"Where the hell is Cole?" Ballard asked.
"He said he was going hunting this morning, sir."
The explanation had not immediately registered with Ballard. "Hunting for what?"
"Why, for Chinese, sir. What else?"
Hunting was one hell of a way to put it.
Now that the enemy fire had slackened, Ballard gave the kid a shove. "Go!"
Watching him run off, Ballard was thinking that they were going to need a miracle to pull off the attack this morning.
He got to his feet, waved the inadequate little carbine, and shouted, "Let's go, boys! We've got a hill to take!"
Ballard led his men forward up the hill, toward the peak of Sniper Ridge. Quickly, he checked the position of his platoon, knowing that the attack had to be coordinated. The idea was for the company to move in a straight line up the slope, putting constant pressure on the Chinese defenders.
"I want suppressing fire on that ridge," he shouted at the top of his lungs, straining to be heard over the din of weapons and incoming Chinese mortars.
"Yes, sir!" shouted back a couple of the men, their heads low over their rifles as they squeezed off round after round. The only way that they were going to push the Chinese off that hill was by sheer firepower.
Not that the Chinese were ready to give up. He could see their heads and shoulders up there, just as intent on shooting Americans as the Americans were on shooting the Chinese. Their deadly light machine guns chattered away at them, kicking up dirt and rocks as the gunners walked their fire toward the attackers.
Ballard ducked involuntarily as more shrapnel went flying by, the chunks so big that he could see them whir past like supersonic sparrows. Some claimed that they had found spent pieces stamped with names straight out of American factories — Kenmore, Ford, Fisher — indicating that the metal used to make Chinese ordnance had been sold to them from American scrapyards. Ballard didn't know if that was true, but he appreciated that there was a certain irony of getting cut in half by metal your own side had made.
Off to his right, he saw that his men were just where they should be. Ballard had started out in the center of his unit, but had now placed himself to the far left of his men so that he could more easily anchor them; he was the pin and they were the string on the map table.
Sergeant Weber came running over, crouched low, stopping once to help a man whose weapon had jammed. To say that Weber was cool under fire would have been an understatement.
"Sir, we need to pivot and hit them right at that gap."
"What gap?"
Weber pointed with a gunpowder-stained finger. "One of our mortars hit there and knocked the hell out of the enemy."
Ballard looked closer. He could, in fact, see now where some of the loosely built rock wall had been scattered at the top of the ridge. The Chinese already seemed to be spread thin to cover the length of the ridge. They would be spread even thinner at that point.
"All right, let's do it." He looked around for his runner, then sent the kid out to the end of the platoon's position with that message. Sergeant Weber was already hustling away, ready to help push the men up the ridge.
Ballard waved a hand to indicate that his men should follow, and then ran up the slope toward the gap. Bullets pecked at the dirt around him. He leveled his carbine at the defenders, closer now, and made them duck down with a burst.
A soldier jumped to the top of the low wall, holding a handful of stick grenades. He started to cock his arm back to throw one, but Ballard heard a rifle crack off to his right. He looked that way and saw the sergeant lowering his weapon. The Chinese soldier dropped and there was an explosion as the grenade that he'd been holding went off, taking out whatever defenders were in the area.
Helped by the grenade, the fire from the ridge suddenly slackened and the platoon surged forward. The last twenty feet up the face of the ridge required slinging their rifles and digging in with their hands and knees as men below covered the assault team.
But suddenly, Ballard and the others reached the top of the ridge. He crawled over the low stone wall and dropped down into a trench, weapon at the ready, but the Chinese were running away. He shot one in the back for good measure.
All around him, other soldiers began piling into the trenches, spreading out, eliminating any opposition.
He looked back down the slope. Somehow, his men had managed to outpace the rest of the company that was still struggling up the slope.
Ballard shouted orders, but his men already knew what to do. They had spread out along the ridge, attacking the flanks of the remaining Chinese defenders.
The rest of the company surged up the last few feet of the ridge and climbed into the defenses, making short work of any defenders who hadn't already fled.
They heard a few grenades, a handful of shots, and then a ragged cheer.
Sniper Ridge was back in American hands, hopefully for good this time.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Back at HQ, with typewriters clacking all around him at the offices of Stars & Stripes, the young journalist settled himself at the desk and flexed his fingers. Don Hardy had just returned from the front and he felt as if he had so much to describe. He wanted to write about the way that the men had attacked the ridge and beaten back the Chinese yet again. He thought about the soldiers who had kept going up that steep slope no matter what, ignoring the gunfire, grenades, and mortars that rained down upon them. Sometimes, the enemy had resorted to hurling rocks.
Finally, there was the sacrifice of those who had not made it off the ridge, but had paid the ultimate sacrifice. They were young and their names were already forgotten, but they had given everything for this fight. Back home in the States, telegrams would be delivered with the awful news.
How could he ever do them justice?
He gulped down half a mug of black coffee to stave off the exhaustion that threatened to fog his mind. Instantly, the caffeine seemed to clear away the cobwebs the way that a stiff breeze suddenly blows the clouds from the sky.
He gazed down at the typewriter keys in the same determined way that a machine gunner gazed down the barrel of his weapon.
And then he began to write. Words flew as his blunt farm boy's fingertips clacked across the keyboard.
He included a few key details about the overall campaign. The assault to recover Sniper Ridge was just one small part of the Battle of Triangle Hill. So far, several hundred Americans and South Koreans had lost their lives there, and who knew how many Chinese — their losses might be in the thousands. Slowly, slowly, the two sides were fighting their way toward a draw. This wasn't like Patton's tanks rushing toward Germany, this was more like the dismal trenches of the Great War that ended in 1918, a slow war of determination and attrition.
As the hands of the clock on the wall spun relentlessly toward deadline, Hardy got the words down on the page.
One by one, as he finished a page, he rolled it out of the typewriter. He set the finished pages to one side, weighting them down with his coffee mug before the breeze from the ceiling fan overhead could whisk them away.
With a typewriter, there wasn't a lot of revising that could be done. He would have to settle for a few hasty pencil marks in the margins.
He would have liked to rewrite parts, but there was the editor, standing over his shoulder. "You done yet?" the editor asked, sounding exasperated.
Feeling a sense of grave ceremony, he squared the edges of the short stack of papers and handed them to the editor, who snatched them away.
Truly feeling exhausted now, he went in search of more coffee.