Red Phoenix (36 page)

McLaren looked around the tent. Everyone was writing, looking at the map, or looking at him. They looked slightly less unsettled, and that was about all he could expect right now.”Anybody got anything else?”

Nobody spoke.

“All right then. Let’s get down to it.”

The assembled officers scattered back to their duties. McLaren pushed through the crowd toward Hansen.

“General Park and his entourage are here, sir.”

“Great. Okay, Doug, separate out all the ass-kissers and bring ’em here for a mini-brief on the overall situation. Make ’em feel like they’re doing something.”

Hansen grinned and asked. “What about the general?”

“Get him up to my command trailer. Park and I have a few things to go over in private. Mano-a-mano.”

Hansen grinned wider, sketched a quick salute, and left. McLaren followed him out the tent and then headed for his trailer. This was going to be touchy.

The Chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs showed up on his doorstep a few minutes later. Park wore impeccably tailored combat fatigues, a cold weather parka, holstered .45, and a helmet he took off as soon as he stepped inside the narrow-bodied trailer.

McLaren met him with a firm handshake and led the Korean over to a canvas-seat director’s chair. He settled into a similar chair and willed himself to be patient through the next several minutes of meaningless pleasantries as Park conveyed his government’s gratitude for the aid being sent by the United States and repeated the ROK’s firm commitment to the unified command structure.

That was what McLaren had been waiting to hear, and he used it to raise a crucial issue: the release of the South Korean officers being held in detention camps for their part in General Chang’s abortive coup. He wanted them back in the field, commanding their units.

Park was outraged. “What you ask is impossible! These men are traitors, conspirators.”

McLaren kept his tone level, but he spaced his words out enough to let Park hear the determination behind them. “I’m not—asking—anything, General. The situation we face is critical. Meeting it is going to take a one-hundred-percent effort from every man in this country—Korean and American alike. And without the officers you’ve got rotting in those camps, a lot of my ROK units aren’t operating up to par. I don’t want any more fiascos like the one up at Kangso this morning.”

The word on that had come through just before the staff briefing. A South Korean infantry battalion commanded by a major whose only obvious military credential was unquestioning loyalty to the Seoul government had been ambushed enroute to the front. The major had panicked and fled—leaving his troops to try to fight their way out of the trap without any command coordination or support. Three hundred of them had been killed by a force of North Korean commandos probably mustering less than half of that number. A total of twenty-three NK bodies had been recovered from the ambush site.

“We can’t afford that kind of exchange ratio, General Park. Hell, we just plain can’t afford to let a bunch of political amateurs try to play combat soldier while there’s real shooting going on.

“Now I’m not talking about the officers that were actually conspiring with Chang. They can hang. They should hang.” McLaren leaned forward. “But we both know that DSC cast its net pretty wide after the coup attempt. You know many of the men being held. A careful reevaluation of the information that led to their arrest should show that most of them are loyal to the government.”

Park frowned. He’d been around long enough to know that what McLaren saidmadesense. He had fought inVietnamand knew how valuable
experienced leaders were. He sat quietly for a moment, obviously considering his response. McLaren waited, knowing he held the upper hand on this one.

A minute passed in uneasy silence until Park said, “Very well, General McLaren. I’ll speak to the President and present your case to him. I think I can get them released.”

The Korean looked up from his folded hands. “But I must warn you, General, that my government will hold you responsible for their actions should they betray us again.”

McLaren nodded calmly. “I wouldn’t expect anything else.” He stood abruptly. “Now that’s settled, let me show you what we’re up against.”

He led the way back to the Operations Center.

THE ARMY LOGISTICS CENTER, YONGSAN ARMY BASE, SEOUL

Anne Larson looked at chaos. The systems programming division could be a little crazy, especially if the computer went down, but this went beyond all reason.

First there were the phones. North Korean commando targets in the Seoul area had included communications centers and automated switchboards, and now the phone service was all snarled up. Her people were spending five minutes just trying to get through to someone on the other side of town. And a lot of the phone numbers for supply and combat units were unusable, because the troops were in the field and there was no way to reach them.

