quarter mile away, were heading in the direction of the beach. Or maybe they were just passing by on a regular ATV patrol along the coastal road. Indeed, the noise seemed to be abating.
Freeman knew there were only three choices: wait, abort, or attack. He’d already used up fifty seconds of Payback’s precious twenty-five-minute window. His pause was only a few seconds long, but seemed like an eternity to Johnny Lee, just down the slope behind him. The general signaled the team to proceed slowly in crouch position.
The first North Korean they saw through their rain-slashed night-vision goggles was an unusually tall soldier, a lieutenant, given his helmet insignia, the man standing atop a molehill-shaped rock with an evil-eye slit across its seaward front. A bunker. The NKA lieutenant, standing about two feet above the machine-gun’s redoubt, did not have night-vision goggles, Freeman noted, but was staring out to sea through big ChiCom-issue IR binoculars. Freeman could see that behind the Korean there was a clutch of about eight ATVs, a final duo of the machines arriving, cutting their engines, the ghostly wooden warehouse twenty yards or so beyond. Suddenly there was no more ATV noise.
Lieutenant Rhee turned around in the pouring rain to admire the last arrivals of the complement of what were now ten Red Dragon ATVs, not quite half the number he had requested, but, he mused, better than nothing. From habit on the DMZ night patrols, he sniffed the air for any sense of alien presence, but all he could smell on the wind was the faint aroma of kimchi — no doubt, he thought, coming from his machine gunner and the gun’s ammo feeder in the bunker directly below him.
In about three seconds, thought Aussie, the North Korean lieutenant was going to turn his head back toward the ocean and see them. What in hell was the general—
A fierce, choking rattle rent the sodden air, as one-in-five white tracer rounds erupted from Freeman’s AK-47, taking down the tall Korean and thudding, with their peculiarly brutal sound, into the clump of surprised ATV riders. An instant later another long burst of AK-47 rounds whistled through the air, this enfilade fired by the Koreans at the general’s trio, who quickly dispersed left of the trail, going to ground as the NKA’s submachine-gun bullets whistled over their heads before thumping and chopping into the surrounding brush. The overwhelming temptation for Salvini, Bone, and Lee was to do the same as Freeman’s trio, only to move right of the trail instead of left, taking up defensive positions in the thick cover. But the tactic the general had so meticulously planned was for him, Aussie, and Choir to attack the southern end of the MANPAD warehouse, Salvini, Bone and Lee to attack the northern end. The general wasn’t averse to changing plans midstream if circumstances warranted it, but the heavy rain and the fact, which he and Aussie had already noted, that the North Koreans seemed not to be wearing night- vision equipment argued against any radical departure from the plan.
“Go!” yelled Freeman, dispelling any doubt the other five might have had about whether or not they should dig in. The sound of his stentorian voice overriding the storm’s own assault sent the team into overdrive. It was in these rushing moments that Freeman’s SpecFors’ endless physical training resulted in what Aussie Lewis had once described as the team’s ability to run “faster’n a fucking Enron accountant,”
The second burst from Freeman’s AK-47 as he ran forward from the brush wasn’t aimed at the wounded NKA lieutenant, who’d dropped behind the cover of the bunker, but into the bunker, from which he could hear the screams of the two men within as Freeman’s next burst of AK-47 fire ricocheted noisily inside the bunker, the burst’s white tracer rounds whizzing about like bits and pieces of white-hot metal, chopping up everything and everyone inside even before the general drew level with it, Aussie popping in two high-fragmentation grenades as the coup de grace, Freeman’s AK-47 now sweeping the ATVs, most of whose drivers hadn’t yet had a chance to bring their “back-slung” weapons to bear.
