by Ian Slater
The captain had straightened out the drag line. “If one of our bombs lands on French soil, France could be at war with us overnight,” he said, turning, suddenly hearing the drag tackle go taut. But it was only one line, the others still loose. He sat back on the seat behind the steering wheel of the plywood boat and put it on “idle,” letting the current push them — the way it would push anything else.
“You think the French capitalists are that stupid?” challenged the youth. “To let a stray bomb bring them to war? No, Comrade. The French are not idiots. If you bombed a whole French city, they would not come in — they would say it was a mistake. They are waiting like the giraffes, the French.”
“Giraffes?”
“Yes… scavengers… you know.”
“You mean hyenas!” laughed the old man. “Giraffes!”
“Whatever you call them,” the youth replied angrily.
“And what if we bombed Paris?” asked the old man. He saw the lines go taut. “Hey then, Comrade? What if Paris was bombed?”
“Paris is different,” conceded the younger man. “That’s quite another matter.”
When they finally found the dead pilot and pulled him aboard, they discovered the air bag, what the “terrorist fliers” called a “Mae West,” had a small tear in it. They delivered the Australian’s body to headquarters in the old Karl Marx Allee and were cheered by some former East Berliners, including several of the Turkish migrant workers unable to go back home but enraged nevertheless by the NATO bombing. The military commander, flanked by Volkspolizei, personally came out to congratulate the people’s patrol.
As they were leaving, the crewman who had been arguing with the people’s captain noticed a police corporal handing the older man what looked like a voucher of some kind. Now he understood why the people’s captain had been so determined to find the flier. Marx was right, he said to the boy. Money is a corrupting force. Nevertheless, if the party had offered a reward—
He went up to the captain and demanded his share, right there and then. And got it.
In Lübars, on the city’s northern outskirts, a gaping bomb crater thirty yards wide was still steaming with burning debris near the remains of the two four-story apartment blocks. The two elderly couples befriended by Leonhard Meir, who was out at the time, had been in one of the apartments when the six Canberra bombers struck.
With an efficiency they were famous for, the Berliners immediately began to clear the rubble, looking for survivors, moving as quickly as caution would allow around the debris, especially a staircase teetering near the edge of the crater, though it was quite clear they did not expect to find anyone who would be easily identifiable. The strangled horn siren of the Volkspolizei put an end to the clearance, however, as police arrived, quickly cordoned off the area for “investigation.”
“Investigation of what?” asked an elderly Berliner, his wife still shaking but with presence of mind enough to pull him away.
“Investigation of crimes against the state!” answered the policeman.
The old man Berliner threw his hands up in disgust. “Crimes against the state? Against those Russian pigs, you mean. Don’t forget Moscow in your investigations, Kamerad!”
“Silence!” shouted the policeman, and despite the death and destruction that had come upon them like a cyclone, several people began laughing, others joining in, mocking the official’s officiousness. Several small boys were playing war, running around the crater and the cordoned-off debris, one with a plane in his hand. It was an American F-15, ghost gray with U.S. Air Force insignia.
“Whose child is that?” demanded the policeman.
“Mine,” said a woman rather timidly.
“Stop him. It is not permitted.”
“What isn’t?” cut in the old man again.
“Antisocial behavior,” answered the Volkspolizei.
The old man spread his hands again, staring at the sky, his faded coat ballooning about him like a clown. “You talk of antisocial behavior!” He pointed angrily at the crater. “You are the cause of this! You — you fascist!”
The Volkspolizei took him away, his wife screaming as he was hustled inside the small Volga sedan.
In the second apartment that had been split open as if struck by an enormous ax, several suites were open to the air like a doll’s house, a body visible and still near the lip of the third floor. And, astonishingly to most of the onlookers, a radio was blaring with news reports of the “brüderlicher Hilfskrieg”—the “fraternal war of assistance”—the boys around the crater fighting now over who would be Bomber-mannschaft, “bomber crew,” and who AA-Flak, “AA battery commander.”
After a while another Volkspolizei returned and checked off names against those on record as having lived in the two apartment blocks. They managed to identify some by wedding rings, medical bands, odd podiatric shoes, and so forth. There were still eleven people unaccounted for, among them the temporary permit holder, Leonhard Meir.
