The twin-engined Prowlers, six of them, with Tomcats covering, were now crossing the North Korean coast, their ECM jammers in the wing pods and in bulging rear fin tips ready to do battle with “Charlie’s”—in this case, the North Koreans’—beams, airborne or ground.
It was hoped that by the time the subsonic two-seater Prowlers with their Tomcats cover were approaching Pyongyang, pulsing down their countermeasure beams from the ALQ-99 jammers, Shirer’s wave of Tomcats would be ready to “clear the lanes” of any MiGs that might try to intercept Saipan’s chopper force. Hauling field-pack 155 howitzers, two 125-ton Galaxies were being escorted across the sea of Japan by six Phantoms, each carrying a “buddy” refueling pod.
At sixteen thousand feet above the weather, the first diamond of Tomcats, riding shotgun for the unarmed Prowlers at nine thousand feet, were on radio silence. Seventy-one miles in from the North Korean coast, over Changdori, the Tomcat leader saw a blip, one of the twelve Prowlers dribbling to the right off his NEPRA — his nonemitting passive-mode radar — screen. There was no call for help from any of the twelve electronic countermeasures aircrafts, for that would have meant breaking the radio silence, and the Tomcat leader assumed, correctly, that the lone Prowler in the monsoon was experiencing mechanical difficulties. Its gap in the Prowler wedge was filled, the rest of the Prowlers closing up as if guided by some invisible hand. It gave the Tomcat leader a quiet sense of pride in the professionalism of the carrier’s family of pilots. The Prowler might be forced to ditch, but rather than emit a giveaway signal, it had simply turned off into the monsoon-torn night alone, any call for help calmly stifled until the plane returned to the carrier’s patrol zone — if it got that far.
Despite all the alarms aboard his F-14, the Tomcat pilot’s eyes kept monitoring the instruments, moving from altimeter, bottom left of the HUD assembly, to the banks of dials below the compass on his right.
Aboard the Prowlers it was rough going, the black torrential downpour shot through with pockets of less dense air, the unarmed planes having a bumpy ride that irritated the two ECM officers in the rear compartment, for as good as the ALQ-99 jammers were, the turbulence didn’t help.
A hundred miles behind them, coming westward over the Sea of Japan, was the small armada of forty Chinook choppers, led by an arrowhead formation of five fierce-eyed Apache helos. Each of the helos sprouted wing pods of nineteen 2.75-inch rockets apiece, an infrared TV masthead sight, and laser range finder for eight Hellfire missiles and the Hughes chain gun.
As the lead Apache rose from a thousand feet above sea level, its copilot saw the red light go on above the “check on systems” display and heard the accompanying buzzer warning them they had insufficient power for the steep climb over the Taebek Mountain range, invisible in the rain but not more than five miles away. The pilot glanced across at the terrain-contouring-map video display confirming they were getting too close to the peaks around Konjin to make any shallower-angled approach, which, in any case, would require breaking formation.
“Lose the port Sidewinder!” ordered the pilot.
“Done,” replied the copilot.
“That was quick.”
“Red light’s still on.”
“Lose the other one,” said the pilot. The light went off, the chopper’s rate of climb increasing. “You were next,” he told the copilot.
“Thanks.”
They had just sacrificed their two best antiaircraft defenses in order to better protect the troops following them in the Chinooks.
Ten minutes from Pyongyang on the Tomcat’s NEPRA screen, a blip was appearing on the far right. Very fast. Then another. Three more — the dots heading for the eleven Prowlers.
The Tomcat leader switched on his air-to-air Sidewinders, heard their growl, and called to the flight, “Tomcat leader. Five Bogeys, maybe more, one o’clock — twelve thousand. Strikers go!”
These were the six Tomcats in front of the diamond, now going down behind the Prowlers, who were already starting to pour down their rain of powerful beams to overwhelm the SAM radars, and dropping chaff as well.
In the semicircle of twelve three-missile-apiece SAM sites east of the city, NKA operators hit the siren buttons as their radars suddenly turned to snow, the eleven Prowlers coming down guided by their red TERCOM — terrain-contour-guided radars. With a constant video feed of mountains, dips, and rivers flashing by, the pilots and crew in their blinkered canopies, windshield wipers on overtime and no use at all, the planes effectively flew themselves. This allowed the two EWOs in the rear section of the plane to direct their jamming beams at any energy source distinct enough to look as if it might be trying to “burn” its way through the heavy-duty beam screen of the Prowlers. Three of the Prowlers were destroyed in twelve seconds, balls of curling orange as the MiGs, now twenty in all, screamed in from the west, another seven from the north, the squadron of MiGs on the ground at Pyongyang Airport all but wiped out by three of the Tomcats striking with two-thousand-pound laser slide “walleye” bombs.
A MiG, unable to come out of the turn, smashed into the flatland west of Turu Islet on the bottom left-hand stretch of the S made up of the Potong River and the much wider Taedong. Halfway up the S, where the river straightened between two islands and flowed under Taedong and Okryu bridges, it passed Kim Il Sung Square. Beyond the square was the wing-tipped Grand People’s Study House, and near the riverbank, framing the square, the Korean Art Gallery to the south, the History Museum to the north. But now none of this was visible except as sharp angular shapes on the helos’ video displays. Several SAM sites sprang to life, firing blindly, radars jammed but hoping to bring down the “American pirates,” as a hysterical Pyongyang Polly was describing them on state radio before it, too, went dead.
“Think they’ll expect troops, General?” Lt. Sandy McMurtry asked Freeman in the lead Chinook.
Freeman tightened his helmet’s chin strap, smacking her affectionately on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Lieutenant — they just think it’s a bombing mission.” He pointed at the Chinook’s radar. “Moment those helo gunships break for perimeter defense, you take me right on down where I told you.”
McMurtry had already keyed in the square that she and the others had gone over so often in their minds during the pre-op discussions on the LPH while Washington had whiled away the time, or so it seemed to them, making up its mind. For a second McMurtry saw the distinctive shape of the ninety-foot-high Arch of Triumph, a slavishly brutal imitation of the Parisian original, and south of it the outline of the Chollima, the famed winged horse of Korean legend. Then momentarily everything was lost as stalks of searchlights exploded from the defensive circle ringing the city and now crisscrossed the sky, reaching up, feeling the rainy darkness for the enemy bombers who, Pyongyang Polly had said, were trying to pollute the sacred birthplace of “our dear beloved leader.”
Amid the chaotic sound of rain, intermixed with antiaircraft fire and the never-ending electronic beeping of warning and centering indicators, McMurtry’s earphones were nothing but a garble of noise as Prowlers and the NKA AA batteries engaged in a war of the beams, for without targets, the huge twelve-finned Soviet SAMs were useless.
In the torrential downpour of the monsoon, which lowered visibility to zero, it was all instrument flying and landing for the helos, and here the American know-how was overwhelmingly superior, the Prowlers “frying” the NKA’s radar screens clean of any targetable image, allowing the Tomcats streaking in behind to drop their five-hundred-pounders with a devastating accuracy not seen since the Vietnam War.
“Bogey on your tail,” yelled a wingman, the striker leader, his bomb gone, hitting the button, going from air-to-ground to air-to-air in milliseconds, screaming up deep into the monsoon, and gone in a crimson flash, a collision with a MiG on the cross vector.
“Aw shit!” said the wingman, going into a roll, locking on to a MiG’s afterburner and engaging his own, his Tomcat now on full war power, its fuel consumption ten times its pre-afterburner phase, heading into the three-minute zone in which he’d use up a third of his total fuel, his wing automatically sweeping back now that the bomb load had been dropped from the more stable wings-out position. He saw the MiG in his sights, pressed the cannon. The MiG was gone — not hit — quickly reducing speed, the American overflying him so that now he was up again behind the American, his air-to-air Aphid waiting for the growl, not sure whether he heard it in the confusion, waiting for the light. The American broke, so did he, both into scissors at the same time, their reaction times to this point exactly on par. The American popped four incendiary flares and dropped, the Aphid catching one of the flares, exploding. The wingman looked for the MiG, but he’d vanished, another missile, American or Russian, he couldn’t tell, passing well ahead.
As the Prowlers completed their turn south, one of the city’s searchlights, having given them up, lucked out on one of the Apaches. Suddenly all the searchlights converged on the Apache. The helo pilot tapped down his sun visor, put the Apache’s nose down, and fired both pods: thirty-eight 2.75-inch rockets. Four of the beams died to pale yellow, then nothing. The Apache was still coming down fast in the strange white-black river of night and searchlights, the copilot picking up a SAM site in a searchlight’s spill.
“Let ‘em go!” said the chopper pilot, the copilot firing all eight Hellfires, the helo’s underchin chain gun spitting a long, bluish-white tongue down at the NKA’s SAM site. The SAM site exploded, the chopper, its rear rotor’s pitch-change spider damaged by AA fire, canting crazily to seventy degrees, the small blades chopping into the tail drive gearbox. The pilot glanced across at the copilot — he was dead, head slumped, lolling in the turbulence of low air currents, the rain so hard it sounded like a hose on the fuselage as the Apache’s pilot braced for the crash. The helo smashed into the dark blanket that was Changsan Park on the city’s northern outskirts. Its explosion terrified the well-to-do Party administrators celebrating the imminent victory, in a day or so at the most — when General Kim’s komtbt— “bear trap”—would clang shut on the Yosu/Pusan pocket. They had just drunk to the extermination of the mikuk chapnomtul— “American bastards”—and their ROK lackeys.
