The soldier in front of Hadley raised his right hand and knelt. Hadley and the men behind him did the same in rapid succession. Hadley turned to ensure that everyone was still and ready.
Ready for what? he wondered. It wasn’t an ambush because they’d never see it coming. The woods would simply erupt in flame and screams of pain. A good number of his men would die in the first frenzied volleys. It would depend from there on reaction times, correct guesses and luck. At ten meters separation Hadley had no chance of issuing orders. It would be every man for himself. Relying on training and instinct.
The man in front of Hadley rose and shoved the heel of his hand toward the sky. Everyone rose, made the same hand signal and moved on. He must’ve seen shadows, Hadley thought Or mounds in the snow. Fallen trees. A ghost in his peripheral vision. Walking point did a number on your head.
Lieutenant Chin led his eighteen remaining men down a winding path. Snow drifted to the earth amid tall hills. Were it not for the tire ruts, the road would have been indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape. It was a flat gouge out of the flanks of the undulating earth.
At least the wind is down, Chin thought as he pressed his aching legs on. All morning they had lurched forward under heavy direct fire. A hundred meters forward, and three men dead. They lay low for thirty minutes under whizzing machine-gun bullets. One wounded and left for dead as a result. Then another rush toward the shelter of a ledge. It turned out to be no shelter at all as the enemy opened up from a previously silent position. Two dead. The enemy were like ghosts. They fired their weapons from such long range that Chin never even learned who he was fighting, much less brought his platoon’s small arms to bear. Rumor was that they were Germans, but they might have been British or French.
The entire time they were under fire, the wind had whistled past Chin’s covered face. It had whipped snow and ice off the tops of drifts that stung his eyes and exposed skin. After a while, the blasts of cold had seemed every bit as much a threat as the enemy’s bullets… until, that is, the airstrike. Then everything had simply come apart. Chin could no longer hear the whistles from over the hill that were his only contact with company headquarters. His men began to rise and flee in bursts of panic timed between dives from enemy bombers. When Chin had risen to chase them — firing into the air over their heads — he was quickly overtaken by the rest of his platoon. Everyone took the opportunity to save their lives… Chin included.
And it did save their lives, he had to admit. Most of them, anyway. He had started the day with thirty-one men. Thirteen lay somewhere behind them, either dead or soon to be dead. The enemy never bothered collecting Chinese wounded. They fired from armored vehicles far away, pulled back under covering airstrikes, and set up again a few kilometers to the north.
‘Did you see that guy in the tree?’ one of his men asked from behind.
Chin didn’t turn, but he kept his ears peeled. The unpleasantness of having to fire over his fleeing men’s heads hadn’t cleared the air between them completely.
‘He must’ve been a sniper,’ another soldier ventured. ‘Got killed, but his gear kept him from falling.’
‘No. He wasn’t strapped to the tree. He was hanging over the limb. He got blown up there! Did you see him? It blew his skin right off his bones!’
‘Maybe he wasn’t even Chinese,’ a third guy joined in. ‘Maybe he was American.’
Everyone laughed. ‘Yeah, you dumb shit! How many dead Americans have you seen? One? Three? And how many dead Chinese?’
‘A thousand,’ someone guessed.
‘Oh, more than that. What about that grave?’ Chin remembered the long cut in the earth. Men with white cotton masks had been pouring white powder over mounds of bodies. An army of men with shovels waited by the side of the hole.
‘The Americans do it right,’ came from one of the men who’d spoken before. ‘They don’t just piss their men away like last night’s beer.’
‘Enough!’ Chin finally shouted. He wheeled on the loose gaggle of men. They stopped in their tracks and eyed their platoon leader. Chin stood facing eighteen armed and brooding men. Men he’d fired shots toward not three hours earlier. He swallowed the lump of fear before continuing. ‘Keep quiet!’ he shouted. He then tried to think up some reason they should follow his order. ‘The Foreign Enemies might have microphones planted in the woods!’
There was a smattering of chuckles that almost brought the muzzle of Chin’s Type 68 assault rifle around. ‘Keep quiet!’ he shouted. He turned and proceeded down the path.
They walked for almost an hour before they saw another soul. Chin was looking for an alternate route — having decided the road led too far to the east — when shouts rang out from the hill to their right.
‘Drop your weapons!’ a man ordered. Chin and his men all turned to see an officer waving a pistol from which hung a lanyard. ‘Drop them or we’ll fire!’ he yelled. Chin saw the other guns in the rocks pointed at the trail.
‘We’re Chinese!’ Chin replied.
‘You’re under arrest by order of the Supreme Commander of the People’s Liberation Army!’ the pistol-toting officer shouted officiously. ‘Now drop your weapons or we’ll open fire!’
‘But why are we under arrest? Chin challenged. He was suddenly outraged. ‘What the hell did we do?
The arresting officer — who looked to be around Chin’s age of twenty — seemed hesitant. ‘You… you are deserters! I have orders to arrest all deserters, and to shoot them on the spot if they resist!’
‘We’re not deserters!’ one of Chin’s men yelled. The officer turned his pistol and almost fired.
‘Shut up!’ Chin shouted at his men. Saving his life. Maybe all of their lives, judging from the number of weapons pointed their way. Chin saw too that his men’s weapons were generally pointing toward the rocks. A single shot could be the spark that sent flames raging out of control. He turned back to the officer with the pistol. ‘We’re not deserters. We’re loyal soldiers. These are my men. I am their platoon leader. How can you have deserters when I — as their commanding officer — led them down this trail?’
He felt rather than saw his men’s heads turn. They were watching Chin now. He felt a sense of pride in that fact ‘The enemy is that way!’ the officer shouted — pointing back up the path down which they’d come.
‘We know that,’ Chin replied. He was beginning to prevail, he felt, and he pressed home his advantage. ‘We’ve been fighting for the last three days straight. I lost thirteen of my men this morning.’ He raised his voice to address his real audience — the dozen or so men holding rifles pointed their way. ‘I lose thirteen men to the Americans,’ he said — choosing Americans to create the proper impression. ‘And now I’m going to lose more to my comrades in arms?
No orders were issued, but the rifles in the rocks above pointed away.
The little man with the pistol, however, wouldn’t let the matter drop. ‘You are deserting your unit!’ he screeched. ‘The enemy is that way!’ he repeated. Again he pointed.