Payback wi-10, page 23
part #10 of WW III Series
“Huh,” said Aussie. “Do you remember the general telling us how the Y track to this fucking shed has been covered in crushed gravel?”
“Yeah,” said Bone. “So?”
“So no slippin’ an’ slidin’ on the trail, big boy.”
“Well, y’know,” said Brady, “sometimes Charlie doesn’t stick to the trail. Sometimes he goes off trail and blindsides you when you’re all following the tourist path to and from the beach like good little Boy Scouts.”
“Point taken,” said Freeman. “Final weapons check.”
Each man gave him a thumbs-up, Sal’s raised so high and ramrod straight that Aussie told him yet once again how during his youth Down Under, such a gesture had been the equivalent of giving someone in America the finger.
“That’s the hundredth time you’ve told us that,” said Sal, his tone edgier than usual.
Everyone wanted to get out of the RS’s two hatches, whose “lids” were flush with the craft’s superstructure to decrease drag at high speed underwater. But now the RS was crawling toward the beach like some metallic slug, its electronic probes absorbing such a flood of incoming data that, like the driver of the latest computerized auto or the pilot of a brand-new Joint Strike Fighter, Eddie Mervyn and Gomez felt simply overwhelmed by the cascade of information. Right now, two hundred yards from the surf, the RS’s computers were giving myriad readouts of wind speed, outside temperature, inside temperature, fuel remaining, electric motor range using MUSCLES system only, jet-pulse range, humidity both inside and outside the RS, and the sea’s salinity content, the computers accordingly making the necessary algorithmic corrections for possible torpedo or decoy firing. Ballast tanks’ status, circuitry verifications, and aerial and hydrophone arrays status were also being integrated to calculate the course of least resistance amid the myriad crosscurrents and rips of the surf. Most of the displayed data was being ignored by the RS’s pilot and copilot, except for four readouts: the precise distance to beach, the angle of beach incline, the water’s decreasing depth, and the graph line showing the exact point at which the RS would become visible. When they reached that point, Eddie Mervyn, with Gomez double-checking, would lift the hard black plastic safety guard over the zebra-striped button that would deploy the RS’s tractorlike treads. Like the wheels of a light aircraft suddenly descending from their previously fuselage-covered wells, the RS’s two forward and two rear miniature oval caterpillar tracks would allow the RS to keep moving forward without pause, taking the team beyond the surf surge, allowing the hit team to deploy dry and so not be weighed down by sodden combat pack or no-name fatigues.
Sal tore open a Trojan packet, took out the condom, and stretched it over the end of his shotgun’s barrel. The reversible-submersible was designed to take them in very close, from the sea’s continental slope or littoral into shallows no deeper than three feet, but Sal’s motto for such amphibious landings had been taken from a sign he’d read as a young boy on holiday in Maui: “All Waves Are Dangerous.” He’d seen more than one SEAL accidentally “baptized by full immersion,” as the instructors called it, the SEAL at the point of disembarkation necessarily turning his back to the sea, loaded with full combat pack one second, underwater the next, felled by a wave that normally wouldn’t have challenged a ten-year-old.
On the infrared search scope’s flat screen they could see the phosphorescent dancing of surf and rain, the rushes of foam going farther than usual across the sand of Beach 5 because of the gale-force winds. Immediately beyond the undulating line that marked the dip and rise of sand dunes was another line. This varied in height from 50 to 130 feet, delineating the jagged crest of steep, scrub-covered cliffs. The latent heat of the land, relative to the colder sea, was emitting tendrils of mist that spiraled up here and there, resembling the vapor columns from hot springs, of the kind SATPIX intel had revealed in the Nine Moon Mountains southwest of Pyongyang.
“Tracks deployed,” announced Eddie Mervyn, the small Kit-Kat-sized SOC — status-of-craft screen — informing them that they were now 138 yards from the lacy foam of exhausted surf. The SOC’s data block also informed them that in precisely one minute and forty seconds, the top of the teardrop bow would be visible to “EXT VWS”—external viewers — at a point between two of the big X-shaped beach defenses, meant to be an impediment to the big American Wasp-class LHDS’—Landing Helicopter Dock Ships’—landing craft.
“Hope any external viewers are in bed,” said Aussie.
