He fell. His balance was still off and he discovered that he needed to stay bent over his left side. The ground was littered with dirt clods and rock, sometimes in large hunks. Then the ground itself jumped. Cam was barely halfway on his feet again. He managed not to collapse onto his bad side. He rolled into a crater and found Estey and Goodrich hunched against the fresh, crumbling earth.
Estey was trying to staunch a wound on Goodrich’s forearm and didn’t see him. Goodrich shouted but Cam only heard his warning tone, not the words. He’d gone less than thirty feet. It felt like another world, especially in the buzzing silence. The artillery had brie†y concentrated here and the hill was a moonscape.
Ruth should have been with them. She rode with Estey, Ballard, Mitchell, and Deborah in the second jeep, but they’d obviously scattered in all directions. Cam wondered what he was going to do if she was uphill of the vehicles.
He kept looking for her across the wasted ground. He fought off Estey’s hand when Estey tried to drag him down. He’d spotted another human shape in the dark, drifting clouds, one running man followed by another. The giants were gone. The sun split through the dust and Cam scrambled out of the crater, only to throw himself down again and claw for his pistol. He’d lost his carbine with the jeep, but Estey still had his weapon and Cam glanced back and screamed, “Look out! Estey!”
There were at least ten human shapes dodging through the haze, far more than the missing part of his group. Their yelling was muf†ed and strange. They were also the wrong color. Cam’s squad wore olive drab, whereas these people dressed in tan camou†age and seemed to be misshapen. Uneven brown rags hung from their heads and arms, and Cam did not recognize their long ri†es or submachine guns.
He took aim but didn’t ‚re as someone else stood up in another crater in front of him. Deborah. Her blond mane was ‚lthy, but still unique. Cam lifted himself to run to her, sick with fear. He was certain that he would see her gunned down. Then she waved to the approaching troops, and Cam struggled to discern the men’s voices.
“U.S. Marines! U.S. Marines!”
He lowered his pistol and ran to the crater.
* * * *
Ruth embraced him and hurt his ribs and he laughed, breathing in the good, complex smell of unwashed girl. She was alive. She’d escaped with scrapes and bruises and one peppered rash of shrapnel on her hip, where she would need surgery not just to remove the †ecks of metal but also the fabric from her shredded uniform, which had been imbedded into her wounds.
Others hadn’t been so lucky. Park and Wesner were dead and Somerset was critically wounded in the belly and face. Hale, also from the lead jeep, had broken his collarbone and both legs when the vehicle went over. It was only a bizarre miracle that Goodrich was only cut on his arm.
Cam absorbed most of this information through the aching cotton that blocked his ears, but they were all yelling. Most of them had dif‚culty hearing and everyone was wild with adrenaline. They knew the artillery could start again any time.
“My rock,” Ruth said. “I lost my rock!”
She must have known it was irrational — even crazy — but she pawed at her clothes anyway, staring helplessly across the torn hillside.
“Shh,” Cam said. “Shh, Ruth.”
Their ‚rst decision was to move everyone who could move except Mitchell and Foshtomi, who volunteered to stay with Somerset. “We’re not leaving him,” Foshtomi said, and the Marine captain nodded and gave them his radio.
The scout/snipers belonged to a long-range SR patrol sent to look for defensible ground above Interstate 70, although their mission changed when Park’s squad drove into their sector. They’d moved to cover the Rangers if possible. Two of their men had been hurt in the shelling, too, because they’d run into the killing ‚eld instead of turning away. Cam marveled at their courage and discipline.
Their strength was crucial to evacuating Ruth, her gear, and the battered Rangers. Estey was nominally in command of the squad now, despite Deborah’s rank, yet it was Deborah who walked back to the second jeep with Goodrich and Cam to be sure the Marines recovered everything Ruth needed.
They might have driven away — they might have used the jeep to carry Somerset — except the front axle was broken and the radiator was torn. Some of the paperwork was confetti and the sample case had four ragged holes blown through it that were leaking blood, but Deborah insisted on wrapping everything up just the same. Then she sagged and let a Marine get his arm around her. She was bleeding herself from a nasty laceration up her back.
Ruth wept openly. Before they walked away, Cam squeezed Foshtomi’s hand and the young woman nodded tersely. She had already taken Park and Wesner’s tags. She planned to bury her friends in one of the craters, and Cam suspected that within a day at most she would bury Somerset as well.
Three men carried Hale on a short, broad stretcher they’d fashioned from a blanket and two ri†es. Cam and Goodrich lugged the AFM. Other men had dumped precious rations and clothing from their packs to make room for the blood samples and paperwork. Ruth limped by herself, her teeth gritting in her pale face. They’d covered less than a quarter-mile when a pair of F-22 Raptors soared out of the northeast, ripping down into the valleys far below to hit the Chinese artillery.
* * * *
His right ear improved. His left did not, and the uneven sound of the people around him continued to affect his balance. Another ‚ghter rushed overhead and Cam was unable to place it until he saw the others looking east. It scared him.
They managed to keep going for thirty minutes before Ruth and one of the Marines needed to rest. Cam didn’t think they’d reach the secured area before dark, no matter that it was still mid-morning. Too many of them were hurt. They were carrying too much. But within a few hours, they were met by a pair of trucks.
Late that afternoon they rode in past line after line of earthworks and razor wire.
These mountainsides faced west and hadn’t burned in the nuclear strike. In the following weeks, however, the land had been reduced to sterile mud slopes. Defensive barriers ringed the mountains as far as Cam could see, many of them studded with gun emplacements and vehicles and wreckage. Enemy planes and artillery had pounded the hill repeatedly. Nearly as much damage had been done by thousands of American feet and the weight of their trucks, tanks, and bulldozers.
The rutted earth stank of ‚re and rot, and the smell thickened as they drove into the series of berms. There were dirty people everywhere, some of them eating, some of them digging. They might have been living in any preindustrial age. It was the radar dishes and tanks that looked out of place.
At last the trucks drove into a prefab warehouse, hiding from the sky. Somehow Ruth had fallen asleep. Cam tried to protect her from the jostle of Rangers and Marines as everyone stood up. No good. Her eyes widened with fear. Then she saw him and smiled wanly. Cam set his hand on her knee. Meanwhile, a medical team quickly unloaded Kevin Hale, who was feverish with trauma.
“Clear a hole, clear a hole,” a man said, pushing through the other medics and of‚cers. Something in the man’s lean build was familiar and Cam tipped his head to stare through the many soldiers, dazed with exhaustion.
It was Major Hernandez.
22
Ruth struggled up from the slat bench in back of the truck and forced herself to walk on her stiff, throbbing hip. “Watch out,” she said. “Please.”
Sergeant Estey had moved to the rear of the vehicle with the scout/sniper captain, speaking urgently to the uniforms gathered below. “I left three men in the ‚eld, sir,” Estey said, repeating the most important part of his report, which he’d called in hours ago.