Authors: Thomas Koloniar
A
board the
Boxer
, Captain Bisping was quite busy—or at least he had a hell of a lot on his mind. For one thing, he was still feeling very much like a sitting duck on an open pond. The
Boxer
had enough ordnance aboard to kill the Chinese vessel dozens of times over, but if he so much as flinched, the submarine’s passive sonar would pick up the sound, and the Chinese captain would beat him to the trigger by more than five minutes—the approximate time it would take to get an antisub warfare helicopter into position to drop a depth charge. Not even the
Algonquin
could be in position to fire in under a minute, her tubes aimed over ninety degrees in the wrong direction.
“Captain! I’ve got Halo on the emergency band. They’re declaring Rotten Dog.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” Bisping declared. “Now, of all goddamn times!” He looked to his executive officer. “Who is it, Duncan, who keeps insisting there are no more wars left to fight?”
“I believe that’s President Thorn, sir.”
“Mr. Brooks, get a message off to Pearl.”
“Yes, sir. ”
“Message to read as follows: ‘Engaged in battle by land and sea. Merry fucking Christmas.’ ”
“Word for word, sir?”
“Yes, Mr. Brooks. Word for fucking word. And somebody call Gunny Beauchamp to the bridge. Talk about fighting a battle with both hands tied behind your goddamn back.”
He took the handset from Brooks. “Halo this is
Boxer
. Over.”
“
Boxer
, be advised we are Rotten Dog. Our main force is pinned down half a mile inland from lifeguard station number nine. Over.”
“Halo, say again all after main force. Over.”
“Pinned down half a mile inland from lifeguard station number nine. Over.”
Bisping gave O’Leary an ironic grimace and muttered, “That’s what I thought she said.”
“Stand by, Halo. We are presently engaged in a sea battle but will send Marine detachment ashore ASAP. Over.”
“What is their ETA? Over.”
“Stand by, Halo.”
“Don’t keep us waiting too long,
Boxer
. Our tit’s in the wringer!”
“We read you,” Bisping said, giving the handset back to Brooks. “Her tit may be in the wringer but my balls are on the block.”
Beauchamp came onto the bridge and saluted crisply, snapping immediately to attention. “Gunnery Sergeant Beauchamp reporting as—”
“At ease, Gunny.”
“Sir.”
“Are your devil dogs ready to go ashore?”
“That’s affirmative, sir.”
“Well be advised, Gunny, you and your men will be going very soon, and your condition will be Rotten Dog. Our evacuees have apparently gotten themselves pinned down half a mile inland from lifeguard station number nine.”
“And if we’re torpedoed, sir?”
“Then you’ll be going ashore indefinitely. Either way, Gunny, you’re on in less than ten.”
“Oorah, sir.”
F
ive miles out to sea, as Commander Reese and his men were creeping toward the sail of the Chinese submarine, they felt the boat lurch forward, its electric motors kicking on to propel the submarine very slowly through the water, barely raising a wake.
Through the murk at that distance, Reese was just able to make out the
Boxer’
s silhouette lying some five miles distant, but only because he knew exactly where she was and what to look for. In a very short time, however, the Chinese officer watching eastward through his own night vision scope from atop the sail would be making a positive identification and calling below to his captain, who would then—in all likelihood—give the order to launch a full spread of torpedoes at both the
Boxer
and
Algonquin
.
There were no ladder rungs on the almost thirty-foot-tall sail of a Song Class submarine the way there were on old fashioned subs, which meant that Reese and his men had to form a human ladder in order for him to reach the rear sail plane jutting backward twenty feet above the pressure hull. Even from atop the sail plane it still took two men standing on one another’s shoulders for Reese to climb the final ten feet. Once atop the sail, he moved quickly forward to the observer’s station, where the Chinese officer was studying the pitch-black shoreline.
Reese heard the man draw an excited breath and saw him reach for the phone, obviously having just spotted the
Boxer
. He dropped down into the observer’s station and grabbed the officer from behind, gripping him under the jaw with his left hand to twist his face away, jamming a killing knife up through the base of his skull and giving the blade a sharp twist, leaving Reese holding a veritable rag doll. He lay the man down and signaled over the net for the rest of his men to join him.
