Jack had caught the symbolism immediately. Maggie’s drawers…the flag waved on the target range that signified that the poor recruit on the firing line had not only missed the bull’s-eye, but had, in fact, missed the entire target. He’d laughed out loud, a harsh, nervous bark, when he got the joke.
“Tradition,” Blandings had told him. “Marines did the same damned thing at least as far back as Khe Sanh.”
After the recording of the national anthem crashed to its home-of-the-brave conclusion, Jack dropped his salute and trotted easily to the nearest sandbagged trench along with several other Marines. There was no formation held this morning—that was reserved for Mondays—but Ol’ Buck and a Quarter was heavily populated, and there were always a dozen or two men and women crossing the grinder when Colors sounded. Lazy seconds later, with lots of time to spare, the first detonation erupted from the grinder, spraying dirt, gravel, and smoke skyward.
“One of these days,” Jack said, leaning back against a sandbag wall and feeling the ground shudder and buck beneath him, “those people are going to get smart and send a volley of hypes after us.” Hypersonic artillery rounds would reach the hilltop target before the sound of their firing had covered five kilometers.
“Nah,” PFC Duberand said. He was a big man—a “fat tray” in Company 4239 who’d trimmed down into hard muscle. He was one of fifteen of Jack’s boot-camp buddies who’d been deployed to the Vlad theater with him. “They ain’t that smart.”
“Shows what you know, newbie,” Corporal Virginia Casey replied. She was an old Siberian hand, a Marine who’d been at the fire base since late July. “Wait’ll you find a company of NC sappers coming through the wire on your watch some night!” Another mortar round thundered, close by, and the Marines hunkered down a bit lower.
“Shit,” Lonnie Costantino said, brushing a scattering of gravel from his active-camo body armor. “If they’re so freakin’ shit-hot, how come we’re up here looking down at them down there?”
“Maybe they don’t like this any more than we do,” Jack said.
“Fuckin’-A, Flash,” Casey said. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the NCA, it’s that the opposition is as tired, as dirty, as hot, as hungry, and as fucking sick of this fucking war as we are.”
“That’s right,” Corporal Slidell said. “They’re just like us, ’cept they talk funny. Hell, they wouldn’t want to upset the nice, friendly little balance of power we’ve worked out here.” Two more mortar rounds whistled in with a savage whump-whump.
Jack looked at Slidell—“call me ‘Slider,’”—with interest. “You mean they don’t want to kick our asses into the Sea of Japan?”
“Oh, sure. They would if they could. But they know that trying it’ll buy ’em another Hill 229. The poor SOBs got enough trouble back home across the river without bleedin’ themselves dry trying to break our line.”
That seemed true enough. Precious little news had come out of North China since the war had started, but POWs and deserters spoke of street fighting in Beijing and Harbin, and of the possibility of wide-scale civil war. Even so, the Chinese had a well-deserved reputation for being able to field huge armies, inexhaustibly supplied by new levies of peasant troops. Some wit in the company had actually calculated that if the Marines killed one Chinese soldier per second for the next twenty years, the Chinese birthrate would still produce a larger standing army than they had now, and that invading Russia was simply Beijing’s way of reaching UN-mandated population controls before the year 2050.
There was a long silence, and then Marines began rising from their shelters. Over in front of the mess hall, the familiar red banner went up, accompanied by shouted jeers and insults. Maggie’s drawers.
He wondered if the Marines would lie to the enemy and wave the red flag one bright morning when the enemy barrage had actually killed someone. Or if they’d keep waving the flag if the Chinese lobbed a few rounds extra someday, after the red flag had gone up. Hell, maybe the Chinese weren’t any more anxious to rock the boat than the Marines were.
Standing, shrugging his torso armor into a more comfortable position and straightening his helmet, Jack walked toward the wall of sandbags and tightly coiled razor wire that made up Fire Base 125’s inner bastion. Covered firing positions, carefully camouflaged, housed Marine riflemen and SLWs. Beyond, the ground, which dropped away down a steep hill toward Chancre Valley below, had been churned and blasted into a flat and open killing ground, one heavily laced with claymore and robotic mines, with teleoperated pop-up weapons towers and hopper-poppers, with sensors that could pinpoint a stealthy man’s heartbeat and relay targeting data that could nail him with fire from a dozen separate positions.