by Ian Slater
“Medic!” called the boy from Brooklyn. The stretcher bearers ran over, crouching. There was a flash in the darkness south of the square from the Haebangsan Hotel. The Humvee’s machine gun roared to life, illuminating the rain and several marines nearby.
“Got him!” shouted the gunner.
As the Medevac team were lifting the downed marine onto a stretcher, Freeman touched Brooklyn’s arm. “C’mon, son. Work to do.”
“Yes, sir.” But now the boy’s voice was cracked with emotion as one of the medics, seeing his colleague was stripping open an emergency field dressing, reached over and stopped him, then pulled the marine’s poncho over his face, the rain bouncing off it with a drumming sound.
“Let’s go,” said Freeman, leaping into the Humvee, a squad automatic weapon with him and grenade vest packs in his right hand.
He turned to the marine major in charge of holding the square. “Give us forty-five minutes, Major. We’re not back, you go ahead with the withdrawal.”
“We’ll stay as long as we can, sir.”
“You’ll stay forty-five minutes and get your ass out of here. Second Tomcat wing’ll have enough to do with those MiGs without baby-sitting us. That means I want choppers in the air at oh six thirty. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
The major’s biggest worry wasn’t whether the general would get back or not but how best to protect the Chinooks, scattered all around. So far the general’s plan was working well, despite the airport and the sporadic fire of some Home Guard and militia troops working their way up Sunji Street, the marines now in the process of blocking it off. While this was happening, the major saw that the men from Freeman’s infantry were pushing more of the Chinooks to the west end of the square between the big protective blocks of the Art Gallery on the square’s south side, the History Museum on the north, and the river directly behind them to the east. Meanwhile on the top floor of the six-storied Grand People’s Study House, marines with spotting scopes took up positions.
“What’s your name, son?” Freeman asked the Humvee’s marksman/squad leader next to him in the cabin.
“Brentwood, sir.”
“All right, Brentwood — we’re going to visit Mansudae Hall. Ever heard of it?”
“On the map, sir. Aboard the LPH when we were going over the-”
“Well, son, you’re going to see it up close. You ready?”
“Yes, sir,” said Brentwood.
The general knew he wasn’t. No one was, before their baptism of fire.
“So far,” Freeman had told Al Banks back at the square, “on the ground we’ve only had chicken-shit resistance.”
“I think that’s about to change,” Banks had cautioned.
“By God, it’s the curfew,” Freeman had proclaimed in a moment of revelation, standing in the pouring rain, arms akimbo. “Thought everyone was staying inside from fright.”
In the Hummer, Freeman could hardly breathe, so excited was he by the prospect — a vision of glory so powerful — heaven so clearly on his side with the curfew and the rain and the monsoon, together with his, Douglas Freeman’s, idea to attack when no one else would, that the general found it impossible to contain his exhilaration. “Hot damn!” He smacked the dash, the startled driver almost driving into the curb and having to hastily readjust his infrared goggles as they swung right at the Grand People’s Study House, rushing the four blocks to the Mansudae Assembly Hall.
* * *
In the ice-cold depths of the North Atlantic, eighty-three miles west of Scotland, the USS Roosevelt’s executive officer, Peter Zeldman, gave the skipper his wake-up call. “Captain. Message station coming up.”
“Okay, Pete. Be right there.” Robert Brentwood pressed the “stop” button on Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town,” swung his feet off the bunk, and made his way over to the washbasin to wake himself fully, his eyes and throat dry as parchment. He made a mental note to tell the chief engineer to turn the switch up on the air/water content control. Brushing his teeth, his mirrored image looking better than he felt, he was struck by how the public face — the face of duty — so often and so convincingly hid the deepest fears of the inner shadows. He glanced at his watch. Three-twelve p.m. Back home — that other planet — his mom would most likely be having her morning coffee, his father at the New York Port Authority, pushing paper and moving ships, cutting corners where he could and sucking Tums where he couldn’t. And what about Lana? Had she and La Roche patched it up? For the life of him, he couldn’t think why a man would want to break with a beautiful girl like that. Maybe it wasn’t all La Roche’s fault. It took “two to tango,” as his mother never tired of saying. Anyway, hopefully, if the burst message did come in, he’d be in Holy Loch tied up within two to three hours and there’d be lots of mail for everyone. Maybe a letter from young David, though that was too much to hope for, knowing his younger brother’s “allergy” to writing anyone. Well, hell, thought Robert, replacing the toothbrush, you’re no letter writer yourself, pal. You ready, Brentwood? he asked himself. Ready. And willing?
