The Missing Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Now, I can’t guarantee where this t’ing is gonna hit. I figure we should try to put one in the slope below them shells, and maybe that’ll tell us how to adjust.”
    Sam was twenty-three, an age when a man would just as soon do one thing as another without thinking about it much, but he was uneasy when he looked downrange. If they could figure an impact point with this test shot, he couldn’t imagine a miss with a second. Summoning within himself a dumb optimism for the perfect hit, he decided not to ask the lieutenant to reconsider. He even envisioned a commendation for developing a new technique for battlefield disposal. Suddenly, something big detonated two miles off, a cloud of black smoke rising like an Indian’s signal, and his confidence shrank. They glanced nervously at one another.
    “Be sure to aim low,” Sam told Comeaux, who turned the elevation wheel to lower the barrel and then pulled the plug out of the muzzle.
    “All right, all right!” Robicheaux hollered. “Let’s plow us a hole.”
    Comeaux held the lanyard tentatively in his hand as the lieutenant shooed the horses away, waving his billed cap and crying out like a schoolboy. Everybody except Comeaux crouched down behind a line of sandbags.
    Comeaux turned his back and squinted. “Fire?”
    “Check the lookout first,” the lieutenant told him.
    Comeaux raised his field glasses and saw the makeshift flag a thousand yards to the west, waving on the hill.
    “He says it’s clear.”
    “Then fire,” the lieutenant said, squatting low behind the sandbags.
    Comeaux opened his mouth wide, bent his knees, then gave the lanyard a jerk.
    The gun bucked back with a head-flattening concussion. Sam thought that his soft palate had fallen down his throat, and his ears strummed as though struck by lightning. They all hugged the ground, Comeaux dove under the gun’s axle as it rocked back and forth, everyone preparing, as the shell screamed downrange, for the second explosion to fall on them like a mountain.
    They heard nothing. Sam looked up and saw the pile was intact. Stunned, Comeaux unlocked the gun’s breach and looked into the smoky hole, as if convinced the shell hadn’t been launched. He turned slowly and raised his shoulders. Then, far off, they heard it: a dull and profound whomp, maybe five miles away.
    “We missed,” Sam announced, and his voice sounded tinny in his singing ears. He knew then he should have stopped the whole thing and that for the rest of his life, whenever he performed some stupid action to save time or inconvenience, he would feel the way he did now, like a lazy, rash fool.
    “Oh, my,” the lieutenant said.
    They all looked at one another, frozen, knowing.
    Sam began running toward one of the horses.
    “Where are you going?” the lieutenant shouted.
    “I’ve got to see where that damn thing came down.”
    The officer ran after him for a few yards, gesturing wildly, but Sam had jumped on the scarred bay and booted him off. “Stop, private! That horse might step on a shell.”
    The animal, confused at first, gradually fell into a rough gallop around the stumps, craters, and islands of wire to the ruined road that ran up a slope in the direction the shell had flown. When Sam looked back, the men stood watching him, motionless, the thin lieutenant now waving as if to a relative on a departing train. Then he went round a bend and they were gone. He charged on over dry ruts and through the wrecked lorries and tanks and a burned-up aero-plane, reining the horse in when the road veered off in the wrong direction. Praying for luck, he soon found an old stone pasture wall and trotted along that, the horse kicking up rifles in its wake. Hundreds of German Mausers lay abandoned along the fence, and he imagined the fight, the assassination of troops approaching the wall, the bayonet-driven countercharge, the panicked retreat up the hill, the screaming slaughter. In a defile between two long hills he turned the bay through