Standing at the Edge

by William Alan Webb

  #

  “Good news?” Claw asked in a weak voice.

  “Looks like we’re not out of miracles yet. We’ve got air support now, so stay with me, you hear? I’ve got some Chinese to get rid of before I can take care of that chest. Just stay with me.”

  Claw smiled with his eyes half-closed. “Sure. It shouldn’t take you long.”

  Vapor rose and sprayed two three-round bursts just to get a look at what was out there, and what he saw wasn’t pretty. Incoming Comanche or not, at least a company of regulars had closed with 150 yards of his position. He felt Jane watching him and slid back into the trench.

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough. One hundred yards out and they’re flanking us.” He tried the radio again. “BH-1, if Ripsaw takes out the APCs, can you effect a pickup? Repeat, can you pick up? We cannot hold this position.”

  “I— oh, shit!”

  #

  Chapter 80

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  America, motherfucker!

  The United States Armed Forces

  Operation Overtime

  0712 hours, April 21

  Hands folded on his desk, Nick Angriff scowled as he listened to the live radio feed, relayed by the Blackhawk to Creech and on to Prime. Interference distorted the signal at times, but not enough to drown out the gist of the action. Walling sat in a wheelchair beside the couch, still using it as a table, with Colonel Kordibowski in one of the two chairs before Angriff’s desk and Major Alexis Iskold, General Fleming’s deputy, in the other.

  “I— oh, shit!”

  Without moving any other part of his body, Angriff rolled his eyes to Kordibowski’s. Breaking radio protocol was one thing, but there had been genuine fear in that outburst. What else can happen? “Where’s that damned airplane?” he growled, sounding for all the world like an angry bear.

  #

  Sierra Army Depot, Herlong, CA

  0724 hours

  “Is that Sierra?” Learning forward between the pilots, Fleming indicated a column of black smoke on the horizon.

  Green Ghost and Jingle Bob sat in the navigator and radioman’s seats. “That’s it,” Bob said. “I’m guessing that’s a brush fire, or maybe a building… Wouldn’t an ammo fire be a lot bigger than that?”

  “Probably,” Fleming said.

  Still rigid in his seat, Bunny Carlos flew the plane like a child riding a bike for the first time. He swallowed every few seconds and kept licking his lips. Fleming felt as if the tension could knock him over.

  “Come to course three-two-two,” Joe Randall said.

  “Coming to course three-two-two.”

  Randall twisted in his seat. “We need a landing zone to shoot for.”

  Bob pointed. “Looks like that fire might be on the base itself. You’d best come in from the southeast. There’s a gap between two mountain ranges that’ll bring you out east of the base. From there, you’ve got about three miles of open desert.”

  “What’s beyond that in case some of the men overshoot?”

  “The munitions farm, but those are bunkers; they’re not high off the ground. They should be okay landing there. But past that is Honey Lake.”

  Green Ghost looked at Fleming. “Your call, General.”

  The tactical situation was complex. Fleming knew the Chinese had deployed and attacked from the south and west, and that Honey Lake made drops to the north dangerous, so theoretically that only left the narrow strip east of the base for the LZ. But while they’d strictly maintained radio silence in case the Chinese were listening, the chatter between Vapor and the Blackhawk had come in intermittently. They’d heard about the Chinese APCs east of the base, and then something unintelligible, and then nothing more except broken static.

  “Sir? We need to know.”

  On his right the sun was up, turning the desert a thousand shades of orange and red. He put up his right hand and blocked the glaring rays, and in that second Fleming realized they’d have the sun at their backs when they jumped. The Chinese would have to look right into the rising sun to see them. “East it is. We go.”

  “Begin descent to eighteen hundred feet,” Randall said, more as a reminder to Carlos than out of necessity. “Start bleeding off air speed. Jump speed one-three-zero knots. Watch out she doesn’t stall; you’re gonna be close.”