No — but ready.
The moment he began the walk toward the control room, Brentwood felt every sailor he passed watching him, wondering. He nodded to most and stopped at the galley.
“What’s on, Cook?”
“Roast lamb and mint sauce, sir.”
“Gravy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Trying to make me fat?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll have to start training like Wilson.”
The cook grinned, hoping the skipper wouldn’t notice he wasn’t wearing his chef’s hat.
“Wilson’s down there now, sir.” He nodded back toward the missile bays. “Doing his laps.”
“Hope he’s wearing sneakers,” Brentwood said, half in jest, half seriously — the “on station” behavior code forbidding anything that would make a noise loud enough to be picked up by an enemy’s towed array.
“Good,” said Brentwood, about to move on. “And Cook?”
“Sir?”
“Get that hat on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stepping into control, the sub still rigged for red, Brentwood could feel the tension.
“Depth?” he asked Zeldman.
“Five hundred, sir.”
“Very well. Take her to one hundred.”
“To one hundred,” confirmed the diving officer, standing behind the plane and trim operators, their half-wheel steering columns moving gently with hydraulic grace.
“Four fifty… three hundred… three fifty…”
Brentwood pressed the intercom for all sections, from torpedo room up forward through “Sherwood Forest,” the missile bays, to the reactor, to call in for status reports.
“Three hundred… one fifty… one hundred, sir.”
“Very well. Roll out VLF.”
“Roll VLF.”
The sub shifted slightly.
“Upwelling, sir,” commented the diving officer, noting the sudden change in salinity and water temperature.
“Stop VLF,” commanded Brentwood.
“Stop VLF.”
Brentwood watched the depth gauge, its needle moving slightly, up again, then down. The sub shifted a little more. Last thing he needed was an inversion layer, a sudden change in water density that could suck the sub down before enough ballast could be blown to regain neutral boyancy, driving the boat down, hitting the bottom at 150 miles per hour. The needle moved down again and back.
“Retract VLF.”
“Retracting, sir.”
Brentwood was now receiving status reports from all the sections. Everything A1. “Pete, let’s take her on a mile or so. Get her away from this upwelling nonsense.”
“Yes, sir.”
Robert Brentwood looked at the steering computer’s clock— at an easy twenty-five knots they should reach a new position in plus or minus four minutes, depending on local sea current/ salinity/temperature var
iations. It would mean running out the VLF a little faster and risking a little more noise for Roosevelt to hopefully clear the upwelling and still have time for a ten-minute wait — but this should be no problem.
* * *
In itself, the fact that the old Cold War rule of Soviet-Warsaw Pact armies forbade anyone under the rank of lieutenant to possess military maps did not seem particularly significant. While it was something that had astonished the Americans and British in the long-gone days when NATO had invited Soviet-Warsaw Pact officers to observe NATO maneuvers, it had not occurred to anyone that the antiquated rule, buried in the bureaucracy of the Soviet army, would have much significance. After all, even platoon officers didn’t require maps, their particular tasks, such as taking a farmhouse, a ditch, or a hill, “microrated,” in the jargon of the strategists and tactical warfare experts, a small piece in the vast jigsaw of war. Most combat troops, only 25 percent of any army doing the actual fighting, rarely knew or cared about the wider battles. All that mattered was for them to survive, to take the particular objective on any given day with minimum casualties, not knowing till it was over, sometimes for months, even years, what part they might have played in the overall scheme of things, whether they had won or lost or had merely come to a bloody draw.
