Burmese Crossfire (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 2)

by Peter Nealen

  He was angry, though it only showed in the whitening of his knuckles as he clutched the tabletop. Cao was entirely focused on the Army’s attack on Parsenkyaw, and had already suggested sending Park and his men to act as his own reconnaissance troops. That was not the mission he and his men were there for, and he knew that both Commissar Lee and Comrade Baek would support him. But the fact that he had taken such losses, and that the paramilitaries had hit his camp, was what really angered him.

  Why had they attacked the camp specifically? Why sneak around a force on the move to attack an obscure camp, that wasn’t even where Park’s platoon conducted their training? Something didn’t add up, and he was beginning to wonder if they weren’t dealing with something besides Burmese paramilitaries or Army scouts.

  The problem was, he did not know who else it could be. The Burmese special forces were not impressive, and they were far, far away from anywhere the imperialists should be able to reach them. The Thais? Perhaps. Retribution for the border crossing? But that would mean the Thais had to have discovered that they were working with the traffickers, and that there hadn’t just been Wa involved in that crossing.

  Perhaps one of the Kokangs had been captured, and had talked? No, they’d been careful. None of the Kokang soldiers had crossed with the traffickers; only the mules had gone over the border. And the mules had been carefully sequestered to make certain that they knew nothing about the operation as a whole. Only their part of it.

  He needed more information. “Lau!” he called.

  “Yes, Chungwi,” Sangup-pyongsa Lau replied, coming to something approximating attention in the low-ceilinged cave.

  “Put together a reconnaissance patrol,” Park instructed. “No more than four men. The best scouts we have. Have them report to me; I wish to show them exactly where I want them to look.” He looked down at the map as he absently returned Lau’s stiff salute. “There is someone out there who killed six more of our comrades last night,” he said. “I want them found.”

  ***

  There was still a bit of light in the west when Brannigan stood, facing down the mountain. It wouldn’t last long; they had found that twilight in the highlands was usually over in less than thirty minutes. They wouldn’t be out of the trees before it was fully dark.

  Flanagan led out, having won a short, quiet game of rock-paper-scissors with Childress for the position. Both men were ghosts in the bush, and while Brannigan had generally leaned a little more on Childress for the pointman position, knowing more of Flanagan’s other skillsets, the difference between them was negligible enough that they’d finally decided that way.

  All three were wearing their rucksacks. They were a little bit lighter than they had been; water was going fast. Eventually, Brannigan suspected, they were going to have to gather some and purify it. He wasn’t looking forward to that; the filters they had were good, but the water he’d seen so far, in a couple of ponds and streams, was anything but clear. He’d seen men get sick from Afghan canal water, even after filtering it. Twice. And this stuff didn’t look any better.

  It was as dark as midnight by the time they came to the edge of the trees. Flanagan turned north, skirting around a cleared field to stay out of the open. They were still on the Chinese side of the border, but Brannigan could see what were unmistakably leftover poppy plants on the edges of the field.

  Recon was strenuous work, though not terribly different from their movement of the previous nights. Stealth was paramount, and that meant two things; constant alertness and care in their movement, and finding a route that made it unlikely that anyone else would use it. Which usually meant the thickest vegetation and the nastiest terrain.

  They weren’t carrying as much weight as he remembered, but that only meant they didn’t have the support that the long-range radios carried by a traditional recon patrol could summon.

  The route that he and Flanagan had worked out was by necessity somewhat constrained. They couldn’t help losing some elevation, dropping down to the valley where the invisible line of the Chinese-Burmese border ran. There were villages to their north and south, and to stay as far away from both as possible, they had to make some compromises. It meant some climbing at the far end, and some open areas that couldn’t be avoided, but they couldn’t control the terrain.

