Chapter 4: Into the Muzzle Flash
The world erupted at 1307.
The prep fire from the artillery had been a promise, a thunderous overture that churned the upper slopes of Hill 207 into a fresh cloud of dirt and smoke. For three minutes, it was the only sound, a percussive rhythm that vibrated in their teeth. Then it ceased. The silence that followed was a physical thing, thick and heavy, pressing against their eardrums. It was the silence of a drawn breath.
“First wave! Go!” Castiel’s voice was raw, cutting through the quiet. Thirty men rose from the cover of the ruined tree line and began the climb. They moved fast, low, their figures gray and indistinct in the drifting haze. The ground was a treacherous soup of mud, shell holes, and splintered wood.
For forty yards, nothing. Only the sucking sound of boots, the ragged breathing. Castiel watched from behind a splintered log, his binoculars glued to the advancing line. Hendriksen was in the second wave with him, Dean somewhere in that ragged center, just as ordered. The medic’s words echoed, a grim prophecy. They’ll have machine guns in the reverse slopes.
The first crack of a rifle was singular, almost polite. It came from the left flank, high up. A private in the first wave stumbled, fell, and didn’t move. Then the hill woke up.
It wasn’t a single machine gun. It was a chorus. The dry, ripping cloth-tear sound of MG-42s erupted from three, maybe four positions concealed in the lip of craters and behind ragged heaps of broken concrete. Tracer rounds, lazy and green in the daylight, etched burning lines down the slope, stitching through the first wave. Men were cut down mid-stride. They crumpled, folded, vanished into craters. The sound was deafening, a sustained, industrial roar that swallowed screams whole.
“Christ,” Hendriksen breathed beside him.
The first wave was gone. Not retreating. Simply erased. The few survivors were pinned, wriggling behind scant lumps of earth, their helmets the only things visible.
“Second wave! Covering fire, advance by squad!” Castiel yelled, his command swallowed by the din but carried by hand signals and the sheer desperation in his eyes. His platoon rose. Their own rifles and the two BARs opened up, a stuttering, futile response against the German torrent. They began to move, a slow, painful crawl upward into the hail.
Castiel moved with them. The world narrowed to the three feet of mud in front of him. The air smelled of wet earth, cordite, and a new, copper-tinged scent that he refused to name. Bullets snapped past, kicking up fountains of dirt. A man to his left—PFC Ellis, who’d been laughing with Dean an hour ago—made a wet, choking sound and slid back down the slope, a dark flower blooming on his chest.
Don’t look. Don’t stop. Dean’s advice, given with brutal clarity. Castiel clenched his jaw until it ached and kept moving, firing his pistol at nothing, at everything.
They reached a shallow, elongated crater, a wound from a earlier shelling. It was already half-full of oily water and three trembling men from the first wave. “Here!” Castiel gestured, and what was left of his platoon tumbled into the relative cover. It was a trap, he knew instantly. They were pinned. The crater gave them shelter from direct fire from above, but the machine guns on the flanks had perfect enfilade. Anyone lifting their head would lose it.
The radioman, a kid named Cooksey with freckles and a perpetual sniffle, was trying to coil himself into the smallest possible ball behind his set. “Raven Six, this is Raven Two-Charlie, we are pinned at base of objective, heavy interlocking fires from—”
A single round, impossibly precise, took him in the side of the head. He slumped forward onto his equipment, a sudden, shocking quiet where his frantic voice had been. The speaker emitted a low, meaningless static hiss.
The company’s only link to the rear, to the artillery, to the world beyond this slaughterhouse slope, was dead.
“Damn it!” Castiel grabbed the handset. “Raven Six, Raven Six, this is Two-Charlie, come in!” Nothing but the hiss. The cord had been cut. They were alone on the hill.
Hendriksen was firing short, controlled bursts over the crater’s rim. “We can’t stay here, Lieutenant! They’ll mortar us or flank us in minutes!”
Castiel knew he was right. But to move was death. To stay was death. His mind, trained for this, scrabbled for a solution. Assault the nests? They didn’t know the exact locations, and the fire was coming from too many angles. Wait for support that didn’t know they needed it? Suicide.
His eyes scanned the hellscape. And he saw him.
Through the drifting smoke and the geysers of dirt, a figure moved against the flow. While everyone else was either prone or scrambling for cover, Dean Winchester was half-crawling, half-dragging himself laterally across the slope. He wasn’t heading up. He wasn’t heading back. He was moving toward the wounded.
Castiel saw him reach a crumpled form near a twist of barbed wire. A flash of his shears, a violent tug, and he had the man free. He didn’t try to stand. He rolled, pulling the soldier with him into a nearby shell hole. Thirty seconds later, he emerged, crawled ten feet to another still-twitching body, and repeated the process. He moved with a terrifying, economical grace, a predator harvesting the injured from the field. He was a magnet for fire—tracers seemed to reach for him—but he moved in unpredictable jags, always a half-second ahead, his medkit somehow still on his back.
“That crazy son of a bitch,” Hendriksen muttered, pausing to reload.