The next man to reach the top of the sail lowered a knotted rope for six others. Two SEALs would remain down on the hull to kill anyone attempting to escape through the bow or stern hatchways.
As expected, the observer’s hatch was sealed from inside, so Reese signaled for Chief Petty Officer Chou to do his thing. Chou picked up the phone, saying in a sickly voice to whomever it was that answered: “Man, I just got a real bad case of the shits!” Or whatever the Cantonese equivalent of that was.
The wheel began to turn on the hatch, and the SEALs prepared to do battle.
The somewhat bemused Chinese sailor below was standing in a compartment illuminated only in dim red light, and he was opening the hatch into absolute darkness, so he didn’t see the silencer of the MP-5 submachine gun Reese was aiming down into his face.
Reese squeezed off a single round and shot the sailor straight through the forehead, dropping him to the deck with a dull thud. He was down the ladder in a split second, moving rapidly into the next compartment, where he gunned down two more unsuspecting sailors standing at the periscope. He waited until the rest of his men were formed up behind him before sliding down the ladder into the next compartment. From there, half of the team made their way forward toward the control room. The other half remained in position to prevent their line of retreat from being blocked.
Reese and the other three walked boldly into the con and opened fire. The startled Chinese sailors screamed as they died, but the captain of the boat kept his head, leaping for the launch buttons.
Reese fired and killed him, but not before the captain managed to launch a single torpedo.
“C
aptain!
Algonquin
reports hydrophone effect! One torpedo in the water—it’s got us dead-bang!”
“Slip both anchors!” Bisping ordered. “All engines full reverse!”
“Launch helicopters!” O’Leary announced simultaneously over the MC. “Launch amphibious craft! All hands rig for impact!”
Having also been prepared for this eventuality, the
Algonquin
had long since off-loaded the majority of her crew into lifeboats, leaving only the captain, the sonar officer, and a few engineers aboard. The engineers applied full power to the destroyer’s propellers, then scrambled up to the weather deck as the
Algonquin
captain put his ship into full reverse. She had good power but was starting from a dead stop, so she didn’t move quickly at first. Even so, her captain was hoping against heaven and hell to get the
Algonquin
into the torpedo’s path before it could detonate beneath the
Boxer
’s hull and break her spine.
Bisping stood on the bridge watching the other ship through a pair of NVDs as the
Boxer
oh-so-slowly began to back away. We’re moving as fast as mechanically possible, he thought, but we’ll never make it.
“Captain!” Brooks shouted. “Commander Reese reports he and his men have taken the con.” Bisping got on the radio immediately, ordering the helicopter pilots not to attack the submarine.
“All landing craft away, sir,” O’Leary announced. “The Marines should be ashore within five.” But Bisping didn’t hear him. He was once again watching to see whether his ship was going to be blown out from under him.
“Captain,
Algonquin
reports it’s going to be close.”
In the same moment, the torpedo passed directly beneath the screws of the
Algonquin
and, sensing her magnetic field, detonated, blowing off the destroyer’s stern in a huge white flash of froth and fire.
A cheer went up on the
Boxer
’s bridge.
“Knock it off!” Bisping ordered. “We just lost half our task force and this battle’s not over. Get me Commander Reese on the radio!”
A few seconds later Bisping was talking to Reese. “How do you want to play this, Commander? I want that sub sunk!”
“We can set demolition charges here in the con, sir, to destroy her controls. After that we can abandon ship, allowing you to sink her at your leisure. One of the helos can lift us out of the water.”
“How do you keep the Chinese sailors from killing you after you make it into the water?”
“I intend to leave this boat in flames, Captain. They’ll be too busy fighting the fires to bother with us. They haven’t even tried to retake the con yet, for Christ’s sake.”
“Very well,” Bisping said. “Get off that boat as quickly and safely as you can so I can sink the damn thing!”
“Roger that.”
