Jae Chong sought refuge in a four-movie-theater complex off the Ginza strip, and in the flickering darkness he had time to think. The difficulty would now be how to get out and make his way home, let alone make the two calls about the blood supply shipment. He tried to remember whether there was a phone in the lobby, but he couldn’t recall. He’d been moving too fast for the clerk in the box office to look down and see the bloodstains on his pants.
Inside the theater the smell of the fake leather seats triggered a smell memory in him, and momentarily he was back during his first meet with the other two agents in his cell, eleven years before. Tazuko Komura was just fifteen then, and Chong recalled that the last time he’d seen her, only a few days before she blew up the Tokyo-Niigata express, her eyes were those of an old woman, weary and frightened that the next knock on the door or the person behind you was from Japan’s counterespionage service.
Chong had thought then that she wouldn’t risk leaving her bag — any piece of unaccompanied luggage would immediately raise suspicion, inviting the conductors to inspect it. No, he’d known then that she’d stay with the bomb till the end. And that’s what he’d do too. Only a crazy would think he had a chance, now that every cop in the Tokyo prefecture would be looking for him.
Maybe there was a phone in the rest room. The movie, which he hadn’t been following, now moved from a vast field of corn and blue sky into a dark passage. He eased out of his seat then and made his way out toward the men’s room, passing several teenagers and an elderly couple sitting down in the lobby waiting for the next show in the adjoining theater to start. None of them took any notice of him.
There was no phone. Another man entered, in his late sixties or early seventies, suit and tie, and stood at the urinal two down from him, trying to hit the piece of camphor ice with his stream. He’d do nicely, Chong thought, noting that the man was alone and about his size. The man had a paunch, but better too large than too small. Chong waited until the man was behind him, then struck out with his elbow, slamming him against one of the cubicle doors. Chong’s right foot followed, smashing the man on the right side of his face, the force of the kick driving him straight into the cubicle. Chong went right in after him, stamping on the flush ball set into the floor, causing the toilet to roar as the old man began to push himself back from the cistern. Chong hit him with a left. The man fell again, knocking himself out on the edge of the toilet. Chong heard the washroom door open. He stepped out of the cubicle, kicked the kid he saw in the groin and smashed his right fist against the boy’s temple, knocking him unconscious. Then Chong returned to the cubicle, pulled off the old man’s jacket and pants, put them in his plastic drugstore bag, and walked out. A teenager, a boy, was approaching the washroom.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” Chong said. “Drunk’s been sick all over.”
The kid, frowning in consternation, nodded and backed off, not quite sure what to do. Chong disappeared back into the theater. The damn cornfields were back again, but he didn’t mind; the light helped him find a seat in an empty back row, where he slipped off his trousers, put on the old man’s trousers and jacket, and walked out. It was only now that he felt the bump in the jacket’s left inside pocket. He took it out and saw it was thick with hundred-yen notes, a small fortune to a worker like Chong. The irony was that there were no coins for a phone. He’d have to break one of the yen notes.
Colonel Melbaine still had Alpha Company on the top half of Disney Hill’s ridgeline waiting for the TACAIR bombardment to stop before they could sweep forward and force the remaining dug-in Chinese to come out or die in the tunnels.
“I ain’t in no hurry,” D’Lupo told Martinez.
“Neither am I,” Doolittle added. “We’ve got a ringside seat, mate. Besides, far as I’m concerned, they can bomb till hell freezes over.” Just then they heard sporadic firing behind and below them.
“That’s a friggin’ AK down there,” D’Lupo opined, turning his head to look a hundred yards or so down the slope. Now, added to the explosions of the TACAIR bombs, they could hear the distinctive popping of USVUN M-16s, followed by the boomp boomp boomp of mortar rounds taking off, then the sound of a bugle.
“Fucking hell!” Martinez said, swinging his rifle from the top of the ridge, pointing it downhill instead.
“What the fuck’s that, man?” a greenhorn called from the next group of foxholes on their left flank.
“It’s a fucking Chinese bugle, man,” D’Lupo informed him. “That way they don’t have to use no radio.”
“They ain’t got no fucking radio,” Martinez said.
“What the fuck’s going on?” came another voice.
Then, whether or not it was a wild guess or whether he’d seen the outline of a PLA soldier illuminated by the burst of his Kalashnikov, Doolittle yelled, “Chinese!”
“Where the hell they come from, man?” a black soldier asked.
“From the fucking tunnels, you dork.”
“Must’ve crept down past us, man.”
D’Lupo had already switched off his safety. “Past us, crap, man. They’re coming out of the tunnels at the base of the hill, so’s they come right up in the middle of the fucking battalion, man, and behind us.” A figure came running at them from the direction of the bottom of the hill. D’Lupo fired and brought him down with the first shot.
