It was so simple.
Hart listened again. There was now no breathing in the locker room except his. He stopped at the double doors into the gymnasium on which Amanda had thoroughly briefed him. “No, they don’t squeak,” she had told him. “At least, I don’t think.” He removed the safeties from his three remaining industrial-sized insecticide cans, and rotated the nozzles fully counterclockwise to “fog.”
He carefully opened the doors — which made no noise — and walked headlong into a soldier.
The barefoot man was heading straight for the bathroom. Hart sprayed before the Chinese soldier even raised his drowsy eyes toward the menace. His eyes bulged, and he dropped to his knees with his mouth open wide in a voiceless scream. He watched helplessly in his last second of life as Hart hurried past him.
There were hundreds of cots laid out in rows all across the hardwood basketball court. Hart pulled a can’s trigger back until it locked wide open. The huge can belched clouds of cyanide gas. He set it down in the tunnel leading to the locker room and locked open the trigger of a second can. He sprayed from side to side as he ran past cots and set the can down at center court. The first coughing and a few squeaking noises petrified Hart, who pulled and locked the trigger of his third can and jogged down an aisle between the cots spraying the lethal fog left and right. Rarely did anyone even rise half way toward sitting, although a few managed to twist themselves out of bed and fall to the floor. It was there the heavy gas was thickest.
He placed the third can to block an exit at the bend in the stands and locked the nozzle open on his fourth and final can. He ran the length of the court again dispensing death. But by the the he reached the final exit, no one even stirred. He set down the hissing can and took one last look at the barracks turned gas chamber. Several hundred Chinese soldiers now lay dead.
Hart made it back to the storm cellar just before sunup.
“Did you do it?” he heard Amanda ask from the darkness. She flicked on a battery-powered lantern by his bed. Amanda and Jimmy sat there waiting.
“What are you doing here?” Hart demanded as he flicked his rifle’s selector switch back to “safe.”
Jimmy said, “I saw you leave.”
“Did you blow up the gymnasium?” Amanda asked. Hart frowned but said nothing. “Did you even go there?” she persisted, and he nodded. “Were there any Chinese soldiers there like I said?” He nodded again. She and her brother grinned at each other. The rumors about Chinese troops bunking down at their school had proven true.
“Did you do anything?” Jimmy asked. Hart nodded. “What?”
“Look,” Hart snapped, “I don’t wanna talk about it! Okay?”
They both looked hurt. In a fit of pique Amanda said, “We’ll find out when school starts anyway.” Hart imposed upon himself a vow of guilty silence.
“Did you at least kill any of ’em?” an exasperated Jimmy persisted.
Hart nodded but would say nothing more about the inglorious battle he’d just won. He shooed them away. Jimmy climbed out first. Amanda stood before him. “I was afraid the doors would squeak.”
“Go,” Hart said, and she complied.
“Shit,” Stephie said as she stood on a hillside overlooking the narrow draw. “There must be a hundred of ’em.” The afternoon sun had raised a sickly sweet smell.
Animal spat on the piles of Chinese bodies. At the base of the hill on which they stood, Third Platoon provided security for engineers who wired vast stores of Chinese supplies for demolition. They used forklifts to evenly distribute pallets of Chinese ammunition among the fuel, food, and new shipments of winter clothing.
John Burns, looking at the bodies filling the small cut between two finger ridges, said, “They were machine gunned.”
“We better get some intell guys here,” Stephie suggested, “before we pull back.”
The steady stream of Animal’s urine began to rain on the bodies.
“Zip it up!” John barked.
“Goddammit!” Stephie shouted.
Animal looked back at them in surprise. “They’re just dead Chinese!” he said.
“Their hands are bound!” John explained, pointing at the dead soldiers. “Tied behind their fucking backs with plastic! They’re barefoot, Animal! They were massacred!”
Animal put himself back in his pants and said nothing, but he hung his head in tacit apology for the desecration.
Over the company net, John and Stephie heard Ackerman order them to blow the dump and hit the road. “There’s Chinese armor counterattacking from the south.”
John reported the details of the slaughter they had discovered to the company commander. Ackerman changed their orders, directing them now to hold their ground until brigade intell arrived.
Their 41st Infantry Division had made a tactical counterattack in the wee hours of the morning and had penetrated over a dozen miles into Chinese lines. Their battalion had seized and were ready to destroy a primary objective: an entire Chinese army group’s forward stocks of supplies. But what had been planned as a quick hit and rapid withdrawal had now been extended a bit longer by Third Platoon’s discovery.
“I don’t get it,” Stephie said, still staring at the reeking bodies. “They’ve been dead for a day or two. You can smell ’em all over that supply depot. They just marched them up here, greased them, and then didn’t even bother to bury them! Surely everybody who came through that depot down there for resupply could smell ’em,” she said, pointing toward the stacks of supplies in the net-covered supply dump. “All the transportation guys would know all about the slaughter.”
Stephie understood finally, and looked up at John. He nodded simply and remained silent.
Animal waited — watching the two of them — then said, “Am I supposed to be picking up some mental, like, signals between you two? ’Cause I’m not.”
“They’re deserters,” Stephie explained. “The Chinese shot them and left them up here so they’d rot. So the truck drivers who visited every battalion in the army group would spread the word. So the clothes they handed out would stink from the bodies of the men they’d shot for desertion.”
Animal’s jaw drooped open as he made a face. “That’s fuckin’ harsh.”
A smile made a brief foray at Stephie’s lips as she looked at John, but she banished it. John, however, had to pinch his lips closed and turn away. They both had had the same thought again.
“Okay,” Animal said. “Now this is gettin’ spooky! Ten seconds ago, you two were tryin’ to make me feel like shit about taking a leak on those fuckers. Now you’ve got some kinda inside joke goin’ about the whole thing!”
“Not a joke,” John said. “I feel sorry for those guys.”
“But they’re starting to shoot their deserters,” Stephie explained. “In large numbers. They’re starting to have mass desertions, Animal. Don’t you get it?”
Suddenly, a broad grin lit the big man’s face. “Yeah. Yeah! Fuckin’ A, man!” He ran off down the hill shouting, “Hey! Hey, come up here and take a look at this shit!” to other soldiers from third platoon.