No one answered him. Mervyn checked the data block again and announced, “Hatches opening in two minutes. I say again, lids opening in two minutes.”
“Hatches opening in two minutes,” acknowledged the general, adding, “Aussie, you and Choir follow me through hatch one. Sal, you lead Bone and Johnny through two. Confirm.”
Aussie and Choir gave a thumbs-up, answering in unison, “Follow you through hatch one.”
“Good,” said Freeman, upon which Sal, Bone Brady, and Johnny Lee answered, not in unison but in staggered response, “Hatch two.”
“Very good,” said Freeman. They’d rehearsed this confirmation drill at least a dozen times en route to McCain, but dammit, neither Sal, Bone, nor Lee had been able to answer in unison, each of them slightly out of sync with the other two. All right, thought Freeman, he’d say nothing about it. First, it would sound tendentious in the extreme, like a frantically obsessive schoolteacher he once had in high school who had routinely gone ballistic if you didn’t recite a sonnet error-free. “No, no, no, no, NO!” the general remembered her chastising her students, and then abruptly brought himself back to the present.
The only thing that mattered was that he, Aussie, and Choir, upon exiting through one, and Sal, Brody, and Lee through two, remembered every detail of the attack plan. Speed and precision were paramount. Five minutes after “hatches open,” the general, Aussie, and Choir should be racing up the Y’s stem and turning left on the Y’s southern arm, Salvini, Bone, and Johnny Lee swinging right, onto the Y’s northern arm, the general’s trio responsible for entering the warehouse at its southern end. At the same time, the plan called for Bone to position himself on a SATPIX-chosen rise closer to the coast road, near the northern entrance of the warehouse. There, he should be able to provide covering fire for teammates Salvini and Lee at the northern end of the building and be able to sweep the coast road with his squad automatic weapon should any PITAC, pain-in-the-ass civilian, be up and around on the predawn road between Kosong, a mile to the north, and the DMZ, ten miles to the south. Meantime, the general’s trio at the building’s northern end would also be provided with suppressing fire from Choir Williams’s SAW.
However, whatever happened, aboard the RS Gomez and Eddie Mervyn had been told by Freeman to allow no more than twenty-five minutes for the operation: “Five minutes up, ten minutes to shoot and loot evidence of MANPAD storage, five minutes back to the beach. Five minutes max for unseen contingencies.” If they weren’t back at the RS by then, Gomez and Mervyn would reverse from their submerged though shallow surf-hide into deeper water, execute a quick 180-degree turn, and head back to the McCain’s battle group at full speed. The humiliation of a botched attack would be tenfold if the NKA somehow managed to either damage or capture America’s most highly secret combat watercraft.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The General’s night-vision goggles were jarred by his leap from the RS’s roughed “step-off” that Gomez had dutifully deployed starboard below hatch one. But the blur caused by the jarring was quickly countered by the NVGs’ MEDs — microscopic electronic dampeners — and he had as good a picture of the half-mile-long banana-shaped beach as he was going to get. Its foreshore was littered by gale-blown flora, including bushes and ghostly tree trunks whose bark had been stripped, the trunks tossed and driven farther south from Siberia in the storm’s surge. Aussie, gripping his Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and Choir, his SAW, followed the general out of hatch one, and off the RS’s starboard side Salvini led Bone and Johnny Lee off the port side of hatch two, the six men crossing the beach, linking up in single file at the base of the Y, a fifteen-foot gap between the first three, led by Freeman, Salvini’s trio behind.
The only sound was that of surf and the steady pouring of rain, the Vibram-soled combat boots of the six men barely audible in the soft, course sand, then the slightly noisier footfalls on the crushed-gravel yard-wide stem of the Y trail and — they weren’t sure.
Freeman didn’t hear it, the legendary general loath to admit that in recent years his hearing in the 2,000-plus hertz range wasn’t what it used to be in the days when he could hear the squeak of a Soviet tank’s treads in soft snow a mile away in the taiga. But Aussie Lewis heard something other than the rain pelting down on the hard leaves of camphor laurel trees and the sustained roar of the sea a hundred yards behind them. He stopped, tapped the general’s shoulder, and gave the hand signal for the others to halt.
