An MP slowed Dennison: standing beside his motorcycle, black glasses over his eyes, tropic hat slapped down low, he seemed a little insane as he swatted at flies. The dust on his cycle matched the dust on his fatigues. Dust was approaching, trailing from a stream of converging trucks, half-tracks, tanks, cars, and ambulances.
Dully, Orville stared at his compass ... so this was Beramet? Where, in Beramet, would they stop, climb out, rest?
In a few minutes the compass began quivering: they were in the thick of street fighting, Arabs dodging from house to house, Nazis firing from doorways, windows, firing machine guns, firing rifles. GI's opened a front. A grenade exploded. Sand gushed up. Another grenade forced sand through the visors and ports of the bus. Both Dennison and Landel coughed violently. Dennison leaned forward, his back soaked, his arms soaked, the cushion behind him clumsy, lumped.
Urine sloshed across the floor.
He forced his brain above the shaking tank and roar of fighting. Hell, how lunatic, self-preservation and fear clawing each other. Eyes on the street havoc, he moved his machine as directed. Sometimes he saw Arabs firing, sometimes Nazis, sometimes smoke blotted everything. Something crumbled and fell through dust. Blinding sunlight took over as the Sherman crept forward.
Gradually through radio communications, through signals with Landel, he became aware that the Beramet probe was almost over ... now he noticed that his hand was scratched and he licked the scratch absently, groggily. It seemed to him that it was some other person's hand.
It seemed to him he was very old (these had been days not hours): in this world there was only pain and everyone hoped to die. In this world there was the torture of sound being tortured. Following a deserted street, he observed death at the next corner, sitting on an oil drum.
He snarled at himself for having joined the Corps, for having thrown in his lot with Landel. A concentration camp would have been better. Time could never obliterate these memories. The brain was permanently wounded. He tried but could not tap the future: he was too exhausted, too hot--as Landel ordered "stop" Dennison doubled over, craving water: he wanted to lie down in water: he wanted to die.
That night, sleeping in the open, death woke him. He woke shaking, remembering, half-remembering ...
On Sunday, eleven tanks and two half-tracks were compelled to halt because of gas shortage: they squirmed into a wadi below a hundred meter red cliff topped by a single dead tree, an acacia that had been dead and stark for fifty years or more.