Colonel Kim and Major Park looked at their unusually tall subaltern. A young officer’s initiative was encouraged up to a point in the Dear Leader’s million-man army, as in any other military, but stupidity wasn’t.
“Where else could the gangster American and his team of thugs be headed for?” asked Colonel Kim.
The earnest young officer, Lieutenant Rhee of the North Korean Army’s East Coast Defense Command, quickly apologized for his presumptuousness, but the fact was that he had more on-the-ground experience than either Colonel Kim or Major Park along the rugged east coast, where the beautiful and massive Taebek range stood as a mighty bastion against the East Sea and Japan 475 miles away. It had been Japan from which the hated Americans had come to aid the detested South in what North Korea had taught its people had been a reactionary capitalist war waged by the United States and its running-dog lackey, South Korea, against the paradisiacal North. By now, this blatant distortion of history was accepted as inviolable fact by several generations of North Koreans, despite them having gone through such devastating famines in the 1990s and early 2000s that starvation rations had killed thousands and literally dwarfed an entire generation.
It was because of these famines that Lieutenant Rhee, at five feet ten, stood out as among the tallest of his generation, from which Pyongyang had had to struggle to get any North Korean soldiers who could hold their own standing next to the six-and-a-half-foot American giants who manned the DMZ with such impressive physical presence. But the North Korean Army, along with their Dear Leader and his cabal in Pyongyang, were the best fed in a country whose Communist leadership under the Dear Leader had poured all it possibly could into its armed forces. As such, the army of which Lieutenant Rhee of North Korea’s Coastal Defense Command was an ardent member came closer to the cliched “lean and mean” ideal than most professional armies. The meanness was the result of a carefully maintained paranoid cradle-to-grave indoctrination of hatred against America and its “running- dog lackeys,” the latter a Communist propaganda expression so old and outworn that other Communist regimes no longer bothered to use it.
It was used again in May 2004 after a train on April 22 carrying ammonia nitrate fertilizer through Ryongchon near the Chinese — North Korean border struck an oil tanker train, which brought down a live power cable, causing a massive explosion that leveled large sections of Ryongchon and killed or wounded over two thousand, most of them children. For the first time in more than thirty years, the Hermit Kingdom requested outside aid, but any coming from the running-dog lackeys of America or South Korea had to be rerouted by sea so that the North Koreans would not think the U.S. or any of its “lackeys” were involved in the aid effort.
For Rhee, the daily propaganda had nurtured a continual sense of vigilance, increased by the undeniable geographic fact of the ruggedness of Korea’s east coast. He could think of few other coastlines that were so ideal for covert landings of special forces by North Korea’s enemies.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On the other side of the world, in the Galaxy’s huge redded-out interior, Douglas Freeman and his eight-man SpecOp team could feel the change in the deep, throbbing timbre of the Galaxy’s four big engines as the giant transport began its glide path from 33,000 feet over the cobalt blue of the far western Pacific toward a verdant sliver of land that was the southeastern coast of Japan. It had been a long haul, both the Galaxy’s crew and Freeman’s team glad to see terra firma. As they passed over the Japanese coastline, an immaculate green patchwork of rice fields below, no one was happier than Choir Williams, who hated the avgas smell that permeated transport aircraft. This only added to his general aversion to air travel, which was, contrary to all counterargument, based on his firm belief that bad things happen in threes. In all other matters, Choir’s SpecFor buddies knew him as the epitome of the nonsuperstitious, commonsense soldier, but on this matter of threes, his belief was as unshakeable as Freeman’s conviction, which also amused fellow SpecFor members, that George Washington had indeed stood in the prow of the boat. Those who knew Freeman well, like Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir, saw the general’s belief not so much as evidence of his eccentric nature but as a manifestation of his lifelong commitment to exemplary leadership. It was the type of “on the point” leadership that Washington had exemplified: visible and unafraid, the kind that those who had served under Freeman had come to expect and which, despite his Pattonesque gruffness at times, was the reason that even those who didn’t like him had to grudgingly admire him.
“Not long now,” Freeman advised Choir, as the Galaxy entered a “shelf” of bone-rattling turbulence at ten thousand feet, the Welsh-American’s face having taken on a pucelike pallor.
“Should’ve eaten somethin’, mate,” advised Aussie loudly, “ ’fore we left Hawaii.”
“He did,” said Sal, winking at Chief Petty Officer Tavos and the four other SEAL volunteers. “A banana and a slice o’ white bread — you know, the old diarrhea diet.”
“No, no,” Aussie corrected Sal, “I meant a
“You wicked bastard,” Choir mumbled weakly.
Freeman smiled at the give-and-take between Choir and Aussie, their ongoing teasing a measure of his team’s morale. Sal’s winking at Tavos and including the four other SEALs in the joke was the kind of small but deliberate act of inclusion that the general knew was crucial if the team was to execute what he, in one of the greatest understatements of his career, had referred to casually in his airborne briefing as “pre-mission DOPAE”— deplaning of personnel and equipment. It was an innocent-sounding acronym, which one of the SEALs, Eddie Mervyn, confided to his colleague multilingual Johnny Lee, must have originated in someone’s
“No way, Eddie,” Lee assured him, smiling. “Closest the general’s come to smoking a joint, I heard, was when he went to a strip joint looking for terrorists in Washington State.”
Eddie Mervyn, checking his weapon of choice, a Heckler & Koch 9mm with folding stock and laser-dot targeting, commented, “No terrorists in a strip joint. Muslim fanatics don’t drink or watch tit.”
“Exactly,” said Lee, “but the scuttlebutt is, the general cottoned to the idea that strip joints’d be the perfect cover for terrorists in the States. No one in Homeland Security’d expect that a fundamentalist fanatic would go to the tit shops and hit the booze, right? Perfect cover.”
Bone Brady was impressed. “So Freeman figured that out?”
“Yep,” said Lee.
The general made no comment, his attention drawn to the six-wheeled equipment that was shuddering in the turbulence. He loosened his harness a tad so he could lean forward from the team’s bench and tighten one of the lines.
Aussie, to the four SEALs’ amazement, had nodded off, his legs sticking out, his feet resting on his combat pack and almost touching one of the bright orange “glo” Air Force HIBUDs—“hi-buoyancy” drums — that had been lashed down below the equipment’s pallet.
“Can see he’s worried,” the loadmaster joshed before he made his way through the narrow space to inform the general that they were fifteen minutes from the carrier battle group
“Thanks, Sergeant,” acknowledged Freeman. “Would you ask the driver to put it through on-screen?”
“Yes, sir.”
As the flat screen came alive, they could see the Galaxy’s line of descent toward Ullung Island, 170 miles east-southeast of Kosong on the North Korean coast, the Kosong warehouse on the SATPIX — satellite pictures — being ten miles north of the DMZ. Whether or not the team would head the 92 miles in to the South Korean coast then head up along the coast, passing over the DMZ, or head instead directly to Kosong would be something Freeman would decide after — or rather,
The screen’s data-block read, “TD2”—time to drop zone—“14 minutes.”
“With this headwind that’s hitting us now,” said Salvini, “I’d say it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”
“Want to bet on it?” joshed Freeman.
