between them, “C. G. Jung wroteof this very characteristic: the personahe called it.”
He spat up a clot of phlegm as acat would a hairball. “It is a complicated system of relations between individualconsciousness and society.”
Dickens blinked his eyes to clearthem of the flying dust which his slapping had only made worse.
“It fittingly is a mask designed onthe one hand to make a definite impression on others, and on the other hand, toconceal the true nature of the individual.”
Eric Evans groaned, “Would someoneplease translate that into simple English?”
Cloverfield shook his head. “I amsuddenly very afraid, for I understood most of that.”
Rachel once again earned herreputation for being unflappable as she calmly put back on her tiny Spartanhelmet and mused, “Well, you do not see that every day.”
Theo snapped, “You heard the Major.Get your as ….”
Rachel raised an amused eyebrow,and he did a midcourse correction, “ … ah, rears into gear and head into thattunnel.”
Lt. Stein moved to my side. “Anyfurther orders, Rick?”
“Like Noah, we go in two by two, stayingsafe in the center, keeping our fingers off the sides and on our hands unburned.”
As Mercer and Floyd teamedtogether, Dimitri asked, “Any particular pairing?”
I was suddenly at a loss. Havinghuge chunks of missing memories from our time in the past was truly inconvenient… and unsettling.
“You know your pairings fromSicily. If you bicker, Sgt. Savalas will gladly assign you a partner.”
The sudden outbursts of groans andprotests let me know I had guessed correctly. Each of them would have rathergargled penguin urine than have Theo pick for them.
“André Friedman and I will marchin the lead.”
He protested, “Why in the lead?”
“You are our Lowell Thomas to myT. E. Lawrence. Any charging Nazi’s we will meet head on, and you can take thepictures, becoming legend.”
He paled and looked longinglybehind us.
We had marched only a few yards,when he slowly turned to me. “Any chance I could go back on the ….”
With a low rumbling, the tunnel’sopening collapsed in on itself, leaving us trapped.
Fortunately, the glow from the white-hotwalls illuminated the darkness somewhat.
Predictably, Stew Taylor whined, “Major.what are we going to do when those walls stop …. Ow!”
Eric Evans, next to him, snapped,“Maybe we’ll set your hair on fire! Make me joyful beyond dreams, Taylor, and keepthe idiot questions to yourself.”
And so, staying true to ourpersonas, we started our long march into darkness and legend.
