The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read Free Page A

it was like a sort of ecstasy.
    He had felt it before, this cold excitement involving something to which he could hardly assign a name—challenge, perhaps, or summons to duty—at any rate a quickening of his senses so clamorous and memorable that in long periods when it was not there he had found himself waiting for it, waiting for the crisis with the tranquil, fierce patience of a communicant awaiting the moment of passion, or a hunter in the marsh watching the final defenseless swoop of birds. It was as if this morning he had once again and for the first time since Guadalcanal been given the call,ordained to bring to some sudden threat of disequilibrium a calm and unshakable sense of order. And he had rushed out into the swirling white dawn with a chill of delight up his back and with his mind clicking like an adding machine. Yet now as he watched the colonel rifling clumsily through his papers, something close to despair returned as he recalled how, instead of the escape being nipped off neatly, the sheep back in their fold, his very first glance at the ruptured window and bars separated so beautifully from their pinnings had told him that, this time, he would have little chance for triumph.
    “I can’t find the main number of the F.B.I.,” the colonel said.
    “I already called them, sir,” Blankenship put in.
    The colonel looked up. “I should have known,” he said mildly. “I forgot. It’s in your special orders, isn’t it? And—”
    “I called the rest, sir. The harbor and city police and the state police. I finally woke up some dogface over at Fort Slocum, and then I called the police in New Rochelle and in Nassau County. I also put in calls to the cops in those birds’ hometowns—Decatur, Illinois, and some little place in Wisconsin. They said they’d have their eyes peeled.”
    A look of bafflement came over the colonel’s face, and perhaps of hurt, too, as if he had become impaled upon the keen cutting edge of Blankenship’s finesse. “By God, Gunner,” he said with a cramped little grin, “you got these birds all taped up.” He rose stiffly and went to the window and stood swaying there, dumpy and morose, hands locked behind him. There was little else to do, the two men were irretrievably gone, and Blankenship wished to be dismissed. He had not taped up anything; he had seized every proliferatinggrowth of the emergency save its essential core. He had not caught those men—that was that—and he felt stuffed with sodden, inert disappointment, remembering how not four hours before and in spite of the sight of the neatly professional breakout he had still been possessed by that familiar chill, immaculate excitement, and his mind had worked with a clarity so pure, so aerial and flawless, that it seemed as if mounds of cobwebs had been torn away from his vision, and that he was suddenly looking for the first time at everything around him through the sheerest transparent glass. And how at that moment something more than logic—an intuition, rather—had told him that those yardbirds had built a boat. Even now he could only guess at how he had arrived at that remarkable judgment, a judgment which turned out to be not only remarkable but true; he only knew that he had known it, and instantly, with as much certitude as he knew his own name, rank, and serial number, and that armed with this certitude he had been spared going through the seven or eight hapless, groping steps of another man.
    He had ordered the alarm sounded, and an immediate count, sending two squads of the guard up to the work area to hunt for a place or shed where a boat might have been built or hidden. And so not ten minutes later, tearing back from the armory through the greenly mounting light, strapping on his pistol, he was neither surprised nor even particularly gratified to hear some sergeant call out through the mist and over the shrill fantastic racket of the siren: “Gunner, we found a shed … a boat was—” because he