respected leader in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution and another two minutes to insert the wire and run it back off the spool, several hundred yards to where the Humvee had been stationed as an advance guard.
“I don’t like this,” said one marine. “Too fucking quiet. Where’re all the people?”
“Inside, you dummy. ‘Where would you be?”
“Come on — hurry it up,” cut in the corporal as they hoisted the spool aboard the Hummer and drove slowly in the direction of the trees that hid the Grecian facade of the Pyongyang Art Troupe Theatre across the wide boulevard.
“Okay,” said the corporal, “let’s do it.”
There was a dull thud, the ground trembled, and the blast rustled the wet ginkgo trees, water coming off them in a spray, and the air filled with dust that quickly fell in the rain. Kim II Sung was no more.
The driver of the second Hummer lost his way, his navigator rifleman giving wrong directions, so that now they were headed toward the Pyongyang Seafood Direct Sales Shop several blocks up from the square by the river.
“Where the fuck are we?” someone shouted.
“Gooks — dead ahead!” A police car, its Klaxon squawking, its blue light flashing urgently, was tearing down Okryu Street, wet leaves flying up behind it, orange sparks seeming to come from its interior. Small-arms fire.
The Humvee’s.50 Browning stuttered, hot casings steaming through the rain. The police car wobbled, then careered wildly, ran across the street, struck the curb, rolled, ending up on its side, wheels still spinning. A man came scurrying up from the cabin like someone trying to escape from a submarine. The Browning stuttered again and he slumped back, arms caught in the door in a V, the fire licking at the rear wheels.
The marines had another look at the map. “Christ, you’re nowhere near it, Smithy.” It was a gross exaggeration — in fact, the driver had only overshot a right turn past the seafood building by less than a hundred yards.
“Back ‘er up,” the corporal ordered, and after thirty seconds ordered, “Now turn right and straight ahead.”
It was another couple of minutes and they were on the western side of the east-west Okryu Bridge, which spanned the wide Taedong River and was one of the two main bridges by which any counterattack from the east would most likely come. The driver still felt spooked by the apparently deserted city, which till now had not offered any resistance on the ground to the landings in its main core, even though the sound and fury of the air battle was enough to awaken the dead, sonic booms rolling overhead — at times so loud, they were mistaken for the monsoon’s crashes of thunder. To the north, the marines could see forked lightning reaching right down to the hills.
The third Humvee had already reached Taedong Bridge, half a dozen blocks or so to the south of Kim D Sung Square, and the demolition team had started laying their charges when the first of three NKA armored cars started across me old wide span, the armored vehicles’ ghostly outline visible for only a second in the light of a flare. The antitank rocket fired from atop the Hummer — the distance to the armored cars no more than three hundred yards — exploded against the bridge railing. The armored cars kept coming, their machine guns now spitting fire and finding their mark, the marine driver and machine gunner thrown back hard against the canopy, dead, the antitank missile operator behind them taking second aim. The lead armored car’s machine gun opened up again, and the AT operator fired. The lead armored car burst into flame, followed by a sound like falling pots and pans as the vehicle stopped. Without hesitation the second armored car behind the first broke out and took up the attack. The third armored car braked, using the first car’s wreckage as good cover, barely showing its main gun. The new lead car fired its main gun and the Hummer leapt into the air, the AT man dead.
Beneath the bridge, which lead onto Mansudae Street, the demo team kept working along the slippery embankment with the extraordinary concentration of sappers, whom Freeman had always held to be among the bravest of the brave. The rain was still heavy and the lone American marine on the bridge took cover behind the burning U.S. truck, not seeing the cupola of the lead car open until its top-mounted.76 began raking the Humvee, pieces of metal and upholstery flying through the air.
“How long?” the marine called to the sappers.
“Two minutes max!”
“They’re on top of us.”
“Hold ‘em, Arnie!”
Arnie dashed from the big stanchion near the end of the bridge across the traffic lanes behind the burning wreckage of the Hummer, hearing a faint gurgling sound coming from it. Going low, catching a quick look at the armored car, he saw the NKA car commander, his leather World-War-II-type helmet striking the marine as old- fashioned as hell. The marine gave him a full burst. The man flung his arms back before he slumped over the right side of the cupola. The marine heard a lot of shouting coming from inside the armored car, but still it kept coming, turning now to ram the Hummer. Arnie dropped his heavy automatic squad gun, ran left to a gap of about three feet between the Hummer’s rear wheels and bridge rail, saw the armored car, now only six feet away, going straight for the front of the American truck. It took him one, two — three steps, up on the wheel guard flange, and two grenades down the cupola, conscious of a stringent, unpleasant odor: the dead man’s breath as he lolled on the cupola. The second car veered and hit Arnie so hard, the demolition team, running the wire back and slipping on the grass, heard their buddy’s ribs snap like sticks. Now the second NKA car was blocked by the V formed by the wreckage of the Humvee and the other armored car. It backed up and suddenly its searchlight penciled out along the embankment. The cupola opened and the gunner, the.76 coaxial slaved to the searchlight, sprayed straight down the approach to the bridge. Out of nowhere, a MiG flashed low, canisters falling, the armored truck enveloped in napalm, the pilot having mistaken the three armored vehicles in radar clutter as American.
One of the demolition team cranked, and the other pushed the plunger. They felt a slight tremor, heard a thud, then a louder claplike noise. The approach to the bridge had collapsed only six or seven feet, but until it was fixed, nothing would be coming across to Mansudae Street.
By now the unarmed Prowlers had been gone from Pyongyang twenty minutes, though it seemed much longer to some of the men on the ground. Still the possibility loomed — was it possible that Freeman could make his “Doolittle” hit-and-run and get out virtually unscathed?
Shirer told half of his remaining twelve F-14s who had made up the second wave to drop chaff and go for railyards on the city’s south side, and he designated three strikers to take out the six bridges across the Potong, particularly Chungsong Bridge on the southwest side, where reinforcements might be rushed from the port of Nampo twenty miles to the south.
Laser-guided bombs took out three of the bridges, but Chung-song in particular was an elusive target, its span running over the island of Suksom pleasure ground bisecting the target, making it more difficult to get at. What made the situation worse all of a sudden was that the chaff jamming over the city was now coming to an end, even as Shirer could see MiGs, at least twenty of them, coming from the west, another seven from northern airfields, perhaps in Manchuria.
Until the Tomcats were relieved in five minutes, they would have to leave the ground force to its own devices. The AA batteries were opening up again now that the jamming was weakening. Shirer half hoped the MiGs would reach them before his and other Tomcats’ fuel dictated a withdrawal, for in the mixed-up blips of Tomcats and MiGs in aerial combat on their screens, the NKA batteries, including the remaining SAMs, would be more discerning lest they hit one of their own.
“Outstanding! Excellent!” were repeated so often in the first half hour by Douglas Freeman as he saw the thousand men secure the perimeter around the square that he began worrying it was all going too well, a suspicion now reinforced by the Tomcats’ leader telling him that though the next wave of Tomcats hadn’t arrived, he would have to take his flight back for refueling.
Then, on the PSC-3 Manpak satellite-bounce radio he was using, Freeman heard the eight hundred airborne troops from the two Galaxies were pinned down at the airport. One of the big planes was forced to stand, soaking up small-arms fire as its men unloaded, and one of the Phantoms that had escorted it was shot down as, low on fuel; it turned back with the second Galaxy, which had delivered its load of four howitzers.
The howitzers and their ammunition had come in on pallets from the Galaxy now heading back, but one of the
