Red Phoenix

by Larry Bond

  “Relax, Saint, I’ve got it all figured. I know an Army aviator, ‘Chips’ Nicholson. He’s a helicopter pilot, and he’ll do anything for two bottles of Scotch.”

  Tony was still confused. “So?”

  “So, since she can’t get here in time, let’s go find her. Chips can fly north, find the convoy, and set you down.”

  Hooter pulled out a map lying on Tony’s desk. “Look, there’s only one way to get from Onyang down here. And Onyang’s only seventy miles away. That’s an hour in the chopper, and she’s probably well south of there by now. We can take off, fly there, and be back by lunch.”

  Tony sat, considering. He usually made decisions quickly, but this was not his style. There wasn’t anything to worry about. The risk of enemy activity was slight.

  He looked up at Hooter as his wingman paced the room. “What will Shadow think?”

  Hooter shook his head. “My fearless leader, uncertain? Shadow won’t know.”

  Tony thought about the risks, and the risk of not seeing Anne. “Okay. Let’s do it. By the way, why ‘Chips’?”

  “He got his helo too close to a tree once. Luckily he was close to the ground. You go find the hooch, I’ll make a phone call.”

  Tony felt at home on the flight line, but looking at the helicopter, he felt a little uneasy. Like most aviators, he regarded rotary wing aircraft as a momentary aberration of aerodynamics. Any minute now everyone would realize that they really couldn’t fly.

  Lieutenant Nicholson was a savvy-looking pilot who greeted Hooter warmly, exchanging punches to the shoulder and friendly insults. Tony was introduced, with Chips saluting smartly. When Chips heard Hooter say “fourteen kills,” he was ready to do the favor for free.

  “But since you went to all that trouble, I wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful. Hop in.” He collected the bottles and stowed them in a safe place.

  John took the copilot’s seat and Tony the crew chief’s jump seat in the main cabin. The lieutenant started the turbines and they quickly spun up to full power. The UH-1 “Huey” usually transported twelve troops, in addition to the crew, so with only three men aboard, it leapt into the air.

  Tony could see Hooter pointing out the route to the pilot, and he put on the intercom headset. “Hooter, there must be more than one convoy between here and Onyang. How will we spot hers from the air?”

  “How many will have trucks full of American civilians?” John answered. “Don’t sweat it, Saint.”

  The weather was clear, and with the doors closed the temperature was comfortable inside the chopper. The engine noise was another story, though, and Tony kept the headset on to block out some of it. They quickly passed over the airbase, the city itself, and then the Kum river just to the north.

  The traffic into the city was heavy, but a convoy of military vehicles would be easily spotted among the civilian passenger cars and trucks. They flew north.

  HIGHWAY 21, SOUTH OF KWANGCH’ON

  Anne hated the sunlight. They were late, and their progress now was so slow they would be lucky to reach Kunsan at all. Bell was driving again, and cursing every time he had to shift gears.

  They were driving through a narrow cut, with the road narrowing from two lanes to one. The road was a downgrade, which kept Bell very busy trying to manage the balky transmission.

  As they listened to the driver’s profane monotone, loud honking started coming from the back of the column. Hutchins quickly halted the convoy, sure that some disaster had struck.

  They piled out of the cab and ran toward the back. The honking continued for a few moments, then stopped as they reached the end.

  Surrounded by a small crowd of soldiers and passengers was a jeep, occupied by one man. A lieutenant colonel climbed out from behind the wheel and he did not look happy. “Who’s in charge of this mob?”

  Hutchins saluted. “Captain J. F. Hutchins, sir, Provisional Transport Detail.”

  The colonel’s laundered, sharply creased battle dress and cold-weather gear contrasted with Hutchins’s rumpled uniform. His combat boots were the old-style leather kind and were finely polished. The name AYERS was stenciled over the breast pocket. While Hutchins’s captain’s bars were embroidered in black thread on his collar tabs, Ayers’s rank insignia were polished silver metal, oversize, and shone from not only his collar tabs but from his helmet as well.

