By midnight, only the occasional speeding car roared up I-5 from San Diego. The forward observer had established good, continuous contact with airborne flight controllers operating over Escondido a safe distance to the north. Just after midnight, Conner had made fleeting radio contact with Green Berets operating to the south of their position. The Special Forces team had reported that Chinese troops had bridged the San Diego River at I-5 and that lead elements were at such-and-such a grid coordinates. Conner had explained that they had no army maps with grid squares.
“They’re just now passing Sea World!” had come the Green Berets’ shout.
By daylight, the Chinese still hadn’t arrived. Conner’s team were deployed along a fifty-meter line in gouges dug out of the hard-baked north shoulder of a state highway, which intersected I-5 at a road junction 200 meters to the west. Sandy flats offered them good sight lines toward the junction and the bay beyond it, but once the Chinese vanguard passed under the state highway’s overpass, they would lose sight of them completely. The scrubby hills to their backs obscured their view of I-5 North, but the hills’ steep cuts also offered their only means of withdrawal. There were no thick pine forests like the ones in Conner’s hometown of Mobile: the terrain on which they had trained to fight for the last three months.
The air force lieutenant in the next hole to the west continued screaming out his sightings to the airborne controllers. Conner checked again on his squad’s lone woman, Private Deborah Stuart, whose hole was just to the east of Conner’s. He had promised her father, when the man had illegally visited their unit, that he would watch after his daughter.
The lead elements of the Chinese army were now drawing even with the road junction to the west.
The air force FO turned to Conner and said, “We’ve got a fire mission!”
Conner nodded and returned to his missile sight. The green crosshairs turned red when the lead tank disappeared under the overpass and he lost his lock. He picked another of the plentiful armored vehicles and instantly got a green Target Designated and a faint tone in his headphones.
“Missiles away!” came the FO’s shout.
“Incoming!” Conner warned over his squad’s Minimal Emission System radio net. “Heads down! Heads down!”
The only warning emitted by the inbound, heavy missiles fired from orbiting attack aircraft miles inland were their high-pitched shrieks — like noisy fireworks that didn’t explode — as their rockets powered them straight into the earth. These fireworks, however, did explode.
The ground bucked underneath Conner, and the air pounded his body and ears with a gripping, disconcerting shake. His eyes were forced closed by the flash and searing heat, and he found himself tumbling into disorientation as the slamming blows washed over him. The smooth pavement of the state highway cracked and buckled like in an earthquake as it rose into the now listing highway’s overpass.
He forced his eyes open and his head up. The long, level pavement behind which they took cover offered Conner a stable horizon, and his senses finally steadied. He could see no Chinese column on the Interstate beneath the twisted bridge through the heavy black smoke. He switched his missile’s sight to thermal, but all it displayed were the plumes of heat from that rose like fiery towers from a dozen belching vehicles.
“Target destroyed!” the FO reported ecstatically. “Target destroyed! Target destroyed! Great shooting!”
“Contact! Contact! Contact!” came frantic screams from several sources over Conner’s MES. His helmet’s audio system placed the panicked calls of Conner’s men to his left — inland, to the east—away from Interstate 5! Conner, however, searched the clouds of smoke rising from the highway to his right, thinking the directional steering of the audio to be in error.
“Tanks! Tanks!” shouted Hickson, the man on his squad’s left.
Conner turned to see Hickson come apart in time to the jarring crack of a main tank gun and its shell’s simultaneous explosion beside Hickson’s shallow hole. Hickson’s arms, legs, and head were flung in different directions. His torso simply disappeared.
Behind the ghastly scene Conner saw a column of armored vehicles bearing down the state highway toward the junction with I-5 at Mission Bay. Straight toward their position.
“Pull back! Pull back!” Conner shouted, although his men were already running for the hills. Two were blown to bits by a single round fired into the dirt at their feet from a tank gun. Heat from the explosion licked at Conner’s face, and debris stung his neck and hand. Heavy machine guns rattled from atop the armored turrets of a long column of tanks that crested the inland hill to their left. Blistering rounds knifed through air, and men fell amid geysers of dry earth and smoke. Conner sprinted for the hills like the rest. It was every man for himself.
The air force lieutenant, a dozen yards in front of Conner and at the base of the first hill, let loose a shout and sank to his knees beside his severed right arm. Before Conner made it to him, the left hemisphere of his head exploded with an exiting, large-caliber machine gun round, and he toppled to that side.
Everywhere, rounds sung through the air and explosions rocked the earth.
Conner found Debbie Stuart curled up at the bottom of a narrow gully where the occasional rainwater channeled toward a small pipe under the road. Tears streamed down her face, which was pressed onto the ground. He dropped beside her in the same instant that explosions and machine gun fire erupted from a new direction. From the direction of I-5.
They were caught in a crossfire of lethal projectiles, which buzzed over their heads. Pelted the dirt. Skipped along the ground. Skimmed great sheaths of earth from the hillside all around.
“Whatta-we-do?” Debbie shouted.
Conner looked back and forth — left and right — at the armored pincers closing on their position. The Chinese tanks’ main guns were now silent for fear of striking their comrades in the closing jaws of their vise. Their heavy machine guns reduced their fire to aimed bursts. The crackle of rifle fire rose and fell as Conner’s men’s lives were snuffed out singly and in pairs.
“What do we do?” Debbie again yelled.
Conner could see dismounted Chinese soldiers bobbing and weaving through the fingers of hills that ran to the road. On the Interstate to the west, he could hear the sounds of engines. The northbound traffic was no longer concerned with the minor firefight on their flank. Debbie Stuart was watching him. Conner took a deep breath, filling his lungs. When he exhaled, it sounded like a sigh.
Debbie read something into his sigh. She lowered her cheek to her rifle’s stock and aimed at the onrushing Chinese infantry. Conner, slow to appreciate the decision that she thought he had made, raised his own rifle from where he lay prone beside her.
Debbie fired two three-round bursts before Conner could take aim. The Chinese that at first had filled Conner’s sights dropped into depressions in the earth and behind wisps of trashy brush. When Debbie fired again, Conner squeezed his trigger and fired into a clump of desert greenery behind which he had seen one man dive.
The air around them turned instantly lethal. Metal projectiles cut close by Conner’s head and shoulders as a dozen brown hiding places erupted with orange fire. Conner ducked just in time. A bullet slammed into his helmet.
A rifle grenade whizzed in at far slower speed and exploded. Debbie screamed in terror. Both American rifles had fallen quiet, but still the Chinese poured on the fire. Another grenade — far closer than the last — slammed into the earth, and Debbie’s wails ended abruptly. Conner raised his unsteady head.