WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  Though he would never know it, the pilot of the downed Apache, in panicking the second and third searchlight batteries, allowed fourteen of the thirty-seven big Chinooks following Freeman’s to land in Kim II Sung Square virtually unseen.

  The American troops, to the utter astonishment of only a few janitors and museum night watchmen, poured out from the long, black shapes in a circle of machine-gun, rifle, and other small-arms fire that was quite audible, even over the rolling thunder of the aerial combat high above. And it was at that moment, with the SAM sites impotent because of the still-falling parachute chaff from the striker Tomcats, and the city militia excited and startled, that Freeman’s plan saw its first success: an unopposed landing of his troops.

  Many of his men were busy pushing the big Chinooks clear of the central area so that others could come down to unload.

  For a totally unexpected and eerie moment, all the streetlights came on as one of the Tomcats’ five-hundred-pounders hit the Pyongyang thermal power plant, ironically switching on lights that were meant to be off during the curfew. But the surge of power was too much, and the next moment the plant and city were once again in darkness. In those fleeting seconds almost every man had frozen or dropped to the ground in Kim II Sung Square, three of the half-dozen cameramen Freeman had insisted accompany him recording the moment on tape, getting three of the Chinooks in the process of unloading their troops, the cameramen not realizing its significance until much later. After the Chinooks had unloaded, they moved off with others as part of the twenty Freeman had detailed to proceed across the city to the Pyongyang Airport. Here they would hopefully be met by the airborne regiment in the two Galaxies with the four self-propelled 155-millimeter howitzers.

  Despite the blackout of the city, some of the SAM sites did receive the extra surges of electricity from emergency generators, but it was not enough. It was as if the Americans had drawn an impenetrable canopy through the rain-laden sky over the entire city, a canopy in which signals were either soaked up or bounced back as chapsori— “rubbish.” And when fourteen SAMs were fired, their long, red tails and back-blast illuminating the immaculately clean and deserted streets around Potong-gang Station, what their jubilant ground crews didn’t realize was that the blips they had momentarily picked up and fired upon were not F-14s at all but F-14 simulators of the “box of tricks,” as the Tomcat pilots called them, which fell through the sky, steadied by spring-loaded fins. Eight of the SAMs hit the decoys, exploding, turning the rain to vapor in the immediate area, debris falling down to the elated NKA crews. It was not until an hour or so later that they discovered their error when puzzled Party officials, racing out for propaganda displays of shot-down American wreckage, could find the remains of only one F-14 amid the litter of SAM casings.

  The top floor of the Grand People’s Study House, Freeman had told the marines, would command a sweeping panorama of the city through infrared binoculars, and it was taken by a squad of marines without opposition as the helos kept landing and the remaining Apaches, loaded with antitank and thousands of small antipersonnel mines, made what they called, in General Freeman’s lexicon, a “ring around the craphouse,” using Kim II Sung Square as the center aim point. From the twenty-two-storied Kim II Sung University on the northern outskirts to Pyongyang Station on the south side through the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum far to the west of Kim Il Sung Square and back around East Pyongyang Stadium, the Apaches led two of the big Chinooks, which laid a string of explosives, while in the square, four of the eight American Motors Hummers, or Humvees, as the troops called them, came down, slung under the last XC Chinooks. Once unhooked, the Humvees, equipped with a.50 machine gun and infrared swivel antitank launcher in the back, were quickly manned by driver, co-driver, and six men armed with SAWs — squad automatic weapons— and demolition charges. Two of the four Hummers that had not made it to the square were totaled, their parent Chinook striking a tree and overhead wires near the History Museum, sliding and tumbling down the embankment into the Taedong River. The other two Hummers had been aboard a Chinook when, only forty feet above the ground in front of the Grand People’s Study House, it collapsed in a sudden wind shear. In the occasionally flare-lit air, it looked like some great, exotic brown cucumber broken in the middle, its quiet poof of flame starting to spread quickly. A marine sergeant thrust his M-16 at the nearest man, went in under the wreckage, crawling into the Hummer’s cabin. Slithering across the rain-slicked vinyl seat, he was unable to raise his head any higher than the steering wheel because of some part of the chopper’s fuselage sticking in through the driver’s window.

