by Ian Slater
One burst and General Freeman had taken out the emergency light, the foyer plunged into darkness, illuminated only by the eerie light of the NKA flares going up outside over the Assembly Hall and Kim Il Sung Square. There were two muffled explosions and the general knew two of his Chinooks had gone, crimson flames leaping high in the rain. As they advanced down either side of the foyer, Brentwood taking the inside of the left column, Freeman fired a “draw” burst. There was no response.
“Bastards are upstairs,” he said in a hoarse whisper. How he wished he’d been able to bring in a dozen trucks, or even the three other Hummers that had been destroyed, for this place, Freeman knew better than any of his troops and even fewer of his officers, sustained the power and majesty of Communist North Korean power. The runt’s Brandenburg Gate, as he had called it.
There was a loud shout from somewhere upstairs. Though he knew no Korean, to Freeman it sounded more like a revolutionary slogan than an order. The general knelt and unclipped his PRC “satbounce” walkie-talkie radio. “Freeman to square. You reading, Al?”
“Yes, sir, loud and clear.”
“Those two Hummers back from the bridges yet?”
“Only one, sir,” replied Banks.
“Get an HM squad up here fast, Al — start firing two hundred yards back and lay ‘em right on the top. Synchronizing?”
“Go, General.”
Freeman flicked the cover of his watch dial up. “Oh five thirty-seven. Now.”
“ Got it. Ten minutes.”
“Affirmative.”
There was an orange flash, and a sound hitting iron. The ATGM launcher on the Humvee outside had been hit. The machine gun kept going, defying all logic, in a continual burst. Then, through the warped rectangle of the door, David Brentwood saw the soft glow of the burning Hummer, the two Americans slumped over the canopy, the machine gun still firing as at least twenty black-pajamaed militia appeared about the flames. The machine gun stopped, the gunner’s body collapsing into the pyre. David could now hear someone on one of the twin staircases that descended either side of the foyer. Freeman was on his PRC again. There was a crackle of static. “Banks?”
“Sir?”
“You left the square with that HM yet?”
“Negative.”
“Then pack your Humvee with every man you can get in. Mortar crew’s going to need as much covering fire as we are. The bastards are all round the building. And Banks—” Freeman’s voice faded for a moment, then came back. “I want a photographer and a flamethrower.”
There was another surge of static on the line and Banks needed to confirm. “Photographer… flamethrower, sir.”
“Fast as you can.”
“We…”
Freeman didn’t hear the rest — young Brentwood had opened up with his SAW, taking out the first two militia to make it through the door, a third tripping over them, the rest breaking either side, lost to the darkness behind the huge marble columns.
“Brentwood — Brooklyn?” Freeman’s voice took on the tone of a basso profundo, its echo bouncing off the nearest statue of a hero worker. “Alternate fire! I’ll start the next one. Brentwood?”
“Sir?”
“You got a PRC?”
“Yes, sir!”
Suddenly the darkness was split by the flash and telltale staccato of AK-47s, glass breaking behind Freeman and Brentwood, bullets singing as they struck marble. Brentwood squeezed off a burst, quickly moving to the next column, every nerve raw, not knowing how far up the hall they’d gone.
“When our boys start moving up those steps,” Freeman yelled, moving toward the balustrade, “we go up to the first floor. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Brooklyn?”
There was a squeaky reply — Brooklyn so terrified, he could hardly find voice.
“More gooks, General,” Brentwood called out, and fired at the door, seeing there were too many for alternate fire if they were to stop them. He thought he got one or two, but the rest had disappeared like the first group, left and right of the cavernous foyer, behind the columns.
His ears still ringing, heart thumping, David crossed the hall, letting off another burst as he reached a marble column close to the balustrade. He felt something stinging him — his left leg-momentarily wondering whether or not it was a bullet but having no time to dwell on it. Soon, he knew, the enemy, now over the initial surprise, must figure out a rough plan of fire without hitting one another.
