John Burns kept looking at Stephie past Johnson, whose eyes were glued to binoculars. John tilted his head toward the bunker’s lone exit. Stephie followed him, stepping over the prone replacements and Becky. John and Stephie emerged into the sandbag-lined trench, alone under pine branches on the cool, damp morning. Stephie leaned against the wall and tilted her helmet off her forehead.
“Johnson says…” John began.
“I know,” Stephie interrupted. “He heard they were going to try to push across here. He said he heard it from a major on brigade staff. Now how many majors does Johnson know?”
“Yeah, but it makes sense,” John reasoned. “They’ll probably try to cross the river in half a dozen places, and this looks like one to me.”
“But it would be suicide!” Stephie whispered as if it were a military secret. “I mean…” she began, slapping her hand on the cold concrete of the bunker wall. John frowned and shook his head condescendingly as if at Stephie’s naïveté. “Oh,” she responded, “and just how the hell do you know what the Chinese are gonna do, von Clausewitz?”
“We’ve got to have a plan,” John said.
Stephie stared at him uncomprehending. “A plan? A plan! My plan is to fight from this fucking bunker with my squad! My plan is to kill as many Chinese as I can!”
“Stephie, if they overrun us, every second counts. The first wave to crest the ridge will keep going to disrupt our rear. The second will put a machine gun on this bunker exit and bring in flamethrowers. Okay? We’ve got to be out of the bunker, down the ridge, and into the thick woods on the other side of the dirt road in the chaos before the Chinese get organized. That means you, me, Johnson, and our people, because if we don’t we’ll be POWs, or dead.”
Stephie nodded.
“Don’t go up to ground level,” John continued. “That’s suicide. Fight your way through the communications trenches back to the rear. Got it?” The chill of the morning air kept Stephie from trusting that her voice wouldn’t break. “Do you understand, Stephie?”
She nodded again.
“Stephie,” John began, with his eyes downcast, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
“No,” Stephie said, quieting him with her fingertips on his lips. Her skin there was sensitive enough to tell when his lips pressed, and when the kiss parted from her outstretched hand.
The rumbling sound of a freight train descending from the sky rattled the air overhead. John shoved Stephie into the bunker’s entrance just ahead of a series of thunderous eruptions. Stephie bounded off walls until she fell flat on her face. They crawled on their bellies around the bend in the passageway as smoking debris smashed high off the walls. The concrete floor thudded beneath Stephie, and ice picks stabbed at her ears. She quickly grew sick to her stomach as clouds of dust and smoke poured into the main chamber. Flame shot through the firing slit. Her ears chimed with every blast. She lost her bearings completely, tumbling end over end even while lying on concrete.
The next sound she remembered hearing was coughing. Then, outside, men shouted. Mines exploded like firecrackers. Mortars, cannon shells, and missiles crashed onto the face of their bunker and sprayed fire and dirt through the slit. One soldier — a replacement — lay at the rear of the bunker. The crimson smear along the wall marked his descent from sitting position to crumpled death. Another replacement screeched at the top of his lungs as the medic used scissors to cut his smoking uniform. Melinda Crane kept her knee on her patient’s chest to contain his insensate thrashings and cut nearly indistinguishable sheets of skin and cloth to expose the smoking wound.
The remainder of First Squad lay curled on the bunker floor, not yet having entered the fight. Stephie rose to her knees — fighting dizziness and nausea — and shouted, “Get up!” John got onto all fours beside her. Sparks flew into the firing slit and burst off the ceiling, spattering soldiers with flecks of concrete. Spec Four Crane scrambled to a newly wounded cherry with the burned replacement clutching wildly after her screaming for more painkiller.
John sat on his heels but doubled over and vomited. Animal gained his footing and lifted his M-60 to the slit. Johnson echoed Stephie’s orders in a croaking voice. Stephie climbed up the wall with both hands to the slender horizontal opening, which was now filled with debris.
Fires dotted the hillside and burned even from the middle of the river. Hulks of Chinese vehicles littered both banks and dirty brown sandbars. One amphibious scout car floated downstream shooting fireworks high into the sky as the vehicle turned slow circles in the stream. Missiles streaked from American lines and killed Chinese vehicles with unerring accuracy.Chinese guns and missile launchers from across the Savannah River tried to thread the needle of bunkers’ firing slits in return.
Survivors spilled out of flaming troop carriers on the near side of the river at the foot of their killing ground. Against what seemed insurmountable odds, the Chinese infantrymen formed into teams in the shelter of deep craters and blazing armor. Soon, Stephie realized, they would rally into squads and platoons, then companies, battalions, and regiments unless somebody did something about it.
She raised her M-16 to her shoulder and rested it on the stable ledge of the firing slit. She paid little attention to the insignificant, air-bursting mortars, even though their shrapnel hailed down on their bunker and randomly ricocheted through the slit. She lined up a Chinese soldier who duck-walked from one clump of men to another, pointing and issuing orders. Her first shot kicked up a splash of white water behind him. Her second sent red spray onto the sand. The stunned Chinese soldier sat on his butt and patted his shoulder and chest, mindlessly searching for his wound. Stephie fired again and blasted his helmet into the stream.
The huddled clusters of soldiers were now leaderless. Stephie picked them off one at a time. There wasn’t much to shoot at — a helmet, an ass, a pair of legs — but she sent rounds down the hill with cool precision. She blew the exposed heel off of one man’s boot after firing three aimed shots at his legs. When he spun wildly to clutch at his wound, she killed him with a devastating shot through the back of his neck. Another of Stephie’s rounds clipped off a piece of a man’s crooked elbow. What was left of his arm flopped sickeningly. A dozen soldiers rose in unison to rush up the ridge. She fired five shots — downing two — before Animal opened up with his -60 and killed the rest with belt-fed, 7.62 mm rounds.
A missile sparked in the trees across the river. Its smoking trail wiggled before steadying, and Stephie ducked. Flames shot into the firing slit just above her. The heat was searing but winked out in a flash. Even so her exposed skin felt sun-burned.
John tried to coax a quivering replacement — Animal’s new assistant machine gunner — to allow him to look at the wound to his eye, but the man adamantly refused. Tate and Dawson, who appeared unscathed, huddled together on the floor. “Get the fuck up and…!” Stephie began before being knocked to her knees with a stupendous blow.
What happened? she thought, trying to make sense of it all.
A cold chill spread down her body like the onset of fever. Prickly fingers of pain began to cast a web outward from her neck. Her mouth hung open — halted mid-sentence — as the pain rose, and rose, and rose. On all fours, she stared down at the single drop of blood that spattered the dusty concrete floor. A second droplet, then a third was soon a steady rain. The blood, Stephie realized, was hers.