Red Phoenix

by Larry Bond

  McLaren sat back, pondering. Not a pretty picture, but not Fort Apache, either. “Okay, we’ve got a lot of help coming, but we’re on our own for at least the next few days. We’ve got to slow down the North Korean push with what’s on hand.”

  He got up and strode to the front of the tent, getting a closer look at the map. “General Shin, I want you to assume that Munsan will fall to the enemy. Start preparing the next main line of resistance here.” His finger stabbed the small town of Pyokche, just fifteen kilometers north of Seoul. “Reinforce it with whatever odds and ends you can scrape together.”

  McLaren turned to face his officers. “That road junction is the key, gentlemen. If the enemy’s assault column presses its drive past Pyokche down the MSR, we’re looking at a direct push to grab Seoul. If it swings southeast, toward Wondang or thereabouts, we’re in for an envelopment and we’ll plan accordingly.”

  He folded his hands behind his back. “All right then. We’ve already ordered the evacuation of American noncombatants and unattached civilians. It’s time for the next logical step. Put out the word to all U.S. installations in Seoul to prepare for evacuation. Headquarters and command functions will go to Taegu, all the support stuff to Japan.”

  He looked over at the Air Force liaison officer. “Jim, your boys have done well so far, but I’m gonna need everything they’ve got.”

  The colonel nodded. “Yes, sir. We have thirty aircraft shuttling between Kimpo and Japan now. There’ll be twice that many in eight hours, and we’ll double that again in sixteen. We’re even calling up Reserve C-130 units.”

  “Good, but see if you can even push that. Given the current pace of the NK advance, I can’t guarantee the safety of the airfield for more than two or three days, and there’s a lot of people to move.”

  He heard helicopters clattering overhead, growing louder, and saw Hansen signaling him from the back of the tent. His “guest” was arriving. Time to wrap the brief up with a quick pep talk. “Okay, gentlemen. That’s it for now. But I want you to keep this in mind. They got the drop on us, but we can hold these bastards. Every hour we can delay the enemy buys time for our reinforcements to arrive. And when we get enough troops on hand we’re gonna kick these s.o.b.’s back across the Z with their tails between their legs.”

  McLaren looked around the tent. Everyone was writing, looking at the map, or looking at him. They looked slightly less unsettled, and that was about all he could expect right now.”Anybody got anything else?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “All right then. Let’s get down to it.”

  The assembled officers scattered back to their duties. McLaren pushed through the crowd toward Hansen.

  “General Park and his entourage are here, sir.”

  “Great. Okay, Doug, separate out all the ass-kissers and bring ’em here for a mini-brief on the overall situation. Make ’em feel like they’re doing something.”

  Hansen grinned and asked. “What about the general?”

  “Get him up to my command trailer. Park and I have a few things to go over in private. Mano-a-mano.”

  Hansen grinned wider, sketched a quick salute, and left. McLaren followed him out the tent and then headed for his trailer. This was going to be touchy.

  The Chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs showed up on his doorstep a few minutes later. Park wore impeccably tailored combat fatigues, a cold weather parka, holstered.45, and a helmet he took off as soon as he stepped inside the narrow-bodied trailer.

  McLaren met him with a firm handshake and led the Korean over to a canvas-seat director’s chair. He settled into a similar chair and willed himself to be patient through the next several minutes of meaningless pleasantries as Park conveyed his government’s gratitude for the aid being sent by the United States and repeated the ROK’s firm commitment to the unified command structure.

  That was what McLaren had been waiting to hear, and he used it to raise a crucial issue: the release of the South Korean officers being held in detention camps for their part in General Chang’s abortive coup. He wanted them back in the field, commanding their units.

  Park was outraged. “What you ask is impossible! These men are traitors, conspirators.”

  McLaren kept his tone level, but he spaced his words out enough to let Park hear the determination behind them. “I’m not — asking — anything, General. The situation we face is critical. Meeting it is going to take a one-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.

  THE ARMY LOGISTICS CENTER, YONGSAN ARMY BASE, SEOUL

  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 b
y 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.

  Beep. Anne pulled out of her reverie and glanced at the screen. Damn, she’d misentered a whole field of data. Start thinking, woman. She shook her head and started over again.

  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 intervals along the perimeter fence.

