Payback wi-10, page 18
part #10 of WW III Series
“Yummy,” said Aussie, ever the contrarian.
“I don’t want to detect any American scent,” emphasized the general, who, despite his orders to stay at mission control, was wearing his battle-camouflage uniform. Like the team’s other seven SpecFor uniforms, it was in marked contrast to the spit and polish of Aussie’s Navy officer issue of ironed, knife-edged khakis. “Remember,” continued Freeman, “no aftershave, no deodorant, no hair gel. No toothpaste — use bicarb. And no hot chocolate, cola, or beverages other than water or Chinese green tea. Intel sources tell us the NKA have currently purchased tons of cheap black Typhoo tea from China, but as long as you stick to your green tea issue you’ll be fine.”
To drive home the point, the general told the five newcomers about what had happened to a SpecFor team in a suspect cave high up in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush. The team, assigned the mission with only ten minutes’ advance notice, had had no time to prepare “food-wise.” It had been a deathtrap, everyone but the team leader wiped out. Freeman had always suspected that, like so many incidents in ’Nam, the rush insertion had been betrayed in large measure by the SpecFor’s telltale American smells. The al Qaeda terrorists who’d unloaded on them, Freeman told his team, had probably literally gotten wind of the SpecFors before they’d even entered the cave.
“Sir,” asked Eddie Mervyn, who’d been selected as chief pilot and whose speech became more rather than less formal as the mission’s H-hour neared, “are we going straight in to Kosong or off-angle?”
Aussie Lewis, who was busying himself changing from his Navy-issue khakis into the camouflage battle uniform that had been rushed over to the McCain courtesy of Colonel Tibbet’s Marine Expeditionary Force aboard the Wasp-class carrier Yorktown, looked at Mervyn in surprise. Choir Williams, Salvini, and the burly Tavos did the same. Along with Freeman’s fundamental axiom of “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace” it was well known among SpecFor types that Freeman’s strategy, unless the enemy was actually waiting and looking straight at you, was that the best line of attack was the shortest, the most direct.
“Straight at ’em,” said Freeman, adding by way of explanation, “I’ve always been a big fan of Horatio Nelson. Straight at ’em.”
Eddie Mervyn, however, gave good cause for what at first had seemed to be ignorance of Freeman’s adage. He indicated the TV in the ready room. Its sound was down, but the pictures from the McCain’s TV weather office, always available for its pilots, gave all the visual aid Eddie needed. “Those L3 thunderheads coming down at this battle group from the northwest don’t look promising,” he told the general, referring to the line of towering white cumulonimbus that were now flattening out into foreboding dark anvil shapes off the North Korean coast, a promise of stormy weather driving south against any straight east-west line of attack against Kosong.
It was Freeman’s turn to surprise Aussie, Choir, and Sal. “You’re quite right, Eddie,” the general said. “There’s no doubt we’re heading into wild weather to the west that’ll be pushing down on our right flank, so I figure the best chance of surprise insertion and extraction is a diamond-shape plan of attack. We head 175 miles northwest from McCain’s battle group here off Ullŭng, then 75 miles southwest to Kosong. Even if the NKA expect an attack, which they won’t because it’s too soon, they’d expect us to come up from the South, either from somewhere along the DMZ or along the coast, certainly not from the north. On the way back, we’ll complete the diamond shape by doing the exact opposite — southeast from Kosong, then wheel northeast back to the battle group.”
“Wheel” reminded Aussie of the general’s famous tank maneuver, and he hoped that the general would have as much success here.
As they dispersed from the ready room, Freeman saw that Choir’s face had not regained its normal color. “You still woozy from the plane ride here?” Freeman asked him pointedly. “Brain fog?”
Brain fog? Mother of God, thought Choir, his face flushing with embarrassment in front of his comrades. “No, sir. I’m fine.”
