Arc Light (56 page)

He looked through the green leaves and saw the corpsman, frozen with his hands just below Cool J's breastbone in mid-press of his CPR, staring ahead in shock. Monk rose up to see through the branches of the shattered tree the wreckage that had been marines strewn all about the beach and into the woods in the thinning smoke.

He felt as much as heard the heavy shells thudding sporadically up and down the beach. He sensed motion and turned in time to see the corpsman rushing forward with his medical kit and rifle.

“Hey!” Monk yelled, scrambling over to Cool J to continue the lifesaving CPR.

Cool J was dead. It was clear on first sight.

“Come on!”
rang out above the now totally surreal sounds of battle, coming to Monk through aching ears that were closed to most sound.
“First and Second squads—get your asses moving!”

It was Gunny. Monk saw him picking men off their stomachs and throwing them bodily toward the Russian positions. He kicked one man who didn't move, then kicked another who got up like a startled animal and ran for the fighting. One by one Gunny picked his way through, leaving the dead in their places, cursing and kicking the living to send them off to join the dead.

With one last look at Cool J and a squeeze of his arm, Monk got to his feet to run forward toward Gunny.
“Goddammit, Lance Corporal!”
Gunny yelled. “You get with the sixty and move 'em on! Keep headin' inland! Don't stop!”

“Aye aye, Gunny!”
Monk yelled on instinct, his entire body quivering as he ran toward the roar of guns. His feet fell on the earth in great plops, his body jarred and twisted with each uncertain step. He forced himself forward against the air-splitting sound of bullets flying by his body—random but deadly—blocking everything else out but the motion of his legs as he squinted and grimaced in anticipation of any one of the dozens of bullets tearing a wound open in his body.

Great crashing sounds and red-hot fire erupted in the woods around him every few seconds. With each explosion Monk cringed in expectation of great pain but felt only the jabbing at his ears and the burning on his exposed arms and neck. Death was everywhere, shot out, shredding trees and humans indiscriminately and peppering the ground with large droplets of hot steel rain. And in between, the woods were alive with streaking bullets. Leaves shook. Bark splintered off trees. The closer ones made their brief presence known with a cutting or buzzing sound as they missed by feet or inches in the randomness of life and death in war.

Human remains littered the landscape. A piece here, a bit of equipment with something still attached there.
One man or two?
the question Monk's mind would involuntarily pose as he stepped high into the air over this human pulp or that man's smoldering torso. Monk's mind refused to admit the true nature of what lay at his feet, focusing instead with great effort on avoiding the soiling of his boots with the wretched mess.

His breath came in shallow pants now, not winded from his run but ragged from near hysteria. The Beast, cold and slimy, had slithered into the cabin, into his sleeping bag, right up his spine. It embraced his chest tightly, and Monk had trouble breathing.

Stick!
Monk thought on seeing his shipmate, his heart speeding as his running legs slowed. “Oh, man, shit!” He ran on. He ran from the legless, tattered body of his squadmate. It was too horrible, not because Stick's wounds differed from the others that had come before, but because of the paper-white face that lay undisturbed atop the wreckage, so clearly identifying the owner of the various parts. Monk tried to escape, to escape from Stick, from the long legs of the tall skinny boy.
Z-z-z-zip, zip, zip
—bullets flew by him at incredible speed on all sides. Sounds came from his chest as he ran, freeing themselves through his throat and mouth and betraying for all to see the collapse of his reason. But there was no one to see but the
dead and the horribly wounded who writhed almost blind with pain. The sounds vibrated at Monk's lower lip, which quivered uncontrollably and modulated the stream of sound.

The trees and bodies rushed by—American and, now, the first Russians.
Tattoo—you too, man?
Monk's rational mind asked as he kept running.
“Ah!”
the air came from his lungs as he took an awkward step and smashed through a low limb to avoid Sergeant Simmons, his squad leader, draped over a fighting hole next to two dead Russians. The back half of Simmons's helmetless head was a shiny red, uneven mess.