Bisping then looked at O’Leary. “Launch two more ASWs,” he ordered. “I want them in position to provide covering fire for Reese and his men as they’re being picked out of the water. Then I want that pig sent to the bottom.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
F
orrest, Kane, and Danzig were all pretty badly shot up. Only by the grace of God had the hits missed their vital organs; their body armor had done its job many times over, but they were all bleeding from multiple limb and shoulder wounds. Forrest was the worst for the wear, one round having penetrated his thigh and another having shattered his right ankle. Kane had bound the joint for him, wrapping an elastic bandage tightly around the canvas boot to help immobilize the foot and to stem the flow of blood, but the pain was intense when he applied any weight to the leg. So far, he had refused morphine, needing his head clear for the ongoing fight.
Veronica sat in the back corner behind the counter with Andie, Joann, Jessie, Renee, Maria, Karen, and the children. Michael, armed with a carbine, was lying in the hall covering the rear entrance, which they had barricaded with a desk and a filing cabinet.
Andie had been nicked in the chest and face by a ricochet, and Maria Vasquez had a bullet wound to her backside. A couple of the children were badly bruised up, and a few of them cried continuously.
Melissa sat in the dark beside Veronica, keeping Laddie on a short leash.
By now they had received word that Tonya had already taken her own life, as well as that of her son Steven, and the women were aghast. Kane had remained silent on the issue but Forrest knew he was blaming himself.
“Hey, she had eighteen happy months,” Forrest said, bumping Kane on the shoulder. “So did the boy. It’s more than what they would’ve had.”
“I told her not to worry,” Kane said quietly, not wanting the others to hear him. “That I’d come for her if anything happened.”
“Maybe we see it differently, partner, but from where I sit, she bailed before you could make good on that promise.”
“Don’t make me feel no better.”
“Ain’t tryin’ to make you feel better. I’m tryin’ to keep your head in the game.”
“My head’s in the game, Captain.”
Forrest crawled forward to peer up at the top balcony across the street. The building was only coated in fluorescent paint on the first floor level, so he still needed the NVD to see the upper levels. “I haven’t seen any movement over there for ten minutes. They’re up to something.”
“Yeah, but what?” said Danzig, crouching in the opposite corner.
They only had to wait a few seconds for the answer. The fuse popped on a grenade right outside the window to the left. Neither Forrest nor the others made a sound. All of them knew from experience that to shout a warning would only prevent them from hearing where the grenade landed. The steel orb hit with a
thunk
inside the showcase, where they were unable to grab it, but they did dive clear of the blast and were already bringing their weapons up as the first attackers came charging in through the smoke.
The women remained surprisingly quiet as Forrest and the others kept up a withering fire, effectively piling bodies up in the showcase window. By the time the enemy realized their surprise assault had failed, they had lost five men. The rest retreated around the side of the building.
Kane and Danzig moved quickly to strip the dead of weapons and ammo as Forrest kept an eye on the apartment across the street with Kane’s M-21 sniper rifle; Kane’s shoulder was too badly wounded for precision sniping. The first enemy to sneak a peek from the second floor balcony took a .308 through the center of his face, and Forrest just missed another the next level down, driving the man back inside. After searching the bodies and stacking them in the window, they retook their positions to either side.
“We can’t let them keep creeping up on us,” Forrest said. “If they come to the well like that enough times, they’re gonna get in.”
A Molotov cocktail landed on the sidewalk in front of the window and exploded, setting the clothing of the dead bodies on fire and illuminating the inside of the store.
“Everyone stay down! They’re trying to see in!”
Two men ran up on either side of the window and tossed in another pair of grenades, blasting the showcase apart and filling Danzig’s left side with shrapnel. He screamed in agony, and Jessie and Veronica both jumped from cover to drag him to safety.
“Stay down!” Danzig shouted, not wanting his wife to get herself killed, but they ignored him and finished pulling him behind the counter where the children were all screaming and the dog was going wild at the end of his leash.
“Jack, what the fuck is going on over there?” Sullivan’s voice sounded over the radio in Forrest’s ear.
“They’re storming the goddamn castle! Let me talk to Wayne.”
“He’s unconscious. Stand by. I’m coming to assist.”
“Negative! Hold your position. There’s nothing you can do for us!”