On top of that, and despite the lousy communications, it seemed like every logistics officer in the ROK was determined to get a complete list of everything in his inventory. She scowled. If they’d been doing their jobs, they wouldn’t have to ask her. One low-level idiot had even called demanding a data dump of everything stockpiled in Korea! She’d hung up on him, hard.

Anne punched a button on her terminal, sending a main-gun-barrel spares list for the 1st of 72nd Armored into the already overloaded print queue. She rolled her desk chair back and stretched, wincing slightly at the pain in her lower back.

It had been a long night and an even longer day. Tony hadn’t been able to get leave from Kunsan so she’d had to make an appearance at the office Christmas party by herself. An hour surrounded by buzzed, hard-up, and horny junior staff officers had seemed like an eternity. She’d stuck it out long enough to avoid being talked about and then left—half-angry with Tony for not being able to be there and half-angry with herself for feeling lonely. Three months before she would have taken the whole thing in stride.

It had taken her a long time to go to sleep. She was deeply disappointed in not spending the evening with Tony. She missed him and missed sharing the holiday with him. She hadn’t even been able to give him his present. As she tossed and turned her last thoughts were of him.

The alert sirens had woken her an hour later.

At first she’d thought the high-pitched wail rising and falling above Seoul was something to do with Christmas, some Korean custom she had never heard of. But the sirens kept on and on—ending in a tremendous, rattling explosion that had knocked books off her shelves and lit up her bedroom window for an instant with an eerie, orangish light. Then she’d heard jets loud and close overhead. Tony had told her that aircraft were never allowed to fly over Seoul.

She’d still been sitting upright in bed half-asleep when the jet engine noises roaring all over the city were suddenly mingled with sharper cracking sounds. Shrapnel from antiaircraft shells bursting overhead had started pattering down on the street outside, sounding a lot like a hard, metallic rainstorm. And while her conscious mind sorted out all the obvious clues, Anne’s subconscious had already had her moving. Out of bed and into her clothes. She’d been fully dressed by the time she allowed herself to think the answer. They were at war.

Just thinking the word “war” made Anne’s stomach turn over. She shook off a mental picture of herself ripped apart by bombs. She thought about Tony trapped in a flaming cockpit, trying to get out … stop it. That wasn’t getting her anywhere. Anne rolled back to her keyboard, fingers punching up a new menu without conscious thought. Her mind drifted back again to the events of last night.

At least she hadn’t gone running out into the street in panic like a lot of her neighbors. Instead she’d sat by the telephone, trying to get through to the base general information number. Nothing. Every time she tried calling, the line was either dead or busy.

After nearly an hour of frantic dialing, Anne had given up and retreated to the apartment’s tiny kitchenette to consider her next move. The U.S. Armed Forces—Korea radio station was silent, off the air, and she couldn’t make out any details in the Korean language broadcasts spewing out of the government-owned stations. Without any solid information, one side of her mind had wanted very much to stay hidden in the apartment. But another side had argued that she would be needed at the Logistics Center and should report in for work.

She’d been right in the middle of this internal debate when the phone started ringing. Anne had grabbed for the receiver, started to speak, and then stopped in midword as she realized it was a computer-generated call relaying a taped message.

“This is the Eighth Army Information Center with an urgent message for
all civilian contract personnel employed at the Yongsan base. At oh two hundred hours this
A.M.,
North Korean forces commenced open hostilities with U.S. and South Korean troops stationed along the Demilitarized Zone.” Well, it’s official, she thought. The recording continued, “Accordingly, the base commander has declared a general alert and ordered all base employees to report to their respective work stations.

“However, civilian employees are cautioned to avoid using personal or public transportation. Special buses are being dispatched to pick you up at your place of residence. Wait for the bus dispatched to your location. All employees with dependents should bring those dependents with them. Make sure that you have the following items: your military ID card, passport, special medical information and prescriptions, and a minimum kit with spare clothing and portable personal valuables. Each person boarding a bus will be limited to one, repeat, one suitcase.” Anne had sat still while the taped message recycled and repeated.

