by Ian Slater
The men on the flanks were resting on the slope up from the ditch when they heard the spitting of light machine-gun fire. Hitting the ground, no one knew where it was coming from until two cavalrymen dropped in the paddy fifty yards behind them, the high waterspouts dancing amid the stalks of rice. The Americans around Tae were unable to return the NKA fire for fear of hitting their own men in the paddy, and it wasn’t until two more Americans had been killed in the paddy and an NKA was seen floating that the firing ceased.
Seeing two of his men badly wounded, staggering from the rice field, the air cavalry lieutenant was on the PRC-25, calling in a Medevac chopper. Major Tae ordered the others into a tighter defensive perimeter. There was a scream off to his left, three men hit by a “Malay whip,” a long, six-inch-thick dead log rigged to a trip wire, slamming down like a swing trapeze. Two men were killed outright, the other, his back broken, screaming in agony — someone yelling at him to shut up, the lieutenant pulling a violet flare, its purple smoke designating the landing zone for the chopper and also alerting any NKA nearby to the Americans’ position.
It was then that Tae saw two badly burned NKA, fifty to sixty yards away, crawling into unburned brush, a whiff of burnt flesh and wood smoke in the air. One of them tried to turn and fire what looked like an AK-47, but either he was out of ammunition or the gun jammed. The other NKA, all but naked, save the singed rags of what had been a drab, olive-colored uniform, kept crawling toward the brush.
The cavalry sergeant caught up with him, and the man, though beaten, was staring up, eyes alive with hatred, his breathing labored and wheezy, eyebrows gone and a gellike pus where napalm had eaten into his left thigh. But there was no mistake, and Tae recognized him at once. Jung-hyun— his daughter’s onetime boyfriend and SFR activist who’d turned on his own country.
The cavalry lieutenant could tell at one glance that Tae had found his man. “About time, eh, Major?”
If Tae heard, he gave no indication, but while the lieutenant was preoccupied with organizing covering fire for the incoming Medevac, Tae handed his squad weapon to the sergeant, then, bending down, drew his knife from its leg sheath. The chopper was coining in, sporadic NKA fire erupting from the bush. “Where is Mi-ja?”
Jung-hyun refused to answer. Tae grabbed Jung’s tattered collar, bringing his head close to the blade. Once more he saw his daughter across the interrogation room — the smell of her perfume, and the rape as real to him as if it were happening now. And for her he could not kill Jung. As he stood up in the stinging dust of the Medevac chopper, whose rotors were beating the air into a maelstrom about him, Tae’s anger at his inability to do that for which he had stayed alive overwhelmed him and he kicked Jung in the side. Jung’s body rolled. There was an explosion — Tae’s body seemed to jump, sending him crashing into the sergeant, the grenade’s shrapnel killing the sergeant outright and mangling Tae’s feet, his boots, shredded with splintered bone, streaming blood.
* * *
In the American camp south at Uijongbu, the instructors used it as an example of how an officer, Tae, well trained and knowledgeable about booby traps, had, in a case of what the instructor called “emotional overload,” forgotten the very thing he’d just told a U.S. air cavalryman a few minutes before: “Never move close in to an NKA body, live or dead.” One of the oldest NKA tricks in the book was to pull a grenade’s pin and shove it under the weight of your body. As soon as you’re moved — down goes the striker. “Boom!”
Had it not been for the Medevac getting Tae to a field hospital within half an hour, said the instructor, the ROK major would have lost his life rather than having to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
“Would have been better off,” said one of the pupils.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“ SCHNELL!”- “QUICKLY!” shouted one of the Stasi guards. The POW column had slowed momentarily while a salvo of high-explosive shells whistled overhead, every one of the British and American soldiers hitting the forest floor. The guard was waving an AKM submachine gun, its black folding butt and tangent sight a stark contrast to the falling snow. The powder snow had stopped for a while over the northernmost part of the Teutoburger Wald, and now, with the temperature only slightly above freezing, the flakes were big and damp, disappearing on contact into the blankets that were being worn as capes by many in the column who had had their uniforms taken by the SPETS.
