Red Phoenix

by Larry Bond

  Kevin clenched his fists and moaned softly. Now he could think again and wished that he couldn’t. His mind kept replaying those last horrible seconds, over and over. Pierce falling in slow motion, bleeding, dead. The grenades going off nearby. Men screaming and dying. Men he’d been responsible for.

  He shook his head in despair. He’d panicked and lived while they’d died. Now the most he could do was save himself. And maybe not even that. He bit his lip and levered himself slowly to his feet.

  Sounds were starting to make themselves clearer to him, and he realized that he could still hear the thumping roar of North Korean artillery from across the DMZ. It wasn’t a continuous, ear-splitting barrage anymore. Instead, the guns fell silent for moments at a time as new targets were sought, identified, and marked for destruction. Then the guns fired again, sending streams of high-explosive shells screaming across the sky toward the south.

  Suddenly Kevin froze. He’d heard footsteps from the communications trench off to his left. The North Koreans had left sentries behind. His left hand fumbled for the 9mm Army-issue pistol holstered at his waist. It wasn’t there. He looked around frantically and saw the Beretta lying in the muck by Pierce’s body. Oh, shit.

  He heard the footsteps again, closer this time. Kevin tensed. There wasn’t time to run. He’d have to try taking the North Korean with his bare hands. He felt a wild urge to laugh and suppressed it. He’d barely passed his ROTC Unarmed Combat classes. What chance did he have now?

  He pressed back harder against the sandbags, willing himself invisible and knowing it wouldn’t work.

  Footsteps again, crunching in the frozen mud at the bottom of the trench. Out of his half-closed eyes, Kevin saw a man step out of the communications trench and start to turn toward him. Now!

  He lunged forward with a strangled yell, knowing he wouldn’t make it. The man was already turning, moving fast, bringing a rifle up toward him. Then Kevin saw his face and faltered.

  It was Rhee, a battered and bloody Rhee, but Rhee nonetheless. His South Korean liaison officer.

  He saw the recognition in the South Korean’s eyes at the same moment. The rifle slid out of Rhee’s hands.

  “You’re alive?” Rhee’s voice was hoarse, and Kevin saw the long, jagged cut running down the right side of his head. Dried blood streaked the South Korean lieutenant’s torn snowsuit.

  Kevin nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment.

  Both men stared at each other, panting, waiting for the fear-invoked adrenaline rush to subside.

  “What happened?” Kevin jerked his head back the way Rhee had come.

  Rhee shook his head and winced. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” He paused, obviously trying to remember something, and then continued in a hoarse whisper, “I was in my … my bunker. There was a flash. An explosion.”

  The South Korean looked around slowly at the bodies heaped around them. “When I came to … everything was like this … everyone dead.”

  He stared back at Kevin. “How did you survive?”

  Kevin laughed, a bitter, coughing laugh that turned into a choked-back sob. “Me? I chickened out. I played dead while they killed my men.”

  Rhee shook his head. “You must not blame yourself, Lieutenant. We were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers in a lightning attack. No one else could have done any better against such odds.”

  “I should have done something.” Kevin heard his voice break. “God, there must have been something I could have done.”

  “There was nothing to be done,” Rhee said flatly. “The communists outnumbered us by more than ten to one. They had absolute artillery superiority. We were short of ammunition and completely surrounded. The result was preordained. Victory was beyond our grasp.”

  Kevin turned away, feeling irrationally stubborn and oddly irritated by Rhee’s attempts to find excuses for him. “Nice try, Lieutenant Rhee, but I screwed up. End of story, okay? Forty men are dead because of me. Because I panicked.”

  The South Korean moved in front of him again. “You cannot dwell on it, Lieutenant. Your reaction was normal. Anybody else would have done the same.” He tapped his chest. “I would have done the same.”

  He leaned closer. “Come, Lieutenant Little. There is much that we must do if we are to get out of this. We may have been defeated, but we are both still able to fight on. And we shall avenge our men a hundred times over.”

