When they lifted the wounded woman onto a stretcher, Stephie remained seated in the pool of the woman’s blood. It had taken six or seven minutes until the evac was done. It had been an eternity spent with that woman and her arm.
Suddenly, as if waking from a slumber and finding herself soiled, Stephie felt revulsion and wanted desperately to wash the blood from her hands. She found that her canteen pouch was empty. She must have dropped her canteen when the ambush began. She rose and began to search the road for her canteen. Piles of equipment lay strewn all about. Blood dried black on the road’s hot pavement. Both the unharmed and the lightly wounded sat slumped low to the ground like survivors of some great crash. The collision of two armies in war.
Stephie passed canteen after canteen amid the litter of gear until she found hers, which had emptied onto the pavement. When she replaced it in its pouch, she was surprised to find that she had two other canteens on her belt and wondered why she hadn’t realized that before.
She washed her hands in a canteen’s warm water. John Burns walked up. “Don’t waste that water,” he said. “You never know how long we’ll be out here.”
“But we’re going straight back to our camp,” she said.
He cocked his head and arched his eyebrows scoldingly.
“You never assume that,” he said, “if you’re infantry.” He stood so close that the pinkish water dripped from her hands onto his sandy trousers and dusty boots. His face was only inches from hers. “Don’t be so stupid,” he whispered angrily. “You almost got yourself killed.”
With those words of reproach or of warning — Stephie didn’t know which — he moved on and Stephie’s mind again went blank.
Lieutenant Ackerman gave the order to form up. His voice sounded the same as it had before, but somehow everything struck Stephie as different. The sun was lower. It felt cooler, as though the seasons had turned. But it was more fundamental than that. Stephie felt as if she were moving through a world that had changed in some pervasive and indefinable way. The road. The beach. The sky. It was as if she had stepped out of reality and into some surreal alternate dimension. Or was it the other way around? Had she emerged from fantasy into stark reality?
When Stephie shouldered her heavy pack, ten thousand needles of pain shot down her spine and up her thighs. It was that pain that, on some visceral level, connected Stephie’s present with her past. The dividing point between the two, however, seemed to remain fixed in time. There was the life she had lived before the first blood drenched her hands, and the existence into which she had descended that followed. She therefore clung tightly to the thread of her aching muscles, which were her only connection between the old world and the new.
On seeing Stephie stooped under the weight of her pack, John Burns offered softly, “I can help.” Stephie shook her head no. Becky Marsh cleared her throat but was again ignored, so Becky sighed loudly and began to bitch. A second thread: something else that hadn’t changed. “That fucking physical fitness test in boot camp!” Becky lamented for the thousandth time. Lieutenant Ackerman was walking down the line and talking quietly to each soldier. “They should’ve fucking told us what the test was for!” Becky had accidentally tested into infantry in a boot camp fitness test. Stephie, by contrast, had worked hard to get in. And now she was determined to carry her own weight.
Platoon Sergeant Kurth pulled Ackerman aside just before he got to Stephie. They were whispering, but Stephie overheard them. Nine dead, Kurth reported. Sixteen wounded, four bad. The news seemed to weigh heavily on Ackerman, who repeated the numbers over the radio to the company commander. It was a Chinese submarine raiding party, Ackerman reported. Heavily armed and with pouches nearly empty of demolition charges that had been placed somewhere inland. Four enemy killed in action. No survivors. He listened for a moment, then had to repeat the figures. “We took nine KIA and sixteen WIA! We have four confirmed enemy kills! Repeat! Four!” The CO asked something else. Ackerman’s eyes rose to Stephie. “Negative,” was his reply over the radio as he turned away from the young private.
The CO signed off, and Kurth and the radioman left Ackerman alone. The tall, skinny lieutenant just stood there. Staring at the road with a look that Stephie couldn’t fathom. When he snapped to, he walked up to Stephie. “You okay, Roberts?” the platoon leader asked. She nodded, not trusting her voice. Four men, she kept thinking, wiped out half our platoon. “Ya know,” Ackerman said in a low tone that drew her scrutiny, “one word and I could put you on one of those choppers.”
“But…” Stephie began, but faltered, momentarily confused. “I’m not wounded, sir.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said quietly.
Stephie understood what he was saying and frowned. Her squadmates — who had all miraculously escaped injury — watched the encounter, Stephie saw, and waited for her reply.
Stephie shook her head, and Ackerman nodded. He moved on without comment, leaving in his wake only the stares of her comrades at Stephie. Some of them — like Becky — were incredulous.
But unlike Becky, Stephie had always demanded equal treatment. Or at least, she thought, treatment as equal as one could possibly expect to be accorded the daughter of the president of the United States of America.
President Bill Baker stood alone at the window waiting. Outside, thousands of noisy pro-nuclear demonstrators — many refugees from the Exclusion Zone, which they claimed Bill had abandoned — called upon him to launch an immediate nuclear strike against Chinese forces. But the forty-three-year-old Republican was convinced that a nuclear war would spell the end of the country with whose survival he’d been entrusted.
Bill’s personal secretary appeared at the door. Behind her stood almost a dozen Secret Service agents, who eyed all with stares that betrayed deadly serious intent. “The National Security Council has convened in the Situation Room,” she reported. “And Mrs. Roberts is being ushered in.”
President Baker nodded and turned back to the protest. People chanted and waved placards with obscure references to the Old Testament. One placard read, “Not one Chinese boot on American soil!” Another sign cried, “Do your job! Save America! Drop the bomb!”
But Bill saw clearly what only a handful of people in Washington and Beijing understood: the laws of Armageddon. Despite all the advances in antimissile technology, one fact hadn’t changed since the earliest days of the atomic arts. The outcome of a nuclear war between two nearly equal nuclear adversaries will ultimately result in the destruction of both warring states. In a nuclear war, America and China would strike each other with staggering and repeated blows. Instead of being vaporized all at once, the early Twenty-First-Century combatants would die over weeks and months of hell on earth. The strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction had been replaced by Protracted Perimeter Engagement. Blow by blow, nuclear-tipped missiles would erode each country’s defenses from the coastline, to the highlands, to the heartland. When missiles penetrated the Great Plains states, Bill Baker was convinced,that would be the end.
“You’ve got to get Stephie out of the army!” came Rachel’s anguished voice. Bill turned to see his personal secretary close the door behind his ex-wife: the mother of Stephie, his only child. “She’s only eighteen, and she’s going to die. Your daughter’s going to die, Bill, at age eighteen! You’re her father! It’s time you started acting like one!”