Again there was no answer.
“Call general quarters,” ordered Brentwood.
“General quarters. General quarters. All hands man your battle stations.”
“Look for ‘skimmers,’ “ instructed Brentwood.
“Alert for skimmers,” repeated the OOD, the lookouts on the bridge’s wings lowering their binoculars, scanning the graying sea, looking for a flash in the distance, anything that would indicate a missile coming in low under the radar screen.
In Seoul, General Cahill ordered all but three of the nineteen bridges blown, and with the weather clearing, firmer ground in the offing, he could finally unleash his heavy fifty-four-ton M-1s, America’s main battle tanks, to buy time for the massive American reinforcements he was sure would come.
Major Tae had been pushed into one of the long columns of over seven thousand battle-shocked and bedraggled South Korean and American prisoners of war taken along the DMZ who were now trudging along in the mud of flooded roads, the forced march confined to side roads passing lush green paddies and brownish, shrub- covered hills, seventy miles in all, from Panmunjom east to Chorwon only a few miles south of what, just forty-eight hours before, had been the DMZ. Now they were being herded southwest again, heading back toward Uijongbu. It would have been half the distance to go straight from Panmunjom to Uijongbu, but the speed of the NKA advance was such that the administration of prisoners, always low in the priorities of an attacking army, had gone awry. Tae, like other intelligence officers, with labels about their necks ticketing them for interrogation, found himself pushed from one column to another and witnessed the mounting frustration of the NKA guards. These were fanatical young reservists who didn’t seem to know where they were going themselves and took their frustrations out on the prisoners, screaming at POWs too weak to go on as if they alone had been responsible for the guards’ confusion instead of the victims of it.
At first there were enough able-bodied men among the seemingly endless columns of prisoners to aid those too weak to go on, putting them on makeshift stretchers of bamboo poles and rain ponchos. But as exhaustion and lack of food weakened the stronger ones as well, the bayoneting began, some of the guards taking obvious relish in killing those South Koreans who had showed any signs of camaraderie with the Americans. Some of the Americans, Tae saw, were obviously being killed for their personal possessions, particularly watches and much-coveted cigarettes. Tae had wanted to help on several occasions, but fear for his own safety made him hesitate.
The warning about the watches swept through the columns but did little to stop the slaughter as prisoners were now being pulled out at random by the AK-47-toting guards and searched. If they found anyone trying to secret something away or not surrendering it immediately, the prisoner’s death came slowly and brutally, the guards using rifle butts in a fury that Tae, with his coldly objective eye, recognized as a savage product of Pyongyang’s ingrained hatred and envy of Americans in general. It also came from the lingering fear of all guards in all armies that if they aren’t tough enough, the entire mud-sloshing column of prisoners might rush and overwhelm them through sheer weight of numbers, the kind of rush the Japanese had traditionally made, preferring death to the ignominy of surrender. The best way to keep control, the guards obviously thought, was to execute any prisoner for the slightest sign of disobedience. The terror of randomly being chosen for death was so palpable in the column that every now and then there was a panicky movement, like columns of ants climbing over one another, as men on the column’s edges sought greater safety by pushing farther into it.
To Tae, who had been in the front line of the counterinsurgency war for so many years, the murders of the Americans did not come as a surprise. Of all the Communist countries, the North Korean regime was unquestionably the maddest. What
An American next to Tae, his left eye bloodied and sodden, the dressing slipping down his face, tripped in a mud-filled pothole. Instinctively Tae’s right hand shot out to steady him. The next second Tae heard shouting, the mustard-colored water splashing about him, as prisoners stumbled away from him and the young American. A heavy thud and Tae’s head shot forward, a burning sensation in his shoulder blades as he sprawled in the mud. He heard the guard cock the Kalashnikov and, looking up, saw the banana-shaped magazine curving down toward the wounded American soldier. The skin around the American’s good eye crinkled in a smile as he fixed his gaze on the South Korean major. “Thanks, buddy—” he began. The Kalashnikov jumped, the sound of the bullet echoing through the lonely, rainy valley either side of the column. The guard swung the semiautomatic toward Tae, about to pull the trigger again, when he saw the label hanging from about Tae’s neck and began screaming that Tae shouldn’t be here, waving his hand back in the direction of the DMZ, shouting that Tae should have been taken west to divisional headquarters at Kaesong. Tae got up unsteadily from the mud, the white of his eyes so marked in contrast to the mud that he looked like a minstrel clown.
He replied in as nonthreatening a tone as he could that he’d gone where he’d been ordered. During the incident the column had not stopped, only a few heads turning back out of curiosity, the savagery visited upon the American having already become the norm. As Tae knew only too well, people could get used to anything. An NKA sergeant, superioR-1ooking, unusually tall for the NKA, came bustling up, chastening the guard. Hadn’t there been an explicit order about conserving ammunition? The guard quietly turned the tables on the sergeant by dutifully pointing out that the collaborationist South Korean major should have been shipped back to divisional headquarters for investigation. The sergeant frowned, Tae realizing the label had even more power than he had realized, glad he hadn’t taken it off. At least it might buy him time, perhaps even special treatment, though this, he knew, could end up being followed by much worse than what was being meted out to the column.
Leaning forward, the sergeant wiped the mud from Tae’s collar, the patch of newer cloth showing where the major’s pips had been before he’d torn them off and thrown them away when the random killing had begun.
“You follow me,” the sergeant told Tae.
“Sergeant, may I request a favor?”
“What is it?” the sergeant asked sharply.
“The American’s identification tags. Could I have—”
“Dog tags!” said the NKA sergeant in English exuberantly. “I study English at Beijing. Foreign Language Institute.”
“Ah,” said Tae noncommittally.
The sergeant cut the dog tags’ cord with his bayonet. With the tags there was a small gold cross on a slim chain, which the sergeant pocketed. “His God did not help him,” he said, grinning, handing the dog tags to Tae.
Tae said nothing and dropped the identification disks into his tunic pocket. The sergeant was now going through the American’s wallet, taking out won bills. He saw Tae watching him and suddenly became rigidly officious. “This is for the People’s Army,” he said.
“I was looking at the photograph,” said Tae quietly.
The sergeant handed him the wallet with an air of stiff magnanimity. “You may have it.”
“Thank you,” said Tae.
The sergeant waved down a motorbike and sidecar, its driver and passenger caked in mud, the engine spitting and coughing as if it were about to give up any moment. Ahead, Tae saw the long column of sodden American and South Korean soldiers, fatigues clinging to them like black wrap as they continued trudging along the narrow, flooded road that disappeared into another misty valley. It was the most hopeless sight he had seen.
The sergeant ordered the driver to take the South Korean major ahead to Uijongbu, explaining that he was an important prisoner, to be debriefed as soon as possible. There was an argument, ending with the passenger in the sidecar getting out grumpily and stalking off with the guard who’d shot the American to the rear of the column. The sergeant ordered Tae into the sidecar and started binding his hands with twist wire. Tae wondered if they’d let him keep the wallet at Uijongbu. He took his only comfort in the cyanide strip hidden in his boot. It was doubtful, he thought, that they’d take his boots away from him.
The bike moved off slowly, sliding at first in the mud, the sidecar ahead of the bike, the sergeant pushing; then it picked up speed and straightened. Tae looked back at the murdered American, a khaki heap in the rain,