With the sound of their footfalls silenced, everyone in the two three-man squads of the hit team could also detect the faint yet distinct two-stroke lawn-mower-like whine, whose persistence could be heard above the sound of the unrelenting rain upon the dense bush of the slope and the pounding of the surf. A blur dashed across the trail in front of the general — a hare. Now the noise was not confined to one engine but a number of them. “Motorbikes,” Aussie whispered to Freeman in front of him, then signaled the same to the four men behind by using the American Sign Language Freeman had insisted they all learn.
Bone Brady nodded, recognizing the sound of all-terrain vehicles, reckoning there must be at least half a dozen of them, or more. Were they one-rider ATVs, Freeman wondered, or two-man vehicles? If the latter, the odds were already two to one against the team if the ATVs, which sounded to the general as if they were about a quarter mile away, were heading in the direction of the beach. Or maybe they were just passing by on a regular ATV patrol along the coastal road. Indeed, the noise seemed to be abating.
Freeman knew there were only three choices: wait, abort, or attack. He’d already used up fifty seconds of Payback’s precious twenty-five-minute window. His pause was only a few seconds long, but seemed like an eternity to Johnny Lee, just down the slope behind him. The general signaled the team to proceed slowly in crouch position.
The first North Korean they saw through their rain-slashed night-vision goggles was an unusually tall soldier, a lieutenant, given his helmet insignia, the man standing atop a molehill-shaped rock with an evil-eye slit across its seaward front. A bunker. The NKA lieutenant, standing about two feet above the machine-gun’s redoubt, did not have night-vision goggles, Freeman noted, but was staring out to sea through big ChiCom-issue IR binoculars. Freeman could see that behind the Korean there was a clutch of about eight ATVs, a final duo of the machines arriving, cutting their engines, the ghostly wooden warehouse twenty yards or so beyond. Suddenly there was no more ATV noise.
Lieutenant Rhee turned around in the pouring rain to admire the last arrivals of the complement of what were now ten Red Dragon ATVs, not quite half the number he had requested, but, he mused, better than nothing. From habit on the DMZ night patrols, he sniffed the air for any sense of alien presence, but all he could smell on the wind was the faint aroma of kimchi — no doubt, he thought, coming from his machine gunner and the gun’s ammo feeder in the bunker directly below him.
In about three seconds, thought Aussie, the North Korean lieutenant was going to turn his head back toward the ocean and see them. What in hell was the general—
A fierce, choking rattle rent the sodden air, as one-in-five white tracer rounds erupted from Freeman’s AK-47, taking down the tall Korean and thudding, with their peculiarly brutal sound, into the clump of surprised ATV riders. An instant later another long burst of AK-47 rounds whistled through the air, this enfilade fired by the Koreans at the general’s trio, who quickly dispersed left of the trail, going to ground as the NKA’s submachine-gun bullets whistled over their heads before thumping and chopping into the surrounding brush. The overwhelming temptation for Salvini, Bone, and Lee was to do the same as Freeman’s trio, only to move right of the trail instead of left, taking up defensive positions in the thick cover. But the tactic the general had so meticulously planned was for him, Aussie, and Choir to attack the southern end of the MANPAD warehouse, Salvini, Bone and Lee to attack the northern end. The general wasn’t averse to changing plans midstream if circumstances warranted it, but the heavy rain and the fact, which he and Aussie had already noted, that the North Koreans seemed not to be wearing night-vision equipment argued against any radical departure from the plan.
“Go!” yelled Freeman, dispelling any doubt the other five might have had about whether or not they should dig in. The sound of his stentorian voice overriding the storm’s own assault sent the team into overdrive. It was in these rushing moments that Freeman’s SpecFors’ endless physical training resulted in what Aussie Lewis had once described as the team’s ability to run “faster’n a fucking Enron accountant,” and with full, C4-loaded packs. It was a bad analogy, Choir had told him. Enron ran from trouble, SpecFors ran into it, like the firemen on 9/11.
The second burst from Freeman’s AK-47 as he ran forward from the brush wasn’t aimed at the wounded NKA lieutenant, who’d dropped behind the cover of the bunker, but into the bunker, from which he could hear the screams of the two men within as Freeman’s next burst of AK-47 fire ricocheted noisily inside the bunker, the burst’s white tracer rounds whizzing about like bits and pieces of white-hot metal, chopping up everything and everyone inside even before the general drew level with it, Aussie popping in two high-fragmentation grenades as the coup de grace, Freeman’s AK-47 now sweeping the ATVs, most of whose drivers hadn’t yet had a chance to bring their “back-slung” weapons to bear.