The thirty-seven remaining troop transports, three taken out by MiGs, were now chopping air, settling down on the big square, using infrared, Freeman having already selected the huge concrete bulks of the Art Gallery and History Museum as flank protection, as well as the thickly treed parks about the square, which would give added protection from the small-arms fire that was bound to open up.
Though he would never know it, the pilot of the downed Apache, in panicking the second and third searchlight batteries, allowed fourteen of the thirty-seven big Chinooks following Freeman’s to land in Kim II Sung Square virtually unseen.
The American troops, to the utter astonishment of only a few janitors and museum night watchmen, poured out from the long, black shapes in a circle of machine-gun, rifle, and other small-arms fire that was quite audible, even over the rolling thunder of the aerial combat high above. And it was at that moment, with the SAM sites impotent because of the still-falling parachute chaff from the striker Tomcats, and the city militia excited and startled, that Freeman’s plan saw its first success: an unopposed landing of his troops.
Many of his men were busy pushing the big Chinooks clear of the central area so that others could come down to unload.
For a totally unexpected and eerie moment, all the streetlights came on as one of the Tomcats’ five-hundred-pounders hit the Pyongyang thermal power plant, ironically switching on lights that were meant to be off during the curfew. But the surge of power was too much, and the next moment the plant and city were once again in darkness. In those fleeting seconds almost every man had frozen or dropped to the ground in Kim II Sung Square, three of the half-dozen cameramen Freeman had insisted accompany him recording the moment on tape, getting three of the Chinooks in the process of unloading their troops, the cameramen not realizing its significance until much later. After the Chinooks had unloaded, they moved off with others as part of the twenty Freeman had detailed to proceed across the city to the Pyongyang Airport. Here they would hopefully be met by the airborne regiment in the two Galaxies with the four self-propelled 155-millimeter howitzers.
Despite the blackout of the city, some of the SAM sites did receive the extra surges of electricity from emergency generators, but it was not enough. It was as if the Americans had drawn an impenetrable canopy through the rain-laden sky over the entire city, a canopy in which signals were either soaked up or bounced back as chapsori— “rubbish.” And when fourteen SAMs were fired, their long, red tails and back-blast illuminating the immaculately clean and deserted streets around Potong-gang Station, what their jubilant ground crews didn’t realize was that the blips they had momentarily picked up and fired upon were not F-14s at all but F-14 simulators of the “box of tricks,” as the Tomcat pilots called them, which fell through the sky, steadied by spring-loaded fins. Eight of the SAMs hit the decoys, exploding, turning the rain to vapor in the immediate area, debris falling down to the elated NKA crews. It was not until an hour or so later that they discovered their error when puzzled Party officials, racing out for propaganda displays of shot-down American wreckage, could find the remains of only one F-14 amid the litter of SAM casings.
The top floor of the Grand People’s Study House, Freeman had told the marines, would command a sweeping panorama of the city through infrared binoculars, and it was taken by a squad of marines without opposition as the helos kept landing and the remaining Apaches, loaded with antitank and thousands of small antipersonnel mines, made what they called, in General Freeman’s lexicon, a “ring around the craphouse,” using Kim II Sung Square as the center aim point. From the twenty-two-storied Kim II Sung University on the northern outskirts to Pyongyang Station on the south side through the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum far to the west of Kim Il Sung Square and back around East Pyongyang Stadium, the Apaches led two of the big Chinooks, which laid a string of explosives, while in the square, four of the eight American Motors Hummers, or Humvees, as the troops called them, came down, slung under the last XC Chinooks. Once unhooked, the Humvees, equipped with a.50 machine gun and infrared swivel antitank launcher in the back, were quickly manned by driver, co-driver, and six men armed with SAWs — squad automatic weapons— and demolition charges. Two of the four Hummers that had not made it to the square were totaled, their parent Chinook striking a tree and overhead wires near the History Museum, sliding and tumbling down the embankment into the Taedong River. The other two Hummers had been aboard a Chinook when, only forty feet above the ground in front of the Grand People’s Study House, it collapsed in a sudden wind shear. In the occasionally flare-lit air, it looked like some great, exotic brown cucumber broken in the middle, its quiet poof of flame starting to spread quickly. A marine sergeant thrust his M-16 at the nearest man, went in under the wreckage, crawling into the Hummer’s cabin. Slithering across the rain-slicked vinyl seat, he was unable to raise his head any higher than the steering wheel because of some part of the chopper’s fuselage sticking in through the driver’s window.
“Where’s he goin’?” shouted another marine.
“Fishing!” another shouted, his mood of bonhomie the result of having passed from sheer bowel-freezing terror into a reverie of relief at still being alive.
The Humvee came to life, jerking out from the wreckage, dragging pieces of fuselage with it.
“On his honeymoon,” someone else shouted. The buoyed mood of the men was caused not simply by the lack of any determined resistance on the ground, evidence of the fact that so far Freeman’s gamble of surprise had paid off, but because of the absence of any vehicular traffic that might be bearing NKA. The magnificently spacious streets around the square were deserted, a possibility that Freeman had privately entertained from the SATINT he’d studied so closely aboard the Saipan. But it was a hope that he knew could be ended any moment by a sudden convoy of infantry coming up from the south or, if the Chinese were still supplying the NKA through Manchuria, troops from the north. Nevertheless, for the moment it was a surprise that helped mitigate the loss of the three Hummers and the crews of the downed Chinooks. Once he was sure the perimeter from the river up past the museum, around the People’s Study House and back to the art gallery, was secure, Freeman sent out three Humvees to complete the next phase of Operation “Trojan.”
One of the Humvees, its nine men all wearing infrared goggles and hunkering down, except for the machine gunner and the ATGM operator, headed north from the square along Sungni Street, swinging left on Mansudae Street. In the last of the flares dropped by the Tomcats, who were low on fuel and returning to sea, their position taken up by Shirer and the second wave, the marines could see the dim outline of the Arch of Triumph half a mile or so away. But their interest centered on the sixty-six-foot-high brown statue of Kim II Sung in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution. Off to their right they could see Chollima statue, the winged black horse, peasants joyously riding it, Marxist holy book held aloft, the book invisible in the rain.
It took the demolition team four and a half minutes to place the plastic hose cylinders around the dear and respected leader in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution and another two minutes to insert the wire and run it back off the spool, several hundred yards to where the Humvee had been stationed as an advance guard.
“I don’t like this,” said one marine. “Too fucking quiet. Where’re all the people?”
“Inside, you dummy. ‘Where would you be?”
“Come on — hurry it up,” cut in the corporal as they hoisted the spool aboard the Hummer and drove slowly in the direction of the trees that hid the Grecian facade of the Pyongyang Art Troupe Theatre across the wide boulevard.
“Okay,” said the corporal, “let’s do it.”
There was a dull thud, the ground trembled, and the blast rustled the wet ginkgo trees, water coming off them in a spray, and the air filled with dust that quickly fell in the rain. Kim II Sung was no more.
The driver of the second Hummer lost his way, his navigator rifleman giving wrong directions, so that now they were headed toward the Pyongyang Seafood Direct Sales Shop several blocks up from the square by the river.
“Where the fuck are we?” someone shouted.
“Gooks — dead ahead!” A police car, its Klaxon squawking, its blue light flashing urgently, was tearing down Okryu Street, wet leaves flying up behind it, orange sparks seeming to come from its interior. Small-arms fire.
The Humvee’s.50 Browning stuttered, hot casings steaming through the rain. The police car wobbled, then careered wildly, ran across the street, struck the curb, rolled, ending up on its side, wheels still spinning. A man came scurrying up from the cabin like someone trying to escape from a submarine. The Browning stuttered again and he slumped back, arms caught in the door in a V, the fire licking at the rear wheels.
The marines had another look at the map. “Christ, you’re nowhere near it, Smithy.” It was a gross exaggeration — in fact, the driver had only overshot a right turn past the seafood building by less than a hundred yards.
“Back ‘er up,” the corporal ordered, and after thirty seconds ordered, “Now turn right and straight ahead.”
It was another couple of minutes and they were on the western side of the east-west Okryu Bridge, which spanned the wide Taedong River and was one of the two main bridges by which any counterattack from the east would most likely come. The driver still felt spooked by the apparently deserted city, which till now had not offered any resistance on the ground to the landings in its main core, even though the sound and fury of the air battle was enough to awaken the dead, sonic booms rolling overhead — at times so loud, they were mistaken for the monsoon’s crashes of thunder. To the north, the marines could see forked lightning reaching right down to the hills.
