The two machine guns accompanying Chambers’ Third Squad blazed not twenty feet behind Stephie. Their stupendous roar fried her nerves. Their grazing fire streaked directly over her head. They were close enough that she could feel their coughing heat.
“He-e-e-ey!” she screamed into the platoon net. “I’m in your line of fire!”
“We got you!” she heard John shout. “Just keep your head down!” came his unnecessary warning.
The two M-60s ate through hundred-round belts of full metal jacket 7.62 mm ammo. The sheets of lead buzzed just inches above Stephie’s body. The cutting sounds of high-velocity rounds were ominously audible even over the staccato roar of the two awesome guns.
As she lay on her stomach with the back of her helmet to the machine guns, she saw movement just ahead. A Chinese soldier was crawling forward through the brush. Stephie risked rolling onto her side to slowly raise her rifle. All she could make out behind a tree not fifteen feet away was a bent knee under camouflage trousers. The machine guns behind her had switched to more selective six-round bursts. With her M-16 parallel to the ground, she flicked the selector switch to “semi” and aimed straight at the man’s knee. A coiled cord from his radio handset dangled directly in her line of sight. She could hear the man blathering breathlessly — panicked — in Chinese.
Her rifle bucked. Her shot cleaved the man’s kneecap and shattered his knee. His head and shoulders came into view as he buckled in pain and screamed at the top of his lungs. She fired again and knocked his helmet off. The dazed man arched his neck to look straight at Stephie’s muzzle.
When he closed his eyes, she blew a hole in the center of his face.
The machine guns ceased fire. The sound of thudding foot-falls approached. A line of American infantrymen stormed past Stephie toward the killing field ahead. The soldiers from Third Squad charged through the woods and fired point-blank into the semi-living and the dead until they had “swept” the woods by killing all of the surviving Chinese.
Sergeant Chambers helped lift Stephie to her feet. Tiny wood splinters protruded from the camo fabric covering her body armor. She winced at the annoying pain from the tiny splinters embedded in her unarmored arms and legs. She rose and wandered over to the Chinese soldier whom she had shot at close range. His body bore insurance holes from Third Squad’s sweep of the woods. From the handset of the man’s field radio, which looked like a green plastic telephone, came shouted queries or orders urgently spoken in Chinese. Stephie picked up the handset and keyed the button in the center.
“Hey!” she shouted to the man on the other end. “Get the fuck outa my country!”
Several of the returning men and women from Third Squad laughed in a hyperactive, post-survival agitation. After a long pause, they all heard a tinny voice over the radio shouting in Chinese.
“Come’n get it, motherfucker!” Stephie shouted, her finger on the talk button.
An M-16 fired from just beside Stephie, startling everyone. John Burns had blasted the radio transceiver into pieces. “Everybody outa here! On the double! We’re pulling back!”
He glared at Stephie, then took off.
After the others raced past, Stephie caught up with John. “Why are we withdrawing?” she asked. His jaw was set, and he didn’t answer. “John! We were supposed to hold till we were pushed off our ground! We haven’t been pushed one inch! We’re just giving up ground!” She grabbed his arm and yanked him.
“We’re pulling back!” he shouted, and he pushed her and began to run. He motioned for soldiers to hurry with vigorous jabs of his finger. When they emerged from the woods, the platoon was in full retreat. Medics hurriedly bandaged flesh wounds. A man hopped out down the road on one good leg with the support of a buddy. Chambers appeared with a body bag slung between four laboring men.
“Who was it?” Stephie asked in the past tense and the impersonal pronoun.
“A new guy,” came Chambers’s reply.
Stephie nodded.
Despite the losses, some soldiers — having survived their first blooding — gave each other high fives.
Stephie chased after and fell in beside John as they brought up the rear at a trot. Behind them, the shopping center was littered with Chinese dead. Third Platoon had lost only one killed but had wiped out an entire enemy infantry company. No other Chinese units were in sight.
“John, our orders were to hold our ground!” Stephie said.
“I called in the contact,” he responded.
“Did they countermand our orders?” she asked.
“I’m the tactical commander,” he replied. Like the captain of a ship, there was only one tactical commander, who under army regs was given the final say. When they rounded a bend and could no longer see the smoking battlefield, they followed their platoon onto the better footing of the road. “John, our orders were…!”
Without warning, the woods from which they had just emerged exploded. Everyone dove back into the ditch as heavy rockets streaked down out of the sky. They plummeted at high speeds and extremely steep angles. Concentric rings of white vapor expanded at high speed from the bursts and popped Stephie’s ears. The waves of over-pressure nearly brought tears of pain to John’s eyes, whose hands were clamped over his punctured eardrums. A dozen crushing explosions felled trees and torched dry brush.
When the last echoes of the heavy barrage rattled through the trees into the distance, Stephie found John’s eyes boring angrily into her. “What did you think that guy was doing on the radio?” John snapped with a fury that Stephie found surprising.
“Well, I didn’t think he was calling in fire on his own position!” Stephie countered.
“Nobody said that he did!” John shouted. “That scout squadron leader prob’ly just called in his coordinates and told them that he was in contact! Their fire controller decided to waste his own people to get at us! But goddammit, Stephie, the point is, do you wanta live? Do you want to survive this war?”
“I wanta win this war, John!” she replied. “I wanta fuckin’ win!”
Bill Baker’s entourage cut a campaign-style swath through the crowds of congressmen, staffers, tourists, and media gathered in the high-ceilinged rotunda. The onlookers’ applause reverberated nicely for the television microphones as Bill smiled and waved into the bright camera lights. He shook hands, pointed, nodded, and winked, working the crowd before briefing Congress in closed, executive session on his plans for the defense of Washington.
He had chosen to give the briefing to the leadership of the House and Senate in person and by coming to the Hill. In part, it was calculated political symbolism meant to shore up support in an increasingly hostile Congress. But even more importantly, Bill had in recent weeks felt a growing sense of obligation to obey the solemn and now ancient rituals of American democracy. To him, delivering a report — in person — to America’s elected representatives on the defense of the capital required a trip to Capitol Hill.
Bill worked the rope line two-handed, shaking hands both low and held high over the shoulders of people in the front row. He could barely make out the faces of the people he greeted against the glare of dozens of television lights held even higher. The unblinking, hard stares of the Secret Service agents, however, seemed untroubled. A half dozen of them surrounded Bill within inches of him but never touched him or obstructed his progress. They carried their heavy coats draped over their forearms on the unseasonably warm day. Their armored coats covered pistols that the agents held drawn, cocked, and pointed at the chests of men, women, and children with whom Baker exchanged pleasantries.