won NATO’s Canadian Cup, the top tank gunnery competition. It was enough for Clemens that the tank’s design, from its long 105-millimeter gun to its low profile and sloping armor plate hull which mitigated all but a direct hit, put it ahead of the others in its class. Other features that made it exceptional were the C02 laser range finder and air-conditioning to insure longer crew endurance times. Clemens had grown up with the M-1, from the early days of congressional heat because of cost overruns, the months of the temperamental test engines, till now. He had kept the faith. Above all — and this, rather than any technical explanations, is what had won most congressmen over — there was the experience of sitting in an Abrams, its fifty-four tons accelerating from zero to twenty miles per hour in six seconds, moving over rough terrain at forty miles an hour, dust flying, the engine roaring but not screaming, and that turret, steady as a billiard ball on green baize, its low body, hence low silhouette, riding on a cushion of independent suspension, the likes of which had never been seen before. It was a thrill not easily forgotten. Apart from the sheer ascetic beauty of it, it meant that the M-1 at top speed, fifty miles per hour, could fire as if it were standing still when in fact racing at a speed that had once merely been a dream in what some experts had thought was a mad designer’s eye.
As Clemens waited, then saw the green-brown camouflage of the first P-76, the “tin can” of the NKA, appear on the Uijongbu road, he almost felt sorry for them, until he remembered how murderously and mercilessly they were shelling Seoul, killing American and Korean women and children indiscriminately.
Tae had always been prepared for invasion, and as he had a plan for his family, he had one for himself, his plan predicated on the assumption that in most men’s lives the glass would be half-empty rather than half-full. Even so, it was no comfort amid the rage and dust of battle that he had long predicted an all-out attack by the North, for in the end each man who had taken the oath of loyalty to the ROK would have to make his own decision, the line between surrender and cowardice often so nebulous in the split second of combat as to have little meaning. He saw the lieutenant in front of him quaking at the thought of surrendering. Now only one hope remained: not that the ROK or U.S. Army would counterattack — both were in disarray — nor did he suppose the NKA would treat him kindly. The war within a family was the most ferocious, the most unforgiving.
His only hope, he believed, lay in the cyanide issued to all front line intelligence officers. The safest place for this, Tae had discovered, was not the teeth — most people ground their teeth at night — or in the wristwatch, for the Communists would take this, not so much for its material value but because a watch in solitary confinement was a comfort. Often it was the only thing by which one could measure the passing of the hours and seasons — sometimes the years. The very act of measurement, of recording a day at a time, was a way of staying sane. The orifices of the body, too, were unreliable, not only because they were often searched by the enemy, but there would always be danger of a capsule or, in this case, a small chewing-guM-1ike strip of concentrated potassium cyanide, breaking in the body, releasing its poison accidentally.
Tae had studied the problem as diligently as he had the matter of the different lengths of chopsticks. In this case it was a German research project into tunneling, mine, and avalanche disasters that had caught his eye, wherein German scientists had tried to find out the most reliable place to insert a small microchip “beeper” to send out a signal in the event of a cave-in. It had been discovered that the most reliable place on the body was a worker’s boots, for unlike shoes or any other form of clothing, these nearly always remained, no matter how many tons of debris or harsh treatment the body had suffered. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, of course; in battle, boots were often claimed as bounty, particularly in peasant armies, and besides, a man without footwear was more a prisoner than if you put him behind barbed wire, unable to run very far in bare feet. And Tae also knew that footwear was sometimes removed for purposes of torture, but generally, except for their laces, which, like a prisoner’s belt, were removed as possible instruments of suicide, boots, he knew, were left to prisoners of war for a very down-to-earth reason — namely that in the heat of battle, moving captives quickly required it.
At considerable expense, Tae had a fake heel made, and in it placed a cyanide capsule, the NKA knowing that such was the prerogative of any ROK intelligence officer privy, as Tae was, to sensitive counterinsurgency material. Tae then had a small, flexible, gumlike sliver of potassium cyanide, developed by the Americans, sewn within the double-layered tongue of the boot, where, even if his NKA captors searched the boot, flexing it, feeling for hidden razors and the like, the gumlike strip would bend as one with the leather. It was for this reason that, despite the shock and smell of battle, the clouds of phosphorus tear gas and the hiss of spent shell casings in the monsoon rain, an extraordinary island of calm lay within him, for the major carried with him, if it became necessary, the ultimate choice in any man’s life, the choice of the moment he would die. He prayed he might not have to, of course, but if, as American colleagues were fond of saying, things got “too rough” and he felt he couldn’t keep the names of the top antiinsurgency agents in the South from being given to his NKA captors, then it would be
He looked at his watch. The five minutes they’d given him were almost up. Of course, they might shoot him there and then, but he doubted it. Then again… He placed the M-60 on his desk, glanced up at the surly sky for a moment, then walking to the door, asked the lieutenant to open it. Frantic with fear and the sense of urgency, the lieutenant jerked the door handle toward him as Tae raised his arms. The lock on the door, always temperamental, wouldn’t give. When finally it gave way and Tae walked out, hands high, he heard the lieutenant coming behind him, murmuring in shame but more in relief, “It’s the right decision, sir.”
The NKA squad leader, in dust-covered green and khaki battle uniform, his face a smudge of camouflage paint, waved for Tae and the lieutenant to come over toward them quickly. The NKA were very professional, no friendliness but not the rage that Tae knew the front line troops often exhibited under fire along the DMZ. The squad leader — up close he reminded Tae a lot of his younger brother in Seoul, an accountant — had Tae manacled, hands behind his back, and scribbled a note on the label that one of the others had looped loosely about his neck. The squad leader detailed two men of the squad to take Tae to Fourth Division HQ immediately. Now four other men, two Americans, two ROK who had only reached the slit trench a hundred yards or so behind Tae’s hut before they came under fire, took their cue from Tae and surrendered. These four, as well as Tae’s lieutenant, were also manacled, and the NKA squad commander bayoneted them, their severed heads stuck on posts around the Quonset hut. It was very important, the squad commander reminded his eight men, that they use the bayonet as much as possible, as a round not fired in action was a round wasted.
He then ordered them to collect all weapons and ammunition in the area that had been abandoned by the “imperialists,” mostly ROK soldiers hastily retreating, ridding themselves of anything that might inhibit them as they ran to catch the last trucks and jeeps out of the area. While most of the machine guns had been spiked and were of no immediate use, they would be collected by mop-up teams and sent back to Pyongyang to be melted down to make new weapons for the Democratic People’s Republic. The M-16 rifles, many of them intact, along with ammunition clips, would be immediately used to arm comrades overrun in the South as they were given the simple choice: join the NKA or be killed.
News of the decapitations at Panmunjom, the squad leader’s superiors knew, would quickly spread through the fleeing ROK regiments and bring the NKA many new recruits. In this the NKA was aided and abetted by General Cahill, who ordered news of the atrocities to be beamed via the three U.S. high-resolution K-band satellites to show the world the kind of people he was up against, believing that it would help galvanize the American public’s support for Korea’s defense. What in hell was Washington doing anyhow?
As far as his shattered local communications allowed him, the general also beamed news of the atrocities to his retreating American regiments. The message here was more brutal: Apart from total victory, the only way out of Korea would be in a body bag.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Supported by 2,063 guns, including over two hundred Soviet-made 203-millimeter Corps-level howitzers which the South Koreans did not even know the North possessed, the invasion front now stretched seventeen miles from Kim’s tank and rifle regiments in the west to his four divisions east above Uijongbu.
A
