The heavy effort managed to stop five of the vehicles from going up in flames, and as dawn broke an hour later, troops were still walking in from the outer areas dragging a body here and there to add to the row of bodies by the barricade.

The sun broke over the trees to the east, dense smoke still filled the surrounding area and a slight breeze started pushing it southward. Preston and Carlos, as well as the rest of the water team, were tired and finally sitting around the barricade, eyeing the dead bodies of the enemy. The road was soaked with a mixture of foam from the extinguishers and the hundreds of gallons of water they had poured onto the immediate area. Both sides of the dirt road had puddles of water that was tinged a reddish color from all the blood. “Carlos, Preston,” a dirty-faced and hatless Sergeant Perry walked up to them. “We have everything that we’ve taken from the attackers piled up further back on the road. We have pieced together 39 bodies plus the one injured in the medical tent. We have two dead of our own and three wounded, and the medical staff is taking care of them. Would you like to come and inspect the equipment we found in the vehicles and see what is important?”

They walked past the bodies and body parts the soldiers were already placing in black trash bags for disposal.

“I don’t think their mothers would recognize any of them. Maybe Lee Wang might,” suggested Carlos. “Sergeant, could you send a radio message to the hangar and have Lee Wang escorted down here?”

Lee arrived five minutes later. By that time, they had concluded that all 39 bodies were Chinese. The rear of the last two trucks still facing the opposite way were full of food and water and one truck—an old Ford V8— had obviously served as an armory. It housed several rockets for the shoulder units, six cases of hand grenades, and several boxes of 7.62 cal, AK-47 ammunition protected in a steel, coffin-like box. They had been lucky that it hadn’t exploded, or there would have been far more causalities and fire damage.

“Lee,” Carlos asked the Chinese man when he arrived. “Do these men look like Chinese soldiers? Do you recognize any of them?” Slowly Lee looked at the bloody and bloodless remains of every man. He stopped at one of the first ones.

“This is Bo Lee Tang, I think. That one, the older man about 50 years old next to him, was Mi Jo. Bo Lee Tang was an American-dressed Chinese policeman on the island where I studied. It looks like him. Bo was only about 18 when I saw him last. He was part of the security detail on the island that kept the discipline and who told us to go home once we had had too much to drink in the American bars. I liked him because when he was off duty he was one of the worst drinkers, and tried to introduce me to American whiskey. He liked it so much that he had a small bottle of American whiskey tattooed on his right shoulder.”

Several soldiers stripped off the sweater and shirt from the body, and a small tattoo of Jack Daniels stared back at them. “The other man was head of the guard detachment for the block we lived in. He rang the bell at 4:00 am in the courtyard every morning for us to get up. He has certainly aged since I last saw him.”

“I believe he was the commander,” the sergeant added.

They continued on, and Lee did not recognize any more. Many were much younger and would have been babies when he left China, he explained to the men around him.

Then they got to the weapons and other items the men had carried with them. “We searched every pocket in their clothing and every corner of every vehicle we could, including the two on the main road,” continued the Sergeant. “Our men have secured the whole area. The forest snipers killed three and the last two enemies were taken out by the Highway snipers. Once the sun is up, we will do a sweep of the entire area as far out as the Forest Snipers, and two groups will walk out in both directions along the feeder road searching for any dead or injured. I don’t believe we have missed any.”

They all looked down at the mass of equipment. Many of the shoulder rocket launchers, and there were eight of them, were twisted broken metal. “There are three in good working order,” observed one of the soldiers looking over them. Many of the AK-47s were also bits of twisted metal. “We have five usable AK-47s, sir,” he added. “They are very modern, no more than two years old, and have the skeleton-steel shoulder butt versus the old solid-steel and wooden ones. Here are their personal electronic gadgets.”

Carlos and Lee found what they were looking for in the pile of equipment—satellite telephones.

“These are American satellite phones,” Carlos identified one as he picked it up. “I have the civilian version of these, the Iridium 9505a. These phones are the 9505c military version. Do you recognize this phone, Sergeant?” Carlos asked, and it didn’t take long for the man to recognize it.

“I was issued one of these two months ago on a training mission when we were down in Georgia,” he replied. “Before we left Seymour Johnson three days ago, we tried to activate all the units we have in our supply closet, but every one of them was dead. How come this one works?”

“It doesn’t,” Carlos replied. “A bullet has broken off its antennae, but we can fix that.” Carlos bent down and found one that seemed intact, and Lee found a second one. Carlos switched his to its ‘on’ position, and it lit up and went into start-up mode. So did Lee’s.

“Switch yours off, Lee, in case they see someone operating it and try to communicate with us. I’ll do the same. We need to prepare for any response to them. Preston, they must be working on a very simple communications satellite system. There were over 70 communication satellites around the world before December 31st, but I did a check when I was in the observatory and found only three operational satellites on perfect stationary points for very slow and limited two-way communications. If I’m right, and Lee checked me on my results, then Zedong Electronics has terminated the rest of the satellites up there, including ours—even those belonging to the Chinese government and all their military communications satellites. I‘ll bet that Zedong Electronics are the only people communicating around the world right now and maybe the Chinese military are as useless as our own.”

“Can we start filling the bags, Preston?” the first sergeant asked.

“Of course! Sorry, guys,” replied Preston. “Let’s collect everything in these equipment piles and get it into the hangar for inspection. Carlos, find a dry bucket and take the phones and parts separately. Maybe you can cannibalize them into more working units.”

“Good idea. Sergeant, let’s check the last two trucks at the end of the road before we head back,” suggested Carlos, placing the small pile of phones into a bucket as they moved on. Lee stayed with the bodies, looking them over and searching for anything he might have missed. He asked a soldier to place all their personal papers, mostly bloody, into another bucket.

The sun was over the trees by the time they got to the road, and a light mist, or smoke by the way it smelled, was clearing. Here, there were no bodies, since they had been carried to the ambush zone. There were just two soldiers guarding the vehicles. The first sergeant walked up to the machine gun-peppered vehicles as the rat-patrol jeep made its way out of the forest on the other side and bounced through the shallow ditch. Joe was driving next to a soldier that was still behind the front gun with three more soldiers standing on the back as the jeep came up to them and stopped.

Preston also noticed a line of half a dozen soldiers walking away from them in both directions, slowly checking both sides of the road, and they were already a couple of hundred yards away.

“Did you leave the sandbags in position?” asked Sergeant Perry.