WW III

Tomcat now on full war power, its fuel consumption ten times its pre-afterburner phase, heading into the three- minute zone in which he’d use up a third of his total fuel, his wing automatically sweeping back now that the bomb load had been dropped from the more stable wings-out position. He saw the MiG in his sights, pressed the cannon. The MiG was gone — not hit — quickly reducing speed, the American overflying him so that now he was up again behind the American, his air-to-air Aphid waiting for the growl, not sure whether he heard it in the confusion, waiting for the light. The American broke, so did he, both into scissors at the same time, their reaction times to this point exactly on par. The American popped four incendiary flares and dropped, the Aphid catching one of the flares, exploding. The wingman looked for the MiG, but he’d vanished, another missile, American or Russian, he couldn’t tell, passing well ahead.

As the Prowlers completed their turn south, one of the city’s searchlights, having given them up, lucked out on one of the Apaches. Suddenly all the searchlights converged on the Apache. The helo pilot tapped down his sun visor, put the Apache’s nose down, and fired both pods: thirty-eight 2.75-inch rockets. Four of the beams died to pale yellow, then nothing. The Apache was still coming down fast in the strange white-black river of night and searchlights, the copilot picking up a SAM site in a searchlight’s spill.

“Let ‘em go!” said the chopper pilot, the copilot firing all eight Hellfires, the helo’s underchin chain gun spitting a long, bluish-white tongue down at the NKA’s SAM site. The SAM site exploded, the chopper, its rear rotor’s pitch-change spider damaged by AA fire, canting crazily to seventy degrees, the small blades chopping into the tail drive gearbox. The pilot glanced across at the copilot — he was dead, head slumped, lolling in the turbulence of low air currents, the rain so hard it sounded like a hose on the fuselage as the Apache’s pilot braced for the crash. The helo smashed into the dark blanket that was Changsan Park on the city’s northern outskirts. Its explosion terrified the well-to-do Party administrators celebrating the imminent victory, in a day or so at the most — when General Kim’s komtbt— “bear trap”—would clang shut on the Yosu/Pusan pocket. They had just drunk to the extermination of the mikuk chapnomtul— “American bastards”—and their ROK lackeys.

The thirty-seven remaining troop transports, three taken out by MiGs, were now chopping air, settling down on the big square, using infrared, Freeman having already selected the huge concrete bulks of the Art Gallery and History Museum as flank protection, as well as the thickly treed parks about the square, which would give added protection from the small-arms fire that was bound to open up.

Though he would never know it, the pilot of the downed Apache, in panicking the second and third searchlight batteries, allowed fourteen of the thirty-seven big Chinooks following Freeman’s to land in Kim II Sung Square virtually unseen.

The American troops, to the utter astonishment of only a few janitors and museum night watchmen, poured out from the long, black shapes in a circle of machine-gun, rifle, and other small-arms fire that was quite audible, even over the rolling thunder of the aerial combat high above. And it was at that moment, with the SAM sites impotent because of the still-falling parachute chaff from the striker Tomcats, and the city militia excited and startled, that Freeman’s plan saw its first success: an unopposed landing of his troops.

Many of his men were busy pushing the big Chinooks clear of the central area so that others could come down to unload.

For a totally unexpected and eerie moment, all the streetlights came on as one of the Tomcats’ five- hundred-pounders hit the Pyongyang thermal power plant, ironically switching on lights that were meant to be off during the curfew. But the surge of power was too much, and the next moment the plant and city were once again in darkness. In those fleeting seconds almost every man had frozen or dropped to the ground in Kim II Sung Square, three of the half-dozen cameramen Freeman had insisted accompany him recording the moment on tape, getting three of the Chinooks in the process of unloading their troops, the cameramen not realizing its significance until much later. After the Chinooks had unloaded, they moved off with others as part of the twenty Freeman had detailed to proceed across the city to the Pyongyang Airport. Here they would hopefully be met by the airborne regiment in the two Galaxies with the four self-propelled 155-millimeter howitzers.

