The big African-American felt the ensuing rush of hot, charred wood and singed grass passing over him, and instinctively closed his eyes against the airborne debris. And this despite his having the protection of his NVGs and Kevlar helmet. He was mad at himself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” He had every right to be angry at his action, instinctive though it may have been. In Freeman’s SpecOp preparations you trained ad nauseam to protect yourself but to curb certain instinctive reactions that endangered the team. In his firing position Bone was facing directly away from the warehouse, his Fritz and NVGs protecting his eyes. With his target rolling toward him from the road at virtually point-blank range, he knew he should have kept his “eyes on the prize,” as Freeman had drilled them. Instead of the Bohai jeep sliding to a stop in a hail of gravel and mud, it could have easily jumped the road’s shoulder and slammed into the knoll from which Brady had been firing, and with his eyes shut he wouldn’t have had time to react, his death depriving the team of its major road-covering fire.
Brady was confirmed in his self-criticism in the next instant, when through his NVGs he detected a figure emerging from the jeep. The white blob of infrared radiation that was Moon pulling himself out of the burning wreck was dripping infrared radiation, which Bone realized was blood. Brady squeezed the SAW’s trigger. Nothing. It had to be a jam, because the Minimi was being fed from one of its preloaded 200-round plastic magazines, and a quick visual of the transparent plastic casing showed he still had plenty of rounds remaining. With no time to clear it, he dashed toward the oncoming Korean, whipping out his K-bar from its shin sheath, slipped on the rain-slicked road, and fell, his impact against the wrecked Bohai’s front bumper temporarily stunning him, which gave Sergeant Moon time to reach in his canvas holster for his 9mm Makarov and fire.
Although half blinded by broken-glass granules and the pouring rain, the NKA sergeant got off three shots in rapid succession. The first went wild and the second struck Bone’s Fritz but ricocheted off, the third smashing the American in the left shoulder, fracturing the clavicle as Brady, recovering from his fall, got up and charged the Korean.
The impact felled both men. Brady’s right hand grabbed Moon’s gun wrist, banging it furiously against the pavement until the Korean lost his grip, the 9mm Makarov skittering noisily across the road, the sparks it produced appearing as transient pinpoints on Brady’s NVGs. Moon had never been so close to an American before, and the stereotyped NKA picture of the huge, black basketball champions of the world, despite the man’s familiar kimchi breath, did nothing to help the Korean NCO. But he was tough too, and, despite
While the two men were locked in their mortal combat, both ends of the warehouse had been entered, by Freeman, Aussie, and Choir at the southern end, Salvini and Johnny Lee at its northern. All five of them had preceded their entrance with concerted cones of fire, making sure that none of their own off-the-shelf, team- designated IRIs, infrared identification dots, was caught in the enfilade.
In the frenzy of his struggle, Moon was aware of an ominous burning pins-and-needles sensation spreading across his chest as he fought the man who had killed his driver and aborted his attempt to reach the Beach 5 turnoff barely a hundred yards away. The big African-American had his knife point at Moon’s throat. Then, with the sweat coursing down his rain-drenched spine, Brady suddenly felt the Korean’s body go limp. He pushed the knife into the man’s throat, but the Korean was already dead. A heart attack, guessed Brady. Whatever, thank God for it. He got up and, though gasping for air and feeling decidedly weak with the intense pain, he immediately began the quick procedure to unjam the Minimi. Brady’s action manifested the kind of determination that under high stress and strain was mute testimony to the outstanding level of physical and mental conditioning that Freeman had insisted upon in his Special Forces throughout his career.
Inside the warehouse, battle was joined. The North Korean defenders, having rallied from their initial panicked surprise, had set up two defensive lines across the middle of the warehouse, one facing south, the other north, using short, stubby boxes, which Freeman guessed were crates of ammunition, as barricades. The general admired the Koreans’ initiative, but if the ammo boxes were full, it was extraordinarily stupid — and not the kind of thing that he would have expected from the vaunted, supposedly highly trained NKA. But this was also the country in which millions continued to starve because paranoid ideology had ridden roughshod over common sense. Within seconds, the football-field-sized interior was literally buzzing with what appeared to be chaotic small-arms fire but which in fact was being carefully directed by the American Payback team in the relatively confined space so as to avoid blue on blue, or so-called “friendly fire.”
