take to destroy this underground freeway?”
Lee cocked his head, studying what he could make out of the tunnel through the darkness and still-swirling dust. “Perhaps as much as a thousand kilos of C4. It will take us most of the day to wire the charges. This could be the second largest ‘freeway’ we have ever found.” He smiled wolfishly and shrugged. “Who knows? If we time it right, we may be able to catch the communists as they return to their work this evening.”
While Lee’s men lowered their equipment through the narrow opening to the surface, the two captains moved off down the tunnel, accompanied by seven M16-toting enlisted men. The engineers needed security while they worked, and Chadwick wanted to get a good look at everything before it was too late.
His nervousness had evaporated with the absence of opposition. Now he had a job to do.
“What’s that on the wall?” The American stopped as his flashlight hit a painted line of Hangul characters.
Lee stepped closer. “It says that this is the ‘Socialist Awareness’ tunnel.” The South Korean sounded both amused and disgusted at the same time.
“Well, it’s the ‘Socialist Awareness’ tunnel for about six more hours. Then it’s going to be the ‘Socialist Collapsed Hole in the Ground.’ ” Chadwick raised his camera and snapped a picture of the nameplate.
They’d already come three hundred meters from the entrance without seeing much of anything. Just the smooth rock walls and floors, an occasional ventilation shaft, and now this painted sign. It looked peaceful, but every step brought them closer to North Korean territory.
A few meters farther on their flashlights picked out a row of dark, boxy forms blocking the passage in the distance. Heavy construction equipment? That didn’t make sense. You didn’t use bulldozers to build tunnels.
They picked up the pace a little, closing on the shapes. They walked another twenty steps or so and then Chadwick pulled up short. In a very soft voice he said, “Oh, shit. Captain Lee, tell me those aren’t what I know they are.”
His flashlight pointed up and outlined the rounded form of a tank turret, and another one next to it, and another one next to that. Three tanks, with their turrets pointed aft, in travel position, were parked abreast in the tunnel.
Lee whirled and shouted something to a private, who took off running. Chadwick understood just enough Korean to understand “colonel” and “more men.” Smart move. Get the brass and get reinforcements. Nobody had ever found any equipment parked in a tunnel before. Son of a bitch. Excitedly he ran over to the left. He shined his flashlight down the passage between the tank and wall. Yep. There was another tank past this one, and one past that, and on until the light was lost in the darkness.
Chadwick stood and stared, drinking in every detail. A long-barreled 115mm main gun. One 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. A heavy machine gun mounted on the turret for use against aircraft and helicopters. An infrared searchlight mounted near the main gun. There couldn’t be any doubt about it. These were Soviet-model T-62A main battle tanks. And here they were sitting in a North Korean tunnel, inside South Korean territory.
A wild feeling of exultation swept over him. This was an intelligence officer’s dream. He wanted to do a hundred things immediately and couldn’t decide which to do first.
Steady, Marc, old boy. Deep breath. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, then looked at Lee. “Any chance we can open up that hole and get some of these guys out?”
“I am going to ask my colonel for permission to do that when he arrives. If we work fast, we should be able to make it. Some of the men in my company are qualified tracked vehicle crewmen.”
Chadwick leapt up onto the vehicle deck and looked for the gas filler cap. He opened it, delighting in the action the way a child might delight in working a new toy. “Empty, naturally.”
“We can have diesel fuel here in about forty-five minutes,” Lee said. “Don’t worry, Captain. It will take us several hours to drill and blast a ramp.”
Chadwick was climbing all over one of the tanks, opening its hatches and peering inside, when two colonels — one an American and the other South Korean — arrived, followed by a panting squad of heavily laden riflemen. The opportunity was just too good to pass up, so he stood at attention on the deck, saluted, and grinned at the two senior officers. “It followed me home, sir. Can I keep it?”
The senior American liaison officer with the South Korean combat engineers, Colonel Miller, just shook his head. “Report, Captain.” But Chadwick could see the ghost of a smile flit across Miller’s face.
Chadwick jumped down and saluted again. “Sir, there’s at least a battalion of armor parked in the tunnel. All T-62 tanks, parked three abreast. Standing up on the deck there, you can see them going back until the light runs out. They aren’t fueled, but they do have main gun ammunition.”
“All right. Get the men checking out the vehicles for documents and other portable intelligence. Don’t forget external markings. I understand we may be able to recover some of these?”
“The engineers think so, sir,” Chadwick said, nodding to Lee. The Korean was heavily engaged with his colonel, who was nodding and smiling.
“Then let’s get on with it. You and Captain Lee take your party down the tunnel and see what else is there. Take lots of pictures. Proceed no further than one-half klick, starting from this point. Consider this the line of departure, but don’t start a war, Captain.” The warning in the colonel’s voice was real.
“Yessir.” Chadwick waved over to Lee, who had just saluted his own departing colonel. It was the first time he’d ever seen a Korean field-grade officer move at anything except a dignified walk.
They moved forward slowly, an officer in front on each side, followed by three heavily armed enlisted men.
Chadwick looked at his watch. It was just two-thirty in the afternoon. Topside it was ninety-five degrees and climbing, but the tunnel was as cool as his basement back home. Their handheld flashlights provided the only source of light. The tunnel had taken many slight bends since they had entered, and more since the start of the equipment. Probably done to avoid difficult rock formations and to confuse anyone trying to plot the progress of the tunnel from above. In any event, no light would reach from either end, so he got into the habit of calling out “Photo” before he took a picture. That gave everyone a chance to cover their eyes and avoid the painful flash.
Lee concentrated on the tunnel itself, doing a hasty survey of distances and directions.
Chadwick counted tanks. There were thirty-one, the book strength of an armored battalion. Behind were trucks, jeeps, and all the other hardware. Someone with an orderly mind had put this stuff in here. He could almost predict what would come next.
What the hell was all this stuff doing down here in the first place? There’d always been speculation that the North Koreans intended some of their tunnels as more than just infiltration routes into the South. But this kind of confirmation was spectacular and completely unexpected. It did make a twisted kind of military sense, though. Stockpiling gear like this in advance would cut down the preparation time needed to launch a major attack across, or under, the DMZ, and it would lower the warning time available to U.S. and South Korean forces along the line. But how could the North Koreans have possibly thought this kind of gear could just lie here undetected, year in and year out, until it was needed? He filed the question away for further consideration later. There was just too much to do right now.
After the tanks the vehicles were only parked two abreast, leaving one lane open. Chadwick guessed that the fueling trucks were next, and he was rewarded by the sight of large, fat-bodied tankers designed to carry the diesel that T-62 tanks guzzled by the gallon. They marched along through the trucks, passed a row of towed 122mm field guns, and suddenly came out into just empty blackness. They stood facing north, looking into the tunnel, regarding the dark and wondering what else was there.
Lee spoke first. “I think we should continue on, Captain. We should find out what else is down here.”
“How far have we come so far?”
“Only about five hundred meters more. It is at least another five hundred meters until we are under the border.”
Chadwick felt his excitement fading a bit, allowing a dose of reality to creep back in. “Yeah, but we’re under the DMZ now. Come on, Captain, we’ve captured a communist armored battalion without a shot being fired. Let’s quit while we’re ahead.”
Torn between his orders, common sense, and curiosity, Lee stood still for a moment and then shrugged in resignation, “All right. Should we survey this equipment then?”
“Yeah. I’d like to have Corporal Rhee assign men to copying license plates and markings and stuff. You and I can start looking for the command tank. It’s probably back toward the — ”
