World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  Lewis turned to Schwarzenegger. “Hey, Fritz. Five to two Thelma doesn’t make it back?”

  “Verriickt!” said Schwarzenegger.

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “It means you are sick in the head,” said Schwarzenegger.

  “All right, all right. Eight to two, but that’s it!”

  * * *

  Unbeknownst to any of the troops, including Laylor, Brentwood, and Cheek-Dawson, when the troops filed out for lunch, the sergeant major, with the assist of the other HQ NCOs, moved through the weapons racks with pliers, here and there slightly crimping in the magazines. This would cause those weapons to jam during the dry runs, the troopers monitored via the television cameras. It was a random check to make sure every trooper could clear a jam and, as required by SAS, change magazines on the roll. Not only their lives but the entire mission — and in this case, the entire war — might depend on it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The tinkling noise Freeman had heard was that of water at the bottom of a well shaft that formed one of the tunnel’s exits — the exit hole in the wall of the well shaft six feet in diameter and a good eight feet above the water line. The exit ladder was a series of deep-set iron handholds.

  Moving with extreme caution, he discovered that about thirty feet in from the exit whence he had come, there was another branch of the tunnel leading off to the left, to a large twelve-by-twelve-by-six-foot-high storage room, which, using his flashlight, he saw was packed high to its roof with everything from binary shells, binary mortars, heavy eighty-one-millimeter mortars, AK-47s, stick, HE, and phosphorus grenades, dozens of boxes of belt and magazine.76-millimeter and.50-millimeter ammunition. As well, there was a pile of ingeniously built assault ladders which were made of bamboo and which, with canvas strips for cross struts, collapsed like the supports of Chinese tripod clotheslines into one long, light, and easily portable shaft.

  Beside the ladders there was a pile of worn brass bugles and a clutch of starter whistles. Then he discovered the room was connected to others of the same size, several of them bisected by timber supports, seven rooms in all, which seemed to radiate out from the well shaft in a spoke pattern, and which had the smell of acrid cordite that came from wooden casks of gunpowder, refilling jacks, and reloading stampers.

  In four of the rooms there were dozens of tightly packed rice bags that had been set on bamboo woven palettes, foot-wide trenches running about them, filled with barbed wire, presumably to dissuade rats and other rodents from getting at the rice. In all, Freeman estimated that the complex of tunnels and rooms held enough ammunition and arms and sundry supplies to equip an attack of at least battalion, possibly regimental, strength — enough for between fifteen hundred and two thousand frontline assault troops.

  He was in the fourth big storage room, reached by a thick right-angle bend and over a small pyramid of earthen stairs, more steps on the up than on the down side and leading into a deeper tunnel, the right-angled turn he’d just passed through and the difference in the tunnel levels potential impediments against any attack by enemy troops on the tunnel complex. Only under earth-shattering artillery would these tunnels cave in, and even then it would have to be a pulverizing barrage as otherwise the various levels and cunningly devised exits and entrances would act like watertight bulkheads aboard a ship, preventing any full-scale destruction.

  Though he was using the flashlight sparingly, only flicking it on for less than a second at a time to take it all in, his attention was immediately attracted by the large number of binary poison gas shells along with the bugles and whistles. A binary was a “natural” for the Chinese — relatively cheap, using otherwise fairly harmless domestic cleaning chemicals which, when combined, would form the deadly nerve gas.

  The bugles and whistles told him the Chinese were massing for a close-quarter attack on the American positions across the Yalu. His greatest wish was to defeat them, but the Chinese and the North Koreans — though the latter’s cruelty was an abomination to him — aroused in him the respect of a professional soldier. He held the Chinese particularly in high regard, for not only were they brave, even if they were brainwashed, but they were extraordinarily adept at combining the old with the new, and if they didn’t have the new, then improvising with what they had. In this case it was the bugles and whistles, the PLA’s answer to the exorbitantly expensive — for them — and often temperamental modern microchip radio backpacks. The battered bugles and whistles not only saved on radio and avoided technical foul-ups so prevalent in frontline fighting, but along with lots of screaming in the last hundred-yard run of a night attack, more often that not, created a dangerous confusion in the opposing ranks. Among fresh American and other Allied troops who had not seen action before, the result was invariably one of panic and on occasion mass retreat.