Several of the ATVs’ fuel tanks were spewing gas, the remaining tanks already spouting leaks as Choir Williams discharged his SAW, its rounds ripping the Red Dragons’ seats apart, creating a kapok snowstorm in the rain, puncturing the remaining gas tanks with multiple perforations. Surprisingly, what Aussie expected to be spurts of gasoline coming from the Red Dragons’ shot-up tanks were nothing more than trickles, indicating that the tanks were near empty, some barely leaking at all. He tossed another grenade at the clump of three-wheeled vehicles. There was an enormous, jagged purple X that momentarily lit up the ATVs in a surreal flash of light, and the crash of the grenade, immediately followed by several of the Red Dragons’ gas tanks exploding, threw the NKA into further confusion.
But the NKA’s return fire, wild at first because of their surprise, quickly became more focused, and Bone Brady, sprinting toward the strip of coast road that ran by the warehouse’s northern end, was knocked clean off his feet by a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, as were Johnny Lee to his left and Salvini on his right. Ironically, it was the thorn-thick brush that had threatened to impede their advance up the slope from the beach that now saved them, the tangled mass of roots and thorn branches absorbing the fragments of RPG that had exploded only feet away. As Brady fell, his SAW clattered noisily to the ground, despite the cushioning effect of the rain-soaked path. His obscenities, heard only by Salvini, were lost to the others in the deafening noise of the firefight. Johnny Lee, his ears ringing from the explosion of the RPG and feeling nauseated from the gut-punching concussion, nevertheless managed to get off three cartridges of number 00 buckshot at the RPG duo huddling by the northern entrance. The twenty-seven pellets blew the two Koreans back with such force into their two Red Dragons that they seemed to be executing backflips from a standing position.
By now, Freeman, Aussie, and Choir, to Freeman’s left and right respectively, were past the mauled ATV group and Lieutenant Rhee, who, hit in the left thigh by Freeman’s AK-47 in its first sweep, lay bleeding profusely. Having sought cover quickly, Rhee had dragged himself so close to the rear of the bunker, which Freeman and Aussie had silenced, that in the darkness, swirling with curtains of rain and sea spray, he couldn’t be seen. But he could see three of the attackers running past him toward the warehouse only seconds away, most of the NKA defenders having withdrawn into the building itself to protect its stores against the assault troops, who, despite their lack of insignia, Rhee was sure must be Americans, because of their size. They looked like giants. Of course, he realized the fact that they wore Kevlar American-style helmets meant nothing, because, like the ubiquitous Russian-made AK-47, the American “Fritz” was readily available to terrorists et al. in the underground arms and armor bazaars worldwide. He heard the sound of splitting wood, his enemies presumably already at the sliding doors at both the southern and the northern ends of the building.
Rhee saw six or seven of his remaining ATV soldiers returning fire from several gun ports situated in the door, but he knew that without the advantage of what obviously must be the enemy’s passive night-vision goggles, his men could aim only at the muzzle flashes of the enemy commandos. Growing weaker and realizing that the round he’d taken in his thigh had probably done more damage than he’d first thought, he knew that if he didn’t hurry and rig a tourniquet, he’d die. Perhaps he could use one of the two dead bunker crewmen’s belts.
Under cover of the noise of a group of his ATV men, who’d remained bunched up outside the building, using the gutted hulks of their three-wheeled vehicles as an ad hoc defensive barrier, he dragged himself a few feet along the rear of the eye-slit bunker rock. With enormous effort, biting his left hand to mute his involuntary gasps of pain, his nervous system going deeper into shock, he pushed against the bunker’s small but craftily camouflaged rabbit-hutch-like iron door, but it wouldn’t open. Mustering all his waning strength, he pushed again, and felt it give way, though there was still considerable resistance. Finally he managed to squeeze himself through the partial opening into the protective rock cave of the bunker, from where he was determined to command his counterattack, and where he felt the attackers would least expect him to be.