The third Humvee had already reached Taedong Bridge, half a dozen blocks or so to the south of Kim D Sung Square, and the demolition team had started laying their charges when the first of three NKA armored cars started across me old wide span, the armored vehicles’ ghostly outline visible for only a second in the light of a flare. The antitank rocket fired from atop the Hummer — the distance to the armored cars no more than three hundred yards — exploded against the bridge railing. The armored cars kept coming, their machine guns now spitting fire and finding their mark, the marine driver and machine gunner thrown back hard against the canopy, dead, the antitank missile operator behind them taking second aim. The lead armored car’s machine gun opened up again, and the AT operator fired. The lead armored car burst into flame, followed by a sound like falling pots and pans as the vehicle stopped. Without hesitation the second armored car behind the first broke out and took up the attack. The third armored car braked, using the first car’s wreckage as good cover, barely showing its main gun. The new lead car fired its main gun and the Hummer leapt into the air, the AT man dead.
Beneath the bridge, which lead onto Mansudae Street, the demo team kept working along the slippery embankment with the extraordinary concentration of sappers, whom Freeman had always held to be among the bravest of the brave. The rain was still heavy and the lone American marine on the bridge took cover behind the burning U.S. truck, not seeing the cupola of the lead car open until its top-mounted.76 began raking the Humvee, pieces of metal and upholstery flying through the air.
“How long?” the marine called to the sappers.
“Two minutes max!”
“They’re on top of us.”
“Hold ‘em, Arnie!”
Arnie dashed from the big stanchion near the end of the bridge across the traffic lanes behind the burning wreckage of the Hummer, hearing a faint gurgling sound coming from it. Going low, catching a quick look at the armored car, he saw the NKA car commander, his leather World-War-II-type helmet striking the marine as old-fashioned as hell. The marine gave him a full burst. The man flung his arms back before he slumped over the right side of the cupola. The marine heard a lot of shouting coming from inside the armored car, but still it kept coming, turning now to ram the Hummer. Arnie dropped his heavy automatic squad gun, ran left to a gap of about three feet between the Hummer’s rear wheels and bridge rail, saw the armored car, now only six feet away, going straight for the front of the American truck. It took him one, two — three steps, up on the wheel guard flange, and two grenades down the cupola, conscious of a stringent, unpleasant odor: the dead man’s breath as he lolled on the cupola. The second car veered and hit Arnie so hard, the demolition team, running the wire back and slipping on the grass, heard their buddy’s ribs snap like sticks. Now the second NKA car was blocked by the V formed by the wreckage of the Humvee and the other armored car. It backed up and suddenly its searchlight penciled out along the embankment. The cupola opened and the gunner, the.76 coaxial slaved to the searchlight, sprayed straight down the approach to the bridge. Out of nowhere, a MiG flashed low, canisters falling, the armored truck enveloped in napalm, the pilot having mistaken the three armored vehicles in radar clutter as American.
One of the demolition team cranked, and the other pushed the plunger. They felt a slight tremor, heard a thud, then a louder claplike noise. The approach to the bridge had collapsed only six or seven feet, but until it was fixed, nothing would be coming across to Mansudae Street.
By now the unarmed Prowlers had been gone from Pyongyang twenty minutes, though it seemed much longer to some of the men on the ground. Still the possibility loomed — was it possible that Freeman could make his “Doolittle” hit-and-run and get out virtually unscathed?
Shirer told half of his remaining twelve F-14s who had made up the second wave to drop chaff and go for railyards on the city’s south side, and he designated three strikers to take out the six bridges across the Potong, particularly Chungsong Bridge on the southwest side, where reinforcements might be rushed from the port of Nampo twenty miles to the south.
Laser-guided bombs took out three of the bridges, but Chung-song in particular was an elusive target, its span running over the island of Suksom pleasure ground bisecting the target, making it more difficult to get at. What made the situation worse all of a sudden was that the chaff jamming over the city was now coming to an end, even as Shirer could see MiGs, at least twenty of them, coming from the west, another seven from northern airfields, perhaps in Manchuria.
Until the Tomcats were relieved in five minutes, they would have to leave the ground force to its own devices. The AA batteries were opening up again now that the jamming was weakening. Shirer half hoped the MiGs would reach them before his and other Tomcats’ fuel dictated a withdrawal, for in the mixed-up blips of Tomcats and MiGs in aerial combat on their screens, the NKA batteries, including the remaining SAMs, would be more discerning lest they hit one of their own.
“Outstanding! Excellent!” were repeated so often in the first half hour by Douglas Freeman as he saw the thousand men secure the perimeter around the square that he began worrying it was all going too well, a suspicion now reinforced by the Tomcats’ leader telling him that though the next wave of Tomcats hadn’t arrived, he would have to take his flight back for refueling.
Then, on the PSC-3 Manpak satellite-bounce radio he was using, Freeman heard the eight hundred airborne troops from the two Galaxies were pinned down at the airport. One of the big planes was forced to stand, soaking up small-arms fire as its men unloaded, and one of the Phantoms that had escorted it was shot down as, low on fuel; it turned back with the second Galaxy, which had delivered its load of four howitzers.
The howitzers and their ammunition had come in on pallets from the Galaxy now heading back, but one of the drag chutes had failed to open, so that the guns were now at the outer flooded edge of the airport rather than on it, and in the darkness a fight raged between the U.S. Airborne and NKA militia for possession of the guns.
Freeman knew it would all come apart if the six tanks that the Airborne’s Colonel Menzies was now sighting managed to reach the airport before the Airborne could get the 105-millimeters into action.
“You can take care of them, Rick,” Freeman told his Airborne commander. “Their goddamned rattletraps come apart if you fart. Over.”
“They’re our tanks, General. Captured M-60s.”
The general paused. “Then knock ‘em off with the howitzers.”
“When we get—” There was an explosion in the background, drowning Menzie’s voice. When he came back on the radio, he told Freeman, “General, there’s a good chance we’re going to lose the Galaxy. It’s one mother of a target — even in the dark. I ‘m concerned about my men, General. If that big bird goes…”
“Then our empty cargo Chinooks can take you out… How long do you think you can hold?”
“Not a matter of holding, General. We can hold all day, but it’s no good if we can’t get out.”
“An hour’s all I need, Rick. You hold.”
“Yes, sir.”
A minute later the sky over the airport went yellow, followed by an explosion — the Galaxy going up in flames, illuminating the Airborne better than any flare.
Freeman turned to Al Banks and a marine major. “I’m going on to Mansudae Hall.” He said it as if he were going over to the PX for a moment. Perhaps, thought the major, the general’s enormous self-confidence came from the long hours of preparation, of poring over the SATINT and Japanese intelligence reports. But then, anyone could read a map. There was more to it. Freeman’s élan had spread through all the men, now digging in around Kim II Sung Square, readying for the inevitable NKA counterattack with three of the bridges on the west side still intact.
“By God,” said Freeman, “what I wouldn’t give for an M-1.”
“Hey, General. You don’t need a tank, sir. You got us.”
They were hunkering down close to the Hummer.
“Where you from, son?”
“Brooklyn, sir.”
“You stay by me. I need a man like you.”
“Where we goin’, General?”
“We’re going to start a fire, son, right in that runt’s seat of government. By God, those Commies talk about ten days that shook the world. We’ll do it in ten minutes!”
There was a shuffling sound — the boy’s buddy hitting the cement.
“Down!” bellowed Freeman. There was another shot, but they couldn’t see where the sniper was.
“Medic!” called the boy from Brooklyn. The stretcher bearers ran over, crouching. There was a flash in the darkness south of the square from the Haebangsan Hotel. The Humvee’s machine gun roared to life, illuminating the rain and several marines nearby.
“Got him!” shouted the gunner.
As the Medevac team were lifting the downed marine onto a stretcher, Freeman touched Brooklyn’s arm. “C’mon, son. Work to do.”
“Yes, sir.” But now the boy’s voice was cracked with emotion as one of the medics, seeing his colleague was stripping open an emergency field dressing, reached over and stopped him, then pulled the marine’s poncho over his face, the rain bouncing off it with a drumming sound.
“Let’s go,” said Freeman, leaping into the Humvee, a squad automatic weapon with him and grenade vest packs in his right hand.
He turned to the marine major in charge of holding the square. “Give us forty-five minutes, Major. We’re not back, you go ahead with the withdrawal.”
“We’ll stay as long as we can, sir.”
“You’ll stay forty-five minutes and get your ass out of here. Second Tomcat wing’ll have enough to do with those MiGs without baby-sitting us. That means I want choppers in the air at oh six thirty. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
The major’s biggest worry wasn’t whether the general would get back or not but how best to protect the Chinooks, scattered all around. So far the general’s plan was working well, despite the airport and the sporadic fire of some Home Guard and militia troops working their way up Sunji Street, the marines now in the process of blocking it off. While this was happening, the major saw that the men from Freeman’s infantry were pushing more of the Chinooks to the west end of the square between the big protective blocks of the Art Gallery on the square’s south side, the History Museum on the north, and the river directly behind them to the east. Meanwhile on the top floor of the six-storied Grand People’s Study House, marines with spotting scopes took up positions.
“What’s your name, son?” Freeman asked the Humvee’s marksman/squad leader next to him in the cabin.
“Brentwood, sir.”
“All right, Brentwood — we’re going to visit Mansudae Hall. Ever heard of it?”
“On the map, sir. Aboard the LPH when we were going over the-”
“Well, son, you’re going to see it up close. You ready?”
“Yes, sir,” said Brentwood.
The general knew he wasn’t. No one was, before their baptism of fire.