A wave of fury washed over Castiel, hot and immediate. He was supposed to be in the center, reacting, not playing hero on the open slope! This was the recklessness, the arrogant disobedience he’d feared. But even as he thought it, he watched Dean haul a sobbing private into cover. He was saving lives. Precisely as he’d said he would. The contradiction was maddening.
The stalemate stretched. Minutes felt like hours. The German fire was methodical, disciplined. They weren’t wasting ammo. They were controlling the field, waiting. The temperature of the battle had cooled from a roaring inferno to a slow, simmering cook-fire. It was somehow worse. The adrenaline ebbed, leaving behind a cold, trembling awareness of their predicament.
Cas needed to know what they faced. “Hendriksen, cover me. I’m going to try to spot those nests.”
“Sir, you can’t—”
But Castiel was already moving, slithering on his belly along the steepest part of the crater wall to a slightly higher lip where a chunk of concrete offered a sliver of a view up the hill. He raised his binoculars slowly, the lenses just clearing the debris.
He scanned the torn earth. There. A muzzle flash, winking from a dark shadow at the base of a splintered fir tree. He traced the line. Another, further right, from what looked like a pile of rubble but was too symmetrical to be natural. A reinforced dugout. A third, higher up, commanding the entire approach. His stomach sank. It was a textbook defensive position, interlocking fields of fire. No wonder the first wave was annihilated. To assault any one nest meant exposing your flank to the others.
A bullet spanged off the concrete two inches from his face, throwing stone chips into his cheek. He dropped down, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“See?” Hendriksen’s voice was grim.
“I see.” He wiped blood from his cheek. It was a scratch. A lottery win. The radio was dead. They had no grenades left for the launchers. They had maybe twenty effective fighting men. The plan, the regulation, the West Point-approved solution, had dissolved in the acid reality of the hill.
He thought of Dean’s grin that morning, tinged with whiskey and despair. I’ve got nothing left to lose.
Maybe that was the only kind of man who could find a way out of this.
“I’m going to find Winchester,” Castiel said, the words tasting strange.
“The medic? What for?”
“To get a situation report on the wounded. And to… consult.” The word felt foreign on his tongue.
He didn’t wait for a reply. Keeping low, he moved back through the crater, past the pale, set faces of his men, past Cooksey’s body with its terrible stillness. He exited the crater’s lower lip, sliding down into a drainage gully that ran diagonally across the slope. It was deeper, wetter, offering better cover. He followed it, his senses screaming, expecting the burn of a bullet in his back with every step.
The gully led to a deeper shell hole, one that had burrowed into the hillside and created a small, cave-like alcove where the roots of a destroyed tree hung down like torn tendons. The air here was different. It was thick with the smell of blood, disinfectant, and sweat.
It was a charnel house. A field hospital in a hole in the ground.
Five men were in various states of ruin. One had his leg wrapped in a crude, blood-soaked tourniquet, his eyes shock-wide. Another was shivering, a pressure bandage on his abdomen. A third lay still, a blanket over his face. In the center of it all, kneeling in the mud and gore, was Dean.
He was barely recognizable. He was covered in blood—not his own, but a macabre map of other men’s trauma, smeared across his hands, his arms, his face. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips, the ash precariously long. He was sewing. With deft, steady movements, he was suturing a long, ugly gash on a soldier’s scalp. His fingers, slick and red, worked the needle and thread with the calm precision of a tailor.
“Almost done, Donnelly,” Dean was saying, his voice a low, conversational rasp. “Just a few more. Gonna give you a hell of a story for the dames. ‘See this? Got it liberating France from a fascist asshole.’ Way better than ‘I fell out of a tree.’”
The soldier, Donnelly, let out a weak, gasping sound that might have been a laugh or a sob.
Dean tied off the suture, bit the thread, and wiped his hands on his already-ruined trousers. He glanced up as Castiel’s shadow fell over the hole. The bright green of his eyes was startlingly vivid against the filth. The cigarette bobbed. “Well, look what the cat dragged in. Lose your way, Lieutenant? The officer’s club is back that way.”
There was no insolence in it now. It was just habit, a worn-out script performed from muscle memory. The eyes above the grin were hollow, focused, old.
“Casualty report,” Castiel said, his own voice sounding detached.
“Three KIA. Two of yours, one from Baker company. Two stable, evac if we ever get evac. Donnelly here has a concussion and a new part in his hair, but he’ll live.” He jerked a thumb towards the blanket-covered form. “Simmons didn’t make it. Took one in the neck. Nothing to be done.” He said it flatly, a clinical fact, but Castiel saw the way his jaw tightened for a fraction of a second. Blaming himself not the enemy when a man dies.
Castiel crouched, the mud soaking into his knees. “The radio’s out. Cooksey’s dead. We’re pinned in a crater about fifty yards up. They have at least three MG nests in interlocking positions. We can’t advance. We can’t call for fire.”