  Entering the sixth of the seven rooms, this one piled high with binary shells, he turned toward a sifting sound and tripped over some kind of wire or cord, the flashlight on, rolling, revealing the room seething with rats, turning in panic in the cul-de-sac formed by the room and trying to race out of it, swarming over him, one attacking his face. There was an enormous crash from a pile of pots and pans, no doubt used for a double purpose: to prepare the rice rolls with which Chinese and North Korean troops could march for days and — again typical of the Chinese — to act as an alarm against any potential pilferer tripping over the cord.

  Within seconds, Freeman was on his feet, blood streaming from his face, its warm, metallic taste in his mouth as he moved as quickly as possible out of the room toward the main feeder tunnel of the hub-and-spoke complex, his fingers trailing the double-walled turns toward the well shaft exit. As soon as he reached it, he heard the quick babble of voices, suddenly silenced by the barking of sharply delivered orders — Korean rather than Chinese, he thought — and then shapes appeared, one already on the ladder.

  Freeman fired the flare, saw its red light blossom high above the well shaft, then fired the.45, heard the echo of his shot and saw the shape on the ladder fall back without a sound, splashing heavily into the water below, a light hail of dirt and stone splattering after the body.

  He heard several shots, and the bullets thudding into the well shaft; then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing ceased and Freeman knew why. A grenade or any heavy-caliber machine-gun fire could penetrate the earthen wall of the supply rooms and set off the whole complex in a series of gigantic explosions. If he moved fast, he might make it to one of the half dozen or so manhole entrances he’d noticed along the main tunnel about a quarter mile back, where he’d left the patrol.

  Gripping the flashlight firmly in his left hand, keeping it low, he used his elbow as a touch guide on his way, the.45 in his right hand. He heard the voices behind him receding, then suddenly, after a turn in the tunnel, they increased, which meant that either they had passed one of the right-angle turns or false earthen walls or were coming in from some smaller tunnel that he wasn’t aware of. His right hand struck cool, damp earth, the butt of the.45 poking him in the chest before he realized he’d come up against another abutment in the tunnel. Quickly feeling his way around it, he stuffed the.45 in his waist belt, pulled the pin from one of the five-second grenades, stepped out from the abutment, and rolled the grenade hard back down the tunnel before jumping back behind the wall.

  The roar was deafening, followed by screams and a pattering sound as dirt kept falling in the tunnel, the acrid smell of the explosive causing his eyes to water as he moved farther on, away from his pursuers, hearing an AK-47 rattling in the background, the dull thud of bullets and then the sound of footsteps drowning the groans as others kept coming.

  Suddenly up ahead of him, about fifteen yards, he saw a shaft of moonlight. It disappeared, but not before he’d glimpsed two figures dropping down softly from it into the tunnel. Without breaking his stride, Freeman pulled the pin and rolled the grenade forward, going down on one knee like an indoor bowler to keep it as centered as possible
, continuing his drop and covering his head. There was an enormous purplish-white flash, a whistling sound, and he felt a sting, or rather several, as if hornets had bitten him in several places along the right arm, which had been protecting his forehead, and he knew he’d been hit by shrapnel. But what the shrapnel had done to the two enemy soldiers, both Chinese, was much worse. One lay dead in the glow of his burning clothing while the other staggered about like a drunk, hand clasped to his face. Freeman went to squeeze off two more shots, but nothing happened. His finger wouldn’t obey his brain. By the time he’d reached the wounded Chinese, he’d transferred the.45 into his left hand. The man ran at him, stumbling. Freeman fired, the man crashing into him, knocking him against the wall before falling dead at Freeman’s feet.

  It seemed to take Freeman an eternity to extract his left boot from under the corpse, and finally he was moving again down the tunnel, but something was happening to his vision. He was confused and could hear nothing but the high whistle of the grenade’s explosion still reverberating in his ear, drowning all other noises.

