Concitor had evidently figured out what was happening when he heard our gunfire and saw the PLA soldiers moving to the east. He had obviously told Devil Hill to hold their fire to let as many PLA infantry as possible make their way into the field of fire before springing the trap.
Thousands of Chinese infantry had started moving up the eastern approaches before Concitor gave the order to open fire. When he did, the Chinese were cut down in the hundreds. The Airborne soldiers on Devil Hill couldn’t always see what they were shooting at, but enough of them had thermal scopes so that everyone was firing in the right general direction.
Whatever spirit there had been in the Chinese attack died away quickly. The ones who had broken less than an hour before broke again, and the division that we had passed through earlier in the day was badly cut up before it even came within range of the Airborne soldiers already on Teatime Hill. The sound of the battle, easily audible to us in the rapidly falling darkness, told the story. For once, the Ak-2000’s sounded weak and few in number, while the M-4’s thundered to the southeast.
After perhaps a minute, the Ak-2000 fire died away, and we could see Chinese soldiers retreating back through our thermal scopes. The Third Battle of Teatime Hill was over.
It took six hours for us to travel our long route back to where our supplies were cached in the northeast. About an hour into our walk, we paused for a few minutes for McCormick to talk to Concitor on the radio. Since we were in a remote location, with no Chinese about for at least a thousand yards, McCormick took his earpiece out and let me and Dietrich listen in on both sides of the conversation.
“Brilliant idea to channel that PLA counter-attack to the east,” Concitor said. “It took me a minute to figure out what you were doing, but when I did, I whooped for joy. I knew we had them by the balls then.”
McCormick said, “That was Dietrich, our resident strategist. He’s a damn clever guy.”
“Pass my thanks along,” Concitor gushed. “We got the preliminary casualty count for the counterattack. Six Airborne dead, eleven wounded. You know how many the PLA lost?” He didn’t wait for a guess. “Eleven hundred. It would have been double that if they hadn’t broken so quickly.”
“What were the casualties for the original assault?” McCormick asked.
Concitor’s euphoria deflated a little. “One hundred and eleven dead, one hundred ninety wounded. We lost about a quarter of the attacking force.” His voice firmed, and he sounded like a Roman emperor, so cold was his calculation. “It was worth it. The PLA lost ten thousand soldiers today between dead, wounded, and desertions. Teatime Hill is firmly in our hands now. We took out some of the PLA’s best frontline soldiers. The Chinese will have one more shot to punch through, that’s it. We’ll have the strong defensive positions in the north on Teatime and Devil Hill and our garrison line in the west. We’ve bought ourselves a realistic chance at winning against seventy-thousand PLA.”
McCormick said, “It’s what, thirty-ish more hours until the heavies get here?”
“Right. Thirty-one hours, by the last estimate.” Concitor sounded tired for a moment, but built steam as he went on. “If we can hold them for that long, it’ll all be over. We’re starting to get reports of frantic activity in Beijing. I think they saw Brown’s failed attack on Teatime Hill and thought we were done, that they’d be in Yilan with the war won within a few hours. Now, they’re facing the very real possibility that they could lose this war.”
“If you had told me there was a good shot of winning when I was at the American Institute in Taipei, I would have thought you were crazy,” McCormick said. “A lot has happened since then.” Then, his voice went cold, “But I’ve got something I need to take care of before the war ends.”
Concitor tried to keep his tone measured, but adrenaline aftershock and fatigue weakened his ability to not sound angry at McCormick. “Clay, look, I know you’re worried about Barker. I know what you want to do. I want to get her back, too. But you are giving that bastard Fong exactly what he wants. We have one more battle to fight. One. Fucking. More. If we win that, we can negotiate to get her back.”
“What if you lose?” McCormick asked quietly.
“Then there will still be negotiations. They won’t want to sour relations by hurting a public figure like Barker,” Concitor insisted.
“I was a public figure too,” McCormick said. “They were going to hide me away for a decade in a camp if Cortez and the Lafayette Initiative hadn’t sprung me.”
Concitor changed tactics. “You’ve done more than anyone else to win this war. You were there at the beginning. You’ve lost friends, mentors, your entire unit. It’ll all be for nothing if the Chinese break through our lines tomorrow.”
McCormick answered that argument with silence. Though his face was neutral, I knew him well enough to see that his mind was churning over the dilemma.
Concitor added, “You don’t even know where she is, and I wouldn’t count on the Taiwanese to figure it out with any degree of certainty. The Chinese are going to be pumping out a ton of fake intelligence, trying to get you to go to the wrong place — and you can bet they’re not going to keep her anywhere near the trap. Hell, she could easily be in China already.”
“I’ve considered that, colonel. I’m not an idiot,” McCormick snapped. “I will think about what you’ve said.”
“Do that, Clay. I’m not your enemy here,” Concitor pleaded. “You’ve got to do what you think is right. I hope you don’t sit out the battle when we need you most.”
With that, the conversation ended. McCormick’s eyes shone moist with frustration and anxiety for Barker. Dietrich and I said nothing, neither of us wanting to push McCormick when he was in such a state. We walked the rest of the way to our supplies without a word between us, and I took the time to consider the situation.
I thought mostly about Colonel Douglas, for whom I had worked after leaving Spetsnaz. I remembered how he had invited me to have dinner with him and his wife at least once a week when I was in London for the first month or two after defecting. He had introduced me to his friends, brought me over for cricket and rugby matches, even invited me out to double dates with acquaintances of his wife.
I’m a worldly man. I’ve been everywhere you can think of, done harrowing shit you wouldn’t believe. But Douglas saw that I was more than a guy who knew how to fire a gun. He saw that I was a human being with needs that couldn’t be met with money thrown at me in a foreign land. The man was a mercenary, but he knew there was more to life than money. He was a tough man, a grizzled veteran of a dozen conflicts.
I knew that he didn’t give a shit about most of the battles he’d fought; he’d just wanted to get paid and build his company. Not as many people knew what he did with his personal fortune. I knew because he invited me to go with him once when he was visiting one of his investments.
He had picked me up in an Aston Martin, and he drove us to Gatwick Airport, where we took his private jet to Glasgow. From there, a driver picked us up and brought us to a grimy suburb about twenty minutes outside the wealthy city center. There, we stopped at a building marked: “The Jo Anne MacCready School.”
Douglas explained in his brogue, “The schools aren’t worth a damn for ’em. If they live here, their parents are probably screwed up. A lot of ’em are heading for a life on the dole or with the gangs.”
“So this is a private school?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he’d said vaguely. It was early afternoon, and an influx of boys in their early teenage years came in. “Little tough bastards here, for the most part,” he said. “I’m giving them somewhere to go. They can goof off in school if they want. But when they come here, they’ve got to work their arses off.”