Rage of Battle

him. He ran back to the gutted battery and into the wood. The voices receded, going farther down the lake. Back at the bike, Meir kicked the starter again. It spluttered, coughed, and rattled to life. He unscrewed the petrol cap and stuck his finger in it. It felt ice-cold. Full tank. He had no excuse — it was either now or never. A dash for freedom down the Corridor or wait. Would the Allies come? Or would it be slow starvation in the occupied sector? No one knew. He let the engine die. If stopped by the GDR Polizei or the Stasi— with nothing but his “enemy alien” card, it would mean torture and interrogation.

He hesitated, got off the bike, moved around, looking for a piece of ID, finding an identification card on one of the dead. The card’s photo, even in the pale, shimmering moonlight over the lake, looked nothing like him. Entscheide doch, Meir! — ”Make up your mind, Meir!”—he told himself. Brio! Do it with brio! He kicked the starter pedal again and, as it gained power with a throaty roar, switched on the slit-eye headlamp and tightened the chin strap of the AA helmet. Slipping the bike into gear, easing out the clutch, he sped over the grass down toward the lakeside road and from there headed out for the autobahn, singing, his voice rising, though drowned by the noise of the bike and sidecar, “La Donna e Mobile” louder and louder, trying to drown the fear that kept telling him to turn back, a heavy drone of Russian bombers overhead. He had strapped on a holstered gun but had absolutely no idea how to use it, wondering if it had a safety catch or not.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On the other side of the world, a flooded green rice paddy below, outside Munsan, heading north, though still five miles south of what used to be the 150-mile-long DMZ between North and South Korea, the loud rotor slap of the Seventh U.S. Army Cavalry choppers could be heard above eight escorting Cobras. The latter’s chin turrets, whose chain machine guns were slaved to the pilot’s helmet eyepiece, kept moving side to side, up and down, like a mosquito’s proboscis.

The usual thin head-on silhouettes of the Cobras were fattened this day by the thirty-eight rockets on each side of the stubby wings, giving the eight choppers a bug-eyed appearance, their tails higher than their bodies. Each of the 304 rockets was armed with a fragmentation head to provide covering scattering-shrapnel fire for the ten Hueys following and the sixty soldiers of the air cavalry aboard them. Their task was to steal the southern end of what was hoped would be a successful encircling movement against a company of North Korean regulars that had ambushed a U.S.-ROK convoy the previous night en route to Kaesong, north of the old DMZ.

All across the Korean peninsula, 120 miles wide at this point, hundreds of such missions continued to press home the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the NKA, a counterattack made possible by Gen. Douglas Freeman’s daring hit-and-run airborne attack against the North Korean capital. Like David Brentwood and many others who had fought and been decorated for the raid that stunned the world and bought valuable time for the fleeing U.S.- ROK forces, General Freeman was no longer in Korea. On leave after undergoing a violent allergic reaction to a tetanus shot, Freeman had, despite his protest, been taken off the active list for some weeks, and now there was concern that without him, the counteroffensive in Korea would bog down.

In the lead Huey, Major Tae, liaison ROK-U.S. officer for the Seventh Cavalry, a man whom Freeman had never met but who had been among the first to see action on the DMZ, was gripping the open door’s edge so tightly, his knuckles were white. The sound of 152 smoke-tailed rockets from the Cobras near him, streaking toward the scrubby side of the paddy, along with the howling rumble of the twin chin turret guns, each gun spraying out 550 rounds of 7.76-millimeter per minute into the scrub, was so loud that even though Tae was plugged in to the Huey’s intercom, he had difficulty hearing the pilot telling him and the six American cavalrymen in the chopper that they were about to put down on the south side of a long east-west irrigation ditch.

Some of the cavalrymen in the chopper, also veterans of the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the invading North Korean army, took no notice of Tae, his eyes watering with the wind, his viselike grip on the doorframe nothing more to them than confirmation that the South Korean major was as apprehensive as they were. The truth, however, was much different.