By nightfall Meir had decided to try again to escape from Berlin. At first he felt somehow responsible for the old couples’ death, for not having been there with them, for having left, all of them in a bad temper. But soon guilt gave way to his determination to reach the west. He had hatched the plan on the way back from his work after having seen several dead Stasi-led AA battery crews near Tegel Forest. All that remained of one battery after a direct hit from one of the Canberras’ iron bombs was strips of flesh dangling from tree branches like sodden toilet paper. But nearby, the headless corpse of one man was still sitting upright in the sidecar of an army motorcycle, the dark blue boiler suit and AA armband the man had been wearing bloodied and lacerated by shrapnel. Meir also noticed that several other corpses nearby which were not burned and were dressed in the boiler suits looked as if they were in their fifties — about his age.
Racing against what he knew would be the imminent arrival of the ambulances, their Klaxons wailing in the distance, Meir quickly stripped a boiler suit from one of the corpses, snatched up one of the helmets strewn about the edge of the wood, and made his way over to the motorcycle. He kicked the starter pedal. Nothing. He kicked again and again until he was exhausted, then gave it what he told himself would be his last try. The bike coughed and promptly died. “Shit!”
Now he could hear a car, perhaps a hundred yards or so away down by the lake, and voices coming toward him. He ran back to the gutted battery and into the wood. The voices receded, going farther down the lake. Back at the bike, Meir kicked the starter again. It spluttered, coughed, and rattled to life. He unscrewed the petrol cap and stuck his finger in it. It felt ice-cold. Full tank. He had no excuse — it was either now or never. A dash for freedom down the Corridor or wait. Would the Allies come? Or would it be slow starvation in the occupied sector? No one knew. He let the engine die. If stopped by the GDR Polizei or the Stasi—with nothing but his “enemy alien” card, it would mean torture and interrogation.
He hesitated, got off the bike, moved around, looking for a piece of ID, finding an identification card on one of the dead. The card’s photo, even in the pale, shimmering moonlight over the lake, looked nothing like him. Entscheide doch, Meir! — ”Make up your mind, Meir!”—he told himself. Brio! Do it with brio! He kicked the starter pedal again and, as it gained power with a throaty roar, switched on the slit-eye headlamp and tightened the chin strap of the AA helmet. Slipping the bike into gear, easing out the clutch, he sped over the grass down toward the lakeside road and from there headed out for the autobahn, singing, his voice rising, though drowned by the noise of the bike and sidecar, “La Donna e Mobile” louder and louder, trying to drown the fear that kept telling him to turn back, a heavy drone of Russian bombers overhead. He had strapped on a holstered gun but had absolutely no idea how to use it, wondering if it had a safety catch or not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On the other side of the world, a flooded green rice paddy below, outside Munsan, heading north, though still five miles south of what
used to be the 150-mile-long DMZ between North and South Korea, the loud rotor slap of the Seventh U.S. Army Cavalry choppers could be heard above eight escorting Cobras. The latter’s chin turrets, whose chain machine guns were slaved to the pilot’s helmet eyepiece, kept moving side to side, up and down, like a mosquito’s proboscis.
The usual thin head-on silhouettes of the Cobras were fattened this day by the thirty-eight rockets on each side of the stubby wings, giving the eight choppers a bug-eyed appearance, their tails higher than their bodies. Each of the 304 rockets was armed with a fragmentation head to provide covering scattering-shrapnel fire for the ten Hueys following and the sixty soldiers of the air cavalry aboard them. Their task was to steal the southern end of what was hoped would be a successful encircling movement against a company of North Korean regulars that had ambushed a U.S.-ROK convoy the previous night en route to Kaesong, north of the old DMZ.
All across the Korean peninsula, 120 miles wide at this point, hundreds of such missions continued to press home the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the NKA, a counterattack made possible by Gen. Douglas Freeman’s daring hit-and-run airborne attack against the North Korean capital. Like David Brentwood and many others who had fought and been decorated for the raid that stunned the world and bought valuable time for the fleeing U.S.-ROK forces, General Freeman was no longer in Korea. On leave after undergoing a violent allergic reaction to a tetanus shot, Freeman had, despite his protest, been taken off the active list for some weeks, and now there was concern that without him, the counteroffensive in Korea would bog down.