  Anne shook her head slowly, remembering the blackened, torn, and gutted buildings, the debris-strewn streets, and the shattered windows she’d seen on the way from the gate into the Logistics Center. The place looked as if it had been hit dead center by a tornado.

  It hadn’t taken long, though, for word of the North Korean commando strike to sweep through the crowds of newly arriving civilian workers. Rumor had magnified both the numbers and the casualties they’d caused.

  As if the thought had been a premonition, she heard someone yell, “Commandos! There’s gook commandos outside!”

  Oh, God. Anne hit the save button on her computer, jumped out of her chair, and ran to the window, along with the rest of the staff. Ed Cumber, one of her programmers, stood shaking, pointing outside at a truck parked in front of their building. Korean troops in full combat gear were jumping out the back and taking up positions along the street.

  Anne started to back away from the window, then stopped and looked closer. There were American soldiers intermingled with the Koreans, talking calmly, sharing cigarettes with them.

  She shook her head and looked disgustedly over at Cumber.

  The tall, bleary-eyed programmer shrank a little under her gaze and tried to defend himself. “Well, I thought … I mean, they were jumping out of the truck, and they…”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, Ed. Just because everybody else is panicking doesn’t mean we should,” she said sternly, aware that she’d jumped the gun just like all the rest.

  Phones were ringing in the office while everybody stood and looked at the motionless Korean soldiers.

  “Back to work!” They scattered.

  Anne moved back to the computer terminal she’d taken over earlier that morning, but she altered course when she saw her secretary waving her over. Gloria was on the phone, listening intently and scribbling notes. “Right, right, uh huh, got it. Okay, I’ll pass the word.”

  She hung up as Anne came over.

  “It’s official, Anne. We’re supposed to prep for possible evacuation. They’re going to start sending all civilian contract workers to Japan sometime in the next forty-eight hours.”

  Anne stood still for several seconds. Japan. She was going to get out of this mess. Then her mind whispered, But what about Tony?

  CHAPTER 26

  Evasion

  OUTPOST MALIBU WEST

  Kevin Little had never been so cold.

  At first the freezing Korean winter air had been a minor annoyance as he lay motionless, playing dead. But now it had become a sharp, stabbing pain — spreading slowly from the bayonet slash through his parka across his whole body. Eac
h short, controlled breath he took moved the icy air farther up his back, sucking away warmth and leaching away his life.

  Kevin had always heard that freezing to death was painless. Now that it was happening to him, he knew that wasn’t true.

  He had to get up and move. Movement meant warmth and warmth meant life. But movement could also mean death if the North Koreans had left sentries behind to guard the hill.

  Kevin lay still, listening for the slightest sounds around him. He’d heard the North Koreans evacuate their wounded and march south, away from Malibu’s smashed bunkers and trenches. But he hadn’t been able to make up his mind about the answer to the crucial question. Had they all gone?

  Kevin wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there beneath his platoon sergeant’s corpse. Time had stopped meaning very much. How long had it been since his platoon had been wiped out? An hour? Two? Three? He couldn’t read his watch without moving his arm.

  A new wave of cold agony swept through him. Kevin clenched his teeth against the pain. He had to get up. Now. Before the cold sapped his strength so much that it began to feel warm. Before he started falling asleep in its chill embrace.

  Awkwardly he crawled out from under Pierce’s body, forcing himself first to his hands and knees and then into a crouch, his back against the sandbag-reinforced trench wall. Teeth chattering, he looked at the wreckage of his platoon.

  Bodies were heaped down the length of the trench, lying crumpled and twisted wherever the killing bullets had thrown them. White, bloodless, unseeing faces stared at the sky.

  Kevin closed his eyes and brushed roughly at the tears frozen to his face, as if he could brush away the images surrounding him. He’d failed his men. He’d led them to disaster. And now he was conscious of a terrible, almost overwhelming sense of shame that he’d survived. It had all happened so quickly. Only a few seconds had elapsed between the moment Pierce was killed and the final collapse of Malibu West’s defense. But during those few chaotic seconds he’d been overpowered by a wave of horrible, mind-numbing fear, caught completely unable to think of what to do next. Playing dead during the massacre had been an instinctive reaction, a last grasp for personal survival.