-17-
The Last Push
The terrible ice age storm that had howled down from the Arctic Circle and halted all movement on the Southern Front was beginning to die a slow death. The insane shrieks no longer whispered in First Rank Lu Po’s ears. He could think again, even though it was dreadfully cold outside the cabin that he and his White Tigers had huddled in during the blizzard.
Lu opened the front door and stepped outside into a frozen wasteland. Ice and snow encrusted the surrounding pines. A thousands branches lay on the virgin snow or were buried under tons of white. The air burned going down his lungs. Each step was a sharp crunch of his boots on the devilish substance. Lu never wanted to see snow again. Once this campaign was over and he took his discharge, he would live in the South Pacific. He would bake in the sunlight and luxuriate in warmth forever.
“What are you waiting for?” he told the Commandos emerging from the log cabin. “Don’t you want to be heroes?”
The White Tigers wore their white combat suits. After a hot morning breakfast, they cradled their weapons.
“The storm hurt us,” said Lu, “but it will have hurt the partisans even worse.”
“They’re native to this land and will have known what to do,” Wang said.
“Maybe. The key is that they’re not elite soldiers like us. If any of them were caught in the open, they’ll be frozen or half-dead by now. It’s time to finish our chore and teach these hardheaded Americans the price of not knowing when they’re beaten. You heard Command. They want every one of them hanged. All the supplies must get through to the front. The final push is about to begin, and we have to make sure our soldiers have enough ammo and fuel to smash through Anchorage.”
It was a speech, and Lu was more than tired of those. It was time to find and hang these tick-like partisans that were sucking off Chinese strength.
Half a day later, Lu knelt beside a guttered fire. His men had found six frozen bodies nearby. The Americans were stiff like boards. These bastards had been caught in the storm. He could almost pity them. After examining the tracks of the survivors and their direction of travel, he followed until the forward scouts spotted three unburied candy wrappers.
“Someone was careless,” said Wang. “Usually they bury these.”
“How many do you think are left in this band?” asked Lu.
Wang shrugged. “Four to six would be my guess.” He frowned as the tracks disappeared deeper into the woods. “Do we follow the trail?”
“Of course,” said Lu. “We follow their tracks until we find and kill them.”
“I don’t know, Bill,” said Carlos. “This position is awfully exposed.” They were on a pine-covered hill overlooking Highway One. Their tracks led deeper into the shadowed forest.
An exhausted Bill Harris couldn’t feel his feet anymore. He knew they were black with advanced frostbite. Gangrene would set in soon unless they were amputated. He didn’t want to go on living without feet. He knew suicide was wrong from God’s perspective. But this wasn’t suicide. He was fighting for his country.
Bill was tired. His teeth chattered all the time and he wondered if he was beginning to hallucinate. A presence had been with him during the trek here, a light off the corner of his eye. He thought it might have been God, but when he’d turned, nothing had been there. This storm….
“Bill, you okay?” asked Carlos.
“Sure,” Bill whispered. His strength was failing. It was so cold, his feet—
“We’d better think about finding shelter,” Carlos said.
“No,” whispered Bill, with his eyes feeling as if they were burning up. Feebly, he shook his head. The storm…before the storm he’d seen too many corpses dangling from the pines. Those were American men and women, and children, too. The Chinese hanged everyone.
When he’d sat huddled under a lean-to during the blizzard, as ice howled around them, he’d remembered crows pecking at the corpses’ eyes. That had done something to him. He’d focused on that during the ice storm and had started a fire with the old hunter’s lighter. The hunter had died….
“Bill,” said Carlos. “We can’t go on like this.”
“The corpses,” Bill whispered.
“You ought to rest.”
“The corpses,” Bill whispered again. He’d seen more today dangling like frozen icicles. It had filled him with the same anger as when he’d watched the T-66s destroying Stan Higgins’s company of Abrams tanks. That had caused him then to wire grenades to a sticky bomb. He’d charged the Chinese monster. There was something in him that maybe only Stan Higgins knew about. It came upon him after losing game after game. Too much defeat would ignite a fire in him. He couldn’t talk then. He would be too angry, too wound up and driven to win. Then he’d drive for the hoop, making his lay-ups. Then his three-point shots would start swooshing in.
The anger, the fire, after knowing that he was going to lose his dead feet…it had ignited him seeing those frozen bodies dangling from the pines. He’d been a free man all his life. He didn’t plan to play the slave now to some invader, especially not with amputated feet! There were times you had to fight. It was better to fight on your knees than being a slave. But it was best to fight standing while you still had feet.
“That’s what I’m going to do today,” Bill whispered.
“What’s that, Pastor?” asked Carlos.
“Here,” said Bill, indicating the hill. “Here’s where I’m making my stand.”
They were on a hill in the shadows of ice-laden pines. Below was the snow-packed Highway One.
“You take the others and go,” Bill whispered. “Just leave me the M2 and the ammo.”
Carlos stared at him. “If you’re staying, I’m staying.”
“Choppers can get us pretty easy if we’re up here,” the youthful pilot said, adding his opinion as he always did.
“With the M2 Browning….” Bill smiled as he might have after making a winning three-point shot.
“You don’t think we’re going to make it out alive, do you?” asked Carlos.
“I don’t know,” said Bill. His eyes felt hot again. It put splotches before his vision. “I’ve seen a lot of corpses hanging from trees. I figure the Chinese are killing off all the real Americans. I don’t know if I want to be around once those people are gone.”
Carlos nodded thoughtfully. “If we’re going to die, let’s make it worth something, huh?”
“I’m not committing suicide,” Bill said feverishly. “I’m just sick of seeing those corpses. And my feet—I’m going to hit back as hard as I know how.”
“What about your feet?” the pilot asked.
“Nothing,” said Bill. He shouldn’t have said anything about them. It was a mistake.
“Do you hear that?” asked Carlos, his voice muffled by his scarf.
Everyone in the small band listened.
“Those sound like trucks,” the pilot said.
“Go,” whispered Bill. He crouched by his M2 and used his freezing fingers to fumble at the ammo belt, soon racking a bullet into the firing chamber. He looked up at the others. They had intense frowns, those that had pulled down their scarves. “Go,” he said again. “Save yourselves to fight later.”
“Look,” said Carlos, pointing.
They did, including Bill. A snowplow appeared from around a bend. Snow and ice roared from it as it cleared the highway. Behind the snowplow were Chinese Army trucks and ordinary commercial vehicles, including a tanker.
“They must be running out of trucks,” said Carlos, “if they’ve begun stealing ours.”