Until the question at the end, she’d remained calm. But now she hugged her legs as tightly as she could to ward off the chill. She nodded, and drew a noisy breath. ‘I vote for the hills,’ she blurted out. ‘Not the valley.’ Woody glanced at the high ground and nodded. ‘When should we go?’ she asked.
‘Soon. If the Chinese force their way through, UNRUSFOR’s gonna turn this valley into a cauldron. They’re gonna drop everything in their arsenal in here. Napalm. High explosives. Fuel-air munitions. Cluster bombs. Mines and booby traps and whatever other nasty shit they’ve hidden away for special occasions. And we gotta pick the right hill, ’cause they’ll drop ’em up there, too.’
Kate hesitated, but then forced the words out. ‘We could… could try to squeeze on a medevac helicopter,’ she tentatively suggested. The high pitch of her voice betrayed her. Woody looked at her, but said nothing. ‘No,’ she quickly added. She was ashamed that she’d even suggested displacing seriously wounded soldiers.
A thin limb was suddenly sheared from the upper reaches of a tree. It never really threatened them, but the cutting sound of the passing bullet was menacing. Kate and Woody both flinched and cringed as the leafy branch crashed to the ground ten feet away.
‘Let’s go,’ Kate said — rising to her feet.
The Chinese had made three concerted attempts to take the hilltop where Andre Faulk lay. The first appeared to have just missed its intended pre-dawn start. In the dim gray light they watched men climb the icy rocks. They slipped and lost one step for each two they took. Many were injured by noisy falls on the sharp crags even before the automatic weapons mowed them down in huge numbers. Before the hand grenades rained onto them by the dozens. Before grenadiers fired canisters of shot that lit the rocks with sparks.
The next two attacks were in broad daylight. They were slaughters on a brilliant blue morning. All three efforts had been repulsed in bloodbaths that did nothing but diminish the defenders’ ammunition. In between, allied bombers had pounded the base of the hill. Andre had no idea how many attacks the air raids had foiled. But the bombs’ explosions were stunning at five hundred meters. Shrapnel struck the rocks around their position with still-lethal force.
Andre was petrified each time the bombers came in. There was no unit name or number on their hilltop. They were provisionals hastily organized for a single task. A scratch team of wounded men whose lone radio had been holed and was useless. But someone must have remembered them. Some forward observer must have seen them there. For bombs were dropped all around, but always at minimally safe distances. They laid a cordon of fire around their hill. Its choking smoke set everyone coughing. The air stank. The Marine jets came closest of all. And when the last F/A-18 pulled up, it waggled its wings to signal its last bombing run.
It grew quiet. The pop and crackle of fighting was distant. Andre lay back. Daydreaming. Taking a painkiller. No Chinese came for a while. Andre knew why. Everyone in position to attack lay dead amid the still smoking bomb craters. He looked up at the puffy clouds. The moon was bright and clear in the daytime sky.
‘There’s another one!’ croaked the man to Andre’s right — number she by the master sergeant’s count. His voice was failing him quickly. Andre had lent the man some painkillers, and he’d come back for more an hour later. He seized on any hope for a rescue. This time he said he’d seen a helicopter. Andre looked, but concluded it was just another mirage.
Number thirteen to Andre’s left had binoculars. He kept a running count of the Chinese movements. They streamed in great numbers toward the battle down the deeply pitted dirt road far below. They were out of range of the men’s light weapons. But the Americans wouldn’t have fired even if they’d been closer. The bottom of the valley was a world away. After the third attack of the day — the fourth overall — their stocks of ammo had dwindled to half. All that mattered now lay within a hundred-meter radius of the summit.
Andre caught his head as he nodded off to sleep. It had almost struck the cold boulder beneath him. That rock had kept him alive. During a lull in the fighting, he’d risen to sit atop it. Its downhill face was scarred and pitted. All manner of bullets and random shrapnel had been stopped by the granite. It was like the armor that wrapped a tank crew in its shell. And it had kept friendly casualties to an absolute minimum. Despite four firelights from as close as fifteen meters, they’d suffered only two new wounds — both slight. Grenades had gone off only a few feet away from Andre. The stunning blasts were deafening. But when the debris fell it was little more than a heavy rain. The rocks had spared them from being shredded to pieces.
The only bad news had been announced by the master sergeant. Two of their brethren, he’d informed them, had taken a turn for the worse. Not from new wounds, but from old ones. Andre hadn’t seen them to know how sick they were, but it must have been bad. A man had limped by to redistribute their ammo.
‘There it is again!’ number six called out raggedly.
This time Andre saw the helicopter. Not a long-range Blackhawk like the one they’d rode in on. But a gunship firing a pod full of rockets. That was now the thin tether of hope on which number six felt his life depended. ‘What kind of combat range do Apaches have?’ Andre’s neighbor asked in a voice he tried to make loud. No one answered. ‘It’s only, like, a hundred miles or something, right?’
More like two or three hundred, Andre thought but didn’t say. It was like the old sailors that Andre had read about back in school. They got excited when they saw a bird because it meant land. Only in this case they weren’t on a ship searching for shore. Their salvation was coming toward them. It was drifting slowly like an iceberg ever closer. Sliding over the earth like a glacier. So slowly you couldn’t tell it was moving. Inch, by inch, by inch, by inch…
A loud explosion from near at hand woke Andre. His eyes shot open and he grabbed his rifle. Smoke drifted over his position. He spun his head from side to side. Pain shot through his cramping muscles like hot fire.
He scrambled up onto his rock parapet and peered over. The hill was filled with Chinese as before. But none moved. All were long dead and beginning to smell in the late afternoon sun.
Another shell burst, stinging Andre’s face.
He dropped down behind the rock with his eyes watering from the pain. His glove shot up to his left cheek. A small smear of crimson darkened his white glove. ‘Sh-h-hit? He dabbed at the tiny wounds with his bare hand and looked at the droplets of blood.
Yet another blast ripped through their positions. It wasn’t the crushing blow from a big artillery tube. And it couldn’t compare to the unearthly hell of an air raid. But the new threat brought ragged breathing from Andre’s chest.
Bam! shook the hilltop a dozen meters away. Mortars! Andre realized in horror. He looked up at the wispy red clouds that drifted overhead. The small shells were fired at a high angle and dropped almost straight down.
Another shell exploded. A man started cursing at the top of his lungs. ‘Shit! Motherfucker! Goddamn this fuckin’ shit, man!’
Are you hit? boomed the master sergeant — managing an impressive volume despite his flagging strength.