The impact of Freeman’s AK-47 and Aussie’s HK 9mm parabellum rounds against the Korean southward- facing line was mixed. Freeman could tell from the sound that some rounds were clearly hitting bodies and fully packed boxes of either ammo or other stores, while others were striking hollow or empty munition boxes. To his enormous relief, he caught a glimpse in the flash of one of Aussie’s stun grenades of the outline of several two- foot-square-by-six-foot-long boxes. “Johnny!” he shouted into his throat mike, “that Korean writing say what I think it says?”
Johnny Lee had to wait for another stun grenade, this one thrown by Salvini, to catch sight of the boxes Freeman was asking about.
“MANPADs!” Lee confirmed. “We got ’em, General. We got ’em!”
“Not yet, Johnny. Gotta get one of those outta here!”
Freeman feared that if one or two errant rounds penetrated any live ammo stored in the boxes, there would be—
No sooner had he had the thought than two quick 9mm bursts from Aussie’s HK set off a round of link-belted ammo in one of the stubby boxes, the box “blooming” in the team’s NVGs into an intensely white blossom of light, only Choir in Freeman’s trio and Salvini at the far northern end managing to flick their NVG filters down in time to prevent the short-lived but blinding flashbulb effect on their eyes.
“FUBAR!” came Aussie’s unbidden situation report. He was right — the exploding ammo box set off others, the ammunition “cooking off” in several of the stubby ammo boxes producing crazy fusillades of fire through the huge, darkened warehouse, shots coming and going in every conceivable direction in a strangely beautiful but deadly display of red and white tracer arcing and crisscrossing through the deafening chaos of both the intentional and unintentional pyrotechnics. Earsplitting crescendos punctuated the small-arms fire every time a purplish flash and crashing sound of an exploding grenade or RPG joined in, filling the huge interior with a lethal lace of white-hot metal that emitted a buzzing sound that could be heard above the pandemonium of deliberately and accidentally discharged weapons, shouts, murderous battle cries, and the incessant drumming of the storm, which now had the coast firmly in its grip.
Thunder could be heard everywhere, so intense that it reminded Freeman, Aussie, and Choir of the massed cannonades that had rolled over them years before in the Russian taiga. But while the thunder was all around, the flashes of lightning that gave birth to the storm’s basso-profundo sound could be seen only through what few windows the warehouse had, because the Payback team had immediately closed the doors behind them the moment they had gained entrance to the building. Freeman’s insistence that the doors must immediately be shut after they entered the building had seemed tendentious and time-wasting, even crazy, to Gomez and Eddie Mervyn during the team’s initial planning session. But if there had been any doubt about the wisdom of the general’s “door” decision among the other team members, it had been rapidly dispelled once the gunfight in the warehouse had erupted. As a young officer, Freeman had been struck by Hitler’s axiom that war is like walking into an already dark room and closing the door, and long experience had taught him that closing the door after you had entered fast
Having cleared the SAW’s jam, Bone Brady, the gaping wound in his left shoulder not bleeding as profusely as he would have expected, was nevertheless in terrible agony. The pain had been there all the time but had been temporarily overridden by the surge of adrenaline he’d needed fighting the now-dead North Korean sergeant. Pulling out a morphine “jab,” he thrust it into his thigh, cradling his injured arm inside his battle tunic, his wide fireman- issue suspenders serving as an immobilizing strap. He’d no sooner clipped one of his six unused “feed boxes” of 5.56mm ammunition onto the SAW than he heard the sound of trucks coming south from Kosong, toward the warehouse. Soon slit headlights were faintly visible in the downpour, the rain so cold he was beginning to shiver, the body heat of his life-and-death struggle with the stocky little Korean sergeant now replaced by what he felt was approaching hypothermia. In the euphoric rush of the painkilling morphine, he had no time to realize how the freezing rain had probably saved his life, the resulting vasoconstriction stemming the flow of blood from his
