MJ-12: Endgame

5

The ground shook constantly as the skies rained metal and the angry shouts of God and Satan pummeled the ears. Miguel Padilla would have given anything for a respite, anything for two minutes of quiet and safety in order to pray and put his soul in God’s hands before rising from his trench again to face the bullets of the Chinese Army.

That wasn’t going to happen, of course. He turned to look at his compatriot, Hugo Contreras, a fellow private in the 2nd Platoon, Company B of the 31st Infantry’s famed Colombia Battalion. Two years ago, they were aimless boys in the poor neighborhoods of Bogotá, resigned to scraping together a meager existence on odd jobs and petty theft. They had volunteered together, gone to Korea together, sent the Chinese fleeing in Operation Thunderbolt.

And now Miguel was sure they would die here on Hill 266, a scrap of a hill called Old Baldy that wasn’t worth a damn to anybody except as something to fight over.

“Come on,” Miguel told Hugo, trying to regain courage. “Let’s show these bastards how Colombians fight.”

Hugo, wide-eyed and covered in mud and sweat and the blood of the dead men around them, nodded nervously, clutching his rifle. “I’m with you. But I’m not a good shot like you.”

This was true. Miguel was the best shot in the squad. In the company. The battalion. Possibly on the entire Korean Peninsula. He pointed to a now vacant machine gun emplacement ten yards off. “When I start shooting, run over there and start firing,” Miguel said. “You don’t have to be a good shot to kill Chinese with a machine gun, yes?”

Hugo smiled this time and nodded quickly, then crouched down and prepared to run. Miguel, meanwhile, set his rifle down and pulled two pistols from his belt — one from his now deceased sergeant, the other from a wounded lieutenant who was in a bunker that would probably not last another hour. The shells rocked the ground around them, the flashes pierced the cold, wet night. He could hear the screams of men on both sides and the barrage of gunfire popping like the sounds coming from the Devil’s own drums.

Miguel had thirteen rounds between his two weapons.

Time to go.

He stood quickly and immediately saw a Chinese face thirty yards away. A second later, the face erupted in a crimson splash from Miguel’s first bullet. The second hit the hand of a Chinese soldier from forty yards out, one gripping a hand grenade. The explosion robbed him of two more targets, but he found three others on his right, another forty-five yards off. Three bullets later they were dead and he ducked back down into the trench.

Hugo was still there. “What the hell, you bastard?” Miguel hissed. “That was your chance!”

But Hugo had no words. He merely stared, on the verge of tears, trembling.

“Mierda,” Miguel sighed. “Let’s try again, okay? I’m going to—”

A gout of flame erupted overhead, prompting both men to duck.

The Chinese had a flamethrower.

“That fucker!” Miguel growled. “Hang on.”

He popped up again, one pistol already extended, and took his shot from just twenty yards out. The bullet went right through the nozzle of the flamethrower, through the Chinese soldier’s right lung and into the tank of fuel behind his body.

The explosion bathed the valley in unholy light — revealing more targets. In the space of five seconds, Miguel took seven more shots. Seven more men died, the last one from nearly a hundred yards away.

A moment later, he was back down in the trench, but Hugo was not there. Ten feet away, Hugo’s body was crumpled on the ground, just short of the machine gun emplacement.

Miguel wanted nothing more than to stop and cry and scream and mourn and take his friend’s body away from this meat grinder. He could do none of those things.

A radio nearby, in the hand of another dead man, sparked to life. “Attention all forces! Retreat! Retreat! We’re about to be overrun! Retreat! Retreat!”

Miguel took one last look at Hugo’s body. “Go with God,” he whispered. Then he ran.

Bullets tore after him as he leaped across the open space and grabbed Hugo’s rifle, crouching behind the machine gun. There were only about fifty rounds left on the machine gun, but Miguel decided to put them to good use. Closing his eyes and reaching out with his mind’s eye, he remembered the terrain in front of him, thinking where the Chinese might try to come next.

He put his finger on the trigger and opened fire, swinging the gun around and targeting the Chinese with short bursts. When the rounds were spent, he took up Hugo’s rifle again and ran, knowing there were fifty less Chinese behind him who could shoot him in the back.

Indeed, he had just gotten his two seconds of silence, and he used it to run like hell for the bottom of the hill.

“Commander, I genuinely don’t give a damn whose order this is, but right now Pork Chop Hill and Old Baldy are being overrun by the Reds, and if you go even one mile north, you’re gonna get dead real fast.”