Now the Koreans were shouting instructions to one another, adding to the sense of increasing chaos. A second later two grenades shattered the air with purplish white. There was a scream, and in the flash Freeman glimpsed three militia coming up his side, rolled a fragmentation grenade, turned about the nearest column, and let off a quick burst from the SAW. Next instant he was on his back, Kevlar helmet hitting the marble floor, a needlelike pain down his neck, the NKA troops shooting wildly, hitting windows and turning the water-slicked floor that had caused Freeman to fall into a gallery of elusive running shadows.
The moment he saw the brilliant light, David, his training overcoming instinct, froze as another militiaman fifty feet away fired a second flare inside the building. David knew what they were looking for would be movement, not shapes, as he pressed himself hard against the pedestal of a peasant woman at harvest.
Brooklyn forgot his training, swung out between the columns with his SAW, and crashed to the ground as a dozen militia cut him down. The flare now fizzing in the far corner, Brentwood snapped into the prone position and swept the floor with a full magazine, hitting four of the militia, sending the others racing back behind the columns toward the door, the general getting one man silhouetted in the penumbra of the flare’s light.
“Brentwood!” he yelled. “Go for the balustrade. Back of it there’s the auditorium. Give ‘em a burst and head back!”
As the general fired the covering burst up the stairs, David ran between the columns, heading beyond the foyer toward the faint outline of the auditorium door, plate glass collapsing from the windows either side of the assembly hall from ricochets. When he reached the auditorium he turned hard right inside, sweeping the SAW in front of him — astonished to see the emergency lights down by the stage were on, casting a soft glow over the two thousand seats that smelled like a new car’s upholstery.
The door burst open and the general came in, almost taking Brentwood with him, the hot barrel of the gun striking David’s flak vest, the general swearing, his SAW’s sling having got caught in the breech, jamming the gun. He yanked hard at it, but it wouldn’t budge. His PRC surged to life, Freeman still uttering oaths, cursing himself now for having left the volume switch up. “Forty-dollar fine,” he said to Brentwood, who tried to smile but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get enough saliva to swallow. Freeman turned the volume down and heard Banks. “General, this is square one.”
“Reading you,” said the general. He was disappointed it wasn’t his mortar crew outside.
“General,” Banks went on in an excited voice, “one of our ROK interpreters has plugged into Charlie traffic — seems—” Banks’s voice rose and fell in waves of interference, and Freeman could hear the gunfire around the square. “Seems, General… the runt’s in Mansudae Hall.”
“For Christ’s sake!” hissed the general. “Why the fuck you think we’re here? Intelligence confirmed he’s been holed up here since…” There was more static, but this time it seemed like the tearing sound of a machine gun in the background.
“That all?” said the general.
“Yes, sir. Mortar crew should be there soon.”
The general turned the volume switch off. It had suddenly become very quiet. They heard the patter of sandaled feet. He yanked at the SAW strap again, but it wouldn’t come free. As David drew his bayonet from its scabbard, handing it to the general to cut the strap loose, Freeman saw the boy’s hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Don’t you worry about it, son,” the general sai
d, in a barely audible voice, his breathing slowing for the first time since they’d entered the great hall. “You’re doing just fine. We’ll get the son of a bitch.” Brentwood began to speak, but Freeman held up his hand, motioning above with his thumb. “Some of the monkeys are going up the stairs. Good.”
David guessed there’d been about half a dozen or so, and when they didn’t find any Americans upstairs, they’d be coming back down. His apprehensive gaze upward conveyed his fear to the general. “Don’t worry,” said Freeman, smiling. “We’ll be all right.” He nodded his head down toward the stage. “You like the front seats or the mezzanine?”
David couldn’t think straight, let alone respond to a joke. All he knew for certain was that he was down to his second to last clip and that whenever anyone told him everything was going to be all right — it never was.
* * *
At latitude fifty-six degrees north and longitude seven degrees ten minutes west, a hundred feet below the sea’s hard blue, USS Roosevelt was eighty miles west of Scotland and thirty miles north of Ireland.
“Any upwelling here?” the captain asked.