  “Captain, your lack of intelligence is only matched by your lack of military bearing and your obvious inability to maintain discipline. I am enroute to a vitally important conference, and your slow-moving circus has slowed from a crawl to a stop.”

  Hutchins started to open his mouth to answer, but the colonel was just drawing a breath. “Since you decided to stop and delay me even further, all I can do is report your performance to your superiors and hope that they aren’t as incompetent as you are.”

  He took Hutchins’s name, rank, serial number, and parent unit, then climbed back in his jeep. “Captain, I want you to get these junk heaps moving at top speed. If I miss that meeting, it may adversely affect the course of the war, and it will be your fault. Now move!”

  They started the convoy up and pulled out of the cut as fast as the transmission would allow. Occasionally a honk or two from the back would exhort them on. They reached the end about five minutes later, and they heard a roar as the jeep’s motor passed the convoy.

  Colonel Ayers was sitting straight upright, at attention in the seat. He ignored the column and roared off to the south.

  Hutchins had returned wordlessly to the cab, and Anne and Bell had followed suit, unsure of what to say as the officer sat expressionless. Finally, just after the colonel drove out of sight, Hutchins said, “You know, it’s hard to think of that man as the end result of millions of years of evolution.”

  Colonel Ayers roared ahead, mentally ticking off a list of charges to bring against that dim-witted officer. Obvious lack of discipline. Ever since the war started, everyone had been getting sloppy. Uniforms, procedures, and especially courtesy toward senior officers such as himself had been given short shrift.

  Well, he wasn’t going to let things go to pot. If he had to remind every man he saw about military courtesy, and take down every name between here and Chonju…

  His musings, combined with a high speed, managed to carry him through Taech’on and the smaller village of Taech’ang. He was rehearsing the presentation to the morale board when he came to a checkpoint at one end of a bridge.

  He beeped his horn and waved for them to open the gate, but the barrier stayed down and a Korean soldier came up and saluted.

  Ayers didn’t bother returning the gesture. “Let me pass, man. I have to attend an important conference in Chonju!”

  The soldier was unimpressed. “Certainly, sir, but I must see your orders and identification card, please.”

  “My ID card?” He fumbled for the papers and identification. “Isn’t it obvious that I’m an American senior officer?”

  The man reached for his papers. “Sir, you might be a North Korean saboteur. They are extremely clever and often disguise themselves as our soldiers.”

  He examined the papers. “You are Colonel Ayers? We have a message for you, sir. Could you please follow me? It’s in the guard shack.”

  “Of course, Private. Lead on.” He followed the Korean into a small building set off the road.

  Inside, an officer was sitting behind a desk. The name on his uniform was YI.

  The soldier looked at Yi and spoke in English. “Sir, this is Colonel Ayers. I believe there is a message for him?”

  Yi stood and saluted. Ayers, glad to see the formalities being observed, returned the salute, but he was baffled by a sudden sharp pain in his right side. He turned his head and looked down, just in time to see a knife sink into his ribs up to the hilt.

  His last thought was an amazed protest: “But they had been so polite!”

  Yi looked down at the body and smiled. A lieutenant colonel. “Sergeant, get him out of here.”

&nb
sp; Sergeant Yong knew what to do. He called to the “off-duty” commandos in the building and started giving orders. The corpse was carried out by a back door and the small bloodstain wiped up. Yi himself started the jeep and drove it off the road to a small stand of trees.

  A small vehicle park was growing there, out of sight of the road. He pulled up alongside a row of trucks. Some were empty, but most had carried cargoes of food, spare parts, or ammunition. One bloodstained vehicle had been filled with men, but Yi’s commandos had gunned them down as they sat in the back. Fifteen replacements would never arrive at the front.

  The North Korean was pleased with his work. It had been a productive night and morning. They would continue to ambush military vehicles for as long as they could.

  They had not molested civilian traffic. It was not their job to create terror, and it would also speed their discovery. They had even let a few trucks go through because civilian cars had been lined up behind them waiting.

