The day after: An apocalyptic morning (154 page)

              "They're closing too fast with too many surviving men," Skip said, looking as the covering group jumped up and began to dash forward. "On both sides but particularly on the right."

              "Are they gonna take the hills?" Jack asked, a little alarmed by the thought.

              "They're not gonna take them," Skip replied, "but it looks like we're going to have to give them away in order to avoid close contact. We need to delay this a little if we can, give our people time to pull back."

              "We have the napalm still," Jack said, telling him nothing that he didn't already know.

              "Yes we do," Skip agreed. "Get Paula on the VHF. It's time we took a little more active part in this thing. Chances are, they're too busy down there to notice what we're doing."

              "Right," Jack said and immediately he began hailing Paula.

              "Sherrie," Skip said, looking back at her for a moment, "get in position. I want to drop on the group that's covering after the next advance."

              "You got it," she said, crawling across the floor.

              Skip slowly turned to the right and then began to gingerly move in a large circle, bringing the helicopter around to the side of the men on the ground. As he expected, no one on the militia's radio frequency sounded an alarm at his movement, so wrapped up in the battle were they. He looked below, his eyes making quick shifts from the terrain to his instruments. Down below the next dash was just taking place, with the group in the rear rushing up to leapfrog their cover positions.

              "Right there, Sherrie," Skip said. "That group of that's in motion. As soon as they hit the dirt to take over covering fire, we'll egg them."

              "I got 'em," Sherrie said, her voice shaky but determined.

              "Paula here," Paula said in his headset in response to Jack's hails. The stutter of gunfire and a few screams could be heard in the background. "Are you gonna give me an air strike?"

              Skip handled the communication now that she was on the air. "That's affirm," he told her. "I'm gonna drop on the covering group. Get ready to light them up."

              "Changing mags now," she said. "Hurry it up! They're getting a little too close for comfort and we're taking casualties! We're gonna have to pull back from here in a minute."

              "Copy," Skip said, watching as the advance came to an end and the group - minus three more of its members - dove to the ground once more. "We're moving in now. As soon as the shit flies, start your pull back to trenches 23, 26, and 28. Do it by the book, wounded out first, pull out the rest in thirds with heavy covering fire."

              "By the book," Paula confirmed.

              Stinson was lying behind a small rise, firing his automatic at one of the flashes before him, trying desperately to take the Garden Hill forces down a few notches before they killed every one of his men. They were still over a hundred and fifty yards away and already he had lost nearly twenty of the original fifty-six that had made the attack. Would they be able to press the advantage even if they did make it up there? It seemed less and less likely by the yard.

              "Fuckin clusterfuck," he mumbled, firing another burst and having his action lock open, indicating an empty magazine. He ejected it to the ground, not bothering to pick it up, and pulled another from his pack. He felt only two more in there. Would that be enough? It would have to be. He slammed it in place, closed the chamber, and then fired another short burst. Ahead of him the front half of his platoon was just about to take cover again.

              Vaguely he registered that the helicopter had moved from the position it had been in a minute before but somehow he did not assign alarm to that observation. There were so many other things that could potentially kill him and his men in the next two minutes that the helicopter was near the bottom of his list of things to worry about. Nor did he pay any attention to the frantic hails of Stu on his radio. He barely even heard them. The fucking prick probably wanted to have a Goddamn status report while they were in the middle of the bloodbath that this battle was turning into. Fuck him. He could have his motherfucking report when it was over. The thought that Stu might be seeing the helicopter positioning itself over the top of his men and that he might be trying to issue a warning never came close to crossing his mind.

              Up ahead, the charging group finally reached the limits of their advance and threw themselves down where they began scrambling for trees and rocks to hide behind. They were five less the number that they had started that charge with, three of them dead on the ground, two of them screaming on the ground but incapacitated. As Stinson watched, a burst of automatic fire reached out and finished the job on one of the wounded ones that had been foolishly trying to get to his feet.

              "Fucking idiot," Stinson muttered, feeling a fleeting moment of sadness and then dismissing it. He looked at his men and took a few deep breaths to brace himself. "Let's go!" he yelled at them. "Leapfrog to the left. Now, now now!"

              The front group began to provide covering fire and his group, one by one, drug themselves to their feet and began to rush forward once again. As before, Stinson waited until they were all underway and then he too jumped up and began to follow. Bullets began to whiz past once more, flying to the sides of him, over the top of him, plunking into the mud before him, but somehow not hitting him. In front of him two of his group went down in the first thirty feet but surprisingly the return fire was a little lighter than it had been on the last charge. It seemed like the Garden Hill defenders were not using their automatic weapons at the moment. Why not? Were they out of ammunition for them? If that was the case then things could maybe be turning around. Could their luck really be changing for the better? Could it?

              The answer came in very dramatic fashion a moment later. Three solid streams of tracers suddenly lanced out from the hillsides, all of them converging in mid-air in a spot high above the covering group's positions. Too late he realized what the significance of that was. He looked up just in time to see the napalm tank split in half 300 feet above and disgorge it's deadly contents.

              He was close enough this time to feel a blast of heat as the mixture ignited. Burning gasoline gel rained down on top of the prone soldiers, hitting the center of their group with unnatural accuracy. Five of them had been lying less than four feet apart, putting gunfire on the hillside before them. They ignited instantly, their bodies engulfed in the flame. It was by far the most devastating airdrop yet.