  Carlos’ expression hadn’t changed from a tense frown and it didn’t change at Randall’s words. Every vibration of the aircraft shook his rigid body as he fought the plane and tried not to crash it. Randall had done all he could. Now it was up to Carlos to find that air speed balance between slow enough for a safe jump and fast enough not to stall the engine. At that altitude, any stall meant a nose-first landing in the desert.

  “You want the intercom, Socrates?” Green Ghost offered him the mike.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is it. There’re no static lines, so watch your altitude. We’re jumping at eighteen hundred feet, winds out of the west at… three knots. Sierra is under attack and the LZ might be hot, so be ready to fight. Once assembled, your first mission is to secure the ammunition bunkers and armored vehicles. Once that’s done, secure the base and defend it. Good luck and God go with you.”

  “Oh, hell,” Randall said.

  “What?” Carlos demanded.

  Randall pointed at one o’clock low. “Assault helicopter.”

  “Can they catch us?” Fleming said.

  “Not in normal flight, no,” Randall said. “But we have to slow to one-thirty knots for a parachute drop and at that speed they can tear us to bits.” He reached for a pair of binoculars in a pouch slightly behind him.

  “Talk to me, Joe! What do I do?”

  Randall kept the binoculars to his eyes but the tone of his voice changed. “Keep going, Bunny. That bird’s not Chinese; it’s an AH-71. That’s Hell’s Hammer! Alisa’s giving us air support.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve got three smoke columns east of the base and a Comanche heading for that burning building to the west.”

  “I’ll be dipped in shit,” Carlos said, without relaxing the slightest bit.

  #

  Operation Overtime

  0733 hours, April 21

  “He’d better not jump out of that airplane,” Angriff said. “He’d better not.” Walling and Kordibowski shared a glance and Angriff saw it. “What? You really think he will? Is that what you think, Rip?”

  “I don’t know, General.”

  “Like hell you don’t. You know as well as I do he’s going to jump.”

  #

  Chapter 81

  War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

  Major Genera Nathan Bedford Forrest

  Sierra Army Depot, Herlong, CA

  0738 hours, April 21

  Norm Fleming had thought of a basking shark when he’d climbed the nose ramp into the C-5. The aircraft had been lowered within two feet of the tarmac in a procedure called kneeling, where the landing gear acted like a hydraulic lift that raises and lowers cars. The nose had then opened upward like a shark’s upper jaw, while the ramp had touched the ground like a tongue. Combined with the aircraft’s sleek fuselage, it had looked like a giant shark swimming with its mouth wide open to swallow plankton.

  How in the world such an image had come to mind, he couldn’t say. Sharks didn’t fascinate him and if he’d been asked to describe a basking shark, he couldn’t have done it. Yet there it was, fresh in his mind as the rear door of the airplane opened like the jaws of a monster.

  Desert raced by in the Galaxy’s wake as the ramp finished deploying. Wind buffeted him as he stood in the hold. With goggles down and helmet strapped on, no one could see the fear on his stony features. Few would have noted anyway. Fleming was good at hiding his emotions. But Nick Angriff would have noticed and somehow that gave him courage. How many times had Nick done this kind of thing? So if he could, so could Fleming.

  He fe
lt a hand on his shoulder and heard a voice in his right ear. “Two minutes, Socrates,” said Green Ghost.

  Turning, he gave the assembled men at his back a thumbs-up. The closest stood ten feet away and with the roar of the wind, he knew they couldn’t hear him. “Do me a favor,” he said to Green Ghost. “If I freeze up, give me a shove.”

  “You’re not gonna freeze up.”

  “I’ve never done this before, Ghost.”

  “Jumped into combat?”

  Fleming nodded. “That, and I’ve never been shot at before, either. I’ve led men in combat zones, but never saw the elephant. If we get down there and I screw up, I need you to tell me, or countermand my orders.”

  “Pardon me, sir, but fuck, no. You know better than that. You told me this shit a hundred times. Those guys back there? They’re following you because they believe in you, that you know what you’re doing. They know you’re gonna make mistakes, all of us do, but they trust you to get them out of it. If you even give a hint of self-doubt, they’re gonna pick up on it. Veterans can push through, but these guys have never been into combat before as a unit. The cohesion won’t be there until after they learn which of their buddies they can count on, and it starts with you.”