Before the war, Tae, an intelligence officer in the ROK, had conformed exactly to the ideals of West Point. A gentleman in every sense, he seemed to some more American than the Americans, despite his short, slim build. Indeed, Tae, though not nearly as widely known as Freeman and not known in America at all, had become something of a legendary figure throughout the U.S. Army in Korea. Interrogating the usual peacetime quota of would-be NKA infiltrators who had been captured while trying to slip into the South, Tae, who forbade torture of any kind, was struck not by anything the NKA prisoners said but by the fact that the chopsticks found in the NKA infiltrators’ kits were shorter — fourteen inches long rather than the standard seventeen. From this he had deduced that the North Korean army, in a country with an acute shortage of timber, was stockpiling wood. In a calculation that merely amused the U.S.-ROK headquarters in Seoul and made no sense to the U.S. officers born and bred in a throwaway consumer society, Tae had predicated that the North’s saving in wood, given the millions of chopsticks used, was probably going to the manufacture of chiges. These were the NKA militia’s famed A-frame backpacks, on which they carried all their ammunition and food, including the shoulder roll of ground pea, millet seed, and rice powder, which, mixed with water, would sustain them and which made the North Korean regular much more self-sufficient than the more elaborately supplied-from-the-rear U.S.-ROK forces.

Despite his prediction of an impending invasion of the South by the North in August, Tae’s warning was not heeded, in the main because an invasion during the monsoon was a no-no in any self-respecting army manual. Even the most junior U.S.-ROK officer knew that your heavy armor would simply bog down in the rains.

In the early hours of August 16, the morning following the South’s annual Independence Day celebrations, the NKA had struck, overwhelming the U.S.-ROK forces all along the line, the NKA’s light, Soviet-made fourteen-ton PT-76 tanks able to move much faster and with more maneuverability than the much heavier and mud-bound fifty- five-ton American M-1s.

Behind the armor, tens of thousands of NKA regulars came pouring out of the tunnels that had been painstakingly dug under the DMZ over several years during North Korean and U.S.-ROK maneuvers when normally sensitive ground noise sensors were rendered useless by the smothering noise of the maneuvers themselves. The United States had found three tunnels in the 1970s and cemented them up, with machine guns at each exit, but the NKA had dug others, which had gone undetected. Many of their troops streamed out in a massive feint that successfully engaged the bulk of the U.S.-ROK forces on the DMZ. This allowed the NKA’s famous Fourth Armored Division, whose forebears had spearheaded the NKA invasion of the South in 1950, to make an end run, breaking through down the Uijongbu Corridor, only eleven miles north of Seoul. Most of the long-standing U.S.-ROK booby traps on the eleven-mile stretch to Seoul had been neutralized by NKA commando teams, while other widespread and synchronized sabotage by “in place” NKA cells effectively gutted the crucial American chopper and fighter bases in the South.

In the face of the NKA’s byorak kongkyok— “lightning wars”—U.S.-ROK communications in a shambles from the sabotage, there had been panic in both the American and South Korean regiments. On the DMZ, Tae had fought bravely in his intelligence headquarters outside Panmunjom, but with the NKA having encircled him and threatening to annihilate everyone in the area unless he surrendered, Tae had been captured.

But if the NKA’s General Kim had succeeded in wreaking a humiliating defeat upon the Americans, his army was about to receive a rude shock. Douglas Freeman, his career looking as if it was about to be eclipsed by the younger men who had inherited the chronic instability of the post-Gorbachev world, devised and led a raid on Pyongyang. Confounding all military logic with a nighttime air cavalry attack on the North Korean capital launched from F-14-escorted choppers off carriers in the Sea of Japan, Freeman’s raid cut the NKA’s overextended supply line to the South. In doing so, Freeman bought precious time for reinforcements from Japan to reach the embattled U.S. and ROK forces, who, their backs to the sea, were fighting a bitter retreat along a fan-shaped perimeter running east-west for eighty-three miles from Pusan to Yosu on Korea’s south coast. Once reinforced and regrouped with an infusion of the fresh troops from bases on Japan’s west coast, the American army and the ROK were soon able to launch a counterattack over the next seven weeks during which they had retaken Seoul and crossed the DMZ, now entering the area around Kaesong where the U.S.-ROK overnight convoy had been attacked.

But while Freeman’s daring attack had electrified the world, as had Doolittle’s on Japan in 1941, and made it