Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon

Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon by Barry Sadler

Book: Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon by Barry Sadler Read Free Book Online
Authors: Barry Sadler
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should get pinned down inside this cache of high explosive, all the water in the Aswan High Dam wouldn't save them. He knew well enough the raging thirst that follows every battle. His concerns were now outside thirst. The numberless campaigns that he had endured had forced him to think like a dispassionate general, regardless of how his tongue might be frying, or his wounds hurting.
    He had learned in the hardest possible way how to ignore, or at worst suppress, the demands of his body so that he could keep that body alive through whatever demands battle might make upon it.
    Doomed as he was to an eternity of soldiering, he had come to hate and fear death. He could confront it when necessary, as he had as a boy soldier in Caesar's legions, but the curse of Christ had deprived him of the luxury of welcoming his death in the very moment of that confrontation. For every death that he suffered now had to be endured over again as the endless curse took effect and his body agonizingly reknitted so that he might live again to die again.
    Not dying had become a very high priority, and each time he succeeded in not dying he got better at avoiding death. His present situation, however, was making him wonder if two thousand years of soldiering had taught him anything after all.
    The main thrust of the battle, as planned, had moved away from the sector that he had first brought under attack. And now he was in possession of a powder keg.
    To be sure, the position was secure for the moment, the field of fire open, the scope for enemy counterattack limited. But it might take only one tracer bullet, or a single grenade not to mention a rocket to blow the whole shebang into eternity.
    An idea came to Casca. He tried to push it away, but it persisted, so he entertained it and explored its possibilities.
    Very well, he thought, here he was, right back where it had all started 1,935 years earlier. Long enough time surely. Maybe by now he was within reach of release. The Jew had cursed him to wait for his return, so there was the implicit promise that the curse would not last forever. The dying revolutionary had not said when or how or why he would return, but a thousand other prophets had chanced their arm on the point. And most of them, almost all of them, made it about now. But from their words, it had looked like about now for most of the nineteen hundred years that Casca had waited for his release.
    Yet this time there was one big difference. He was back in the land where the curse had first been laid upon him.
    The poet that lurks unrealized in every man cried out in Casca for a final resolution of his eternal dilemma in the place where it had been born.
    And now, perhaps in a way that he could have never thought of, the resolution might be in sight.
    If, as seemed likely, one round from the Arabs were to arrive within this building stacked to the ceiling with high explosive, then surely he would die.
    Surely, he would really die.
    How could even the curse of the vengeance minded crucified one put back together a body so blown apart? The flesh wound in his side had already healed, but that had been a mere scratch.
    Casca had a horrifying but also liberating vision of being blown apart, blasted to the four winds by any chance round that might arrive. And, surely, that must be the end.
    Across the top of a pile of rockets his eyes connected with Hyman Hagkel's. "The End of Days, do you think?" Hymie smiled at him, his fanatical eyes clearly lusting toward his own death.
    In Casca's soul a tiny dissonance trembled. He shook his head.
    "Just one more end to one more day," he said. "And it's up to us how it ends. Let's get to it."
    With sudden determined resolution he moved to where Billy Glennon's Browning commanded the field of their most likely source of attack. "See anything?" he asked.
    "Damnedest field of fire I've ever looked over," Glennon grunted without taking his eyes from the area covered by his gun. "Where the hell are they? If they

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