The day after: An apocalyptic morning (149 page)

              "How you doing, Sherrie?" Skip asked her over the intercom.

              "Just bitchin," she said, her voice broken.

              "Glad to hear it," he told her. "Three minutes to target."

              Skip flew to the south of town, out over the canyon, and brought them up to an altitude of 6000 feet above sea level, which would put them about 1800 feet above the battle area. He then cut back to the north, heading for the battle zone at forty knots. Jack had the master map spread out before him. Due to the wind in the cabin that taking the doors off had produced, he was having a little difficulty keeping it flat.

              Skip took a few glances at the map as he flew, matching the terrain below him with the features on the map. Though he could plainly see the flashes of gunfire from the trenches and the answering fire from the militia, he wanted to take no chances on dropping in the wrong place. He was going to put his load exactly where Christine wanted it. There would be no repeat of his Iraqi experience here.

              As he came over the battlefield itself, he was able to see the tiny figures of the militia below them. They were huddled behind the trees and hiding behind logs, firing back at the hillside that they had been engaged from. As Christine had theorized, it looked like they were setting up to try to flank the hill on both sides, unknowing of course that there were occupied trenches on both of the flanks. Well, they would find out about that the hard way, wouldn't they?

              He saw his target area ahead. Behind a group of logs and small hills directly across from Christine's platoon were twenty or thirty Auburnites. They were part of the group providing covering fire for the coming advance and were much closer together than was healthy for them. They were the group that had been hit first it seemed. He could see a few dead bodies lying in front of them. No more than three feet separated most of the men. Skip flew towards them, slowing his airspeed. His intent was to hover right over the top of them.

              "You ready to spot for me, Sherrie?" Skip asked her.

              "It's what I live for," she said, reluctantly releasing her hold on the rope and crawling forward. As horrid a thought as it was, she pushed her face outside of the missing door and peered downward. Skip and Jack, while hovering directly over the target, would not be able to see it, but she would. The wind buffeted her violently, threatening to rip the headset from her head. Ice crystals pelted her neck painfully. Below she could see the entire battlefield, stretched out like some three-dimensional map. She plainly saw nearly two hundred militia in various positions, many of them with rifles winking at the trenches where the Garden Hill forces were deployed.

              Skip described for her what the target area looked like, explaining that he was now almost directly over the top of it. She looked at the confusing blur of brown and green below and finally spotted what he was talking about. A group of men huddled behind some logs, firing their guns. "I've got them," she said into her headset.

              "Are you sure?" he asked her, not meaning to be insulting, just wanting to be sure.

              "I'm sure," she said. "Go forward a little and to the right."

              Skip, who was now in a hover, eased forward and edged the machine just a tad to the right.

              Stu had taken note that the helicopter had returned a few minutes before but was otherwise ignoring it. Instead he concentrated on whether all of his men were in position for the flanking attacks he was about to send into motion. Everything looked about right so...

              "What the fuck is on the bottom of that helicopter?" Colby asked, putting a set of binoculars to his eyes.

              "What?" Stu asked, alarmed. He looked up and was able to see that there was a definite change in the normal shape of the aircraft. It was hovering, moving slowly over their troops, as if... as if positioning itself. What the hell?

              "It looks like a gas tank out of a car," Colby said, shaking his head. "What the fuck?"

              At the words "gas tank" Stu stiffened. Anything that the Garden Hills fucks made out of a gas tank and suspended above troops with a helicopter could only be something bad, something that went bang. He looked directly below where the machine was positioning itself. "Oh shit," he muttered, grabbing for the radio. "First platoon," he screamed into it. "You need to pull back now!"

              "Now," Sherrie said when he was directly overhead. "Right now!"

              "Got it, Sherrie," Skip said calmly, his hand reaching for the lever that released the hook. Before pulling it he keyed his radio, which was set on the VHF frequency. "Are you ready, Christine?" he asked her.

              "We're ready," she assured him.

              "It's on the way," he said and pulled the lever.

              The tank dropped like a rock, straight down, picking up speed according to the laws of gravity. Below, the men were trying to get turned around so they could crawl free of the drop zone but they would not, could not have enough time. The tank pulled the rope out behind it, uncoiling it neatly just as Paul had intended. When it reached the end of the rope the 120-pound tank jerked to a sudden halt from more than a hundred miles per hour. This was more than enough pressure to rip the flimsy piece of steel down its weld like a zipper. The tank ripped in half and fifteen gallons of napalm spread out and began to fall 300 feet above the retreating troops.

              Just before the terminal snap of the tank released the gelatinous concoction, Christine and two other squad leaders opened up with their M-16s, aiming for the area just below the tank. All had switched their magazines over to ones containing tracer rounds only. The red phosphorus streams looked almost like laser beams. Two of them intersected the falling napalm and set it alight. There was a solid whoomph sound as the weapon ignited and a second later the burning gel fell over the formation below.

              Three of the men were completely engulfed in flames, dying right were they lay. Two more were partially engulfed and they ran screaming into the woods. They tried to do as they were taught back in school and stop, drop, and roll, but that would not put out the fire. Their clothing, hair, and flesh burned away in only a few moments. They screamed wildly, frantically until some horrified soldiers gathered their wits enough to shoot them. Two others got slightly hit from the attack, sustaining second and third degree burns that would eventually kill them from infection but that allowed them to fight on for the moment.

              In the air above, Skip spun the helicopter around and began to move slowly off to the south once more. Sherrie, after confirming a good drop, began to pull the rope back inside. Paul himself had taught her how to do this and within ten minutes she would have all fifteen hundred feet of it ready for the next drop.

