Payback wi-10, page 16
part #10 of WW III Series
And so, by the time General Douglas Freeman and his eight fellow “nonactive” list team members were en route on their black-ops Payback mission, the defiant but ever-cautious, hardworking Omura, the “quiet old guy” who had built up a chain of teriyaki/rice and sushi stalls throughout the islands after the war and who, in his quietude, didn’t seem to bear any residual animosity against America for its treatment of Japanese-American immigrants during the war, had developed one of the most sophisticated North Korean espionage rings in the United States.
Following what the international media were calling a “terrorist” attack in America against the three airliners, North Korean Intelligence HQ in Pyongyang issued a red alert to its agents throughout the world. Omura’s network was specifically ordered to watch for any unusual U.S. military activity in Hawaii, as it was the most likely stopover and refueling base for any U.S. SpecOps “Asian target” mission launched from America’s West Coast — the big U.S. base in Yokohama the most likely springboard after Hawaii.
Omura’s espionage ring went into high gear. One of his agents, a worker at the huge military airbase adjacent to Honolulu’s civilian airport, saw a huge plane land that same evening. With his folding NVG zoom-lens video camera he got a shot of nine men plus the pilot and air crew who alighted from the huge cavernous jungle-green/khaki aircraft. Ten minutes later Omura’s agent was able to take infrared stills of the loading of what he estimated was a sixty-to seventy-foot-long fuselage with six wheels, two at either end and two in the middle. It was encased in U.S. Army khaki all-weather wrap and had three equally spaced bumps, like engine blocks, along the top, the wrap, it occurred to Omura’s agent, the same kind in which the Americans had transported aircraft and helicopters from Hawaii to Camrahn Bay during the Vietnam War. But he reported that he could see no rotor blades attached, assuming these, as was usual during transport, had been bundled inside the huge Galaxy.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pyongyang (North Korean Intelligence HQ)
“Sometimes,” colonel Kim said, upon receiving the coded e-mail message, “the Americans wrap the rotors separately from the main body of the helicopter like a collapsed beach umbrella. Unfortunately our agent’s NVG camera’s angle has obviously not penetrated deeper into the plane’s interior.”
“It looks to me, Comrade Colonel,” suggested his second in command, Major Park, “that it is a helo. One of the three bumps, the middle one, is the engine, the other two being rotor mounts, one forward, the other to the rear.”
“Like their original Chinook,” said Colonel Kim, “only a smaller, faster lift helo.”
The colonel thought hard, his dour grimace born of the ruthless competition for promotion in a country that prided itself in being the last true Communist stronghold in a capitalist-corrupted world. He looked again at Omura’s spy’s report. In his mind’s eye Colonel Kim was going over the various types of U.S. helos, trying to discern what kind of load the American Special Forces could be carrying. One of the men in the infrared stills, Omura’s message informed him, was definitely the legendary Freeman who, Kim remembered, had made a name for himself against the Siberian Sixth Armored. But he was retired, wasn’t he? And what heavy load was the helo, if it was a helo, trying to deliver? And where? Surely the American marauder Freeman — if he was planning an attack on North Korea — must realize what folly it would be to enter North Korean airspace with any kind of helo. Even if Freeman was daring enough to fly NOE, nap of the earth, under the radar screen, he would first be picked up by North Korean coastal radar as he flew in from Japan or Okinawa farther to the south.
“Special weapons?” suggested Major Park. “To attack the heavily defended depot at Kosong?”
“Are you sure,” put in Lieutenant Rhee of Coastal Defense Unit 5, “the Americans’ target is Kosong? Perhaps they are only going as far as Japan?”
Colonel Kim and Major Park looked at their unusually tall subaltern. A young officer’s initiative was encouraged up to a point in the Dear Leader’s million-man army, as in any other military, but stupidity wasn’t.
“Where else could the gangster American and his team of thugs be headed for?” asked Colonel Kim.