Despite the blackout of the city, some of the SAM sites did receive the extra surges of electricity from emergency generators, but it was not enough. It was as if the Americans had drawn an impenetrable canopy through the rain-laden sky over the entire city, a canopy in which signals were either soaked up or bounced back as chapsori— “rubbish.” And when fourteen SAMs were fired, their long, red tails and back- blast illuminating the immaculately clean and deserted streets around Potong-gang Station, what their jubilant ground crews didn’t realize was that the blips they had momentarily picked up and fired upon were not F-14s at all but F-14 simulators of the “box of tricks,” as the Tomcat pilots called them, which fell through the sky, steadied by spring-loaded fins. Eight of the SAMs hit the decoys, exploding, turning the rain to vapor in the immediate area, debris falling down to the elated NKA crews. It was not until an hour or so later that they discovered their error when puzzled Party officials, racing out for propaganda displays of shot-down American wreckage, could find the remains of only one F-14 amid the litter of SAM casings.

The top floor of the Grand People’s Study House, Freeman had told the marines, would command a sweeping panorama of the city through infrared binoculars, and it was taken by a squad of marines without opposition as the helos kept landing and the remaining Apaches, loaded with antitank and thousands of small antipersonnel mines, made what they called, in General Freeman’s lexicon, a “ring around the craphouse,” using Kim II Sung Square as the center aim point. From the twenty-two-storied Kim II Sung University on the northern outskirts to Pyongyang Station on the south side through the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum far to the west of Kim Il Sung Square and back around East Pyongyang Stadium, the Apaches led two of the big Chinooks, which laid a string of explosives, while in the square, four of the eight American Motors Hummers, or Humvees, as the troops called them, came down, slung under the last XC Chinooks. Once unhooked, the Humvees, equipped with a.50 machine gun and infrared swivel antitank launcher in the back, were quickly manned by driver, co-driver, and six men armed with SAWs — squad automatic weapons— and demolition charges. Two of the four Hummers that had not made it to the square were totaled, their parent Chinook striking a tree and overhead wires near the History Museum, sliding and tumbling down the embankment into the Taedong River. The other two Hummers had been aboard a Chinook when, only forty feet above the ground in front of the Grand People’s Study House, it collapsed in a sudden wind shear. In the occasionally flare-lit air, it looked like some great, exotic brown cucumber broken in the middle, its quiet poof of flame starting to spread quickly. A marine sergeant thrust his M-16 at the nearest man, went in under the wreckage, crawling into the Hummer’s cabin. Slithering across the rain-slicked vinyl seat, he was unable to raise his head any higher than the steering wheel because of some part of the chopper’s fuselage sticking in through the driver’s window.

“Where’s he goin’?” shouted another marine.

“Fishing!” another shouted, his mood of bonhomie the result of having passed from sheer bowel-freezing terror into a reverie of relief at still being alive.

The Humvee came to life, jerking out from the wreckage, dragging pieces of fuselage with it.

“On his honeymoon,” someone else shouted. The buoyed mood of the men was caused not simply by the lack of any determined resistance on the ground, evidence of the fact that so far Freeman’s gamble of surprise had paid off, but because of the absence of any vehicular traffic that might be bearing NKA. The magnificently spacious streets around the square were deserted, a possibility that Freeman had privately entertained from the SATINT he’d studied so closely aboard the Saipan. But it was a hope that he knew could be ended any moment by a sudden convoy of infantry coming up from the south or, if the Chinese were still supplying the NKA through Manchuria, troops from the north. Nevertheless, for the moment it was a surprise that helped mitigate the loss of the three Hummers and the crews of the downed Chinooks. Once he was sure the perimeter from the river up past the museum, around the People’s Study House and back to the art gallery, was secure, Freeman sent out three Humvees to complete the next phase of Operation “Trojan.”

One of the Humvees, its nine men all wearing infrared goggles and hunkering down, except for the machine gunner and the ATGM operator, headed north from the square along Sungni Street, swinging left on Mansudae Street. In the last of the flares dropped by the Tomcats, who were low on fuel and returning to sea, their position taken up by Shirer and the second wave, the marines could see the dim outline of the Arch of Triumph half a mile or so away. But their interest centered on the sixty-six-foot-high brown statue of Kim II Sung in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution. Off to their right they could see Chollima statue, the winged black horse, peasants joyously riding it, Marxist holy book held aloft, the book invisible in the rain.

It took the demolition team four and a half minutes to place the plastic hose cylinders around the dear and