Han watched the confrontation as if he were at a sporting match, but there also was information in what Yi said. Criticism of the American campaign’s casualties was obviously growing. The astute university student knew which button to push.
General Sheng didn’t need to countermand his earlier order. Yi had already done it for him.
Back at the airport, Yi didn’t bother to say goodbye to General Sheng. But to Han, she said in English again, “I had a really good time, even though there was only that one ride.” They had ridden a stomach-wrenching roller coaster. She had squealed at a frequency Han had thought reserved for dolphins. General Sheng, unsteady on his feet after climbing out of the small car, had declined her mocking offer to go for a second ride. Despite his growing nausea, Han had gone around twice more.
“I hope,” Han responded, “that the next time you visit America we can see more sights. And I certainly hope we’ll have more time to spend with each other.”
“I would like that,” Yi replied, smiling. “Maybe we’ll have more privacy too.”
Han arched his brow, and kissed her hand and then both of her cheeks. After his second peck, she pressed her warm, open mouth against his.
It was cool and overcast. Stephie eyed the gray sky. There would be rain soon. She could smell it on the fresh breezes that occasionally cleansed the air of the stench of rifle fire. She walked along the line of prone riflemen. Her men and women. “Squeeze ’em off!” she shouted hoarsely as they aimed at paper targets mounted on a wooden fence that traversed a hill two hundred meters away. The Interstate at their backs was empty. Dirt rose in splashes from the hillside backstop at the other end of their makeshift rifle range. The fire from her platoon was a steady crackle of single, aimed shots. They had been at it for more than an hour. Smudged brass shell casings were piled inches high beside smoking rifles to be collected, turned in, and reloaded. Each soldier had been given fifteen 30-round magazines. They were nearing the end of their 450 rounds of target practice. “Make ’em count!” Staff Sergeant Roberts croaked.
She kicked the boots of one woman. “Spread your feet! You need a stable platform for that weapon!” The girl nodded. Her helmet flopped on her head. The next cherry in line — a boy just out of boot camp like most of the others — aimed and aimed. Stephie stopped and waited, but he never fired. His pile of spent shell casings wasn’t nearly as high as the others, and he had five full magazines stacked beside him. Stephie walked up to him, and his eyes left his sights momentarily to take in the scuffed toes of her dusty boots. Even then he aimed, and aimed, and aimed.
Stephie boiled at the sight of the son of a bitch. It took only a few of them in a platoon to get them all killed on first contact with the enemy. She leaned over, bent at the waist, and filled her lungs with the noxious air. “Fire that goddamned weapon you motherfucking shithead!“ she shouted at the top of her lungs.
He jerked the trigger. The rifle bucked.
“Again!” He complied. “Again!” A casing spun out of the chamber. “Again!” she shouted, raising her binoculars. A puff of dirt flew from the hill five feet from the guy’s target. “Again!” She heard the report, but the round landed somewhere outside her binocular’s field of view.
With her teeth set painfully together, she glared down at the bastard. He was fucking crying like a baby! She hauled off and kicked him in the kidney, and he grunted and doubled over. She dropped to one knee and grabbed him by his collar, twisting it and pulling until the button on the front of his blouse choked him.
“You’re gonna kill somebody,” she said in a low voice as he stared bug-eyed up at her and gasped for breath. “You’re gonna put a round right through somebody’s fuckin’ face, and you’re gonna watch his brains fly out the back of his head. Or you’re gonna drill him square in the chest so his eyeballs pop outa their sockets. Or you’re gonna dismember him — cut his arms and legs off — round by fuckin’ round until he’s dead, you understand me!” The guy nodded jerkily.
“Sergeant Roberts,” Stephie heard. It was John Burns. Lieutenant John Burns. He stood behind her, staring at her. So was everybody else nearby in the line.
Stephie released the coward, rose, and raised the binoculars that hung from her neck. The guy’s target — stapled to a decrepit wooden post — was unscathed by one hour’s fire. She looked back down at the fucker, whose face was planted in the dirt beneath him. “You’ve got 150 rounds, motherfucker,” she said. “I want that fence post your target’s mounted on hangin’ loose on barbed wire before you leave here. You understand me, private?”
“Yes…! Yes, Staff Sergeant!” he managed before coughing.
The firing up and down the line resumed. Stephie brushed past John, who had expected her to stop. He grabbed her arm and yanked. She pulled free. “Lighten up,” he said in almost a whisper.
“No,” she replied in just as low a tone.
John cocked his head. “Lighten up,” he repeated, “Staff Sergeant Roberts.”
She turned to face him square. “No, sir.” She resumed her walk down the line, ripping new assholes with redoubled anger.
By early afternoon, a steady cold drizzle fell from the sky. Their training, however, continued. On the shoulder of the highway beside a low-slung armored fighting vehicle, the fifty-odd men and women stood in slick ponchos with their rifles slung over their shoulders, muzzles down. A crewman pointed out the ball-mounted weapons in the new-model vehicle, which none of the troops had ever seen before. The camouflage-painted personnel carrier, which bristled with all-threat missiles, was just off the production line.
Stephie wasn’t interested in the lecture. The time when they might use such a vehicle — when they might go on the offensive — seemed so distant as to be irrelevant. Stephie barely listened to the nerdy lecturer, whose thick glasses would have been so fogged as to be unusable were it not for the rivulets of rainwater washing down them. Instead, she watched her troops like a hawk, punishing any drooping eyelids with loud blows to the helmet. Threatening with menacing glares any straying attention.
“The temperature on the ceramic armor,” the crewman continued after one of Stephie’s outbursts, “is equalized to within one-half of a degree with the ambient air temperature. That reduces its infrared signature on Chinese night vision devices so much that it’s almost invisible.”
One of the women was coughing. She slumped under the weight of her fighting load. Stephie maneuvered for a closer look. Every time the woman swallowed, she coughed. She kept opening her eyes wide as if she couldn’t see otherwise. Water dripped from wisps of hair that ringed her face beneath her helmet. Her head wobbled, then she saw Stephie. She straightened her back and fixed her gaze on the lecturer.
Stephie called the woman over and pulled her aside. The new recruit was petrified. “Head on over to the battalion aid station,” Stephie said quietly. The private wasn’t about to argue and seemed greatly relieved that Stephie cared so much. The cherry gave in, finally, to the fever and slumped from rigid attention to barely standing. “I don’t want you getting everybody else sick, too,” Stephie added. The woman seemed to take offense and smirked before leaving. She looked back over her shoulder — twice — at Stephie as she slogged down the muddy shoulder. Stephie made sure the woman didn’t see that she noticed.