‘Excuse me.’ A soldier approached Clark in the brigade CP. He wore no insignia.
‘Yes?’ Clark replied.
‘Can I have a few moments of your time?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Jim DeSilva, Newsweek magazine.’
Clark chuckled. ‘Boy, what’d you do to get this assignment? Hit on your editor’s daughter?’ The journalist laughed. ‘And no, you can’t have any of my time. Check with me after the war… if anybody gives a shit about what I have to say then.’
There was a stir at the entrance to the bunker. A small crowd gathered around a man in Arctic whites. A staffer led the man — a captain — up to Clark’s small desk. Everyone wore grim faces.
The captain was carrying a white towel on a stick.
‘Sir,’ the haggard, unshaven man said. I’ve been sent as an intermediary from the Chinese. Captain Lawrence, sir. Bravo Company, 2/263rd.’ Clark offered the man his seat and ordered hot food brought in on the double. ‘I was captured when they overran us,’ he said — his voice breaking. He licked his chapped lips and coughed. ‘They’re promising good treatment of prisoners and to turn the wounded over to friendly lines. But they’re demanding the immediate surrender of Birobidzhan.’
The food was brought in on a metal mess tray. The captain ate it in huge bites.
‘I want him debriefed,’ Clark said to his S-2 — the brigade intelligence officer. ‘Chinese troop strengths and deployments. Numbers of friendly prisoners of war. Names or descriptions of all he can remember.’
‘Are you sending him back to the Chinese?’ the S-2 asked in an incredulous tone.
The captain looked sick from stress, from exposure, from lack of sleep. Lawrence looked at the intelligence officer. ‘They’ll kill men if I don’t go back. They’ve got about thirty or so that I’ve seen.’
‘You go on back,’ Clark said. The man nodded. ‘You can write a letter home, if you want, before you leave. We’ll give you a list of units along the road to Khabarovsk that will surrender. You take it back to the Chinese.’ Clark turned to his operations officer. ‘Tell those unit commanders to begin destroying their weapons once they’ve made contact with local Chinese commanders.’ Clark turned back to the captain. ‘And as for this base, you tell the Chinese that the only way they’re gonna get it is to come in here and take it.’ The captain raised his head to face Clark. ‘Use whatever words you want, but you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’
Captain Lawrence nodded. He wrote a letter to his wife and children at Clark’s desk, and then returned to Chinese lines with Clark’s answer.
Stempel’s small band had followed the sound of the fighting all through the night. Every time they’d stopped moving, numbness spread up his limbs from his extremities. Every time they had resumed their march, he’d regained some feeling… but not all.
At the only road they crossed, they saw Chinese. The sergeant — a pair of binoculars to his eyes — had said there were trucks being unloaded on the road’s shoulder. It was dark, and they had crossed the road at a dead run — all together. The Chinese obviously had no night-vision goggles because the crossing had been uneventful. After that, however, their rate of progress toward the ever-increasing noise of battle slowed, and their caution grew. There had to be Chinese in the woods.
On one of their pauses they had watched while the flickering light of flares burst in the sky and fell, visible only briefly through the treetops. It sounded from the distance as if a giant fireworks factory had blown up and was slowly cooking off its wares. But the sounds of the fighting seemed never to diminish. They fell sometimes for several minutes, then grew again in just seconds to a fever pitch. The closer they got, the more awesome the sound became. The more frequently they looked at each other with significant arches of their brows — their only permitted manner of communication.
Stempel felt an odd kinship with the men. He had spoken only once — his first brief exchange with the sergeant. But he felt a bond with them that was hard to describe. He knew their ranks from the black plastic insignia mounted on the fronts of their helmets. They were mostly privates, like himself. But there were two PFCs, a Spec Three, and the sergeant.
The names Stempel ascribed to them for personal reference began with those ranks. There was ‘The Sergeant’ and ‘The Spec Three,’ of course. Then ‘The PFC With the Grenade Launcher’ and ‘The PFC Without the Grenade Launcher.’ Next came ‘The Private With the Bloody Face.’ ‘The Private With the Dead Radio.’ And ‘The Private With the Leg Wound,’ who had to be helped along by two others on a rotating basis — one on each shoulder. The others Stempel had had no contact with and no reason to name.
The Sergeant gathered everyone around as the night sky crackled. It was an unprecedented gathering. Stempel got the sense that something momentous loomed. When The Sergeant began to whisper to the huddled group, Stempel found it both unfamiliar and dangerous. He and the others kept looking around even though the volume of The Sergeant’s voice was barely audible three feet away.
‘That’s the airbase,’ he said — nodding toward the sound of the fighting. Stempel knew nothing about any airbase. The noise rose several decibels as a flight of jets roared in. A string of thudding explosions sounded in their wake. ‘The fighting is too hot. We’re gonna have to wait. It’ll be light soon. We gotta spread out. Dig in. Don’t mess the snow up. We want concealment, not cover.’
‘What about our bootprints?’ The Spec Three asked. ‘If we stop here, they may lead the Chinks straight to us.’
‘Shit,’ The Sergeant replied. ‘Okay, listen up. You know that little stream that we passed? It’s iced over. There’s not much snow on the ice. We’ll double back. Keep to our old tracks. Then we’ll head down the streambed a ways and dig in on the bank. Everybody okay with that?’
After a moment, one of the privates with no name said, ‘I cain’t feel my toes.’ There was a depth of fear in his trembling voice that led Stempel to share his worry — both for the private with no name, and for his own numb extremities.
‘There ain’t nothin’ we can do but git into that airbase,’ The Sergeant replied. ‘And we can’t do that till the fightin’ dies down. Now let’s move out.’
They all rose and began to follow the bootprints back toward the streambed. They took high, awkward steps. Their boots squeaked as they descended through the same holes in the snow as before. Someone grabbed Stempel’s arm in the darkness. It was the private with no name from before. Stempel could see in the starlight that the man’s brow was deeply furrowed. ‘I cain’t feel my toes!’ he whispered. There was an angry shush from up front.
Stempel could only shrug. He tried to wear a sympathetic expression. He watched the man head on. His steps were even more awkward than the others. The guy’s feet dropped down through the snow in an ungainly plop. Stempel wondered whether the problem wasn’t worse than just numb toes. Thereafter, Stempel had a name for the man with the dark eyes and deep furrow in his brow. He became The Private Who Couldn’t Feel His Feet.
‘How are you feeling this morning?’ a smiling Elaine asked.
‘I hurt all over,’ Gordon said.
She kissed him — careful not to lean on the mattress. ‘Do you need anything?’