Payback

the much milder eastern Washington Walla Walla variety his mother used to insist on and fry for his dad, who, like many other onion lovers, would at times, as he’d told Margaret, eat the Walla Wallas raw, so gentle was the taste on the palate.

It had been the reason Freeman’s dad had earned the nickname “Costanza,” after the Seinfeld character who, having lost his spectacles, took what he thought was an apple from the fridge and began to eat it, his pride refusing to admit the mistake, so that soon his eyes were streaming with tears. But rather than the smell memory, triggered by the mouthwatering aromas of the carrier’s short-order chefs, reminding Freeman of the hilarious Seinfeld scene and its association with his beloved dad munching away contentedly on the seasonal Walla Wallas, it disturbed him, just as it had when — God only knew why — the general had found himself thinking of onions while watching the horrific videos of the man- portable missiles attacking the three airlines.

Or was it that the whiff of the frying sweet Walla Walla onions now on the carrier was merely a reminder of the MANPAD attacks, of how one experiences the most absurd random and often inappropriate thoughts at times when you would expect yourself to be focusing solely on the tragedy or the dangerous job at hand?

Perhaps, Freeman mused, such random thoughts were simply the mind’s way of escaping from a deluge of sensory input, in this case drawing him away from the horror of the MANPAD murders, away from, however temporarily, the strain of the external event on the mind in the way that one’s crazy, uninhibited night dreams vent the tensions of our necessarily inhibited, civilized days. Or, dammit, was the smell memory trying to tell him something quite rational, even banal, yet important? Onions, his dad, and MANPADs. What in hell was the connection? He felt as if he were working a crossword: parents, onions, MANPADs, and—

“General?” It was Aussie.

“Yes?”

“Bad news, I’m afraid. Tavos got clobbered worse’n we thought. Doc’s just sent down word that our boy’s got one hell of a gash at the base of the neck, hemorrhaging like a bastard. He’s out. We can’t take him. I’d say you’re it, General. You can use Tavos’s pack. Blue Tile can keep their satellite eye on us.” He paused, waiting for Freeman’s response. But Aussie knew what the answer had to be. No matter that the President had preferred the general to stay back in McCain’s Blue Tile rooms, the hard fact was that one man less than planned on a mission such as this was like a coach taking out his first baseman.

“You good to go, General?” asked Aussie.

“I’m ready,” said the general, bracing himself against the bulkhead, palming the ten-round mag into his “blued” 9mm HK sidearm, grabbing his personal combat pouch and lowering it to Sal, who was already up in the RS’s midship hatch, holding Tavos’s full pack. “How’s Choir doing?” he asked.

“Green,” said Sal.

“He’ll be right as rain,” said Aussie. “It’s all this slopping about on the surface that bothers him. Once we’re submerged, out of the chop, he’ll be okay.”

For Choir’s sake, Freeman was tempted to order Eddie Mervyn and Gomez to head straight for Kosong, due west, to reduce the time they’d be planing through the chop, but he stuck to his planned route, a tight-angled dogleg approach, northwest then southwest, which he was confident would be the least-expected line of attack.

“I’m fine,” came an unconvincing Welsh accent. “I’ve taken a Gravol.”

“Yeah,” cut in Aussie as they began the “close hatch and secure” drill. “But don’t nod off on us on the beach.”

“It’ll have worn off by then,” Choir tried to assure him.

The general said nothing, which surprised John Cuso, who would have pigeonholed the legendary commander as a strict, no-drugs commander. And he was right, but Freeman trusted his men and knew none of them would take anything that would endanger the others or undercut their chance of success. He trusted himself to do the same. He asked John Cuso to look in on Tavos. “Wish him well.”

“I’ll do that, General. Good luck.”

As the twin exhaust pulse-jet-thrust engine surged to life, the RS’s wake footpath-thin, unlike the usual road-width wakes left by most craft of its size, Cuso was struck by how quiet it was, no doubt the composite construction of its cigar-tube-shaped superstructure baffling and containing the sound as it rose on an incoming swell under its own soft-throated power, then disappeared into the dark valley of the next trough.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Rhee should have been much calmer than he was at this moment above Kosong’s Beach 5. He had done a six-month high-stress stint on guard duty at Panmunjom, face-to-face with the American and South Korean sentries, where the air fairly crackled with the tension between the two armed camps, the so-called armistice since the uneasy truce of over fifty years ago having done nothing to reduce the mutual hatred.

It was on the DMZ that Rhee had learned how to stare unblinkingly, as did the Americans and South Koreans, for abnormally long periods, like schoolyard foes standing toe to toe, never losing their Gun nae ju ne, what the Americans called “cool.” Rhee thought of his time on the DMZ now because he could feel his chest muscles tightening in anger, lips firmly closed, the torque exerted by his temporal mandibular joint sending a bone ache through his sinuses and around to the back of his head, in what would soon be a full-blown tension headache. Pyongyang’s rudeness in not even responding to his request for Red Dragon all-terrain vehicles for his twenty-five-man rush platoon didn’t help, angering him so much that he could feel his temples starting to throb. He spotted one of his Unit 5 five-man patrols fifty yards away from the beach that lay directly below Kosong’s MANPAD warehouse.

She bal! — Shit! He should not have been able to see anyone in the patrol, but he’d spotted a clump of grass that seemed to be levitating.

“Megook-saram imnida! I am an American!” he shouted into his throat mike. “I can see you a hundred yards off. Report to me immediately!” With that, Rhee began walking through the damp-smelling coastal brush toward the offending soldier, a short, slim man. He was so thin that his vest load of grenades, flares, and ammunition created the impression of a stick insect afflicted with protruding goiters, the camouflage net on his helmet festooned with dead grass on a background of green coastal vegetation. Rhee’s anger increased as he realized it was Sergeant Moon, one of the veterans who, as a very young man, had volunteered as one of the secret North Vietnamese’s foreigners’ brigade formed by Pyongyang to gain vital field experience in fighting the Americans.

“You should know better!” Rhee snapped at Moon. “Since when does paspalum grass grow at right angles?”

“Sorry, Comrade Lieutenant.”

Rhee nodded, immediately accepting Moon’s apology, and Moon knew the lieutenant was motivated by his annoyance with Pyongyang over HQ’s failure to provide the all-terrain vehicles, preventing him from training a rush platoon to the level of proficiency Rhee wanted in preparation for any American or South Korean infiltration. Moon, who, as Rhee’s most experienced noncommissioned officer in Unit 5, did most of the paperwork when not on patrol, reassured Rhee that he had personally forwarded the requisition for the vehicles. “Perhaps, sir,” Moon said encouragingly, “headquarters have already dispatched them.”

“Hmm—,” began Rhee, pleased that at least he had someone in whom he could confide his frustration with HQ, a frustration that was very dangerous to share, Pyongyang’s political commissars swooping down on the slightest sign of complaint or discontent. “—maybe. But we have heard nothing yet. Not even a radio acknowledgment.”

Moon nodded his agreement, the paspalum grass falling from his helmet’s camouflage net as he did so. “No, sir, but atmospherics have been sabotaging our communications. Solar flare activity’s almost as bad as it was in 2003. The signals officer in Wonsan told me the surges of ions from the sun have even been knocking out American satellite signals and radio traffic.”

Rhee appreciated his sergeant’s efforts to reassure him, but there’d been no interference whatsoever with the radio signals from their allies, the Chinese, who were a lot farther north of Kosong than was Pyongyang. And