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

said. “I don’t much like brig duty, either.”
    There was a knock at the door, which opened without a second’s pause to let in a chill gust of air from the corridors and a pretty blond woman of about thirty, sleek in furs. “Darling,” she said breathlessly, “I have to have—Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know anyone—”
    “Suzie, I’ve told you—” the colonel began.
    Blankenship moved toward the door. “That’s all right, Mrs. Wilhoite, I was just going.”
    “Suzie, I’ve told you—”
    “Webby, I have to get the eleven o’clock ferry, and I’ve got to have some money if I’m to see the caterers and do all those things—”
    “Excuse me, Mrs. Wilhoite,” Blankenship murmured, squeezing by.
    “I’m sorry, darling,” she went on, “but I do have—Oh, Mr. Blankenship, you are coming to the party, aren’t you?”
    “Which party is that, Mrs. Wilhoite?”
    “Which one ? The Thanksgiving party, of course, tomorrow night. You are Mr. Blankenship, aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” he said, then quickly: “I mean yes, I’m coming, and I am Mr. Blankenship.”
    She gave a small bright laugh, which he found himself echoing, rather foolishly, with a faint grin. “Oh good,” she said. “So many of you officers we never see, and I always get you confused with that—what’s his name?—Lieutenant—”
    “Darling,” the colonel put in, “if you’re going to make that ferry—”
    She turned and Blankenship slid away, pulling on his gloves. Outside the building, a cold damp blast of air struck him; he shivered, slanting his eyes toward the sky. It had become suddenly dim. Eclipse-like, a luminous corona surrounded the sun, and a shifting rack of mist, outriders of those great gray clouds which all morning had mounted to the north, brought a stiff wind and the promise of snow. The asphalt expanse of ground was deserted, except for a dozen gray prisoners in the distance, marching dejectedly in column and guarded by a lone marine. Against the advancing overcast the buildings, the brick towers and battlements, seemed to take on a sudden baronial and oppressive splendor; here and there lights winked on, though it was nearly noon. There was something in the scene hinting too much at the final white onset of winter; to Blankenship, with the climate of the tropics still steaming in his blood, it was touched by a vague sense of menace. Quickly descending the steps, he hurried toward his blockhouse, passing clumps of prisoners, pinched with cold, who arranged themselves in frozen and panicky attention when he approached. Yet as he muttered the usual “As you were,” he gave the prisoners hardly a glance, beset as he was with the same troubled feeling of anger and impotence he had had in the colonel’s office, which he had thought a breath of cold air might cure, but hadn’t.
    Nor was it only the escape now, although as he thought of the escape again another pang of failure came like the quick blow of a fist at the pit of his stomach, when he remembered how in the boat at dawn, rounding a point ofrocks—pistol unlimbered and feet braced against the spray-drenched gunwales and with the siren roaring in his ears like the ascending demented howls of souls chained in hell—he had thought, in one final and illusory moment of self-deception, that he had spotted those bastards. He had not, of course. What had appeared to be, in that fraudulent and compromising light, a boat had turned out to be nothing but a cardboard box heaved over some ship’s side. It had not been the quarry which he felt at that instant he would have literally sacrificed a leg or an arm to capture, but a maddening piece of driftage upon which the words HORMEL FINE SOUPS had been written and which, with its mirage-like deceit, gave him a second’s furious resolve to strangle the manufacturer of both soup and box. For he felt he had been tricked in the race at every turn. It was as if those yardbirds had been handicapped two lengths instead