Now, with other prisoners being picked up along the way, the British and American column being force-marched to Gobfeld, eighteen miles north of Bielefeld and forty miles southwest of Hannover, had swelled to more than three hundred men. As much as the prisoners resented the bullying guards, most of them, like David, realized that ironically, in the Russian’s haste to move the POWs out of the way of their advancing echelons of armor-led troops and motorized regiments, the Stasi guards were in fact keeping some Allied prisoners alive who would have otherwise died from hypothermia had they been allowed to stop for any length of time.
Even so, the cockney’s earlier comment to David Brentwood and Waite that they were all “for the high jump “—execution-made the prisoners reluctant to keep up the punishing pace. “Hope the bastard that’s got my uniform is warm,” complained a U.S. engineer. “I’m sure as hell not.”
“Least you’ve got your boots, mate,” said Fred Waite, the British private who had teamed up with David Brentwood. “Least your twinkies won’t fell off.”
“Speak for yourself. Anyway—”
“Schweig dock!” yelled a guard.
“Shut up your fucking self,” said Waite, turning to Brentwood, his breath steaming the air. “That Kraut’s getting on my tit.”
Brentwood said nothing, glancing anxiously about as another stream of POWs, thirty or so Americans, up ahead were being melded into the main column heading for Gobfeld. For a moment David thought he recognized Thelman, but the main POW stream quickly swallowed up the new additions before Brentwood could know for sure. Dizzy, like so many of the other prisoners, from lack of food and sleep, and the effects of the cold, David found it necessary to muster all his strength merely to keep going in the column. Nevertheless, he tried to increase his pace.
“Easy, Davey, old son,” cautioned Waite, his breath no longer visible in the air, his body losing the battle. “Not the World Cup, you know.”
“Thought I saw a buddy of mine,” answered David.
“Yes, well relax. Husband your energy, old son. That’s the—” Waite wanted to say “ticket” but couldn’t go on, gasping for air like an exhausted swimmer. Brentwood took the Englishman’s left arm and draped it about his shoulder, taking his weight. “You okay, Fred?”
“No.”
“Schnell! Schnell!” one of the guards yelled, soon joined by several others shouting at the stragglers on the flanks. Brentwood heard the shouts of an altercation several yards behind them. The snow muffled the tramp of the column, and the voices seemed unusually loud, bouncing off the pine trees. “Schnell!” the guard kept shouting. Brentwood saw it was the Englishman with the badly injured eye. The bandage had slipped down from his eye, the blood now a dark plum color against the snow. The man was sitting on a stump, winding up the bandage and telling the guard to “stuff it!”
Several prisoners stopped, including David, and within seconds it was looking ugly; a feldwebel was running down the side of the column, with two other guards trying to keep up with him, other guards yelling for prisoners to stay in column, prisoners retorting, some of them derisively clapping the Stasi guards. “Run, girls! Run, you sausage guts!”
The feldwebel stopped by the Englishman, drew his pistol, and ordered the man to get up. The Englishman refused and the feldwebel shot him. There was silence, then a bulge of prisoners forming around the dead Englishman, his bandage fallen, like a streamer in the snow. Guards either side of the feldwebel held cocked Sudayev submachine guns. Suddenly David saw Thelman fifty yards ahead of him, also looking back at what was going on. The tension hung in the air
like icicles. The feldwebel shouted and a few prisoners shuffled forward, the outrage still thick in the air, but the submachine guns were staring the prisoners down at point-blank range. “Any soldiers stopping,” shouted the feldwebel, “will be shot. You understand!”
“Christ—” said Waite, the bottom seeming to drop out from what David had thought was the Englishman’s reservoir of high morale. “I’m — I’m for the knackers,” confessed Waite. “Like bloody running downhill — once you slow down, you’re buggered.”
David had tried to get Thelman’s attention, but he had disappeared into the column in front of a tall flyer, one of the glider pilots who’d overshot Munster, coming down too close to the Teutoburger Wald.
As the POW column emerged from the wood a few miles south of Gobfeld, the prisoners were surprised to see a convoy with ten olive-green army trucks with Russian markings on the rear bumper.
“Bloody ‘ell,” said Waite, his teeth chattering, as they were ordered aboard the trucks. “This is more like it.”