  Kevin closed his eyes again and sank back against the sandbags. Avenge their men? They’d be lucky to survive the next couple of hours. Right now, he just wanted to sleep. Funny, the air felt warmer somehow.

  Hands grabbed him and shook him. Kevin opened his eyes to find Rhee’s face inches away. “Come on, Lieutenant! There is no time for self-pity. You’re alive. Now stay that way!”

  The South Korean’s voice hardened. “It’s going to take both of us to get out of this. If you want to fall apart, do it later, after we’re back in our own lines.”

  Kevin felt anger surge through him, driving back both the cold and sorrow. “Goddamn you, Rhee. Let go of me!” He pushed the South Korean’s hands away and straightened up.

  Still angry, he turned away and grabbed an M16 off the trench floor. He didn’t see the wan, sorrowing smile cross Rhee’s face and vanish.

  He turned back to the South Korean. “Okay, Mr. Rhee. Just what the fuck do you suggest we do to get out of this mess?”

  Rhee kept his face expressionless. “First, I think we must get off this hill. The communists have gone for now, but they’ll be back. You can be sure of that.”

  Kevin nodded, grudgingly accepting the sense of Rhee’s argument. “Okay. But we can’t move very far in daylight. We’d be spotted in minutes.”

  “True. But we can try to get into cover in a gully or a patch of brush. Somewhere out of sight and out of the way. After that?” The Korean shrugged and moved away from Kevin up onto a firing step to study the ground around Malibu West’s small, rocky hill.

  Kevin followed him.

  North Korean tanks and troop carriers were still pouring south over the open fields around them — the passage marked by the sound of rumbling engines and squealing, clanking treads. Canvas-sided trucks followed, bouncing and lurching across the torn, roadless ground.

  Suddenly sunlight flashed off a canopy as a jet roared low over them and then dropped even lower, screaming west toward the closest North Korean column. The plane pulled up sharply and banked as its bombs found their targets. A pair of trucks disappeared in searing, orange-red explosions.

  The jet dived again for the safety of the hills and vanished, pursued by streams of tracers and by airbursts from larger-caliber antiaircraft guns. Oily smoke from the flaming trucks billowed into the sky above the North Korean column, but other trucks and tanks were already detouring around them — still driving south.

  Kevin and Rhee slid back down to the bottom of the trench. Kevin raised an eyebrow at the South Korean, his question silent but clear. Well? Which way should they go?

  Rhee jerked a thumb to the southeast, and Kevin nodded his agreement. There’d been fewer North Korean troops visible in that direction.

  The two men grabbed their weapons and hauled themselves over the lip of the trench, staying low. Then they crawled down the hill to the southeast, looking for somewhere to lie hidden until the sun went down.

  Malibu West lay abandoned behind them.

  DECEMBER 26 — SOUTHEAST OF MALIBU WEST, SOUTH OF THE DMZ

  Kevin clutched his M16 tighter and crouched lower in the snow-choked ditch, scanning the darkness. Where was Rhee?

  The South Korean had gone on ahead nearly ten minutes ago to scout out the little village and side road their maps showed right ahead beyond the small rise to his front. What was keeping him?

  Kevin knew that he and Rhee had been lucky so far. They’d lain undetected in a clump of dead brush through the rest of Christmas Day while a North Korean assault column rumbled south just a few hundred meters away. Once night had fallen,
they’d wriggled out of the brush and jogged southeast, guiding themselves by Rhee’s compass and by the bright flashes of the North Korean guns still firing from beyond the DMZ.

  Late at night, clouds had rolled in from the north, covering the sky and raising the temperature enough for a light snow to begin falling, settling in over the whole battlefront. They’d welcomed both the relative warmth and the cover from prying eyes it provided.

  Now, though, the snow was a hindrance. Fast-falling flakes made it almost impossible to see anything more than a few meters away. Kevin peered out into the swirling darkness, alert for the slightest sound or sign of movement.

  Snow crunched somewhere off to the right. Kevin twisted toward the sound, his fingers seeking the M16’s safety.

  “Little?” Rhee’s voice sounded even more hoarse and strained than it had before.