But on this October day, while the USS SN/BN Roosevelt approached message station, and another Brentwood, half a world away, was running up the stairs of the granite and marble Mansudae Assembly Hall, now quickly having been reinforced by North Korean regulars and the “black-pajamaed” militia of Pyongyang, something decisive was about to happen on NATO’s central front.
In the southwestern corner of West Germany, a weary Margaret Ford, the young lieutenant of twenty-six, and her crew of three were about to launch another Lance missile with conventional warhead. Ford’s crew was one of twelve out of the original twenty-three that had been located for” shoot and scoot” counterbattery fire in the German Black Forest. A light shower had fallen, but now the sun was trying to come out as the rain clouds passed over the forest into France, and Margaret Ford, though she did not know it, was about to change the course of history.
An advance Soviet mobile observation post, a camouflage-painted, fourteen-ton Russian BMP — armored personnel carrier — traveling at thirty miles per hour, carrying ten troops and armed with the standard 7.62-millimeter machine gun and antitank missiles, stopped on a side road, twenty miles from the Black Forest, now a blue smudge through the hazy autumn mist. The greenish-yellow poplars were turning and flickering in the midafternoon sun, and the sudden warmth made the fields steam for miles around.
The men aboard the BMP had been on hard rations for forty-eight hours, with little sleep, nerves jangled by a brief but spirited American counterattack which had taken place behind them on the big bend in the Danube as it curved south from Regensburg. And when they had lost their officer, whom they all liked, during the fierce American 155-millimeter barrage of high explosives and armor-piercing shells, the Russian crew’s morale had taken a bad body blow. Had it not been for the sergeant’s initiative in keeping the men going, they would probably have called for a break earlier on, but now the sergeant didn’t have a choice as one of the men ema stalo plokho— “was feeling carsick “—in the personnel carrier, not surprising in the suffocating heat from the engine and the sun combining in the coffinlike interior. The jolting, jarring, and lack of any sense of direction for the men inside was guaranteed to leave even the toughest reeling after three or four hours in battle conditions. The sergeant had yelled for the driver to stop earlier, but the BMP was so noisy, he couldn’t be heard. But with the smell of the man’s vomit filling the already dirty and stale air inside, the driver finally got the message.
As the sick man rested with a few comrades, the sergeant and four others took the BMP over to a green hill nearby from which they could see a farm about two or three kilometers away and had a good view of the retreating American 155s, their flashers, like pieces of a shattered orange mirror, visible at the edge of the dense forest. The sergeant and his comrades could also see that the shells from their own guns roaring away five miles behind them were falling short of the West German and American batteries.
Suddenly a Lance missile could be seen streaking from the blur of the woods twenty miles away, but the elevation of the Russian guns was still obviously too acute and the sergeant was reporting on his radio, “Too short! Too short!” until the Soviet battery commander, in an effort to save valuable rounds at the end of the already overextended supply lines from Czechoslovakia and Poland and Russia, ordered the fifty big G-6s to “down.” New salvos came screaming lower, over the crew of the BMP, the G-6s’ twenty-five-mile range six miles longer than the American 155s’. The Russian shells not only tore into the American and West German positions in the Black Forest, but over four hundred of the HE shells crashed into the forest on the French side.
Several of the Allied TV, print, and radio reporters covering the war from the Rhineland — on the supposedly “safe” French side — were hit. Two of them, both French, were killed, another, British, from ITN, badly wounded.
A shell or two amiss was to be expected, inevitable perhaps, but not salvo after salvo — and all because the Russian sergeant, not knowing precisely where he was, only in front of American and West German guns, had simply done his job.
When West German TV and British networks bounced the signals via satellite throughout Europe, particularly into the homes throughout France, “the balloon,” as the newly sworn-in British minister of war said, with barely concealed satisfaction, “went up.”