“Yeah?” came a doubting voice from behind. “Where are they taking us?”
“If they wanted to do us in, mate,” said another Englishman, “they could have done it in the woods.”
The doubting voice was silenced, but Waite himself gave David a very cool, practical reason why the woods wouldn’t have been a place of execution. “Not enough open space to bury three hundred of us, unless they used ‘dozers.” As if to underscore his point, Waite now remarked on the fact that they were loading the dead Englishman onto one of the trucks. “No evidence,” said Waite.
“Take cover!” shouted one of the prisoners. Three Thunderbolts, terrifyingly close to the ground, swept out of the cloud above the trees, a short burst from the lead Gau cannon, its rotary barrel spewing a narrow cone of thirty-millimeter tracer, exploding three trucks in less than two seconds. The men aboard the trucks, half of them on fire, dropped from the tailgates, rolling in the snow at the roadside.
The other two Thunderbolts, pilots so near, they were plainly visible as they whooshed by, withheld their fire the moment they recognized Allied POWs waving them off-NATO’s Thunderbolts’ supply of thirty-millimeter tank-killing ammunition dangerously low due to the heavy convoy losses.
The Stasi guards, short of trucks now, were already quickly selecting the fittest of those who had survived, loading them onto the other vehicles. David Brentwood and Waite, already on one of the other trucks in the middle of the column, found themselves squashed hard against the vehicle’s cabin by the press of newcomers.
“Stumble-Ass!” It was Thelman, face lighting up the moment he spotted Brentwood.
“Schweig dock!” shouted one of the four guards assigned to the truck, but in the confusion, no one took any notice.
“Buddy of mine,” explained David, grinning for the first time in the last seventy-six hours. “We were at Parris Island together. Same DI. Called me ‘Stumble-Ass’—Thelman ‘Thelma.’ He was a son of a bitch.”
“Charming,” said a cultured English voice.
When they reached Gobfeld, the convoy roared on through the town.
“Thought someone said we were stopping here.”
“You’ve been misinformed, old boy,” came the English voice. “We’re going to a holiday camp in Stadthagen.”
“Where’s that?”
“Seven miles farther on, I believe.”
As the truck bumped its way north over the artillery-scored road, snow started falling again, but this time more densely than before.
“What’s in Stadthagen, Fritz?” asked one of the Americans. The guard said nothing. “Anyone speak Kraut?” asked someone else. The cultured English voice, which Brentwood could now see belonged to a junior lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, owned up to knowing “a few words” of German. In fact, he was fluent, and the rest of the men fell silent so that he could talk to the guard, but it was still difficult to hear above the high whine and rattle of the convoy.
“He says,” the Englishman reported to his eager audience, “that there are no girls in Stadthagen and that it will be hard work.”
“What will be?”
The Englishman asked the guard to be more specific. “He says there is a ‘store’ there. A very big store.”
“Macy’s?” suggested Thelman.
“Harrods?” said another.
David was pleased to see the morale picking up now that they were off their feet, at least for a while, and in the relative warmth of the truck, even if they were destined to work hard at whatever it was in Stadthagen.
“I think,” proffered the English engineer, “that he rather means stores. I should think he’s alluding to a prepo site of some kind. Did we have one at Stadthagen?” He looked about the truck.
“Yes,” answered a British lance corporal, wearing the insignia of RAF ground crew. “Ruddy great petrol dump.”
“Ah!” said the engineer. “Then, chaps, we’ll ‘roll out the barrel’!”
“And we’ll have a barrel of fun,” a few voices chimed in. But the hilarity collapsed beneath the rumble of more massed Soviet artillery than any of them had heard before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
In pitch darkness, flying low over the sea six hundred miles southeast of Mednyy Island, the smaller of the two windswept Komandorskiyes, or Commander Islands, Col. Sergei Marchenko’s attack wing of fourteen MiG-27 Flogger Ds, with three drop tanks apiece, were now turning due south toward Adak Island seventy miles away. With a jagged, rugged coastline and topography, the U.S. island, one of the Aleutians’ chain of forty-six volcanoes, looked large enough on the map, but in reality it was at no point more than twenty miles wide. Marchenko was glad they were on satellite navigation. At their attack speed, it wouldn’t take more than two minutes for the entire wing to pass over the island.
