The Chinese soldiers ran headlong into sheets of huge slugs that dramatically upended them and sometimes killed their comrades directly behind them. Some got away, but enough died of such horrifying wounds that most of the rest of the soldiers just took cover.
They must be young, Hart thought. Green.
The realization bothered him, but not enough to stop his killing. He switched his aim to those who chose to climb slowly up or down the hill. It was a turkey shoot. Each round killed a helpless man. Every so often, Hart just couldn’t fire. The crosshairs rested steady and true on the broad back of some poor guy who clung precariously to the crumbling hillside, but he couldn’t pull the trigger and he moved on. The inhibition defied explanation. He would kill four or five men without a care in the world, then the trigger would seem to stiffen, and he would skip one. On occasion, he would find the same man in his scope again and he would blow his head off without the least hesitation. The randomness of Hart’s killing disturbed him.
He interrupted his single-round sniping only to load another box magazine and to let his gun cool. A large mass of men cowered in a shallow ditch behind the high-slung chassis of their trucks, but not for long. Hart had only their helmets and the tops of their backs as targets, but the slowly flowing, burning gasoline poured into their ditch and flushed them. Truck by truck, they were forced to make a run. Hart switched to full auto.
He held on tight to the pistol grip and strafed their path as nearly horizontal to the road as he could. The running men were cut to pieces.
He went through an entire box of ammo. When the river of gasoline finally burned itself out, he shifted his fire to the men who had chosen to remain pinned in ones and twos to the road. More efficient, more intentional single shots sufficed for them, but he didn’t waste any time in between. The bullets’ trajectories were so true that the moment his sight crossed a form he squeezed, and the man died a half second later. Hart finished off his third box and ate into the fifty rounds of his last box at a practiced rate of one round every second-and-a-half. In a little over a minute he was done.
Flames still raged at the blackened foundation of what had been the roadside service station. Dozens of vehicles up and down the column had inch-and-a-half-wide holes in their side quarter panels behind which lay engine blocks that were similarly holed. Hart was out of ammo, but few Chinese soldiers risked moving, even though hundreds had survived unharmed. They must have thought Hart was pausing to load fresh rounds that would soon resume popping eyeballs out of sockets with the huge bullets’ kinetic energy. They had lived, they just didn’t know it yet.
Hissing sounds from the hill above alerted Hart to the danger. His head jerked left and right as he checked the sky. Three small missiles streaked off down the valley. Three treetop-scraping Chinese helicopters met the missiles with their windshields. The gunships crashed to the valley floor in nearly balletic, fiery unison that produced magnificent pyrotechnic displays. The pre-positioned automatic launcher had only three missiles left in its tubes.
Chinese gunships would shortly arrive in even greater numbers. Hart began to stow his equipment in his pack haphazardly. Speed was what he needed now. The pinned commander of the infantry battalion would be on the radio.
Hart left his thin, infra-red absorbing Mylar enclosure behind. He had a dozen more back at his primary cache. At the crest of the ridge behind him, Hart knelt and looked at his watch. The entire engagement had lasted less than ten minutes. His silent mental count put Chinese dead at over two hundred. It was a stunning, one-man victory that left Hart strangely depressed.
The conversations fell quiet when President Baker entered the darkened Situation Room located in a bunker a hundred feet beneath the White House. He settled into his familiar place at the head of the table, feeling a lack of confidence so extreme it reminded him of stage fright. He was nervous, agitated, and hyper-alert for no particular reason. He interpreted casual greetings as signs of loyalty or betrayal. Eye contact was a signal that they would stick with him to the bitter end. An averted gaze that they would turn on the failed leader who had led the nation to the brink of destruction.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” General Cotler said, staring Bill straight in the eye. The bags under the general’s puffy eyes were so dark that he looked like a boxer after a fight. Baker felt the prickly rush of panic slither up his arms and torso as all eyes — friend and foe — measured their president. “The last units have been withdrawn from Atlanta, sir,” Cotler said in a funereal voice. “The 218th Infantry Brigade held I-95 open long enough for Fourth Corps to withdraw to Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, in good order. But the Two-One-Eight is now surrounded in Savannah. They’ve taken about 33 percent casualties: 3700 killed or wounded. They and the local Savannah militia have entrenched around the city. The brigade commander is awaiting your orders, sir.”
Baker opened his mouth but had to close it again to swallow. He cleared his throat. Some unseen but attentive technician — taking his cue from the general’s briefing — put shaky pictures on the screens behind Cotler’s head. Bright yellow backhoes and bulldozers dug tank traps around the southern city. Periodically, the camera shook as self-propelled artillery in the background pounded out rounds, adding to the black wall of distant smoke that marked the approach of the enemy.
Baker issued his orders in a drained, wooden voice. “They should continue to fight so long as they have any reasonable means to resist.” The orders were becoming Bill’s mantra. Cotler nodded. The men and women in Savannah would be measured against the standard set by the Marines and sailors at Guantanamo Bay. It was better known in the public as “fight to the death.”
Baker was suddenly seized by a need to breath. He inhaled, but the wind caught in his chest, and he inhaled a second and then a third time until his lungs were full. More eyes were averted after the effort than before.
“So the Fourth Corps,” the vice president said, consulting her briefing book, “minus the 218th, which is a separate, free-standing brigade, made it out of Florida intact.” She made a note, keeping her own private ledger whose entries were accounted for in lives. Or are they in deaths? Baker wondered. Elizabeth Sobo then asked, “What about Seventh Corps?”
All heads swivelled from the VP to General Cotler. Seventh Corps had borne the brunt of the first week of fighting. The media had taken to calling them “human traffic cones”—supposedly named after the orange warning markers placed across highways, which was the closest the media was allowed to the fighting and therefore the standard reporting vantage for dashing news anchormen. But Baker’s blood boiled in anger at the double meaning — the bitterly sarcastic mental image of impotent thumps heard on the undercarriages of speeding Chinese tanks.
Cotler didn’t look up as he read. “The 3rd Armored Division retired from the field with sixty-two serviceable tanks and about five thousand effective troops. The 6th Infantry with about twenty tanks and seven thousand men and women. But both are totally disorganized and disrupted. It’ll take months for them to re-form.”