I wondered how much time there would be. Ten minutes? Fifteen? Over the radio, I called for the officer I had assigned to liaise with the Taiwanese Militia. “We’ve taken Teatime Hill. Send the Militia up to reinforce us.”
The officer acknowledged his orders. The militia wouldn’t be as useful as trained soldiers, but we needed every advantage. If the Chinese retook Teatime Hill, there was nothing between them and the town center. They would be free to wipe out the western garrison and Devil Hill at their leisure and push on to Yilan. I had gambled the war that we could take Teatime Hill and not lose it again right away.
I spaced my company commanders out in our new defensive positions and tried to create as many overlapping fields of fire as possible. A combined shout came from the next hill over, interrupting my efforts. “All, ready yourselves. They’re coming…”
Chapter 12: Ivanov
We fired off our complement of grenades, thirty each, over the course of the assault on Teatime Hill. Return fire came our way sporadically, but nothing came close. We were deep in cover, and the PLA infantry had much more pressing problems. We made sure to target their officers quickly, knowing that the enlisted were unlikely to suddenly run off on their own to attack the threat to their rear.
By the time we’d finished firing off our grenades, the battle was very nearly over, and retreating Chinese were running near our position. The Americans were firing on their retreating figures, and suddenly friendly fire hitting us was a very real threat. McCormick radioed, “Rally at the farm shed.”
I slung my grenade launcher back over my back next to my T97 rifle and withdrew my silenced pistol. Crawling slowly, it took me about eight minutes to get to the shed. On my way over, I kept an eye toward the retreating Chinese coming at me. One seemed to be coming right at me, so I gave him three quick shots to the head. In the general chaos, one more PLA infantryman falling dead wasn’t noticed.
I reached the shed and knocked on the side so that if McCormick or Dietrich were inside, they wouldn’t blast my head off when I opened the door. Checking to make sure no Chinese could see me, I stood up and slowly opened the door. Dietrich and McCormick were already inside.
We all looked each other over. No wounds. We had come through the battle completely unscathed, and the Americans had successfully taken back Teatime Hill. That was the extent of our orders, and I whispered, “We should get moving if we’re going to get out of the area before the Chinese come swarming.”
McCormick shook his head. “Negative, the night’s still young, Dmitriy. The PLA is going to launch an attack straight through our position. We can disrupt the attack.”
“How? We’ve only got, what, two or three magazines apiece? We’ve used up all our grenades,” I pointed out.
“Target the officers,” McCormick said simply. “Or we wait until they’re engaged with the Airborne and hit their flank, try to confuse ’em.”
A look of inspiration crossed Dietrich’s face, and he grinned a wicked smile. “Oh, I think we can do more than confuse them, sergeant.” He explained the plan to us.
We moved out to our position near the base of Teatime Hill without delay, which was fortunate because the PLA attack came only a few minutes after we had arrived on location.
The plan was certainly ambitious. I had never done anything quite like it, and the conservative professional part of me wondered if it was perhaps a bit too radical. We were making a lot of assumptions about the Chinese and their commanders, and we also had to rely on the Airborne to come through for the most important part.
The PLA were approaching now, the same division of men that we had passed earlier on our way to Teatime Hill. Now they were storming through the valley, along with many of the PLA infantry who had survived the rout after the Airborne attack. McCormick, Dietrich, and I were lying prone in a dense part of the forest, just a few feet separating us.
“Don’t let them get close,” McCormick whispered as we looked through our thermal scopes. “We need to use the advantage of the infrared suppressing suits.”
With that, he took his first two shots while the Chinese were still about two-hundred yards away. We had removed the silencers from our rifles. For once, our job wasn’t to hide and strike suddenly. McCormick’s shots hit an enlisted man in the chest, and he went down fast.
A split-second later, Dietrich and I fired on two other enlisted men in other squads. We specifically avoided firing on officers. We needed to keep the people in charge alive as long as possible. Conserving our ammunition, we took carefully aimed shots once every second or two, trying to spread the damage to as many different units as possible.
At first, the Chinese stopped to return fire. The soldiers without thermal scopes couldn’t see through the rain and fog, and those with thermal scopes could only see isolated flashes from our weapons while we wore the Taiwanese suits. We shifted positions, moving a few yards to the right after every few shots to ensure that the return fire was never accurate enough to be a real threat to us.
Soon, the Chinese officers were reporting back to their superior officers that there were enemy soldiers at the foot of Teatime Hill, delaying the attack. That simply would not do. Whoever we were, the Chinese high command didn’t need to worry about some isolated unit that had clearly gone too far. We could be cut off and surrounded at leisure; what mattered at that moment was hitting the American positions at the top of Teatime Hill as quickly as possible.
They ordered their men to bypass us. The topography of the area was such that they could bypass us in one of two directions. They could try to loop around to the west, but there was another tea plantation in that direction, and the cover thinned out sharply. Proceeding through the plantation on the way to the top of Teatime Hill would be far more dangerous than taking the eastern loop, which would also quickly put Teatime Hill between them and us.
As the Chinese forces pushed forward, we kept up our fire, and they in turn continuously moved to the east, thousands of them pushing in that direction to begin the march up Teatime Hill from the eastern side.
We hadn’t coordinated the plan with Colonel Concitor, but we assumed he would quickly see the potential. Soon, we were down to a single clip each, and it was time to leave. We needed to keep a reserve in case we needed to fight again before reaching our cache of supplies. Without any fanfare, we started running off to the west, embarking west on a long circular route of ten miles that would eventually take us back to the area northeast of Pinglin.
Not long after we departed, call it three minutes, we heard the thunder of gunfire in the distance on Devil Hill. McCormick laughed and pumped a fist. “That’s the first time I’ve ever led a PLA attack! Nice idea, Dietrich.” He slapped the German on the shoulder, and Dietrich gave a crooked grin.
“No mean genius on my part, I must admit.”
For once, I had to agree. The PLA had been in command of Teatime Hill so long that they had forgotten why the position had been so strong in the first place. Devil Hill covered the eastern approaches up Teatime Hill. We had funneled the PLA attack in that direction so that the Airborne troops on Devil Hill could rake the attackers with gunfire and cut them down well before they were in a position to assail the defenses on Teatime Hill.