by Peter Nealen
He knew that the camp had come under attack. Even if Ahn hadn’t called a brief distress signal on the radio, they’d heard the gunfire from nearly two kilometers away. Park was not going to go charging in without reconnaissance.
“We gave the recognition signal, but there was no reply,” Mun reported. “We could hear low voices in the camp, but could not hear what they were saying. I do not think they were speaking Mandarin or Korean.”
“Did you see anything?” Jeon asked. “Patrols, perimeter sentries?”
Mun shook his head, almost invisible in the darkness. “There might have been a shape in the southern defense pit,” he said, “but I could not make it out, and it did not move. That was when I sent the signal. No one responded, but no one shot at us, either.”
Park peered across the valley, chewing his lip. He did not know that he was very nearly in the same spot where Brannigan had observed the route up to the camp, not even an hour before. It was too dark to see the marks of the mercenaries’ passage.
“Jeon,” he said, “I think that we must assume that the camp has been overrun. If the enemy was not speaking Mandarin, it must mean that some of the paramilitaries got around us and attacked the camp.” He did not know how that was possible, but it was the only thing that made sense. He could hear the bombardment in Parsenkyaw, but that was presently Cao’s concern. And knowing what he did about the Burmese Army, he doubted that Moe Tint Man Goe would risk splitting his force. That would mean taking on the risk of having part of it cut off on the far side of Parsenkyaw.
He quickly began to outline his tactical plan. They would have to move quickly, to overwhelm the paramilitaries and retake the camp. Not only would losing the camp make them lose face, and hurt their relationship with Cao and the Kokang Army, but he had little doubt that Cao would soon be demanding more of their support against the Burmese. He would not grovel in front of the Kokang leader after having lost his own base of operations.
Together, he and Jeon disseminated the plan to the rest of the platoon, Commissar Lee hovering nearby like a malignant spirit that none of them believed in, as if worried that Park’s battle plan might somehow be politically unacceptable. He said nothing, though, even as Park assigned him a place in the upcoming attack. With the men they had left in the camp presumably dead, they would need every rifle.
Focused now, the North Korean soldiers began to slip down the hill into the valley, staying low in the tall grass and keeping to the shadows of the trees.
***
Flanagan was sweating, and he was starting to itch. None of the discomfort was quite equal to the urgency he felt to warn Brannigan that they’d been probed, but at the same time, he didn’t dare move. If the enemy scouts were still out there, they might see the movement. He thought he’d caught a glimpse of one slipping away through the trees, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t more.
There hadn’t been any more noises, at least none that he could hear over the sporadic gunfire rolling its echoes across the hills from Parsenkyaw. But he knew that all it would take would be one man with a rifle, hunkered down in the weeds and the shadows, watching and waiting.
Finally, he knew he had to risk it. If they’d had time to set up a tug line, a string going from defensive position to defensive position around the perimeter, he might have been able to alert the rest without risking any noise. But there hadn’t been time, and they probably didn’t have enough 550 cord among them to make it work, anyway.
He drew the encrypted radio out of its pouch on his vest. Hopefully everyone else had remembered to turn their radios on after they’d started moving. They had been trying not to use them for reasons of noise discipline, but if ever they were needed, it was right then.
“All stations, movement on the perimeter, southeast,” he whispered. He didn’t want to say more than that. After all, that was all he’d seen.
A few moments later, a quiet rustle behind them announced Brannigan’s arrival as the big man dropped down into the sandbagged hole with them. The Colonel’s bulk filled what was left of the opening under the logs. “Where?” was all he said.
Flanagan didn’t point. “In the trees, about a hundred twenty yards southeast,” he said. “At least one, possibly two.”
“Definitely scouts?” Brannigan asked.
“Yeah,” Curtis said, his voice hushed. “They tried sending a tap code, probably their recognition signal. We didn’t try to return it.”