For a moment after hanging up, she hadn’t known whether to be relieved now that she knew for sure what was going on or even more frightened. She’d finally shelved the question and started packing, figuring there’d be time enough later to sort out her feelings.

Beep.
Anne pulled out of her reverie and glanced at the screen. Damn, she’d misentered a whole field of data. Start thinking, woman. She shook her head and started over again.

Now the bus ride, she thought, that had been frightening. She’d been picked up just before dawn by a green-painted Army bus escorted by a street sweeper to push shrapnel fragments aside and a jeep filled with M16-toting MPs. The trek to Yongsan had been an hour-long, circuitous crawl through Seoul’s streets. They’d stopped every so often to load on more of her coworkers and their families.

The capital’s boulevards had been strangely empty of the normal, morning rush-hour traffic. And Anne had seen fully equipped South Korean soldiers posted at every major intersection. Storefronts all along their route were still covered by roll-down metal shutters.

Their arrival at Yongsan’s main gate had only reinforced her uneasiness. MPs in bulky flak jackets had boarded the bus and scrutinized every passenger’s identification. Others stood on guard on the pavement outside, weapons at the ready. And she’d glimpsed still more troops hurriedly building sandbagged machine gun nests at intervals along the perimeter fence.

Anne shook her head slowly, remembering the blackened, torn, and gutted buildings, the debris-strewn streets, and the shattered windows she’d seen on the way from the gate into the Logistics Center. The place looked as if it had been hit dead center by a tornado.

It hadn’t taken long, though, for word of the North Korean commando
strike to sweep through the crowds of newly arriving civilian workers. Rumor had magnified both the numbers and the casualties they’d caused.

As if the thought had been a premonition, she heard someone yell, “Commandos! There’s gook commandos outside!”

Oh, God. Anne hit the save button on her computer, jumped out of her chair, and ran to the window, along with the rest of the staff. Ed Cumber, one of her programmers, stood shaking, pointing outside at a truck parked in front of their building. Korean troops in full combat gear were jumping out the back and taking up positions along the street.

Anne started to back away from the window, then stopped and looked closer. There were American soldiers intermingled with the Koreans, talking calmly, sharing cigarettes with them.

She shook her head and looked disgustedly over at Cumber.

The tall, bleary-eyed programmer shrank a little under her gaze and tried to defend himself. “Well, I thought … I mean, they were jumping out of the truck, and they…”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Ed. Just because everybody else is panicking doesn’t mean we should,” she said sternly, aware that she’d jumped the gun just like all the rest.

Phones were ringing in the office while everybody stood and looked at the motionless Korean soldiers.

“Back to work!” They scattered.

Anne moved back to the computer terminal she’d taken over earlier that morning, but she altered course when she saw her secretary waving her over. Gloria was on the phone, listening intently and scribbling notes. “Right, right, uh huh, got it. Okay, I’ll pass the word.”

She hung up as Anne came over.

“It’s official, Anne. We’re supposed to prep for possible evacuation. They’re going to start sending all civilian contract workers to Japan sometime in the next forty-eight hours.”

Anne stood still for several seconds. Japan. She was going to get out of this mess. Then her mind whispered, But what about Tony?

______________
CHAPTER
26

Evasion

OUTPOST MALIBU WEST

Kevin Little had never been so cold.

At first the freezing Korean winter air had been a minor annoyance as he lay motionless, playing dead. But now it had become a sharp, stabbing pain—spreading slowly from the bayonet slash through his parka across his whole body. Each short, controlled breath he took moved the icy air farther up his back, sucking away warmth and leaching away his life.

Kevin had always heard that freezing to death was painless. Now that it was happening to him, he knew that wasn’t true.

He had to get up and move. Movement meant warmth and warmth meant life. But movement could also mean death if the North Koreans had left sentries behind to guard the hill.

