“Go!” Jang-mi grabbed his hand. “They are here!”
Some of the young men who had made up Jang-mi’s patrol had shed their weapons and blended in with the other villagers. However, one young man and the old man with the wispy beard still held their rifles. They ran with Miller and Jang-mi out of the village, across a nearby field.
Miller realized that they had gotten out of Dodge not a moment too soon. He glanced back and saw a Chinese officer approaching the gathered villagers. Beside him was a soldier carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight. A sniper. He had not even been aware that the Chinese had snipers. That was just great. Miller kept his head down and two steps later he and the others were hidden by the dense thicket.
As Major Wu approached, he saw that the villagers stood in a group, as if they had either been expecting company — or had just greeted a visitor. There were about twenty people, dressed in various homespun outfits and one or two of the older men wearing the peculiar flat-brimmed straw hats of traditional Koreans. Their dress and simple dwellings spoke of poverty and hardship, while their faces betrayed nothing as they greeted Wu and his men.
Wu smiled. It was not a welcoming smile. With him, it was a facial expression that conveyed the opposite of happiness.
“The American pilot, where are you hiding him?” Wu demanded in passable Korean, a language that was a close cousin of Chinese. He was still panting from the effort of racing down the old mountain road.
He did not feel like running off after the trio they had spotted, and there was no guarantee that he and his men would have caught them, anyhow. Not with that head start.
Wu was sure that if these peasants were anything like the ones in China, that they had a designated place where they went in times of trouble. It was how villagers survived centuries of constant invasion and warfare. It was where they would have hidden the pilot.
The villagers looked at Wu, and then at one another. No one spoke.
Wu looked at Deng and nodded.
Deng raised his rifle and then seemed to hesitate, but he was only picking his victim. His muzzle settled on one of the old men wearing the ridiculous hats.
“You,” Wu said to the old man. “Tell me where the American pilot was taken.”
“Who?” the old man asked, his lined face like a mask of innocence.
Wu nodded at Deng, who pulled the trigger and shot the old man in the chest. He slumped down in the dirt, his silly hat rolling away.
“Where—“ Wu started to shout his question again, but the villagers were not staying around to answer. Instead, they scattered. Some ran into their huts, while others snatched up children and ran for the woods.
Deng shot one of the fleeing villagers between the shoulder blades.
The soldiers accompanying Wu looked on in stunned silence but made no effort to join in the slaughter.
“Shoot them!” Wu ordered. “Shoot them all!”
When the soldiers did not act right away, Wu reached over and smacked one in the head with the muzzle of his pistol.
That got the soldiers’ attention and they finally started shooting, but their hearts weren’t in it. Some fired over the villagers’ heads. Others fired directly into the air. They could not be ordered into being murderers.
Only Deng seemed intent on killing. He fired again, hitting a young teenage boy who had made the mistake of halting and staring back at the soldiers in defiance. He died clutching his chest in agony, then writhed on the ground.
The villagers had scattered like rabbits. In disgust, Wu ordered the shooting to stop. He would have liked to go from hut to hut, punishing the villagers for their insolence toward Chinese soldiers, but there was no time for that.
Wu walked over to the cooking fire, stepping over the body of the old man. He grabbed a burning stick from the fire and threw it into the thatch of the nearest hut. Tinder dry, the thatch smoldered for only a few moments before flames began to lick across the roof. From inside, he heard whimpers of fear. The flames spread, but no one came running out.
Wu had no patience for seeing how long the villagers could withstand the fire.
“Follow me,” he shouted, then started across the field toward where they had last seen the American pilot.
Cole and the kid hurried toward the distant sound of shooting as fast as they could. There I go again, Cole thought. Headed straight toward trouble. Grinning to himself, he reckoned that he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“What do you think is going on, Cole?”
“Sounds one-sided to me,” he said. “The gunshots all sound the same, like nobody is shooting back.”
“What do you suppose that means.”
“I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”
Lately, Cole had noticed that he didn’t hear as well as he used to. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He heard just as good, but there was a constant ringing in his ears whenever he was in a quiet place. An Army medic had told him it was tinnitus, caused by frequent exposure to loud noises like rifle shots, which was kind of hard to avoid as a soldier. Hell, half the artillerymen and tankers were just plain deaf, so he was way ahead of them.
They pushed their way through the brush, less worried now about the noise that they were making. Cole figured that any Chinese patrols in the area were doing the same thing that he and the kid were, which was to head toward the sound of gunfire ahead.
One thing about the Korean landscape was that it was just plain ugly. The hills and mountains were mostly barren, with the exception of scrub trees and brushy thickets. Back home, the Appalachian Mountains were lush with forests of chestnut, oak, and maple. God, he missed that, along with the smell of the fresh mountain air in summer or even the crackling leaves underfoot in the fall and winter. Down in the low places here, the air smelled mostly of the human excrement that the local farmers used to fertilize their crops of rice and cabbages.
A few more steps, and Cole emerged into a clearing. Signaling for the kid to stay put under cover, he crouched low and swept his rifle around, but they were alone. He waved the kid out.
“What is this place?” the kid asked.
Cole saw what appeared to be an ancient stone wall, half-covered in vines. The wall reached about ten feet high and it appeared to be several feet deep, with some sort of ruins hugging the top of the wall. In the shelter of the wall, a handful of actual trees had grown. They looked like hornbeams to Cole — a tree he hadn’t seen much of in these parts. The smooth bark rippled as if with huge corded muscles.
To the left of the wall there was a narrow road that stretched off into the hills to the north. Tufts of grass grew down the center of the road, but the wagon ruts looked fresh.
“I’ve seen these places before. It’s an old hill fort. People were fighting over Korea a long time before we got here.”
“I don’t know why.”
Cole guffawed. “That makes two of us.”
He moved into the clearing, his hunter’s eyes noticing at once that someone had been here recently. Some of the rough grass was trampled. Above, a few branches hung down where they had been snapped off. At first glance, it was puzzling to say what could have reached that high.
He looked into some of the bushes at the edge of the clearing and found what he was looking for. Reaching in, he dragged out a handful of silken material.
“Looks like our friend was here.”
“But where is he now?”
Cole nodded in the direction in which they had been moving. “I’d say he’s in trouble. Time to leg it, boy.”
They crossed the clearing and back into the endless thicket. The sound of gunfire had ended and the sudden quiet seemed ominous. When Cole looked up, he could see a column of thick smoke roiling into the sky. Not far now. In five more minutes of wrestling through the underbrush, they were close enough that Cole could smell the smoke. He heard someone sobbing, then a keening wail. The brush fell away and Cole found himself looking down on a village. What he saw down there made his jaw drop and his hands clench his rifle.