“Good job,” Brannigan said. “Hold fast; if we’re going to have to fight, I’d rather defend this position, throw ‘em back into the woods, and then move out while they’re off balance. I don’t want to try to withdraw and be halfway disengaged when they hit us. Stay in cover, and hold your fire until you’re certain.”
“Will do,” Flanagan said, still without taking his eyes off the slope below him and across the valley.
Was that movement over there? It was too far away to be sure in the dark.
Then Brannigan was gone, clambering up out of the little bunker quietly and moving away toward the next position.
Flanagan and Curtis stayed put, sweated, and waited. Even Curtis didn’t seem to be feeling the urge to banter anymore. Not with North Koreans lurking out there in the dark. Both men knew that it wouldn’t be the wet-behind-the-ears recruits that would have been sent on a mission like this. These were going to be North Korean Special Forces troops. They might not be on the same level as American SOF, but Flanagan had learned a long time ago that holding the enemy in contempt tended to result in dead friendlies.
There. That was definitely movement, at the base of the hill. It was hard to see in the monochrome of the NVGs, but it looked like the grass had been moving, and not with the nearly nonexistent wind.
Were all those trees and bushes down there in the same spots they had been an hour ago? He suddenly remembered stories about Japanese infiltrators creeping toward US Marine positions, disguised as trees, moving only a few feet per hour. It was why, when he’d been a young Marine, he’d been taught to memorize his sector when on sentry duty.
He thought about having Curtis just rake the treeline with a burst. He stifled the thought. They could well end up needing the ammo. No sense in wasting it shooting at shadows.
He heard a faint rustle of movement down below, and settled in behind his rifle, searching over the sight for the enemy. They were there, somewhere.
Then the treeline erupted in muzzle flashes.
Two bigger, strobing flowers of flame spat at them, and the air overhead was shredded by the tearing, crackling passage of dozens of bullets. Both men shrank down behind the sandbags as rounds smacked into the parapet in front of them and the logs above their heads. Then there was a loud bang, and the front of the sandbagged position seemed to explode.
Both men were hammered down into the bottom of the shallow fighting hole, battered by the concussion and showered with mud, vegetation, and splinters. One of the Norks had just fired an RPG at the bunker. It must have hit just barely short; otherwise they would have been obliterated.
Over the ringing in his ears and the rattle, snap, and roar of gunfire, Flanagan thought he heard a whistle. Some of the fire on their position slackened, just a little.
He knew they were coming. He looked at Curtis. The other man’s expression was invisible, between the shadows and the obscuring tubes of his NVGs, but they both knew the score. They might get their heads blown off, but they had to get up and fight, or they were both going to die in that hole, regardless.
With a heave, Flanagan came off the floor of the bunker, laid his G3 down on the now somewhat lower parapet of shredded sandbags, and searched for a target.
The machineguns’ muzzle flashes were the obvious ones. He controlled the urge to flinch down and try to bury himself in the clay beneath him, stared into the left-hand muzzle blast, and fired.
His rifle thundered, stabbing flame and pushing hard into his shoulder. The big battle rifle was from a time when accuracy and power were more hi
ghly prized on the battlefield than pure volume of fire, so he did what he could to make his shots count.
The machinegun faltered with the first shot, and he put two more shots in roughly the same spot, as fast as he could get the red dot to settle again. Brass sailed over his shoulder, bounced off the logs above, and rained back down on the two of them.
Curtis had just gotten his MG 3 up onto the parapet when Flanagan started shooting. One of the hot casings hit him in the neck and he flinched, swore, swiped the burning-hot brass away, then got down behind the MG 3 and leaned into it, barely getting the sights in the general direction of the trees before mashing the trigger down.
The machinegun roared, spitting a thousand rounds a minute down toward the trees. Bright white flame danced at the muzzle, as Curtis balanced the recoil with long-practiced ease. The little man boasted that there wasn’t a machinegun made that he couldn’t play like a piano, and the MG 3 didn’t prove him wrong.
