Payback

The big reinforced-brass warehouse lock, however, hadn’t yielded to the two HAL rounds Choir fired at near point-blank range into the doors’ “Dear Leader” lock. The HAL, a hardened lead slug, encased in its polyethylene sabot, had become as legendary in its effectiveness against hard targets as Freeman’s leadership was in the matter of tactics, the HAL a favored assault round in SWAT and SpecFor teams fighting terrorists from Kentucky to Kabul. But, as Freeman was first to see through his NVGs, the lock was still intact. The famed slugs, though capable of passing clean through an engine block, had proved no match for the lock’s double casing and reinforcing rods behind the two sliding doors at each end of the football-field-sized warehouse. Disappointed, Choir saw that while the lock’s keyway had been blasted out by a HAL, its all-important casing, though scarred, was infuriatingly intact, its horseshoe-shaped shank still holding the two sliding doors together.

“Give ’em the Play-Doh!” Choir yelled to Aussie. Having already decided that this was the only alternative course, Aussie was ready with a beige baseball-sized glob of Semtex C4 plastique, which he pushed hard against the lock, the Semtex’s adhesive, doughlike consistency making it a malleable recipient of the black-striped, reddish-orange det cord that Aussie pushed into it.

“Back!” he shouted, sticking another detonator into the soft explosive to reduce the one-in-ten chance of a fail to one in a hundred. He lit the two det cords’ fuses, stepping back smartly with Freeman and Choir behind the southwest corner of the warehouse as each cord’s firing-train sequence began, each ignition charge setting off the aluminum-shelled intermediate charge and then the base charge against the lock. The explosion shook the entire building, and sent up a huge cloud of dust that immediately became sodden in the downpour and turned to mud.

Freeman’s trio could hear windows blown out, shouts of alarm, and then the anticipated volleys of fire from within the warehouse. The fact that relatively few rounds seemed to be striking and passing through the explosion- charred doors meant most of the bullets were merely “swiss-cheesing” the doors, the NKA’s indiscriminate aim seldom hitting the fist-sized hole that a second before had been the top-of-the-line “Dear Leader” double-cased lock. This told Freeman, Aussie, and Choir that the voluminous but erratically aimed enfilade coming from within the warehouse was “piss-pants firing,” as Freeman called it, the kind of shooting routinely encountered by newly drafted recruits in every army since the world’s first volley of musketry.

Rhee, his tremulous hands covered in the blood and feces-splattered mud, whose slime he couldn’t see but felt and smelled, found it difficult to breathe. The astringent fumes of cordite and the odors from the smoldering, steel-reinforced doors plugged his sinuses, causing a pounding headache that was rapidly spreading back from his cheekbones and temples to the base of his neck. Nevertheless, Rhee again pushed the numbers on his cell phone and waited again for Sergeant Moon. And again there was no response, only static, not even the usual snooty Pyongyang operators who informed callers that the “comrade you are calling is either away from his phone or unavailable at this time.” Rhee told himself to calm down. He was a lieutenant, wasn’t he? An officer. The Party expected him to stay “cool,” an expression he detested but one that was still used by younger NKA conscripts who had unfortunately picked up the “migook,” or American, slang from the propaganda programs beamed in via satellite from the hated “Voice of America.”

Though having temporarily staunched his loss of blood, Rhee felt himself sliding toward unconsciousness, only the pain of the bone-embedded round keeping him awake. So what if he couldn’t reach Moon? He suddenly remembered that Sergeant Moon was off duty now, in Kosong. But by now, surely the whole of Kosong must have heard the noise — if not the small-arms fire, then certainly the resonating bang of the enemy now blowing the door lock on the other, northern, end of the warehouse as well. Moon would surely be roused by the noise of the fighting and would quickly rally the three five-man patrols north, south, and west of the warehouse, forming a crescent- shaped defense line into a “crab-claw” pincer movement, sweeping toward the road, across to the warehouse, trapping the invaders, one of whom Rhee could hear shouting in an unmistakable American accent.