“No — no — no!” came a frantic, screaming voice. “Americans! Amer—”
“Flares!” a platoon lieutenant from Bravo yelled, coming up on D’Lupo’s right. He didn’t want to illuminate his own troops, but with one blue on blue already, he had to chance it, yelling out “Flare!” again so that all those in Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie companies at the hill’s base could get their heads down and/or freeze to deny the Chinese any sign of movement. D’Lupo saw at least four or five PLA within a hundred feet of his nine-man section. Added to the noise of the air bombs there was now a cacophony of machine-gun bursts, purple and white flashes of exploding grenades, the firing of rifles, and amid them the crash of 82mm mortars, falling trees, and bushes blown sky-high, the fresh-smelling dirt from their roots coming down with other debris of stone and shattered wood on the helmets of the USVUN troops, most of whom were the Americans from Melbaine’s battalion.
In the dying and flickering gray of flare light, Martinez cut down two PLA rushing his foxhole from the cover of low shrub while the American that D’Lupo had shot was being dragged by his buddy toward the foxholes of D’Lupo’s Alpha Company squad.
“What the fuck you doing, man?” the buddy yelled at D’Lupo. “Oh, man!” The soldier was crying with rage. “You dumb bastards! You killed my buddy! You—”
“Shut up, man!” the black soldier said, reaching out toward the downed man’s body. The soldier released his buddy and let fly with a left that missed the black soldier, causing the puncher to overbalance and fall. The black soldier grabbed the man’s collar. “Listen to me, man. Your buddy ain’t dead. Still a pulse, man! Get a grip on yourself. Now git down and shut the fuck up! Medic!” he yelled. “Man down—”
Abruptly, he stopped shouting. One of the shots crackling overhead had hit the wounded man’s head, exploding his brain over other members of the squad. By the time the medic made it through the whistling shrapnel of a mortar round, the crying soldier’s buddy was dead, Martinez dragging the two bodies in front of him for extra cover. Martinez saw a Chinese fifteen feet away coming at him with a Kalashnikov look-alike, a T-56, on full automatic, its bayonet catching flare light. Martinez and Doolittle opened up, an M-60 tearing the air to the right of them, and they saw the Chinese soldier’s body stop, torso and legs lurching, an arm separating, the T-56 crashing to earth. Martinez, exhilarated by the kill, heart thumping in fear, cast a sideways glance at D’Lupo. “You all right, Lupe?”
D’Lupo was throwing up. Martinez put his hand on his buddy’s shoulder. “Fucking accident, man. We all thought it was Charlie.”
“Yeah,” Doolittle chimed in. “What’re we s’posed to do when the fuckers are amongst us? Ask for fucking ID? Son of a bitch shoulda yelled at us ‘fore he started running.”
“That’s right,” Martinez said. “Gotta put it behind ya, Lupe.” But Martinez knew that D’Lupo would never be able to put it behind him.
“Wish to Christ it was me,” D’Lupo said, his voice taut with anxiety.
“Aw, rats,” Martinez said. “Listen, I’ll tell the captain.”
Doolittle saw a shadow in flare light. Was it a tree or a well-camouflaged gook or one of his own? He fidgeted with his rifle, holding his fire. “We don’t have to tell anyone, Marty.”
“Yeah, we do,” Martinez said.
“Yeah,” D’Lupo said, his voice barely audible in the bedlam erupting all around them. “Yeah — we do.”
D’Lupo was right, not just about having to report his blue on blue, but in having quickly assessed what had gone terribly wrong amid the USVUN units on the long southern slope of Disney Hill. The Chinese, instead of fleeing north of the ridge atop the hill or lying low until the TACAIR bombardment ceased, had come back, streaming through the tunnels like so many ants erupting out of exit-cum-entrances at the base of the southern slope and in the middle of the Americans. There were more U.S. infantry killed by friendly fire in the predawn darkness than all those accidentally shot in the Vietnam War.
The Chinese showed no fear and no mercy, taking full advantage of the fact that, having burst forth from the tunnels— sometimes only yards from an American position — they were immune from the American artillery some miles south of the hill because of the well-known American and USVUN refusal to shell their own troops.
With dawn approaching and the end of the Enterprise’s bombing runs just north of Disney Hill, Freeman’s forces were in sudden danger of catastrophe if the Chinese came out of their tunnels on the northern side and counterattacked. The Americans and other USVUN troops would then be caught in a “crush” movement between the Chinese who’d poured out of the southern sections of the tunnels and those who might still be alive under the bombed northern section.
Major Cline opined that he didn’t see how anything could have survived the bombing on the north side. Freeman, who had been in an optimistic mood after having seen off the Special Forces, which were heading west on the mission to the Laotian-Vietnamese border, was now a man who knew Second Army and his career were a step this side of a military disaster if the Chinese counterattacked from the northern side. It was already a highly dangerous situation, with God only knew how many PLA already among his troops.
He had to do something — quickly.