  Another shaft of moonlight — blurred — and a sparkler, like the kind he’d waved around as a kid. He stopped, shook his head as if this might clear it, and tried to replace the.45 in the left holster until he realized that it was the right holster he needed. Shoving the flashlight in his left pocket and leaning against the wall of the tunnel, he moved his hands as quickly as he could to put on the gas mask against the spitting phosphorus grenade that was now lighting up the tunnel in the dancing, ghostly light. He felt better, clearer-headed, and pulled the headband tight as he raced on through the white, choking cloud, a red-hot needle sensation in his left leg no doubt a fragment of phosphorus burning its way in. He could smell his flesh. Then the smell was gone and he knew that as long as he kept moving down the tunnel, tossing a few grenades back whenever he made a turn, he might just make it to an exit before they did. He felt the gas mask crumpling, like cellophane, and suddenly his feet were gone from under him, the rifle butt smashing bone. Everything stopped.

  * * *

  The reconnaissance patrol now under the command of Private Wezlinski, retreating, as they’d been ordered, after seeing the red flare fired by Freeman, were cut down on the ice, heavy mortar rounds exploding about them, sending great shards of ice-shrapnel whistling through the air, one of which decapitated Wezlinski as a radioman frantically begged air support, screaming that “Charlie” depots had been found by Freeman, who had obviously been too far away from them to return in time and so had fired the flare. Whether or not Freeman had been seen by the Chinese before or after he’d fired the flare and whether or not he’d been killed or captured by them was not known. The only thing anyone could be certain about was that Freeman had found the Chinese.

  Even though the LORY — low radioactivity yield — atomic shells were on the way, however, it was by no means certain that they would stop the Chinese. If the Chinese had tunneled in, Seoul knew that with the radiation yield and explosive power of the atomic shells being far less than A-bombs, they would not necessarily thwart the attack — only ten shells being fired initially in an effort to convince the Chinese that if they did not stop using gas, the Americans, though poorly equipped insofar as CBW defenses were concerned, were prepared to escalate to full-scale A-shell attacks.

  In Seoul HQ, Col. Jim Norton, his face reflecting the soft hues of the operations board, kept hearing Lin Biao: “So we lose a million or two?” He closed his eyes and prayed it would net escalate out of control — and prayed for the safety of Douglas Freeman.

  * * *

  The 122-millimeter Chinese shells ripping open the moonlit sky over the Yalu were “binaries.” These consisted of two harmless liquid chemicals separated by a membrane that, upon rupturing during flight, allowed the two liquids to mix so that when the shells struck the American positions, a deadly aerosol of nerve gas was released.

  The gas was not detected by any of the enormously expensive and advanced CBW “Kraut” detector wagons moving up to the Yalu, nor by any of the CAM/Sprites — small, remote-controlled helicopters equipped with laser altimeters and onboard chemical processors capable of detecting gas as close as one meter above ground. Instead the gas’s presence was witnessed by a GI at Outpost Delta, who, after seeing all nine men in a section falling after the first explosions a hundred yards to his left, donned his cumbersome CBW suit and ran, or rather waddled, over and used the oldest detector of all, a strip of litmus paper stuck on the end of his knife. As he dragged it through the snow around the corpses, the paper changed color, from a navy blue to a salmon pink. Some of the bodies lay crumpled, arms outstretched, hands, more like claws, stiff, others looking as if they had been tearing at their chests in the final moments of paralytic asphyxiation. The remainder of the bodies were in the fetal position, faces buried in vomit.

  The GI, as quickly as the cumbersome suit would allow, returned to Outpost Delta’s bunker and informed the major, who in turn donned his CBW suit and went over to verify the GI’s report as the Chinese artillery barrage, intermixed with shell flares, continued. As the major headed back, picking his way through craters that moments before had been an outlying network of trenches, the GI began vomiting uncontrollably, tearing at his suit, which, like tens of thousands of others, provided by the lowest bidder, failed to keep out the gas and became his tomb even as the major signaled to Seoul HQ that Delta was under nerve gas attack.

