The echoes rose, fell. There was no way to know where anyone was located.
“For Christ’s sake, cease fire, Marines!”
I had a sickening flash of the injured and sick from the submarine, torn apart by fire. The tents, Eddie, the grouped sleds, caught in a cross fire or mowed down by the Chinese. The sick, strapped down, were too weak to free themselves and crawl away to seek even bare cover.
“Get down!”
I did not know if the combatants knew the location of each other. The likelihood of being hit by a stray bullet was as great as being struck by an aimed one. I shouted over the Motorola for Chief Apparecio and Karen Vleska not to fire a torpedo!
Did they even hear me?
Major Pettit and his squad leaders directed men to spread out, crawl toward the pressure ridge, or the sleds. They’d be humpbacked forms, wriggling toward the last place they’d seen the Chinese, who would naturally be somewhere else by now.
On the Chinese set I heard another stream of shouts.
Andrew Sachs bore up well, considering his civilian status. He remained rational, and seemed horrified. “Now someone’s yelling about a bear! A polar bear! Is that what started it? A starving bear and…” He was laughing now, but not sanely. “A damn bear! This place!”
“Tell me everything they say.”
“Now someone is warning them that we’ve got one of their radios. Saying we’re monitoring what they say.”
The Chinese radio went silent.
There came the cr-ack of rounds overhead, and then a zipping noise, which meant that whoever was firing had adjusted angle so that the bullets came level with my head. I pulled Sachs down. A barrage slammed into the bridge. My M4 was up but I didn’t fire back. It was possible that a Marine was shooting out there. I shoved the Chinese radio at Sachs and bellowed for him to tell them — yell into the set no matter what — that we hadn’t started it, to stop firing, to say I was trying to get our guys to stop, too.
“This is Colonel Rush! Cease fire, Marines!”
Sachs said that the Chinese had probably switched bands. But he kept turning dials and babbling into the set. Maybe he’d been the one to tell them to switch bands in the first place. I had no idea what he was really saying.
“Doc! Doc! Freed is down!”
“Enemy incoming! Rapid fire!”
Then I heard Major Pettit. “If you keep firing, Crowley, that handset of yours will get shoved up where the sun never shines. The colonel said to shut it down!”
Nobody likes being shot at. If you hear the other side stopping, you tend to do it, too.
The shooting — at least the U.S. side — seemed to be slackening, or was it my imagination?
The bullpups fell silent.
All the firing stopped.
There was only wind now, like laughter, and the groaning of men, and someone screaming.
I tried to reach Eddie. “Major Nakamura?”
“All good here, Colonel.” I felt some relief that he was okay. “Nobody hurt, but they goddamn shot up the snow, holy shit, son of a bitch! They killed the goddamn snow two hundred times. That snow is deader than Julius Caesar.”
I switched handsets. “Captain Zhou? Can you hear me?”
Stiffly, after moving bandwidths, on the third try, I heard an answer, flat and cold. He’d probably turned his radios on again. “I hear you.”
“It was the ice started it. Or possibly a bear. We did not fire first.”
Silence. Did he believe me? He had to know I could have torpedoed his vessel, and hadn’t. He must have been waiting for the impact and explosion on his end. He must have heard his own guys yelling about the bear.
I tried again. “Captain Zhou.”
The interpreter’s voice said grudgingly, “The captain says he knows about the bear, Colonel.”
I ordered Chief Apparecio, so that Zhou could hear, “Scuttle her. Open the sea cocks or torpedo tubes. Set explosives. Do whatever you can do as fast as possible and get out.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
I told Zhou, “Let’s continue what we started. Tend the wounded. Take your men aboard. If you still wish to give us medicines, thank you. Then let’s go home.”
Pettit reported the Chinese soldiers filing back to their Zodiacs, carrying two wounded. Pettit commandeered one of their Zodiacs. The Chinese would get their weapons back when they reached the sub. I knew that combat could still break out again at any provocation.
Sachs asked me, as we climbed down to the ice, as the roar of water flooding into the sub reached us, as the sub began listing and ice crept closer to the bridge, “Do you really think he’ll go away?”
“No. I think he’ll submerge and wait for orders. But I’m not about to blow up a Chinese submarine and start World War Three.”
I told Zhou, feigning bitterness, giving him some bragging rights at home, some face, giving him a recording of the American commander, “If it weren’t for you, we could have kept her afloat, Zhou. Could have saved her.”
Let his bosses think that Zhou caused us to lose a $2.4 billion submarine. Well, technically speaking, he did.
But I still have to figure out what is making the Montana crew sick! That sickness may be more dangerous than losing the submarine.
Maybe my gesture did it. Maybe Zhou would have done it anyway. But he sent over two Zodiacs loaded with crates of medicines, a few of them the same ones we carried, the same ones any prudent doctor would start out with against the symptoms I’d seen in those tents and life rafts. It was funny, I thought, eyeing the Chinese and English logos on the crates, the names of the companies that supplied both countries, funny because our weapons to kill each other were different. But our medicines to save lives were the same.
Everyone seemed shaken, but glad to be alive.
She went down slowly at first, tipping forward at the bow, where the torpedo tubes were flooding. Then the long cylinder shape started sliding forward. I watched the eel-like form glide into the frothing lead, sending up spray… and then there was only a fin in the air… and then that, too, was gone, only foam indicating that the craft had ever been there.
Two dead Marines lay in the snow. Two others, wounded and bandaged and shot up with morphine, could not pull sleds. Now we had Marine patients. Thirty sailors from the Montana lay coupled on sleds, in various stages of illness, some slack from drugs, some glaze-eyed with exhaustion or fever, the worst hacking up yellow bile, putrid bits of contagion that left a trail on the snow.
As for the dead, I hated giving the next order. Leave them. There were not enough sleds to move them, and we needed every spare second to get the needy to safety, if we wanted them to live. Later — after the storm passed — another mission could be dispatched to collect the bodies or incinerate them, depending on what — in the end — had made them ill.
The Marines wanted to take their dead, but I told Pettit, in no uncertain terms, that if we did that, we’d have a riot on our hands from the Montana survivors, who would demand the same treatment for their friends.
No one was happy. But Pettit understood. The healthier Montana crew would help pull sleds. Clinton would lead us back toward the Wilmington, or at least the direction in which our radio locators said she’d be.
The Chinese sub was gone, at least on the surface. Eddie skied beside me in silence for a while.
“You think Zhou’s directly underneath us, or to the right or left?” he said, eyeing the ice rubble field.
“What I want to know is, who’s talking to him?”
We looked over the moving figures, the jagged line probing its way back toward the warmth of the Wilmington, if Clinton could help find her again.