The earnest young officer, Lieutenant Rhee of the North Korean Army’s East Coast Defense Command, quickly apologized for his presumptuousness, but the fact was that he had more on-the-ground experience than either Colonel Kim or Major Park along the rugged east coast, where the beautiful and massive Taebek range stood as a mighty bastion against the East Sea and Japan 475 miles away. It had been Japan from which the hated Americans had come to aid the detested South in what North Korea had taught its people had been a reactionary capitalist war waged by the United States and its running-dog lackey, South Korea, against the paradisiacal North. By now, this blatant distortion of history was accepted as inviolable fact by several generations of North Koreans, despite them having gone through such devastating famines in the 1990s and early 2000s that starvation rations had killed thousands and literally dwarfed an entire generation.
It was because of these famines that Lieutenant Rhee, at five feet ten, stood out as among the tallest of his generation, from which Pyongyang had had to struggle to get any North Korean soldiers who could hold their own standing next to the six-and-a-half-foot American giants who manned the DMZ with such impressive physical presence. But the North Korean Army, along with their Dear Leader and his cabal in Pyongyang, were the best fed in a country whose Communist leadership under the Dear Leader had poured all it possibly could into its armed forces. As such, the army of which Lieutenant Rhee of North Korea’s Coastal Defense Command was an ardent member came closer to the clichéd “lean and mean” ideal than most professional armies. The meanness was the result of a carefully maintained paranoid cradle-to-grave indoctrination of hatred against America and its “running-dog lackeys,” the latter a Communist propaganda expression so old and outworn that other Communist regimes no longer bothered to use it.
It was used again in May 2004 after a train on April 22 carrying ammonia nitrate fertilizer through Ryongchon near the Chinese — North Korean border struck an oil tanker train, which brought down a live power cable, causing a massive explosion that leveled large sections of Ryongchon and killed or wounded over two thousand, most of them children. For the first time in more than thirty years, the Hermit Kingdom requested outside aid, but any coming from the running-dog lackeys of America or South Korea had to be rerouted by sea so that the North Koreans would not think the U.S. or any of its “lackeys” were involved in the aid effort.
For Rhee, the daily propaganda had nurtured a continual sense of vigilance, increased by the undeniable geographic fact of the ruggedness of Korea’s east coast. He could think of few other coastlines that were so ideal for covert landings of special forces by North Korea’s enemies.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On the other side of the world, in the Galaxy’s huge redded-out interior, Douglas Freeman and his eight-man SpecOp team could feel the change in the deep, throbbing timbre of the Galaxy’s four big engines as the giant transport began its glide path from 33,000 feet over the cobalt blue of the far western Pacific toward a verdant sliver of land that was the southeastern coast of Japan. It had been a long haul, both the Galaxy’s crew and Freeman’s team glad to see terra firma. As they passed over the Japanese coastline, an immaculate green patchwork of rice fields below, no one was happier than Choir Williams, who hated the avgas smell that permeated transport aircraft. This only added to his general aversion to air travel, which was, contrary to all counterargument, based on his firm belief that bad things happen in threes. In all other matters, Choir’s SpecFor buddies knew him as the epitome of the nonsuperstitious, commonsense soldier, but on this matter of threes, his belief was as unshakeable as Freeman’s conviction, which also amused fellow SpecFor members, that George Washington had indeed stood in the prow of the boat. Those who knew Freeman well, like Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir, saw the general’s belief not so much as evidence of his eccentric nature but as a manifestation of his lifelong commitment to exemplary leadership. It was the type of “on the point” leadership that Washington had exemplified: visible and unafraid, the kind that those who had served under Freeman had come to expect and which, despite his Pattonesque gruffness at times, was the reason that even those who didn’t like him had to grudgingly admire him.
“Not long now,” Freeman advised Choir, as the Galaxy entered a “shelf” of bone-rattling turbulence at ten thousand feet, the Welsh-American’s face having taken on a pucelike pallor.
“Should’ve eaten somethin’, mate,” advised Aussie loudly, “ ’fore we left Hawaii.”