              "Motherfucker!" Stinson screamed, feeling the heat wave singe his face a little, watching his men burn. They didn't even move from where they lay, didn't even try to get up and run. Goddammit, these Garden Hill fucks weren't fighting fair! How could they fight against someone who could drop napalm upon their positions with impunity?

              His men reacted with horror at the attack. Of those that had been providing the covering fire - those that hadn't been hit directly with the napalm - several of them stood and tried to run from the conflagration that had been their comrades. They did this without thinking, purely out of horrified instinct. And they paid the price for it. The moment they stood the guns of the enemy sought them out. The tracers that had just ignited the napalm reached out and swept across them like a futuristic ray beam, cutting them instantly down.

              "Goddammit, stay the fuck down!" Stinson yelled over his radio.

              He was obeyed, again more because of the observed results of disobedience than anything else.

              "Keep putting fire on that hill," he ordered next. "Shoot, you fucking idiots, shoot!"

              They shot and Stinson ordered his own group forward. One more fell to enemy fire but within ten seconds he and his men were lying down near the scene of the napalm attack, trying to regroup. The stench of burning was very strong and the heat from the fire was uncomfortable upon their faces. It caused steam to rise from their wet clothing.

              "They're fucking killing us!" Givens yelled as he crawled over from his own position. "Goddamn it, they fucking napalmed us again!"

              "No shit," Stinson said, trying to keep his eyes off the burning bodies. He looked instead at his second-in-command, noting that he had been wounded by the attack as well. A small patch of his right arm had been burned, charring his clothing away and leaving a hole the size of a silver dollar. "Are you all right?"

              "It hurts like a motherfucker," Givens told him. "We need to pull back! Christ!"

              "We can't," Stinson said. "We need to push on. We're almost there. How many do we have left?"

              "Fuck," Givens spat, taking a few breaths to calm himself. He looked around and began to count the ragged, scared group.

              The count turned out to be twenty-eight men still capable of fighting. Fully fifty percent lost.

              "Okay, here's the deal," Stinson said. "I'll give you six of my men and that'll even us up at fourteen apiece. Same drill. Half covers while half advances. We're at least out of the crossfire now and since we're less than 150 yards from the hills, the covering fire should do a better job of keeping their heads down. We'll do it in thirty yard dashes instead of fifty."

              Givens looked downright miserable at these words. "I didn't sign up for this shit, Stinson," he said. "What the fuck are we doing this for?"

              "No one ever said it made sense," Stinson told him. "And for what its worth, I didn't sign up for this either. I'd much rather be back in Auburn fucking my bitches right now. But we're stuck with what we're stuck with, ain't we? And we're almost there now."

              "Yeah, only a hundred and fifty fucking yards to go," he said. "We lost half in the first hundred and fifty. That leaves the other half for this run, don't it?"

              Stinson had no answer for him. Instead he barked out the names of six of his men and told them they were reassigned.

              Paula had watched the results of the napalm attack with nothing short of savage glee. She did not care that fellow human beings had just been roasted alive to die a horrible, painful death. All she cared about was that four or five of the faceless enemy that were trying to attack her town, that had caused death and injury to her platoon, were gone and no longer a threat to her. When the panicked men in the vicinity of the flames had leapt to their feet to flee the area she had unhesitantly cut them down with left-over tracers in her weapon, actually cheering in satisfaction as she saw the red streaks intersect human bodies. Though she would probably feel guilt about this glee later - if there was a later - she refused to let these thoughts intrude right now.

              This attack had been more costly than the first one. The bullets of the enemy had been better aimed from closer positions and more of them had found their way around or through the sandbags that were their protection. Mike Orland, one of the men in her platoon and the husband of two of the women in Christine's platoon, was dead in the trench, a bullet through his head. In the next trench over Julie Sanders had been killed by a shot to the throat. There were two major injuries as well. Sarah, Steve Kensington's wife, had taken a burst of automatic weapons fire in the upper chest. She was conscious but having considerable trouble breathing, probably experiencing a slowly collapsing lung. Lucy Strang, who had once been a hairdresser, had taken a rifle bullet in her right breast. She was also conscious but also having trouble breathing. In addition to the major injuries there was Lori Stanislaus, Ted's wife, who had had a lucky round smash through her upper arm, rendering it useless.

              Paula herself had felt bullets pass within inches of her face on several occasions, had felt the wind generated by the displacement of air caressing her cheeks. This was something else that her mind was probably going to be obsessing over later on but, as with the deaths she had caused, it was not something she had time to analyze just now. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

              "Okay, people," she said over her tactical radio, the one that the Auburnites could potentially be monitoring. "It's time to initiate our prime directive. We're gonna go with plan A. Squad leaders, do you understand?"

              Plan A was the controlled withdrawal in thirds utilizing covering fire. The squad leaders all reported their understanding.

              "Okay," Paula said next. "Let's have the sick birds go first. You know what to do."

              They did. The evacuation of wounded in preparation for withdrawal was something that they had practiced repeatedly during the training phase. They had even gone so far as to carry simulated victims during those sessions. Without any further direction, the platoon swung into action. Sarah and Lucy had each been placed on makeshift litters that had been constructed out of sheets. Handles had been sewn into the corners, allowing them to be carried. The squad leaders assigned two people per litter and told them to get ready. The other wounded, Lori Stanislaus, was well enough to evacuate herself. When everyone reported readiness the word was passed to Paula.