Cal whacked Rick on the arm and both of them saluted Danny, who returned the gesture crisply. Three days in Korea and Rick still hadn’t caught on to the military saluting thing yet, but Cal was an old hand; Danny figured Cal had pretended to be every serviceman except a Coastie by now. “Lance Corporal, go get us a jeep,” Danny said, handing off Kern’s written order. “Make sure we get extra gas.”
Rick ducked inside the barn, leaving Cal and Danny outside. To the north, they could hear the rumble of shelling in the distance, like a gathering storm. A moment later, several Air Force fighters screamed overhead.
“Don’t seem like a good direction to go,” Cal said.
Danny closed his eyes a moment to concentrate, finding the target again in his mind. “I think he’s heading south, away from the fighting. Colonel says they’ve abandoned the hill and the Air Force is bombing it to hell behind them. Should be okay, just… wait.”
Then suddenly there was a second Variant there.
Danny saw the new target in his mind, probably no more than two miles away from the one that had blazed into his consciousness just after they’d returned from Moscow. A second Variant coming south.
Coming from North Korea.
Danny opened his eyes and looked right at Cal. “Gunny, get in there and set a fire under them. I want that jeep now.”
Poor Cal nearly jumped out of his skin, but immediately dashed inside the barn and started raising hell. And Danny began to wonder if they could end up getting two for the price of one there in the middle of the Korean War. If they survived.
Miguel staggered down the road with the rest of his company, as dawn broke over Korea. His squad was all but gone, and all he could do was think of poor Hugo, whose body was probably bombed to hell and back by the U.S. Air Force. Even though he was just a private, Miguel understood the bombing all too well — if the U.N. forces couldn’t keep Old Baldy, they’d make damn sure nobody else could either.
So there would be no body to bring home. Miguel hadn’t even stopped to take any token from Hugo’s body, no dog tags or photos. He would someday go to Hugo’s mother and have nothing to offer other than that her son died in battle, and while Hugo had been scared, he’d died moving toward a gun, moving to help.
It was a small comfort, but it was something. Hugo had not been the bravest of men, but when he’d fought, he’d fought well. What was more, he’d kept everyone’s spirits up with his jokes and his singing and his outsized stories of his exploits back in Bogotá. Miguel, of course, had known full well that Hugo had not, in fact, courted the daughter of a banker or beaten eight men in a row playing darts, but it had been fun all the same.
Miguel, of course, wouldn’t have had any trouble beating eight men in darts. Or eighty, for that matter.
Two weeks earlier, Miguel had woken up from a sound sleep and felt… different. He hadn’t been able to explain it, but it was as though his reflexes and his mind had grown sharper, his hands and eyes acting as one. That day, they had engaged in target practice, and Miguel’s sergeant had been furious to find that Miguel had only registered one shot on target, in the very center.
In fact, all of Miguel’s shots had been on target — they had all gone through the same hole as the first. The second round of practice had gone better, as Miguel had clustered his shots neatly around the center bullseye. This, too, had brought unwanted attention, but in a different way, and by the third round, Miguel had known to place his shots carefully, to make them look random, even though every bullet had landed exactly where he’d wanted.
That night, Miguel had gotten an idea. He’d taken a knife from the mess hall, as well as an old football one of the Americans had lying around. He’d thrown the knife — something he had never done before with any seriousness — using a tree for target practice. Twenty-seven throws had landed in the exact same spot, even when he’d backed up as far as he possibly could and just heaved the knife away from him.
It had been the same with the football. Miguel was strong but untrained, yet he’d been able to land the football right into an empty oil drum from seventy-five yards out without even trying. Without even looking.
Before putting the knife back, he’d sat down at a wooden table in the mess hall and stabbed at the wood in rapid succession. The little experiment had been worthwhile indeed, because Miguel had found he could not place the tip of the knife in the same place every time — he’d almost stabbed himself in the hand, in fact. It was only with firearms or thrown objects that he’d been perfect. It was… odd, to say the least.
But by the time they were deployed to Old Baldy in relief of A Company, Miguel had known it was a blessing. The hill had been under constant attack and bombardment, and the Chinese had spent three horrible days trying to take their position. At one point, one of the sergeants had chided Miguel for not using up his ammunition in defense of the hill, but Hugo and some others had been quick to his defense, having seen Miguel’s newfound ability in action. Every bullet had found a home in the body of an enemy. One of the others, a farm boy named Paco, had counted Miguel’s kills and was up to 173 on the afternoon of the second day. Paco was still on Old Baldy, along with Hugo. Together in death and honor.
Well, at least in death. Honor seemed trivial now. There were only twenty-three men with Miguel now, the remnants of his company who were still able to walk and fight. All of them had the faces of ghosts, men who had seen far more than they would ever be able to take in, knowing that whatever they couldn’t process now would revisit them again in nightmares, over and over, for the rest of their lives.
A shot rang out. And the sergeant next to Miguel fell.
Ambush, he thought as he reflexively hit the dirt, bringing up his weapon and firing into the distance. A Chinese soldier screamed from the ridge above the road, falling down the hill as he died.
“Down! Down!” the officer in charge cried out before he, too, was silenced by a bullet.
The men scattered into ditches and behind the scrubby trees and bushes. The road was shit for cover, but from the sound of it, there seemed to be maybe only twenty or thirty Chinese firing on them — a couple of squads caught behind the lines when the Air Force bombing sealed off their way home.
Miguel crawled over to the fallen officer and grabbed his sidearm. The M1911 only held seven rounds, but Miguel knew he could fire faster and more efficiently than with the M1 rifle he’d been carrying. Using the officer’s body as cover, Miguel looked up and saw movement. Six shots later, six more Chinese were down.
There was more shouting in Chinese, more movement. Miguel caught a glimpse of something on his left flank, fired again, and watched as a Chinese soldier rolled down the side of the hill toward the road. That led to more shouting and shuffling around while Miguel scrambled on his belly to another fallen comrade, grabbing his rifle before diving into a ditch with three other terrified soldiers — two Americans and a fellow Colombian he hadn’t met before. One of the Americans was shouting into his radio in a panic, and Miguel knew just enough English to know he was practically begging for backup.
What was more surprising was the response — someone was coming. That was a rare bit of good news.
“Five minutes,” the American said, holding up five fingers, panic now mingled with hope. “Cinco minutos.”
Thanks for the translation, Miguel thought. He’d been serving long enough to know the basics. The big question was how long they could realistically last. And that meant protecting their flanks, keeping the Chinese in front of them. Miguel pointed toward the right. “Watch there,” he told the soldiers around him in English. “Keep in front.”