In the lead Huey, Major Tae, liaison ROK-U.S. officer for the Seventh Cavalry, a man whom Freeman had never met but who had been among the first to see action on the DMZ, was gripping the open door’s edge so tightly, his knuckles were white. The sound of 152 smoke-tailed rockets from the Cobras near him, streaking toward the scrubby side of the paddy, along with the howling rumble of the twin chin turret guns, each gun spraying out 550 rounds of 7.76-millimeter per minute into the scrub, was so loud that even though Tae was plugged in to the Huey’s intercom, he had difficulty hearing the pilot telling him and the six American cavalrymen in the chopper that they were about to put down on the south side of a long east-west irrigation ditch.
Some of the cavalrymen in the chopper, also veterans of the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the invading North Korean army, took no notice of Tae, his eyes watering with the wind, his viselike grip on the doorframe nothing more to them than confirmation that the South Korean major was as apprehensive as they were. The truth, however, was much different.
Before the war, Tae, an intelligence officer in the ROK, had conformed exactly to the ideals of West Point. A gentleman in every sense, he seemed to some more American than the Americans, despite his short, slim build. Indeed, Tae, though not nearly as widely known as Freeman and not known in America at all, had become something of a legendary figure throughout the U.S. Army in Korea. Interrogating the usual peacetime quota of would-be NKA infiltrators who had been captured while trying to slip into the South, Tae, who forbade torture of any kind, was struck not by anything the NKA prisoners said but by the fact that the chopsticks found in the NKA infiltrators’ kits were shorter — fourteen inches long rather than the standard seventeen. From this he had deduced that the North Korean army, in a country with an acute shortage of timber, was stockpiling wood. In a calculation that merely amused the U.S.-ROK headquarters in Seoul and made no sense to the U.S. officers born and bred in a throwaway consumer society, Tae had predicated that the North’s saving in wood, given the millions of chopsticks used, was probably going to the manufacture of chiges. These were the NKA militia’s famed A-frame backpacks, on which they carried all their ammunition and food, including the shoulder roll of ground pea, millet seed, and rice powder, which, mixed with water, would sustain them and which made the North Korean regular much more self-sufficient than the more elaborately supplied-from-the-rear U.S.-ROK forces.
Despite his prediction of an impending invasion of the South by the North in August, Tae’s warning was not heeded, in the main because an invasion during the monsoon was a no-no in any self-respecting army manual. Even the most junior U.S.-ROK officer knew that your heavy armor would simply bog down in the rains.
In the early hours of August 16, the morning following the South’s annual Independence Day celebrations, the NKA had struck, overwhelming the U.S.-ROK forces all along the line, the NKA’s light, Soviet-made fourteen-ton PT-76 tanks able to move much faster and with more maneuverability than the much heavier and mud-bound fifty-five-ton American M-1s.
Behind the armor, tens of thousands of NKA regulars came pouring out of the tunnels that had been painstakingly dug under the DMZ over several years during North Korean and U.S.-ROK maneuvers when normally sensitive ground noise sensors were rendered useless by the smothering noise of the maneuvers themselves. The United States had found three tunnels in the 1970s and cemented them up, with machine guns at each exit, but the NKA had dug others, which had gone undetected. Many of their troops streamed out in a massive feint that successfully engaged the bulk of the U.S.-ROK forces on the DMZ. This allowed the NKA’s famous Fourth Armored Division, whose forebears had spearheaded the NKA invasion of the South in 1950, to make an end run, breaking through down the Uijongbu Corridor, only eleven miles north of Seoul. Most of the long-standing U.S.-ROK booby traps on the eleven-mile stretch to Seoul had been neutralized by NKA commando teams, while other widespread and synchronized sabotage by “in place” NKA cells effectively gutted the crucial American chopper and fighter bases in the South.
In the face of the NKA’s byorak kongkyok— “lightning wars”—U.S.-ROK communications in a shambles from the sabotage, there had been panic in both the American and South Korean regiments. On the DMZ, Tae had fought bravely in his intelligence headquarters outside Panmunjom, but with the NKA having encircled him and threatening to annihilate everyone in the area unless he surrendered, Tae had been captured.
