“I’m f-f-freezing,” a shivering Amanda whispered. Like the rest, she was soaked through from the water trickling through the streambeds. Hart briskly rubbed her arms and legs through soggy clothing. Her breath came in quaking puffs through chattering teeth.
Jimmy was the color of paper. Mrs. Lipscomb’s eyes had sunken deeper into their sockets above black bags that made her look ill.
“Okay,” Hart said at a normal volume that sounded like a shout. He stood upright.
“What are you doing?” Jimmy asked in alarm.
“Everybody get up,” Hart ordered as he extracted the white sheet they had made back at the Lipscomb’s home. “Come on, get up.”
“But they’ll see us!” Amanda cried.
“We want them to see us,” Hart explained.
“The Chinese?” Amanda asked.
“No, the Americans.”
The Lipscombs looked at each other, then slowly rose with a rustling of fabric and a few grunts. They followed Hart and his white flag forward. Northward. Toward America.
Their eyes roamed the hills and trees. With every step Hart grew more tense, but his face remained serene. He even smiled for the benefit of Amanda, whose eyes were wide with terror.
At the top of a slight rise, Hart saw several armored fighting vehicles — both Chinese and American — holed and still. At the far side of the narrow field in which they sat there rose a wooded ridge. He paused and waved the white flag. The Lipscombs looked from him to the empty landscape and back at him again.
When nothing happened, Hart lowered the flag and headed across the open dale. He hadn’t taken five steps when a single shot rang out.
The dirt kicked into the air ten feet in front of his boots. The Lipscombs flung themselves onto the ground and Amanda called out to Hart, but he was grinning and waving the flag in figure eights over his head.
Moments later, a squad headed down the opposite ridge single file. Their circuitous route was carefully plotted. They wove their way through the minefield that lay ten feet in front of Jim Hart’s boots.
“So… what are you saying?” Amanda Lipscomb asked Hart. She sat in the army ambulance with three blankets wrapped around her shoulders. Her face was ruddy from windburn and exposure. Her hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, twigs, and pine straw. But she looked at Hart with eyes wide and pleading. “You’re saying good-bye? Just like that?”
Hart shrugged and sighed. Amanda’s mother and brother — similarly swaddled — looked on.
“But… But I thought…” she began. She turned to her mother with her plea. Mrs. Lipscomb cast her a sympathetic look. Desperate, Amanda turned back to Hart. “But after the war, right? You’ve got to go fight, but after the war you’ll find us. You’ll come find us.”
Find me, Hart knew her to be saying. He frowned.
“You will,” Amanda persisted. “You will. With all we’ve been through… You saved my life! You saved all of us. You’ll come and find us. Promise me.” Hart said nothing. “Promise me!”
“All right,” Hart said. “I’ll look you up after the war, if…”
“You will,” Amanda repeated. “You will.” She rose and tried to kiss Hart on the lips. He turned, and she kissed his cheek. He kissed her forehead, shook hands with and then hugged Jimmy, and then hugged Mrs. Lipscomb.
“You will,” Amanda said as Hart climbed down from the ambulance with his rifle. “You will.”
The Filipino nurse pushed the door open. Wu entered the Eleventh Army Group’s officer’s forward field hospital. The portable beds covered nearly every square meter of the otherwise empty school cafeteria. Wu stopped at Aisle Number Seven. The bandage-covered patients lay head to head. As Wu walked down the narrow aisle, he saw that the rows of beds were pushed together in sets of two with just enough room on one side of each to allow the linens to be changed. Doctors with palmtops strolled slowly from bed to bed and spoke briefly with nurses and patients.
A man on a stretcher — covered head to toe by a blanket — was taken from his bed through doors leading to the daylight outside. Orderlies stripped his bed, dumped the stained sheets into a large, wheeled trash can, and remade the bed with fresh linens in under thirty seconds. Another man on a stretcher — this one living — was being brought in from the kitchen-turned-operating-theater. He took the dead man’s place in the newly made bed.
They are efficient, Wu thought. They have experience with casualties. A fluttering in his belly left him unsettled at the realization. Further upsetting was the foul smell of bowels and the even fouler scent of antiseptic detergent. But most disturbing of all were the moans made faint by stupefying drugs dripping from overhead bags.
Equipment had been rolled up to beds based on wounds. Inflated oxygen tents entombed burn victims. Other devices inflated or suctioned lungs — Wu couldn’t tell which — through tubes disappearing into nostrils and mouths. Still other machines displayed vital signs, processed urine for men with no kidneys, and scanned brains for flickers of life.
Wu searched the large room for Lieutenant Tsui, his best friend from military school. They had shared the same room for fourteen years, from age four to just last summer. Tsui was the closest thing to a brother that Wu ever had.
The faces of the patients were unrecognizable. They were either bandaged or swollen to horrifying proportions from some anatomically distant wound. A touchscreen computer was attached to every bed railing. Doctors and nurses punched beeping buttons. Case histories and vital signs popped into windows. At the top of the small screens were the wounded officers’ names.
Bed after bed, Wu checked the names and saw the most unsurvivable wounds imaginable. Easily a third had lost entire limbs. Arms were severed singly. Legs seemed to be lost in pairs. But even more devastating were the burned and the crushed. The former were semicomplete patchworks of engrafted artificial skin left bare behind plastic sleeves filled with pure oxygen. The latter were reconstructions in progress, as indistinguishable as burn victims with heads and hands swollen to many times human size.
“Wu?” came Tsui’s familiar voice.
Wu’s lips twitched suddenly — inexplicably — as he almost began to cry. He forced himself to look. Tsui had lost both his legs. “Hi,” Wu said in English. Tsui said nothing from behind bandages that covered the right half of his face. Wu slowly approached the bed with its green glowing screen. Tsui’s heart beat safely in a window. Wu held his helmet in both hands. He twirled it and looked down at it, then up at Tsui. “I’m really very, very sorry,” he whispered in Chinese.
Tsui said nothing, but began to sob. Tears welled in Tsui’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Tears flowed from Wu’s eyes also. He slipped his arms under Tsui and hugged him. “It’s not fair,” Tsui squeezed from his chest. “It’s not fair!” he raged in anguish. Wu grabbed Tsui’s cotton gown in his hands. Tsui’s fists clutched at Wu’s thick, camouflage blouse.
“What happened?” Wu asked. Tsui’s grip, then his hug, released. His friend lay back onto his bed. The nineteen-year-old lay limp, staring away from Wu. “What happened?” Wu repeated.
“What does it matter?” Tsui mumbled.