‘In your opinion, Colonel Adams, would it have made a difference if those guns had fired eight hundred rounds instead of one hundred?’ The officer nodded. ‘Please answer for the record.’
‘Yes…’ he blurted out. His head dropped. Clark wondered whether he’d thought of anything else since that day. ‘The measure of artillery performance is placing as many rounds as possible on target in the shortest amount of time. It would’ve made a difference… yes.’
Clark closed his eyes and shook his head. The man had decided to accept full responsibility. When he opened his eyes, the chairman was nodding. ‘Why didn’t those guns fire the expected number of rounds, colonel?’
The answer was delivered in a monotone. He knew it by heart. ‘The guns’ lubricants thickened because of the cold. Some recoil mechanisms didn’t bring the guns back into battery for three or four minutes. The guns that could fire tried to cover but ran out of ammo. The cold also affected a lot of the rounds that we did get off. Their propellants and fuses were frozen, which resulted in a high percentage of shorts, overs and duds.’
‘And why is it, colonel, that you experienced so many problems from the cold weather?’
The man finally raised his head. He looked his inquisitor straight in the eye and said, ‘We didn’t have time to winterize. To acclimatize. To train in a Siberian winter so we could fix the problems before they…’ He lost his train of thought. His haunted eyes drifted off.
‘Please state your name,’ the chairman said into the microphone.
‘Clark, Nate, Lieutenant General, United States Army.’
‘And you are Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army Pacific and of United Nations Russian Forces, is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir. That’s correct.’
‘Now general, on January 26th — three days after the Chinese invaded Siberia — they cut the road leading from Birobidzhan to Khabarovsk, is that correct?’ Clark confirmed the facts. ‘And that resulted in Birobidzhan — which was being evacuated at the time to Khabarovsk — being surrounded, is that correct?’ Again Clark agreed. ‘Can you tell this committee how the Chinese managed to cut that road before the evacuation was complete?’
‘The Chinese had been infiltrating Siberia for weeks in force. According to prisoners we’ve interviewed, they were under strict orders to avoid any contact with UNRUSFOR troops. The enormous size of our theater of operations and the thick forest canopy prevented our discovering where and in what strength they were concentrating.’
‘And for some hours after the Chinese had cut the road with probably a division-strength unit, the commander at Birobidzhan — the late Brigadier General Merrill — still sent lightly-armed convoys down the road toward Khabarovsk, is that correct?’
‘The first word anyone had that the road was blocked came from aerial reconnaissance, which reported abandoned vehicles on the road. General Merrill correctly concluded they’d been ambushed and sent a battalion-strength task force up the road on a clearing operation. He continued to send truck convoys behind the mixed armor-infantry force because of the severe time constraints imposed on the evacuation by the advancing main Chinese force and on the presumption that the road would be cleared.’
‘And was the road cleared?’ the chairman asked — the answer patently obvious.
‘No… sir. The clearing operation was turned back with heavy losses. The trucks were ambushed and had to be bulldozed off the road. Very few of the unarmored vehicles made it back to Birobidzhan. And there were approximately five hundred men killed or missing and presumed killed or captured.’
The chairman was nodding. ‘How do you personally rate General Merrill’s performance at Birobidzhan, General Clark?’
‘I firmly believe that Brigadier General Merrill, Lieutenant Colonel Adams, and every other soldier in my command has fought bravely and well under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. None were as prepared as they should have been for what hit them. I also, however, firmly believe it is not the government which sent them here who should be asking them “why?”… but the other way around.’
‘You sure you’re ready for this?’ Stempel’s new squad leader asked. His voice was already lowered in anticipation of danger.
Stempel nodded, trying to slow his breathing. He nodded again, and the man moved on to check the others in Stempel’s new squad. He tugged on equipment to see if it made noise. He asked if they knew their radio call sign and that of the company commander and battalion fire support officer… just in case.
They each practiced giving the password that would get them back in through the wire. When the sergeant talked to his men, he grasped them firmly by their shoulders and squeezed. Sometimes he used a gentle shake to reinforce his comments. He was only twenty-three, but he was a good NCO.
The waiting left Stempel’s stomach churning. His mouth was dry. Tremors shook his limbs. It was his first combat patrol — his first time outside the wire — in the two weeks plus he’d been on the base. It was pitch dark. It seemed colder the closer they came to the time.
‘All right, Second Squad,’ the sergeant whispered to the men gathered in the trench. ‘Let’s go. Unsafe your weapons at the top.’
The men began to climb crude ladders made from wood packing crates. Stempel got in line to scale the trench wall. On the ladder he could barely handle one rung at a time. The effort required enormous effort. He was carrying eight magazines in pouches on his belt. Another eight stashed in thigh pockets. But that burden was physical. Far heavier was his psychological load.
Ice and snow covered the sandbags at the top. An alien landscape lay ahead. He’d been out numerous times to police the battlefield after ritualistic dawn attacks. But never beyond the wire.
Stempel rose to his feet at the forwardmost line of trenches.
Everything looked different about the terrain. When viewed from just inches above ground level — standing at a fighting post — every undulation rose like a mountain. Like an ant who saw peaks and valleys. But now — in the dim starlight — he saw the killing ground was flat.
They headed toward the wire, picking up the pace to a trot. Harold leapt over the first strands of concertina wire. They were half buried in snow. Less an obstacle than a boundary. A border. The limits of relative safety. The beginning of extreme danger.
They slowed. Stempel was breathing hard. His breath turned to clouds of starlit smoke. He searched for the Chinese through the periodic clouds of billowing fog. He stayed in exactly the same path as the man in front. He placed his feet in the tracks. Maybe those places wouldn’t explode.
At the trees they all dropped to the ground. Harold raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed into the dark woods ahead. He’d followed Patterson, who lay three meters away. At night, the spacing was much tighter than during the day. You risked bunching up in order to maintain contact. If you ever got separated from your unit — which happened all the time in firefights — you couldn’t exactly call out. You were on your own, and both sides’ guns would shoot you on sight.
He glanced over at the man on his right. He was a short and wiry grenadier who carried an M-279 grenade launcher mounted underneath his M-16. He replaced a casualty they’d taken the week before. A guy had been blinded when a small mortar landed in front of his fighting position. Stempel knew nothing about the replacement other than what he’d noticed that morning. When they awoke in the trench under a light dusting of snow, he looked as if he’d grown a white beard that stood out starkly against his dark skin. It had taken him several minutes to scrape the ice crystals off his two-day-old beard.