  “Here.”

  Rhee dropped down into the ditch beside him.

  “Well?”

  “We can cross through the village safely enough. There’s no one there to …” Rhee faltered for a second and then went on, “Come, you’ll have to see it for yourself, and we have no time to waste.”

  The Korean lieutenant clambered out of the ditch and moved off into the night. Kevin followed.

  He understood what Rhee meant when they reached the outskirts of the lifeless village. A North Korean tank column must have rolled right through the middle of the place, machine guns blazing. The killing had been indiscriminate, wanton.

  Old men, women, and children lay scattered in and around their wrecked homes, cut down without reason or pity. The new-fallen snow mercifully covered most of the torn bodies and hid much of the horror.

  But not all of it. Kevin’s face tightened when he saw the huddled figures of a mother and her three children lying still against the bullet-riddled wall of the village shrine. Bastards. They’d pay for this. And for his men.

  He shook Rhee’s shoulder, pulling the Korean lieutenant away from the nightmare around them. They had meant to look for food, but all he could think of was leaving this place. Rhee wiped the tears from his face and led the way out of the village into the rice paddies and orchards beyond.

  They had to find a place to hide before the sun came up. Artillery continued to thunder off to the north.

  NEAR TUIL, SOUTH KOREA

  The North Korean company commander watched impatiently as his crews stripped the camouflage away from their T-55 tanks. It was all taking too long for his taste. The sun would be up in a matter of minutes, and he’d wanted to be on the way well before first light.

  The North Korean captain frowned. If he’d had his way they would never have stopped for the night. His T-55s had infrared searchlights mounted beside their 100-millimeter guns. They could have pressed the attack onward through the darkness and snow. And he was quite sure that kind of unrelenting pressure would have cracked the imperialist defenses ahead of them wide open.

  The captain’s lip curled. But no, his battalion commander had explained, the infantry units accompanying the attack were exhausted. They had to rest. They would all drive on together first thing in the morning.

  Well, screw the infantry. Those damned footslogging weaklings had given the fascists a four-hour respite. Four hours to strengthen their defenses, resupply, and rest. Now he and his men would have to pay a heavier price in blood and burned-out tanks to make the same gains they could have made with relative ease in the night.

  To top everything off, his battalion commander had forbidden anyone to bivouac in the small village they’d shot up. The fool had been afraid the imperialist artillery batteries might have the area zeroed-in. So instead of warming themselves inside captured houses, he and his men had shivered sleepless inside their tanks.

  He slapped the side of the turret in frustration. “Come on, you puling swine. Move!”

  His men raced even faster to fold and stow their white camouflage nets. Their company commander’s morning temper tantrums were infamous. All his urgings, however, couldn’t do much to speed the moment when they could start turning over their T-55s’ powerful, water-cooled diesel engines.

  And when the sun rose blood-red, only five of the company’s eight remaining tanks had their diesels revving at full throttle.

  The captain muttered angrily to himself as he waited for the other tank commanders to get their armored behemoths underway. His breath steamed in the frozen air. The temperature was dropping again.

  Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he turned, squinting painfully into the rising sun. Nothing. Nothing. There.

  He stood rooted in place for a moment, mesmerized by the oncoming shapes. Then he grabbed for the twin handles of the turret-mounted DShK-38 heavy machine gun and bellowed, “Air raid warning — EAST!”

  BLUE DRAGON FLIGHT, 25TH SQUADRON, ROK AIR FORCE

  Major Chon of the South Korean Air Force smiled beneath his oxygen mask as his American-built A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted its ugly nose above the ridgeline and dropped back down in a gentle dive toward the ice-covered rice paddies below.

  He glanced quickly right and left. The three other planes of his flight were pacing him, flying in a line-abreast formation to maximize their chances of sighting a worthwhile ground target.

  Chon smiled again. This was more like it. Much better than yesterday.