Kevin lay still, listening for the slightest sounds around him. He’d heard the North Koreans evacuate their wounded and march south, away from Malibu’s smashed bunkers and trenches. But he hadn’t been able to make up his mind about the answer to the crucial question. Had they all gone?

Kevin wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there beneath his platoon sergeant’s corpse. Time had stopped meaning very much. How long had it been since his platoon had been wiped out? An hour? Two? Three? He couldn’t read his watch without moving his arm.

A new wave of cold agony swept through him. Kevin clenched his teeth against the pain. He had to get up. Now. Before the cold sapped his strength so much that it began to feel warm. Before he started falling asleep in its chill embrace.

Awkwardly he crawled out from under Pierce’s body, forcing himself first to his hands and knees and then into a crouch, his back against the sandbag-reinforced trench wall. Teeth chattering, he looked at the wreckage of his platoon.

Bodies were heaped down the length of the trench, lying crumpled and twisted wherever the killing bullets had thrown them. White, bloodless, unseeing faces stared at the sky.

Kevin closed his eyes and brushed roughly at the tears frozen to his face, as if he could brush away the images surrounding him. He’d failed his men. He’d led them to disaster. And now he was conscious of a terrible, almost overwhelming sense of shame that he’d survived. It had all happened so quickly. Only a few seconds had elapsed between the moment Pierce was killed and the final collapse of Malibu West’s defense. But during those few chaotic seconds he’d been overpowered by a wave of horrible, mind-numbing fear, caught completely unable to think of what to do next. Playing dead during the massacre had been an instinctive reaction, a last grasp for personal survival.

Kevin clenched his fists and moaned softly. Now he could think again and wished that he couldn’t. His mind kept replaying those last horrible seconds, over and over. Pierce falling in slow motion, bleeding, dead. The grenades going off nearby. Men screaming and dying. Men he’d been responsible for.

He shook his head in despair. He’d panicked and lived while they’d died. Now the most he could do was save himself. And maybe not even that. He bit his lip and levered himself slowly to his feet.

Sounds were starting to make themselves clearer to him, and he realized that he could still hear the thumping roar of North Korean artillery from across the DMZ. It wasn’t a continuous, ear-splitting barrage anymore. Instead, the guns fell silent for moments at a time as new targets were sought, identified, and marked for destruction. Then the guns fired again, sending streams of high-explosive shells screaming across the sky toward the south.

Suddenly Kevin froze. He’d heard footsteps from the communications trench off to his left. The North Koreans had left sentries behind. His left hand fumbled for the 9mm Army-issue pistol holstered at his waist. It wasn’t there. He looked around frantically and saw the Beretta lying in the muck by Pierce’s body. Oh, shit.

He heard the footsteps again, closer this time. Kevin tensed. There wasn’t time to run. He’d have to try taking the North Korean with his bare hands. He felt a wild urge to laugh and suppressed it. He’d barely passed his ROTC Unarmed Combat classes. What chance did he have now?

He pressed back harder against the sandbags, willing himself invisible and knowing it wouldn’t work.

Footsteps again, crunching in the frozen mud at the bottom of the trench. Out of his half-closed eyes, Kevin saw a man step out of the communications trench and start to turn toward him. Now!

He lunged forward with a strangled yell, knowing he wouldn’t make it.
The man was already turning, moving fast, bringing a rifle up toward him. Then Kevin saw his face and faltered.

It was Rhee, a battered and bloody Rhee, but Rhee nonetheless. His South Korean liaison officer.

He saw the recognition in the South Korean’s eyes at the same moment. The rifle slid out of Rhee’s hands.

“You’re alive?” Rhee’s voice was hoarse, and Kevin saw the long, jagged cut running down the right side of his head. Dried blood streaked the South Korean lieutenant’s torn snowsuit.

Kevin nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment.

Both men stared at each other, panting, waiting for the fear-invoked adrenaline rush to subside.

“What happened?” Kevin jerked his head back the way Rhee had come.

