“Use this!” he shouted. The young Korean nodded grimly.
Fear had gripped some of the Koreans so that they had stopped firing and cowered behind the low walls of the fort, hands over their ears. As a result, their return fire had slackened considerably. Cole stopped to put weapons back into their hands. “You need to fight!” he said. Some nodded and began shooting back at the Chinese, but others could not shake off the grip of fear and dropped the rifles as soon as Cole thrust the weapons at them.
He knew from experience that if the Chinese overran the fort, that they might show some mercy to any captured Americans. American prisoners had value for propaganda purposes. They could be paraded for newsreels and photographs like prize animals at the county fair. Also, captured Americans served as a bargaining chip in the negotiations to end the war. Captured Koreans would be killed outright as traitors, more than likely bayoneted to save bullets. Bleeding out through a bayonet wound in your guts was a slow, painful way to die, but you’d be dead all the same.
That was how the Chinese operated. The Communists were cruel bastards. Any wounded Americans would also be killed because the Chinese couldn’t be bothered to care for them. Cole had seen that happen at the Chosin Reservoir. He still had nightmares in which he heard the screams of the wounded GIs being burned alive once the Chinese captured the ambulances.
“Fight!” he shouted desperately at the Koreans, urging them to shoot back. “There ain’t no place to hide. It’s fight now or die later!”
They couldn’t understand Cole’s words, but they got the message, hearing the tone of urgency in his voice. Their return fire increased in intensity, scattering the Chinese on the road below.
Finally, he spotted Jang-mi.
She was bent over Chul, who was bleeding heavily from a chest wound. Cole could hear the air sucking in and out of it and knew that the tough old man didn’t have long for this world. As Cole approached, Chul pulled Jang-mi's hands away from the rag that she was pressing against the wound. He spoke to her in Korean, which Cole couldn't understand, but he thought that Chul had said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry about me. Go on and fight.”
Jang-mi nodded, picked up her rifle, and returned to the wall. Chul closed his eyes, sighed contentedly, and died as easily as if he had fallen asleep. It was a better fate than many others this day. Nearby, the boy named Seo-jun looked back at Chul’s body, then fired down at the Chinese with a vengeance, despite the tears streaming down his face.
Ballard and old Sergeant Weber were also moving along the wall, encouraging the defenders wherever they could and making sure that everyone had enough ammunition. They moved people to fill the gaps left by casualties. Like Cole, they had seen the danger posed by the mortars and the enemy machine gunners and tried to direct fire before the enemy could take a toll with those devastating weapons.
Jake Miller had chosen to fight alongside Jang-mi and he wielded his rifle awkwardly. One thing for sure, the flyboy was no infantry soldier. But Cole couldn’t deny that the pilot appeared full of fight.
He turned to Cole, “Look at that. We've almost got them on the run.”
“Almost,” Cole replied, although he was thinking that wasn’t about to happen.
“What I wouldn't give right now for a Corsair that I could fly in here and drop a bomb on their heads and give them little strafing for good measure,” Miller said.
“If you know who to call about that, now would be a good time,” Cole said.
“Do prayers count?” Miller just laughed, shook his head, and fired his rifle. No Corsairs appeared and no reinforcements. There was just this motley crew of defenders, their numbers diminishing by the minute as the Chinese fire took its toll.
The fight had only been going on for a few minutes, but already it felt like a lifetime. Cole had found that to be the case with most battles.
A fight never lasted as long as you thought, but every minute of a battled stretched on like some terrifying nightmare that you couldn’t wake from.
Jang-mi was doing her best to rally the Koreans, so Cole ran back in the direction of the Borinqueneers. He found that they had settled in for a bitter fight, crouching behind the low wall that served as the fort’s parapet or among the rocks where time and storms had scattered sections of the wall — helped by a few Chinese mortar rounds. The smell of sweating men and blood and cordite hung over the whole area. Some of the men were wounded, but they had patched themselves back up and gotten back into the fight. Cisco seemed to be everywhere at once, reassuring the others or running to get more ammunition.
Cole saw the grim determination on all of their faces and grunted to himself in satisfaction. The officers who had pegged these boys as cowards after the debacle at Outpost Kelly was just plain wrong. Hell, even he had been wrong about the Borinqueneers. He understood now that their orders during the fight on Outpost Kelly had just gotten confused by the language barrier. Here at the fortress, these Puerto Ricans were fighting like wildcats.
The kid was fighting alongside them. Running at a crouch, Cole jumped down beside him.
“Where have you been?” the kid asked.
“Oh, I strolled down to the corner store for the paper and a pack of smokes.”
The kid grinned. “I’d believe that if you could read and if you smoked.”
“You got a point there,” Cole said.
“Next time, pick me up a soda pop.”
“Hell, I’ll do better than that, kid. If we survive this, I’ll buy you a beer.”
Chapter Twenty
Down below on the road, Major Wu and Deng had been among those caught by total surprise when the walls of what appeared to be an abandoned fortress suddenly erupted in fire. One moment they had been trudging along shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellow Communists, and the next thing they knew, soldiers were running for cover or collapsing into the dirt.
“Take cover!” Wu shouted as the carnage began. He heard bullets thwacking into the bodies of the soldiers around him. “We are under attack!”
“Sir, this way!”
Deng grabbed Wu by the shoulder and pulled him closer to the rock wall they were passing. At least it offered some cover. On the far side of the road, there was nowhere to go, but only a sheer drop. In the confusion on the crowded mountain road, some of the men had been pushed off the edge and fallen to their deaths, screaming in terror. Something passed by with a tremendous whoosh, leaving shattered men in its wake. Wu realized that it was a tank round. Down the road, the tank round hit something and exploded, wreaking more havoc.
Wu felt no fear, but only anger. Had the imperialists tricked them? He wondered why their scouts had not noticed the defenses here, but the scouts had barely been able to stay ahead as the entire army rushed ahead almost at a trot, trying to cover a bit more distance before full daylight and the threat of enemy aircraft.
Besides, he could see how the defenders had been cleverly hidden. Even the tanks were covered in brush to camouflage them. Looking closer, he could see a barricade down the road that their troops must cross in order to proceed. It would take some effort to clear the barrier. Meanwhile, the defenders would be shooting at them the whole time. Wu could see that the trap had been set carefully. It was more than he would have given the slow-witted Americans credit for.
Of course, Wu was a political officer who did not command any troops other than his little band of snipers that he had assembled for propaganda purposes. However, he was satisfied that the officers had a clear grasp of the situation that the army was in.