“Dad, go back!” she shouted, waving her arm. “Run!”
The door burst open, and out rushed Chinese troops. They tackled her father at the dead run with their shoulders. He hit the pavement with the weight of the two men. One cupped the back of her father’s head with gloved hands.
The men who followed the Chinese out of the electrical house were shot to pieces. Cored pillars of gore shot from rib cages. Heads burst. Arms flew from sleeves. Boots bicycle-kicked high as their legs pinwheeled away. All before the roars of American machine guns arrived.
Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching! sounded heavy bullets off girders as the burping roars rose half a mile away. John pulled Stephie to the ground just as a Chinese soldier jammed an acrylic chock in one side of her father’s mouth. The man’s latex fingers rooted in the other side of her father’s mouth as he thrashed but was pinned and being frisked by the other soldier. The man searching his mouth found what he was looking for and threw it through a bomb hole in the bridge.
The American heavy machine guns shooting at the bridge fell silent, but Chinese tanks opened fire. Cracks and nearly simultaneous booms dueled for sonic primacy from opposite riverbanks. Towers of smoke rose from American lines, but no fire came in return. Discipline held among nervous American gunners, whose earphones were certainly filled with panicked, frenzied shouts to “Cease-fire!” With their president exposed in the middle of a bridge, the Americans took the blows and died by the dozens while holding their fire.
“Cease firing now!” an enraged Wu ordered General Sheng, shouting over the roar. All but the two cowered on knees, all fours, or bellies. Sheng and Wu stood upright. “Give the order to cease-fire!” Wu demanded again.
Wu had never been this angry in his life, and that was good. He needed that anger and the adrenaline rush that he got from the jarring blasts of massed artillery. Sheng looked at Wu’s face and snapped the order to a communications officer lying prone at his feet. “Cease-fire,” Sheng said. The officer relayed the command. Ten long seconds passed. Thirty rounds rocked the air. Wu and Sheng stared at each other.
With one final, laggard boom, a quiet descended upon the river. Wu said to Sheng, with no menace or ill will, “There is an honorable way.”
Sheng’s eyes arched wide. His mouth gaped. Colonel Li rose to his feet, but not beside Sheng. He kept his distance. His reaction reflected a highly evolved political instinct. Massively parallel calculations led to neutrality over loyalty in a single, cold beat of Li’s heart. Sheng’s face closed up tight. His eyes and lips were pinched slits. It was a hard look.
All right, Wu thought.
Hart’s crosshairs danced across the helmets of the men lying atop the president. Only the two were left alive on the bridge. Seven others lay sprawled in widening pools of blood. But the two who pinned the president clung close to their quarry.
The technical dilemma was gruesome. His .50 caliber could splash high velocity bone splinters onto the president. It would spew Kevlar shrapnel. And if Hart’s scope had the wind, humidity, or air pressure off, the half-inch-thick shell could go through the top of the president’s head and out the bottom of his heel. Plus, Hart would get only one shot before the remaining soldier hugged the president tight. Even if Hart could cleave off the side of the man’s head, the Chinese would kill Hart then simply hose down the bridge with fire and kill everyone on it.
At the far end of the bridge, Hart saw just now, an American infantry company was on the move. They double-timed it up the bridge with slings snapping and weapons at the ready. An almost identical scene was being played out on the near side of the bridge, only this one by the Chinese. The two companies of infantry converged on the center of the span.
The situation was hopeless. “Shit,” Hart cursed under his breath. In about five minutes, there would be a firefight. The five people pinned down in the middle — including the president and his daughter — would certainly die along with a couple of hundred dismounted infantry.
Hart changed his aim a fraction of an arc second. The cross hairs moved from the helmets of the Chinese soldiers onto the bare skull of the president of the United States. “If it’s a trap,” Hart had acknowledged three times, “I’ll do the president! All right? Over!” But his finger didn’t pull. He hesitated.
They hadn’t said that he had to take his first shot.
The Chinese soldier’s breath stank as he held Bill’s hair in a painful grip and spoke to him from two inches away. “Your daughter will die,” he said, “if we don’t get off this bridge now.” Bill was so close he could hear the man’s orders stream over the radio from his earphones. “Your choice, Mr. President.”
Bill nodded.
The two men stuck to his sides, shielding him like bodyguards, Bill decided. He stood straight up to offer a better target, but one of his protectors punched him in the gut to double him over, almost knocking his breath out. They then ran him — one of his hands pinned behind his back — toward Stephie and the wounded soldier.
“Dad!” Stephie said, sobbing as they hugged each other. The Chinese soldiers hugged them both but pressed hard, short-barreled weapons to Bill’s ribs and Stephie’s chin. Bill finally recognized the swollen face of John Burns, who stared up through glassy eyes with a pool of blood at his crotch and a Chinese soldier’s knee to his unresisting chest.
“Let’s go!” one of the soldiers ordered, forcing Bill to his feet. Stephie stood. The other Chinese soldier grunted as if he had trouble rising, then rolled over onto the pavement, reaching in vain for his knife, which was sticking out of the small of his back from just under his body armor.
John had drawn it from the now empty scabbard on the man’s boot.
The strap on a machine pistol slapped as the lone remaining Chinese soldier whipped the weapon toward John Burns. Stephie growled, “No!” and lunged.
Burns grabbed the muzzle.
It roared into John’s hands and blazed into his face.
Stephie tackled the Chinese soldier onto his side.
The smoking machine pistol remained clutched in the hands of the bloody pulp that had once been John Burns.
“Grrr!” Stephie gurgled as she clawed at the eyes of the shrieking soldier. “Yi-ah-h-h!” he screamed as he unsuccessfully fought her two hands with one of his and tried to crush her throat with his other. Stephie bulled out her slim neck, and her face went red. She was sobbing as she jabbed her sharp chin down against his grip and tried to kill him with five fingernails. She finally found his eyes. The Chinese soldier screeched and thrashed his head from side to side as he defended now with both hands. She gasped for air. He arched his back, but she held her position on top of him with the toes of her boots spread to either side, killing him in slow motion. “Die, you motherfucker, die!” she grunted. He screamed and tried to bite her hand.
Bill pulled the machine pistol from John Burns’s bloody fingers and held it against the soldier’s head. “Die now,” Stephie said as she suddenly sat back on her haunches and completely ceased her attack.
Bill blew the top of the man’s head off with a shocking, sickening burst. Stephie sat atop the gory sight, however, wiping her hands on the man’s chest. She had gouged out one of his eyes.
Stephie grabbed the machine pistol from Bill. He just watched her. Astonished by her callousness. She dropped the magazine and reloaded a new one from the dead Chinese soldier’s pouch. Her victim might as well never have existed. Nothing existed for her except for the approaching Chinese. Bill followed her gaze. He could already see the bobbing helmets.