Freeman nodded, but did Choir glimpse a lingering doubt in the general’s face? The Welsh-American had always known that the kind of air sickness — or, more accurately, the motion sickness — he was prone to could make you “woozy,” as the general had put it, temporarily incapable or at least slower than normal. And the last thing that Payback’s team needed was a member who was slower than normal. Where they were headed, slower meant dead.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lieutenant Rhee of the North Koreans’ Kosong Coastal Defense Unit 5 had earlier expressed doubts to Colonel Kim and Major Park as to whether or not the American gangsters would dare launch a Special Forces attack against North Korea for fear of enraging the NKA’s Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Rhee had also suggested that if the Americans did attack North Korea, the MANPAD warehouse at Kosong might not be their target. But now he was reconsidering the opinions he’d given to the colonel and major, in part because such individual initiative was not encouraged in the highly trained and well-equipped NKA, its organization a mirror image of the old Sino/Soviet military structure, where any thinking “outside the box” was immediately suspect, especially when it involved junior officers and the lower ranks. Individuals such as Rhee who strayed in thought from the party line implicitly challenged the infallibility of the Dear Leader.
Still, Rhee knew intuitively that the key to success, as so often demonstrated in the West, was to occasionally demonstrate the willingness to take a risk. And so he thought he might adopt another concept from the decadent West in the same daring spirit the Dear Leader had shown when he’d ordered North Korean special forces to kidnap a capitalist South Korean film director in 1978 to make movies for him. Lieutenant Rhee decided that he would take out some insurance, sending fifteen of his Coastal Defense Unit 5’s fifty-five men to Beach 5, the relatively small half-mile-long crescent of sand near the Kosong warehouse and the sector for which the unit was named. He would split the remaining forty men into three five-man patrols north, south, and west of the warehouse, in effect fanning them out to form a semicircle around the warehouse and the beach directly below, leaving the remaining twenty-five men in Unit 5 to form a “mobile rush” platoon, each soldier mounted on a Chinese-made three-wheel “Red Dragon” vehicle. The powerful off-road runabouts, with their thick, tough, gripping pneumatic tires, were ideal for the cart tracks that augmented the coastal road that ran south past the North’s moodily beautiful Diamond Mountains, the latter an extension of South Korea’s equally rugged south Taebek range.
This vitally strategic road linked Kosong to the North’s port of Wonsan sixty miles to the north, the road overlooked by the towering, snow-covered crags of Mt. Kumgang, which sat majestically just north of the deadly demilitarized zone.
Rhee had “done his time” on patrols along the 2.5-mile-wide, 148-mile-long swath of land mines and high razor-wire fences of the DMZ. DMZ “incidents” following the armistice had caused the death of another 1,638 Koreans and Americans, and so he doubted that the imperialists and their South Korean lackeys would launch any kind of retaliatory attack across the DMZ. It was too carefully guarded. The only problem he had now was waiting to get the signature of Colonel Kim for the release of the twenty-five dragon vehicles he’d ordered, Kim in turn having to receive the written permission of the commander of IV Corps, the latter constituting the NKA’s easternmost deployment of troops, south of the east-west Pyongyang-Wonsan axis.
Rhee, like every other North Korean, had been born and raised in the Hermit Kingdom, so called because of its seclusion and the ludicrous irony of it being the only hard-line Communist state in the iron grip of a royal family — like succession. And so he was used to the extraordinary amount of red tape involved in getting the most minor things accomplished in the military’s bureaucracy. Even so, the lieutenant found it difficult to mask his annoyance with Colonel Kim, who, as CO of the nine-hundred-infantryman battalion to which Unit 5 was assigned, had not yet obtained Pyongyang’s release of the necessary vehicles. It wasn’t as if, Rhee pondered, he’d requested an upgunned laser-sight and snorkel-equipped Chonmaho tank for some mad dash across the DMZ.
Pondering the delay, Rhee wondered if IV Corps HQ, who knew him only as a number, suspected him of wanting the all-terrain vehicles not to bolster his defense of Beach 5 but for a darker, more nefarious reason. Was he a closet kotchebi, one of the so-called Fluttering Swallows, who, in Pyongyang’s words, had turned their back on “the glorious people’s republic of our Dear Leader, wanting instead to flee to the decadent capitalist cesspool of America’s running-dog lackeys in the South”?
In fact, it had never occurred to Rhee to defect. Not only would it mean torture and death if you were captured, but the journey usually involved long, dangerous treks north through mountain hides into China, the DMZ to the south being simply too heavily mined and defended. It meant keeping well away from any kind of road, and if you managed to escape the NKA patrols, there was the treacherous crossing of the wide Yalu River into China where, in all likelihood, government officials would promptly arrest you and return you to North Korea. Of course the swallows could try to escape across the Tumen River in the far northeast into the Chinese and Russian “boot on its side” area south of Lake Khanka, where there were Chinese and Russian border patrols everywhere.