“No, sir. Salinity, temperature look fine.”
“Look or are?”
“They’re normal, sir.”
“Very well. Ahead five knots, roll out VLF to two thousand.”
“VLF rolling, sir.”
* * *
At the Sorbonne in Paris, over five thousand leftist students, some of them anarchists, were rioting, fighting police, protesting France’s decision to “defend the borders.”
In Whitehall, the new minister of war was on the scrambler to 10 Downing Street.
“Agreed, Prime Minister, it’s not a declaration of war per se. But I should have thought that a ‘defense of one’s borders’ means…” The minister grimaced. “No, Prime Minister. Yes, it is possible. Very well. Yes. Right away, Prime Minister.”
When the minister of war put down the phone, his hand went to his forehead in an effort to remember what he’d been saying to Under Secretary Hoskins. But his mind was still on the prime minister’s unsettling reservation about the French action. “PM’s office can’t seem to understand,” began the minister, “that while the French response means we can’t use their rapid deployment force in NATO as yet, we will be able to the moment any foreign troops violate French soil. And—” he looked across at his secretary “—that has to happen — otherwise what’s the bloody point of the Russians fighting the bloody war? If we have the French ports for resupply, we still stand a chance. We don’t have the Chunnel, and if we don’t have the ports and the Bolshies continue to hold Holland, Hamburg, and Bremen, and take Rotterdam, then I should think we’re in very deep. Wouldn’t you agree, Hoskins?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean to say—” the minister’s right hand reached out for an elusive word as if he were answering an opposition question in the House “—the bloody French have to come in.” He paused for a moment, thinking, hands behind his back, moving toward the now armor-plated window. “I mean, all that lovely wine. It’s unthinkable.”
“Yes, Minister.”
But the reports from JIB — Joint Intelligence Bureau — indicated that the Russian surge had lost much of its wallop. There had been early snow, and the war of mobility was grinding down. It didn’t go nuclear, as all the experts had told the minister it would, and “Pray God it won’t,” said the minister, adding, “But I think, Hoskins, contrary to what we all thought — I should say, what all the experts thought — that we’re in for a long war.”
* * *
“No VLF signal,” Zeldman reported to the captain.
Captain Robert Brentwood nodded and gave orders to the executive officer of the USS Roosevelt to map a course for the next twenty-four hours that would place them in the deepest part of the Norwegian Sea — within comfortable launching range of targets on the Kola Peninsula and beyond, guaranteeing the Roosevelt’s missiles the minimum possible CEP — circular error of probability — when striking all twenty-four of the sub’s designated targets.
In “Sherwood Forest,” aft of the sub’s sail, where the six missiles in two rows of three stood ready in their gleaming forty-foot-high, seven-foot-wide tubes, Raymond Wilson, one of the off-duty RCOs, or reactor control operators, was jogging, the steady hum of the forty-ton ventilators washing comfortably overhead like the pleasantly reassuring noise of a summer breeze in high timber. Wilson, the man whom Captain Brentwood and the cook had been joking about earlier, was in his workaday blue cotton and polyester jumpsuit and quiet matching canvas-sole shoes, the blue in stark contrast to the smooth, creamy white color of the missile tubes. He sat on one of the narrow flip-down benches near the bulkhead, taking his pulse, his breathing slowing, whole body relaxed, yet his senses acute, missing nothing, the odor of the sub like that of a sparkling clean showroom — a world away from what he’d been told were the stink-holes of the old World War II diesels. He felt good-fit, confident he’d live to be a hundred.
* * *
The second wave of refueled Tomcats had now penetrated North Korean airspace once again, and a swarm of thirty MiGs attacked, the Tomcats breaking, fifteen to do battle with the MiGs, the other fourteen Strikers racing for Pyongyang.
Then everything happened astonishingly fast.
