Only three rounds came out. His magazine was empty.
He looked around, listened, but heard nothing. He turned the flashlight off, stood upright, and inserted the third magazine. He lowered the night vision goggles onto his eyes and hit the power switch. The world alit in the green, flickering glow from the campfire thirty feet away. Hart turned back to the camp to see the Lipscombs gathering and comforting themselves in a small, traumatized huddle.
That made nine, Hart thought to himself.
No one had made it out of the open end of the hollow from which Hart had come, weapon blazing. The hills around the camp in the other direction formed the walls of a three-sided box. Number Ten was somewhere in that box. Hart unfolded the metal stock of his machine pistol and raised the weapon to his shoulder. Bent forward slightly at the waist, Hart began his slow walk through the artificially lit night. He swept the weapon and his gaze from left to right and back again as he took each methodical step forward.
“Captain Hart?” came Mrs. Lipscomb’s tentative call. Hart ignored her, intent on his prey. “Where are you?” came Amanda’s shaking, ragged voice. He looked around. Jimmy was finishing his study of a Chinese assault rifle and pulling the bolt back.
Hart returned to the hunt. Up ahead were two large, half-buried boulders. A scrubby bush grew from the small deposit of soil that must have collected between them. He could see nothing suspicious, but his intuition made him pause. Having spent so many weeks as prey, his mind made an informed guess.
He switched to infrared, and the contours of a hot body glowed brightly in the bush. Hart could tell that the man had no weapon, for he lay in the fetal position with both hands tucked under his armpits. He didn’t seem to be bleeding, which would have left warm phosphorescent splashes and trails on the ground and leaves. As Hart got to within a few feet and stood over the man, the high-resolution screens in his goggles clearly showed the man shaking.
“Captain Hart, are you alive?” Amanda yelled in desperation before collapsing into noisy sobs.
Hart kicked the man’s boots. The soldier retracted his legs as if he’d stepped on an electric eel and lay curled in a tight fetal ball. “Come on,” Hart said. “Get up.” It took Hart kicking the man again for the soldier to admit to himself that he’d been found and to rise, reluctantly, to his feet. He was, apparently, unharmed. Hart pressed the machine pistol to the small of his back and pulled the trigger to within a feather’s touch of firing. He put the man’s hands on his head and patted him down from head to toe, tossing to the side anything that he found clipped to his belts or in his trouser pockets.
He prodded the man forward and walked behind him. “We’re coming in!” Hart announced on seeing that Jimmy held the assault rifle to his shoulder.
Hart and his prisoner stepped into the light of the roaring campfire. Jimmy’s muzzle joined Hart’s on their target: a short, slender teenager, whose chin was buried to his chest and whose eyelids drooped in utter depression. Amanda rushed to Hart and clung to his side, shivering and sobbing.
“Did they get on the radio?” Hart asked. Jimmy didn’t answer. He held the rifle to his shoulder with his cheek planted to the stock and his right eye to the rear sights. His jaw was clenched and his cheek was twitching. He clenched and unclenched his cramping right hand, which was wrapped around the pistol grip of the weapon.
Hart turned to their mother, who sat on the bloody log in a daze. “Did they radio anyone after they found you?” She looked up at him with exhausted eyes and shook her head slowly.
“What does it matter?” Amanda said in a voice thickened by tears. “Everybody heard the shooting.”
“Maybe,” Hart said. He looked up at the high, surrounding hills. “Maybe not.” The cold air would carry the sounds, but the hollow would reflect the noise upward. And they could well be ten miles from the nearest Chinese.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” the anxious Jimmy asked, still taking aim at the face of their captive.
Hart looked around at the large quantity of weapons littering the camp. All were loaded. The downcast eyes of their prisoner had surely noticed. “I don’t know,” Hart replied, but in truth he did know. The killing rage that had consumed him had waned with his execution of Number Nine. By the time he’d found Number Ten, he had no more killing left in him.
“Well, what’re we gonna do with him?” Jimmy asked.
Amanda was calmer now. She still held onto Hart, but she held her head upright and stared at the prisoner, sniffing to dry her nose. “Let’s kill him,” she answered her brother calmly.
Hart opened his mouth to object, but stopped himself. He had just marched through that camp and dispensed death with total abandon. Bullet-riddled bodies lay cooling all around. Why stop at Number Ten? Especially when it made practical sense.
But the problem was, it didn’t seem right to him. Somehow, justice had been served. In the randomness of death, the tenth Chinese soldier had survived the killing long enough to become a prisoner, and you didn’t kill prisoners. Or did you?
They all looked at Hart now. Amanda, who had proposed the murder, with doe-eyed innocence. Jimmy, with hyperactive flits of gaze only momentarily distracted from his weapon. Mrs. Lipscomb from behind a lens of numbing shock. And the Chinese soldier, who looked up though his chin was tucked meekly to his chest.
“We cain’t let him go,” Jimmy said.
Amanda detached herself from Hart’s side and picked up a rifle. Hart watched. So did the Chinese soldier. Still sniffing, she turned the rifle over from one side to the other until she found the selector switch. Maybe because she had seen her brother chamber a round, or maybe because she’d grown up in a gun-owning southern family, she knew to yank back on the bolt. It didn’t go all the way back, and she put the stock between her knees and pulled again. A round was ejected, and a new cartridge fed cleanly into the chamber.
“Is this on ‘safe’?” she asked Hart, holding the receiver up to Hart. He looked and confirmed that the selector switch was on safe. She flicked the switch to “fire” and leveled the weapon.
The Chinese soldier stood beside the fire five feet in front of the girl.
Hart jumped when the weapon roared. The flame shot almost the entire distance to the weapon’s target, and the Chinese soldier was hammered backwards to the ground.
In the silence that followed, Hart heard another click. Amanda slung the now safed rifle over her shoulder and began to collect bandoliers of ammo. Jimmy did the same. Hart didn’t object, and they crossed the river and continued on to the north.
9
A fog hung over the quiet, frigid battlefield. Jim Hart and the Lipscombs carefully picked their way across a charred landscape covered in mist. Jimmy and Amanda held their rifles at the ready, but Hart knew that they would be useless. They were midway between two armies whose arsenals dwarfed their puny weapons.
The little band had reached the front the night before. They had waited anxiously for sunrise to the immediate rear of the Chinese army lines. Twice patrols had passed close. The danger was inherent in Hart’s plan. Their survival depended on timing. They would cross in the hour before dawn, pass through enemy lines in total darkness, and reach American lines by the first light of dawn.
So far, Hart knew, they had been lucky. There had been no morning attack in their sector. Fighting had risen with the white glow in the sky until it had raged a few miles to either side of their crossing point. The rattle and crash of battle had masked what little noise the four of them had made as they crawled on hands and knees through no-man’s-land along frigid streams that cut deeply into the earth.