entered his trailer. The morning’s first briefing was already long overdue.
The dull, coughing sound of twin explosions rolled across the flatlands and echoed off the steep, rocky hill above the highway.
“Good shooting, Private Park!” Kevin laid an approving hand on the shoulder of the South Korean reservist manning 3rd Platoon’s Dragon launcher.
The man smiled shyly and bowed his head in thanks at the compliment.
A thousand meters away, two North Korean T-62 tanks burned in fiery testimony to Park’s skill. His missile had slammed squarely into one and exploded, catching the second T-62 inside the resulting fireball. On either side of the dead tanks, other enemy vehicles hastily dispersed, some behind the dense white puffs thrown by onboard smoke dischargers. APCs disgorged their infantry, who promptly sought cover in roadside ditches.
Kevin studied the apparent confusion in satisfaction. His ambush, as expected, had forced the North Koreans to deploy for battle — a maneuver that wasted precious time and fuel. He watched for a couple of minutes more, making sure, and then let the binoculars fall back onto his chest. It was time to head out.
“Lieutenant Rhee!” Rhee’s head popped up from beside a boulder. “Move your people back to the next position. We’ve done enough here.”
The Korean nodded and started bellowing orders. Kevin stood aside as the files of white-camouflaged soldiers began slipping past him, down the slope toward the valley spreading out below this last hill. He glanced toward the road. Were the North Koreans reacting any faster this time?
Nope, the NK column was still trying to shake itself out into attack order. From the look of things, it would be at least another ten minutes before they could advance against what they assumed was an enemy-held hill. Kevin would have liked to have met their expectations. The terrain was perfect, too steep for tanks and with too little cover for attacking infantry. Even a small number of defenders wouldn’t have had much trouble bloodying a much larger assaulting force.
He sighed. Orders were orders.
Even when they didn’t make any sense.
For the last seven days, they’d been retreating virtually nonstop — halting just long enough to delay the North Koreans, inflict a few casualties, and then hustle on. At first he and his men hadn’t minded. They took fewer casualties of their own in that kind of running fight. But as the retreat went on and on, they’d started to question the sanity of the higher-ups. The UN forces had been abandoning defensive positions that could have been held. Why? And where were the reinforcements promised from the States and from South Korea’s enormous pool of trained reserves?
This latest withdrawal made even less sense than all the others. Once past this range of rugged hills, the North Korean spearheads would again enter flat, open ground — ground perfect for tanks and other armored vehicles. And the next really defensible position lay along the Paekma River, thirty kilometers south and just a few kilometers north of the city of Taejon. Christ, how far did the generals plan to let the NKs go before they did something?
Kevin rubbed a weary hand over his face, glad that the weather had warmed up enough to let him dispense with the makeshift scarf he’d had to wear over his mouth and nose when the last Siberian cold front had roared through — plunging temperatures well below zero. One of his men had frozen to death on guard duty that last hellish night. What was his name? Costello. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the man’s face. But he’d never forget that pathetic corpse, huddled stiff and blue at the bottom of a one-man foxhole. Not in a million years.
He followed his men down the hill.
The long convoys of green-painted trucks filled every southbound lane, moving at high speed past groups of refugees forced to the side of the road. Each had its canvas covers tightly closed, for protection against both the weather and prying eyes, but several still bore markings that identified them as belonging to the U.S. 3rd Marine Division.
One of the refugees, a wizened, old farmer, shrugged his pack onto the pavement and stood straight as the trucks roared by. As a young man he had served beside the Marines in the battle for the Pusan perimeter. Mustering the English he’d picked up then, he called out, “Hey, Mac! Where’re you heading?”
A youthful Marine corporal stuck his head out the window of one of the passing trucks and yelled back, “To kick some communist ass!”
Cheers followed the trucks on their way down the road toward Pusan.
Shin Dal-Kon was a realistic man. And as a realistic man, he understood that the odds were greatly against his living to see another day. But Shin was also a dedicated man, and he had a duty to perform. A duty that would surely kill him.
He moistened his lips and stared out again through the window, counting ships and vehicles. Shin’s small gift shop was perfectly placed, within easy walking distance of the Pusan railway station and less than five hundred meters from the harbor’s main docks. During the summer months the store was usually clogged with foreign visitors buying trinkets or postcards — a condition that made other, less ordinary exchanges ludicrously easy.
In fact, his masters in Pyongyang now considered Shin Dal-Kon their top agent in Pusan. Or so they’d always told him, he thought wryly. Certainly he was one of the longest-lived. The short, bald, ordinary-looking man had served the North continuously since 1963.
But now that service was about to come to a sudden end. And all because of Pyongyang’s desperate need for information about what the Americans were up to. His control’s last signal had ordered him to report any significant findings by radio — and without delay.
He wondered, did the desk-sitters up North know they’d ordered his death in the same signal? Shin had survived for more than twenty-five years for a single, good reason — he was always careful. No dispatch ever followed the same route or ever went through fewer than three cut-outs before it started north. And Shin had never, never used any of the radios which he’d been issued. South Korea’s radio-direction-finding units were too skilled to toy with. They could pinpoint an illicit radio transmitter in minutes. That was a lesson Shin had learned secondhand and never forgotten. But now he had to ignore it.
Despite tight security, the American effort was too obvious to be missed. Seemingly endless convoys of trucks crowding the dockyard’s roads; warships moored offshore while transports anchored alongside massive cargo cranes; stern-faced security detachments on every street corner, and perhaps most significantly, the complete disappearance of the rowdy American sailors who’d once thronged Pusan’s bars and brothels. They all spelled one thing to the North Korean agent: amphibious invasion. Soon the American armada would depart, and Pyongyang had to be ready for its reappearance at some point along the coast.
And so Shin had to sound the warning. And so Shin would die, as soon as South Korea’s security forces broke down his shop’s door.
He put down the notepad containing his coded signal and went down the stairs and out into his small garden. Carefully he levered frozen soil away at one corner of the garden, knelt, and gingerly lifted a heavy earthenware pot of the kind used to ferment kimchee. Shin hefted the pot and brought it back inside before lifting its top to reveal the ultramodern shortwave radio concealed inside.
Working quickly, partly from fear and partly from an impatient desire to see the thing done, he raised the whip-thin aerial, made sure the frequency setting was correct, and began transmitting.
The traffic-battered minivan looked like any of the thousands of similar vehicles scattered across South Korea’s city streets. But instead of dried fish, cooking oil, or sacks of rice, it contained an array of highly sophisticated radio listening devices.
The senior duty agent for the National Security Planning Agency’s Pusan Station leaned over the operator’s shoulder. “Anything yet?”
The man nodded abruptly as faint beeps emerged from his equipment. “Yes, he’s just started transmitting.”
The agent smiled and keyed his own transmitter. “All units report in and stand by for my signal.”
Acknowledgments flooded through his headphones. Satisfied, the NSP agent moved back to the other man. “Well?”
