Fallen Sniper

Chapter Twenty-Four

Cole awoke to a world of hurt.

His head hurt. He had crusted blood in his eyes. A big gash in his side. And he could barely move his right leg.

But it could have been worse. He hadn’t expected to wake up at all.

Stepping off the cliff like that had been his way of turning the tables on the enemy and denying them the satisfaction of capturing him. He saw it as his final act of defiance in the face of defeat.

Or so he had thought. Because now here he was at the bottom of the cliff. Bloody and broken, but breathing.

There didn’t seem to be any Chinese around, so he was thankful for that much. They must have thought he was dead.

Cole would have thought the same thing. He looked up, wondering how in hell he had survived. It was a good one hundred and fifty feet, maybe two hundred, to the top of that cliff. But it wasn’t a straight drop. A big clump of trees grew about halfway up, jutting from a ledge, and another cluster of trees grew at the bottom.

If he had fallen straight down, he would have been flatter than a pancake. But he was lying under those trees at the bottom of the cliff.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

He sort of recalled having hit those trees on the way down and they had slowed him down. He didn’t remember anything after that. However, the trees at the bottom must have cushioned his fall like a big ol’ feather bed. Yeah, right. More like how the ball felt after getting hit by the bat.

Cole lay flat on his back, his arms and legs flung out. He supposed that he looked like a picture he had once seen in a church book of a fallen angel, cast out of heaven for his sins and forced to live as a demon in the mortal world. He groaned and tried to roll over, but it took him a couple of attempts. Once he had managed to sit up, he took stock of his situation.

Aside from the blood in his eyes, his head seemed intact. At least he was thinking more or less clearly. A tree limb had speared him good in the side, laying him open clean down to the ribs, cracking a couple in the process. A little lower, and he would have been skewered in the guts. Still, it hurt like hell to breathe.

He could live with that. However, it was his leg that worried him the most. His right leg was fine. But the left leg twisted off at a funny angle. He had suffered broken bones twice as a boy, and they had been painful in their own way, a deep ache. His leg looked fairly shattered and he could hardly feel it, like it wasn’t even part of him.

He’d have to deal with that soon, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

His rifle was long gone, surely lost in the fall, and out of bullets, anyhow. He was glad that he had saved the last one for that Chinese officer and put a rifle slug through his skull. No regrets about that.

Pistol? Gone. Somehow, he still had a grenade strapped to him. He ought to have used that up on the cliff. If things got too bad, he felt reassured that he could just blow himself up.

He also had his Bowie knife, which was the only tool he needed to survive. He drew it from the sheath and admired the mottled Damascus steel blade with its razor-sharp edge. He felt a sense of gratitude to his old friend Hollis Baily, who had made it in his workshop. Maybe one day, Cole would get to be as good at making knives. But first, he had to get the hell out of this valley and back to the American lines or he would be permanently missing in action.

First, he had to deal with his leg.

“This is gonna hurt some,” he said aloud, just in case the fates were listening and decided to take pity on him.

Dragging himself around some more, he found some sturdy sticks. He then dragged himself to a pile of rocks and rearranged them enough to wedge his ankle between them. He had to admit that he felt sick to his stomach noticing that his left foot was pointing in an unnatural direction.

He sat up, took hold of his leg like it was a chunk of cordwood, counted to three, and twisted.

Birds flew out of the trees overhead when he screamed.

The pain made beads of sweat stand out on his forehead, but at least now, his foot was facing in the right direction.

Using strips cut from his uniform shirt, he bound the sticks against his leg to make a splint. Using a much longer stick, he was able to get back on his feet.

It hurt like hell. He couldn’t exactly walk, but he could hobble.

Back home in the mountains, he had known people hurt just as bad in a farm accident, or at the sawmill, or even falling off the barn roof that they had been trying to fix. The hospital was a long ways off and getting there — and paying for it — had been beyond the ability of many country people in the Great Depression. Surviving a terrible accident wasn’t always a blessing because it meant a lingering death with maybe some moonshine to dull the pain. Better to fall and break your neck than suffer.

He knew that by tomorrow morning that he would likely have a fever. If he didn’t get help by then, he would probably die, too weak to move — infection finishing off what the fall had not. The Army doctors could fix him up — if he could get there in time.

“Ain’t time to give up yet,” he told himself, and started his slow, painful hobble toward the stream he had seen from the top of the cliff.

Cole hadn’t seen any maps and he didn’t know the name of this stream or this valley, but he knew the simple truth of water, which was that small streams flowed into bigger streams, which flowed into rivers. Along the banks of a river, there would be help.