Colonel William Kern, U.S. Army, stared hard at Danny, as if willing him to make better choices in life, and honestly, Danny couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t like he wanted to drive up into a hellstorm, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Danny could sense the new Variant ahead of him, toward the fighting, and he was afraid that spark of Enhancement in his mind’s eye might wink out at any moment. There wasn’t any time.

“Colonel, I appreciate that, and believe me, I’m not looking forward to going. But I have to. These orders are straight from General Vandenberg himself, and I don’t think anybody here is in a position to countermand them. All I need is a jeep. That’s it,” Danny said.

Kern shook his head sadly. “Jeeps don’t grow on trees, son. I’ve half a mind to make you walk. But—” The colonel raised his hand to cut off Danny’s retort. “You got one. If you don’t bring it back, at least do me a favor and crash it into the Chinese, okay? But really, bring it the hell back in one piece.”

Danny walked out of the farmhouse serving as Kern’s office in some village outside Yeoncheon and made his way to the impromptu motor pool in a nearby barn, where Cal and Rick were already waiting. Both were covered as Marine-enlisted — Cal as a gunnery sergeant, Rick as a lance corporal. Danny had given some thought to covering them all as U.S. Army, since the Army was in charge of the front here, but the customs and nuances would likely escape them all. Their orders would cause them to stick out anyway, so they might as well stick out all the way.

Cal whacked Rick on the arm and both of them saluted Danny, who returned the gesture crisply. Three days in Korea and Rick still hadn’t caught on to the military saluting thing yet, but Cal was an old hand; Danny figured Cal had pretended to be every serviceman except a Coastie by now. “Lance Corporal, go get us a jeep,” Danny said, handing off Kern’s written order. “Make sure we get extra gas.”

Rick ducked inside the barn, leaving Cal and Danny outside. To the north, they could hear the rumble of shelling in the distance, like a gathering storm. A moment later, several Air Force fighters screamed overhead.

“Don’t seem like a good direction to go,” Cal said.

Danny closed his eyes a moment to concentrate, finding the target again in his mind. “I think he’s heading south, away from the fighting. Colonel says they’ve abandoned the hill and the Air Force is bombing it to hell behind them. Should be okay, just… wait.”

Then suddenly there was a second Variant there.

Danny saw the new target in his mind, probably no more than two miles away from the one that had blazed into his consciousness just after they’d returned from Moscow. A second Variant coming south.

Coming from North Korea.

Danny opened his eyes and looked right at Cal. “Gunny, get in there and set a fire under them. I want that jeep now.”

Poor Cal nearly jumped out of his skin, but immediately dashed inside the barn and started raising hell. And Danny began to wonder if they could end up getting two for the price of one there in the middle of the Korean War. If they survived.

Miguel staggered down the road with the rest of his company, as dawn broke over Korea. His squad was all but gone, and all he could do was think of poor Hugo, whose body was probably bombed to hell and back by the U.S. Air Force. Even though he was just a private, Miguel understood the bombing all too well — if the U.N. forces couldn’t keep Old Baldy, they’d make damn sure nobody else could either.

So there would be no body to bring home. Miguel hadn’t even stopped to take any token from Hugo’s body, no dog tags or photos. He would someday go to Hugo’s mother and have nothing to offer other than that her son died in battle, and while Hugo had been scared, he’d died moving toward a gun, moving to help.

It was a small comfort, but it was something. Hugo had not been the bravest of men, but when he’d fought, he’d fought well. What was more, he’d kept everyone’s spirits up with his jokes and his singing and his outsized stories of his exploits back in Bogotá. Miguel, of course, had known full well that Hugo had not, in fact, courted the daughter of a banker or beaten eight men in a row playing darts, but it had been fun all the same.

Miguel, of course, wouldn’t have had any trouble beating eight men in darts. Or eighty, for that matter.

Two weeks earlier, Miguel had woken up from a sound sleep and felt… different. He hadn’t been able to explain it, but it was as though his reflexes and his mind had grown sharper, his hands and eyes acting as one. That day, they had engaged in target practice, and Miguel’s sergeant had been furious to find that Miguel had only registered one shot on target, in the very center.

In fact, all of Miguel’s shots had been on target — they had all gone through the same hole as the first. The second round of practice had gone better, as Miguel had clustered his shots neatly around the center bullseye. This, too, had brought unwanted attention, but in a different way, and by the third round, Miguel had known to place his shots carefully, to make them look random, even though every bullet had landed exactly where he’d wanted.