  “Where’s he goin’?” shouted another marine.

  “Fishing!” another shouted, his mood of bonhomie the result of having passed from sheer bowel-freezing terror into a reverie of relief at still being alive.

  The Humvee came to life, jerking out from the wreckage, dragging pieces of fuselage with it.

  “On his honeymoon,” someone else shouted. The buoyed mood of the men was caused not simply by the lack of any determined resistance on the ground, evidence of the fact that so far Freeman’s gamble of surprise had paid off, but because of the absence of any vehicular traffic that might be bearing NKA. The magnificently spacious streets around the square were deserted, a possibility that Freeman had privately entertained from the SATINT he’d studied so closely aboard the Saipan. But it was a hope that he knew could be ended any moment by a sudden convoy of infantry coming up from the south or, if the Chinese were still supplying the NKA through Manchuria, troops from the north. Nevertheless, for the moment it was a surprise that helped mitigate the loss of the three Hummers and the crews of the downed Chinooks. Once he was sure the perimeter from the river up past the museum, around the People’s Study House and back to the art gallery, was secure, Freeman sent out three Humvees to complete the next phase of Operation “Trojan.”

  One of the Humvees, its nine men all wearing infrared goggles and hunkering down, except for the machine gunner and the ATGM operator, headed north from the square along Sungni Street, swinging left on Mansudae Street. In the last of the flares dropped by the Tomcats, who were low on fuel and returning to sea, their position taken up by Shirer and the second wave, the marines could see the dim outline of the Arch of Triumph half a mile or so away. But their interest centered on the sixty-six-foot-high brown statue of Kim II Sung in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution. Off to their right they could see Chollima statue, the winged black horse, peasants joyously riding it, Marxist holy book held aloft, the book invisible in the rain.

  It took the demolition team four and a half minutes to place the plastic hose cylinders around the dear and respected leader in front of the Museum of the Korean Revolution and another two minutes to insert the wire and run it back off the spool, several hundred yards to where the Humvee had been stationed as an advance guard.

  “I don’t like this,” said one marine. “Too fucking quiet. Where’re all the people?”

  “Inside, you dummy. ‘Where would you be?”

  “Come on — hurry it up,” cut in the corporal as they hoisted the spool aboard the Hummer and drove slowly in the direction of the trees that hid the Grecian facade of the Pyongyang Art Troupe Theatre across the wide boulevard.

  “Okay,” said the corporal, “let’s do it.”

  There was a dull thud, the ground trembled, and the blast rustled the wet ginkgo trees, water coming off them in a spray, and the air filled with dust that quickly fell in the rain. Kim II Sung was no more.

  The driver of the second Hummer lost his way, his navigator rifleman giving wrong directions, so that now they were headed toward the Pyongyang Seafood Direct Sales Shop several blocks up from the square by the river.

  “Where the fuck are we?” someone shouted.

  “Gooks — dead ahead!” A police car, its Klaxon squawking, its blue light flashing urgently, was tearing down Okryu Street, wet leaves flying up behind it, orange sparks seeming to come from its int
erior. Small-arms fire.

  The Humvee’s.50 Browning stuttered, hot casings steaming through the rain. The police car wobbled, then careered wildly, ran across the street, struck the curb, rolled, ending up on its side, wheels still spinning. A man came scurrying up from the cabin like someone trying to escape from a submarine. The Browning stuttered again and he slumped back, arms caught in the door in a V, the fire licking at the rear wheels.

  The marines had another look at the map. “Christ, you’re nowhere near it, Smithy.” It was a gross exaggeration — in fact, the driver had only overshot a right turn past the seafood building by less than a hundred yards.

  “Back ‘er up,” the corporal ordered, and after thirty seconds ordered, “Now turn right and straight ahead.”

