“Get up here, Marsh!” Johnson shouted as he blazed away with his M-16. Stephie’s fire joined his, but she couldn’t rid herself of the crawling skin that warned of danger to the rear. The few targets who cowered on the hillside below were mere victims at a massacre.
Stephie turned and headed for the exit. “I’m gonna check the trench!”
Johnson shouted at Marsh to get the hell up to the firing slit. Stephie stepped over Becky’s legs wearing a look of utter disdain. Becky returned the glare defiantly.
Outside, the main fighting line was in complete disarray. Craters enlarged or collapsed the trench walls. Thick smoke obscured the muddy floor. Animal lay hunched over his machine gun amid toppled sandbags defending the bunker’s lone exit with the squad’s most awesome weapon. He held it aloft prepared to swing his fire left or right, as needed.
“Which way did they go?” Stephie yelled over the rattle and pop of gunfire in both directions.
“The two cherries went that way,” Animal pointed to the right, “and Burns went that-a-way.”
Stephie followed Animal’s finger — and John Burns — to the left and keyed her helmet’s boom mike. “Dawson, you read me? Over?” A panting, whispered acknowledgment confirmed they hadn’t made contact on the right. “John?” Stephie next asked expectantly, staring down the smokey trench after him. She got no reply. “John, do you read me, over?”
Pop! Pop! Pop-po-po-pop! erupted the reports of vicious, close-in combat from the direction in which she was headed. Stephie cautiously advanced toward the sound of the firefight over fallen timbers and landslides. Her rifle was planted firmly in the hollow of her shoulder. Her eye was glued to her sights. Her finger was within a hair’s breadth of releasing the sear. Ghosts formed and dissipated in the drifting smoke. Stephie stifled coughs that might draw blind fire by clamping her lips tightly shut. The imaginary aimpoint beyond the raised front sight of her rifle was her sole focus.
The smoke swirled from a draft in the wake of a warily approaching Chinese soldier.
Crack! Stephie’s rifle recoiled.
The Chinese soldier’s face exploded ten feet in front of Stephie.
She dove behind a pile of sandbags as the trench erupted in full-auto fire. The top layer of sandbags above her disintegrated in rips and sprays from thirty or forty rounds. Covering fire, she thought as she fumbled with a hand grenade. She pulled the pin, let the handle pop, and tossed the frag no more than five feet over the fallen trench wall.
The explosion thumped into her back and sent loose earth cascading from the walls. A severed arm landed at Stephie’s feet. She flicked the M-16’s selector switch to “burst” and rolled into the smoke pulling the trigger repeatedly. Her three-round bursts stabbed randomly into the drifting haze. Under her own covering fire, Stephie rose and dashed across the trench past three dismembered Chinese and a small, smoking hole. Black objects arced past her in the opposite direction. She dove into a sagging ballistic shelter as half a dozen grenades erupted at her former position.
The shelter’s single support — a misaligned wooden brace — barely held aloft the drooping roof of logs, earth, and sandbags. Stephie lay on her side with her rifle raised. From out of the clouds of heavier-than-air smoke around a zig in the trench line came a parade of rifles followed by men. One, she counted to herself on the appearance of each new, oblivious Chinese soldier. Two. Three. Four. None had seen her behind a jumbled pile of sandbags that had fallen from the shelter’s roof. Each Chinese soldier carried large, square satchel charges: thirteen-pound blocks of bunker-busting plastic explosives. Five, she counted. Six. Seven. Eight.
Animal’s machine gun opened fire. The first three men never made it back to the wall over which Stephie had flipped her grenade. The five others cowered behind it on Stephie’s side amid their dismembered comrades’ entrails. Still others arrived from around the next bend in the main trench to join the forwardmost troops. One worked to fuse his satchel charge. They were preparing to hurl the charge onto Animal’s position. Once the machine gunner was dead, everyone else in the bunker would die too.
On the left — from the direction John had gone — a grenade burst in the trench. Chinese were shredded by the fragments. A lone M-16 fired three-round bursts.
Four Chinese soldiers on Stephie’s right pressed themselves low to the ground as the fifth fused his smoking satchel charge. The man arched way back to hurl the canvas square toward the bunker.
Stephie killed him with a burst from her rifle. The satchel charge fell into the middle of the man’s four comrades a dozen feet from where Stephie lay.
She kicked at the shelter’s lone support and the roof collapsed on top of her. But that was nothing compared to the next staggering blow.
Stephie awoke inside a dark, smothering coffin. Her head was spinning, and she passed in and out of consciousness. Several times through the night, she awoke to the sound of gunfire, but each time she drifted out again. When her head next cleared, she saw light through the cracks. It was daytime, but which day? Over loud ringing in her ears Stephie heard grunts and cracking wood and gripes muttered in English.
“…fuckin’ ridiculous when we could be gettin’ some sleep.”
The words grew louder just ahead of the blaze of sunlight and rush of fresh air. Dirt drifted into Stephie’s eyes as someone yanked at the logs covering her.
“Hey. Hey-hey-hey! Here she is!” Private Dawson shouted. “She’s over here!”
As the remnants of the bombardment shelter’s roof were pulled off Stephie, dirt rained onto her face. Someone dabbed at Stephie’s face with a cold, wet cloth. She opened her eyes to see a face half covered with a bloody, red bandage. The one nostril that was visible was plugged with bloody gauze. The chinstrap of the man’s helmet dangled beneath him as he worked patiently to wash her face.
“I thought… you were dead,” Stephie croaked.
John Burns unearthed her as if she were an archeological artifact: slowly, painstakingly, expecting to find her broken into pieces. She was dazed and stunned but surprisingly unharmed. A single tear plowed a furrow down John’s dirt-caked cheek as he lifted Stephie into his arms.
“They look good,” Han said to the event coordinator as they looked at the monitor. The two men stood backstage at the buzzing studio where the American audience had been gathered for Han’s televised town hall meeting. “They look like they just came from church,” Han commented.
“That’s where we got them,” the civilian media professional from Beijing said. “Say, are you going to be here for the editing?”
Han shook his head and replied, “No, I’ve got a photo op in Atlanta.”
“Hospitals and refugee centers?” the publicity man asked.
Han nodded. “So I’ll leave you in complete charge of the editing. I’d like the theme to be upbeat: people happy because they’re industrious. We’ve got to get them to go back to work quickly or the net present value of their lost productivity screws up the rate of return on the whole campaign.”
“I’ve got some stock footage of American industry,” the coordinator suggested. “But I’m not sure about the… the tone.”
“Don’t worry about inciting American patriotism. In fact, I want you to expressly appeal to it. If the military censors give you any trouble, call my cell phone. What I want is for you to make them feel good about themselves and what they produce. But stay away from any heavy-handed, Maoist-looking crap. No tractors or assembly lines or steel mills. Give it a Twenty-First Century feel.”