He was thinking more about the kotchebi because of the danger they posed to his sector. Some of them, he knew from personal experience, had tried to escape on small, homemade boats, intending to rendezvous off the coast with South Korean smugglers who dared to make a quick nocturnal dash across the 38th parallel at night to pick up their human cargo. Rhee’s own Unit 5 had foiled the attempted escape of fourteen would-be “fluttering swallows” in the last nine months, a high number for the relatively small patrol area around Kosong and Beach 5.
Indeed, several of his Unit 5 men had been part of a rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms sinking of a smuggler’s boat off Kosong. The smuggler was not as forthcoming about revealing the names of his contacts in the North, and Rhee promptly ordered the man’s legs broken. The Unit 5 squad, using their rifle butts to execute the lieutenant’s command, had gone into a frenzy, their blows a chance to vent their hatred and envy of their Southern neighbors’ affluence and degenerate American morals, evidenced by the centerfolds of naked women that South Korean patrols routinely dropped here and there along the DMZ to goad Rhee’s men. The smuggler, writhing in agony, screamed that the swallows he’d picked up were wanting to go north to the toe of the 20-mile-wide, 150-mile-long “boot” which provided the only direct land access north of the Najin-Sonbong Free Trade Zone to Russia’s far east. Here, in the crowded free-trade zone, surveillance of possible American infiltrators must be difficult. American Special Forces posing as traders might be able to slip through.
Colonel Kim, studying the battle maps at Unit 5’s barracks, his hands clasped behind his green uniform, his red colonel stars on his stiff shoulder boards catching the light, was preoccupied, not with the far north around the Free Trade Zone but rather with possible entry points to the South along the DMZ. Major Park saw the colonel’s fingers closing and opening like a claw in spasm, a telltale sign of his superior’s irritation with Rhee’s concern about the Najin-Sonbong FTZ. “That’s absurd,” the colonel snapped at Rhee. “Look at the map, Comrade. From Najin-Sonbong Free Trade Zone to the warehouse here in Kosong is over 250 miles.”
“Helicopters,” said Rhee, his tone bordering on insubordination. “The Americans have helicopters.”
Major Park flushed angrily. “You think the gangsters would fly all the way down from the FTZ because it is easier for them to use the FTZ as a base? If they come at all — and it’s too soon — they will come by helo from the sea. Straight in from the sea, not on such a ridiculous, roundabout way. The Americans only know one way. Our Intelligence files tell us that the U.S. gangster Freeman prides himself on it. ‘Straight through,’ that is his strategy. Americans by nature are too impatient for any other way.”
The colonel, the only one of the three officers whose rank made him privy to Omura’s agent’s report about the all-weather-wrapped equipment that had been loaded onto the Galaxy in Honolulu, leaned forward, fingers drumming irritably on the map table.
“Inchon,” he said simply, and Major Park lapsed into an embarrassed silence, while Rhee found new respect for the colonel.
Inchon, Rhee had realized, had happened way back in 1950, but was it a salutary lesson in the present circumstances? None of the three men had been born, let alone been a soldier in the army when the present Dear Leader’s father, Kim Il Sung, had unleashed his million-strong Communist Army, his seven Soviet-equipped North Korean Army divisions hurling themselves against the South. As Kim, Park, and Rhee grew up, they, like all of North Korea’s children, had learned the story of the eighty-thousand-strong NKA invasion force which, spearheaded by an armored division of over 250 tanks, had surged across the 38th parallel early on the early morning of June 25, 1950. Seoul, the South Korean capital, had fallen in seventy-two hours, its fleeing, terrified population caught by Movietone cameramen, the sweeping black-and-white images of the South Korean collapse flashed across the world, the prospect of yet another world war threatening barely five years after the cataclysm of 1939–1945 had ended with the hope that a United Nations could prevent war.