  Step by step, they moved through the dark like wraiths, moving more slowly and carefully because of the lack of illumination. Even the image in their NVGs was pitch black in places, making it necessary to move by feel most of the time. Put out a foot, test the ground. Slowly, carefully, put weight on it, ready to yank it back if something cracked or started to give way. Keep a hand out to avoid walking into a tree, or worse, knocking a rifle against one. Once the foot is planted, lift the back foot.

  Repeat. Ad nauseum.

  Between the undergrowth and the darkness, they hadn’t made it more than two hundred meters past the Chinese border after four hours of careful movement through the woods.

  Flanagan stopped dead, holding up a fist. Brannigan mirrored the movement, freezing as best he could, though he had to put his weight on his front foot quickly. Trying to balance on one foot in the jungle at night, with a rucksack on your back and a rifle and chest rig on your front, is not going to end well.

  Agonizingly slowly, Flanagan sank to a knee in the undergrowth. Brannigan followed suit, having to pause and shift his weight ever so slightly as a fallen branch bent under his knee, threatening to crack under him.

  Flanagan had his rifle lifted, and Brannigan peered along the line of the other man’s barrel. That was when he saw the shapes moving through the trees.

  There were three of them, moving carefully, slowly, and deliberately. They were little more than shadows, occasionally visible between the trees, but he could see enough in the grainy green glow of his NVGs to know they were armed. And they were on the hunt.

  And they were moving directly toward Flanagan.

  Brannigan felt his heart almost stop, and he had to concentrate to make sure he kept breathing. They really didn’t need to get in a firefight now, but it was too late to move away. They were too close to go unheard. He could already hear the rustle of movement as the three got closer and closer, over the pounding of the blood in his temples and the impossibly loud rasp of his breath in his nostrils.

  It was eerie. The play of darkness in the woods was such that the advancing scouts, whoever they were, would disappear entirely for a moment, then suddenly be meters closer. They weren’t turning aside. Their point man was going to walk right into Flanagan in moments.

  Brannigan resisted the urge to hold his breath. He could see more detail as the closest man came into a patch of starlight again. He was clearly wearing some sort of fatigues, a chest rig, and patrol cap. He had no NVGs, which was a blessing. He might have spotted Flanagan by that time otherwise.

  But it was about to become a moot point. He was less than ten meters from Flanagan and walking straight toward him. Brannigan could almost hear the other man’s mental curse, and then the night was split by the G3’s thunder. Flame stabbed in the dark, and the lead scout staggered, tried to bring his rifle up, then fell backward.

  Flanagan had thrown himself flat as soon as he’d fired, and Brannigan followed. It was a good thing, too, because a moment later the two men behind the stricken lead scout opened fire on full automatic, muzzle flashes flickering brightly in the dark and bullets ripping through the air and the foliage overhead.

  Brannigan and Flanagan returned fire, though it wasn’t well-aimed or accurate. It was a bit hard when both surviving enemy soldiers were mag-dumping into the dark from only about fifteen meters away.

  Then the scouts were retreating, running back the way they’d come, pausing only long enough to turn and fire more long bursts to cover their movement.

  Brannigan had hastily crawled toward the nearest tree and pressed himself close to the damp earth beneath it, as bullets smacked into the bole over his head with heavy thumps. Flanagan had ceased fire, and
Brannigan was momentarily afraid that he’d been hit. He couldn’t see him through the underbrush. He couldn’t see Childress, either.

  The firing died away, and he waited, hoping that the enemy had decided they’d broken contact. But a moment later, another burst roared out and slashed through the underbrush with a series of hissing snaps. The scouts weren’t taking chances.

  Finally, it had been long enough that he was pretty sure it was over. “Status?” he hissed.

  “Up and up,” Flanagan replied.

  “I’m good,” Childress whispered. He was barely two meters behind Brannigan, also huddled behind a tree.

