was like this … everyone dead.”
He stared back at Kevin. “How did you survive?”
Kevin laughed, a bitter, coughing laugh that turned into a choked-back sob. “Me? I chickened out. I played dead while they killed my men.”
Rhee shook his head. “You must not blame yourself, Lieutenant. We were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers in a lightning attack. No one else could have done any better against such odds.”
“I should have done something.” Kevin heard his voice break. “God, there must have been something I could have done.”
“There was nothing to be done,” Rhee said flatly. “The communists outnumbered us by more than ten to one. They had absolute artillery superiority. We were short of ammunition and completely surrounded. The result was preordained. Victory was beyond our grasp.”
Kevin turned away, feeling irrationally stubborn and oddly irritated by Rhee’s attempts to find excuses for him. “Nice try, Lieutenant Rhee, but I screwed up. End of story, okay? Forty men are dead because of me. Because I panicked.”
The South Korean moved in front of him again. “You cannot dwell on it, Lieutenant. Your reaction was normal. Anybody else would have done the same.” He tapped his chest. “I would have done the same.”
He leaned closer. “Come, Lieutenant Little. There is much that we must do if we are to get out of this. We may have been defeated, but we are both still able to fight on. And we shall avenge our men a hundred times over.”
Kevin closed his eyes again and sank back against the sandbags. Avenge their men? They’d be lucky to survive the next couple of hours. Right now, he just wanted to sleep. Funny, the air felt warmer somehow.
Hands grabbed him and shook him. Kevin opened his eyes to find Rhee’s face inches away. “Come on, Lieutenant! There is no time for self-pity. You’re alive. Now stay that way!”
The South Korean’s voice hardened. “It’s going to take both of us to get out of this. If you want to fall apart, do it later, after we’re back in our own lines.”
Kevin felt anger surge through him, driving back both the cold and sorrow. “Goddamn you, Rhee. Let go of me!” He pushed the South Korean’s hands away and straightened up.
Still angry, he turned away and grabbed an M16 off the trench floor. He didn’t see the wan, sorrowing smile cross Rhee’s face and vanish.
He turned back to the South Korean. “Okay, Mr. Rhee. Just what the fuck do you suggest we do to get out of this mess?”
Rhee kept his face expressionless. “First, I think we must get off this hill. The communists have gone for now, but they’ll be back. You can be sure of that.”
Kevin nodded, grudgingly accepting the sense of Rhee’s argument. “Okay. But we can’t move very far in daylight. We’d be spotted in minutes.”
“True. But we can try to get into cover in a gully or a patch of brush. Somewhere out of sight and out of the way. After that?” The Korean shrugged and moved away from Kevin up onto a firing step to study the ground around Malibu West’s small, rocky hill.
Kevin followed him.
North Korean tanks and troop carriers were still pouring south over the open fields around them — the passage marked by the sound of rumbling engines and squealing, clanking treads. Canvas-sided trucks followed, bouncing and lurching across the torn, roadless ground.
Suddenly sunlight flashed off a canopy as a jet roared low over them and then dropped even lower, screaming west toward the closest North Korean column. The plane pulled up sharply and banked as its bombs found their targets. A pair of trucks disappeared in searing, orange-red explosions.
The jet dived again for the safety of the hills and vanished, pursued by streams of tracers and by airbursts from larger-caliber antiaircraft guns. Oily smoke from the flaming trucks billowed into the sky above the North Korean column, but other trucks and tanks were already detouring around them — still driving south.
Kevin and Rhee slid back down to the bottom of the trench. Kevin raised an eyebrow at the South Korean, his question silent but clear. Well? Which way should they go?
Rhee jerked a thumb to the southeast, and Kevin nodded his agreement. There’d been fewer North Korean troops visible in that direction.
The two men grabbed their weapons and hauled themselves over the lip of the trench, staying low. Then they crawled down the hill to the southeast, looking for somewhere to lie hidden until the sun went down.
Malibu West lay abandoned behind them.
Kevin clutched his M16 tighter and crouched lower in the snow-choked ditch, scanning the darkness. Where was Rhee?
The South Korean had gone on ahead nearly ten minutes ago to scout out the little village and side road their maps showed right ahead beyond the small rise to his front. What was keeping him?
Kevin knew that he and Rhee had been lucky so far. They’d lain undetected in a clump of dead brush through the rest of Christmas Day while a North Korean assault column rumbled south just a few hundred meters away. Once night had fallen, they’d wriggled out of the brush and jogged southeast, guiding themselves by Rhee’s compass and by the bright flashes of the North Korean guns still firing from beyond the DMZ.
Late at night, clouds had rolled in from the north, covering the sky and raising the temperature enough for a light snow to begin falling, settling in over the whole battlefront. They’d welcomed both the relative warmth and the cover from prying eyes it provided.
Now, though, the snow was a hindrance. Fast-falling flakes made it almost impossible to see anything more than a few meters away. Kevin peered out into the swirling darkness, alert for the slightest sound or sign of movement.
Snow crunched somewhere off to the right. Kevin twisted toward the sound, his fingers seeking the M16’s safety.
“Little?” Rhee’s voice sounded even more hoarse and strained than it had before.
“Here.”
Rhee dropped down into the ditch beside him.
“Well?”
“We can cross through the village safely enough. There’s no one there to …” Rhee faltered for a second and then went on, “Come, you’ll have to see it for yourself, and we have no time to waste.”
The Korean lieutenant clambered out of the ditch and moved off into the night. Kevin followed.
He understood what Rhee meant when they reached the outskirts of the lifeless village. A North Korean tank column must have rolled right through the middle of the place, machine guns blazing. The killing had been indiscriminate, wanton.
Old men, women, and children lay scattered in and around their wrecked homes, cut down without reason or pity. The new-fallen snow mercifully covered most of the torn bodies and hid much of the horror.
But not all of it. Kevin’s face tightened when he saw the huddled figures of a mother and her three children lying still against the bullet-riddled wall of the village shrine. Bastards. They’d pay for this. And for his men.
He shook Rhee’s shoulder, pulling the Korean lieutenant away from the nightmare around them. They had meant to look for food, but all he could think of was leaving this place. Rhee wiped the tears from his face and led the way out of the village into the rice paddies and orchards beyond.
They had to find a place to hide before the sun came up. Artillery continued to thunder off to the north.
The North Korean company commander watched impatiently as his crews stripped the camouflage away from their T-55 tanks. It was all taking too long for his taste. The sun would be up in a matter of minutes, and he’d wanted to be on the way well before first light.
The North Korean captain frowned. If he’d had his way they would never have stopped for the night. His T- 55s had infrared searchlights mounted beside their 100-millimeter guns. They could have pressed the attack onward through the darkness and snow. And he was quite sure that kind of unrelenting pressure would have cracked the imperialist defenses ahead of them wide open.
The captain’s lip curled. But no, his battalion commander had explained, the infantry units accompanying the