He soon reached the running water. The sound of it gave him solace, for running water meant life. He knew this stream would flow into the Imjin River, which in turn flowed past the Army outpost.

Of course, there might be more than a few Chinese between here and there, but he tried not to worry about that yet.

The water was still muddy from all the monsoon rains, but he didn’t care. His canteen was gone, so with great effort, Cole got down on his belly and drank his fill like some wild animal at a watering hole. He sucked in gulps of the gritty water through blood lips, thinking that he had never tasted anything so good.

A little while later, he realized that he needed to urinate. He was not reassured to see his red-tinged flow spattering on the sand. The blood surely meant he had internal injuries. He’d thought that maybe he had a day to find help, but maybe he’d been wrong about that. Maybe he had a few hours.

He trudged along the bank of the stream, which ran swiftly, perhaps ten feet across. Rocks and brambles lined the far shore, but he was lucky to have the sandy side where the going was easier.

He found comfort in the sound of running water against the backdrop of utter quiet. There was something mysterious in the babbling of water, as if it spoke a message he couldn’t quite hear. Then again, maybe he was already getting delirious if he was listening for the stream to tell him something.

The stream did remind him of being a boy back home in the mountains, running his trapline. Back then, would he ever have thought that he would be limping along a stream in Korea? Not likely. He’d never even heard of the place.

Cole wondered if he ever would get home again. He wouldn’t have minded wandering that stream again. He wouldn’t have minded seeing Norma Jean Elwood, either. But he supposed that this remote valley in Korea was as good a place to die as any.

He pushed the thought from his mind. You ain’t dead yet.

Although the fight at the fort had started at dawn, the shadows already stretched long and the sun was sinking toward the mountaintops. The day seemed too short, but he was missing a big chunk of it. He must have been knocked out longer than he realized.

He pressed on as long as he could, but as it grew darker, he knew that he would have to stop for the night. He had no light of any kind, and if he stumbled and fell in the dark, he wasn’t sure that he would have the energy to get back up.

He was also getting cold. And hungry. If he was going to do something about those two things, the time to do it was while he still had some daylight. Whatever food and matches he’d had in his pockets had been ripped away in the fall, so he would have to try something else.

Cole kept going until he found a wide, sandy bend in the stream where the waterway deepened and slowed, the current moving like a smooth brown muscle. Slowly, painstakingly, he gathered what he needed for a fire. First, he needed tinder. He found something that resembled milkweed and gathered the feathery tufts. Then he found bone-dry kindling that was buried deep in a pile of flood drift.

Using the walking stick for support, he managed to lower himself to his knees. Clearing a space in the sand, he built a fire lay that resembled an Indian teepee — bigger sticks on the outside, with a heart of fine shavings and the weed tuft. His hands shook, whether from cold or weakness he couldn’t say.

There was no shortage of flint, and he held a sharp-edged piece in one hand and struck the stone with the spine of his knife.

It took a couple of tries, but he got some sparks. They skewed away and winked out, but he directed them the next time at the heart of tuft and shavings. Finally, a spark landed and lit the tuft. He blew gently, and the smoking ember turned into a tiny flame. The fire spread and grew, catching on the outer layers of the teepee. He felt welcome warmth on his face.

He knew that it was something of a risk, having a fire out here in Indian country. But if he didn’t have a fire, the risk was that during the cool of night in his condition, he might die of exposure. Besides, there was no telling what critters might be prowling the night. Wolves and even tigers had once roamed these mountains before being wiped out by Japanese hunters decades before. These predators were supposedly gone now, but there were stories about a few surviving in the more remote places. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing now, to get eaten by a tiger?

With the small fire going, he turned his attention to filling his empty belly. He had not eaten since the night before and getting this far down the bank of the stream had taken all his energy.

He had no rifle, not that he had seen any game, anyway. There wasn’t any time to trap.

However, there would be fish in that deep water in the stream. He just didn’t have a fishing pole, hooks, or any bait.

Cole considered his options. What he did have was a hand grenade.

As a boy, he remembered how he had once gone with his pa and some friends to the river. They had climbed into a leaky old skiff that the men had trouble rowing in the current. It hadn’t helped that the men had been about half-drunk, or maybe mostly drunk, which wasn’t unusual for his pa. These drunken fishermen had gotten hold of a few sticks of dynamite, which was popular then for the removal of stumps and large rocks from farm fields.

“We are gonna do us some hillbilly fishin’,” his pa announced. “Best cover your ears, boy.”