“So far,” Freeman had told Al Banks back at the square, “on the ground we’ve only had chicken-shit resistance.”
“I think that’s about to change,” Banks had cautioned.
“By God, it’s the curfew,” Freeman had proclaimed in a moment of revelation, standing in the pouring rain, arms akimbo. “Thought everyone was staying inside from fright.”
In the Hummer, Freeman could hardly breathe, so excited was he by the prospect — a vision of glory so powerful — heaven so clearly on his side with the curfew and the rain and the monsoon, together with his, Douglas Freeman’s, idea to attack when no one else would, that the general found it impossible to contain his exhilaration. “Hot damn!” He smacked the dash, the startled driver almost driving into the curb and having to hastily readjust his infrared goggles as they swung right at the Grand People’s Study House, rushing the four blocks to the Mansudae Assembly Hall.
In the ice-cold depths of the North Atlantic, eighty-three miles west of Scotland, the USS Roosevelt’s executive officer, Peter Zeldman, gave the skipper his wake-up call. “Captain. Message station coming up.”
“Okay, Pete. Be right there.” Robert Brentwood pressed the “stop” button on Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town,” swung his feet off the bunk, and made his way over to the washbasin to wake himself fully, his eyes and throat dry as parchment. He made a mental note to tell the chief engineer to turn the switch up on the air/water content control. Brushing his teeth, his mirrored image looking better than he felt, he was struck by how the public face — the face of duty — so often and so convincingly hid the deepest fears of the inner shadows. He glanced at his watch. Three-twelve p.m. Back home — that other planet — his mom would most likely be having her morning coffee, his father at the New York Port Authority, pushing paper and moving ships, cutting corners where he could and sucking Tums where he couldn’t. And what about Lana? Had she and La Roche patched it up? For the life of him, he couldn’t think why a man would want to break with a beautiful girl like that. Maybe it wasn’t all La Roche’s fault. It took “two to tango,” as his mother never tired of saying. Anyway, hopefully, if the burst message did come in, he’d be in Holy Loch tied up within two to three hours and there’d be lots of mail for everyone. Maybe a letter from young David, though that was too much to hope for, knowing his younger brother’s “allergy” to writing anyone. Well, hell, thought Robert, replacing the toothbrush, you’re no letter writer yourself, pal. You ready, Brentwood? he asked himself. Ready. And willing?
No — but ready.
The moment he began the walk toward the control room, Brentwood felt every sailor he passed watching him, wondering. He nodded to most and stopped at the galley.
“What’s on, Cook?”
“Roast lamb and mint sauce, sir.”
“Gravy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Trying to make me fat?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll have to start training like Wilson.”
The cook grinned, hoping the skipper wouldn’t notice he wasn’t wearing his chef’s hat.
“Wilson’s down there now, sir.” He nodded back toward the missile bays. “Doing his laps.”
“Hope he’s wearing sneakers,” Brentwood said, half in jest, half seriously — the “on station” behavior code forbidding anything that would make a noise loud enough to be picked up by an enemy’s towed array.
“Good,” said Brentwood, about to move on. “And Cook?”
“Sir?”
“Get that hat on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stepping into control, the sub still rigged for red, Brentwood could feel the tension.
“Depth?” he asked Zeldman.
“Five hundred, sir.”
“Very well. Take her to one hundred.”
“To one hundred,” confirmed the diving officer, standing behind the plane and trim operators, their half-wheel steering columns moving gently with hydraulic grace.
“Four fifty… three hundred… three fifty…”
Brentwood pressed the intercom for all sections, from torpedo room up forward through “Sherwood Forest,” the missile bays, to the reactor, to call in for status reports.
“Three hundred… one fifty… one hundred, sir.”
“Very well. Roll out VLF.”
“Roll VLF.”
The sub shifted slightly.
“Upwelling, sir,” commented the diving officer, noting the sudden change in salinity and water temperature.
“Stop VLF,” commanded Brentwood.
“Stop VLF.”
Brentwood watched the depth gauge, its needle moving slightly, up again, then down. The sub shifted a little more. Last thing he needed was an inversion layer, a sudden change in water density that could suck the sub down before enough ballast could be blown to regain neutral boyancy, driving the boat down, hitting the bottom at 150 miles per hour. The needle moved down again and back.
“Retract VLF.”
“Retracting, sir.”
Brentwood was now receiving status reports from all the sections. Everything A1. “Pete, let’s take her on a mile or so. Get her away from this upwelling nonsense.”
“Yes, sir.”
Robert Brentwood looked at the steering computer’s clock— at an easy twenty-five knots they should reach a new position in plus or minus four minutes, depending on local sea current/ salinity/temperature variations. It would mean running out the VLF a little faster and risking a little more noise for Roosevelt to hopefully clear the upwelling and still have time for a ten-minute wait — but this should be no problem.
In itself, the fact that the old Cold War rule of Soviet-Warsaw Pact armies forbade anyone under the rank of lieutenant to possess military maps did not seem particularly significant. While it was something that had astonished the Americans and British in the long-gone days when NATO had invited Soviet-Warsaw Pact officers to observe NATO maneuvers, it had not occurred to anyone that the antiquated rule, buried in the bureaucracy of the Soviet army, would have much significance. After all, even platoon officers didn’t require maps, their particular tasks, such as taking a farmhouse, a ditch, or a hill, “microrated,” in the jargon of the strategists and tactical warfare experts, a small piece in the vast jigsaw of war. Most combat troops, only 25 percent of any army doing the actual fighting, rarely knew or cared about the wider battles. All that mattered was for them to survive, to take the particular objective on any given day with minimum casualties, not knowing till it was over, sometimes for months, even years, what part they might have played in the overall scheme of things, whether they had won or lost or had merely come to a bloody draw.
But on this October day, while the USS SN/BN Roosevelt approached message station, and another Brentwood, half a world away, was running up the stairs of the granite and marble Mansudae Assembly Hall, now quickly having been reinforced by North Korean regulars and the “black-pajamaed” militia of Pyongyang, something decisive was about to happen on NATO’s central front.
In the southwestern corner of West Germany, a weary Margaret Ford, the young lieutenant of twenty-six, and her crew of three were about to launch another Lance missile with conventional warhead. Ford’s crew was one of twelve out of the original twenty-three that had been located for” shoot and scoot” counterbattery fire in the German Black Forest. A light shower had fallen, but now the sun was trying to come out as the rain clouds passed over the forest into France, and Margaret Ford, though she did not know it, was about to change the course of history.
An advance Soviet mobile observation post, a camouflage-painted, fourteen-ton Russian BMP — armored personnel carrier — traveling at thirty miles per hour, carrying ten troops and armed with the standard 7.62-millimeter machine gun and antitank missiles, stopped on a side road, twenty miles from the Black Forest, now a blue smudge through the hazy autumn mist. The greenish-yellow poplars were turning and flickering in the midafternoon sun, and the sudden warmth made the fields steam for miles around.
The men aboard the BMP had been on hard rations for forty-eight hours, with little sleep, nerves jangled by a brief but spirited American counterattack which had taken place behind them on the big bend in the Danube as it curved south from Regensburg. And when they had lost their officer, whom they all liked, during the fierce American 155-millimeter barrage of high explosives and armor-piercing shells, the Russian crew’s morale had taken a bad body blow. Had it not been for the sergeant’s initiative in keeping the men going, they would probably have called for a break earlier on, but now the sergeant didn’t have a choice as one of the men ema stalo plokho— “was feeling carsick “—in the personnel carrier, not surprising in the suffocating heat from the engine and the sun combining in the coffinlike interior. The jolting, jarring, and lack of any sense of direction for the men inside was guaranteed to leave even the toughest reeling after three or four hours in battle conditions. The sergeant had yelled for the driver to stop earlier, but the BMP was so noisy, he couldn’t be heard. But with the smell of the man’s vomit filling the already dirty and stale air inside, the driver finally got the message.
As the sick man rested with a few comrades, the sergeant and four others took the BMP over to a green hill nearby from which they could see a farm about two or three kilometers away and had a good view of the retreating American 155s, their flashers, like pieces of a shattered orange mirror, visible at the edge of the dense forest. The sergeant and his comrades could also see that the shells from their own guns roaring away five miles behind them were falling short of the West German and American batteries.
Suddenly a Lance missile could be seen streaking from the blur of the woods twenty miles away, but the elevation of the Russian guns was still obviously too acute and the sergeant was reporting on his radio, “Too short! Too short!” until the Soviet battery commander, in an effort to save valuable rounds at the end of the already overextended supply lines from Czechoslovakia and Poland and Russia, ordered the fifty big G-6s to “down.” New salvos came screaming lower, over the crew of the BMP, the G-6s’ twenty-five-mile range six miles longer than the American 155s’. The Russian shells not only tore into the American and West German positions in the Black Forest, but over four hundred of the HE shells crashed into the forest on the French side.
Several of the Allied TV, print, and radio reporters covering the war from the Rhineland — on the supposedly “safe” French side — were hit. Two of them, both French, were killed, another, British, from ITN, badly wounded.
A shell or two amiss was to be expected, inevitable perhaps, but not salvo after salvo — and all because the Russian sergeant, not knowing precisely where he was, only in front of American and West German guns, had simply done his job.
