N9

N9

Further down the  spit were  Blue Company,  Orange, and  White, each with five  platoons, all  of them  storming the  sand spit simultaneously. The astonishing sight of a rusty barge breaking up into twenty motorized  landing boats,  turning like  a drill team on parade, beaching on the spit, and disgorging a thousand IDF troops onto Egyptian soil was spotted by the alarmed men in the fort  control tower. They called it  in to a  secondary gun battery somewhere in Sharm el-Sheikh.

A pair of soldiers in Judith's Platoon, male  and female, tried to pinpoint where the rounds were coming from the puffs of smoke on the beach. Blue 5th Plt. took three killed and seven injured before he  got  a  fix. The woman called  out  the  resulting coordinates over a portable radio and requested an airstrike.

At first  Judith wasn't  sure  what  happened next. She found herself waking up with her  legs soaked by seawater. It slowly dawned on her that she had been knocked by the concussion of an incoming mortar round and ended up a little ways into the water. Judith had no recollection of the last few seconds. Minutes? She didn't know. Her only thought was that dying was so  easy. But Judith was  not  to  die  on  that  day. Her body  armor  had intercepted most of the blast shrapnel, and the overpressure had been enough to put her in a mild state of shock  but it was not life-threatening. Still, Judith was a little dazed,  and she no longer led the assault, to be sure. With her mind in a fog, she followed her people as quickly as she could manage.

A lieutenant assigned to serve under Judith had taken charge of the  assault when  he saw  her go  down. It was all  handled as seamlessly as possible but the lieutenant no longer really had a coherent  platoon to  lead. There had been  a  total of  three incoming rounds. Five in Judith's platoon were immediately dead, eight were wounded, and four of those would soon die from organ failure or simply by bleeding out. The survivors merged with the other platoons running towards the battery.

At the fort Judith could see the Egyptians were not fighting up to snuff. She could sense a feeling  of little boy  lost among them. The surprise amphibious assault in their rear had been the turn of the tide. It was palpable. It fell over the Egyptians like a shadow and they began to surrender en masse.

The big guns of the  fort were disarmed  by 9 AM  that morning. Then Judith, seeing  the blue  and white  flag of  her adoptive nation raised over  the battery,  fell at  her feet  in a  dead faint. It was only  then that she  received the  proper medical attention that she needed.