McCormick checked his watch. Dusk was rapidly approaching, and with it came the hour of the attack. We agreed that when there were seven minutes left before the Airborne’s assault on Teatime Hill began, we would try to make our way quickly through the valley, killing anyone in our path. At that point, we could eliminate whatever patrols stood in our way and there wouldn’t be enough time for Fong to realize that something was amiss and react to the news.
We waited in a dense thicket in the woods. There were only about ten minutes left at that point until it would be time for us to move out. With so little time, there was no reason to assign watches. We lay about ten yards from one another, each looking in a different direction, scanning for an unlucky Chinese patrol that might happen upon us at the last moment.
The excitement that came over me in the last few minutes before the attack was not the slightly diluted terror that strikes younger soldiers. Instead, combat has become like a roller coaster for me. More thrilling than terrifying, more a ride to be enjoyed than a fear to be mastered. If I am to die on the battlefield, well, I don’t seek that outcome, but I am prepared for it.
“Go,” McCormick whispered.
We rose as one and formed into a single file line with me at the head, McCormick five yards behind, and Dietrich in the rear. Each of us constantly scanned for enemies.
It didn’t take long. As we descended into the valley, I saw a patrol of five men about seventy yards ahead of us. The PLA soldiers were spaced about fifteen yards apart, trying to cover the maximum ground while keeping each other within visual range. “Contact,” I whispered, going down on one knee.
“Got ’em,” McCormick whispered. “Let’s see how good these suits are. We’ll get as close to them as possible and use pistols, they’re quieter. I’ll take the two on the left, Ivanov take the two on the right. Dietrich, take the middle and anyone else if there’s one of them we can’t see yet.”
We grunted our understanding, and then we were off. I moved off to the right at a crouch, closing the distance rapidly. The patrol was moving through the dense forest to the southwest, and we approached from the west, approaching them almost head on. I had the most head-on approach, while McCormick could take his pair at almost a perpendicular angle.
No matter. Killing two unsuspecting PLA regulars was a walk in the park for me. When they were about twenty yards away, I stopped and went down to one knee. The two soldiers were looking straight ahead, right in my direction, but neither of them gave any indication of noticing until they were just ten yards away.
One of them stopped and said something in Chinese that sounded like a question. I answered with two shots to his head with my silenced nine-millimeter pistol, then shifted aim to his friend a few yards to the left. That one was a little further away, but still an easy shot.
“Chicoms down,” I said.
I heard faint clicks to my left, and Dietrich and McCormick confirmed that they had taken out their men as well. I hadn’t bothered keeping track of their progress, and I looked over to see McCormick wiping off his knife. “I moved a little faster than you did,” he said with a grin.
I looked over to his victims and saw that one had two shots in the head, but the other had been stabbed at the base of the skull and had his neck broken. That would be McCormick taking his anger out on the battlefield. I said nothing about it.
“Move on,” McCormick said, and we did.
Another patrol got in our way, this time it was a full squad heading down Teatime Hill. We were on the ascent to Teatime Hill at this point, and the first stage of the assault would be starting any minute now. “Gotta take these ones quick,” McCormick said. “I’ll start at the head of the column, Dietrich the middle, and Ivanov the rear. Don’t let any escape.”
We confirmed the order, readying our silenced T97 rifles. They were louder than the pistols, but they would probably still be quiet enough to escape notice or, at least, quiet enough that no one on Teatime Hill would be immediately clear on what the noise was.
I scurried about twenty yards to the left of McCormick, and Dietrich went twenty yards to the right. The PLA squad was moving in a line, and Dietrich and I needed to create more of an angle so that we could reach the rearmost soldiers. Luckily, the Chinese were relatively close together.
Without warning, McCormick fired at the first man in the line when they were about forty yards away. While the distance wasn’t a problem, the dense trees made the shot a little chancy. I took out the rearmost soldier, then the next, but the third man had seen McCormick shoot the first man in line. He screamed and ducked next to a huge tree, escaping my line of sight.
“Shit,” I said, running toward his position with my weapon raised and aimed. McCormick and Dietrich would be finishing off their parts of the line, and I needed to wrap mine up.
After what seemed an eternity but was probably only one second, I caught a glimpse of the PLA soldier’s Ak-2000 and fired, knocking the weapon out of his hand. The man screamed again, and I sprinted toward him, dropping my rifle and withdrawing my Spetsnaz fighting knife. I rounded the tree in two seconds and slammed my knife into the back of the terrified man’s neck.
“Damn, the scream was loud enough for half the damn PLA to hear,” McCormick said when he reached me. He shook his head, “Whatever, we’ve got to get in position. Teatime Hill’s about to get a whole lot louder anyway.”
We ran up Teatime Hill until we were about ten yards from the edge of the tea field at its summit. Without a word, Dietrich hit the deck while McCormick and I moved off to the east and west. There was about seventy yards between us, and we covered a large portion of the overall defensive line on Teatime Hill, which largely consisted of trenches and foxholes on the far end of the tea field.
When I reached a good patch of dense brush, I fell to the ground and slung my T97 rifle over my back. From my back, I withdrew an XM25 grenade launcher.
The XM25 grenade launcher had taken a tortuous path to end up in my hands on that early evening in Taiwan, and I think it’s worth describing that path because it suggests how fucked up the world is. It was a fundamentally simple concept. Grenades are extremely useful in combat for flushing soldiers out from behind cover. The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to get close enough to throw a grenade in just the right place to flush out an enemy and, of course, a hand-thrown grenade has a long fuse and can be thrown back if you’re not careful.
For that reason, in the mid-20th century, many countries had developed grenade launchers, which could shoot the projectiles further than an ordinary soldier could throw. Grenades shot from a grenade launcher would most often explode on impact, which was helpful in many situations. However, if an enemy is in a trench or foxhole, a grenade launcher won’t help unless you miraculously shoot the grenade almost straight up so that it lands right in the foxhole mortar-style.
The XM25 took the concept of the grenade launcher into the 21st century. A soldier could aim down the weapon at an enemy position to automatically program in the range. Then, he fired the grenade at the enemy position. Electronics in the grenade itself detected when the round had traversed the pre-programmed distance and exploded in mid-air. The soldier could add, say, two feet to the distance set in the grenade prior to shooting so that the round exploded right above the enemy’s position.
The theory was so simple as to mask the earth-shaking consequences of the technology. Soldiers had been safe behind cover for thousands of years of combat, but now there was no way to hide on the battlefield short of locking yourself in a room without windows. There was no way to fire on the enemy and then duck down behind a window or in a foxhole or trench.