  Fleming squinted even though Green Ghost couldn’t see his eyes. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  Green Ghost flashed him a rare smile. “So does Saint Nick.”

  Then a single word echoed from the front of the plane to the back, shouted by the troopers themselves. “Go!”

  Fleming didn’t think about it. He ran down the ramp and jumped into the nothingness below.

  #

  His training took over the instant he jumped. Fleming didn’t think about the fact that he was accelerating in free fall to more than one hundred miles per hour, or what would happen if his chutes failed. As he’d been instructed, he counted to three and pulled the ripcord. The parachute deployed overhead and stopped him with a jolt. Only then did he notice his heart pounding in his chest.

  Floating more than 1700 feet above the desert gave him fourteen seconds to observe the terrain below. Scattered fires burned all across the battlefield, but one building sent a column of dense black smoke mushrooming high into the sky. North of that were more buildings and then acres and acres of low mounds: the ammunition bunkers. And far in the distance to the north and west, shafts of morning sunlight glinted off the metallic hulls of hundreds and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles.

  A long, low ridge separated their landing zone from the base. He started making tight S turns at one thousand feet to land as close to the ridge as possible and still be on level ground. Those behind him would key on his landing area. At two hundred feet, an antelope saw him and sprang away. He flared his chute, pulling down on both toggles simultaneously. It slowed him until his ground speed was slow enough to land safely. All of the other paratroopers watched him make a perfect running landing and gather his chute in like a pro.

  Green Ghost landed nearest and got to him first. “Nice landing,” he said, and smiled again.

  Fleming couldn’t ever remember him smiling once, much less twice in a day. “Thanks. I want the men to assemble over by that ridge, and then we’ll set up a CP.”

  “Major Ball is over there, sir, but I request permission to go find my men. They’re somewhere in the middle of all that shooting.”

  He started running toward the blazing buildings before Fleming could answer. “Granted!” the general called after him.

  #

  “What did you mean, oh, shit?” Vapor repeated into the radio.

  On the fifth try, he got a response. “The Chinese are breaking through the defensive line in the south.”

  “The more, the merrier.”

  Vapor crawled five feet to his left, rose, and fired at a kneeling Chinese a hundred yards away. Puffs on his gray-green camouflage uniform indicated hits. His target fell to the dirt, but Vapor couldn’t wait to see if he was dead. Bullets churned the lip of the trench and two mortar rounds landed close. He blinked as blood ran into his eyes.

  “Vapor, do you read? You have paratroopers to the east. I repeat, paratroopers are landing to the east. Also...” Nothing but static for a moment, then, “burning and out of action.” And that was all.

  What the fuck did BH-1 expect him to do? What was burning? Where? He popped up ten feet from his last firing point and fired two bursts into a C-man who’d gotten within thirty yards and was about to toss a grenade. Four rounds were on the target and he staggered. He held the grenade until it exploded and blasted his arm off at the shoulder. Vapor slid back down and wiped his eyes again. His blood turned the dirt on his finger into sticky mud.

  “I’m out of ammo.” Jane sat propped against the bottom of the trench, panting.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he yelled over the noise of battle. “Chinese paratroopers landing to the east.”

  He slotted his last magazine into place. At the trench’s opposite end, Colonel Lamar and the teens had finally dug their two friends from the dirt pile, but they were beyond resuscitation. Like Jane, Lamar lay with her head back in seeming surrender.

  Popping up to once again fire, Vapor found himself staring down the barrel of a Chinese tank, three hundred yards away. He turned to shout a warning, but it was too late. The high-explosive round hit three feet in front of the trench’s lip, right where Lamar lay. The resulting explosion blew that end of the trench inward, burying Lamar and the other teens like their friends had been buried.