B
ut Sullivan hadn’t heard him, having already peeled off the headset and given it to West. He ducked out of the pharmacy and ran to the corner. Scanning the cluttered greenish-black street through the NVD, he saw two men rifling the second snowcat for the MREs and shot them dead, dropping into the snow and taking aim, left-handed, on seven more men lining up outside the porn shop window, preparing to make another assault.
He opened fire on their legs, knowing many of them wore armor of their own, and the attackers danced about on the sidewalk in an almost comic display as the bullets tore the meat from their bones. They fell, scrabbling for cover through the snow on their hands and knees, but a grenade was lobbed from the porn shop window and it exploded in their midst, ripping many of them apart, though only killing two. The survivors lay in a bloody, screaming tangle on the walk.
As Sullivan stood to withdraw to the pharmacy, he was jumped by two stinking, hairy men. The NVD was bashed from his helmet and the carbine pried from his grip. Someone kicked him in the groin and he buckled, grabbing a grenade from his harness and pulling the pin with his teeth before stuffing it down the pants of an assailant.
The man cried out and let go of him, presumably to pull the grenade from his pants, but it was too dark for Sullivan to know for sure. His other attacker was still struggling to subdue him when the grenade went off. Sullivan felt himself fly through the air. He landed hard on his back, the left side of his face and neck full of shrapnel, his left arm nearly severed at the elbow and his left leg in tatters.
He blacked out.
He came to in total darkness a short time later, feeling hands probing his wounds, and grabbed ineffectually with his crippled right hand for the knife on his belt.
“Easy,” West said, gently catching the arm.
“You’re safe now,” Taylor said softly into his one good ear. “Sean brought you back in.”
“Jack’s group,” Sullivan murmured. “Are they . . . ?”
“They’re secure for the moment.” West was working feverishly beneath a flashlight to stanch the flow of blood from Sullivan’s wounds. “Whatever you did seems to have bought them some time.”
“You have to finish it,” Sullivan whispered, feeling the morphine carrying him away. “Finish it now . . . too many to hold off . . . saw them in the flash . . .”
West looked at Price, both of them realizing what that meant, and picked up the headset. “Jack, it’s Sean. Over.”
“Go ahead.”
“Jack, Sullivan says we’re about to be overwhelmed. He says we should all finish it now.”
“How does he know?”
“He’s unconscious but his exact words were ‘finish it now, too many to hold off.’ ”
“Can he make it?”
“No.”
“Go ahead and establish your own protocol there, Sean. We’re going to hold out here to the last possible moment. Tell T and E that I did my best, will ya?”
“They know that, Jack. We all know.”
“Wish I did, goddamnit. Godspeed, Sean.”
“What’s going on?” Taylor asked, panic in her eyes, her voice trembling.
“Go on in the back with the kids, sweetheart. I’ll be back to join you in a minute.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, starting to cry. “Sean, what are you going to do?”
“Price?”
“Come on, honey,” Price said gently, helping Taylor to her feet.
“Don’t, Sean. Please . . .”
West took one of the titanium vials from his jacket pocket and twisted off the lid, shaking the glass capsule into his hand. “God,” he said quietly, slipping the capsule between Sullivan’s molars. “Allow me to commend this man’s spirit into your good hands.”
He pressed upward on Sullivan’s jaw to crush the capsule between his teeth. Sullivan’s body tensed for an instant and then relaxed. West stood up and went into the back room.
“Erin,” he said gently. “We need to see about Wayne.”
“No, Sean!” Erin said, holding the baby in her arms and beginning to cry. “You’re not allowed. He’s
my
husband!”
“I won’t do anything without your permission, honey, but it’s time to make some decisions. We may only have seconds left.”
The other mothers were crying as well, their hands trembling as they took the vials from their pockets. By now the children realized the true purpose of the astronaut medicine and they were all crying as well.
“This is bullshit!” Lynette said in disgust. “To get this close—”
“Lynny . . .” Price said quietly.
West sat down with his kids and took Taylor’s hand. “There’s no reason for us to be afraid. We’re in God’s hands. Now everyone put a capsule under your tongue and join hands.”
Everyone did as he said.
“Will it hurt?” one of the little ones asked, sobbing.
“No, baby doll. You’ll just go to sleep and wake right back up in heaven with God. I promise.”