Rhee shook his head and winced. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” He paused, obviously trying to remember something, and then continued in a hoarse whisper, “I was in my … my bunker. There was a flash. An explosion.”

The South Korean looked around slowly at the bodies heaped around them. “When I came to … everything was like this … everyone dead.”

He stared back at Kevin. “How did you survive?”

Kevin laughed, a bitter, coughing laugh that turned into a choked-back sob. “Me? I chickened out. I played dead while they killed my men.”

Rhee shook his head. “You must not blame yourself, Lieutenant. We were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers in a lightning attack. No one else could have done any better against such odds.”

“I should have done something.” Kevin heard his voice break. “God, there must have been something I could have done.”

“There was nothing to be done,” Rhee said flatly. “The communists outnumbered us by more than ten to one. They had absolute artillery superiority. We were short of ammunition and completely surrounded. The result was preordained. Victory was beyond our grasp.”

Kevin turned away, feeling irrationally stubborn and oddly irritated by Rhee’s attempts to find excuses for him. “Nice try, Lieutenant Rhee, but I screwed up. End of story, okay? Forty men are dead because of me. Because I panicked.”

The South Korean moved in front of him again. “You cannot dwell on it, Lieutenant. Your reaction was normal. Anybody else would have done the same.” He tapped his chest. “I would have done the same.”

He leaned closer. “Come, Lieutenant Little. There is much that we must do if we are to get out of this. We may have been defeated, but we are both still able to fight on. And we shall avenge our men a hundred times over.”

Kevin closed his eyes again and sank back against the sandbags. Avenge their men? They’d be lucky to survive the next couple of hours. Right now, he just wanted to sleep. Funny, the air felt warmer somehow.

Hands grabbed him and shook him. Kevin opened his eyes to find Rhee’s face inches away. “Come on, Lieutenant! There is no time for self-pity. You’re alive. Now stay that way!”

The South Korean’s voice hardened. “It’s going to take both of us to get out of this. If you want to fall apart, do it later, after we’re back in our own lines.”

Kevin felt anger surge through him, driving back both the cold and sorrow. “Goddamn you, Rhee. Let go of me!” He pushed the South Korean’s hands away and straightened up.

Still angry, he turned away and grabbed an M16 off the trench floor. He didn’t see the wan, sorrowing smile cross Rhee’s face and vanish.

He turned back to the South Korean. “Okay, Mr. Rhee. Just what the fuck do you suggest we do to get out of this mess?”

Rhee kept his face expressionless. “First, I think we must get off this hill. The communists have gone for now, but they’ll be back. You can be sure of that.”

Kevin nodded, grudgingly accepting the sense of Rhee’s argument. “Okay. But we can’t move very far in daylight. We’d be spotted in minutes.”

“True. But we can try to get into cover in a gully or a patch of brush. Somewhere out of sight and out of the way. After that?” The Korean shrugged and moved away from Kevin up onto a firing step to study the ground around Malibu West’s small, rocky hill.

Kevin followed him.

North Korean tanks and troop carriers were still pouring south over the open fields around them—the passage marked by the sound of rumbling engines and squealing, clanking treads. Canvas-sided trucks followed, bouncing and lurching across the torn, roadless ground.

Suddenly sunlight flashed off a canopy as a jet roared low over them and then dropped even lower, screaming west toward the closest North Korean column. The plane pulled up sharply and banked as its bombs found their targets. A pair of trucks disappeared in searing, orange-red explosions.

The jet dived again for the safety of the hills and vanished, pursued by streams of tracers and by airbursts from larger-caliber antiaircraft guns. Oily smoke from the flaming trucks billowed into the sky above the North Korean column, but other trucks and tanks were already detouring around them—still driving south.

Kevin and Rhee slid back down to the bottom of the trench. Kevin raised an eyebrow at the South Korean, his question silent but clear. Well? Which way should they go?

Rhee jerked a thumb to the southeast, and Kevin nodded his agreement. There’d been fewer North Korean troops visible in that direction.

