There was a loud, hollow boom as a shell struck the top of the kettle, flopping the entire AT on its side. Two more struck. We were like a boxer who is out on his feet, taking shots with no way to protect himself.
In the flashing red emergency light, I saw a private jump to his feet and run toward the front of the cabin. As if out of nowhere, someone reached out a hand and smashed the man across the front of his helmet with so much force that the Marine fell to the floor. My visor identified Sergeant Marshall as he pulled back his M27 and knelt over the fallen man.
The lights came back on, and within moments, we were down on the beach.
The ATs landed in a row, their shields facing the bluffs at the top of the beach. The enemy’s guns could not penetrate the barrier created by the shields—the only danger came from accidentally stumbling into them.
Under other circumstances the coastline might have been beautiful. A bright blue sky with puffy clouds stretched off to the horizon. We had landed on a beach with white sand and still, gray water. Ahead, through the electrified window of our shields, I saw sandy bluffs leading to coral rock foothills. The melting air in front of the shields blurred my vision, but I thought I saw men scurrying along the tops of the bluffs.
Then I heard the guttural growl of gunships. Two ships waddled across the sky, traveling over our heads and stopping over the enemy. They hovered in the air firing rockets and side-mounted chain guns. A huge explosion churned up a geyser of sand and a blinding green flash as the enemy’s particle-beam cannon exploded.
Debris from the explosion flew in all directions. Concrete, dirt, and bits of rocks rained down around us. Fire burned at the top of the bluffs. The radioactive core of the particle-beam cannon might well have irradiated the enemy. The firefight seemed to have ended.
Though we did not have tanks with us, our transports brought several cavalry units with gun-mounted, all-terrain vehicles—sprite four-wheel two-man buggies—with mounted chain guns and missile launchers. As the platoons organized behind the shields, the ATVs sped up the beach, kicking plumes of sand in their wake.
They drove in a zigzagging pattern, weaving toward the bluffs. When the first unit drove within a hundred yards of the hill, a single rocket fired. It was all so fast. I heard the hiss, saw the contrail, and the ATV vanished in a ball of flames.
The two gunships that had pulled back from the scene flew back and hovered over the area looking for targets. They continued over the area for minutes without firing. Whoever was down there was well hidden.
With no other options, we prepared to rush the bluffs. “Prepare for attack,” McKay yelled over the interLink. The shield in front of our AT extinguished. For a moment I saw the distant hills clearly.
“Attack.”
We started up the beach, running hard and kicking up loose sand. I kept my eye on the top of the bluffs, the enemy fortification. “Vince, do you see anything?” I called on a private frequency.
“If anybody’s alive up there,” Lee panted, “they’re either wearing radiation armor or they glow in the dark.”
The body gloves we wore under our armor would protect us from radiation poisoning, but technicians would need to neutralize the radiation before we could remove so much as a glove. In that kind of battle, radioactivity worked for us.
The gunships continued to float over the attack area looking for targets. They did not fire. Perhaps Lee was right. Perhaps some dying soldier flamed our ATV as his last act of defiance. As the first men reached the flaming, smoking remains of that ATV, gunfire erupted from the hillside.
“Drop!” I yelled over the platoon frequency.
Up ahead, machine guns fired so many shots into the first few men that their armor exploded, spraying blood and shredded plastic.
The gunships fired, but their shots were blind. The men on the ships must have been hunting human targets. Their heat sensors and radar would not locate motion-tracking
drones.
“It’s trackers,” I said to Lee.
“It looks that way,” Lee agreed.
“Think we can go around them?” I asked.
“It’s not worth the trouble,” Lee answered. “You watch, they’re going to light up the hill.”
As if on cue, the gunships fired incendiary rockets. One moment the bluffs were green and white, covered with sand and vines, the next they glowed ocher as chemical fires superheated the ground to well over eighteen hundred degrees. The flash heat vanished quickly; but wiring melted and munitions exploded as the bunkers at the far end of the beach turned into ovens. The air boiled with the crackle of bullets and the boom of artillery shells as the once-smooth ridge at the top of the bluffs convulsed into a jagged scar.
The problem with “lighting the hill” was that it took three hours for the heat to dissipate. Until the temperature went down, the most our ground forces could do was sit. Thurston sent Harriers and bombers to patrol the other side of the foothills, but the heavily forested terrain made flybys ineffective. We’d gone to Little Man to annihilate the enemy; but for the time being, all we could do was sit tight as the enemy fled to safety.
When we crested the hill, we saw the remains of a mile-long concrete bunker with yard-thick walls. With its ground cover blown to the winds, the concrete shell of the bunker lay exposed like a giant trench. Heat and explosions had blown the top off the structure, leaving a mazelike complex beneath. No other path was left for us, so we dropped down into the ruins.
I could not smell the outside world through my helmet. I sometimes smelled my own sweat after a long march or battle, but that was about it. Walking across the bunker’s concrete floors, I thought I smelled death. It did not smell like burned meat. The dry and dusty scent of ash filled my helmet. Looking back, I am sure that I imagined the smell, of course I imagined it; but at the time, it seemed very real to me. The floor was littered with the cinder remains of wooden beams. It wasn’t until we got deeper into the bunker that we discovered the bodies.
The charred remains of hundreds of men covered the floor in the center of the compound. There was no way to identify the bodies; they were scorched beyond recognition. They looked mummified, with all traces of hair burned away and skin that looked like parched leather. The fleshy, loose skin around their lips had shrunk, leaving their mouths with toothy grins. When one of my men accidentally stepped on a body, it crumbled into dust and bone beneath his boot.
“Think they’re Japanese?” Vince asked, as we left a room in which four bodies had fallen on top of each other as if stacked.
“How could you possibly tell?” I asked. “What could these people have done to deserve this?”
Vince did not answer. That was the only reasonable response.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Harris, you’re on guard duty,” Lector said, as I climbed the ladder out of the bunkers.
“Aye,” I answered, fighting back the urge to say more. I watched Lector swagger back to the front of the platoon, then switched interLink frequencies. “Lee, you there?”
“Sure,” Lee said.
“Lector just gave me guard duty.”
“That should be dull,” Lee said. “Yamashiro will be light-years from here by now.”
“If he was ever here,” I said.
“Of course he was here,” Lee said. He clipped his syllables as he spoke, something he did when he felt irritated. I knew better than to argue.
Thick forest covered the foothills ahead of us. Trees with green and orange leaves, so brightly colored they looked like gigantic flowers, blanketed the countryside. “Gather up,” I called to my men, as we started for the forest.
The foothills stretched for miles. Beyond the hills, I could see the vague outline of tall mountains against the horizon. Somewhere between the forested hills and the mountains we would catch our enemy. “Let’s roll,” I said, after organizing my men.