They went on and the channel narrowed but he could see it opening wider ahead. Maybe I just had the jitters, he thought. Then he saw a crab come sliding out fast from the high mangrove roots and plop into the water. He looked hard into the mangroves but he could see nothing beyond the trunks and branches. Another crab came out very fast and went into the water.
Just then they opened on him. He did not see the blinking flash and he was hit before he heard the stutter of the gun and Gil was on his feet beside him. Antonio was firing tracers where he had seen the gun flash.
“Where the tracers are going,” Thomas Hudson said to Gil. Thomas Hudson felt as though someone had clubbed him three times with a baseball bat and his left leg was wet.
Gil lobbed the bomb with a high overhand motion and Thomas Hudson saw its long brass cylinder and conic nose shining in the sun. It was spinning, not going end over end.
“Down, Gil,” he said and thought he ought to drop himself. Then he knew he shouldn’t but should hold the ship as she was. The twin .50’s had opened up and he could hear them pounding and he felt the jolt of them through his bare feet. Very noisy, he thought. That will keep the bastards down.
He saw the blinding burst of the bomb before the roar came and the smoke started to rise. He smelled the smoke and the smell of broken branches and burned green leaves.
“Get up, Gil, and throw two frags. One on each side of the smoke.”
Gil did not lob the frags. He threw them like the long throw from third base to first and in the air they looked like gray iron artichokes with a thin trickle of smoke coming from them.
Before they burst cracking white in the mangroves Thomas Hudson said into the tube, “Shoot the shit out of it, Henry. They can’t run in there.”
The smoke from the frags smelled differently from the bomb and Thomas Hudson said to Gil, “Throw two more frags. One beyond the bomb and one in this side close.”
He watched the frags go and then hit the deck. He did not know whether he hit the deck or the deck hit him because the deck was very slippery from the blood that had been running down his leg and he fell hard. At the second burst he heard two fragments tear through the canvas. Others hit the hull.
“Help me up,” he said to Gil. “You threw that last one close enough.”
“Where are you hit, Tom?”
“A couple of places.”
Ahead he saw Willie and Ara coming up the channel in the dinghy.
He spoke in the tube to Antonio and asked him to hand up a first aid kit to Gil.
Just then he saw Willie drop flat in the bow of the dinghy and start firing into the mangroves on the right. He could hear the dat-dat-dat of his Thompson gun. Then there was a longer burst. He put in both his motors and headed for them with all the speed the channel would allow. His idea of this speed was not completely accurate because he felt very sick. He felt sick into his bones and through his chest and his bowels and the ache went into his testicles. He did not feel weak yet but he could feel the first onslaught of weakness.
“Get your guns to bear on the right bank,” he said to Henry. “Willie’s found more of them.”
“Yes, Tom. Are you all right?”
“I’m hit but I’m all right. What about you and George?”
“We’re fine.”
“Open up any time you see anything.”
“Yes, Tom.”
Thomas Hudson stopped his engines and commenced to go astern again slowly to hold the ship outside the angle where Willie was firing. Willie had a clip in now with tracers in it and he was trying to spot the target for the ship.
“You got it, Henry?” he asked through the tube. “Yes, Tom.”
“Work on it and around it with short bursts.”