Cole did as he was told, then watched as his father lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it far out into the river.

The resulting explosion had sent a wave that nearly swamped the boat. Cole had found himself more excited than terrified. The men whooped. And then, in their drunken fashion, they had paddled the boat around to scoop up the stunned fish on the surface of the river.

“Time for some hillbilly fishin’,” Cole said.

He pulled the pin on the grenade and tossed it into the deep water, then threw himself down in the sand.

The grenade lifted a geyser of water several feet in the air and shattered the stillness of the valley. He hoped to hell that the Chinese hadn’t heard that.

He saw a couple of fish on the surface, just as he had hoped, but the fish began to drift away on the current. Cole realized that he had miscalculated. How would he get at these fish in his condition?

But as luck would have it, the blast had tossed one fish onto the bank nearby. Not fully stunned, the fish flopped around in an effort to get back into the water. Cole pounced on it, his ribs screaming in protest as he did so.

Soon, scaled and gutted, he had the fish on a stick over the fire. He didn’t know what kind of fish it was, maybe something like a Korean small-mouth bass, but it smelled delicious. He could barely wait for it to finish roasting, and he then picked the bones clean and threw them into the stream along with the offal so as not to attract any critters.

He stretched out on the sand next to the fire, letting it be his guardian. The stars burned overhead. They had been there before him and would still be there long after he was gone. The question was, would he be going tonight?

Cole didn’t fall asleep so much as he passed out.

He awoke a few hours later in the gray light of dawn. The fire had burned down to coals and he felt cold. His whole body ached and he felt feverish. But the pain felt good in a way because it meant that he was still alive.

With an effort, he managed to get back to his feet.

Covering the first twenty feet that morning took him half an hour. He was that stiff.

“Gonna have to pick up the pace,” he told himself.

It was easier said than done, and mostly he was dragging his hurt leg, but the next twenty feet took considerably less time to cover. He kept going.

By the time he reached the Imjin River, the sun was high overhead. There wasn’t any sign yet of the U.S. forces. He might still have miles to go following the riverbank before he came to any friendly forces — assuming that he didn’t run into the Chinese first. Helpless as he was, they would make short work of him.

Also, he saw that he had a logistical problem. He needed to cross the stream. He was on the eastern shore, which meant that the stream itself blocked him from following the Imjin downriver.

Slowly, Cole waded into the stream. He hated water, having almost drowned as a boy during a trapping mishap. The water was deeper here where the stream emptied into the river, and he took his time, fighting against the tug of the current. If he went under, that would be that. He didn’t have the strength or agility to do anything like swim. He cursed himself for not crossing the stream earlier, where it had been shallow, but he hadn’t always been in his right mind.

When he finally reached the opposite bank, he had to crawl out and rest for a while. When he lifted his head, the sun had traveled some distance and he was shivering. He realized that he must have passed out again.

“Better get moving, you dumb hillbilly,” he urged himself. He doubted that he would survive a second night out here at the mercy of the elements and animals, so he pushed on.

It was just getting dark when he saw the bridge ahead, then trucks and soldiers. To his relief, they were Americans. In fact, this was the same bridge that the tanks under Lieutenant Dunbar had protected during the monsoon flood by blasting debris out of the river.

He tried to call out to the soldiers, but his voice was a croak. He had no choice but to keep hobbling. The sentry on duty at the bridge clearly saw him, but ignored him. Then Cole realized that the man thought the ragged, bloody figure holding himself up with a stick was a Korean peasant.

“Go away, you damn gook,” the soldier said. “No civilians across the bridge. No ticky, no laundry, get it? Now, beat it!”

Cole kept shambling forward, his voice a rusty rasp in his parched throat. “American,” was all that he got out.

“Yeah, I’m American,” the soldier said, annoyed. He took a step toward the figure on the road and raised his rifle butt, intending to teach the peasant a lesson. Then he halted and stared, wide-eyed, as he recognized that the ragged figure wore a torn U.S. uniform and had an American face, though bloodied and bruised.

The sentry hurried to help him, shouting for a medic.

“Holy cow, buddy,” the sentry said, getting an arm around Cole to support him. “What happened to you?”

“I fell,” Cole said.

For Cole, the fighting was over. A medic helped him into a Jeep and rushed him to the aid station. Early the next morning, when there was enough light to fly, choppers arrived to airlift him and other wounded to a MASH Unit. It would be the start of a painful recovery and a long journey from Korea to Japan to the United States, but Caje Cole was finally on his way home.