  The first day of the war had been a disaster for the ROK’s lone A-10 ground attack squadron. Right at the start, North Korean commandos had crash-landed right on Yanggu’s runways and fanned out across the field, shooting up and grenading barracks, maintenance shops, a Vulcan antiaircraft battery, and the nearest I-Hawk SAM battery. They’d inflicted heavy casualties and damage before Air Force security troops had killed them.

  The air raid that followed had been even worse. The 25th’s A-10s were still taxiing out when a squadron of MiG-23s roared in out of the mountains — laying a string of concrete-piercing bombs across the now-defenseless base and its aircraft shelters. The bombs had turned three of the squadron’s twelve planes into flaming wrecks and had grounded the rest until the base’s shattered runways could be repaired.

  That was bad enough. But then the Air Force staff gurus in Seoul had given first priority to the ROK’s fighter and air defense squadrons. As a result, specialized runway repair crews hadn’t arrived at Yanggu until late in the day — near dark. And by then the crews had been so exhausted that it had taken nearly six hours to fill in the holes and restore the runways to operational status.

  That was all in the past now, though, and Chon expected today’s tank-killing missions to erase the stain on his squadron’s honor. They’d been ordered up into the predawn gray to hunt down enemy armored units that had been spotted late yesterday moving into overrun some of the few troops still holding firm against the North Korean onslaught.

  Chon scanned the low, undulating ground rushing toward him. Small, scattered clumps of trees, a snow-covered road and rice paddies, houses on the horizon — a tiny village. Ah. There they were. He spotted clouds of steam and exhaust smoke rising near the village where a cluster of T-55 tanks and other armored vehicles were gunning their engines to dispel the growing cold.

  He broke radio silence. “Blue Dragon flight, this is Lead. Target at two o’clock. Attack in sequence.”

  Chon banked right and dropped lower, lining up for a quick strafing run. The other three A-10s followed suit. He thumbed a switch on the stick, setting the plane’s internal decoy dispenser system to AUTOMATIC. NOW the A-10 would pop an IR decoy flare every couple of seconds through his attack run. With luck, any heat-seeking SAMs fired at him would be attracted to the flow of fast-burning magnesium flares instead.

  The South Korean major settled his thumb back on the trigger for the plane’s GAU-8 30mm rotary cannon and watched the cluster of enemy tanks and APCs grow larger in his HUD’s target reticule. His thumb tensed, waiting.

  NEAR TUIL, SOUTH KOREA

  Lying half-hidden in a nearby drainage ditch, Kevin Little and R
hee watched in amazed relief as the first dark-green, flat-winged A-10 screamed down out of the sky toward the North Korean tanks, trailing an incandescent stream of slowly falling flares.

  They’d taken shelter in the ditch early in the morning, too punch-drunk to spot the camouflaged T-55 company just a hundred meters ahead. When the tank engines had coughed to life, each had known they’d had it. Their improvised hiding place was right on the enemy’s line of march, and the North Koreans couldn’t possibly miss them once the tanks started rolling.

  The A-10 fired and its nose disappeared in a blaze of light as it threw a hail of heavy, depleted-uranium slugs toward its targets.

  The slugs vaporized snow and threw up fountains of new-made mud in a straight line pointing right at the parked T-55s. Then the bullet stream slammed into the thin top armor of the first tank, slashed through steel, and fireballed it — throwing burning diesel fuel and armor fragments high into the air. A second tank exploded, and a third sat lifeless and immobile, shredded from end to end.

  The A-10 roared overhead, picking up speed as its twin turbofans went to maximum thrust. Its companions came in close behind, completing the slaughter. More North Korean tanks and APCs were ripped apart.

  Kevin’s eyes followed the lead plane pulling up out of its strafing run. As it raced low over a white-cloaked orchard, a streak of orange flame leapt out from among the dead trees — darting after the Thunderbolt. Christ, North Korean infantry must be bivouacked in the grove, he thought, and one of them had fired a hand-held SAM to try to avenge his tank-driving comrades.

  Aware of the oncoming missile, the A-10 suddenly jinked hard left, climbed sharply to clear a low ridge, and spewed a new cluster of flares. The SAM veered off, closing on one of the decoys.