"I'm almost out of ammo," the kid replied.
"Me too."
Cole chanced a look over the rim of the foxhole at the enemy. Fortunately, Pomeroy had been keeping up a steady fire, but the Chinese were still coming.
"I've got an idea," Cole said, reaching for the Bangalore torpedo. "Have you got a light?"
"I don't smoke."
"Goddammit, neither do I. Trade places with Pomeroy. We need covering fire."
The kid leveled his rifle at the enemy and started shooting, while Pomeroy crouched beside him in the bottom of the hole. He saw at once what Cole had planned. "You are a crazy son of a bitch, Hillbilly," he said. "But it might just work."
"If we can send this bomb back at them, it could buy us some time."
Pomeroy fished in his pocket for his lighter. They had already shed their gloves and mittens in order to shoot, but now the backs of their hands were nearly frozen while their fingertips were burned from the heat of handling the hot rifle barrels. Pomeroy took out a Zippo lighter and struggled to get his stiff thumb to roll the wheel mechanism to strike a spark.
A Chinese mortar thumped nearby, showering them with snow and debris. "Dammit!" Pomeroy shouted. He dropped the lighter, then fumbled for it among the snow and loose rocks at the bottom of the hole. "That was close."
"Never mind that," Cole said. "Just get that fuse lit."
He picked up the Bangalore torpedo and tilted it so that his body sheltered it from the wind. On the third try, Pomeroy got the Zippo sparked. He held the flickering flame to the fuse, which was damp, and took a few seconds to catch. Finally, it started sputtering like a Fourth of July sparkler. Considering that the fuse had been put out once, he reckoned that he only had a few seconds.
He swung the end of the bamboo pole and hurled the Bangalore torpedo at the advancing Chinese.
"Down!" he shouted.
All three of them hugged the belly of the foxhole. At first, nothing happened, and the Chinese were so close that they could hear them shouting commands at one another. That reminded him to put both hands over his ears.
In the next instant, the air seemed to get sucked out of Cole's lungs and the ground jumped. Boom. A wave of heat and light washed over them. When they looked up again, the enemy advance in front of them was shattered. The enemy soldiers no longer came in waves — or maybe they had just moved on to find an easier position to attack the poor bastards there.
"That put a dent in them," Pomeroy said, his voice touched by awe.
"I reckon that wasn't the last of them," Cole said.
Unfortunately, he was right. All around them, the night was filled with tracer fire and muzzle flashes. Nearby, a BAR kept up its constant chatter and off the right, a machine gun let loose with burst after burst. Flares still filled the sky, so that there was no hiding the sheer numbers of Chinese.
Their respite from the battle was all too brief. A group of three Chinese soldiers ran at them, seemingly out of nowhere. Cole shot one, but the other two were suddenly upon them, leaping down into the foxhole.
Pomeroy clubbed one with his rifle. Once the man was down, he hit him again for good measure. The third enemy soldier was grappling with the kid, trying to stick a bayonet in him, but the kid had grabbed hold of the rifle and was struggling to wrestle it out of the Chinese soldier's grip.
Cole used the butt of the M-1 to smash the Chinese soldier in the head. The soldier let go of the rifle, then took a wild swing at Cole, hitting him with a glancing blow across the chin. The Chinese soldier didn't get a chance to swing at him again. Behind him, Tommy had picked up the enemy soldier's rifle and rammed the bayonet home. The man's eyes grew wide in surprise, and then he crumpled.
Screaming, the kid plunged the bayonet at him again and again.
"All right, kid, you got him," Cole said, taking Tommy by the shoulder. He reached for the rifle taken from the Chinese soldier and saw that it was an M-1. The sons of bitches must have scavenged it off the battlefield. "He had one of our rifles. Search his pockets. Maybe he's got some ammo."
The kid was still too stunned to react, but Cole pulled him down so that he wouldn't make a target. In the dead enemy soldier's pockets he found several clips of ammunition for the M-1. They were back in business.
He gave some of the clips to Pomeroy and kept the rest for himself. They started firing at any Chinese who charged their position. All too soon, Cole heard the ping as the empty clip ejected. He jammed in another clip and started shooting again. This wasn't marksmanship, he thought as he pulled the trigger again and again. It was slaughter. He didn't know enough about the enemy to hate them, or really know much of anything about them. He was shooting to survive. Kill or be killed. Ping went the clip again.
How much longer could they do this? Either until the bullets ran out or some Chinese soldier took a lucky shot.
In the distance, the bugles started sounding again. The Chinese attack began to ebb. Incredibly, although the Chinese troops were among them, all around them, as a matter of fact, they had not succeeded in completely overwhelming the U.S. and ROK troops, who were still holding fast. The Chinese soldiers began to retreat back up the slope. No more flares were fired, but as the light faded, he could make out small groups of retreating soldiers, many of them helping wounded comrades along.
"Good riddance," Pomeroy said. The voice next to him started Cole. He had almost forgotten that he wasn't alone.
"You're still alive?"
"Just barely," Pomeroy admitted.
"Kid?"
"Yeah." The kid's voice sounded shaky, either from fear or cold — maybe a little of both.
"I just hope to hell that these bastards are done for the night," Pomeroy said. "If they attack again, we're all goners."
"Amen to that," Cole said.
A single rifle shot cracked in the distance from the Chinese side, and someone cried out from one of the nearby mortar squads. Some Chinese sniper was still at work up there.
"Keep your heads down," Cole said, mostly for the kid's benefit.
For the most part, the American guns had fallen silent, letting the enemy retreat unmolested. It would have been nice to think that this was some gesture, an esprit de corps between enemies, but Cole reckoned the truth was a lot simpler. The fact was that most of the Americans were just about out of ammo.
Pomeroy was right. If the Chinese returned, the Americans were all goners.
Chapter Eighteen
At daylight, the scene that greeted the survivors of the attack was like waking from a nightmare that turned out to be all too real. Scattered around them in every direction lay the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers from the last two assaults. It might just be possible to cover at least half a mile, Cole thought, by stepping from body to body without ever touching the ground.
Judging by their contorted figures, many of the Chinese had not died peacefully. Their twisted limbs and bodies were now frozen into grotesque contortions. Cole gazed out at the carnage and shook his head. Sure, they were supposed to be the enemy. A few hours ago, these same men had been trying to shoot or bayonet him. However, seeing so much death did not exactly delight Cole, but just the opposite — he was struck by the waste of it all.
He wondered again what that Chinese soldier had been saying to him before Cole had pulled the trigger. Cole hoped that the soldier had been cussing him. He decided that was what he would believe, although he knew that he would also have a hard time getting that memory out of his head anytime soon.
He took a deep breath and pushed all those thoughts out of his mind. When you got soft was when you died. If he ever got home again, he could try to find some answer to all of this in the Bible or in long rambles through the mountains. However, the shores of the Chosin Reservoir in the Taebaek Mountains was not the place for self-doubt, not if he wanted to survive.