The two men grabbed their weapons and hauled themselves over the lip of
the trench, staying low. Then they crawled down the hill to the southeast, looking for somewhere to lie hidden until the sun went down.

Malibu West lay abandoned behind them.

DECEMBER 26—SOUTHEAST OF MALIBU WEST, SOUTH OF THE DMZ

Kevin clutched his M16 tighter and crouched lower in the snow-choked ditch, scanning the darkness. Where was Rhee?

The South Korean had gone on ahead nearly ten minutes ago to scout out the little village and side road their maps showed right ahead beyond the small rise to his front. What was keeping him?

Kevin knew that he and Rhee had been lucky so far. They’d lain undetected in a clump of dead brush through the rest of Christmas Day while a North Korean assault column rumbled south just a few hundred meters away. Once night had fallen, they’d wriggled out of the brush and jogged southeast, guiding themselves by Rhee’s compass and by the bright flashes of the North Korean guns still firing from beyond the DMZ.

Late at night, clouds had rolled in from the north, covering the sky and raising the temperature enough for a light snow to begin falling, settling in over the whole battlefront. They’d welcomed both the relative warmth and the cover from prying eyes it provided.

Now, though, the snow was a hindrance. Fast-falling flakes made it almost impossible to see anything more than a few meters away. Kevin peered out into the swirling darkness, alert for the slightest sound or sign of movement.

Snow crunched somewhere off to the right. Kevin twisted toward the sound, his fingers seeking the M16’s safety.

“Little?” Rhee’s voice sounded even more hoarse and strained than it had before.

“Here.”

Rhee dropped down into the ditch beside him.

“Well?”

“We can cross through the village safely enough. There’s no one there to …” Rhee faltered for a second and then went on, “Come, you’ll have to see it for yourself, and we have no time to waste.”

The Korean lieutenant clambered out of the ditch and moved off into the night. Kevin followed.

He understood what Rhee meant when they reached the outskirts of the lifeless village. A North Korean tank column must have rolled right through the middle of the place, machine guns blazing. The killing had been indiscriminate, wanton.

Old men, women, and children lay scattered in and around their wrecked
homes, cut down without reason or pity. The new-fallen snow mercifully covered most of the torn bodies and hid much of the horror.

But not all of it. Kevin’s face tightened when he saw the huddled figures of a mother and her three children lying still against the bullet-riddled wall of the village shrine. Bastards. They’d pay for this. And for his men.

He shook Rhee’s shoulder, pulling the Korean lieutenant away from the nightmare around them. They had meant to look for food, but all he could think of was leaving this place. Rhee wiped the tears from his face and led the way out of the village into the rice paddies and orchards beyond.

They had to find a place to hide before the sun came up. Artillery continued to thunder off to the north.

NEAR TUIL, SOUTH KOREA

The North Korean company commander watched impatiently as his crews stripped the camouflage away from their T-55 tanks. It was all taking too long for his taste. The sun would be up in a matter of minutes, and he’d wanted to be on the way well before first light.

The North Korean captain frowned. If he’d had his way they would never have stopped for the night. His T-55s had infrared searchlights mounted beside their 100-millimeter guns. They could have pressed the attack onward through the darkness and snow. And he was quite sure that kind of unrelenting pressure would have cracked the imperialist defenses ahead of them wide open.

The captain’s lip curled. But no, his battalion commander had explained, the infantry units accompanying the attack were exhausted. They had to rest. They would all drive on together first thing in the morning.

Well, screw the infantry. Those damned footslogging weaklings had given the fascists a four-hour respite. Four hours to strengthen their defenses, resupply, and rest. Now he and his men would have to pay a heavier price in blood and burned-out tanks to make the same gains they could have made with relative ease in the night.

To top everything off, his battalion commander had forbidden anyone to bivouac in the small village they’d shot up. The fool had been afraid the imperialist artillery batteries might have the area zeroed-in. So instead of warming themselves inside captured houses, he and his men had shivered sleepless inside their tanks.