Flanagan wasn’t going to spray bullets into the shadows; even with the load of ammunition he was carrying, he wasn’t willing to waste the rounds. The second machinegun had gone silent as soon as Curtis had opened up, and Flanagan was searching for more targets.
There were none. The treeline had gone still and quiet. Flanagan spat grit out of his mouth, as silently as he could, never taking his eyes off the dark line below where the fire had come from.
A moment later, a series of whistle blasts off to the east was suddenly drowned out by a rattling storm of gunfire.
***
Only over two decades of discipline enabled Wade to stay still, his eyes locked onto his sector on the east side of the camp, as he heard the thunder and roar of the firefight to the south, where Flanagan and Curtis were set up. Every fiber of his being screamed to run toward the fight, to get in there and support the other two men, killing as many North Koreans as possible.
But this was his spot on the perimeter, and so this was where he was going to stay.
The two underground bunkers that they had seen from the center of the camp had turned out to be defensive positions after all, with firing ports directed east and west. They were deeper and better constructed than the north and south fighting holes, though they were still cramped, damp, and smelly. Of course, the entire jungle stank, so Wade was able to filter that out, at least a bit.
The firing died down to the south, more quickly than he’d expected, and his focus sharpened a little, his adrenaline starting to rise. Had the southern attack been only a feint? A moment later, he had his answer.
Whistle blasts split the sudden quiet of the night, and muzzle flashes lit up the trees to the east. Bullets snapped overhead and thudded into the mud and the logs. The volume of fire was enough that, just for a moment, Wade and Santelli, who had just joined him in the bunker a moment before, as Flanagan’s warning had gone out over the radio, flinched down toward the floor of the bunker. A bullet’s whip-crack as it flew through the firing port to thud into the dirt behind them only made matters worse.
That reflexive dive for cover saved both their lives. Because right after that initial fusillade, the shadowy forms running up the slope toward the camp threw their grenades, just before dropping flat in the grass.
The bunker shook as the frags detonated only a few feet away. Dirt and fragmentation blasted in through the firing port, showering the men with filth and scouring bark off the logs overhead. Then the incoming gunfire intensified, as the North Korean troops charged forward, firing from the hip.
Wade couldn’t see them coming, but he knew they were there. He knew that he had to get up and start shooting, or they were all dead. “A lot worse ways to go,” he muttered, as he hauled himself up, leveled his G3 out the firing port, and looked for a target.
There were at least half a dozen dark figures running up the shallow slope to the east toward the camp. They were all shooting, firing from the hip as they came, spraying bullets at the camp to keep the defenders’ heads down as they advanced.
Fortunately, hip fire, especially on fully automatic like these soldiers were using, is far more intimidating than it is actually effective. Steeling himself against the urge to flinch away from the flickering flashes and the flying metal, Wade leveled his red dot on the nearest silhouette and stroked the trigger.
Two shots ripped into the charging specter, the 7.62 NATO’s thunder heavier than the reports of the 5.45x39mm cartridges the Type 88s were using. The man stumbled, triggered one last burst into the dirt, and slammed down onto his face.
Wade was already shifting targets, giving the next man to his right another pair. That one also dropped, spinning halfway around as the heavy bullets smashed into his torso.
Beside him, Santelli was up and firing, sending single shots downrange as he picked out his targets and engaged.
The North Koreans didn’t keep coming after the first few fell. This apparently wasn’t a human-wave attack; the “advisors” probably didn’t have the manpower for it. As soon as the Blackhearts started shooting back, the survivors dropped flat to the ground, disappearing into the grass.
Wade didn’t hesitate, or bother to waste ammunition firing blind. He reached down, pulled an HG 84 grenade out of his vest and prepped it.
The ceiling was too low to get a proper throw. “Fucking Nork midgets can’t even build a bunker you can throw a frag out of,” he bitched, then half-stood, bending over under the logs of the overhead, and managed an awkward, sideways throw. The grenade didn’t go nearly as far as he’d hoped, hitting the ground with a faint thump only a few yards in front of the bunker before detonating with a heavy thud, throwing a black fountain of smoke and debris into the air.