Monk ducked every time he heard the buzzing sounds splitting the air beside him—far too late to do any good as the bullets passed even before you knew they were there.

The fighting was loud now, closer, and Monk's hearing was returning slowly as the shelling died down. The intensity of the spitting sound of bullets splintering through the trees increased, and Monk zigged one way and then zagged the other as he had done while running the Confidence Course at Parris Island, bent over at the waist and propelling himself toward the familiar sounds of firing from marine weapons. Toward the living.

Bursting straight through thick brush and into a small clearing, Monk saw an M-60 rattling out its rounds, its muzzle partially lost in the shimmer of heat rising above it as it spit short streams of bullets. Monk threw himself down next to the two prone men who manned the gun.

It was Bone and the new kid.

“Reload,” the kid yelled as the last of the belt chinged through the machine gun's chamber.

“Monk! All right, man!” Bone yelled. “Cover us while we change barrels!”

Monk had to look down to see that he still carried his rifle. He raised it to his shoulder without thinking, flicked the selector by feel to
SEMI
, and looked down its black length, his right eye settling behind the round rear sight. His gaze blurred and he had to continually refocus his efforts to find a suitable target. Out of the corner of his eye, Monk could see Smalls, thick mittens on his hands, unscrewing the superhot barrel of the M-60 and then sticking the new barrel on.

Blinking and forcing himself to look down the rifle into the woods ahead, Monk saw a bush shake for an instant and then grow still. Casually he aimed the rifle in its direction. At the same instant that Monk rested the top of the bush on the center blade of the M-16's front sight, a man rose straight up. Monk's immediate reaction was
panic that he had almost shot the man, who began to run away, dropping his rifle and pumping his arms furiously.

It was an easy shot: at less than eighty meters the man ran straight away, not dodging and weaving as taught. Centering the sight between his shoulder blades, Monk squeezed the trigger and the rifle bucked once.

As the brief blur from the heat of the blast dissipated, Monk could see the man falling forward, his back arched and his blond hair suddenly visible as his helmet flew off.

The Russian disappeared to the ground, and Monk felt a punch land on his arm.

“Shot,
man!” Bone yelled, holding the flat of his palm up for a high five.

I didn't mean to shoot the guy,
Monk thought to himself. The Russian National Guard unit that faced them began to crumble, the woods in front filled with running men. Bone's M-60 opened up again, reaping its harvest in great swaths as it and other unseen guns cut down the fleeing men.

Fuck it!
Monk thought as he began to jerk the trigger of his M-16 roughly, missing most of his targets because of the poor form but seeing some men fall just from the statistics of war. He never fired more than once at a man; if he missed he reaimed at another as they climbed the bare hill opposite the beachhead a couple of hundred meters away. It was only fair, he figured, since he didn't have it in for any one of them in particular.

When the last of the targets had fallen before reaching the crest of the hill, Bone and the kid reloaded their machine gun and Bone said, “We better hook back up with the rest of the guys. Where do you think they are?”

Monk dropped his rifle and lowered his head into the crooks of his arms. He jammed his eyes shut so hard he heard a rushing sound in his ears.

“Hey, T Man,” Bone said, “what's wrong? You
hit?”

Monk shook his head, and as Bone persisted in trying to talk to him and gently pull his arms away from his face, Smalls went back to look for their squad leader. Monk kept his head buried in his arms and tried to sleep, tried desperately to forget everything and never remember again.

Chandler felt a trickle of excitement run down his spine as he looked out the window. After eighteen hours on the plane, almost half of it on the ground at bombed-out Stuttgart airport awaiting a new shipment of fuel straight from air force trucks, they were moments away from leaving the aircraft for good. The plane was very low now, a few hundred feet off the ground. Golding or Frazier was working the throttle all the time—up a little, then down and back up all the way to a roar.

