He moved back down Sejong-Ro and stood on the sidewalk watching as the streets emptied of civilian traffic and filled up with truckload after truckload of green-jacketed riot police. It was very quiet now and growing hotter as the sun climbed directly overhead.
Then he heard it. Softly at first, but growing louder with every passing second. A rhythmic sound that seemed to echo off the tall buildings around him. Then he recognized it. It was the sound of thousands of voices chanting, yelling the same phrase over and over:
The Combat Police at the barricades heard it too. McLaren saw their officers — including that s.o.b. lieutenant — cursing and kicking them into formed ranks. The engines of the armored cars behind them caught and roared into life. The turrets with the water cannon and tear gas launchers turned to point down the empty street.
McLaren was tall enough to see over most of the riot police, and he could just begin to catch glimpses of the front rank of the crowd marching up the boulevard. He whistled softly to himself. There were a damned lot of them — thousands at least. And their shouts were even louder now that they’d seen the police line.
Most of them didn’t look like the longhairs who’d taken to the streets in the States while he was in Nam. They wore clean clothes and neatly cropped hair. But they were also wearing handkerchiefs and surgical masks over their faces to block out tear gas. And there was something unnerving about their relentless approach.
Despite the heat McLaren felt a chill run up his spine. This felt a lot like combat, but it was too mechanical, too predictable. It was like watching some kind of animated physics diagram — high-velocity mass meets immovable object. McLaren knew what bothered him most about it all. He wasn’t in charge and he couldn’t do a single thing to change the outcome.
Suddenly he tensed. Someone was behind him. It was the same feeling he’d had just before that damned Cong sniper put an AK round into his right leg back in Nam. Without turning around, McLaren stepped into the shelter of a store doorway and chanced a look back down the street. He started and had to stop himself from laughing out loud. It wasn’t a rifle scope that he’d sensed. It was the big lens on a TV camera.
But he ducked back into the doorway all the same as the CNN cameraman and his assistant jogged past toward the barricade line. It wouldn’t do at all for the folks back home to see an American officer in full uniform standing around in the middle of a South Korean protest. That’d be just the sort of thing that would give the nervous Nellies in the Pentagon PR office the fits.
Twenty yards down the street the cameraman clambered onto the hood of a parked car to get a better shot of the demonstrators surging toward the police barricades.
The demonstrators closed to within fifty yards, then forty, thirty, twenty. Bricks and bottles started clattering off the riot troopers’ raised shields. McLaren snarled. What the hell were they waiting for?
Now. A grenade launcher on one of the armored cars coughed. Others followed suit, and McLaren saw a white mist of tear gas billowing above the crowd, drifting downwind south along the street. He waited for the water cannon to open up. But the damned idiots had parked them too far back. The armored cars were rolling forward, but it was too late. The protestors were too close.
They smashed into the front ranks of the riot police — shoving barricades aside, wrenching at plastic shields or kicking under them, and still screaming,
The barricades were down, and the police line was beginning to give. There were Combat Police on the ground now, lying curled up as demonstrators kicked them savagely. Others were being pulled into the crowd or shoved sprawling back into their ranks. The students sensed victory, and more and more of them fought their way forward through the press to get at the police. McLaren saw an officer stagger back, his face smashed by a thrown brick. The stupid bastard hadn’t had his visor down.
McLaren stepped out of the doorway. It was just about time to go. When the police broke and ran, it was going to be every uniform for itself.
But he stopped. The rear ranks of the Combat Police had unslung their rifles and were stepping forward — bringing them up and aiming over the crowd. And there was that damned lieutenant, getting ready to drop his hand to signal a volley like he was on some parade ground.
Then it happened. McLaren couldn’t see what caused it — a thrown rock or bottle, an accidental elbow in the side, or just plain gutless stupidity — but somebody’s M16 went off on full automatic, spraying twenty high-velocity rounds into the struggling crowd of protestors and Combat Policemen.
Everything seemed to slide into slow motion for a moment. Bodies were thrown everywhere inside the deadly arc described by the assault rifle’s bullets. A spectacled student’s face exploded as a round caught him in the right eye. A Combat Policeman fell to his knees and then onto his face — a widening, red stain welling from the bullet holes in his back. A pretty girl stared in horror at the place where her hand had been. Others staggered back or fell over to lie crumpled on the pavement.
Then things snapped back into focus. The people in the front of the crowd were screaming and trying to run — trying to force their way away from the carnage around them. But the thousands of protestors pouring north along Sejong Street couldn’t see or hear what had happened ahead, and they kept pressing forward — shoving the screaming men and women in front ahead of them.
Oh, shit, McLaren thought. That did it. The other young policemen had been staring in shock at the bloody tangle of bodies at their feet. But now, as the mob surged closer, they panicked. First one, and then the rest, started firing into the crowd at point-blank range.
Dozens of protestors were cut down in a matter of seconds — smashed to the pavement in a hail of automatic weapons fire. As they fell in writhing, blood-soaked heaps, the crowd finally began breaking, with hundreds, then thousands, of people screaming, turning, and trying to run.
But the Combat Police were now completely out of control. They began moving forward, still firing. And McLaren could see some of them fumbling for new magazines. Goddamnit, some of those bastards were even reloading!
Without thinking about it he left the doorway and started to run toward them. Maybe he could kick some sense into those frigging morons. But it was probably too late for that.
They were already chasing after the screaming crowds scattering back down Sejong Street. Some were still shooting, firing from the hip as they ran. Others contented themselves with clubbing any student within reach.
McLaren saw one trooper pause, aim, and send a long burst into a small group of pleading men and women cowering in front of a department store display window. They were thrown back in among the bullet-riddled mannequins.
He kept running down the street, but a muffled cry following a sharp groan brought him skidding to a stop. He turned. There, not ten feet away, was a crazy-eyed Combat Policeman trying to tear the TV camera out of the hands of the CNN cameraman he’d seen earlier. The soundman sat slumped against a car door, hands pressed to his face with blood running out between them.
That, by God, was too damned much. McLaren didn’t much care for most reporters, but these guys were Americans, after all. He charged in, pulled the riot trooper around by his combat webbing, and sent a right cross smashing into the man’s face. The Korean staggered back, and McLaren followed up with a left into his stomach. The trooper grunted and fell over gasping for air. McLaren felt himself grinning despite himself. Not bad for a man in his fifties.
He turned to the cameraman kneeling by his partner. “Can he walk?”
The reporter nodded. “Yeah. I think so. But we’re gonna have to help him along.” He slung his equipment across his back. Then, for the first time, he took a close look at McLaren. “Jesus, man. I don’t think I’ve ever been rescued by a real, live U.S. cavalryman before.” He stuck a hand out. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
McLaren shook hands. “No problem.” He bent down to take one of the dazed soundman’s arms. “Right now, though, I think it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
With the wounded man stumbling between them, they lurched up the street toward the American embassy. Behind them, McLaren could hear the rattle of automatic weapons still echoing throughout Seoul’s city center. It
