Payback

McCain’s XO was aware he was still in the room. “So do I, John.”

“And start a war,” said Admiral Crowley.

“We’re already in one,” rejoined Cuso.

“I meant widen it,” retorted Crowley grumpily. “We’ve got enough mad Muslims to deal with.” There were lapel-pin-sized red crescents, possible hostile sites, all over Big Blue, from Kabul to the Russian Far East and the Russian Near East. “Last thing we need,” he said, indicating the inset map of Korea, “is an all-out brawl with these jokers on the Prick.” He saw a young EWO — a woman — glance around at him, then back at the screen.

“Holy shit!” said Ray Lynch. It was a sight to behold for those watching Big Blue and for the six Americans — Freeman, Choir, Aussie, Lee, Sal, and Brady — on the beach, for as the RS’s bulbous, cigar-tube-shaped bow became visible in the third surf line of the storm-driven sea, dawn was breaking. Bone, his loss of blood and energy causing him to falter, was struck by two succeeding ten-foot waves, going under, Salvini dragging the six-foot-long, steel-band-wrapped box. Gomez, his left hand on the RS’s forward starboard stabilizer wing, lunged out to grab the rope handhold of the box that Salvini was dragging. Gomez knew it probably weighed no more than thirty-five pounds, if there was a launcher and missile inside, but whatever its weight, it was hard to handle in the surf.

For a moment, visible via satellite to all in Blue Tile, but ironically not to those on the beach, Gomez lost his grip as he tried to help Salvini, the box tumbling about so rapidly in a wall of surging foam that he could have sworn it was empty, until Salvini, straining and up to his waist in the surf, body-pressed the box over the foam’s crest, where Gomez took hold of it again and felt its weight on his left arm, a deep gash in his bicep, unnoticed by him till now, having been caused by one of the box’s metal binding straps, but noted by the EWOs and others in Blue Tile hundreds of miles away whose computers were being fed the SATPIX’s IR camera relay feed.

Mervyn, the RS’s state-of-the-art computers notwithstanding, did a superb job keeping the craft stable enough to allow Sal and Gomez to haul the long box down through hatch one.

Back on the beach, because of the storm’s residual force, Freeman, Aussie, Choir, and Lee became momentarily hidden in a thick fog that, had they not been temporarily caught in the windless eye of the storm, the wind would have blown asunder and revealed them naked, as it were, on the beach, trying to reach the RS. The fog didn’t stop the NKA’s pursuit, but in the early dawn the pale sunlight diffused in the thick fog created a glare that defeated all efforts of the NKA pursuers, except for Lieutenant Rhee, to see the escaping Americans.

Rhee, having spent the last twenty minutes in pain and anguish at not being able to contact his troops because of the Americans obviously jamming the NKA frequencies, and unable to take part in the fight, now dragged himself up to the eye slit of the stench-filled bunker and with considerable effort raised his head and the big ChiCom IR binoculars level with the bunker’s slit. He almost blacked out from the effort. Pausing a moment to get his breath, Rhee focused on the down slope that led like a bushy apron to the beach. The fog that had swept in to fill the vacuum of the storm’s eye naturally obscured his field of vision, but failed to entirely blanket out all infrared radiation, most of this appearing to him in the IR lenses of the ChiCom binoculars in the form of short spits of light as weapons were fired by his pursuing NKA comrades and by the withdrawing Americans, but as to who was whom, he couldn’t be sure, exacerbating his frustration. He sat, hunched and wounded, behind a 79G “Sky Arrow,” the clumsily nicknamed but extremely hard-hitting NKA version of the ChiCom’s 12.7mm antiaircraft machine gun, which could and often did double up against South Korean state-of-readiness patrols across the DMZ as a heavy infantry machine gun, which, as Rhee well knew, was capable of meting out horrific damage to any ground target within a mile of the shoreline.

When he glimpsed an umbrella of radiant heat hovering just above the roiling gray wall of the surf, he felt his throat contract, his tongue dry and rough as sandpaper, the stench of his two dead comrades momentarily evicted by his excitement. The umbrella of heat above the water had to be a U.S. helicopter, whose noise was either baffled by the plastic, sound-suppressing blisters that the Migooks often used in SpecOps or was being drowned out by the feral roar of the T-55, which, in spite of the sound of its throaty menace, was achieving little more, it seemed to Rhee, than being a fifty-five-ton shield for the twenty to thirty NKA infantry trying to stop the Americans, the tank’s machine-guns’ fire traversing the beach, but as yet apparently not hitting anyone.

