“You’re going to be shot,” Richard Fielding audibly assured General Latham.
“I’ve always been ready to give my life for my country!” Latham replied, drawing rafts of shouts and angry calls from dozens of military officers. The spontaneous outburst came from all ranks and all services. It came from those most deeply offended by Latham’s blasphemous profession of patriotism: his fellow officers. And the only person more shocked by it than General Latham was Clarissa.
For she shared the officers’ enmity toward Latham and Asher. She felt it, firsthand, just as they did. The only difference between them and her was that she shared Latham and Asher’s guilt.
Bill stood directly in front of Clarissa, blocking her way. “I’m innocent!” Clarissa pled. “Bill, I didn’t…!”
“Now is the time,” he interrupted, “for all good men to come to the aid of their party.”
The American assault had bogged down.
On the eve of the attack, Lieutenant Colonel Ackerman, commander of Third Battalion, had given Stephanie Roberts a provisional field promotion to First Lieutenant, whereupon she had become executive officer of Charlie Company. When the company commander — straight from a war spent at a desk with a bad back — was blown to bits by a mine ten minutes into the fight, Stephie had become commanding officer, C Company, Third Battalion, 519th Infantry.
Charlie Company had been decimated in the defense of the Potomac River, even though several of its leaders had, like Stephie, been repatriated in the prisoner exchange. The company — typically reinforced and fielding up to 150 soldiers — was down to only 80 men and women. They had reorganized from four platoons into two.
Second Platoon now waited on First Platoon’s covering fire.
Stephie and her commo crawled through a parking garage toward the hesitant First Platoon under a thick sheet of Chinese fire. First Platoon was heads down behind a concrete wall that periodically burst into flame. Men and women lay in blood — shrieking in agony — being tended to by frantic medics. One of the wounded, Stephie had learned over the radio, was their platoon leader.
“I need fire!” Animal shouted from behind the Thai restaurant just outside. The unit he commanded — Second Platoon — was pinned under heavy fire.
“Hang on!” Stephie shouted back.
Eighteen-year-olds lay under the lip of the ground-floor, concrete wall. Most still wore their packs. All were terrified. They’d spent their short army careers in bunkers and trenches. Their war had been different from this. Though fighting from fixed positions had been horrifying, this, apparently, was worse. It was worse, Stephie knew, because it was different.
“This shit’s too thick!” Animal cried out over the radio. “We can’t make it across that street, Steph! Shit! I got four machine guns on my front! No way! No how!”
“Copy!” Stephie replied curtly. A long row of frightened eyes hunkered beneath the chipping, flaming wall and stared at their new CO. Squad leaders were either dead or tending to the numerous wounded. Second Platoon was, for all intents and purposes, leaderless.
“All right, listen up!” Stephie yelled at the ragged top of her lungs. Even the medics momentarily stopped amid the spurts of blood and thrashing limbs of pinned comrades. The clock ticked. The Chinese could be maneuvering against them. Stephie made it as short as she could. “Plan’s changed! New plan! This platoon takes the objective! Second platoon lays fire! This is an attack! Each and every one of you attack! Nobody is going to stop! The faster and harder we do this,” she shouted, pounding her clenched fist into her palm, “the more violently we do this, the more fire we lay down on the enemy as we do this, the more of us that come through!”
She was catching eyes in turn, belting equal doses of courage into each section of the long line of suddenly petrified soldiers.
“We attack! Attack, attack, attack! We’re infantry! This is our country!” Men and women around squared their quivering jaws and gripped their weapons with bloodless knuckles. “Drop your packs! Combat loads only! Squad leaders, over here for a meeting!”
Stephie got on the radio and relayed the orders to an appreciative Animal. From the noise in the background, it was clear that Animal’s platoon was enduring withering fire. Stephie turned to the new maneuver unit, reorganized them from four squads into three, and gave each missions. She went from soldier to soldier, slapping legs, squeezing arms, tapping body armor and helmets. She made physical contact with all thirty men and women and waited for each one to give her a nod. To make a personal, tacit pledge to her — a solid, binding commitment through eye contact alone — that they would follow her in the attack.
The thin metal roof and poles of the breezeway connecting the garage to the gutted office building emitted “chinging” sounds from steady Chinese fire. They headed out of the garage and lost their first soldier — a woman — in the tiny gap between the garage and the bombed-out building ten meters away. Half of the platoon had already made it through safely. The half that followed continued unmolested. The woman in the middle was hit in the face and killed instantly.
Stephie led the platoon through the charred, gutted office building, whose walls and exposed girders sang with randomly fired enemy rounds. The two armies were separated by a suburban street across which Stephie’s First Platoon would have to attack. Animal’s Second Platoon was holding their fire from an adjacent Thai restaurant in which Animal had positioned them. Its front wall, Stephie could see through the empty window frames, puffed and flamed from the impact of Chinese rounds.
Stephie’s boots crunched through the ash on the totaled ground floor. Although the fires had obviously died out hours earlier, smoke still filled the gutted remains of the building. The stench was so great that Stephie’s eyes watered. The taste fouled her mouth. To its credit, the structure still stood.
As they neared the row of offices along the street-side wall — the front line — explosions erupted at close range. Everybody dove into the soot as random chunks of shrapnel crashed into walls, but Stephie realized that it was American covering fire. “Where are you?” Animal screamed over the sound of the barrage.
“We’re almost there!” Stephie replied. “We’re going on my order! Sixty seconds!”
She turned to the prostrate attackers. “Everybody up! That’s our support!” she said, pointing toward the hellish blaze from which they cowered. “We go in forty-five seconds. In line! Let’s go! Move! Move! Move!”
She led them through an office that had been turned into a crater. They climbed down the ledges of broken foundation into the glassless atrium created by a thousand-pound missile warhead. Then they crawled up the dirt to ground level and emerged from the building into open air.
There lay the principal advantage of the avenue of attack Stephie had chosen: an intact, three-foot-high brick wall. Stephie lay amid cigarette butts in the outdoor smokers’ haven and directed First Platoon’s three squads in either direction from the crater. She didn’t have to tell them to keep below the wall. The hot flame and roar of the barrage and the smacks of shrapnel against the building’s hide above them did that for her. She did, however, have to tell them to crawl faster by shouting, “On all fours! Go! Go! Go!”