There was one last bit of business for me before I could let myself die. Wasting no time, I used both arms to pull myself forward, ignoring the throbbing pain in my shoulder and the numbness in my legs. I only needed to move about five meters.
Fong was still on the roof’s surface, wincing in pain. Because his hands were still tied, he couldn’t cushion his fall at all, and he had probably broken something when McCormick pushed him down. He had rolled over on his back and was looking up to the dark, foggy night sky.
That fog would probably buy me the few seconds I needed, I judged. When I was next to Fong, I pushed myself to my knees, and my eyes went red from the pain.
I raised my pistol to Fong’s head. He met my eyes. “For Douglas,” I said simply.
I pulled the trigger three times, and Fong’s head rocked back from the impacts. The PLA colonel who had come so close to winning the war for China was dead.
I threw the pistol off the roof and collapsed next to him. There was nothing left to do, and I waited patiently for Unit One to come kill me.
Chapter 13: Concitor
“Ivanov just shot and killed Fong on the roof of the building.” McCormick’s voice sounded shocked on the radio.
The news didn’t shake me. Though I did regret that Ivanov would now almost certainly die, I didn’t particularly mind Fong being killed. I hadn’t known McCormick’s plan in advance so, when I heard him explain the sedative to Fong over the radio, that was the first time I knew about it. My instant thought was that McCormick should have used poison. I guess Clay just decided he wouldn’t kill unnecessarily. Maybe he saw Fong as what he might have been — a family man who had a made a career in the daylight instead of the shadows.
It was no time to psychoanalyze the man. “Where is the helicopter taking you?”
McCormick took a moment to answer, jarred by events. “Uh, Yilan. We can’t land back in Citadel, the PLA is too close, they’d shoot down the helicopter.”
“Alright, Clay. You and your men did a hell of a job out there. Getting rid of Fong is going to make it a lot easier to hold them off. It’ll take them more time to figure out their command structure now, and then the new guy is probably not going to be as talented as Fong was. The war could be over by this time tomorrow, and if it is, a huge part of the credit goes to you and your men.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Thanks, Tom,” McCormick said tiredly. “Is Amy alright?”
“I’ve got my best medics looking at her. The PLA did an adequate job patching her up, she’ll be fine. She keeps asking where you are. I didn’t want to tell her until I could give her good news.”
McCormick said, “You can tell her about Fong. After I get to Yilan, I’m going to go out to the PLA forces cutting off Pinglin from the south, see if I can’t put a dent in them.”
The man would never stop. “Get some rest first. You’ve earned it.”
“I’ll rest tomorrow. Good luck, colonel.” And with that, McCormick’s line clicked off.
I sat back in the easy chair I had commandeered. Moving back into Pinglin proper after we had taken Teatime Hill, I reestablished an ad hoc command center in the cafe I had found earlier near the gymnasium where Brown and Gutierrez had been killed. There was still good coffee in the cafe, after all.
Maps were spread before me on a table, but I didn’t need them. It felt like I had been in Citadel for years, and I knew its contours well. I called upon that knowledge as I returned to planning the defense for the final Chinese assault.
Start with the basics, I told myself.
There were four routes into Citadeclass="underline" north, south, east, and west. The north and west were the most dangerous. A small guard force was in the east and south, no more than a hundred and fifty soldiers total. They were there mainly to give notice if the PLA unexpectedly pushed from the east and to prevent the relatively few PLA who had cut the lines of communication to the south from trying a surprise assault on our rear.
That left the north and the west, where most of the fighting had been taking place. The road in the north was defended by Teatime Hill on the left and Devil Hill on the right. The west had a more conventional line which ran through the buildings on the west side and ultimately ascended to link up with Teatime Hill. Now that we had taken Teatime Hill, there was no direct Chinese line of sight into Citadel within rifle range. I could move Airborne soldiers around at will, rushing troops to the most threatened parts of the line.
The west. It was fitting that the great offensive of the People’s Republic of China, the strongest empire of the east, would focus its final assault on the west. Teatime Hill and Devil Hill locked down the northern approach, and it would be much harder to bring overwhelming force to bear when the attacker would have to run up a hill first. On the western side, however, the approach along the river was flat. There were hills to the north, but the Chinese already occupied those, and even I wasn’t enthusiastic about mustering up another attack to take them. We were spread thin enough already; taking another hill would only dilute our strength further.
I considered options for defending the western approach. I had sprung an ambush there once, but the Chinese wouldn’t fall for the same trick again. This time, the numbers would be such that even a successful ambush might be crushed by follow-on PLA troops if the ambushers couldn’t immediately resume a strong defensive position.
The only solution I could see was to set up a defense in-depth. I planned out multiple lines of defense, different phaselines that the defenders could retreat back to once the Chinese infantry overwhelmed a given line. After that, it was just a matter of juggling the Airborne soldiers I had to shift them rapidly to the areas most threatened. I had started that ahead of time by reallocating the defenses: four hundred soldiers were taken off Teatime Hill and four hundred from Devil Hill and sent to bolster the western defenses. There were now about six hundred American troops each on Devil and Teatime Hill and eighteen hundred on the western defenses. Finally, there were also about nine-hundred Taiwanese militia, and I placed those at the center of the town as a reserve, ready to plug gaps wherever I needed them. They would be used only as a last resort.
Digging in, establishing phaselines and fallback positions, and thinking up some defensive tricks occupied my time as everyone waited for the end to come. Whenever I felt tired, I reminded myself that the war would likely be won or lost in the next assault, and my energy returned.
After about ninety minutes, I noticed that the fog was beginning to lift. I radioed the Taiwanese to ask what had happened to the Chinese cloud seeding operations. “They aren’t the only ones who know how to seed clouds. It’s amazing what countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will let you do in their airspace for enough money. There’s going to be some strong rainstorms in the middle part of China for the next few days. Not much moisture left over to reach Taiwan. Ought to be clear skies,” the officer said with a grin.
I laughed and called the Pentagon to share that bit of weather prediction. Legend had it that George Patton had prayed for good weather during the Battle of the Bulge so that Allied air power could be brought to bear against the Germans. In 2029, we didn’t need to consult a theologian to get one last edge for the coming battle. The American and Taiwanese planes would have a field day.
Over the next five hours, we saw the weather continue to improve to the point that stars were visible overhead. From Pinglin, we saw a squadron of F-22’s fly by on their way west, providing a screen for the less advanced attack aircraft to operate behind. Using binoculars, the sharper-eyed among us could see American F-16C Falcons and F-18F Super Hornets lob smart bombs at PLA anti-aircraft emplacements and troop concentrations and the main roads to the north and west.