When West German TV and British networks bounced the signals via satellite throughout Europe, particularly into the homes throughout France, “the balloon,” as the newly sworn-in British minister of war said, with barely concealed satisfaction, “went up.”
“Vive la France, gentlemen,” he said. “She is now in the war. Which means, gentlemen, we have our ports.”
“So far,” said an assistant who foresaw something in Gallic disposition within NATO that either the minister did not want to admit to or did not appreciate being referred to, especially not by a junior member of his department.
“ ‘So far’ will do quite nicely,” said the minister icily. “If it won’t do, Parks,” the minister continued, holding his glass out for a refill without looking at the steward, “I suspect you could be called up. Yes?”
The NKA militia approaching the dark, four-storied monolith of concrete and granite that was the Mansudae Assembly Hall were terrified when they saw the Americans. It wasn’t merely the rolling thunder of the overhead battle amid the monsoon that so unnerved them — it was the Americans’ goggles.
Freeman and the nine men in the Humvee, having taken infrared and “starlite” goggle training in stride, could not know that, for all the wrong reasons, they conformed to everything the militia had been told about the U.S. imperialist warmongers — like the banner of the Sinchon “Museum of American Imperialist Atrocities,” which depicted socialist toddlers joyously shooting the U.S. monster, in the form of a wicked-eyed “Uncle Sam.” It was part illusion, reinforced by the reality of the size of the marines’ packs, the big SAWs — squad automatic weapons — and the hideous-looking robotic eyes of the infrared and starlite goggles, the gray plastic lenses protruding from a base the size of a quarter, tapering to a dime-sized lens, giving the Americans an even more terrifying, unblinking appearance to the heavily armed NKA militia and police now defending the North Korean Assembly Hall. The two men on the Humvee’s ATGM-mount and.50 machine gun created a murderous fire-front, the remaining seven, including Freeman, split into two teams, Freeman with his SAW leading the three in front, the probe team, while the four others, all equipped with SAWs in support, were moving in reaction to the lead team’s situation.
The big doors were closing as Freeman, Brentwood, and Brooklyn started up the stairs — a burst of fire from about twenty feet away to their left clipping Brentwood’s helmet, the three of them going down hard on the cold marble steps, Freeman yelling back at the Humvee to “take out that—”
There was a “whoosh” of flame only feet above their heads and the loudest explosion David Brentwood had ever heard, as if someone had let off two massive firecrackers strapped to his head, the noise added to by the reverberations of the huge door, now agape, not unhinged but licked by the yellow flame of the antitank rocket that left a large, jagged section blown out from the door’s right panel, smoke bleeding from it like dry ice, and part of the lower hinge torn, curled back as neatly as a pop can tab — two dead NKA militiamen, another crawling away from the door.
“Let’s go!” Freeman shouted, got up and led the probe team, Brentwood on his left, Brooklyn to his right, up the remainder of the long, wide marble stairs. From the sides of the building and from two third-floor offices either side of the draped NKA flag, from where the dear and beloved leader had issued some of his most famous edicts, flashlights winked in the power outage, then went out themselves.
Almost to the door, night became day, and the three Americans saw two groups of black-trousered militia coming from both corners of the building. David Brentwood to Freeman’s left returned the fire.
“Come on!” yelled the general. “We’re in the sack.”
It didn’t make any sense to David, but he was only too happy to obey the order. Once inside the door, his ears still ringing from the noise of the antitank missile hitting the big doors together with the din of the machine gun raking the militia outside, he realized what the general had meant. The two groups of militia coming from either side of the building couldn’t fire at the Americans without fear of hitting one another in a “fire sack”—the realization bringing a flashback to David of his instructors at Camp Lejeune.
Inside the building an emergency battery light created monstrous shadows. The infrared goggles proved to be of limited use and the three men quickly took them off. While the goggles had allowed them a clear picture of the enormous spotted marble columns with massive sculptures of revolutionary workers and peasants clustered about their bases looking heavenward, they robbed the three Americans of peripheral vision. It was a trade-off — wider vision but less distinct images. David could smell strong wax polish and hear the tinkling of chandeliers, then echoes of boots coming up the marble steps outside the door.
One burst and General Freeman had taken out the emergency light, the foyer plunged into darkness, illuminated only by the eerie light of the NKA flares going up outside over the Assembly Hall and Kim Il Sung Square. There were two muffled explosions and the general knew two of his Chinooks had gone, crimson flames leaping high in the rain. As they advanced down either side of the foyer, Brentwood taking the inside of the left column, Freeman fired a “draw” burst. There was no response.
“Bastards are upstairs,” he said in a hoarse whisper. How he wished he’d been able to bring in a dozen trucks, or even the three other Hummers that had been destroyed, for this place, Freeman knew better than any of his troops and even fewer of his officers, sustained the power and majesty of Communist North Korean power. The runt’s Brandenburg Gate, as he had called it.
There was a loud shout from somewhere upstairs. Though he knew no Korean, to Freeman it sounded more like a revolutionary slogan than an order. The general knelt and unclipped his PRC “satbounce” walkie-talkie radio. “Freeman to square. You reading, Al?”
“Yes, sir, loud and clear.”
“Those two Hummers back from the bridges yet?”
“Only one, sir,” replied Banks.
“Get an HM squad up here fast, Al — start firing two hundred yards back and lay ‘em right on the top. Synchronizing?”
“Go, General.”
Freeman flicked the cover of his watch dial up. “Oh five thirty-seven. Now.”
“ Got it. Ten minutes.”
“Affirmative.”
There was an orange flash, and a sound hitting iron. The ATGM launcher on the Humvee outside had been hit. The machine gun kept going, defying all logic, in a continual burst. Then, through the warped rectangle of the door, David Brentwood saw the soft glow of the burning Hummer, the two Americans slumped over the canopy, the machine gun still firing as at least twenty black-pajamaed militia appeared about the flames. The machine gun stopped, the gunner’s body collapsing into the pyre. David could now hear someone on one of the twin staircases that descended either side of the foyer. Freeman was on his PRC again. There was a crackle of static. “Banks?”
“Sir?”
“You left the square with that HM yet?”
“Negative.”
“Then pack your Humvee with every man you can get in. Mortar crew’s going to need as much covering fire as we are. The bastards are all round the building. And Banks—” Freeman’s voice faded for a moment, then came back. “I want a photographer and a flamethrower.”
There was another surge of static on the line and Banks needed to confirm. “Photographer… flamethrower, sir.”
“Fast as you can.”
“We…”
Freeman didn’t hear the rest — young Brentwood had opened up with his SAW, taking out the first two militia to make it through the door, a third tripping over them, the rest breaking either side, lost to the darkness behind the huge marble columns.
“Brentwood — Brooklyn?” Freeman’s voice took on the tone of a basso profundo, its echo bouncing off the nearest statue of a hero worker. “Alternate fire! I’ll start the next one. Brentwood?”
“Sir?”
“You got a PRC?”
“Yes, sir!”
Suddenly the darkness was split by the flash and telltale staccato of AK-47s, glass breaking behind Freeman and Brentwood, bullets singing as they struck marble. Brentwood squeezed off a burst, quickly moving to the next column, every nerve raw, not knowing how far up the hall they’d gone.
“When our boys start moving up those steps,” Freeman yelled, moving toward the balustrade, “we go up to the first floor. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Brooklyn?”
There was a squeaky reply — Brooklyn so terrified, he could hardly find voice.
“More gooks, General,” Brentwood called out, and fired at the door, seeing there were too many for alternate fire if they were to stop them. He thought he got one or two, but the rest had disappeared like the first group, left and right of the cavernous foyer, behind the columns.
His ears still ringing, heart thumping, David crossed the hall, letting off another burst as he reached a marble column close to the balustrade. He felt something stinging him — his left leg-momentarily wondering whether or not it was a bullet but having no time to dwell on it. Soon, he knew, the enemy, now over the initial surprise, must figure out a rough plan of fire without hitting one another.
Now the Koreans were shouting instructions to one another, adding to the sense of increasing chaos. A second later two grenades shattered the air with purplish white. There was a scream, and in the flash Freeman glimpsed three militia coming up his side, rolled a fragmentation grenade, turned about the nearest column, and let off a quick burst from the SAW. Next instant he was on his back, Kevlar helmet hitting the marble floor, a needlelike pain down his neck, the NKA troops shooting wildly, hitting windows and turning the water-slicked floor that had caused Freeman to fall into a gallery of elusive running shadows.
The moment he saw the brilliant light, David, his training overcoming instinct, froze as another militiaman fifty feet away fired a second flare inside the building. David knew what they were looking for would be movement, not shapes, as he pressed himself hard against the pedestal of a peasant woman at harvest.
Brooklyn forgot his training, swung out between the columns with his SAW, and crashed to the ground as a dozen militia cut him down. The flare now fizzing in the far corner, Brentwood snapped into the prone position and swept the floor with a full magazine, hitting four of the militia, sending the others racing back behind the columns toward the door, the general getting one man silhouetted in the penumbra of the flare’s light.
“Brentwood!” he yelled. “Go for the balustrade. Back of it there’s the auditorium. Give ‘em a burst and head back!”