Seeing a tank in such a mode, Rhee quickly recalled NKA officers such as Colonel Kim and Major Park referring to ineffective T-55s as “Kofi Annans”—all noise and little action. Now even NKA infantry fire was falling off for lack of targets. Then he heard the guttural cough from the tank’s cluster of grenade/flare-popping tubes firing a salvo of high search flares into the Americans’ fortuitous fog cover. The flares burned with such intensity as they descended beneath their chutes that their light “bloomed” out Rhee’s binoculars, the latter’s filter to no avail.

While swearing at the stupidity of the T-55’s commander for, albeit unknowingly, whiting out his ChiCom binoculars’ IR capability and making his eyes water copiously in the backwash of the astringent phosphorus, Rhee saw something with the naked eye at about the point where his IR binoculars had picked up the umbrella of heat. It looked for all the world like a huge, truncated cigar casing, a massive version of the cigar tubes that held the NKA senior officers’ Havana cigars. Then he saw two — or was it three? — figures by it. Given the fog-curtained dawn, it was impossible to make out whether they were swimming or hanging on to the thing. Then as quickly as he’d cursed the tank commander, Rhee was praising his commander in arms, the phosphorus flares so hot they were creating burn holes in the fog over the beach and surf, one of these holes providing Rhee with a temporary window through which he plainly saw the bulbous bow of the craft and its strange back-to-front appearance, as if its bow was its stern and vice versa.

It didn’t matter to Rhee exactly what it was. All he knew was that it was well within range of his bunker’s heavy 12.7mm machine gun. The weapon’s mid-gun sight was warped, but the target was only about two hundred yards away at most. If he couldn’t get one or two rounds into it with the 700-rounds-a-minute Sky Arrow, he should be put on public latrine duty where everyone from old NKA veterans to young girls had posters of the current American President plastered on urinals and in toilet basins to aim at.

He flicked off the safety and, using the palm of his left hand to steady the gun’s stock, squeezed the trigger. If the blowback noise took him by surprise, it also startled Freeman and Aussie, the last of the six-man Payback team to reach the RS as fog rushed in again to fill the temporary vacuum that had been created by the phosphorus flares’ burn-off of oxygen. Worse, while most of the big 12.7mm antiaircraft slugs chopped futilely into the cold and angry surf, at least two rounds struck the bulbous bow.

“Jesus!” shouted Aussie as he momentarily lost his grip, while helping the wounded Bone. Brady, despite having managed to jerk down the pull tab on his Mae West earlier with his free hand before being knocked under, was having to struggle to stay upright long enough for Freeman and Aussie to help pull and push him up to the RS’s starboard retractable stabilizer canard, which doubled as both handhold and footstep up to hatch two, hatch one having been ordered closed by Eddie Mervyn to prevent more of the kind of flooding that had followed Salvini and the MANPAD box in as it was dragged and bullied down at a near-impossible angle through hatch one into the RS’s belly.

“C’mon, Bone!” Aussie yelled. “Shake a leg, mate, or we’ll be fucking pate!”

Freeman retrieved Bone by grabbing his left shoulder, Brady’s scream so loud Gomez thought his wounded comrade was done for, but then Bone was knocked from the general’s grasp by a wave and disappeared.

Rhee fired again, his left hand sliding inadvertently on the rain-slicked stock, unwittingly depressing the barrel’s angle of fire. On the beach there were other screams and shouts as an errant burst from the fog-shrouded bunker fell short of the RS, chomping instead into a squad of NKA infantry. The latter, having become suddenly impatient with the T-55’s cautious progress on the wet sand, had rushed forward toward the roaring but fog-hidden surf, afraid that the enemy might slip away due to one of those incidentals that civilian know-it-alls find inexplicable but which men at arms experience more often than is ever recorded. For the moment that the tank commander, now doing an Israeli, standing up for better vision in the tank’s cupola, his only protection that of the ribbed leather helmet, saw the infantry squad’s bodies being literally butchered by very heavy machine-gun fire, he surmised that his tank and its attendant infantry were coming under a rearguard fire from the bunker. The cagey Americans, he had assumed, had left one or perhaps two of their number in the bunker to delay — or rather, ambush — the NKA’s progress down the slope and onto the beach, buying their fellow gangsters time to get away. In a second the tank commander slewed the T-55’s turret 180 degrees, shouting to his crew that they were taking fire from the rear. “Cha-ja! — Find it!” he shouted into his mike. “Cha-ja!”

Though he couldn’t be heard over the tank’s internal radio circuit, all NKA frequencies continuing to be jammed by Blue Tile’s satellite-directed down-beams via the E2-F Hawkeye, the commander’s voice was so loudly