The combat photographer climbed up the loose walls for a view of the carnage ahead. The viewfinder and screens of the world’s television sets filled with the second system of interlocked American bunkers. They were clearly thicker and stronger than the first. Explosions churned the smokey, shattered landscape around the bunkers in a scene straight out of hell, but still flames dotted the firing slits. The paltry few Chinese attackers crawled forward under withering fire.
The cameraman slid back down the crater wall to the fire-blackened bottom and turned the lens again to Wu.
“All units! All units!” cried the officer over the radio. “Attack the second line of defenses immediately! Repeat! Attack the second line of defenses immediately!”
“What are we going to do?” asked Wu’s lone, surviving NCO, a squad leader. Seeing Wu’s silent stare, he prodded, “Sir?”
Men screamed from their wounds outside the shell crater. Inside it, all eyes were on Wu. The camera lens zoomed, Wu guessed, for a close-up of his face.
“Sir?” the sergeant repeated. “What are our orders?” Men now streamed back over the ridge, sprinting helmetless and weaponless, with blind panic on their wide-eyed faces. “Lieutenant Wu, what are our orders, sir?” pestered the persistent squad leader.
“Attack! Attack! Attack!” shouted his superior officer.
“Withdraw to the rally point,” Wu ordered woodenly.
The sergeant and men stared now not at Wu, but at the radio. Wu repeated authoritatively, “We will withdraw to the rally point. Those are my orders.” When he had their full attention, he said, “You did all you could — you did your jobs — but this battle is over for us.”
“Attack! Attack! Atta…!”
Wu shut the radio off with a click.
General Sheng shut his eyes as Wu led his men out of the crater. They followed, as always, only this time toward the rear. He even collected the disorganized, fleeing men from the second echelon, whose attack had been routed by the unbending American defenses. When Sheng opened his eyes, Wu had retraced his steps all the way to the line of departure, and had collected a unit that numbered over twice as many men as the platoon with which Wu had begun the day. The hundred-odd soldiers didn’t know who Wu was, but they followed the calm officer who commanded without threats or bluster and with an ease with which one could only be born.
“I want a copy of that broadcast,” Colonel Li ordered. The technician who sat beside the monitor nodded.
Another staffer pointed to the television screen. “They’re keeping count,” said the excited major, “of how many soldiers are following Lieutenant Han Wushi!”
Sheng looked. The counter read “105” in the corner of the screen. “One hundred and seven, now!” reported the reporter. The counter clicked to “107.” And so it went.
Colonel Li finally approached Sheng one hour and fifteen minutes later. He had been avoiding Sheng. Distancing himself. You pathetic, gutless coward, Sheng thought, and then he smiled at Li.
“I’ll convene a court-martial before sunset,” Li tentatively suggested, “if that is your order, General Sheng.”
“Colonel Li,” Sheng said. “What is your combat record?”
Li’s eyes widened. “Sir?”
“Oh, yes,” Sheng said. “You have one week of duty on your combat record in the final days of our glorious rout in the Indian War. You are correct. It is not enough for an officer of your rank. I will consider your request.”
“My request?” Li blurted out in confusion.
“But for the time being,” Sheng said, “I need your full assistance here.” Colonel Li lowered his eyes. He understood the threat. “Commit the reserves,” Sheng ordered. “Commit all army group and army reserves to the attack. I want to reach the Potomac before dark, and I want to be across in strength by midnight.”
Li nodded. His eyes never rose to Sheng’s, remaining on the floor as they should. The bastard ran back to his bank of radios and maps and screamed orders to scrambling staffers like a son of a bitch, which was how Sheng had used him and why Sheng still needed him.
What a fool you are, Sheng thought with venomous hatred for the spineless sycophant, who survived by sheer brutality. Can’t you see? Sheng thought as Li cursed at the chief medical officer. The counter on the Han Wushi show read “1,239,” and was rising. It’s all over but for the end.
12
“Stand your ground!” Stephie shouted into the radio as the Battle of Washington began. Artillery rolled through the hills toward their line. The bursts rose above the ridges and toppled trees. What finally came into view were straight rows of salvos being walked by computer toward their bunkers. It was World War III fought World War I-style on a crystalline Virginia day.
The Forty-first Infantry Division was compacted into a one-mile front on Washington’s last line of defense. The icy Potomac River flowed at their backs. Stephie’s platoon held onto the last six hundred meters of northern Virginia. They had no room to maneuver or withdraw. Every last man and woman knew that they made their stand here.
Curtains of brown earth rose skyward in ever-approaching rows of death. Trees were severed near the base like twigs and spun sideways through the air. Clouds of mist formed on the edges of rapidly expanding bubbles of shock. Each line of bursts leapfrogged the prior one. Each shook Stephie’s insides with greater and more terrifying violence. At four hundredmeters, shrapnel began pelting the bunker’s concrete, and Stephie hit the deck. In the flashes of approaching hell, she took one last check of her bunker. Fifteen men and women lay curled along the walls preparing for prenuclear high explosives, which to them might as well have been nukes. Both were the destroyers of worlds.
Although Stephie and Animal had tried to prepare the cherries for what was coming, none had ever been through the body rocks at the Savannah River. Their thumbs were jammed hard onto the high-tech baffles in their ears. Their skin was greased with flash cream to prevent the sunburn that lay on the fringes of the real, bad burn. Their biochemical protective outer gear — camouflage, one-piece suits with clear plastic faceplates — was also fire resistant. Their Kevlar helmets and body armor covering them neck to thigh prevented penetration of thick slugs of shrapnel. But there was nothing to protect the young men and women from the fear that raged against their rickety defenses.
The world began to buck up into Stephie as the barrage neared. To the concrete’s thump was added the quake delivered by the air. She jammed her eyelids shut. Both radio nets — up and down the chain of command — turned to spikes of static in both ears. A tidal wave of violence washed over them at an inexorable, horrible pace. Her body ached worse with each and every blast. Each blow shook the unitary bunkers, which had been poured as one unit around plastic forms. They shook and nauseated their contents, but they didn’t crack. At least that was the theory.
When the rows reached the bunker, one 175 mm shell struck the roof of the bunker. Stephie was bounced three feet into the air.
Stephie’s ears popped, and she couldn’t breathe. Not because the air outside had been sucked from the bunker, which it had, but because the wind had been knocked from her chest. Her diaphragm had been paralyzed by the blow. Flames had obviously shot through the bunker, because smoke swirled thickly. Her helmet filled with the voice-activated screams of the wounded over the radio.