wreathed in flame.
Another Dragon team fired off to the flank, but its target tank suddenly disappeared in a cloud of whitish-gray smoke. Must’ve popped its smoke dispenser, Kevin thought. The missile plunged into the smoke cloud and missed. Damn.
The M-48 exploded, spewing orange flame and metal fragments through the trees. There were screams from some of the infantry foxholes near the wrecked tank. “I’m hit! Oh, GOD! I’m hit!”
Kevin dropped flat to the ground, pressing his hands to his ears, trying to shut out the sounds. It was happening again, just like Malibu West.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” It was Montoya, nudging him, holding out the radio handset. “It’s Echo Five Two.”
Kevin looked up. The RTO was crouched with his back to the log, staring at him like a little lost puppy dog. Somehow the sight gave him a sense of purpose. Montoya needed him. Maybe they all needed him.
He grabbed the handset. “Two, this is Six. Over.”
Geary’s voice quavered audibly; he’d been shaken by what he was seeing. “Six, PCs to your front are unloading troops.”
Kevin grabbed his binoculars and focused them on the open ground below the hill. No good. The smoke from the two burning T-72s blocked his view. The other three had disappeared. Had they pulled back?
He swept the binoculars from right to left, searching for signs of movement. There. He could see shapes moving in the smoke — men carrying AKM rifles, RPK light machine guns, and RPG-7 launchers. Engine noises were audible above the crackling flames. Troop carriers backing up the North Korean infantry he could now see clearly. They were only four hundred meters away and trotting in fast.
“Sierra Echo Two One, this is Juliet Echo Five Six. I have a Delta Tango for Yankee Delta two three zero six seven five. Over.” Kevin called in a DT — a defensive target artillery fire mission. He wanted to see how the North Koreans liked a dose of their own medicine.
“Roger, Echo Five Six. Stand by.” The NK infantry kept moving forward, hunched over under the weight of their gear. BMPs and BTRs were visible now, nosing out from the smoke.
The BMPs and BTRs were armored vehicles, designed to carry infantry. Kevin had forgotten what the letters stood for, an abbreviation of their Russian designations. The Soviets rarely gave their equipment sexy names like “Patton” or “Bradley.”
The BTR was an eight-wheeled armored box with a machine gun on top. It was big and could carry fourteen men. The BMP was a nastier beast but could only carry nine troops. To make up for the difference, it carried a small turret with a 73mm gun, an antitank missile launcher, and a machine gun. It had better armor and was tracked, so it could go places the BTR couldn’t. Both could swim across rivers.
The radio spoke: “Shot, out.”
Kevin heard a high-pitched howling arcing overhead and saw dirt spray skyward behind the advancing North Koreans. “Echo Two One, this is Six. Drop fifty and fire for effect!”
He dropped back behind cover as the first time-fused shells whirred over and exploded in midair, showering deadly fragments across the wave of North Korean infantry charging toward the hill. A dozen or more dropped into the snow without a sound, mowed down like standing wheat at harvest time. Others were thrown back screaming, torn apart by splinters.
Kevin felt the ground rock. A shell burst two hundred meters away, hurling dirt away in a black cloud. Then another exploded, closer in. Holy shit! Those weren’t American shells. The North Koreans were responding in kind, walking their own artillery in on his positions.
“Cover! Cover! Incoming!” He threw himself back into a shallow foxhole and dragged Montoya in after him. Evergreen needles slashed at his face. They hadn’t had time to strip the branches off the logs providing overhead cover for their holes.
The noise was deafening, maddening. Kevin and Montoya coughed as dirt thrown by a near-miss cascaded into their foxhole.
“Echo Five Six, this is Two. Over.” He could barely hear it.
He wriggled round to get at the radio strapped to Montoya’s back and had to shout to make himself heard. “Two, this is Six! Go ahead.”
“NK infantry stopped. But the BMPs are still closing with you.”
It was time to show his ace. “Two, this is Six. Open fire! Say again, open fire!”
“You got it!” Geary sounded excited now. He and his men had flank shots on most of the approaching North Korean vehicles. BMPs started going up in flames as Dragon teams hidden among the rice paddies found the range.
“Target, sir!” The corporal’s yell brought the captain’s head back inside the darkened radar van.
“Where?”
The corporal leaned closer to his green-glowing monitor, pounding keys as the van’s onboard computer evaluated radar traces made by the North Korean shells pounding Echo Company’s hill. In a microsecond it backtracked along their projected trajectory, compensated for known temperature and wind velocity, and flashed the estimated position of the North Korean battery on-screen. It was in range.
The captain grabbed his command phone. “Fire mission! Counterbattery!” He squatted to look at the corporal’s computer monitor. “Target at Yankee Delta six five eight two three zero!”
He carried the handset over to the van’s open door, looking down into the shallow valley where the four surviving guns of Battery B were deployed.
“Target laid in.” The battery commander’s voice was flat, all emotion ground out by more than ninety-six hours of near-continuous combat and heavy losses.
“Fire at will!”
Battery B’s 155mm self-propelled howitzers crashed back, flinging four HE shells toward the North Korean artillery battery sixteen kilometers away. Four more followed fifteen seconds later.
The North Korean artillery captain froze in shock as the first American shells exploded on and around his battery’s gunline.
His second-in-command had quicker reflexes. He dove to the bottom of a slit trench dug next to the CP and stayed there for a full minute as the ground trembled from hit after hit. When the barrage lifted, he raised his head cautiously above ground level to survey the damage.
He glanced back at the CP and quickly averted his gaze from the bloody scraps of flesh that had once been his captain. Things weren’t any better anywhere else. One D-30 howitzer had taken a direct hit and sat mangled on its central firing jack, with its seven-man crew lying dead beside it. Four of the battery’s five remaining guns were also out of action, and more than half his gunners were dead or severely wounded. Moans rose from the wreckage.