But if the NKA’s General Kim had succeeded in wreaking a humiliating defeat upon the Americans, his army was about to receive a rude shock. Douglas Freeman, his career looking as if it was about to be eclipsed by the younger men who had inherited the chronic instability of the post-Gorbachev world, devised and led a raid on Pyongyang. Confounding all military logic with a nighttime air cavalry attack on the North Korean capital launched from F-14-escorted choppers off carriers in the Sea of Japan, Freeman’s raid cut the NKA’s overextended supply line to the South. In doing so, Freeman bought precious time for reinforcements from Japan to reach the embattled U.S. and ROK forces, who, their backs to the sea, were fighting a bitter retreat along a fan-shaped perimeter running east-west for eighty-three miles from Pusan to Yosu on Korea’s south coast. Once reinforced and regrouped with an infusion of the fresh troops from bases on Japan’s west coast, the American army and the ROK were soon able to launch a counterattack over the next seven weeks during which they had retaken Seoul and crossed the DMZ, now entering the area around Kaesong where the U.S.-ROK overnight convoy had been attacked.
But while Freeman’s daring attack had electrified the world, as had Doolittle’s on Japan in 1941, and made it possible for the U.S.-ROK forces to retake the DMZ, the American troops that liberated the Uijongbu POW camps and set the then emaciated Tae free had come too late for Tae’s family. His wife and eight-year-old son had been strafed and killed, his nineteen-year-old daughter, Mi-ja, captured, betrayed by a boyfriend, Jung-hyun, who, an active member of the SFR— Students for Reunification — had talked her into the huge student demonstrations against the Americans that had preceded the NKA invasion. Jung-hyun, like so many from the SFR, was now believed by the U.S.-ROK intelligence to be an NKA officer somewhere in the North.
* * *
Now, amid the roar of battle, looking down on the wind-flattened green of the rice paddy, Tae was braced to jump but knew he must wait — watching long, dense trails of white smoke rising from where the Cobra esco
rts had dropped smoke canisters to curtain off the paddy from the thick scrub on the northern side of the east-west ditch. The scrub was erupting with dust from the fragmentation rockets and tracer from the 7.76-millimeter, so powerful, it was cutting saplings clean through, branches trembling, then flung to the ground, creating more dust, on fire and adding to the smoke.
Tae lifted his squad automatic weapon and waved the six other men to follow him out. Heads lowered, rivulets of water spreading away from them through the violently shivering grass, the men spread out, the splashing sound of their canvas-topped boots lost amid the whistle of bullets and machine-gun fire coming from beyond the scrub through the smoke screen, the shuffling noise of the big 120-millimeter mortar adding to the scream of the Hueys’ engines as the choppers hovered a foot or so from the ground while they unloaded, bullets thwacking into the fuselage. But Tae was unafraid, already well ahead of the squad, traversing the ditch and, to the other squad members’ astonishment, going straight over its protective wall into the thick smoke cover.
“Jesus!” shouted one of the air cavalrymen. “He’s crazy!”
The soldier was right. Something had happened to Tae the night that the North Korean major had brought in what he called a soltuk— “inducement”—for Tae to reveal the names of the top three KCIA counterinsurgency chiefs in the Pusan-Yosu region.
Tae had withstood the initial beatings, steeled himself enough to get through the unrelieved panic of the NKA soldiers holding him down, one of them stuffing a filthy rag, stinking of gasoline, into his mouth, pushing him underwater, then tying him to a chair, blindfolding him, suddenly tipping the chair back, catching it, setting it upright, tipping it back again to increase the panic. And men, as four men held him, another taking the pliers to his testicles. But his last torture had its own answer — a half second after they began, he blacked out. They’d left him for two days — back in his cell — giving him plenty of time to think about the pain next time, his strength fading, his only food a scum-rimmed rice cup of watery soup, a small piece of rancid meat flung into it. It was white and they told him it was fish, but he knew it wasn’t, having seen dozens of rats scampering through the cells and feeling them scuttling over his face and stomach during the night. When they brought him into the tent the third day, the major had asked him if he had enjoyed the meal. Tae, his arms pulled back and pinned by the guard, looked at the NKA major and, with his voice hissing through the broken teeth and raspy from dehydration, replied, “Very much. Thank you.”