* * *
In the Mansudae Hall, General Freeman and David Brentwood ducked automatically, for no amount of training could steel a man’s nerves against the instinctive reaction to seek cover from high explosive. There was a high, whistling noise, then the next explosion shaking the building, plaster flaking off the auditorium’s walls. Another crash, more plaster, a lot of yelling from the floor above. The mortar crews were doing their job. Freeman and Brentwood heard confused firing upstairs, then shouting. As the North Koreans started back down the stairs, Brentwood and Freeman stepped out, firing two long bursts into the bunch of figures, killing several, sending the rest scuttling back up the stairs. Freeman was calling the mortar crew on the PRC. “Cease firing!” There was one more explosion.
“Let’s go!” said Freeman. “You take the left stairs.”
They made it up to the second floor without incident, but on the third they saw a small group of NKA, who suddenly retreated, their silhouettes clearly outlined in the fires that had been started by the mortar shelling, toxic smoke already rising from the burning red carpets. The NKA squad could now be heard above on the fourth floor, and Brentwood and Freeman followed, the din of firing beneath them on the ground floor telling them the marine reinforcements from the Humvee were coming in.
On the fourth floor, the NKA, unable to go farther, the exit door stairwell filled with smoke, suddenly split into two groups, three of them, or so it looked to Brentwood, melting into an office on the left, the others disappearing through a door on the right side of the hallway.
“They’ve got the runt!” yelled Freeman. “That’s why they’re trying to hightail it. You take the left.”
David Brentwood stood, back against the hallway wall, his SAW pointed at the office door, the general doing the same across the hall, raising their guns, butts positioned for eye protection, blowing out the locks, then spraying the doors. There was return fire on Brentwood’s side, hitting his Kevlar vest, slamming him across the hallway — bullet holes peppering the stone-finished walls high above the opposite door, sending bits of marble flake whistling through the air as Brentwood, down on the floor, emptied the rest of the magazine into the door.
There had been no return fire from the general’s side. He went to fire again, but the SAW jammed. He threw it down, pulled a grenade, kicked the door in, his hand a blur in and out, the grenade’s explosion sending a cloud of dust and paper floating gently to the red carpet. He went in low with his Beretta, right hand arcing, his left cupping for support. There was silence, a lot of paper still falling, the room thick with plaster dust. By now, David Brentwood was back on his feet, SAW blazing, going into the room from which he’d take
n fire. In the office across the hall, Freeman, debris still settling about him, saw four figures: two stunned officials in green Mao suits, one of them a small, pudgy man with glasses, the other covered in fallen plaster, a streak of blood on his face, and two NKA officers, one of whom, a lieutenant, was dead in front of the desk, the other, a major, on the floor to the right, his uniform in tatters from the explosion, moaning and clutching his stomach, rolling in debris beneath a picture of the “dear and respected leader.” The picture was amazingly intact, not even its glass broken, but the grenade the general had thrown in was meant mainly to terrify and stun — which it had clearly done.
Inside the other office Brentwood saw that both men, militia, were dead, one still holding his AK-47, staring up through the light given off by the advancing flames. David whipped about as he heard heavy firing down on the main floor, sounding like marine SAWs. He saw his magazine was empty and reached for the last one.
The general waved the two officials away from the desk with his Beretta. “Over there, Comrades!”
Brentwood was walking over, having taken the finished magazine out and seeing the toxic smoke that was billowing at the blocked end of the hallway and moving quickly toward them. “General, we’d better—” He saw the one groaning on the ground rolling a grenade at the general’s feet. Knocking the general farther into the room, Brentwood scooped the grenade up, throwing it down the hallway. Its blast took out three neon light fixtures and blew a door in, the NKA’s Major Rhee coming at them, a knife in his hand. The general fired four times and now the picture of the dear and respected leader tilted sharply, its frame shattered, the leader solemn at a ridiculous angle.
“Move!” yelled Freeman at the other two, “before I shoot you, too, you goddamned Commie rats!”
A marine at the far end almost fired a burst before he saw the other marine, Brentwood, and General Freeman.
The general tore off the NKA soldiers’ dog tags, at the same time trying to apply pressure on where the knife had cut him on the left arm.