With almost half their fuel for the 1,553-mile round trip gone, they would have approximately five minutes over Adak Naval Station from the initial aiming point of the thirty-six-hundred-foot-high Mount Moffett. If all went well, they would drop over ninety-two thousand pounds of iron and laser-guided bombs on the remote American submarine base. A half hour later, Adak radar out, one thousand SPETS paratroopers, already in the air aboard seven Candid transports from both Mednyy and Beringa in the Komandorskiyes, would be chuted into the remains of Adak to take over the bomb-gutted submarine listening and provisioning base that threatened the entire Soviet east flank.
It would be strictly hit-and-run, with high losses expected. And though Sergei Marchenko’s wing would not run from a fight, the orders from STAVKA via Khabarovsk command were very specific. No aircraft were to be sacrificed in dogfights with either the advance U.S. carrier screen fighters or the relatively few American fighters on Adak. Dogfights usually meant going to afterburner, and fuel suddenly sucked up at twenty times the normal rate, leaving the Floggers with insufficient fuel to make the return journey.
To lend weight to STAVKA’s order, Sergei Marchenko, during engine start-up on Mednyy strip, had stressed that even if the enemy carrier Salt Lake City picked up the MiGs’ departure from the Komandorskiyes on satellite, the range to and from the American carrier meant that the danger of running low on fuel would be as much a problem for the Americans from the carrier battle group as it was for Marchenko’s wing. Though the American jets had greater ranges than their Soviet counterparts, the Americans had farther to come and could afford only a very short time over the Aleutians. This was particularly so given the fact that the Americans would most likely be drawn away from Adak by the feint of nine shorter-range but faster MiG Fishbeds now approaching Shemya four hundred miles west of Adak.
Hopefully all the enemy fighters between Adak and Shemya would be drawn in, the Americans logically assuming that as the prelude to any Soviet invasion of the Aleutians, the first Soviet target would be the massive early-warning radar arrays on Shemya, which was only 350 miles from the Kamchatka Peninsula ICBM sites.
* * *
Four hundred
miles east of Adak, one of the huge phased radar arrays on Shemya, looking like some great wedge of black cheese in the night, was picking up six surface vessels. Either big Japanese trawlers or possible hostiles, they were bearing 293 at a distance of 150 miles. Coming in behind them at five hundred feet were nine blips traveling at Mach 1.05. Undoubtedly fighters. To cover a possible invasion force? wondered Shemya’s CO.
There were other unidentified aircraft Shemya had been tracking, but they had been much slower, possibly a long-range reconnaissance sub-hunting force. In any case, they had now passed into Adak’s radar envelope well to the east. The CO quickly turned his attention back to the faster blips and the six ships. If it was an invasion force, it was a small one. On the other hand, if the ships were chopper and VTOL — vertical takeoff and landing — fighter carriers, it would constitute a major fleet attack.
The commanding officer, or “Gatekeeper,” as he was known because of Shemya’s strategic importance, was taking no chances. He ordered eight F-4 Phantoms aloft to intercept the suspected hostiles, withholding his fourteen much faster swing-wing F-111Fs in the event of other attacks that might be coming in on the deck, successfully evading his radar to the north, south, and west of him.
The thing that puzzled CO Shemya most was that if the Soviets were going to try to take out Shemya’s early-warning capability, why hadn’t they used an attacking force of their long-range supersonic Blackjack swing-wing bombers? The duty officer, however, turned to the vast, triangular area of ocean covered by Shemya in the west, Adak four hundred miles to the east, and the Salt Lake City carrier force nine hundred miles south. He pointed out that it wasn’t enough merely to knock out the radar station on Shemya; you had to occupy it and make sure it stayed that way, otherwise the U.S. Navy would immediately send in their Seabees to repair the damage. This convinced the CO that his first hunch was right, that the six blips and accompanying fighters were an initial invasion force coming at him, to be followed by many more once, and if, the base was secured. He ordered “engine start” for the fourteen F-111Fs carrying the combinations of iron bombs and TV-guided Maverick air-to-surface missiles.
