There was no word yet on the fate of the sniper, Caje Cole, who had stayed behind to single-handedly hold back the enemy so that the task force could retreat. He wrote what happened, then shook his head. The account seemed unbelievable as he wrote it, but anyone who had ever been caught in the gaze of Cole’s cold gray eyes wouldn’t doubt it for a minute. If Cole didn’t deserve a posthumous Medal of Honor, he didn’t know who did.
For all the heroism that had taken place at the fort, however, Hardy couldn’t help the sense that this was just one more meaningless battle in a meaningless war.
The Chinese kept pushing, but it was clear that they had their problems as well. The Chinese were poorly supplied and heavily bombed. Their losses were atrocious. How much longer could they continue this war?
Meanwhile, men on both sides continued to fight and die. The civilian population in the war zone continued to suffer.
Eventually, the fighting would end and a truce would be declared at the negotiating table in Panmunjom. The Chinese had kept up the pressure, attacking wherever they could, in what was essentially a land grab. When the negotiating stopped and an agreement was reached, nobody could expect the communists to withdraw from any of the territory they held. The enemy’s strategy would prove to be effective.
“At least we held them off,” the clerk announced. To his credit, he had left the command post and done his duty with rifle and bayonet in the line until the threat of being overrun by the enemy had passed.
“Don’t worry, whatever we held, they’ll be sure to give away at the negotiating table,” Hardy said.
Hardy had seen the maps; the Jamestown Line was ten miles north of the 38th Parallel that was being discussed as the new boundary. He hated to see hundreds of square miles that they had fought for simply handed over to the Communists.
Hardy’s fears would prove to come true. The Korean Peninsula would be divided along the 38th Parallel to create two countries: a Communist state north of the boundary and a Democracy to the south. No one yet had a crystal ball to see that the free people of South Korea would grow to become one of the world’s great economies, while shortages and famine continued for decades in the north.
By the time the war was over, at least three million people would have died, many of the dead being civilians slaughtered on both sides. Adding to the butcher’s bill, more than thirty thousand young American men had perished in the hills and valleys, along with more than one hundred thousand young South Korean soldiers, fighting for their freedom. The Korean Peninsula was soaked in blood from one end to the other.
All that was a story that was yet to be told. The final chapter had yet to be written. For now, Hardy struggled to tell what had happened at the fort, how a small task force had held off a Chinese battalion and possibly saved the entire Jamestown Line from crumbling. In the end, they had not fought for anyone but each other.
He typed the last word, gathered the pages, and ran to find a Jeep that would carry the news of what had happened at Outpost Alamo.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cole awoke to a world of hurt.
His head hurt. He had crusted blood in his eyes. A big gash in his side. And he could barely move his right leg.
But it could have been worse. He hadn’t expected to wake up at all.
Stepping off the cliff like that had been his way of turning the tables on the enemy and denying them the satisfaction of capturing him. He saw it as his final act of defiance in the face of defeat.
Or so he had thought. Because now here he was at the bottom of the cliff. Bloody and broken, but breathing.
There didn’t seem to be any Chinese around, so he was thankful for that much. They must have thought he was dead.
Cole would have thought the same thing. He looked up, wondering how in hell he had survived. It was a good one hundred and fifty feet, maybe two hundred, to the top of that cliff. But it wasn’t a straight drop. A big clump of trees grew about halfway up, jutting from a ledge, and another cluster of trees grew at the bottom.
If he had fallen straight down, he would have been flatter than a pancake. But he was lying under those trees at the bottom of the cliff.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
He sort of recalled having hit those trees on the way down and they had slowed him down. He didn’t remember anything after that. However, the trees at the bottom must have cushioned his fall like a big ol’ feather bed. Yeah, right. More like how the ball felt after getting hit by the bat.
Cole lay flat on his back, his arms and legs flung out. He supposed that he looked like a picture he had once seen in a church book of a fallen angel, cast out of heaven for his sins and forced to live as a demon in the mortal world. He groaned and tried to roll over, but it took him a couple of attempts. Once he had managed to sit up, he took stock of his situation.
Aside from the blood in his eyes, his head seemed intact. At least he was thinking more or less clearly. A tree limb had speared him good in the side, laying him open clean down to the ribs, cracking a couple in the process. A little lower, and he would have been skewered in the guts. Still, it hurt like hell to breathe.
He could live with that. However, it was his leg that worried him the most. His right leg was fine. But the left leg twisted off at a funny angle. He had suffered broken bones twice as a boy, and they had been painful in their own way, a deep ache. His leg looked fairly shattered and he could hardly feel it, like it wasn’t even part of him.
He’d have to deal with that soon, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
His rifle was long gone, surely lost in the fall, and out of bullets, anyhow. He was glad that he had saved the last one for that Chinese officer and put a rifle slug through his skull. No regrets about that.
Pistol? Gone. Somehow, he still had a grenade strapped to him. He ought to have used that up on the cliff. If things got too bad, he felt reassured that he could just blow himself up.
He also had his Bowie knife, which was the only tool he needed to survive. He drew it from the sheath and admired the mottled Damascus steel blade with its razor-sharp edge. He felt a sense of gratitude to his old friend Hollis Baily, who had made it in his workshop. Maybe one day, Cole would get to be as good at making knives. But first, he had to get the hell out of this valley and back to the American lines or he would be permanently missing in action.
First, he had to deal with his leg.
“This is gonna hurt some,” he said aloud, just in case the fates were listening and decided to take pity on him.
Dragging himself around some more, he found some sturdy sticks. He then dragged himself to a pile of rocks and rearranged them enough to wedge his ankle between them. He had to admit that he felt sick to his stomach noticing that his left foot was pointing in an unnatural direction.
He sat up, took hold of his leg like it was a chunk of cordwood, counted to three, and twisted.
Birds flew out of the trees overhead when he screamed.
The pain made beads of sweat stand out on his forehead, but at least now, his foot was facing in the right direction.
Using strips cut from his uniform shirt, he bound the sticks against his leg to make a splint. Using a much longer stick, he was able to get back on his feet.
It hurt like hell. He couldn’t exactly walk, but he could hobble.
Back home in the mountains, he had known people hurt just as bad in a farm accident, or at the sawmill, or even falling off the barn roof that they had been trying to fix. The hospital was a long ways off and getting there — and paying for it — had been beyond the ability of many country people in the Great Depression. Surviving a terrible accident wasn’t always a blessing because it meant a lingering death with maybe some moonshine to dull the pain. Better to fall and break your neck than suffer.