John took her helmet off and rolled her onto her back. The pain — now excruciating — grew worse with every breath, which was now exhaled in panted, moaning cries. Stephie couldn’t force herself to think straight. She lay her left cheek on the concrete and focused on the spent cartridges that rained from Animal’s M-60 and grew into piles on the floor. John probed the base of her neck, which erupted into flames of agony. “A-a-ah!” she screamed. “Oh-God! God! Sto-o-op!”
“You’re gonna be okay,” John said as he poured water from his canteen onto her neck.
“Stop! Stop it!” she demanded, swatting at him and slapping at his face. But when she saw the blood that dripped from his bare hand, she clenched her teeth, jammed her eyes shut, and puffed through pursed lips as if enduring the rigors of childbirth. The pain grew even greater when Crane began to sew up her ripped flesh. Stephie grunted, rolled her head along the concrete to lift her shoulders from the floor. Moaned to blot out everything. Then saw Dawson and Tate staring at her in horror. “Get the f-fuck up there and f-fight!” she spat, and they rose.
“You’ve got a two-inch long gash across the base of your neck,” John said calmly over the roar of weapons. Melinda Crane coated Stephie’s neck with freezing antibacterial spray. Stephie stifled her screams by clenching her aching jaw. Sweat gushed from every pore. A sharp sting in her arm preceded an almost instantaneous feeling of contentment, which loosened her clenched jaw and relaxed her cramping muscles. She sighed deeply as John dried and bandaged the nape of her neck and Crane scrambled off to other patients.
Rifles and machine guns roared. Grenades, mortars, and exploding 20 and 30 mm cannon shells popped just outside Stephie’s secure nest of pleasant feelings. Only the booms of 120 mm main tank guns against the front wall of the bunker managed to rouse any vague sense of fear in Stephie. She lay on her back watching cartridges rattle around on the floor next to Stephon Johnson’s combat boots. She followed news of the war writ in flashes through the slit onto the ceiling far, far above.
She was surprised when John helped her sit up with her back to the wall just beneath the firing slit. She had so much she wanted to say, but brass rifle casings clattered off her helmet and she lost her train of thought. A thick bandage covered the back of her neck just under her helmet. Every time Stephie turned her head, the dull ache lit up like fireworks, so she stiffly turned her entire torso to peruse the bunker. John now stood at the firing slit firing round after aimed round. Crane had moved on to Animal’s screaming assistant machine gunner, whose hands she still couldn’t pry off his face. The hand of the man who’d been burned was outstretched toward the chamber in general, but his fingers formed a still, dead claw.
Stephie’s rifle lay by her side. It seemed heavier than she remembered when she tried to stand beside John.
“Get down!” John shouted. His hand on her shoulder shoved her roughly to one knee, which landed on a shell casing. Pain burst from both her knee and the wound on her neck. The next time, she was ready for John’s hand, which she slapped away and stuck her rifle into the firing slit. The sight before her was surreal. There were fires and muzzle flashes everywhere. Bullets picked at the bunker’s facade. One in every few dozen ricocheted into the chamber through the slit. But what drew Stephie’s attention was the awesome sight of a regiment of fifty tracked and wheeled Chinese vehicles rushing down the opposite hill in line. They weaved amid the flaming wreckage of earlier waves: first, second, third, she had lost track. At the water’s edge, the row of vehicles disappeared almost in unison behind huge splashes from their boat-shaped amphibious bows.
In the water, all slowed to a crawl. The swimming vehicles — sitting ducks for American missile crews — exploded by the dozen in mid-river. They gained traction and rose onto sandbars — gaining speed with water cascading off their hulls — but still they exploded. They exploded on the near bank. They exploded as they rose up the hill. Stephie stood at the firing slit watching.
Grenades launched by infantrymen arced through air toward their bunker. Everyone but the dazed Stephie ducked. She felt their hot bursts on her exposed face and hands. Shrapnel rattled harmlessly through the firing slit. Stephie raised her rifle and took patient aim, striking a grenadier squarely in the chest. He wore body armor and the round simply knocked him onto his back, but still exposed.
“Stephie…” John said, grabbing her shoulder. Her second round flew harmlessly into the river.
She pulled herself free and snapped, “You made me miss!” The grenadier was crawling down the hill to retrieve his helmet. Stephie fired a round straight into his right butt cheek, which must have fractured some major bone. He rolled over and looked around in confusion. She fired once more and bounced his bare head off a tree stump.
From the burning hulks that had made it halfway up the hill poured more and more Chinese infantrymen. More and more targets for Stephie’s bucking M-16.
The thwop of beating helicopter rotors rose suddenly above the battle. The slope just outside erupted in flame. Stephie ducked below the slit just as a Chinese gunship raked their bunker with its 30 mm automatic cannon. Melinda Crane yelped and grabbed at her left calf before an even louder explosion ended the aircraft’s cannon fire. Stephie and the others immediately rose up to the slit. The helicopter had rolled over once from its collapsed skids onto its Plexiglas canopy, which had settled into a crater on the hillside. The pilot and co-pilot hung upside down in their seats. They flailed at their harnesses not forty meters beneath the bunker.
Animal stitched the wreckage with M-60 rounds, which did nothing more than put a string of stars across the bullet-proof canopy. “I got it!” Stephie shouted and laid her M-16 on its side, ensuring that the under-barrel grenade launcher had a clear path to the target. John said be careful, and Stephie snapped, “I’ve got it!”
The pilot sat on the roof of the upside-down aircraft and worked to open an escape hatch. When Stephie’s aim was true, she checked one last time to ensure the grenade wouldn’t make contact with the concrete. Satisfied, she pulled the launcher’s trigger. The thump sounded nearly simultaneously with the bursting grenade. The co-pilot’s blood splattered the inside of the canopy, but the pilot kicked the hatch open. The fire was rapidly consuming the cockpit from the outside, but the pilot succeeded in squeezing out through the flames and raced away from the growing conflagration. Pow, came a single shot from John’s rifle. The unlucky pilot tumbled down the hill already dead.
The helicopter’s missiles, tracers and shells shrieked off in all directions until its under-pylon fuel tanks exploded. The heat from the petroleum flames washed across the front of their bunker, forcing all to duck behind the concrete shield. Stephie looked around the bunker’s chamber. The guy along the blood-streaked wall and the burned guy — both replacements — were dead. Animal’s assistant machine gunner sat against a side wall with bloody bandages covering his face, methodically pounding his clenched fist against the floor. Only seven were left: Stephie, John, Stephon Johnson, Animal, Dawson, Tate, and John’s lone surviving replacement, whatever his name was.
A burst of static preceded Ackerman’s shouts into everyone’s earphones. “Clear the trenches! The Chinese are in! Clear the trenches! Clear the trenches!”
John motioned for Animal to follow. He grabbed his lone man and Stephie’s cherry, Dawson. The sound of blistering fire from automatic weapons entered the bunker through the opening at its rear. Becky scooted back into the main chamber from where she had weathered the storm just inside the passageway.