  Vapor knew what would come next and didn’t move, yelling at Jane to stay put. Seven seconds after the first one, a second shell hit the exposed mound covering Lamar. Dirt and shell splinters raked him and Jane both without doing major damage.

  They still had two Gustav rounds left, but time was up. Peeking over the lip of the trench, Vapor watched the turret rotate a few degrees to its right and point straight at him. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to retreat. He could only wait and wonder what dying would be like. His mind automatically counted down the seconds until the tank could fire again.

  Four… three… two… at one the world erupted in flame, but it wasn’t him who burned. It was the tank. Something struck it right at the juncture of hull and turret. For a long second the flash of contact was all he could see, but then an internal explosion vented flame and smoke from every hatch and seam. Cannon rounds set off by the heat tore the steel machine into pieces and one huge explosion threw the turret fifty feet sideways.

  Even before his brain could process what he’d seen, a giant machine swept overhead and flew west. Looking up, he saw the unmistakable outline of an AH-71 Comanche. Hell’s Hammer had struck at last.

  #

  With the Chinese stunned by the gunship’s sudden appearance, Vapor had a chance to scan the battlefield to the south, north, and west. Even through the thickening, drifting smoke, he could only keep his head above ground level for a few seconds. Partly he didn’t want to give the Chinese a target, but mostly the intense heat from the burning headquarters was enough to blister skin and keep him down.

  Through smoke and dust boiling around him, to the south he saw muzzle flashes and something exploding around the defensive line. In the second he had to observe, two defenders ran backward from an oncoming APC. Swiveling to the west and a bit north, he could tell some of the line still held, but the Chinese had broken through in places.

  It was over.

  “We’ve gotta go!” he screamed as the roof of the building behind them collapsed in a shower of sparks.

  Jane had crawled to the tangled mound of earth, bodies, and blood where Lamar and the teenagers had lain. “She might still be alive.”

  Vapor slung his rifle, cursed all women everywhere, and crawled on hands and knees to the injured scraper. He turned her by the shoulder and felt a rare moment of pity at her muddy, tear-stained face. “She’s gone, Jane, and we’ve got to go now! Don’t forget you have a daughter who doesn’t want you to die in this damned trench.”
>
  The mention of Nado did the trick. “You’re going to have to help me.”

  Vapor cupped his fingers and she stepped into them with her good foot. Not waiting for her to climb over the trench’s edge, he flung her out. Groaning, he lifted Claw’s dead weight as high as he could and Jane gripped him under the arms. Vapor pushed up on Claw’s feet as she pulled, and between them they wrestled him out of the trench. Vapor was last out and they both lay prone, glancing around to see if they’d been spotted. Smoke covered them, then a breeze blew it away at exactly the wrong moment, exposing them and attracting rifle and mortar fire.

  “Crawl! We’ve gotta get outa here!”

  As if a capricious god of war wanted to tease the other side, the breeze shifted and covered them in smoke again. Floating carbon particles stung their eyes and burned their lungs, but it was the miracle they’d needed. Coughing, Vapor pulled Jane to her feet and looped her arm around his shoulders. They each grabbed one of Claw’s feet and dragged him on his back.

  Enveloped in the smoke-cloud, they had almost made it to a large field fifty feet from the fire when a random AK-47 bullet hit Vapor in the left calf, sending him tumbling to the ground and Jane with him. Before the pain fully set in, they crawled behind a tree, leaving Claw exposed a few feet away. Close to the desert floor, the smoke thinned enough for them to gulp in needed oxygen.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He yanked out his last bandage and tied it around the wound. Blood already filled his boot. “Fuck, that hurts!”

  Jane closed her eyes against her own pain, swallowed, and said, “You curse too much.”

  Four rows of buildings across a narrow street beckoned them to safety, but neither moved. The exertion needed to get there seemed too great. When a mortar shell hit the nearest building and blew in the roof, it gave them the needed excuse not to move.

  #

  “Ripsaw Real to Ripsaw two, Alisa, do you read?” Joe Randall repeated it again and again, but got only static in reply. “Alisa, if you hear me, respond.”