As the general fired the covering burst up the stairs, David ran between the columns, heading beyond the foyer toward the faint outline of the auditorium door, plate glass collapsing from the windows either side of the assembly hall from ricochets. When he reached the auditorium he turned hard right inside, sweeping the SAW in front of him — astonished to see the emergency lights down by the stage were on, casting a soft glow over the two thousand seats that smelled like a new car’s upholstery.
The door burst open and the general came in, almost taking Brentwood with him, the hot barrel of the gun striking David’s flak vest, the general swearing, his SAW’s sling having got caught in the breech, jamming the gun. He yanked hard at it, but it wouldn’t budge. His PRC surged to life, Freeman still uttering oaths, cursing himself now for having left the volume switch up. “Forty-dollar fine,” he said to Brentwood, who tried to smile but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get enough saliva to swallow. Freeman turned the volume down and heard Banks. “General, this is square one.”
“Reading you,” said the general. He was disappointed it wasn’t his mortar crew outside.
“General,” Banks went on in an excited voice, “one of our ROK interpreters has plugged into Charlie traffic — seems—” Banks’s voice rose and fell in waves of interference, and Freeman could hear the gunfire around the square. “Seems, General… the runt’s in Mansudae Hall.”
“For Christ’s sake!” hissed the general. “Why the fuck you think we’re here? Intelligence confirmed he’s been holed up here since…” There was more static, but this time it seemed like the tearing sound of a machine gun in the background.
“That all?” said the general.
“Yes, sir. Mortar crew should be there soon.”
The general turned the volume switch off. It had suddenly become very quiet. They heard the patter of sandaled feet. He yanked at the SAW strap again, but it wouldn’t come free. As David drew his bayonet from its scabbard, handing it to the general to cut the strap loose, Freeman saw the boy’s hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Don’t you worry about it, son,” the general said, in a barely audible voice, his breathing slowing for the first time since they’d entered the great hall. “You’re doing just fine. We’ll get the son of a bitch.” Brentwood began to speak, but Freeman held up his hand, motioning above with his thumb. “Some of the monkeys are going up the stairs. Good.”
David guessed there’d been about half a dozen or so, and when they didn’t find any Americans upstairs, they’d be coming back down. His apprehensive gaze upward conveyed his fear to the general. “Don’t worry,” said Freeman, smiling. “We’ll be all right.” He nodded his head down toward the stage. “You like the front seats or the mezzanine?”
David couldn’t think straight, let alone respond to a joke. All he knew for certain was that he was down to his second to last clip and that whenever anyone told him everything was going to be all right — it never was.
At latitude fifty-six degrees north and longitude seven degrees ten minutes west, a hundred feet below the sea’s hard blue, USS Roosevelt was eighty miles west of Scotland and thirty miles north of Ireland.
“Any upwelling here?” the captain asked.
“No, sir. Salinity, temperature look fine.”
“Look or are?”
“They’re normal, sir.”
“Very well. Ahead five knots, roll out VLF to two thousand.”
“VLF rolling, sir.”
At the Sorbonne in Paris, over five thousand leftist students, some of them anarchists, were rioting, fighting police, protesting France’s decision to “defend the borders.”
In Whitehall, the new minister of war was on the scrambler to 10 Downing Street.
“Agreed, Prime Minister, it’s not a declaration of war per se. But I should have thought that a ‘defense of one’s borders’ means…” The minister grimaced. “No, Prime Minister. Yes, it is possible. Very well. Yes. Right away, Prime Minister.”
When the minister of war put down the phone, his hand went to his forehead in an effort to remember what he’d been saying to Under Secretary Hoskins. But his mind was still on the prime minister’s unsettling reservation about the French action. “PM’s office can’t seem to understand,” began the minister, “that while the French response means we can’t use their rapid deployment force in NATO as yet, we will be able to the moment any foreign troops violate French soil. And—” he looked across at his secretary “—that has to happen — otherwise what’s the bloody point of the Russians fighting the bloody war? If we have the French ports for resupply, we still stand a chance. We don’t have the Chunnel, and if we don’t have the ports and the Bolshies continue to hold Holland, Hamburg, and Bremen, and take Rotterdam, then I should think we’re in very deep. Wouldn’t you agree, Hoskins?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean to say—” the minister’s right hand reached out for an elusive word as if he were answering an opposition question in the House “—the bloody French have to come in.” He paused for a moment, thinking, hands behind his back, moving toward the now armor-plated window. “I mean, all that lovely wine. It’s unthinkable.”
“Yes, Minister.”
But the reports from JIB — Joint Intelligence Bureau — indicated that the Russian surge had lost much of its wallop. There had been early snow, and the war of mobility was grinding down. It didn’t go nuclear, as all the experts had told the minister it would, and “Pray God it won’t,” said the minister, adding, “But I think, Hoskins, contrary to what we all thought — I should say, what all the experts thought — that we’re in for a long war.”
“No VLF signal,” Zeldman reported to the captain.
Captain Robert Brentwood nodded and gave orders to the executive officer of the USS Roosevelt to map a course for the next twenty-four hours that would place them in the deepest part of the Norwegian Sea — within comfortable launching range of targets on the Kola Peninsula and beyond, guaranteeing the Roosevelt’s missiles the minimum possible CEP — circular error of probability — when striking all twenty-four of the sub’s designated targets.
In “Sherwood Forest,” aft of the sub’s sail, where the six missiles in two rows of three stood ready in their gleaming forty-foot-high, seven-foot-wide tubes, Raymond Wilson, one of the off-duty RCOs, or reactor control operators, was jogging, the steady hum of the forty-ton ventilators washing comfortably overhead like the pleasantly reassuring noise of a summer breeze in high timber. Wilson, the man whom Captain Brentwood and the cook had been joking about earlier, was in his workaday blue cotton and polyester jumpsuit and quiet matching canvas-sole shoes, the blue in stark contrast to the smooth, creamy white color of the missile tubes. He sat on one of the narrow flip-down benches near the bulkhead, taking his pulse, his breathing slowing, whole body relaxed, yet his senses acute, missing nothing, the odor of the sub like that of a sparkling clean showroom — a world away from what he’d been told were the stink-holes of the old World War II diesels. He felt good-fit, confident he’d live to be a hundred.
The second wave of refueled Tomcats had now penetrated North Korean airspace once again, and a swarm of thirty MiGs attacked, the Tomcats breaking, fifteen to do battle with the MiGs, the other fourteen Strikers racing for Pyongyang.
Then everything happened astonishingly fast.
In the Mansudae Hall, General Freeman and David Brentwood ducked automatically, for no amount of training could steel a man’s nerves against the instinctive reaction to seek cover from high explosive. There was a high, whistling noise, then the next explosion shaking the building, plaster flaking off the auditorium’s walls. Another crash, more plaster, a lot of yelling from the floor above. The mortar crews were doing their job. Freeman and Brentwood heard confused firing upstairs, then shouting. As the North Koreans started back down the stairs, Brentwood and Freeman stepped out, firing two long bursts into the bunch of figures, killing several, sending the rest scuttling back up the stairs. Freeman was calling the mortar crew on the PRC. “Cease firing!” There was one more explosion.
“Let’s go!” said Freeman. “You take the left stairs.”
They made it up to the second floor without incident, but on the third they saw a small group of NKA, who suddenly retreated, their silhouettes clearly outlined in the fires that had been started by the mortar shelling, toxic smoke already rising from the burning red carpets. The NKA squad could now be heard above on the fourth floor, and Brentwood and Freeman followed, the din of firing beneath them on the ground floor telling them the marine reinforcements from the Humvee were coming in.
On the fourth floor, the NKA, unable to go farther, the exit door stairwell filled with smoke, suddenly split into two groups, three of them, or so it looked to Brentwood, melting into an office on the left, the others disappearing through a door on the right side of the hallway.
“They’ve got the runt!” yelled Freeman. “That’s why they’re trying to hightail it. You take the left.”
David Brentwood stood, back against the hallway wall, his SAW pointed at the office door, the general doing the same across the hall, raising their guns, butts positioned for eye protection, blowing out the locks, then spraying the doors. There was return fire on Brentwood’s side, hitting his Kevlar vest, slamming him across the hallway — bullet holes peppering the stone-finished walls high above the opposite door, sending bits of marble flake whistling through the air as Brentwood, down on the floor, emptied the rest of the magazine into the door.
There had been no return fire from the general’s side. He went to fire again, but the SAW jammed. He threw it down, pulled a grenade, kicked the door in, his hand a blur in and out, the grenade’s explosion sending a cloud of dust and paper floating gently to the red carpet. He went in low with his Beretta, right hand arcing, his left cupping for support. There was silence, a lot of paper still falling, the room thick with plaster dust. By now, David Brentwood was back on his feet, SAW blazing, going into the room from which he’d taken fire. In the office across the hall, Freeman, debris still settling about him, saw four figures: two stunned officials in green Mao suits, one of them a small, pudgy man with glasses, the other covered in fallen plaster, a streak of blood on his face, and two NKA officers, one of whom, a lieutenant, was dead in front of the desk, the other, a major, on the floor to the right, his uniform in tatters from the explosion, moaning and clutching his stomach, rolling in debris beneath a picture of the “dear and respected leader.” The picture was amazingly intact, not even its glass broken, but the grenade the general had thrown in was meant mainly to terrify and stun — which it had clearly done.