  Eventually a convoy too big or too well armed would survive their attack, but until then this road was no help to the South, or their imperialist backers. He especially hated Americans, because without their help they could have liberated the southern half of the peninsula years ago.

  That reminded him to look at the dead American colonel. Grabbing a small bag that had belonged to the officer, he hiked over to a spot under the trees. They had dumped all the bodies there, covering successive layers with snow. As he approached his bloody handiwork, Yi was glad that this was not a summer offensive.

  Yong had just finished searching the dead officer. “Nothing, sir. He was a minor staff officer for American Second Infantry Division. All he had were these travel orders, and an agenda for a ‘Morale Conference’ tomorrow at Chonju.”

  Yi tossed him the bag. “Search this, too.” But he didn’t expect to find anything. His disappointment showed in his tone. Their first lieutenant colonel, and he had been a nobody.

  OVER HIGHWAY 21

  They had been aloft for about twenty minutes, flying north at sixty miles an hour, two hundred feet off the ground. Tony was torn between professional interest and personal frustration. He normally didn’t fly this low or this slow, except when he was landing. It was easy to search at this speed.

  This hadn’t let him find Anne, though. They had seen almost no military vehicles, and the few they had seen were clearly not the group of trucks they were looking for.

  Both John and Tony were looking while Chips piloted, following the two-lane road. Up ahead in the distance they could see the highway narrow to one lane as it crossed a bridge. Tony half-expected to see the convoy pulled up, waiting for its turn to cross. It wasn’t. He was looking farther up the road when Hooter called him.

  “Hey, Saint, there’s a bunch of trucks pulled up off the road to the right. Looks like we found them.”

  Chips heard Hooter’s comments and immediately swung over to take a closer look at the vehicles. Tony had swung his binoculars over at once to look for Anne, but he could see no movement near them. He saw two covered cargo trucks, but also an open flat-bed, a tanker truck of some sort, a jeep …

  “Hooter, this isn’t Anne’s convoy. They aren’t the right vehicles, and there aren’t any people around.”

  “Picky, picky. I don’t know, Saint, this is the closest thing to a convoy we’ve seen. Do you want to set down and check it out?”

  Tony wanted to be sure this wasn’t their convoy. “Chips, can you take us down for a closer look?”

  The craft slowed and circled, approaching the vehicle park at a slow walk. Tony scanned the collection. Maybe it was Anne’s convoy and some other trucks mixed together. Some sort of rest stop?

  One vehicle caught his attention. Its top was ragged and looked as if it had been camouflaged.

  Hooter was scanning the rest of the area, already convinced that this was a waste of time. He was about to tell Tony that when he spotted a dark patch, growing as the snow covering it was blown off.

  “Saint, look over to the right.” His tone was confused, and concerned. Tony moved across the cabin and focused on the area. The patch quickly resolved into shapes, but he kept on looking at them, hoping he was wrong.

  Yi and his men watched from the road as the helicopter circled, then descended out of sight. It was obviously the enemy. Running ahead, he waved his men into the trees. They heard the craft and saw it again, lower, almost stationary over the abandoned vehicles.

  Quickly he dashed from tree to tree, keeping the trunks between himself and the aircraft. His men followed his movements, stalking the helicopter as if it were a living thing. The snow it blew around helped hide them, but that was also his downfall.

  They saw the aircraft hover, then pivot to face the spot where they had dumped the bodies. There could be no doubt.

  He called out “Fire!” and raised his own rifle, aiming for the cabin.

  Chips, Tony and Hooter all stared at the bodies. They were piled on top of one another, rather neatly, Tony thought absentmindedly. The longer they hovered there, the more snow was blown away and the more corpses became visible.

  Hooter had been counting out loud, punctuating the litany with exclamations: “… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, Jesus, sixteen…”

  There was a zing! sound, and reflexively Tony turned toward it. It was followed by a few more, and a zingzingzingCrack as the window crazed on the port side door.

  Chips didn’t wait for an analysis. He pulled hard on the collective and pushed the nose over, not waiting to climb. As soon as the Huey was moving forward, he started to slew the tail left and right, steering as evasive a course as his speed and height allowed.

