World War III

I wiped at the wound. He’d turned the bleed-off wheel to full-open about the time the counterattack began. Bullets ripped through the wooden structure as if it were only cardboard. The south wall looked like the back of a target range silhouette. Sections of the interior chalk and paper wallboard had been blasted loose and Caffey could see the splintered round holes the size of a man’s finger in the outside wall. Chunks of pink fiberglass insulation and white chalk littered the floor around him. A grenade had blown the metal door completely off its hinges and through the shattered door frame Caffey could see into the breaker. Oil had surrounded the first vehicle and was closing in on the rocket-launcher as its driver tried desperately to escape in reverse.

“Able! Baker! Goddamnit, answer me!”

“I think they’ve had it,” came a terse reply. It was the helicopter pilot. “But we’re blasting the shit out of these monkeys, Colonel.”

Caffey crawled to a spot where he could see the gunship. It had made one strafing pass and was about a mile away, turning for a second run. “Don’t come back this way!” Caffey yelled at the aircraft. He pressed the talkie transmit button. “Lieutenant! For chrissake, follow orders! Circle east! East! Don’t come back down the breaker! Strike laterally! They can’t see you coming from the east!”

The Huey gunship seemed to hover indecisively a moment like a dragonfly deciding which lily pad to light on next. Its rotors whipped up a frenzy of loose snow as it just sat in the air.

“Do it!” Caffey yelled. “East!”

The chopper moved. Maybe the pilot didn’t hear. Maybe he didn’t want to hear because he began another strafing run, fast and low, barely off the ground. “Tallyho!” was the last thing Caffey heard from the pilot as the machine sped toward the column at an altitude approximately level with the top of the pipeline.

“No!” Caffey screamed.

If the helicopter fired a single round, Caffey didn’t see it. Two hundred Soviet soldiers must have opened up on it as the Huey raced into range. The helicopter didn’t even get close. The explosion disintegrated it in a shower of flame and twisted wreckage.

“Goddamn you!” Caffey pounded his fist on the floor. “Goddamn you!”

The back door of the pump house burst open. Caffey rolled frantically to his back, leveling the M-16 at the figure that rushed in. It was Parsons.

“Colonel!”

“Here!” Caffey wiped blood out of his eye. “Where’s—”

“Dead,” Parsons said. He ran to Caffey and scooted to his knees. “Merano, Green, Pitts… they’re all dead.” He’d been hit in the forearm, Caffey noticed. Blood oozed down over his glove. “I saw the chopper get it.” He nodded at the door. “We’d better get out of here, Colonel. There’s only three of us left.”

Caffey glanced through the broken doorway toward the breaker. The oil was still spreading. Both vehicles were stuck in the stuff, their tracks churning in it. Soldiers were moving in all directions trying to get away from it. Caffey looked at Parsons. “We just have one more thing to do, Lieutenant.” He withdrew a phosphorus grenade from his jacket and pulled himself up. “Help me shut off this bleeder-valve. The idea’s to burn the sonofabitches, not blow up the goddamn station.”

It took their combined strength and more than a minute’s straining against the pipe’s back pressure to turn the valve wheel a full revolution to the closed position. When it was done they ran to the rear door without looking back. Kate lay with her head down and her weapon pointed at the rocket launcher as Caffey and Parsons dove into the hole behind her. The side of the building above her position was chewed and scarred by a hundred bullet holes.

Caffey pulled the pin and held the safety spoon against the grenade in his tight grip. “Keep your faces covered after I throw this little mother,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of heat and a lot of smoke and God knows what else.”

Parsons nodded.

“Kate.” Caffey nudged her. “Goddamn it, forget the sonofabitches and get down here!” But she didn’t move. “Goddamn — Kate? Major!” He pulled her cartridge belt and she slid backwards into his arms.

“Kate!” He rolled her on her side. A ribbon of dried blood streaked the side of her face from a wound above her hairline. The M-16 she was holding still had its original clip locked in it. She’d been killed in the first minute. “Oh, no,” he said in a whisper. “Oh, shit… no!”

“You’d better throw that thing,” Parsons urged beside him. “There’s just two of us left… and I think they know it.” He made a gesture toward the column. “They’re coming, Colonel.”

Caffey emptied the air from his lungs in a raging scream and threw the grenade with all his strength.

The safety spoon sprang clear in the air, starting the chemical reaction that ignited the phosphorus. The grenade sailed in a long parabolic arc, trailing smoke through bright sunlight. The clouds had finally broken and let through great shafts of light. But the static scene lasted only as long as it took the grenade to return to earth.