Inside the other office Brentwood saw that both men, militia, were dead, one still holding his AK-47, staring up through the light given off by the advancing flames. David whipped about as he heard heavy firing down on the main floor, sounding like marine SAWs. He saw his magazine was empty and reached for the last one.
The general waved the two officials away from the desk with his Beretta. “Over there, Comrades!”
Brentwood was walking over, having taken the finished magazine out and seeing the toxic smoke that was billowing at the blocked end of the hallway and moving quickly toward them. “General, we’d better—” He saw the one groaning on the ground rolling a grenade at the general’s feet. Knocking the general farther into the room, Brentwood scooped the grenade up, throwing it down the hallway. Its blast took out three neon light fixtures and blew a door in, the NKA’s Major Rhee coming at them, a knife in his hand. The general fired four times and now the picture of the dear and respected leader tilted sharply, its frame shattered, the leader solemn at a ridiculous angle.
“Move!” yelled Freeman at the other two, “before I shoot you, too, you goddamned Commie rats!”
A marine at the far end almost fired a burst before he saw the other marine, Brentwood, and General Freeman.
The general tore off the NKA soldiers’ dog tags, at the same time trying to apply pressure on where the knife had cut him on the left arm.
The Tomcats were again too good for the MiGs, the American jets’ fly-by-wire technology far superior to the Russian- and Chinese-made controls when it came to using circuits instead of ailerons. And while the monsoon was abating, the rain was still so heavy that flying by instrumentation alone put the Americans still further ahead, the final toll in this sortie, four Tomcats lost to fifteen MiGs. And what Freeman had expected to be the worst of it, the fighting withdrawal, went far better than expected. Ironically, his decision to attack in the monsoon, when flying by instrument was the only way, had been the best decision about the use of an air force since the world war had begun. Within hours its implications were revolutionizing NATO strategy, giving new hope to the exhausted and outnumbered NATO pilots in the European theater that the bad weather of winter might promise to give them a decided edge against the Soviet and Warsaw Pact planes.
Success on the ground at Pyongyang, where Freeman’s chopper had been the last to leave, was not due solely to the Tomcats’ superb ability to keep the MiGs off the Chinooks, but was largely due to the three remaining Apache helos, which, rearmed from three supply Chinooks and lighter because of the jettisoned extra fuel pods they had had coming in, rose from the square like angry gnats and attacked the NKA armored column approaching from Nampo, able to come down directly above the tanks’ turret tops, the latter being the most vulnerable armored section of any battle tank. The Hellfire missiles set the first six PT-76s afire, the bigger, heavier tanks, including most of the captured American M-60s, having already been sent south days before for Kim’s final push on the Yosu perimeter.
Even so, when Freeman returned to the Saipan, he was a disappointed man. The little pudgy official with the glasses, interrogated aboard the LPH, was not the “runt” after all but a senior official with the NKA’s ministry of supply, merely working late at Mansudae Hall.
“Where the hell is he then?” thundered Freeman, drained and tired.
“They say he’s well outside the city in a bunker,” Al Banks informed the general. “Apparently, first radar alert they had, or rather when our Prowlers started scrambling, they got him out.”
“By God,” Freeman said disgustedly, “he’s a goddamned coward as well.”
“General, sir, you did a magnificent job. Washington expected us to take sixty — eighty — percent casualties. We got out with less than fourteen percent.”
“Well, Al,” said the general, who kept moving around in the sick bay, the SB attendant trying to clean the deep knife wound, “fourteen percent is two hundred and eighty men, Al. And not to get that Commie bastard is a — it’s—”
“General,” interjected Banks, his relief at getting back alive infusing him with the same excitement as it had the media types now filing their stories via the fleet communications center aboard the Salt Lake City south of them, “we, you, got into the North Korean capital — in the worst weather imaginable — shook the hell out of them, and came out. General, our boys in the Yosu perimeter are counterattacking like you wouldn’t believe.”
The general started to simmer down. “The other two attacks on Taegu and Taejon — how are they doing?”
“Proceeding as planned, General — knocking the hell out of their supply line, and the NKA air force has shot its wad. Salt Lake City tells us our attack sucked up most of the MiGs from the south away from the perimeter. Our reinforcements are unloading at Pusan now.”
“Well,” said the general grumpily, but clearly bolstered by the news, “that was worth it. But it sticks in my craw that we never got that turd.” His arm was still, the sick bay attendant working fast, but there was a lot of dirt in the wound and grease around it, and the attendant was wondering whether he should remind the general or not about the importance of cleaning a wound, in combat or anywhere else, as quickly as possible. He decided to take the plunge.
“Sir, you should get a tetanus booster.”
“What — oh, all right, son. If you say so.”
The general turned to Banks again, who was looking a bit out of it, thrown off balance by the LPH’s sharp turn and a long roll that sent the medic’s kidney dish clanking on the steel deck. “You’d better sit down, Al.”
“I’ll be okay, General. Sorry, I forgot what we were—”
“That other bozo in the Mao suit. Who’s he?”
“Ministry of supply’s secretary — or so he says. We could run it through the Pentagon computer link if you like?”
“No. Waste of time.”
“The dog tags you got, General. Both NKA officers. One a lieutenant. The other was a Major Rhee. Intelligence. He—”
“Yes — the son of a bitch tried to kill me. Sneaky bastard. Well, that young marine — Brentwood — and I. We put pay to that. Damn knife wound.” The general held his arm up. “Looks like I’ve been in a whorehouse brawl.”
“Well, General, you did better with that major than you think.”
Banks turned to the ROK captain, who had been sitting quietly by the sick bay’s centrifuge. “That right, Dae?” asked Banks.
The ROK captain turned to Freeman. “Sir, the major was from General Kim’s personal staff. Intelligence. We found these on him—” The ROK officer handed Freeman a bunch of creased papers, a lot of Korean characters on them that the general didn’t understand but recognized as the outline of military areas V and VII. It was the Yosu-Pusan perimeter. The ROK officer leaned forward, pointing to various Korean markings outside the perimeter on the Nam River, which flowed down from Taegu, breaching the perimeter at Chinju fifteen miles north of Sachon. “Disposition of U.S.-ROK forces, General.” He pointed next to the cluster of Korean characters above the arc of the perimeter. Next to each character were rectangles and squares of NKA troop and all battery dispositions. “Kim’s strategy for his attack on Yosu, day after next, General.”
“What!”
“Don’t worry, sir,” Banks quickly interjected. “We had the information coded and SAT-bounced to Pusan HQ, Washington, and Tokyo before your chopper and the last Tomcats crossed the coast.”
“Hot damn!” said Freeman. “We didn’t do so bad after all, Al.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, General.”
“Dumb bastards. Should’ve burned ‘em,” said Freeman.
“We didn’t give them much time, General,” responded Banks, sharing the general’s excitement. “We were in and out of Crap City under two hours.”
“Seemed like two days,” confessed Freeman.
“Most of the men feel the same, sir.”
Suddenly Freeman fell silent. “We get all our dead out?”
“No, sir. Airborne over at the airfield took the worst of it. It was the howitzers that the NKA were really after — thought it was a major breakthrough from the South. They wanted Rick Menzies’ big guns.”
“Rick get out?”
“No, sir. He was spiking the guns last I heard, but that’s only hearsay — until we get confirmation from his two IC. LPH got a bit overcrowded here with everybody coming in. Some of the choppers went on to the carrier.”
“We don’t need to get it straight from anyone,” said Freeman. “He was a pro to the core.” The general winced as the medic touched his arm with the alcohol, then, seeing what it was, only cotton batting, looked embarrassed. “Talking of pros, I want that Brentwood boy and that other man—” The general tried to remember his name. “Boy from Brooklyn—”
“We’ll trace him, sir.”
The general was still avoiding the sight of the tetanus needle. “Owe my life to that Brentwood. Make a note of it, AL Silver Star.”
“Happy to, sir.” The general grimaced as the cold steel pushed into his arm and he felt the antitetanus serum injected into him. “Al — our photographers. Did they get out?”
“Four of the six, General.”
Freeman nodded. “They get pictures of us all over Crap City?”
Banks was so tired that for a second he thought Freeman meant pictures somehow being spread all over Pyongyang like propaganda leaflets.
“They get shots of us?” pressed the general, the first time the ROK officer had seen anything like apprehensiveness, even fear, in the general’s eyes.
“Oh, yes, General,” answered Banks. “Two of them were up on the People’s Study House. Top floor. Infrared shots mostly, around the square and of the howitzers firing. I think they got most of it, far as I know.”
“You haven’t seen any yet?” asked the general.
“No, sir. I—”
“By God, Al. We’ve got to get those pictures stateside right away. The President’ll want to see them. American people need to know—”
Banks began to tell him that the news of the American raid via SAT signals was already burning the wires hot to half a dozen news agencies throughout the world. “It’ll be headline news all around the world, General.”
“Pictures, Al. Goddamn it — we need to get the pictures out. Know what the Chinese say. Picture is worth a thousand words.”
“I’ll check it out, sir.”
“Do it now.”
“Yes, General,” said Banks wearily, getting up and feeling a little light-headed, making toward the sick bay door. “I’ll get right onto it.”