“He did,” said Sal, winking at Chief Petty Officer Tavos and the four other SEAL volunteers. “A banana and a slice o’ white bread — you know, the old diarrhea diet.”
“No, no,” Aussie corrected Sal, “I meant a meal—you know, a mess o’ fried eggs, bacon, nice greasy side of fries, and—”
“You wicked bastard,” Choir mumbled weakly.
Freeman smiled at the give-and-take between Choir and Aussie, their ongoing teasing a measure of his team’s morale. Sal’s winking at Tavos and including the four other SEALs in the joke was the kind of small but deliberate act of inclusion that the general knew was crucial if the team was to execute what he, in one of the greatest understatements of his career, had referred to casually in his airborne briefing as “pre-mission DOPAE”—deplaning of personnel and equipment. It was an innocent-sounding acronym, which one of the SEALs, Eddie Mervyn, confided to his colleague multilingual Johnny Lee, must have originated in someone’s dope-smoking mode.
“No way, Eddie,” Lee assured him, smiling. “Closest the general’s come to smoking a joint, I heard, was when he went to a strip joint looking for terrorists in Washington State.”
Eddie Mervyn, checking his weapon of choice, a Heckler & Koch 9mm with folding stock and laser-dot targeting, commented, “No terrorists in a strip joint. Muslim fanatics don’t drink or watch tit.”
“Exactly,” said Lee, “but the scuttlebutt is, the general cottoned to the idea that strip joints’d be the perfect cover for terrorists in the States. No one in Homeland Security’d expect that a fundamentalist fanatic would go to the tit shops and hit the booze, right? Perfect cover.”
Bone Brady was impressed. “So Freeman figured that out?”
“Yep,” said Lee.
The general made no comment, his attention drawn to the six-wheeled equipment that was shuddering in the turbulence. He loosened his harness a tad so he could lean forward from the team’s bench and tighten one of the lines.
Aussie, to the four SEALs’ amazement, had nodded off, his legs sticking out, his feet resting on his combat pack and almost touching one of the bright orange “glo” Air Force HIBUDs—“hi-buoyancy” drums — that had been lashed down below the equipment’s pallet.
“Can see he’s worried,” the loadmaster joshed before he made his way through the narrow space to inform the general that they were fifteen minutes from the carrier battle group McCain off the island of Ullŭng.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” acknowledged Freeman. “Would you ask the driver to put it through on-screen?”
“Yes, sir.”
As the flat screen came alive, they could see the Galaxy’s line of descent toward Ullŭng Island, 170 miles east-southeast of Kosong on the North Korean coast, the Kosong warehouse on the SATPIX — satellite pictures — being ten miles north of the DMZ. Whether or not the team would head the 92 miles in to the South Korean coast then head up along the coast, passing over the DMZ, or head instead directly to Kosong would be something Freeman would decide after — or rather, if—the deplaning of personnel and equipment succeeded, and after he received updated real-time intel. The latter could be provided only by the Signals Exploitation Space, the ultrasecret “blue tile” room with its “Big Blue” screen located deep in the inner sanctums of the McCain, as the carrier steamed at reduced speed off Ullŭng, protected by its battle group’s screen of cruisers, destroyers, and two nuclear attack submarines.
The screen’s data-block read, “TD2”—time to drop zone—“14 minutes.”
“With this headwind that’s hitting us now,” said Salvini, “I’d say it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”
“Want to bet on it?” joshed Freeman.
“Bet?” It was Lewis, suddenly awake and sitting up. “Did I hear bet?”
Freeman smiled knowingly at Brady, who was sitting immediately to the general’s right. “Aussie’d bet on the sun not coming up. Next to watching that so-called football game down under, ‘Australian Rules’—an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one — Aussies are addicted to beer and gambling.”
“Yeah,” Salvini called out above the sustained roar of the Galaxy’s turbofans. “An Aussie gets wounded, they transfuse him with Foster’s Lager.”
