soldier grabbed the man’s collar. “Listen to me, man. Your buddy ain’t dead. Still a pulse, man! Get a grip on yourself. Now git down and shut the fuck up! Medic!” he yelled. “Man down—”
Abruptly, he stopped shouting. One of the shots crackling overhead had hit the wounded man’s head, exploding his brain over other members of the squad. By the time the medic made it through the whistling shrapnel of a mortar round, the crying soldier’s buddy was dead, Martinez dragging the two bodies in front of him for extra cover. Martinez saw a Chinese fifteen feet away coming at him with a Kalashnikov look-alike, a T-56, on full automatic, its bayonet catching flare light. Martinez and Doolittle opened up, an M-60 tearing the air to the right of them, and they saw the Chinese soldier’s body stop, torso and legs lurching, an arm separating, the T-56 crashing to earth. Martinez, exhilarated by the kill, heart thumping in fear, cast a sideways glance at D’Lupo. “You all right, Lupe?”
D’Lupo was throwing up. Martinez put his hand on his buddy’s shoulder. “Fucking accident, man. We all thought it was Charlie.”
“Yeah,” Doolittle chimed in. “What’re we s’posed to do when the fuckers are amongst us? Ask for fucking ID? Son of a bitch shoulda yelled at us ‘fore he started running.”
“That’s right,” Martinez said. “Gotta put it behind ya, Lupe.” But Martinez knew that D’Lupo would never be able to put it behind him.
“Wish to Christ it was me,” D’Lupo said, his voice taut with anxiety.
“Aw, rats,” Martinez said. “Listen, I’ll tell the captain.”
Doolittle saw a shadow in flare light. Was it a tree or a well-camouflaged gook or one of his own? He fidgeted with his rifle, holding his fire. “We don’t have to tell anyone, Marty.”
“Yeah, we do,” Martinez said.
“Yeah,” D’Lupo said, his voice barely audible in the bedlam erupting all around them. “Yeah — we do.”
D’Lupo was right, not just about having to report his blue on blue, but in having quickly assessed what had gone terribly wrong amid the USVUN units on the long southern slope of Disney Hill. The Chinese, instead of fleeing north of the ridge atop the hill or lying low until the TACAIR bombardment ceased, had come back, streaming through the tunnels like so many ants erupting out of exit-cum-entrances at the base of the southern slope and in the middle of the Americans. There were more U.S. infantry killed by friendly fire in the predawn darkness than all those accidentally shot in the Vietnam War.
The Chinese showed no fear and no mercy, taking full advantage of the fact that, having burst forth from the tunnels— sometimes only yards from an American position — they were immune from the American artillery some miles south of the hill because of the well-known American and USVUN refusal to shell their own troops.
With dawn approaching and the end of the
Major Cline opined that he didn’t see how anything could have survived the bombing on the north side. Freeman, who had been in an optimistic mood after having seen off the Special Forces, which were heading west on the mission to the Laotian-Vietnamese border, was now a man who knew Second Army and his career were a step this side of a military disaster if the Chinese counterattacked from the northern side. It was already a highly dangerous situation, with God only knew how many PLA already among his troops.
He had to do something — quickly.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
From what he liked to call his eagle’s nest, Jonas Breem, in his wine-red velour robe, gazed down on the blue early-morning reaches of Victoria harbor, pouring coffee from the sterling silver pot and pontificating on the stupidity of the Russian inventor, Kalashnikov, who had designed the most popular assault rifle in history, with millions now sold around the world, without Kalashnikov receiving a single royalty.
“Now, if the doddering old fool had done business with me,” he told Mi Yin, who was just waking up, “he would have been one of Moscow’s millionaires. But no, with the mind of a peasant and true revolutionary, he gave the patent to the party, and some other old fool laughed his way to the bank.”
Kalashnikovs were on Breem’s mind this morning because he had just brokered yet another delivery of five thousand K-74s between Moscow and Beijing for the PLA, and was reveling in his latest profit in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.
Ironically, not all of the shipment had come from corrupted Russian factory managers, but from U.S. sellers who had seen the end of the U.S. market for the assault weapon following a congressional ban on the Kalashnikovs and others of their ilk. Breem was highly amused by the certainty that many of the rifles sold to him at bargain basement prices in the U.S. were now killing Americans, or “army suckers,” as he referred to them.
“You want to be a loser, Mi Yin? Join the army. All the racking same, babe. Nowheresville. Know what I mean?”
Mi Yin murmured something, but Breem, turning from the enormous grand-view window of his skyscraper, could tell she hadn’t heard, and when Jonas Breem spoke, everyone was supposed to sit up and listen. He picked up a tulip glass, still half full of champagne, and taking a step toward the huge, king-size bed, threw the silk sheets aside and emptied the contents on her crotch. “Hey, that woke you, eh?”
Her mouth open in shock, Mi Yin shot up in the bed, quickly clasping a pillow protectively against her.
“Oh, spare me the modest virgin bit,” Breem said, walking back to the table. “You’ve been gone through more times than — hey, what are you doing?”
“Going to the bathroom,” she said petulantly. “Do you mind?”
“Yeah,” Breem said. “Come here.” Tossing her hair back, the pillow still in front of her, she looked to see if he was serious. He was — he nearly always was.
“C’mon. Come here.”
She walked toward him, around the bed, trying to affect a nonchalant air of self-assurance, but she was still clutching the pillow.
“Put that fucking thing down.”
“I–I have to have a shower.”
“You have it with a pillow? For Chrissake—” He snatched it away from her and tossed it on the bed. “You stink like a wino. You know that?”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.” Holding a cup of coffee with one hand, he gestured toward the bed with the other. “Go on, spread out. I feel like a dawn breaker.”
“Can’t I shower first?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” He smiled maliciously.
She understood him all right. She was supposed to lie flat on her back and let him lick her.
He undid the robe and flung it away from him, pressed a remote on the bed stand and the drapes opened wider. He liked to imagine everyone was looking up at him performing cunnilingus, “pissing themselves with envy,” as he put it.
“Know what I’m gonna do to you?” He waited. “You know, babe?”
“No,” she had to answer, even though she knew very well what they were going to do. They’d done it enough.
“I’m gonna lick your cunt till it’s dry.”
“No,” she said.
He knelt over her. Suddenly his hand flashed out, slapped her hard on the cheek. Her face flushed with the pain and humiliation. “What?” he said indignantly. “What’d you say?”
“No,” she repeated.
“You little bitch!” He hit her again, so hard she began to cry.
“Hey, hey!” He suddenly became solicitous of her well-being, kissing her. “You’re all right, babe — it’s all