  Tony was not buckled in and found himself hanging on to a bracket. Reaching for one of the seat belts, he was knocked loose from his hold by a sudden shock. The helicopter shuddered, and there was a screeching sound. The floor under him was canted to the left, and he finally had to pull himself hand over hand to his seat.

  His headset had ripped off when he fell across the cabin. As he strapped in, he looked forward to see John motioning for him to put it on.

  As soon as he complied, he heard Chips’s voice. “The left engine is out!”

  Hooter broke in, “We’re clear. No more firing.”

  Chips was a busy man. The helicopter was lightly loaded, so the remaining engine could provide enough power to keep them airborne. Barely. The question was, what else had been shot off?

  Tony was in the unusual position of being in a broken aircraft but not at the controls. All he could do was trust Chips and hang on. The Army pilot quickly scanned the controls and tried to listen to the remaining engine. “We’re airworthy, but I’ve got to set it down soon. Temperature on number two is a little high.”

  Tony was more worried about what they had seen. “Those have to be North Koreans back at the bridge. Call on the guard frequency and put out a warning.”

  They continued north while Hooter used the radio.

  TAECH’ANG

  It was just a small village on a two-lane road. Since the principal industry was farming, it looked asleep in winter, even during the day. Surrounded by now-frozen rice paddies, they were through it in a few minutes.

  Anne welcomed it, seeing it as another milestone. Each landmark passed meant that they were that much closer to Kunsan. It was ten-thirty. If there were no more interruptions, they would be in Kunsan by lunchtime.

  AT THE CHOSAN RIVER BRIDGE

  Yi tried to be fatalistic, but he couldn’t. Curse whatever luck had let the helicopter see the bodies. They had emptied their rifles at it, but M16 rifles just didn’t have the range or hitting power to bring down an aircraft. Still, they had crippled it, which wouldn’t prevent it from sending out a warning.

  The helicopter would radio a warning, and enemy troops would show up. They would attack his position, and he would kill as many fascists as he could, and then he and all his men would be killed. There had never been any question of how the mission would end, just how l
ong it would take. And they weren’t the only special forces unit in the North Korean Army.

  Their mission had already succeeded. Because they had interdicted this bridge for a while, the guards on all the bridges would have to be increased, and also on tunnels, junctions, any choke point. Any South Korean soldier would be suspected of being a North Korean saboteur, and no truck driver would be certain of reaching his destination.

  “Sergeant!” Yong came running up. “Are the charges to the bridge wired?”

  “Yes, sir. And the vehicles and bodies are both booby-trapped.”

  “How about the rest of the explosives?”

  “Being wired now, sir. Another five minutes at the most.”

  Yi looked grim. “We are ready. Tell Corporal Soo to watch the bridge and to blow it if he sees anything approach from the south. Who were you going to put in the outpost?”

  “Private Suh, sir. He’s very reliable.”

  “I know. Get him up there. Everybody not on ‘sentry duty’ should be watching for the enemy. Otherwise, let’s continue as before. We’ll kill as many of the enemy as we can.”

  TWO KILOMETERS SOUTH OF TAECH’ANG

  Chips stomped around on the frozen ground. “How long before those troops get here?”

  Hooter answered. “Half an hour, tops. They have to come from Taech’on. Counting time to saddle up, that’s pretty quick.

  “Yeah, well, it’s damn cold, there’s enemy commandos in the area, and I’ve got a busted helo to explain.”

  Hooter was unconcerned. “When they hear how you detected that North Korean outpost while flying an emergency medical mission, you’ll probably get a medal.”

  Tony had to ask, “ ‘Medical mission?’ ”

  “Sure, Saint. If you had missed your girl, you would have had a broken heart.” He turned to Chips. “They’ll believe anything. Don’t worry.”

  All they could do was wait. They passed the time checking the damage to the helicopter, trying to stay warm, and waiting to see who came down the road first.

  Tony heard them first. “Listen, engines.” They were coming from the north.