  “Same,” Brannigan said, after taking a moment to check himself. Adrenaline can shut out pain and shock. He had known at least one man who’d bled out from a shrapnel wound he hadn’t even realized he’d had. “Well, we’ve got a track to follow now,” he whispered, as he drew his radio out and turned it on. “I’ll report in to Roger, then we’ll start following them. Hopefully, they lead us to wherever our little friends have gone.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Chungwi Park!” Lau called out, his voice echoing strangely down the tunnel. He rushed into the central chamber breathlessly, as Park turned stiffly to face him.

  “Yes, Sangup-pyongsa?” Park asked calmly, even as he felt the surge of adrenaline. Lau was excited, and not in a good way. Something had happened.

  “The scouts are back,” Lau reported. “They made contact with an enemy force to the south of here, not far from the border. Cho is dead.” His voice was deliberately dispassionate as he reported the lead scout’s demise, as was fitting of a soldier in the Korean People’s Army. Park knew that Lau and Cho had been friends, but duty came before friendship. All of them were ultimately expendable.

  “Bring them in here,” Park instructed. Lau saluted, then turned and shouted down the tunnel. A moment later, Kang and Seo entered, standing stiffly at attention before Park. Both men were short, and therefore didn’t have to stoop under the low ceiling like Park did.

  “Report,” Park ordered.

  “We were sweeping close to the border, looking for signs of the paramilitaries who fled from our old camp,” Kang answered. “We had entered a patch of forest, when Cho stumbled on what must have been a sentry. The sentry shot him, and then we were fired upon. We broke contact and returned to report.”

  “Where exactly did this encounter happen?” Park asked, pointing to the map. Kang moved to the table and peered down at the map.

  Park knew that if he hadn’t been a member of the Light Infantry Guide Bureau, asking Kang to locate the position on the map would have been pointless. Most of the regular KPA kept their enlisted men under strict control. Only officers and more experienced NCOs were allowed to learn map reading and land navigation. Only the importance of the mission and the distance from headquarters had made it necessary to ensure that all of Park’s men knew how to navigate on their own.

  “It was in this area,” Kang finally said, pointing to a spot on the map, just south of Pingshan Mountain. It was alarmingly close to their current position, but it made some sense as a fallback position for the paramilitaries. It was away from habitation, and there was plenty of forest to hide in. Presuming that the Burmese would not have wanted even their proxies to violate Chinese territory, it meant that, given the way they’d broken out of the encirclement the night before, the paramilitaries’ main body, such as it was, was probably there.

  “Well done,” Park said. “Reload your weapons and be prepared to move.” He looked at Lau, who was still standing by the entryway. “Muster the rest of the men. I need to meet with General Cao.”

  ***

  “No,” Cao said flatly. He was sitting at his desk, still in his skivvies and red-eyed. He’d been fast asleep when Park had come looking for him, along with most of his staff. “The Army has hit us hard in Parsenkyaw, and has nearly secured Marish. If there is to be a Kokang Self-Administered Zone left, we must confront that threat.”

  “And yet,” Park argued, “with a threat in our rear area, we can be caught by surprise at the worst possible time. What if the Army comes past Parsenkyaw, begins to engage your forces at the edge of this safe haven, and then, when the bulk of your forces are engaged there, the paramilitaries strike at our rear? Even if there are only a few of them, they can have a disproportionate effect on our defense against the Army.”

  Cao eyed him narrowly. “You seem quite dedicated to eliminating these paramilitaries all of a sudden, Zhong Wei Park,” he said, as he lit a cheroot. The foul-smelling smoke quickly seemed to fill the room. “Is it possible that the perfect Communist man from North Korea is angry at the loss of his men?”

  Park bit back the scathing reply that leapt to his mind. Of course he was angry. He was just as angry at Cao as he was at the enemy. If Cao had not insisted on mostly symbolic direct support for the attack on Lontan, he would never have allowed the paramilitaries to take his camp.

  “I only have the mission in mind, Sojang,” he assured Cao.

