Stephie tore at the zipper to her suit faceplate. She ended up ripping the entire hood from her head and tearing the helmet and the shouts from her ears. She coughed and sucked the air through balky lungs.
“Oh, God, moth-e-er!” came a boy’s scream from across the smokey enclosure. “Mother! Ah! Please! God!” The wails rebounded off walls at double their volume.
We’ve gotta fight, Stephie suddenly realized. She drew a deep, faltering breath and tried to shout. “Every…!” she began before she coughed over and over. Then, to her great surprise, she vomited.
The heaves lasted several seconds.
“Oh-h-h! Jesus! God!” shouted a grievously wounded cherry.
“Everybody,” Stephie shouted, spewing strings of spittle, “up to the firing slit!”
She struggled to rise to the firing slit, and saw their killing field filled with attacking Chinese soldiers. Her head dipped, involuntarily, in momentary disappointment. There was no way that they could hold. This was the-end of everything.
She raised her head and then her rifle, and turned to her shell-shocked troops. “Get up here God-dammit!” she shouted.
She shouldered her assault rifle and spewed thirty rounds down the hill in a burst that spanned thirty meters of front. Half a dozen Chinese had fallen, maybe more. She reloaded and raked back to the left, then reloaded again and laid it on to the right. As Chinese fire increased, she dipped beneath the concrete wall to reload her smoking weapon.
A woman, Stephie’s age, clutched at Stephie’s calf. She was blown half to fucking pieces. She had dragged herself, leaving a trail of blood, over to Stephie. To the LT. To her one last chance at life.
Stephie looked the girl in the eye and shook her head. The girl laid her head down, and Stephie started to cry. “Fight!” she screamed at everyone. “Fight!” she shouted at the harried medic. She jammed the box magazine into the assault rifle and tore her bloused trousers from the dead girl’s grip. She resumed killing, through flowing tears, with evangelical passion in a state of pure hate.
“Angel Three, Angel Three, do you read me!” came John Burns’s shout over the company commander’s net. His bunker was consumed with the sound of explosions. The sound of hand grenades!
“…getting overrun! Repeat! CP overrun!”
Stephie began moving on hearing the word “overrun.”
“You! You! You! You! And you!” she shouted as she clapped her hand painfully on helmets and shoulders. The three men and two women all looked at her. “Follow me!” Stephie shouted before heading for the exit.
Five infantrymen followed.
Chinese infantry poured into the bright trench line on the sunny hillside just to the north. “They’re in,” she advised her troops before leading them in an attack on the breach, and toward John’s bunker.
Stephie in front dropped prone and fired on seeing the first Chinese soldiers. Two of her soldiers just behind her fired over her head. A half dozen Chinese died instantly. They had looked lost in the mazelike fortifications.
“Come on!” Stephie said, grunting and rising and running toward the enemy. They found only bits and pieces of Second Squad, First Platoon, strewn about a crater. White streaks rose from the inverted point of the conical hole, which split the middle of the trench. She and her team climbed onto the collapsing remains of firing posts and sprayed Chinese troops thirty meters beneath them, surprising them and hitting a dozen as they labored up the slope.
“Come on!” Stephie shouted, leading toward the opening of John’s bunker. When she finally found it, she saw no one. Black smoke drifted out. “Can you hear me?” she whispered into the radio. They heard nothing in reply.
It could be the concrete, she thought, leading five people blindly forward. Slowly. So slowly that the two soldiers behind her — anxious not to get left behind — stepped on Stephie’s boot heels.
“John,” she whispered into the microphone, edging her way toward the bunker, “can you hear me?”
“Stay away!” John screamed from inside.
“Let’s go!” Stephie hissed to her army of five. They rushed forward toward the sound of his voice. Entered the bunker. Zigged and zagged through the entrance.
A rifle butt clanged off Stephie’s helmet like a sledgehammer. A fusillade of fire exploded above her. She drifted. Drifted. Drifted.
Stephie awoke to ragged pleas in a familiar voice.
“Ple-e-ease!” Becky Marsh wailed. “Please! Oh, God, ple-e-ease! Pluh-ea-ea-ea…!” Her sobs trailed off into spasmodic gulps of air.
Stephie opened her eyes. Her head was propped up. She saw Becky kneeling in front of a half dozen rifle muzzles. Two of Stephie’s five soldiers lay dead in spreading pools of blood. Outside the bunker, the sound of fighting was intense.
Inside, the half dozen Americans were lined up along one wall of John’s command bunker. The tense, frightened Chinese held them at gunpoint with their backs to the opposite wall. From the looks on the faces of the Chinese soldiers, their tight grips on their rifles, and their fingers pulled hard against their triggers, it would be over in seconds. They were awaiting a one-word command.
Stephie looked up at the man who cradled her head in his lap. His face was swollen to half again its normal size. Both eyes were nearly shut. His lower lip was cracked open and misaligned. “John?” Stephie tried to say. The left side of her head pounded in pain.
“She! There! Her!” Becky shouted on seeing Stephie stir. Becky slid on her knees to Stephie’s boots, which Becky slapped. “She’s the president’s daughter! The president! Do you understand? Of the United States! President Baker! She’s President Baker’s daughter!”
Stephie kicked at Becky’s hands, but it was too late. Several Chinese soldiers turned their heads to each other in surprise. Several of them obviously knew enough English to understand. Most of the guns were lowered or swung away. Two men went to Stephie. John tried to fend them off with his hands, but the Chinese raised the butts of their rifles. Stephie yelled, “No!”
A sergeant came over and pushed one of his men to the concrete. He bowed his head to Stephie, as if in acknowledgment of her station in life, and helped her sit straight up. With gentle tugs of her arm and nods of his head, he was pulling her away from the others.
“No!” Stephie said to the sergeant, who instantly released her arm. She grabbed onto John’s shoulders and waved her hand across the half dozen mostly wounded Americans. “Together! We all go together!” She knit her fingers into one and clasped her hands tightly.
Becky repeated, “Together! Together. We’re all together.”
The sergeant issued an order, and they were all herded outside. Stephie felt naked without a helmet when the cold air touched the blood, which dried slowly on her face below the wound under her hairline. But one young Chinese soldier found her helmet, ripped the ear buds out, and put it on her head. The were marched onto the forward slope and away from the capital they defended. As they crested the ridge, Stephie looked back over her shoulder. From where she stood, she could see the Washington Monument. Down below, great geysers of white water rose all around Chinese engineers, who were building a pontoon bridge. Burning bits of the bridge spun lazily downstream. Engineers lay dead — by the hundreds — on the beach. The Potomac was filled with the bodies of Chinese soldiers, which flowed slowly to the sea.
In that glimpse, she knew that the Chinese were losing the Battle of Washington.
Stephie marched away from the river and into Chinese territory with a smile on her face.