ran to the spot where the soldier had ducked down.
Someone moved. Zeus fired another burst, then went down as gunfire erupted on his left. He pulled his legs under him, curled on the ground, and waited.
He wasn’t sure how many bullets he had left in the gun, but it couldn’t be many.
Someone groaned a few feet away. It must be the grenade thrower, Zeus thought. He scanned through the weeds, not sure where the others were. He tried to quiet his breath, listening, but he could get no clue either from sound or sight.
Slowly, Zeus shifted his weight in the direction of the man he had gunned down. He leaned forward onto his elbows and knees, crawling in the man’s direction.
The groans got louder. There was another — there were at least two men wounded here.
Farther back in the field, someone shouted something in Chinese. The moaning got louder, but there was no answer.
Zeus pushed through the weeds until he saw a dark-green blotch in front of him — one of the soldiers. The man was sprawled on the ground, eyes gaping. Zeus’s bullets had caught him in the throat. He’d drowned in his own blood.
The soldier had a Type 95 assault rifle still in his hands. Zeus pried it from his fingers, then pulled two spare magazines from his belt. Stuffing the boxes into his pants, Zeus crawled away. He held the rifle in his left hand, the submachine gun in his right.
The groans were getting louder. But now there was a new sound: tanks again, engines revving.
Huddling against the wet weeds, Zeus crawled in the direction of the nearest moan. It was the grenade thrower, who’d been hit in the side of the face and arm. He lay on his back, blood seeping around him in a pool. He blinked his eyes when he saw Zeus.
Zeus crawled next to him. He couldn’t see the man’s rifle, but he had a sidearm in a holster. Zeus, covering him with the rifle, let go of the submachine gun and reached to the holster. He undid the catch and pulled out a small semiautomatic pistol.
The man tried to speak, but the only sound he could manage was a choking cough. There was a green canvas bag a few feet away. It looked almost like a shopping bag, bulging slightly with fruit.
There were three grenades inside.
There were several Chinese soldiers still alive nearby, scattered in the field, but Zeus wasn’t exactly sure where, and without getting up and drawing their fire — a dubious proposition if they were close — he had no way of finding out. He decided to simply throw the grenades in a spread left to right.
Someone whispered in Chinese on his right. Zeus tried to guess at the words. Was the man calling to a comrade? Or was he talking to someone next to him?
The man whispered again, a little louder.
Zeus groaned in response. The whisperer said something else, a little more urgently.
Zeus didn’t answer. The brush nearby rustled — the soldier was crawling toward him, assuming he was a fallen comrade. He was very close — only a few feet away.
The man’s face poked through a clump of tall strands of grass. He wore small round glasses barely large enough to cover the whites of his eyes.
He had a pistol in his hand.
He tilted his head, puzzled when he saw Zeus.
Zeus pressed on the trigger of the submachine gun. It flew upward, his one hand not sufficient leverage against the blowback. Several bullets passed into his enemy’s forehead.
Caught between surprise and understanding, the man seemed to hover in the air a moment before collapsing, dead.
Zeus dropped the submachine gun and the rifle, and grabbed a grenade. He pulled the pin — it was smoother than he thought — and threw it to his left, arcing it upward as if throwing a long pass downfield. He grabbed a second and did the same.
The pin on the third stuck. He pulled but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again, then ducked as the first grenade exploded. Letting go of the grenade, he took hold of the rifle as the second exploded. He rose to his knee and doused the field with the entire contents of the magazine. His fingers fumbled over the unfamiliar weapon as he changed the box. Slamming it home after what seemed hours, he poured on the gunfire, once more running through the magazine.
There was no return fire.
Zeus rose tentatively, looking over the field. He stood, then turned slowly.
“Chau!” he called.
“Down!” came a voice. It was Angkor’s.
Zeus started to turn toward it, then realized what the warning meant: an armored vehicle was rounding the corner ahead on the left. It was a Type 77-2, a tracked armored personnel carrier.
A missile shot from the ditch where Angkor and Chau were hiding. The front of the troop carrier vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust. Zeus stared at it, forgetting for a moment where he was, let alone understanding that the shrapnel from the hit could kill if it reached him. The vehicle slumped behind the cloud, smoke furling to either side. Finally Zeus remembered the danger, and pulled up the assault rifle, ready to shoot at the soldiers escaping. But there were none — the missile had penetrated the interior and detonated inside, obliterating the passengers.
A second vehicle appeared behind the first, to its right, moving up the shoulder of the road. Zeus retreated to his left, back into the field. He threw himself down as he heard the whiz of the missile leaving the trench. The AT-14 hit home before he reached the ground, crushing through the front of the carrier with an unworldly sound.
There were more vehicles behind them. Two troop trucks — Zeus could hear the engines revving as the vehicles went off the road, trying to avoid the broken APCs.
He’d thrown himself down near the body of one of the soldiers he’d killed earlier. An ammo box sat a few feet away.
It held bullets for a machine gun. Zeus couldn’t see the weapon until he noticed a thick clump of grass about five feet away. The grass was camouflage, wrapped around the barrel and the main works.
He turned the weapon on its tripod, bringing it to bear on the troop trucks clearing the APCs. Situating a belt of bullets into the feed, he sighted and began firing. He was too low at first, then overcorrected, spewing bullets wildly around the field. Letting off the trigger, he pulled his body closer to the weapon and tried again. This time he was accurate enough to get a stream of slugs into the engine compartment of the lead truck. It continued a short ways, coasting on momentum until suddenly it stopped and began rolling backward down the slight incline it had climbed. By that time, Zeus had laced the rear of the truck with bullets and put a few into the cab of the second vehicle.
The belt ran through. Zeus fumbled with the cocking mechanism, trying to pull up the cover assembly to accept a new belt. The troops who’d been in the trucks were peppering the field with gunfire. A burst hit only a few inches away. Zeus left the gun and pushed himself face-first into the ground as bullets hit all around him.
Still under fire, he crawled next to the machine gun, reaching up and trying to reload it blind. Finally, he gingerly fit a round against the stop and got the cover down. But a fresh volley of bullets made him lurch backward.
An AT-14 spit from the ditch across the way. It slammed home into a vehicle Zeus couldn’t see, though he heard the explosion.
The launch gave the Chinese soldiers a new target. As soon as Zeus realized he wasn’t being fired at anymore, he pulled himself back to the machine gun. He laced the field, covering it with bullets.
Either one of the Chinese soldiers set off a smoke grenade for protection or one of the tracer rounds in the machine gun set fire to the grass. Smoke began rising from the Chinese position, a thick curtain of it.
Something moved at the far edge of the smoke on Zeus’s right, near the bend in the road. Zeus aimed and began firing; within a few shots the machine gun choked, jammed. Reaching to clear it, he felt something slice against his neck, hot and sharp. The next thing he knew, he was on his back, bullets whizzing overhead.
He didn’t realize he’d been shot until he felt something wet drip across his neck bone. He reached and touched it, then brought his hand close to his face. His fingers were black with dirt and the oil and grime from the