Dean listened, nodding slightly as he rummaged in his kit. He pulled out a small, flat bottle of clear liquid—not whiskey, something medicinal. He took a small sip, swirled it in his mouth, and swallowed. He offered it to Castiel. “Plaster solvent. Ninety percent alcohol. Tastes like despair and pine trees, but it’s sterile.”
Castiel stared at it, then took a swallow. It burned a path of fire to his gut, clearing the cordite from his sinuses. He coughed.
“Welcome to the party,” Dean said, taking the bottle back. He capped it. “Interlocking, huh? So you can’t hit one without the others chewing you to bits.”
“Yes.”
Dean lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. He exhaled smoke slowly, his gaze turning inward, seeing the hill not as a lieutenant saw it, but as a problem in three-dimensional, lethal geometry. “They’re patient. They’re letting you stew. They’ll either counter-attack or drop mortars on your little crater soon. Probably mortars. Cheaper.”
“Your professional opinion, Sergeant?”
Dean’s eyes snapped back to his. The humor was gone. “You want my opinion? We’re in a world of shit. The textbook says you need suppressive fire or explosives. You got neither.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “But they got a weakness. They’re focused on your crater. On the main body. They’re not thinking about the garbage in the gullies. The… clutter.”
A cold understanding began to dawn in Castiel. “You’re proposing a flanking maneuver.”
“I’m proposing one crazy bastard who’s already covered in crap and doesn’t register as a threat might be able to get close to one of those nests. The one on the far left, by the tree. It’s the most exposed. The gully I used runs behind and below it.”
“You’re a medic. You don’t carry a rifle. You don’t kill.”
“I know what I am.” Dean’s voice was iron. “And I know what a grenade does. I don’t have to pull the pin with my teeth and scream like John Wayne. I just have to get close enough to introduce Mr. Mills Bomb to Herr Machine Gunner. The explosion does the killing. I’m just the mailman.”
It was the most insane, unregulated, brilliant thing Castiel had ever heard. It leveraged everything Dean was: his disregard for his own safety, his intimate knowledge of the terrain of suffering, his ability to move unseen. It was also a certain death sentence. The moment he threw, the other nests would shred him.
“You won’t make it back,” Castiel said.
Dean’s grin returned, wide and genuine and terrifying. It was the grin of a man stepping onto solid ground after a long walk on a tightrope. “I told you, Lieutenant. I’ve got nothing to lose. And you’ve got twenty men in a crater who do.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “You need a decision. Now. They’re dialing in those mortars as we speak.”
The weight of command was no longer an abstract concept. It was here, in this hole of blood and mud, resting on the shoulders of a broken man offering himself as a solution. Castiel thought of regulations, of the Articles of War, of the clear line between combatant and non-combatant. He looked at the two wounded men breathing because of Dean, at the blanket over Simmons. He listened to the sporadic crack-thump of the guns above.
He had come to consult. The consultation was over.
“Can you do it?” Castiel asked, his voice low.
“I can get close. That’s all I promise.”
Castiel nodded once, a sharp, painful motion. He unsnapped the holster on his hip. He drew his M1911 pistol, checked the chamber, and held it out, grip first, to Dean. “Take it.”
Dean looked at the weapon as if it were a poisonous snake. “I told you. I don’t—”
“You are not to use it on the enemy,” Castiel interrupted, his gaze locking onto Dean’s. “It is a tool of last resort. For you. If you are trapped. If capture is imminent.” He pushed it forward an inch. “You will not be taken alive to give them intelligence. That is an order, Sergeant.”
The meaning hung between them, dark and absolute. Dean searched Castiel’s face, looking for pity, for hesitation. He found only a commander’s brutal, necessary calculus.
Slowly, Dean reached out. His bloody fingers closed around the grip. He hefted the pistol, then tucked it into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back, hidden. “You’re learning, Lieutenant,” he said, the ghost of his old smirk playing on his lips. He began stuffing his medkit with fresh bandages, morphine syrettes, and two grenades he took from the belts of the dead.
“What are you doing?” Castiel asked.
“Still a medic. Might run into customers on the way.” He stood up in the alcove, a figure of mud and blood and resolve. “Give me ten minutes after the firing starts. When you hear a party up by the tree, that’s your cue. You hit the center nest with everything you’ve got. All at once. Don’t dribble it. A big, loud, distracting punch in the face. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Dean paused, looking at the wounded. “Get these two moved further down the gully if you can. It gets deeper twenty yards back.” He looked at Castiel one last time. The bravado was completely gone, stripped away. What remained was pure, focused intent. “Don’t stop, Cas. However you can.”
He used the first name. Not “Lieutenant.” A slip, or a gift. Then he turned, grabbed a root, and hauled himself out of the hole with a single, fluid motion. He melted into the gully’s shadow and was gone.
Castiel was left alone with the wounded and the dead, the weight of the pistol now absent from his hip, replaced by a heavier, more terrible burden. He looked at his watch. He had ten minutes to organize a desperate charge, to prime his shattered platoon for one more impossible push.
The hill waited, silent and murderous. But now, in its bowels, a different kind of weapon was on the move. A mailman, carrying a message of deliverance written in steel and fire.