The plane burst out over the airport environs and the engine was cut to idle. Below, the standard high chain link fence and cleared, grassy, tabletop surface streamed by. About a hundred yards inside the high fence there was concertina wire, coils of barbed wire running in constant strands parallel to the main fence. Behind the wire, the green grass was scarred with angry gashes of dark brown and black—slit trenches and sand-bagged bunkers filled with the heads of Slovak security forces helmeted in steel. The jet engines whirred to life once again, the pitch of their sound rising quickly, dramatically, and finally roaring, then being throttled back to a low whine.

Runway streamed by underneath. A line of craters stitched across the grass at a steep angle to the runway; the scars of the bombs that had found the concrete were being tended to by engineers who flashed underneath Chandler's window ducking and holding their ears. The plane was flying level over the damaged portion.

Suddenly the engines were cut completely again. The plane sank like a stone, thudding hard on the runway and bouncing back up again, settling back down agonizingly slowly. Chandler's pulse began to race. His new life was about to begin.

As the plane bounced briefly again off the concrete, eating up runway at a prodigious rate, Chandler noticed that they were awfully close to the edge. The wing extended far out over the blue lights and grass. A final squeal of the tires and jarring shake were followed by a ferocious roar from the engines' reverse thrust that, in combination with what had to be maximum application of the brakes, threw Chandler forward hard against the seat belt of the vibrating airplane. Crashing sounds were heard from the galley and a deeper bump from elsewhere behind as loose objects shifted with the force of the deceleration. The aircraft creaked and the brakes moaned, a fact registered more through the soles of David's feet than with his ears.

“Please gather your belongings and prepare to exit through the front galley doors,” Rebecca said with a rapidity sounding almost
urgent. “You may leave your seats, but please brace yourselves for any sudden turns or stops.”

Everyone was up. Chandler took one last look out to see the still speeding plane's turn reveal a long, battered shell of a building, its face pockmarked with holes and its windows gone. The walls above the windows were blackened from the fires that had completed the building's destruction.

A stairway was waiting on the tarmac and, as they came to a hard stop, throwing the standing soldiers forward a step, the stairway was rolled up to the plane.

Chandler got up. The whine of the engines came loudly through the open door of the galley.

The cockpit door burst open.

“Everybody off, right now!” Golding shouted. “Chandler, there should be an Air Mobility Command Combat Control Team down there somewhere.”

Chandler felt the baggage doors underneath the plane jar open. Barnes dashed out the door followed by a stream of men and women.

Chandler turned back to Golding. “What the hell's the deal?”

“Gotta get outa here right now,” Golding said. “There's a flight of bogeys bearin' down. I'd get your men as far away from this airfield as possible.”

It was then that Chandler noticed the wail of a siren through the open door of the plane.
Air raid!
Chandler jostled his way to the door and stepped out onto the small landing of the stairs. Barnes was down beneath, directing men to the mound of camouflaged gear that was growing on the concrete as Slovak soldiers tossed everything to the ground from the plane's open belly.

“Barnes!”
Chandler yelled. “There's an air raid on the way! Get the men to pick up a load, anybody's load, and head 'em off the tarmac to some cover!”

“Sir!”
Barnes acknowledged, turning to relay the order. Soldiers were pouring down the stairs.

Chandler thought,
Air raid,
and then yelled,
“Barnes!
MOPP Level Four!” Full chemical protective gear. Who knew what was loaded on the attacking aircraft?

Chandler headed to his seat for his gear. Bailey stood in the rear of the line exiting first class. When Chandler got to his seat, he noticed through the open door that the cockpit crew was completing their preflight check. He retrieved his chemical gear and rifle from the overhead compartment.

“Major!” It was Golding, twisting around in his seat, already strapped in.

Chandler stepped into the cockpit, expecting more of Golding's shit.

“I just wanted to say—good luck, son.” He extended his right hand up over his seat back, which Chandler shook, along with Frazier's and Gator's.

“Good luck to you,” Chandler said. “By the way, that was the shittiest landing I've ever seen. You almost missed the runway.”

“I did miss the runway,” Golding said. “That was the taxiway we landed on. Runway's got a coupla potholes in it—near as bad as a New York City street.”