  It was another couple of minutes and they were on the western side of the east-west Okryu Bridge, which spanned the wide Taedong River and was one of the two main bridges by which any counterattack from the east would most likely come. The driver still felt spooked by the apparently deserted city, which till now had not offered any resistance on the ground to the landings in its main core, even though the sound and fury of the air battle was enough to awaken the dead, sonic booms rolling overhead — at times so loud, they were mistaken for the monsoon’s crashes of thunder. To the north, the marines could see forked lightning reaching right down to the hills.

  The third Humvee had already reached Taedong Bridge, half a dozen blocks or so to the south of Kim D Sung Square, and the demolition team had started laying their charges when the first of three NKA armored cars started across me old wide span, the armored vehicles’ ghostly outline visible for only a second in the light of a flare. The antitank rocket fired from atop the Hummer — the distance to the armored cars no more than three hundred yards — exploded against the bridge railing. The armored cars kept coming, their machine guns now spitting fire and finding their mark, the marine driver and machine gunner thrown back hard against the canopy, dead, the antitank missile operator behind them taking second aim. The lead armored car’s machine gun opened up again, and the AT operator fired. The lead armored car burst into flame, followed by a sound like falling pots and pans as the vehicle stopped. Without hesitation the second armored car behind the first broke out and took up the attack. The third armored car braked, using the first car’s wreckage as good cover, barely showing its main gun. The new lead car fired its main gun and the Hummer leapt into the air, the AT man dead.

  Beneath the bridge, which lead onto Mansudae Street, the demo team kept working along the slippery embankment with the extraordinary concentration of sappers, whom Freeman had always held to be among the bravest of the brave. The rain was still heavy and the lone American marine on the bridge took cover behind the burning U.S. truck, not seeing the cupola of the lead car open until its top-mounted.76 began raking the Humvee, pieces of metal and upholstery flying through the air.

  “How long?” the marine called to the sappers.

  “Two minutes max!”

  “They’re on top of us.”

  “Hold ‘em, Arnie!”

  Arnie dashed from the big stanchion near the end of the bridge across the traffic lanes behind the burning wreckage of the Hummer, hearing a faint gurgling sound coming from it. Going low, catching a quick look at the armored car, he saw the NKA car commander, his leather World-War-II-type helmet striking the marine as old-fashioned as hell. The marine gave him a full burst. The man flung his arms back before he slumped over the right side of the cupola. The marine heard a lot of shouting coming from inside the armored car, but still it kept coming, turning now to ram the Hummer. Arnie dropped his heavy automatic squad gun, ran left to a gap of about three feet between the Hummer’s rear wheels and bridge rail, saw the armored car, now only six feet away, going straight for the front of the American truck. It took him one, two — three steps, up on the wheel guard flange, and two grenades down the cupola, conscious of a stringent, unpleasant odor: the dead man’s breath as he lolled on the cupola. The second car veered and hit Arnie so hard, the demolition team, running the wire back and slipping on the grass, heard their buddy’s ribs snap like sticks. Now the second NKA car was blocked by the V formed by the wreckage of the Humvee and the other armored car. It backed up and suddenly its searchlight penciled out along the embankment. The cupola opened and the gunner, the.76 coaxial slaved to the searchlight, sprayed straight down the approach to the bridge. Out of nowhere, a MiG flashed low, canisters falling, the armored truck enveloped in napalm, the pilot having mistaken the three armored vehicles in radar clutter as American.

  One of the demolition team cranked, and the other pushed the plunger. They felt a slight tremor, heard a thud, then a louder claplike noise. The approach to the bridge had collapsed only six or seven feet, but until it was fixed, nothing would be coming across to Mansudae Street.

  * * *

  By now the unarmed Prowlers had been gone from Pyongyang twenty minutes, though it seemed much longer to some of the men on the ground. Still the possibility loomed — was it possible that Freeman could make his “Doolittle” hit-and-run and get out virtually unscathed?

  * * *

  Shirer told half of his remaining twelve F-14s who had made up the second wave to drop chaff and go for railyards on the city’s south side, and he designated three strikers to take out the six bridges across the Potong, particularly Chungsong Bridge on the southwest side, where reinforcements might be rushed from the port of Nampo twenty miles to the south.