Several of the ATVs’ fuel tanks were spewing gas, the remaining tanks already spouting leaks as Choir Williams discharged his SAW, its rounds ripping the Red Dragons’ seats apart, creating a kapok snowstorm in the rain, puncturing the remaining gas tanks with multiple perforations. Surprisingly, what Aussie expected to be spurts of gasoline coming from the Red Dragons’ shot-up tanks were nothing more than trickles, indicating that the tanks were near empty, some barely leaking at all. He tossed another grenade at the clump of three-wheeled vehicles. There was an enormous, jagged purple X that momentarily lit up the ATVs in a surreal flash of light, and the crash of the grenade, immediately followed by several of the Red Dragons’ gas tanks exploding, threw the NKA into further confusion.
But the NKA’s return fire, wild at first because of their surprise, quickly became more focused, and Bone Brady, sprinting toward the strip of coast road that ran by the warehouse’s northern end, was knocked clean off his feet by a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, as were Johnny Lee to his left and Salvini on his right. Ironically, it was the thorn-thick brush that had threatened to impede their advance up the slope from the beach that now saved them, the tangled mass of roots and thorn branches absorbing the fragments of RPG that had exploded only feet away. As Brady fell, his SAW clattered noisily to the ground, despite the cushioning effect of the rain-soaked path. His obscenities, heard only by Salvini, were lost to the others in the deafening noise of the firefight. Johnny Lee, his ears ringing from the explosion of the RPG and feeling nauseated from the gut-punching concussion, nevertheless managed to get off three cartridges of number 00 buckshot at the RPG duo huddling by the northern entrance. The twenty-seven pellets blew the two Koreans back with such force into their two Red Dragons that they seemed to be executing backflips from a standing position.
By now, Freeman, Aussie, and Choir, to Freeman’s left and right respectively, were past the mauled ATV group and Lieutenant Rhee, who, hit in the left thigh by Freeman’s AK-47 in its first sweep, lay bleeding profusely. Having sought cover quickly, Rhee had dragged himself so close to the rear of the bunker, which Freeman and Aussie had silenced, that in the darkness, swirling with curtains of rain and sea spray, he couldn’t be seen. But
Rhee saw six or seven of his remaining ATV soldiers returning fire from several gun ports situated in the door, but he knew that without the advantage of what obviously must be the enemy’s passive night-vision goggles, his men could aim only at the muzzle flashes of the enemy commandos. Growing weaker and realizing that the round he’d taken in his thigh had probably done more damage than he’d first thought, he knew that if he didn’t hurry and rig a tourniquet, he’d die. Perhaps he could use one of the two dead bunker crewmen’s belts.
Under cover of the noise of a group of his ATV men, who’d remained bunched up outside the building, using the gutted hulks of their three-wheeled vehicles as an ad hoc defensive barrier, he dragged himself a few feet along the rear of the eye-slit bunker rock. With enormous effort, biting his left hand to mute his involuntary gasps of pain, his nervous system going deeper into shock, he pushed against the bunker’s small but craftily camouflaged rabbit- hutch-like iron door, but it wouldn’t open. Mustering all his waning strength, he pushed again, and felt it give way, though there was still considerable resistance. Finally he managed to squeeze himself through the partial opening into the protective rock cave of the bunker, from where he was determined to command his counterattack, and where he felt the attackers would least expect him to be.
In the pitch-black interior he found it difficult to breathe, and the stench of feces and urine from the grenade-gashed night pail was suffocating. He managed to rig a tourniquet by using one of the dead men’s belts without, he hoped, being seen by the marauders, who had seemingly come out of nowhere. Despite the agony he was in, the Korean lieutenant never doubted for a moment that the enemy would be either killed or captured. Every one of them. Though he felt nauseated from the cloying combination of spent cordite, body odor, and defecation, and despite the noise of the battle raging outside, Rhee willed himself to concentrate, pulling out his cell to call in the remaining thirty of his men who formed the crescent-shaped patrol zone around Beach 5. And he was especially keen to contact Sergeant Moon, to make sure that the ten men stationed on the beach itself would cut off any escape down the Y from the warehouse by the enemy — Americans, South Koreans, or whoever the attackers were.
There was a loud