  What he did not mention, because he did not know, was that in snow conditions, the dispersal of the gas was delayed more than normal, increasing its persistency and therefore making it even more deadly. The major got the call through to retaliate with atomic shells and died in a violent spasm of diarrhea and vomiting as he in turn was asphyxiated by the gas, only dimly hearing the first atomic shells of World War III whistling through the wintry night into the Chinese artillery positions across the Yalu.

  * * *

  From his tunnel position above the Yalu, General Kim, supreme commander of NKA forces, and his Chinese cohorts reported to Beijing that the Americans were using “nuclear” shells. This information, though encoded for transmission to Beijing, was picked up by Soviet satellite, and Chernko’s Sino-Soviet KGB units, already knowing the Chinese code, informed Moscow.

  The information convinced Suzlov that seeing Pandora’s box had been opened, if, at the meeting that night, the Politburo and STAVKA agreed, he would order a first strike of nuclear, as well as chemical, weapons in Europe before the American-Asian policy could be adopted by NATO. And it would not only be atomic shells but missiles — for no other reason than that is what Soviet forces had most of. This, Suzlov told his aides, was a direct result of the cutback of conventional arms during Gorbachev’s disastrous tenure, for such cutbacks had meant that without enough conventional weapons to stop NATO’s advance, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons became inevitable if the Americans were to be defeated.

  Cautious though he was, an apparatchik through and through, Suzlov also told his aides that if at the meeting the Politburo and STAVKA endorsed him and decided to go nuclear, he wouldn’t pussyfoot like the Americans in Vietnam, who procrastinated — and who could have won the Vietnam War in a day had they had the smelost’—”balls”—to drop an A-bomb on Hanoi.

  He, Suzlov, would go all out, and with the indisputable advantage his people had with nuclear bunker defenses, he would have the decisive edge.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Ray Brentwood’s IX-44E chugged back into San Diego Harbor as the sun was sinking in a tangerine sky, the great towering silhouettes of the warships even more impressive than when Ray and his barge crew had left that morning. In the distance he could see the sleek, black lines of a fast frigate heading out to sea, her bow slicing the water like a knife, and the phosphorescence of her wake the only visible sign of her progress to war.

  As they tied up, Ray took the sample bottle of the spill, as he had done more than a dozen times since his sludge-removal barge had been mopping
up small spills here and there up the coast. While the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington wasn’t overly concerned with “chicken-shit” spills, as one Washington official bluntly put it, EPA had a master data bank into which all oil companies were required to register their cargo’s “fingerprints” in the form of having particular isotopes added to each cargo so that polluters could be identified. But EPA was loath to press either IMCO — the intergovernmental maritime consultative organization — or TOVALOP — the tanker owners’ voluntary agreement on liability for oil pollution — to discipline their own members when the oil being spilled by enemy subs sinking Allied tankers was astronomically larger than that of local spills. The problem was that EPA hadn’t taken into account what they later dubbed the NP, or “nagging power,” of local residents up and down California’s more affluent coastline who demanded the names of the offending companies and captains who had vented bilge oil at sea, so that they could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

  And so it was that once a week, Ray Brentwood took his sample bottles of the spills his barge had sucked up to the harbor pollution control office, where he could clip the bottle into the analyzer, flick on the switch, and wait for any matchup with the EPA’s master computer isotope list. When the matchups occurred, the terminal beeped, and like an accusing finger pointing at an overdue library book borrower, it kept up until it had stopped spitting out its printout of the matchup between sample and master list.

  This day, however, two of the twelve samples would not match. Ray ran them again, with the same result. Next, he called EPA in Washington, though with the phone networks still in a mess from sabotage, it took him fifteen minutes to get through. Was it possible, he asked, that there was oil not “fingerprinted” with isotopes? The answer was a definite no— all refined oil and crude was fingerprinted by law, and supervised by government inspectors.