  Laser-guided bombs took out three of the bridges, but Chung-song in particular was an elusive target, its span running over the island of Suksom pleasure ground bisecting the target, making it more difficult to get at. What made the situation worse all of a sudden was that the chaff jamming over the city was now coming to an end, even as Shirer could see MiGs, at least twenty of them, coming from the west, another seven from northern airfields, perhaps in Manchuria.

  Until the Tomcats were relieved in five minutes, they would have to leave the ground force to its own devices. The AA batteries were opening up again now that the jamming was weakening. Shirer half hoped the MiGs would reach them before his and other Tomcats’ fuel dictated a withdrawal, for in the mixed-up blips of Tomcats and MiGs in aerial combat on their screens, the NKA batteries, including the remaining SAMs, would be more discerning lest they hit one of their own.

  “Outstanding! Excellent!” were repeated so often in the first half hour by Douglas Freeman as he saw the thousand men secure the perimeter around the square that he began worrying it was all going too well, a suspicion now reinforced by the Tomcats’ leader telling him that though the next wave of Tomcats hadn’t arrived, he would have to take his flight back for refueling.

  Then, on the PSC-3 Manpak satellite-bounce radio he was using, Freeman heard the eight hundred airborne troops from the two Galaxies were pinned down at the airport. One of the big planes was forced to stand, soaking up small-arms fire as its men unloaded, and one of the Phantoms that had escorted it was shot down as, low on fuel; it turned back with the second Galaxy, which had delivered its load of four howitzers.

  The howitzers and their ammunition had come in on pallets from the Galaxy now heading back, but one of the drag chutes had failed to open, so that the guns were now at the outer flooded edge of the airport rather than on it, and in the darkness a fight raged between the U.S. Airborne and NKA militia for possession of the guns.

  Freeman knew it would all come apart if the six tanks that the Airborne’s Colonel Menzies was now sighting managed to reach the airport before the Airborne could get the 105-millimeters into action.

  “You can take care of them, Rick,” Freeman told his Airborne commander. “Their goddamned rattletraps come apart if you fart. Over.”

  “They’re our tanks, General. Captured M-60s.”

  The general paused. “Then knock ‘em off with the howitzers.”

  “When we get—” There was an explosion in the background, drowning Menzie’s voice. When
he came back on the radio, he told Freeman, “General, there’s a good chance we’re going to lose the Galaxy. It’s one mother of a target — even in the dark. I ‘m concerned about my men, General. If that big bird goes…”

  “Then our empty cargo Chinooks can take you out… How long do you think you can hold?”

  “Not a matter of holding, General. We can hold all day, but it’s no good if we can’t get out.”

  “An hour’s all I need, Rick. You hold.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A minute later the sky over the airport went yellow, followed by an explosion — the Galaxy going up in flames, illuminating the Airborne better than any flare.

  Freeman turned to Al Banks and a marine major. “I’m going on to Mansudae Hall.” He said it as if he were going over to the PX for a moment. Perhaps, thought the major, the general’s enormous self-confidence came from the long hours of preparation, of poring over the SATINT and Japanese intelligence reports. But then, anyone could read a map. There was more to it. Freeman’s élan had spread through all the men, now digging in around Kim II Sung Square, readying for the inevitable NKA counterattack with three of the bridges on the west side still intact.

  “By God,” said Freeman, “what I wouldn’t give for an M-1.”

  “Hey, General. You don’t need a tank, sir. You got us.”

  They were hunkering down close to the Hummer.

  “Where you from, son?”

  “Brooklyn, sir.”

  “You stay by me. I need a man like you.”

  “Where we goin’, General?”

  “We’re going to start a fire, son, right in that runt’s seat of government. By God, those Commies talk about ten days that shook the world. We’ll do it in ten minutes!”

  There was a shuffling sound — the boy’s buddy hitting the cement.

  “Down!” bellowed Freeman. There was another shot, but they couldn’t see where the sniper was.