smoking, was on the sodden ground begging for mercy. Shirley hesitated, so Murphy hit him with the brick — once — as he had the driver. “Frank, you man the machine gun, Shirley, you’re navigator. Let’s go.”
The moment Murphy felt the keys in the ignition, he couldn’t contain his excitement. “Jesus loves me!” He pumped the gas pedal twice and turned the key. The truck started to life, running roughly but going.
He drove the truck halfway down the wire, his parking lights on, and saw Danny’s truck, or rather its two orange eyes, approaching him. Shadowy figures jumped from both trucks and quickly hooked wire to their tailgate. But before starting northward for the secondary road west of Ningming, both trucks now swung their machine guns about and waited till the next flash of lightning, then fired at the four trucks around the administrative block.
It was about ten seconds before one of the trucks caught fire, and from then on they were easy sport for the two gunners. Another truck lurched hard to its right, tires now in shreds, the windscreens and engines of the other two shot through with full bursts of 7.62mm. The remaining two corner PLA trucks could be heard starting up, but they too were shot up in the surprise enfilade of fire from the two prisoner-commandeered vehicles.
There was pandemonium as lights came on in the administration building, only to disappear in the sound of crashing glass as Danny’s and Murphy’s machine guns raked the building at practically point-blank range, the temporary lights in it a perfect aiming point. Now, in the madly dancing glow of the burning trucks, Danny’s and Murphy’s teams could see scores of prisoners streaming out from what had been Danny’s hut, using bunk beds to ram the front doors of the other huts. More prisoners came out and raced for the five-yard-wide corridor through the razor wire.
Danny and Murphy knew it was time to go, a dozen or so prisoners clambering aboard as the wire on the two trucks’ tailgates was disconnected, the trucks heading off on the POW camp-Ningming road, sporadic AK-47 fire from the compound spitting into the night.
On Disney Hill, sixteen miles south, Colonel Melbaine’s counterattack had regained the hill’s summit by dark. The heavy rains slowed the USVUN advance in the later afternoon, but it sealed the fate of the Chinese tunnels on the north side, which were now no more than drainage conduits, their integrity gone because of the severe structural damage done to them by the heavy U.S. TACATR and artillery fire the day before.
Even so, Melbaine knew that if General Wei could be resupplied fast enough and with enough fresh troops, of which he had many more than the USVUN, it could quickly become a stalemate again, followed by another retreat by the Americans and their allies. And though Melbaine was a toughened combat veteran whose sole job was the conduct of war, he knew as well as Freeman did the symbolic, political importance of pushing the Chinese beyond Disney Hill to the 22nd parallel,
But if the big question for Freeman was enemy resupply — a danger that might once again push his troops back — the pressing danger for Danny Mellin’s escapees was whether anyone two miles away at the Ningming airfield had seen the explosion of the trucks in the POW compound. It was more man likely that the thunderstorm and downpour had muffled or completely drowned out the sound of their explosions, but it was just as certain that the brief firefight at the compound had been reported to the PLA guard contingent at the Ningming airfield.
The moment General Wei heard reports of an “attack” around Ningming, he immediately took it to be an Anglo-American special
For half an hour all along the line, field phones were crackling, passing on the information that American saboteurs had reached Ningming. Comrade Upshut and the others at the POW camp went along with Wei’s interpretation of the presence of allied troops around Ningming; otherwise, Upshut and his comrades would have to confess to the spectacular breakout in their camp, and why two of eight PLA-type BM-14 trucks were missing, and four of them destroyed, two still aflame outside the camp’s administration hut. And then there was the not-so- minor point of Upshut and the others immediately calling for a head count of prisoners in the dancing firelight of what had been the administration building. It was a head count infused with fury and panic on the part of the guards.
The count showed that thirty-seven had escaped, about twenty more than in either Danny Mellin’s or Mike Murphy’s trucks, whose twenty had run out through the break in the wire, slipping away in the darkness even as the remaining prisoners were ordered to form up in their respective hut groups. Another dozen or so slipped away on their way back to the huts as the fires from the trucks, now subdued by the rain, failed to illuminate the open wire beyond the huts to any of the PLA guards.
When Danny Mellin saw the egg-yolk smear of light that was the perimeter lights of Ningming airfield, he also saw stalks of searchlights reaching out like long, white fingers south of the field into the rain-slashed darkness. This wasn’t how the breakout was supposed to end, with Ningming field suddenly bristling with PLA air force troops.
None of the searchlights had yet reached the two trucks, but already flares were bursting in the air beyond the airfield’s perimeter, showing just how heavily it was raining, the streaks of rain illuminated like so many icicles, and here and there Mellin and Murphy could see in the distance dim rectangular shapes coming out of the airfield’s perimeter: PLA trucks, no doubt full of troops.
Both Mellin and Murphy saw that it was impossible to get past the Ningming field using the Ningming secondary road, and the rain that was obscuring them at the moment was also turning the marshland around the levy road into a sea.
Mellin, about fifty yards ahead of Murphy’s truck, pumped the brakes and stopped. Shirley Fortescue jumped down and ran, already soaking wet, to the dark shape of the Australian’s truck, the vehicle momentarily etched in the glow of a descending para flare.
“What’s up?” Murphy shouted, head leaning out the driver’s side.
“Mike,” Shirley told him, “Danny says we won’t get past them, and if we go off the road we’ll be bogged down.”
“So what’s he suggest? We swim?”
“More or less,” she answered, her voice all but lost in the torrential downpour. “He’s telling everyone to get out of the trucks and head south.”
“I want to talk to them,” Murphy yelled. “You get your mob out, Shirley, I’ll get mine.”
Within a minute there was a sodden conference on the levy leading toward Ningming, with both Danny Mellin and Murphy knowing they probably had no more than ten minutes before the PLA would arrive.
“Listen up,” Murphy said. “Danny’s right. We’re going to have to ditch these trucks and split up. That way it’s going to take them a bloody lot longer to track us all down, including the ones who got through the wire after we got through. This way we can tie up a lot of Chinese troops that might be otherwise guarding that railroad from here to the border. I suggest we pair off. Let’s get going.”
“Michael.” It was so unexpected, it stunned him. It was Shirley.
“Yeah?”
“What are you and your number two…” She indicated a Vietnamese/Chinese in the truck’s cabin.
“Yeah, well, young Trang and I figured we might give you a bit of a head start.”
“Mike!” Danny shouted. “Don’t try—”
“Upshut!” Murphy yelled, and it elicited a grim laugh. “Now go on, get lost, and try to team up with someone who speaks Cantonese.”
Shadows of the escaping POWs were vanishing beyond the flickering gray circles of dying flares, and now Murphy could see six pairs of yellow-slitted headlights, like a short, fast, winding snake, no more than a mile away to the north, and another two trucks coming from the camp behind as he quickly backed up the truck that Mellin had been driving, moving it askew so as to block the road. He tossed the keys away and, uncinching the PLA-type light machine gun from its mount, ran back to his own truck and lay down by the rear right wheel.
Already the graceful arcs of light machine-gun fire were reaching toward him from the north, while behind him, Murphy could see the two remaining trucks from the POW camp now screaming along the levy. He and Trang could hear the heavy
