hundred-percent effort from every man in this country — Korean and American alike. And without the officers you’ve got rotting in those camps, a lot of my ROK units aren’t operating up to par. I don’t want any more fiascos like the one up at Kangso this morning.”
The word on that had come through just before the staff briefing. A South Korean infantry battalion commanded by a major whose only obvious military credential was unquestioning loyalty to the Seoul government had been ambushed enroute to the front. The major had panicked and fled — leaving his troops to try to fight their way out of the trap without any command coordination or support. Three hundred of them had been killed by a force of North Korean commandos probably mustering less than half of that number. A total of twenty-three NK bodies had been recovered from the ambush site.
“We can’t afford that kind of exchange ratio, General Park. Hell, we just plain can’t afford to let a bunch of political amateurs try to play combat soldier while there’s real shooting going on.
“Now I’m not talking about the officers that were actually conspiring with Chang. They can hang. They should hang.” McLaren leaned forward. “But we both know that DSC cast its net pretty wide after the coup attempt. You know many of the men being held. A careful reevaluation of the information that led to their arrest should show that most of them are loyal to the government.”
Park frowned. He’d been around long enough to know that what McLaren saidmadesense. He had fought inVietnamand knew how valuable experienced leaders were. He sat quietly for a moment, obviously considering his response. McLaren waited, knowing he held the upper hand on this one.
A minute passed in uneasy silence until Park said, “Very well, General McLaren. I’ll speak to the President and present your case to him. I think I can get them released.”
The Korean looked up from his folded hands. “But I must warn you, General, that my government will hold you responsible for their actions should they betray us again.”
McLaren nodded calmly. “I wouldn’t expect anything else.” He stood abruptly. “Now that’s settled, let me show you what we’re up against.”
He led the way back to the Operations Center.
Anne Larson looked at chaos. The systems programming division could be a little crazy, especially if the computer went down, but this went beyond all reason.
First there were the phones. North Korean commando targets in the Seoul area had included communications centers and automated switchboards, and now the phone service was all snarled up. Her people were spending five minutes just trying to get through to someone on the other side of town. And a lot of the phone numbers for supply and combat units were unusable, because the troops were in the field and there was no way to reach them.
On top of that, and despite the lousy communications, it seemed like every logistics officer in the ROK was determined to get a complete list of everything in his inventory. She scowled. If they’d been doing their jobs, they wouldn’t have to ask her. One low-level idiot had even called demanding a data dump of everything stockpiled in Korea! She’d hung up on him, hard.
Anne punched a button on her terminal, sending a main-gun-barrel spares list for the 1st of 72nd Armored into the already overloaded print queue. She rolled her desk chair back and stretched, wincing slightly at the pain in her lower back.
It had been a long night and an even longer day. Tony hadn’t been able to get leave from Kunsan so she’d had to make an appearance at the office Christmas party by herself. An hour surrounded by buzzed, hard-up, and horny junior staff officers had seemed like an eternity. She’d stuck it out long enough to avoid being talked about and then left — half-angry with Tony for not being able to be there and half-angry with herself for feeling lonely. Three months before she would have taken the whole thing in stride.
It had taken her a long time to go to sleep. She was deeply disappointed in not spending the evening with Tony. She missed him and missed sharing the holiday with him. She hadn’t even been able to give him his present. As she tossed and turned her last thoughts were of him.
The alert sirens had woken her an hour later.
At first she’d thought the high-pitched wail rising and falling above Seoul was something to do with Christmas, some Korean custom she had never heard of. But the sirens kept on and on — ending in a tremendous, rattling explosion that had knocked books off her shelves and lit up her bedroom window for an instant with an eerie, orangish light. Then she’d heard jets loud and close overhead. Tony had told her that aircraft were never allowed to fly over Seoul.
She’d still been sitting upright in bed half-asleep when the jet engine noises roaring all over the city were suddenly mingled with sharper cracking sounds. Shrapnel from antiaircraft shells bursting overhead had started pattering down on the street outside, sounding a lot like a hard, metallic rainstorm. And while her conscious mind sorted out all the obvious clues, Anne’s subconscious had already had her moving. Out of bed and into her clothes. She’d been fully dressed by the time she allowed herself to think the answer. They were at war.
Just thinking the word “war” made Anne’s stomach turn over. She shook off a mental picture of herself ripped apart by bombs. She thought about Tony trapped in a flaming cockpit, trying to get out … stop it. That wasn’t getting her anywhere. Anne rolled back to her keyboard, fingers punching up a new menu without conscious thought. Her mind drifted back again to the events of last night.
At least she hadn’t gone running out into the street in panic like a lot of her neighbors. Instead she’d sat by the telephone, trying to get through to the base general information number. Nothing. Every time she tried calling, the line was either dead or busy.
After nearly an hour of frantic dialing, Anne had given up and retreated to the apartment’s tiny kitchenette to consider her next move. The U.S. Armed Forces — Korea radio station was silent, off the air, and she couldn’t make out any details in the Korean language broadcasts spewing out of the government-owned stations. Without any solid information, one side of her mind had wanted very much to stay hidden in the apartment. But another side had argued that she would be needed at the Logistics Center and should report in for work.
She’d been right in the middle of this internal debate when the phone started ringing. Anne had grabbed for the receiver, started to speak, and then stopped in midword as she realized it was a computer-generated call relaying a taped message.
“This is the Eighth Army Information Center with an urgent message for all civilian contract personnel employed at the Yongsan base. At oh two hundred hours this A.M., North Korean forces commenced open hostilities with U.S. and South Korean troops stationed along the Demilitarized Zone.” Well, it’s official, she thought. The recording continued, “Accordingly, the base commander has declared a general alert and ordered all base employees to report to their respective work stations.
“However, civilian employees are cautioned to avoid using personal or public transportation. Special buses are being dispatched to pick you up at your place of residence. Wait for the bus dispatched to your location. All employees with dependents should bring those dependents with them. Make sure that you have the following items: your military ID card, passport, special medical information and prescriptions, and a minimum kit with spare clothing and portable personal valuables. Each person boarding a bus will be limited to one, repeat, one suitcase.” Anne had sat still while the taped message recycled and repeated.
For a moment after hanging up, she hadn’t known whether to be relieved now that she knew for sure what was going on or even more frightened. She’d finally shelved the question and started packing, figuring there’d be time enough later to sort out her feelings.
Now the bus ride, she thought, that had been frightening. She’d been picked up just before dawn by a green-painted Army bus escorted by a street sweeper to push shrapnel fragments aside and a jeep filled with M16- toting MPs. The trek to Yongsan had been an hour-long, circuitous crawl through Seoul’s streets. They’d stopped every so often to load on more of her coworkers and their families.
The capital’s boulevards had been strangely empty of the normal, morning rush-hour traffic. And Anne had seen fully equipped South Korean soldiers posted at every major intersection. Storefronts all along their route were still covered by roll-down metal shutters.
Their arrival at Yongsan’s main gate had only reinforced her uneasiness. MPs in bulky flak jackets had boarded the bus and scrutinized every passenger’s identification. Others stood on guard on the pavement outside, weapons at the ready. And she’d glimpsed still more troops hurriedly building sandbagged machine gun nests at