“Foster’s, my ass!” Aussie corrected him, sitting up and assuming the air of an outraged connoisseur. “I only drink Castlemaine. That’s Castlemaine Four X to you, Mr. Salvini.” Aussie turned to look along the bench to the tall African-American. “What’s the bet, Shorty?”
“Data-block up there,” explained Brady, indicating the screen, “is telling us it’s fourteen — no, thirteen — minutes to the drop zone. Sal thinks it’ll be longer.”
“Ten minutes,” came the pilot’s warning, the headwind having now dissipated.
“Damn!” said Aussie. “I could have made some money.”
The red light was still on but already the Galaxy’s ramp yawn was under way, the great plane’s huge door lowering like the jaw of some airborne leviathan, the whine and howl of its hydraulic pressure lines mixing with the rush of cold air invading the huge, warm cave of the plane’s interior.
Far below, they could see a vast, cobalt-blue sea, wrinkled and flecked here and there by the short-lived whiteness of breaking waves. The loadmaster and another crew member released the tension lines. The crated equipment, which included the team’s eight individual eighty-pound combat packs, Freeman not needing one insofar as he’d been ordered by the President to stay at mission control, slid noisily but evenly down over the rows of precisely aligned rollers.
The drogue chute pack attached to the palletized load followed it out into the void in a long taper of bundled lines, the sudden unraveling and reefing of the three enormous nylon conical-ribbon drogue chutes, each 83.5 feet in diameter, sounding like a thousand tents struck by a banshee wind. The noise was so alarming that for several moments, before the tripetal blossoming of the drogues’ dazzling white canopies a half mile aft of the plane, Johnny Lee instinctively stepped back — onto Eddie Mervyn’s combat boots. Mervyn’s obscenity was unheard by his diving buddy, given the combined maelstrom of unraveling lines, slipstream, engine noise, and the racket created by the hundreds of well-oiled floor rollers still spinning, despite their load having exited, descending toward the sea. It was a sea that, given the centuries-old conflict between the two countries, was claimed by both Korea, as the East Sea, and by the inheritors of Nippon, as the Sea of Japan, even before Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and its brutal domination of the country until 1945.
“Go!” shouted the Air Force sergeant. The team stepped into space, Freeman and his first four from the ramp’s starboard side, Aussie and the remaining three from the port side, the roaring wind so cold, so fast, it took their breath away, heart rates increasing, the dot of Ullŭng Island coming up at them fast.
Then each man felt the sudden jerk, his body rising as his Mach III Alpha — the high-glide tactical parachute — took over. With the best glide-rate-to-descent ratio of any Special Forces chutes in the world and its eighteen ripple-arc panels and independently flexed left/right control cords, it allowed its jumper unprecedented maneuverability, despite each commando’s heavy combat pack.
The black basalt pinnacles of Ullŭng Island appeared momentarily to be sliding uphill, an optical illusion caused by the nine men’s alpha chutes inclining slightly against the horizontal during a short, sharp buffeting by updrafts. Beyond the island, Freeman and his men now saw the whitish gray slivers of the McCain’s 7th Fleet battle group, the carrier battle group out of COMPAC’s — Commander Pacific’s — base in Yokosuka, Japan. McCain was steaming, as expected, in the middle of her protective screen. Not surprisingly, the two attack subs, presumably fore and aft, were nowhere in sight.
Within McCain’s screen of twelve vessels, which included four destroyers, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, a replenishment vessel, and the two nuclear attack submarines, was the Wasp-class helo carrier transport USS Yorktown, carrying 2,100 Marines of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of Colonel Jack Tibbet. Marines high and low were making bets as to whether the nine parachutists would be able to land on the “boat,” as the big aircraft carrier McCain was known to her six thousand personnel, the other ships’ sole reason for being in the battle group to protect Captain Crowley’s flat-top.
“What d’you think, sir?” Executive Officer John Cuso asked Crowley, who, as captain of the McCain, was also admiral of the fleet.