Rhee was wrong about Moon hearing the firefight. The sergeant was off duty at the time, but Moon, like most who lived on the southern outskirts of Kosong, had been oblivious to the small-arms chatter a mile or so to the south of the town, the chatter and rattle of small arms and the distant boomp of the Semtex explosions subsumed by the more dominant sound of the Force 9’s wind and rain, as well as by the persistent crashing of the sea against the coastline of the Wonsan-to-DMZ coastal defense sector. Moon, a deep sleeper even during the loud sirens of Pyongyang’s oft-pronounced “high alert” times, became aware of the attack only when the young son of the fisherman next door who hung his nets out near Beach 5 unit’s HQ heard the big Semtex explosions and alerted the sergeant.

Once awakened, Moon, though still sleep-drugged and careful not to switch on the single overhead light lest it wake his wife, moved quickly, plunging a hand into one of the water-filled glasses for his dentures, and dispensing with his usual habit of upending his boots and thumping their soles to evict “crawlies,” as his son called unwanted insects.

Within five minutes, speeding along the wind-and-rain-whipped coastal road in a Chinese-made Bohai jeep with Unit 5’s driver and one of his marksmen, the latter hanging on to his hat, Moon dialed in the patrols, which should be able to morph, as practiced, from a crescent to a pincer and close on the enemy within fifteen minutes at the most. But all he got was static. Next, he called the Beach 5 patrol. How in hell, he wanted to know, had they not seen the attackers land? There was no response, only a surging of white noise, like that of a distant sea, and the fierce crackle of lightning, which had probably knocked out the big microwave relay antennae high atop the hills around Kosong, and Wonsan over forty miles farther north.

He heard another explosion, this convincing him that the invaders had definitely gained high ground above the beach, meaning they must be about to attack the warehouse — perhaps they had already reached it? If only Colonel Kim and Major Park had paid more attention to Lieutenant Rhee’s warning of a possible attack.

“Faster!” he ordered his driver, who now had the Bohai up to seventy miles an hour, the rain so torrential that the vehicle’s wipers couldn’t contend with the gale’s deluge. Moon called the beach patrol again. No answer.

“Nothing on the cell?” shouted the driver, his voice all but lost to a roll of thunder.

“Nothing,” Moon replied. “Nothing but static.”

He was trying the jeep’s radio phone. More static.

The harried driver was confused; he was too busy trying to concentrate on avoiding the potholes in what had once been the Dear Leader’s well-paved coast road to fully grasp the sergeant’s comments about the enemy apparently not being seen on the beach. “You mean,” he shouted again above the howl of the force 9’s winds, “that the enemy weren’t on the beach — they came by air?”

Sergeant Moon swore, a pothole juddering the vehicle so hard, his thermos cup of insam cha spilled the hot ginseng tea onto his thigh. “Kapshida! — Let’s go!” he shouted at the driver. “You’re driving like a peasant! And what do you mean, they came by air? In weather like this?”

“The Americans have good aircraft,” said the driver. “Some of their helicopters—”

“Yes, yes!” cut in Moon impatiently, “but we would have heard them.”

“Maybe not,” countered the driver. “I remember in Vietnam their Pave High—”

“Pave Low!” Moon corrected him tendentiously. “Yes, yes, they’re on you before you know it and can fly low. I know.”

“So low—,” began the driver.

“Be quiet. We’ll see.” Moon was thinking of parachutists. He hated the West as deeply as any other Korean, but it hadn’t blinded him to either the West’s technological brilliance or the bravery of its running-dog lackeys. Americans or British, for example — they had courage, enough to try a low-level infiltration, riding tough through the violent storm down to seven hundred feet in order to launch the kind of quick, brutal commando assault that was now under way, then helicoptering out. A submarine was out of the question, for how could one of the American attack subs, or one of their huge Trident “Boomers,” even if they got to the coast, off-load commandoes in such violent weather? A small boat would never make it to shore.

The long burst of one-in-five red tracer from Bone’s Minimi flitted across the coast road like a stream of fireflies. But the effect of the 5.56mm rounds had decidedly more punch than any insect, shattering the Bohai’s windscreen and killing the driver, sending the vehicle into a precarious roll toward Bone’s firing position on the opposite, eastern side of the coast road. Brady heard and felt a tremendous whoomp, which was the concussion wave from Sal and Johnny Lee having to hit the lock on the northern end of the warehouse a third time in order to literally punch out the “Dear Leader” ’s casing.