“Vive la France, gentlemen,” he said. “She is now in the war. Which means, gentlemen, we have our ports.”
“So far,” said an assistant who foresaw something in Gallic disposition within NATO that either the minister did not want to admit to or did not appreciate being referred to, especially not by a junior member of his department.
“ ‘So far’ will do quite nicely,” said the minister icily. “If it won’t do, Parks,” the minister continued, holding his glass out for a refill without looking at the steward, “I suspect you could be called up. Yes?”
* * *
The NKA militia approaching the dark, four-storied monolith of concrete and granite that was the Mansudae Assembly Hall were terrified when they saw the Americans. It wasn’t merely the rolling thunder of the overhead battle amid the monsoon that so unnerved them — it was the Americans’ goggles.
Freeman and the nine men in the Humvee, having taken infrared and “starlite” goggle training in stride, could not know that, for all the wrong reasons, they conformed to everything the militia had been told about the U.S. imperialist warmongers — like the banner of the Sinchon “Museum of American Imperialist Atrocities,” which depicted socialist toddlers joyously shooting the U.S. monster, in the form of a wicked-eyed “Uncle Sam.” It was part illusion, reinforced by the reality of the size of the marines’ packs, the big SAWs — squad automatic weapons — and the hideous-looking robotic eyes of the infrared and starlite goggles, the gray plastic lenses protruding from a base the size of a quarter, tapering to a dime-sized lens, giving the Americans an even more terrifying, unblinking appearance to the heavily armed NKA militia and police now defending the North Korean Assembly Hall. The two men on the Humvee’s ATGM-mount and.50 machine gun created a murderous fire-front, the remaining seven, including Freeman, split into two teams, Freeman with his SAW leading the three in front, the probe team, while the four others, all equipped with SAWs in support, were moving in reaction to the lead team’s situation.
The big doors were closing as Freeman, Brentwood, and Brooklyn started up the stairs — a burst of fire from about twenty feet away to their left clipping Brentwood’s helmet, the three of them going down hard on the cold marble steps, Freeman yelling back at the Humvee to “take out that—”
There was a “whoosh” of flame only feet above their heads and the loudest explosion David Brentwood had ever h
eard, as if someone had let off two massive firecrackers strapped to his head, the noise added to by the reverberations of the huge door, now agape, not unhinged but licked by the yellow flame of the antitank rocket that left a large, jagged section blown out from the door’s right panel, smoke bleeding from it like dry ice, and part of the lower hinge torn, curled back as neatly as a pop can tab — two dead NKA militiamen, another crawling away from the door.
“Let’s go!” Freeman shouted, got up and led the probe team, Brentwood on his left, Brooklyn to his right, up the remainder of the long, wide marble stairs. From the sides of the building and from two third-floor offices either side of the draped NKA flag, from where the dear and beloved leader had issued some of his most famous edicts, flashlights winked in the power outage, then went out themselves.
Almost to the door, night became day, and the three Americans saw two groups of black-trousered militia coming from both corners of the building. David Brentwood to Freeman’s left returned the fire.
“Come on!” yelled the general. “We’re in the sack.”
It didn’t make any sense to David, but he was only too happy to obey the order. Once inside the door, his ears still ringing from the noise of the antitank missile hitting the big doors together with the din of the machine gun raking the militia outside, he realized what the general had meant. The two groups of militia coming from either side of the building couldn’t fire at the Americans without fear of hitting one another in a “fire sack”—the realization bringing a flashback to David of his instructors at Camp Lejeune.
Inside the building an emergency battery light created monstrous shadows. The infrared goggles proved to be of limited use and the three men quickly took them off. While the goggles had allowed them a clear picture of the enormous spotted marble columns with massive sculptures of revolutionary workers and peasants clustered about their bases looking heavenward, they robbed the three Americans of peripheral vision. It was a trade-off — wider vision but less distinct images. David could smell strong wax polish and hear the tinkling of chandeliers, then echoes of boots coming up the marble steps outside the door.