“Al-”
Banks turned slowly, trying not to look as fatigued as he felt. “Yes, General?”
“Al. There’s only one son of a bitch in this world with a bigger ego than that runt!”
Banks looked puzzled.
“Me,” the general said, and winked.
Banks was correct. Dawn now, 6:00 p.m. the night before in Washington and 11:00 p.m. in London — too late for the early evening news in America and pushing it for the midnight BBC broadcast, the news nevertheless took the world by storm. All programs in progress were put on hold as announcers cut in with the news flash of the American attack, the video pictures showing Kim Il Sung’s enormous statue now a rubble on the ground, his body badly cracked yet clearly recognizable, the head split and nothing left standing but the hump of the pedestal.
Then came the biggest shock of all: cuts of Pyongyang Polly, picked up by satellite, announcing to the slow accompaniment of funereal music that “our dear and respected leader” had been killed in the American raid and that the new people’s provisional revolutionary government was being led by “our dearly revered president, Choi Yunshik,” formerly a vice martial in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The CIA at Langley knew nothing more about Choi than that he was a middle-of-the-roader who had opposed the hitherto unheard-of Communist “succession” of Kim Jong Il taking over his father’s title.
General Kim, it was announced by Pyongyang Polly, was being relieved, “due to ill health.”
With the precious time and intelligence gained by Freeman’s attack, the pressure on the Yosu/Pusan perimeter was immediately reduced. Kim’s overextended supply line severed by the “Freeman-style” attacks, as the press was calling them, on Taejon and Taegu had only added to General Kim’s problems.
Everything had come unglued for Kim, due in no small measure to the capture of Kim’s plan of attack on Pusan from Major Rhee, who, after interrogating Tae at Uijongbu, had been given the plan by Kim to take to Pyongyang for the blessing of the NKA’s general staff.
In Beijing, behind the highly lacquered bloodred gates of Zhongnanhai Compound on Changan Avenue, the North Korean ambassador reported that Pyongyang wished to “discuss the situation” with the United States, and as there was no official representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea “ in the imperialist warmonger’s capital,” the government in Pyongyang representing the “freedom-loving people of North Korea” requested that their comrades of the People’s Republic of China might intercede on their behalf.
The ambassador’s request was not well received by Premier Lin, who reminded the Korean that their late dear leader, Kim II Sung, father of Kim Jong D, whom Chinese intelligence knew was not dead but under house arrest, had once referred to the Chinese as “American puppets.”
The ambassador was shocked, and said, with great respect, that he did not recall this.
“It was,” said Premier Lin coldly, “in February 1989.” With that, Lin rose, indicating the meeting was at an end. Pyongyang would be informed of the Central Committee’s decision.
The ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea bowed as low as his back condition would permit.
In three days Pyongyang, seeing their exhausted troops now reeling back from the Yosu/Pusan perimeter as far as Taegu, saw what President Mayne referred to rather mundanely as “the writing on the wall,” at least as far as the Korean theater was concerned.
The CIA was receiving messages from Beijing’s Bureau of Public Safety, the Chinese equivalent of the FBI, that “certain overtures” had been made from Pyongyang. These confirmed the CIA’s suspicion, gained from Japanese businessmen who had visited North Korea prior to the war, that, despite the loyal public displays of affection, the wearing of sixteen different pins of their dear and respected leader, the most secretive dictatorship on earth had within it a boiling discontent. The people, in consequence of the economic cost of Kim II Sung’s lavish self-idolatry, and that of his son, were experiencing the lowest standard of living in the Communist world, it being estimated that over 20 percent of the country’s GNP was going to the military.
General Freeman did not know any of this as he was in the throes of a violent allergic reaction to the tetanus shot. Nothing on his record sheet indicated any such reaction, it being hypothesized that the original vaccination given him years before had been made from a different serum. The knife wound had become badly infected, and in Tokyo’s U.S. military hospital, to which he was transferred, surgeons were discussing the possibility that they might have to amputate.
At the moment the United States Congress rose in unison upon hearing that the heretofore little-known General Douglas Freeman, U.S. Army, was to be the recipient fo the first Congressional Medal of Honor in the Asian theater, Captain Robert Brentwood, U.S. Navy, was in the redded-out control room on the top level of the four-tiered sub off the Kola Peninsula. He was about to take the USS Roosevelt up for a last attempt to receive a burst message via the VLF. No message came.
“Retract VLF,” he ordered. “Ready HF.” This was a whip aerial that would slide up from the periscope cluster to receive on the higher-frequency channels, but its appearance above the sea’s surface could prove fatal if picked up by enemy SATRECON — satellite reconnaissance.
“Five minutes only, Pete,” instructed Brentwood. “Then retract.”
“Understood. Five minutes. Counting.”
At three minutes fifty-seven seconds there was an electronic burp, the receiving screen registering digitized transmission from a TACAMO aircraft out of Reykjavik, Iceland.
There was a collective sigh.
“Jesus!” said one of the planesmen, too relieved not to break the silence order. Brentwood let it pass, relieved himself. From the computer room an operator handed him the computer-converted number-for-word message to USS Roosevelt: “Battle Stations Missiles.”
There was no Klaxon or alarm chime as, following strict procedure, Executive Officer Peter Zeldman calmly announced on the mike, “Now hear this…” as he stood on the attack center’s raised podium about the search-and-attack periscopes.
Next, Captain Brentwood ordered, “Set Condition One SQ”—the nuclear sub’s highest alert.
“Set Condition One SQ. Aye, aye, sir,” repeated Zeldman, then with all compartments “punching in” on the electronic state-of-readiness board, Zeldman confirmed, “Condition One SQ all set.”
“Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. The USS Roosevelt, containing more explosive power than all the wars in history, each of its missiles forty times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was ready.
Leaving the attack center, Brentwood walked briskly forward of the BBQ sonar console, nicknamed “Barbecue” by the crew, past the NAVSTAR navigation console to the radio room, where he was joined by Zeldman and two other officers. As Brentwood and Zeldman watched, the other two officers from the sub’s strategic missile division opened the two small green combination safes, extracting a black plastic capsule from both. The code phrase in each was the same — in this case “Anna Belle”— the fact that both capsules contained the same name confirming the Pentagon’s order for Roosevelt to “fire all missiles.”
“Neutral trim,” ordered Brentwood solemnly.
“In neutral trim now, sir.”
“Very well. Prepare to spin. Stand by to flood outer tubes.”
“Standing by.”
“Very well. Flood tubes one, two, three, and four.” The outer doors of the torpedo tubes opened, followed by the hissing sound of air under pressure expelling water from the tubes, the four Mk-48 torpedoes sliding forward from their rail-tracked dollies into the tubes, ready to fire at any enemy sub or ship that might try to run interference with the missile launch.
In missile control the weapons officer, his gold submariner’s dolphins insignia a bloody red in the light, began feeding the local orientating corrections for Kola Peninsula into the warheads’ computers, aligning them to true north — insuring bull’s-eye trajectories for the forty-eight reentry vehicle warheads atop the six missiles. “Spin-up complete,” he announced, inserting and turning the circuit key he carried at all times on a lanyard about his neck. His assistant, a junior officer, walked, headphone wire trailing, along the narrow “Blood Alley,” the redded-out corridor of tall, lean computers, ticking off each missile’s status, verifying for the weapons officer that every one of the Trident-Cs was ready to pass through the last of its four prelaunch modes.
“Prepare for ripple fire,” instructed Brentwood, his order calmly informing the weapons officer that all missiles were to be fired, the Roosevelt now hovering in neutral buoyancy at launch depth, a hundred feet below the surface. In ripple fire sequence, each of the six thirty-ton, eight-warhead Tridents could be launched with enough water above the sub to prevent serious “blast-off” damage to the hull’s carbon steel fairing aft of the sail. It would also allow the missile to obtain optional launch from the moment steam pressure blasted each six-thousand-mile-range missile from its four-story silo. To thwart the danger of the sub yawing violently each time it lost the sixty-seven thousand pounds of each missile, the emptied tube immediately replaced by rushing water, the firing sequence would be staggered — in ripple fire — so that missile one would be followed by missile six and so on, maintaining the sub’s trim.
His hands holding the highly polished brass rail that girded the control room’s attack center, Robert Brentwood’s lean frame bent forward, his deep-set brown eyes concentrating on the computer screen directly in front of him. Checking that all missiles were ready for launch, he held his key ready to click into the MK-98 firing control system, the weapons officer waiting below, the black flexi-hose trailing snakelike behind him from the plastic red firing grip in his hand, his thumb now on the transparent protector cap, ready to flip it up and depress the red button. Six times.
Only Brentwood, his executive officer, weapons officer, and three vitally positioned crewmen could now tell, from the last number-for-letter variation in the code, that this time Brentwood would not have to insert the key and complete the circuits, it being judged absolutely imperative by the president and the chief of naval operations that a crew should not know when it was a WSRT — weapons systems readiness test drill — until the final seconds, if they were to maintain the razor-edge efficiency needed to defend their country in the time of “maximum peril.”
The trouble with this, as Robert Brentwood had often discussed with his younger brother Ray, was that after a high alert, the natural reaction for the crew was to relax. This could be the greatest danger of all.