It was a race against the clock. Artillery barrages couldn’t last long. Chinese missiles would be airborne in a minute, at most. The armored, self-propelled American guns had to be five hundred meters down the road before they struck.
Just as First Platoon made it into position — a long line of human beings facing the road and the enemy guns on the opposite side of it — and Stephie reported, “We’re there!” to Animal, the barrage lifted. “Lay it down!” Even before the echos from the artillery died down, she shouted over her platoon’s net, “First Platoon! Advance and fire at will!”
They climbed over the wall and brushed aside the crisp and blasted hedge on the other side and began their run across the open street.
“A-h-h-h!” Stephie yelled — deep and guttural from the back of her throat — as she crossed singed grass and cracked sidewalk. The noise she made was half a voluntary growl to steel her nerves and will her body toward the guns that lay, unseen, ahead. The sound was also half an involuntary wail of anticipatory agony. The same shouts rose from the other soldiers in First Platoon as the line made it onto the street’s pavement. Surviving Chinese gunners who raised their heads were met by fire from Animal’s Second Platoon. Every rifle, machine gun, and missile launcher from their sister platoon loosed a volley that streaked past parking meters and mailboxes and smacked broadsides into the blazing walls and windows of the strip shopping center on the other side of the paved dividing line, forcing the Chinese defenders to drop or die.
Only three of Stephie’s soldiers fell on crossing the road. They were dragged to cover writhing and trailing blood across concrete. It was a remarkable feat. Stephie remained with First Squad to stay roughly in the center of the platoon. On their left, Third Squad’s objective was a small, free-standing dry cleaner. Although it appeared empty, they hosed it down with fire before entering it and informing Stephie over the tactical net that it was clear.
On Stephie’s right, the men and women of Third Squad tossed grenade after grenade into the blazing, two-story furniture store, which was attached to the long U-shaped shopping center that was their objective. First Squad — led by Stephie — would launch the whole point of the battle: a sweeping action.
They received fire from the rear door across a small, park-like sitting area. There were no windows facing the grassy side lot, only the one door, and it exploded with grenades fired from launchers mounted underneath assault rifles. “They’ll be waiting for us behind that door!” Stephie shouted to one of the two engineers she’d scrounged up on her way back to her unit from Washington. The other one had been hit crossing the road. “We need to blow that wall open!”
Under covering fire, the combat engineer and two riflemen dashed to the brick side wall of the shopping center a dozen feet from the lone and now empty doorway. Seconds later, they scrambled away from the smoking satchel — sitting wedged against the wall atop a water meter two feet off the ground — with even greater haste. The last man in line was blown from his feet, but he was lucky. The smoke quickly cleared in the light breeze and water spouted from the broken pipes. A limbless Chinese corpse lay draped through the ragged hole in the wall.
Stephie lead the attack through the hole, opening fire into the black, smoke-filled hollows even as she approached the building. On Stephie’s command, she and the eight surviving soldiers of First Squad hurriedly tossed hand grenades in rapid succession past the jagged rows of broken bricks, and then dove to the ground beside the wall. The last woman barely escaped the nine firecracker blasts.
Stephie immediately climbed into the choking smoke. More bodies — soldiers cowering in the store’s back office — littered the floor. Stephie led the two squads inside, wading blindly through the swirling haze in a stoop, ramming the shinguards and kneepads sewn into her trousers into an overturned filing cabinet. Twisting her ankle on a shattered half brick. All the while worrying about the jumpy soldiers behind her as much as the Chinese to her front.
“Another charge,” she whispered to the engineer, pointing through the office doorway into the still hallway just beyond. He looked at her as if she were crazy. Using high explosives in such near proximity in the enclosed space. “Give it a good hurl,” Stephie suggested.
He swallowed hard and crawled forward under cover of First Squad’s weapons, which were trained on the doorway. He fumbled with the fuse, then pulled it, arched his back, and heaved the heavy canvas satchel through the doorway and out of sight down the corridor. Chinese fire peppered the door frame above him as he scampered on elbows and knees toward Stephie as fast as he could.
She lowered her helmet to the floor and plugged her ears with her thumbs.
The explosion hit her hardest through the floor. It bucked up into her cheekbone like a punch. All around her debris bounced into air or tumbled from shelves. One of her women screamed when a filing cabinet was toppled onto her. Choking smoke and dust fouled the air.
“Let’s go!” Stephie shouted before coughing.
She rose quickly but was the third person through the doorway. Her soldiers were learning — or relearning — an important lesson of infantry warfare. If you want to live, you follow hard behind your fire support. You kill the enemy in the seconds before his mind clears and his senses and nerves steady. The corridor erupted in brief pulses of full-auto flashes from the two soldiers’ weapons. Stephie followed, but found nothing living to kill.
They used four more satchel charges as they blew holes in walls and cleared their path of reeling defenders. It was easier than it should have been because the Chinese were done. Fought out. Finished. They fired on first sight of an attacker, but then either ran away or curled into a tuck under the hail of return fire. Either way they died without making a stand.
Stephie led her infantrymen in a crawl across a showroom from washers to dryers, which did a piss poor job of stopping Chinese rounds. She lost two people — a man and a woman — who sat upright behind the appliances to reload their weapons.
Third Squad covered their rear. Second Squad joined the remnants of Stephie’s First Squad in the attack. Stephie led them through the next hole in the wall, and they sprinted across the flaming showroom floor of a carpet outlet, which the Chinese had set on fire before they abandoned the store. The fumes from the burning merchandise were choking. Three Americans fell, one dead. By the time they made it through the blaze, the Chinese were in full retreat.
That retreat became a slaughter when Animal’s Second Platoon crossed the road, flanking and routing the flanked defenders left behind to cover the withdrawal. Easily a hundred fleeing Chinese were mowed down in a field behind the shopping center, all shot in the back.
Fire and maneuver was new to the former American bunker troops, but it was what they had all been taught in basic training, and what they had witnessed the Chinese do. It was infantry combat. It was victory. They exulted in it.
There were high fives from the surviving attackers. Hearty handshakes and hand slaps between the two, reunited platoons. Some men hugged in mutual celebration of life.
But Animal and Stephie didn’t celebrate. “How many?” she asked in a quiet voice on greeting Animal in the shelter of the smoldering ruins of a house behind the shopping center. Chinese lay sprawled — twisted and contorted — all around. Some, Stephie noted in satisfaction, hadn’t bothered to bring their weapons with them in their flight.