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
“No VLF signal,” Zeldman reported to the captain.
Captain Robert Brentwood nodded and gave orders to the executive officer of the USS
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
“Where the hell is he then?” thundered Freeman, drained and tired.