That night, Miguel had gotten an idea. He’d taken a knife from the mess hall, as well as an old football one of the Americans had lying around. He’d thrown the knife — something he had never done before with any seriousness — using a tree for target practice. Twenty-seven throws had landed in the exact same spot, even when he’d backed up as far as he possibly could and just heaved the knife away from him.

It had been the same with the football. Miguel was strong but untrained, yet he’d been able to land the football right into an empty oil drum from seventy-five yards out without even trying. Without even looking.

Before putting the knife back, he’d sat down at a wooden table in the mess hall and stabbed at the wood in rapid succession. The little experiment had been worthwhile indeed, because Miguel had found he could not place the tip of the knife in the same place every time — he’d almost stabbed himself in the hand, in fact. It was only with firearms or thrown objects that he’d been perfect. It was… odd, to say the least.

But by the time they were deployed to Old Baldy in relief of A Company, Miguel had known it was a blessing. The hill had been under constant attack and bombardment, and the Chinese had spent three horrible days trying to take their position. At one point, one of the sergeants had chided Miguel for not using up his ammunition in defense of the hill, but Hugo and some others had been quick to his defense, having seen Miguel’s newfound ability in action. Every bullet had found a home in the body of an enemy. One of the others, a farm boy named Paco, had counted Miguel’s kills and was up to 173 on the afternoon of the second day. Paco was still on Old Baldy, along with Hugo. Together in death and honor.

Well, at least in death. Honor seemed trivial now. There were only twenty-three men with Miguel now, the remnants of his company who were still able to walk and fight. All of them had the faces of ghosts, men who had seen far more than they would ever be able to take in, knowing that whatever they couldn’t process now would revisit them again in nightmares, over and over, for the rest of their lives.

A shot rang out. And the sergeant next to Miguel fell.

Ambush, he thought as he reflexively hit the dirt, bringing up his weapon and firing into the distance. A Chinese soldier screamed from the ridge above the road, falling down the hill as he died.

“Down! Down!” the officer in charge cried out before he, too, was silenced by a bullet.

The men scattered into ditches and behind the scrubby trees and bushes. The road was shit for cover, but from the sound of it, there seemed to be maybe only twenty or thirty Chinese firing on them — a couple of squads caught behind the lines when the Air Force bombing sealed off their way home.

Miguel crawled over to the fallen officer and grabbed his sidearm. The M1911 only held seven rounds, but Miguel knew he could fire faster and more efficiently than with the M1 rifle he’d been carrying. Using the officer’s body as cover, Miguel looked up and saw movement. Six shots later, six more Chinese were down.

There was more shouting in Chinese, more movement. Miguel caught a glimpse of something on his left flank, fired again, and watched as a Chinese soldier rolled down the side of the hill toward the road. That led to more shouting and shuffling around while Miguel scrambled on his belly to another fallen comrade, grabbing his rifle before diving into a ditch with three other terrified soldiers — two Americans and a fellow Colombian he hadn’t met before. One of the Americans was shouting into his radio in a panic, and Miguel knew just enough English to know he was practically begging for backup.

What was more surprising was the response — someone was coming. That was a rare bit of good news.

“Five minutes,” the American said, holding up five fingers, panic now mingled with hope. “Cinco minutos.”

Thanks for the translation, Miguel thought. He’d been serving long enough to know the basics. The big question was how long they could realistically last. And that meant protecting their flanks, keeping the Chinese in front of them. Miguel pointed toward the right. “Watch there,” he told the soldiers around him in English. “Keep in front.”

The American looked like he wanted to argue, but instead just nodded and tapped his compatriot on the shoulder, speaking in too-rapid English with a horrible accent Miguel couldn’t follow. Miguel turned to his countryman. “What’s your name?” he said in Spanish.

“Pablo,” the man said, eyes wide as saucers. Miguel automatically assumed the man wouldn’t make it out alive, and felt bad for thinking it immediately after.

“Cover the left flank. If it moves, fire. We can’t let them get on top of the ridge on either side of the road, you hear me?”

Pablo nodded and brought his weapon to bear once more, while Miguel took stock. They had two extra rifle cartridges between them. He hoped the Chinese were merely scouts, rather than a vanguard of a larger assault. Otherwise, they would all die.

The Americans started firing to the right, and Miguel saw one man fall — and two others scurry between the trees. He turned, waited patiently, and within the space of ten seconds, found his targets. Hearing Pablo fire, he turned back to his left, finding another target and another victim.

“Damn, son, you’re a fine shot,” the American with the radio said. “How’d you do that?”

“Suerte. Luck,” Miguel said, hunkering down again. “Watch. Careful.”

