done many, many times before. It was, after all, only cutting. He had, by this time, opened a deep wound in the smooth block of metal.
But at the same time, and despite the mesmerizing, messianic quality of the flame a few inches beyond his eyes, it was hard to concentrate. It was all so strange, and Jack had the terrible knowledge that he was doing something wrong. He should have fought harder. He should have made them beat him.
But he kept thinking, it wasn’t my fault. It happened so fast. It was … it was hard, you know. You’re in a no-win situation.
And he kept thinking how the world required heroes, but instead, it had gotten only him, Jack Hummel, podunk welder and former high school glory boy who had the guts of a rat. He began to hate himself.
You fucking scum, he said to himself.
But he knew they’d kill him and kill his kids. What difference did it make if the world got blown up then?
Barnard was amazed, really, at how well it seemed to be going. The guys were handling it like a wild game of cowboys and Indians, racing through the tree stumps, pawing up the slope in their platoon-abreast formation, keeping good contact with each other, John Wayneing it with the best of them. Even the machine-gun crews, with their twenty-three-pound M-60s and their forty to fifty pounds of ammo belts were keeping up, whereas in the exercises the gunners had tended to fall way back while the younger men gamboled ahead, fleet as deer.
Barnard had picked a tree about fifty yards ahead as his last line of departure; he’d fire there. He could see the crest now, the white-and-red striping of the radio mast against the blue sky, and some kind of low, dark tent just barely visible, but everything else was quiet. The trees had been chopped up by the A-10s; it was like hustling through an exploded toothpick factory over rough ground where the twenty-millimeter shells had plowed the earth. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.
“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”
“Delta, I have no contact yet. It’s all quiet. Maybe they left or something.”
“Get your assault support fire going, Bravo.”
“I thought I’d wait just—”
“Get it going, Bravo, that’s a command.”
“Affirmative, Delta,” said Barnard, handing the phone mike back to his RTO.
“Open fire!” he screamed.
Along the lumbering line, the Guardsmen began to hip-shoot their M-16s, jinking out rounds in semiautomatic. Up ahead, Barnard saw, the snow was beginning to fly where the torrent of 5.56-millimeter bullets popped into the earth.
“Go,” he screamed again, “come on, goddammit, hurry.”
His sergeants took up the cry and the volume of fire increased as the men syncopated their shots to their own rushing footsteps. So full of the blood-thinning joy and terror of the moment as they were, they began also to scream. The noise rose, unwilled, from their lungs. It was a moment of glory: the rush of the screaming infantry against the white hill under the blue sky, the punctuation of the rifles, and now the higher, faster whipping of the M-60s anchoring either end of the line, really pouring out the fire, raking what was visible of the hilltop less than a hundred yards ahead now as they—
Alex shot the officer in the throat from about two hundred meters with a scoped G-3; he’d been aiming for the head but the captain, bumbling along beside his RTO man just off the assault line, must have stepped on a log or something and so he rose in the scope just as Alex’s patient finger carefully stroked the trigger.
But it was still the shot he’d been waiting for.
You want to take down the senior commander at the first opportunity, Alex knew; nothing quite so devastates an attacking force than to see the man they’ve bonded to over the long years slide backward with his head blown away. And Alex had picked him out almost immediately as the attackers broke from the cover of the trees.
The unit began to fire. He could see them going down.
Because the wound that Alex delivered was not quite what Alex had intended, the bullet missed the brain and tore through the muscles and cartilage to the left of the larynx, and, since it was a full metal jacket in 7.62- millimeter NATO, didn’t mushroom and didn’t deliver a killing blast of hydrostatic shock, but rather exited neatly. The captain felt as if he’d been whacked in the throat with a baseball bat; the world went instantly to pieces as he fell backward into the snow. In seconds, however, his head had cleared, and his first thought was not for himself but for his men. He could see many of them were down and that the tracers floated out toward them like confetti thrown at a parade of triumph. The air seemed alive with buzzing, cracking things.
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sir, Christ, Captain, oh, fuck,
“Medic!” screamed Barnard.
A burst of fire, kicking up snow and bits of wood, lashed by him. He scrunched into the earth. His left side felt numb; his head hurt terribly. He rolled over, fighting for breath.
“Captain, Captain, what do we do?” somebody yelled.
Alex only had two heavy automatic weapons, the M-60 from the van and the H&K-21, but he knew he had to break the assault’s spine in the very first second or fall victim to a messy perimeter fight that would sap the energy of his men.
He’d therefore placed the two guns together in the center of his line, thereby, of course, violating all infantry doctrine, because a single grenade or even a well-placed burst of fire could destroy them both. He’d also directed that several two-hundred-round belts be ripped from their canisters and linked, so that they could fire continually without reloading for one full minute. This meant the barrels overheated dangerously; thus, stationed next to each barrel there crouched a trooper with — an astonishing improvisation, come to think of it — a fire extinguisher from the ruins of the installation. As the guns fired, these men squirted cold carbon dioxide onto the barrels and works.
The guns fired for one minute, one solid minute of full automatic. It didn’t really matter, Alex believed, how accurate they were; what was important was the volume of fire and the impression of endless ammunition hurtling at the attackers. Still, they were very accurate.
“Bravo, this is Delta Six. This is Delta Six, do you copy? Bravo, what is your situation? We can hear heavy fire. What is your situation? Bravo, don’t let your men bunch up, keep them moving. Act aggressively, Bravo, you’ve got to act aggressively.” Puller gripped the phone. He was aware he was violating his own most precious principle, which was not to interfere with ground forces during maneuver, knowing from bitter experience at Desert One that a staff commander on the radio merely screwed things up. But the sound of the fire from the mountain was heavy and terrifying.
“I think you’re talking to a dead man, Colonel,” said Skazy.
Down at the girl scout camp they could hear the gunfire rising from the mountain for a long minute. Then it stopped, and there was silence. Then, now and then, the pop and crack of a single rifle, or a burst of automatic fire.
“Return their fire, goddammit,” Barnard yelled back, coming out of his shock. Anger, confusion, finally bitterness, began to gnaw at him. He groped around for his M-16, found it, and rolled over. Other shots were beginning to rise from his troops. At least we’re answering them, goddammit, he thought.
So where was the great Delta? Back on its ass down the mountain! All this shit about Delta in the magazines, and Delta sits on its ass while Bravo Company of the 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, gets ripped to ribbons.
Barnard got his black plastic rifle up against his shoulder. Squinting over the sights, he could see the gun flashes from Aggressor Force, yet he felt in no particular danger. Languidly, he began to fire, jerking off rounds one, two, three at a time. The rifle had very little kick. He fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another one. After a while it seemed a little stupid.
