Hart stood amid the glowing dead he’d strewn about the ditch and the road. He felt invincible for a moment, but the adrenaline wore off a mile or two away. From there on he just felt sick.
10
The gyrating helicopter bucked beneath Wu as he ducked beside a ball-mounted, six-barreled aircraft cannon. The Gatlin gun — style weapon aimed down through clear armored glass, pivoting with digital quickness. His thumbs were jammed hard into his ears, but still he jumped when the fearsome 30 mm loosed a one-second, one-hundred-round buzz. The vibrations penetrated him to the core.
The Virginia countryside streaked beneath Wu’s boot heels, which were braced semisuccessfully against the slippery, see-through deck, which was composed of translucent laminate. A rubberized, half-meter-wide strip down the center of the nearly invisible fuselage looked like a catwalk on a daredevil aircraft.
Six hollow-eyed soldiers sat opposite Wu on the other side of the rubber air bridge. They eyed him with sullen curiosity. Some had gingerly boarded the helicopter at the division staging area still limping from wounds so recent that Wu thought they might not yet have healed properly. When they had all crowded into the side of the compartment away from Wu, hehad thought that it was because they didn’t care for him. He wore crisply laundered battle dress and unscuffed webbing. The black assault rifle he had checked out of the armory bore no nicks, dents, or scratches. Wu knew that his appearance was described by the common soldiers — derogatorily — as that “new-in-box look.”
But now he realized that the half dozen young veterans knew better than to sit next to the infernal, remotely operated gun. Another hundred-round burst of explosive rounds gave Wu an unpleasant rush of adrenaline like at an unexeptedly slammed door. He followed the streaking tracer rounds to the forest below. Fire rose from a stream’s bank a kilometer away, and white splashed from the water as the gun buzzed again.
Wu shied away from the warming barrels. The pilot flew extremely low in a pitching circle round and round the smoking target. A crewman appeared from the flight deck up front, duckwalking his way rearward toward Wu. Treetops flashed just meters beneath the crewman, who negotiated his way from one hand strap to the next. When he arrived beside Wu, he pulled a jack from the bulkhead and plugged it into Wu’s helmet. Wu reached up and inserted the earbuds dangling from the Kevlar.
“We’ll be done in a minute!” shouted the crewman over the intercom. “We got diverted by a ground controller! They’ve got the gun!” he said, nodding at the pivoting machine cannon. A television camera mounted on the fuselage outside matched the gun’s pivots and sweeps. “It’s a forward observer team!” the crewman said, cupping one hand in another as if grasping and directing an imaginary joystick. “You know, they have a screen and control our fire direction system! We just fly over the target area till they release us! There’s just one hold-out! We shouldn’t be long!”
Wu raised the stubby boom mike on his chin strap. “You say there’s just one man down there?” Wu asked.
The crewman shook his head. “It’s a woman, apparently!” he shouted. “One woman with a rifle in the woods!” He made a face and shrugged as if to say, “Who could imagine such a thing?” then duckwalked back to the cockpit.
As he’d predicted, the wild flight steadied suddenly. The gun returned to a lower, stowed position. The aircraft left the smoking target area. Mission accomplished, Wu thought. Woman dead. He had the rest of the flight to celebrate the victory in silence. His mood matched that of the six soldiers staring at him.
The helicopter landed in the parking lot of a gutted suburban mall, and Wu exited into the chill. The downdraft from the rotors intensified, forcing Wu and the others to their knees until silence reigned in the absence of the powerful aircraft.
Wu rose and looked around. The wares of various stores and their packaging were strewn like debris blasted from smashed doors and broken windows across the pavement. But there had been no explosions other than social disorder, Wu thought. The stores had clearly been looted.
Several of the soldiers with whom he’d flown in headed for the mall, but Wu’s attention was fixed on the wooded hills to the north. It had taken ten days and three more visits to General Sheng before Wu’s reassignment had been approved. Personally approved, in fact, by the defense minister. Shen Shen had used the time to lavish Wu with sex in her desperate attempt to talk him out of going.
He shouted at the would-be scavengers and pointed toward the front. Toward the rumble of artillery and the ominous curtain of black smoke that marked the American defenses surrounding the great naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. The near constant crackle of massed small-arms fire formed a wall of noise that seemed to come from all points of the northern horizon. Against that patter played the percussion of light artillery. Drumrolls of dozens of rounds timed onto their targets. The even deeper pounding base of heavy rockets promised a finale, but there was no end to the symphony. No final movement, just the staccato melody of infantry weapons that always carried the tune.
The morning air was chilly. They crossed abandoned fields on the rural outskirts of the small southern town. Climbed over a barbed wire fence. Ascended a wooded hill.
Patches of snow clung to the shades under the brush. Despite the fury from the front, the woods seemed almost quiet. The young soldiers Wu led — veterans at age nineteen or twenty — all held their rifles at the ready. He had no idea what they expected to encounter, but he unslung his rifle, confirmed that the magazine was full and seated, and held it at port arms.
They crested the hill and descended toward another open pasture. An inflated green dome sat in the center of the field surrounded by thousands of brown slashes in green grass. It was as if treasure hunters had systematically excavated the rolling landscape in search of some mislaid plunder.
But they were graves, Wu realized. Failures buried all around the besieged, portable field hospital. The desperate facility they approached was overcrowded. Men lay on litters on the ground under the open sky just outside. Nurses and doctors tended to soldiers, whose arms were raised to shield their eyes from the sun.
Wu led his small group in a wide semicircle around the moans of pain, which easily carried the distance. Their pitiful voices turned the symphony of weapons into a tragedy. The faint wails drowned out the sound of fighting that would surely add to the hospital’s load.
A young Chinese nurse wearing an apron that flapped with trotting knees intercepted Wu’s small party. “We need blood!” she demanded. “It won’t take ten minutes!”
Wu never stopped walking. He shook his head and waved her off like a beggar. “Please, sir!” she squealed. “The medical staff can’t give any more! Men are dying for lack of a transfusion!”
Wu halted his march, turned, and followed the nurse. The soldiers followed him.
Lieutenant Wu eventually reported to his company commander with drill-field precision. The grimy captain rose to his feet in a bullet-riddled house that smelled of fire and stared wide-eyed at Wu. “Why are you here?” he asked in a high-pitched voice. It was obvious the man had been told who Wu was.