Ahead, more shots were fired. There were a couple other clusters of still-living U.N. troops ahead, but the shots grew less frequent. Miguel imagined they were being winnowed down. This wasn’t some kind of scouting mission; this was an assault. The Reds were going around Old Baldy to strike at their underbelly — and Miguel was nestled right in that underbelly.

“What the hell?” the other American said in wonder. The man was staring forward, not toward the right flank where he should have been. Miguel turned and dropped two more Chinese where the American had been slacking.

“American! You watch right!” he yelled in English, but the man kept staring forward. Miguel followed his gaze, and then saw why.

An entire squad of Chinese were walking up the road, out in the open, about seventy-five yards ahead. They were alert and ready, but just walking. No cover. Nothing. A stroll down the street.

“Tu funeral,” Miguel muttered, bringing his rifle up and focusing on the point man of the group, a very serious-looking Chinese man with a baby face. Miguel fired.

The Chinese waved a hand. The shot… missed.

“Qué es esto?” Miguel breathed. He took another shot. Another miss.

The radioman also opened fire, squeezing off three shots. All misses.

Then Miguel saw chips of bark and tree flying away off either side of the road. Ricochets.

Miguel’s mind raced, and he quickly came to an impossible conclusion. If he was somehow lucky enough to land every shot, it stood to reason that someone else might be lucky enough to cause them to miss.

From up ahead, he heard a man yell “Down!” in English, and saw another American lob a grenade at the oncoming Chinese. The enemy point man lazily moved his hand toward the grenade while it was still ten yards out — and it changed course in mid-flight, heading right back to the ditch it had been thrown from.

Miguel ducked just in time. Dirt and pebbles rained down on them as the grenade exploded. The debris was sticky, but he didn’t have time to think about that too much, because his problems in that moment were so much bigger.

“Run!” the American radioman screamed. He and his compatriot took off quickly down the road. Miguel didn’t even have time to call out to them before they were shot in the back and fell. Miguel rose up with his rifle and fired again, this time landing a shot against one of the Chinese in the rear of the squad. His second shot whistled past his ear before he hit the deck again — had he not moved ever so slightly after firing, he’d be dead.

Pablo turned to him, tears in his eyes. “What do we do?”

Miguel weighed his options. Retreat, whether straight back or up the hills on either side, would get them killed quickly. They needed a distraction.

Suddenly, he heard a jeep motor coming up from behind them. Their reinforcements. But they didn’t know what they were up against. All those bullets ricocheting around…. Miguel looked around for the radio, but the now dead American had taken it with him.

“Don’t come!” he yelled, turning behind him. “Retreat! Retreat!”

The jeep rounded the corner and was greeted with a steady staccato of Chinese rifle fire. They were all going to die.

But a blinding white light and a massive explosion suddenly filled the air.

“The Air Force!” Miguel shouted, grabbing Pablo by the shirt. “Move!”

They immediately started running back down the road to the jeep, which had stopped. There were three men inside — two Americans, one of them a black man, and what looked to be a Korean. “Go! Go! We go now!” Miguel yelled. The white American stood up and motioned them to hurry, while the Korean…

Another blinding white light and explosion sent Miguel and Pablo to the dirt. For a moment, Miguel could’ve sworn the light had come from the jeep itself. From the Korean man. But it had to be a trick of the light or something. So he got up and kept moving.

Pablo was right there with him — until the Chinese started firing again. Miguel’s countryman went down without a sound. Miguel kept running.

A third flash and explosion silenced the rifle fire, and several strong hands lifted Miguel into the back of the jeep. “Others,” Miguel panted. “There are others. Friendlies.”

“Go!” the white man yelled.

Miguel struggled to sit up. “No! Others! Reinforcements!”

The black man sat down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Ain’t no reinforcements. We gotta go.” He then closed his eyes a moment. “He’s fine, Danny.”

The jeep tore back down the road at high speed, the futile pops of Chinese fire fading in the distance. “Why? Why do that?”

The white man — an officer from the leaf on his collar — turned back to face Miguel and, to his surprise, responded in Spanish. “I’m sorry, soldier. But we had to get you out of there. You’re more important than you realize.”

Miguel took several long seconds to process this, then ventured a guess. “Because I have good aim?”

“How good?” the officer asked.

“I never miss. Ever.”

“Yes. Probably that.”

“Except there was a man back there, I couldn’t hit him. He sent my shots flying back at me,” Miguel said. “He stopped a grenade in mid-air and sent it back to the American who threw it.”

The officer frowned. “Let’s get you back. You have a lot to tell us.”