Rhee remembered the exhilaration in his great-grandfather’s voice as he described how his platoon, indeed all the NKA platoons, ran, not walked, behind their Chinese-built Soviet T-34 main battle tanks as the NKA armor crushed Seoul, mercilessly routing and rolling over the terrified outgunned, outtrained, outplanned, and panic-stricken South Korean troops. U.S. troops were rushed from U.S.-occupied Japan to hold the line. They couldn’t. Though many were veterans of the fierce fighting of just a few years before in Europe and the South Pacific, having been blooded in the horrific close-quarters combat from Saipan to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, many were now out of shape, having enjoyed the long postwar furlough in Japan and carrying “spare-tire” stomachs to show it. And they were out of practice, their positions overrun as they joined the millions of fleeing South Koreans.
Through sheer luck, the Soviet member of the five-member-country Security Council had stormed out of the U.N. headquarters in New York in a fit of pique the day before the invasion and so wasn’t present for the crucial emergency Sunday Security Council vote as to whether or not the U.N. should send U.N. forces to assist the South Koreans in their hour of dire need. Without the Soviets, who would have had the power of a veto, the Security Council vote was unanimous to assist South Korea. And so U.S., British, Australian, Canadian, Turkish, and other troops, under overall U.S. command, embraced that euphemism for war, “police action,” on the Korean Peninsula. Like all civil wars, from before Athens and Sparta to the massive slaughter of the American Civil War and the equally savage Russian Revolution of 1917, the war between North and South in Korea was unforgiving, members of one American division machine-gunning unarmed NKA POWs in the dread-filled tit-for-tat nature of the “police action.” In less than twelve months, the NKA, as Rhee’s great-grandfather had told him, had managed, with the help of the Chinese, to force the U.S.-led, blue-flagged U.N. troops to retreat over 175 miles to the southern end of the “limp dick” as U.S., Australian, and British soldiers insultingly referred to the drooping-phallus-shaped country. The U.N. soldiers were fighting for their lives in the ever-shrinking Pusan pocket, a sixty-mile-diameter enclave of burning buildings and exhausted, dying men.
It was an extraordinary victory for Kim Il Sung’s armor-led Communist legions. And a massive humiliation for the U.N. forces, especially for the U.S. Army, the once-great capitalist army that as recently as five years before had boasted a strength of millions but which now stood, very unsteadily, at only a fraction of that. America, Rhee’s great-grandfather explained, was so typical of weak, democratic countries. It had demobilized so rapidly in 1945–1946, after the Nazis and Japanese fascists had surrendered, that all the U.N. force had now, apart from the relatively few tough British Commonwealth brigades, U.S. Marines, and the Turks, were what Rhee’s great-grandfather’s generation called overfed, “degenerate Americans” shipped over in haste from Japan.
The NKA’s noose of steel, Rhee recalled his great-grandfather telling him, had tightened around Pusan, forward NKA officers consolidating their forces and making wagers with one another about who would be the first officer to have the honor of seeing the first U.S. flag of surrender.
Kim, seeing how the young lieutenant’s concern about a possible Freeman attack from the Free Trade Zone had been stymied by the mention of Inchon, reminded Major Park and Rhee in an uncharacteristic moment of levity that the joke at the time around the Pusan perimeter was that many South Koreans and some Americans had torn off their white T-shirts and underpants, so desperate were they to surrender. But it was not easy to see them, given the thick, roiling black smoke that had resulted from the U.N.’s forces’ ad hoc scorched-earth policy, and in the chaos that ensued from the South Korean forces’ massive abandonment of arms and matériel during their rout to Pusan.
Lieutenant Rhee knew the rest: it had been drilled into him and his comrades at school how his great grandfather’s generation of North Koreans had continued to close on Pusan along the 150- to 200-mile-long semicircular perimeter, the NKA’s disposition of forces looking from high points along the banks of the Naktong River on the evening of September 14 like a predator’s open mouth about to snap shut on the beleaguered American and other U.N. forces, their backs to the East Sea. U.S. fighter bombers were swarming overhead, but all along the perimeter, as had often been the case during the U.S. and South Korean retreat from the 38th parallel, the confusion created by the flood of refugees intermixed with fleeing soldiers, the NKA in hot pursuit, made it impossible for the pilots to distinguish friend from foe, scores of the U.N. soldiers being killed or wounded by “friendly fire.”
