The two government agents rushed to their side. The other shoppers were horrified and kept their distance, but the two agents swung into action. One checked under Oksana’s coat. The other pinned his thrashing wife to the slippery floor.
‘Shit!’ the man checking Oksana hissed.
Oksana began to cry. She had been shot like her mother and little sister.
The stranger now fought for the life of Pyotr’s daughter. The life of his youngest seeped through Pyotr’s cramping fingers ounce by ounce. It seemed like hours before the ambulances arrived. By then the two girls had both fallen unconscious.
Olga screamed till she too gave out.
The rest of the night was all plastic tubes and hospital smells.
Sweat-soaked doctors coming to see Pyotr with somber words. He lost track of what was being done. Mostly, he just sat. He broke out crying only when he saw the two agents. They were covered head-to-toe in his family’s blood. The men stayed with him the whole time like old friends.
Early in the morning the doctors told him they’d all live. Pyotr didn’t remember much else from that night.
Chin and his three fellow platoon leaders sat hunched in the small tent.
‘Here he comes,’ one of the university snots said. He closed the tent flap.
The company commander crawled in and instantly began to bitch. ‘What are you doing? he snapped at the four lieutenants. Chin and the others stared back in stunned silence. ‘I could see the light from a hundred meters!’ His voice was hushed. But from the strain showing in his body and face he might as well have been shouting. ‘You men are my officers! I’ve got to count on you to use your heads!’
Chin didn’t dare look at the others. He’d never seen the captain this mad. Plus his fellow platoon leaders were all pricks anyway.
The captain removed his gloves and pulled a beat-up plastic tube from inside his white poncho. He unscrewed it and extracted a rolled-up paper map with care. His fingers were already trembling from the cold. He noisily flattened the map — the paper crackling under his hands and heightening Chin’s sense of anticipation. It wasn’t often they got a chance to look at the map.
The colorful paper coiled back up as the captain tucked his hands under his armpits. ‘Okay,’ the captain said — his words quaking from a chattering jaw. ‘I called this company meeting to pass down word from army group command. These orders are to go no lower than your rank.’ He looked each of his four subordinates in the eye.
Chin felt a stirring of his blood at so solemn a charge. It was a privilege to learn so important a secret — whatever it was. He looked around and immediately grew annoyed. The other platoon leaders’ faces all showed disrespect. One man — Lieutenant Hung, who Chin had caught reading the subversive text back in barracks — even wore a sneer.
‘The People’s Republic is engaged in a glorious victory,’ the captain recited woodenly. The tone dampened the excitement Chin had felt. ‘You are each to be commended for your efforts.’ Lieutenant Hung drew an unusually deep breath — almost a sigh of impatience. He drew a squinting, menacing look from the captain. The company commander then turned his attention to the map. There were a variety of colors and symbols marked in pencil. ‘We have to be ready to repel attacks on our flanks from here, here and here.’ He pointed. Everyone now hunched over the map, eclipsing most of the light from the single lantern. ‘Get back!’ the captain shouted. Everyone sank back onto their haunches but still studied the unit positions and terrain.
‘You’re pointing at our left, our center and our right,’ Lieutenant Hung said. His tone was just this side of insolence.
‘Good,’ the captain said sarcastically. ‘You can read a map!’ Chin kept his mouth firmly shut.
‘If we’re in the middle of a glorious victory,’ Hung continued, ‘why are we worried about our flanks?’
‘Those are our orders!’
‘And why do we alternate between ridiculously loose dispersion of our units during the day,’ Hung pressed, ‘and tight defensive groupings at night?’
Chin had never realized it before, but every day and night it was the same. When they broke camp in the morning, the four platoons scattered widely before moving out. But they bivouaced just meters apart.
‘Yeah,’ came a seconding voice. ‘We used to maneuver at night. The Europeans curled up into a ball when the sun went down, and we hit them.’
‘Do you like patrolling at night?’ the captain finally barked. He shot challenging looks at each face in succession. ‘Do you want to go up against those bases — night after night — again? To run into their patrols and wait for the artillery to come raining in?’
Chin remembered those scary nights with a shudder. The only way to survive the artillery was to hug the westerners so tight the big guns couldn’t fire on them.
‘Our orders,’ the captain shouted, ‘are to pull into a defensive mode every night and to be prepared to repel advances against three of our four fronts!’ He was staring the smart-assed platoon leader back against the tent wall.
But Lieutenant Hung didn’t flinch. He didn’t recoil — as Chin would have — expecting blows. He sat there unmoving, and that in itself was almost insubordination.
‘Is that clear enough for you?’ the captain asked in low tones.
It seemed to be, for Hung nodded.
Chin tried to comprehend what it was that both Hung and the captain understood. He gave up, however, and drew only the most basic facts from the captain’s briefing. China was losing the war — not winning, as he had thought — and they should prepare to be attacked from all sides. And he could also tell from the interactions of his comrades that the glue of army discipline was weakening.
But it was also quite possibly being replaced by an even stronger bond. For there was a palpable sense of fear in that tent. From then on, the bickering came to an end.
The snoring kept Andre Faulk awake.
It was his first night with his new unit. He lay in his bunk and his mind raced. The barracks were frigid. They had to be. Everyone was wearing long underwear and boots. Only your hands, face and throat felt the effects of the chill.
It had come as a surprise when he was told the rules. You slept in battle dress like a fireman slept in his clothes. And you did it for the same reason. For you responded to desperate calls. A firebase on the verge of being overrun. A hole in a line to be plugged. A last-ditch effort to stop a breakthrough. Human filler plugged into a dam that was leaking in a hundred places.
Andre’s stomach turned and gurgled loudly. He rolled over onto his back in a series of jerks that left his clothes twisted out of place. The metal bunk creaked and squealed. The snores of the man in the bunk above sputtered. Andre stared up at the bulge. It was dimly visible in the light from the duty room. Several metal links were missing from the Russian bed. The mattress poked through like bald spots on an old tire.
He sighed. His breath fogged in front of his face.
There were nine new guys who’d joined the air cavalry platoon with Andre. Nine replacements for a unit of only thirty-three men at full strength. Nine divided by thirty-three was something like one out of three or four. Those were the odds. One out of three or four. In about six weeks’ worth of fighting. With no end in sight. And maybe they weren’t the first replacements, he hadn’t thought of that.