  In truth, Park was rationalizing his thirst for revenge quite a lot. He told himself that it was simple military logic, and to some extent he was right. But as hard as he tried to stay true to the ideals of the DPRK, to detach himself from all bourgeoise attachments in the service of the Supreme Leader and the People’s Revolution, when he saw the corpses of men he had fought and trained with for years in his mind’s eye, a cold, killing rage welled up in his chest. And the only way to deal with it was to hunt down the men who had killed his subordinates and eliminate them as the subhumans that they were.

  Cao watched him sardonically through the clouds of smoke from his cheroot. Finally, though, he nodded. “Very well. You make a good case. But I can only spare Huang Chin and his men. The rest of our forces must be prepared to meet the Army if they continue their advance.”

  Park knew that Chin had less than a company under his command, and half of them were undertrained at best. More than half of those were children under the age of ten. But it would have to do. He saluted. “I will begin preparing my men,” he said.

  Cao waved at him dismissively with the cheroot in his hand. Park’s lips tightened, but he simply turned and stalked out.

  He realized that he truly hated Cao. But to move against the man would only get him and his men lined up against a wall and shot, either by Cao’s considerably more numerous Kokangs or by order of Commissar Lee when they returned home.

  He hurried toward the entrance to their bunker system. There were many preparations to make before they could launch the attack, and little time in which to make them.

  ***

  Hancock was waiting when Brannigan brought the recon patrol into the rendezvous point, another stand of woods on the flanks of Pingshan Mountain, now just over a kilometer from the village where Park was already beginning his preparations.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Brannigan murmured as he knelt next to Hancock.

  “Sounded like it,” Hancock replied, as Childress and Flanagan slipped into the circle. “Nobody hit?”

  “No,” Brannigan said, taking the chance to sit down with his ruck leaning against a tree. He was tired; this was proving to be a lot rougher than Khadarkh had been. “It worked out, though. We couldn’t catch up with them—wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway—but we’re pretty sure we know where they went.” He pointed to the meager handful of lights downhill and to their northwest. “There are an awful lot of sentries around that village, and we counted two roving patrols. It looks like there are a lot more people there than you’d expect, given the size of the place.”

  Hancock nodded, nearly invisible in the gloom. “Any signs of fortifications?” he asked. “If they had those bunkers built into that camp…”

  “Not that we could see from where we were,” Brannigan said, “but given what I know about the Norks and irregular warfare in this part of the world in general, I think we should expect at least some spider holes in between the buildings. Possibly more than that.
” He thought for a moment as he gulped too-warm water from his dwindling supply. “If they fell back here after the Army hit Parsenkyaw, then this must have been a planned position. And, if they’ve been getting advice and support from the Norks…” he trailed off, thinking.

  “The same Norks who have been digging in on the north side of the DMZ for almost seventy years?” Hancock asked quietly.

  “Yeah.” Brannigan understood the implications as well as Hancock did.

  The North Koreans had been in a perpetual state of war with their neighbors to the south ever since the first offensive of 1950. It had been a cold war ever since the cease-fire of 1953, a heavily-armed Mexican standoff across the 38th Parallel. During that time, the North Koreans had heavily fortified their side, and there were signs that they’d been doing the same in a sort of underground defense in depth across most of their country. There were also credible reports of superhighway-sized tunnels running beneath the DMZ, so that in the event that the cease-fire broke down, entire brigades of North Korean troops and tanks would start appearing deep behind ROK lines.

  Given that history, Brannigan realized that it was entirely possible that, if they’d had enough time, the entire mountain could be honeycombed. They could easily find themselves in a bad situation, with enemy troops popping out of the ground behind them after they’d cleared a section of the village.

  Of course, their mission wasn’t to clear the village. The Kokang Army wasn’t their target, not specifically. If any of the ethnic-Chinese Communists got between them and the Norks, they’d probably have to be killed; Brannigan knew they’d probably already killed a few dozen the night before. But as long as they were sure that they’d at least killed enough of the North Koreans to render their mission to the Kokangs ineffective, then they could pop smoke and get out.