              "What the fuck was that?" Colby yelled, smelling the strong gasoline odor mixed with the stench of burning flesh. The ground around the drop zone was still ablaze, though weakening. The two halves of the tank had dropped to the ground just on the sides of the position. They too were burning.

              "Holy shit," Stu said, stunned and doubtful for perhaps the first time. "Fuckin' napalm. They dropped fuckin napalm on us!"

              "Napalm," Colby said, nearing hysteria. "Where the hell did they get napalm?"

              "It's homemade," Stu said. "They're dropping it out of gas tanks and igniting it with their tracers." He shook his head a little. "Clever fuckers, aren't they?"

              "How the hell can we win against someone with napalm?" Colby asked. "Maybe we'd better pull back and think about this a little."

              "No," Stu said. "We need to push forward. They only have one chopper and it takes time to load those things up. They won't be able to use it that often."

              "But..."

              "We need to clear that hill and push on," Stu said. "The quicker we get inside that wall, the quicker we'll be safe. They won't drop that shit in their own territory. Now let's get those troops moving."

              Colby said nothing, just continued to stare at the smoking corpses in fear. What a horrible way to die! Being burned alive by jellied gasoline dropped from the sky.

              Stu didn't wait for his acknowledgment or his consent. As far as he was concerned, Colby was just a useless appendage at this point. He keyed up his radio. "First platoon, get back into position and start shooting. Third and fifth platoons, get ready to move in. We'll cover your advance while you close in on the flanks. Everyone else, covering fire on that hill, right now!"

              The volume of fire at the hillside picked up to a ferocious level as more than a hundred guns opened up on it.

              "Third platoon, fifth platoon," Stu ordered, "go, go, go!"

              "Holy Jesus," Christine said as the barrage came rolling in. Sandbags exploded, spraying dirt everywhere and it sounded like a swarm of angry insects was buzzing overhead. There was a thud and a scream from the end of her trench and she looked over to see that Sally Brigham had taken a round right in her face, blowing the back of her head off. The scream had come from Laura Mint, who was looking at her former friend in horror.

              "Oh my God, Sally!" Laura screamed, edging over to cradle her.

              "She's dead," Christine yelled, unable to feel anything but fear at the moment. "Get back to your position. They'll be moving in on us!"

              Sally gave a terrified look at Christine, a longing look at Sally, but did as she was told and got back to her firing port.

              A moment later Maggie, who was in the next trench over in charge of a squad, reported on the tactical radio that she had one of her troops wounded.

              "How bad?" Christine yelled into the radio.

              "Shot through the shoulder," Maggie's voice said, abandoning code for the moment. "She needs to be pulled out. She's bleeding bad."

              "Copy," Christine said. "Get some bandages on her and get ready to evac her. As soon as the firing slacks off, get her out of here."

              While Maggie acknowledged this, Christine put her head back to her firing port. She saw what seemed to be hundreds of flashes down below and an actual haze of gunsmoke over the enemy positions. Bullets continued to slam in all around her, shredding her protective sandbags even more. From the right side of the militia line a large group of men, about forty or so, suddenly broke from cover and began to dash towards the eastern side of her hill. At the same time another group of forty to the west broke cover and began running towards that side.

              "They're moving in," Christine told her platoon. "Shift fire to the flanks!"

              Everyone in the three trenches abandoned the effort to pin down the platoon in front of them and moved their guns either to the left or the right to engage the men trying to envelope them. From the distance they were at their fire was not very accurate and only a few men on each side fell, the rest continuing to rush forward. It was terrifying to watch.

              In a set of trenches a quarter mile to the west, Mick's platoon watched this advance and tracked targets with their weapons. They were about to give the charging Auburnites a big surprise. In yet another set of trenches to the east, Paula and her platoon were preparing to do the same.

              It was Paula's group that opened up first. The advancing fifth platoon nearly ran right into them. When they were less than three hundred yards in range, the riflemen opened up. This time surprise was almost complete. So intent was the enemy on reaching their objective and getting around behind it, that they didn't notice the flashes off to their left until four of their number suddenly fell to the mud. And even then it took them a minute to figure out that the shots had not come from their objective. By that time they were well inside two hundred and fifty yards and easy fodder for the semi-automatic and automatic weapons of Paula's squads. They opened up with a harsh chatter, spraying bullets down all over the formation. More men fell, their heads splitting open, their chests riddled with bullet holes. Others, finally figuring out that they'd been trapped, dove to the ground and began returning fire.

              Their own shots were ineffective, doing nothing but slamming into sandbags and mud, but they themselves were caught between two groups of armed enemy and the crossfire on them was murderous. More men fell as aimed rifle shots and bursts of automatic weapons fire raked over them. Within three minutes more than half of the forty-man platoon - including the leader - was dead or dying and more than ten of the remaining twenty was wounded.

              Sergeant Stinson had started off the march as nothing more than a simple squad leader. Now, with more than half of the army dead or deserted, he was the commander of a rag-tag platoon that had been formed from pieces of other platoons. It was a responsibility that he had never hoped for and that he did not enjoy, especially not on this mission.

              It was his platoon - the third platoon - that was tasked with hitting the right flank of the hill. He was near the rear of the formation as they jogged across the uneven, muddy ground, heading towards a gap between two hills. Bullets from the objective zinged in at infrequent intervals but the range was at the extreme to hit moving targets. Still two of his men, he didn't have time to identify just who, had been felled by lucky shots.