Erin couldn’t hold anyone’s hand, however; she would need them both for pinching capsules into the mouths of her husband and infant daughter. Jenny offered to help her but she refused.
“Can we all agree to wait until they come into the building?” Taylor asked through her tears. “Can we do that? I love you all so much!”
“I like that idea,” Michelle said, gripping her son’s hand. “Okay, baby? We’re all going to heaven at the same time, so make sure you wait for Mommy.”
“Okay, Mom,” the little boy said, seemingly unafraid.
West began to recite from the Twenty-third Psalm: “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in—’ ”
Without warning Lynette let go of her husband’s hand and sprang to her feet, dashing for the front of the store, gripping a flashlight.
West let go of Taylor’s hand and jumped up to chase after her, but Price all but tackled him in the doorway.
“Price, what the hell are you doing?”
“You can’t catch her,” Price said, hearing Lynette scampering over the barricade. “Your place is here, Sean. She’s my wife . . .”
Lynette ran down the street and froze at the corner, shining the flashlight on a disbelieving horde of barbarous-looking men, who for a moment might have believed they were seeing an angel with flowing blond hair, were it not for the grenade she gripped in the opposite hand.
“Catch!” she said, lobbing it into the air over their heads and turning to run back toward the pharmacy.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” one of the men shouted as they scattered in the dark, none of them having any idea where the grenade would land. When it did land it rolled beneath a car where two men had taken cover, wounding them both upon detonation and prompting their comrades to move in and finish them off quickly in accordance with the laws of the wild.
Lynette stumbled in her dash for the pharmacy and was caught from behind by her hair and shoved into a lamppost, knocking the flashlight from her hand. She struggled to keep her feet, tussling in the blackness with a surprisingly weak and apparently shorter man, gnashing her teeth lest she accidentally spit out the capsule of cyanide she still kept in her mouth. She slashed with her fingers, found the soft gelatinous orb of the attacker’s eyeball and grabbed him close, thrusting her thumb into the socket to claw it out. The man screamed and reeled away, but as she turned to run once more, she was struck by a vicious uppercut from an unseen fist that fractured her jaw, dropping her to her knees. She was not even remotely aware of the broken slivers of glass in her tongue as she fell forward onto her face.
Her body was lifted in the darkness as four men attempted to haul her off across the street, all of them thinking she was merely unconscious, but Price shot them down from behind then turned the carbine on the rest of the mob, which had reformed and was on the move. He was struck by a hail of bullets, the men trampling his body in their renewed assault on the pharmacy, kicking and pounding at the barricade to get inside.
“Not yet!” West told the women, breaking away from their prayers, his instinct for survival overriding all common sense as he grabbed his carbine and leapt into the doorway, firing into the mob at forty feet.
The attackers screamed and pulled back onto the walk, returning his fire.
Outside, the street erupted in a fusillade of automatic weapons fire and the attackers fell back from the pharmacy in confusion. West stood listening as the gunfire reached a crescendo, then he slammed the storeroom door and moved to cover the bodies of his wife and children with his own, shouting for everyone to spit out their capsules of cyanide.
Seconds later there was a cacophony of rapid 40mm cannon fire followed by the roaring sound of an 850 horse power Motoren-und Turbinen-Union diesel motor as it went rumbling past the building toward the corner.
“In here!” they heard Marty shout from the front of the store. “They’re in here!”
“W
ho brought the forty mike mike?” Danzig mumbled through a fog of morphine, his head resting in Jessie’s lap where they hid behind the counter in the porn shop.
“Jack!” Veronica shouted toward the front of the store. “What’s going on?”
Forrest climbed painfully up into the showcase and stole a quick glance west toward the corner. “Jesus Christ!” he said jumping back down and landing painfully on his bad ankle. “Everybody spit those fucking capsules out! Melissa!”
“I already did!”
“Is it the goddamn Marines or what?” Kane asked, sticking his head down from a crawl space in the ceiling. He and Forrest had decided that he would be the last one left alive, surviving them all just long enough to rain their last six grenades down upon their attackers after the shop had finally fallen and filled up with the enemy, an enemy that might rape the bodies of the women.