For a long moment, everything was eerily quiet. No more gunfire tore through the night. If not for the stench of gunpowder and explosives, it might almost seem like nothing had ever happened. The open ground in front of the bunker was empty and still.
But Wade knew the Norks were still out there. These weren’t Iraqis, or even Afghans. That attack had been far more coordinated than anything he’d seen any of the Islamic enemies he’d fought pull off. And he had little doubt that there was more in store.
He wasn’t wrong. He didn’t see the frags flying through the air, and he barely heard the soft thumps as they landed. But they were close enough to the firing port that he got just enough warning to duck, reaching over to drag Santelli down with him.
A heartbeat later, a pair of thunderclaps blew more debris in through the firing port, the shockwaves close enough that they hammered at both men through the narrow gap. Then, almost inaudible to their battered hearing, the whistles sounded again.
Coughing, Santelli was pulling another frag out. Wade quickly followed suit. They were going to be out of the damned things pretty soon at this rate, but if they got overrun in the next few minutes, conserving ammunition was going to be pointless.
Together, the two men reared up and tossed the frags, right into the teeth of the gunfire that the North Koreans were once again spraying against the bunker and the huts behind it. Then both men ducked down, knowing that the frags hadn’t gone far enough.
Two more explosions rocked the night, and then a long, roaring, ravening burst of automatic fire tore into the advancing attackers from the north.
Wade saw at least one more of the dark shapes of the charging North Koreans get hit, though they all dropped at almost the same time, disappearing once more into the grass. Bianco raked the open ground with machinegun fire again, though, either to keep heads down or to hopefully kill a few more who hadn’t gotten quite flat enough or hadn’t retreated quickly enough.
Once again, the hillside went quiet. Wade watched just over his red dot’s aperture, looking for movement, listening for a warning sound that might tell him where the next attack was coming from.
“Friendly,” Brannigan’s voice rumbled from behind them, and then the Colonel was in the bunker, barely seeming to fit under the ceiling. He peered out between Wade and Santelli, looking for the sam
e signals.
Whoever had trained the Norks had done a good job. There was no sign of movement, not even any groans of pain and agony from anyone who might be wounded. The ground in front of the bunker was still and silent. If the North Koreans were retreating or advancing, they were doing it slowly and quietly.
Time dragged by. No one dared check a watch, but kept eyes riveted on the ground in front of them, ears straining to hear past the ringing left by gunfire and explosions, listening for the rustle of movement, the blasts of whistles, or any other indication that another attack was coming.
Only after what felt like forever, but couldn’t have been more than about thirty minutes judging by the movement of the few stars visible in the sky overhead, Brannigan let out a nearly inaudible sigh. “I think they’ve pulled back for now,” he whispered. “Either of you hit?”
“Negative,” Santelli whispered back.
“I don’t think so,” Wade replied, keeping his rifle up and his eyes out. He didn’t trust the quiet.
“Get ready to move out,” Brannigan said. “Those Norks are still out there, and they’re still the target. We needed to hold what we had for the moment, but we need to get mobile again, or they’re going to massacre us.”
Then he was gone, slipping quietly out of the bunker’s entrance. Wade barely noticed. He was still watching his sector.
CHAPTER 13
Villareal stood by as Towne continued to attempt to interrogate the Korean prisoner, Jenkins hovering over them, his rifle held ready. It wasn’t quite pointed at the Korean, but it wasn’t more than a split-second’s movement away from being ready to put a bullet through him. Jenkins’ expression was invisible behind his NVGs, but his stance and attitude somehow gave the impression that he was staring balefully at the North Korean, just waiting for a reason or just an opportunity to smoke him.
The fact that Villareal could think of that possibility with a certain equanimity bothered him more than the fact that he was pretty sure that Jenkins was looking for an excuse more than he was just being watchful for a false move on the Korean’s part.