Burmese Crossfire (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 2)

by Peter Nealen

  He had found the bodies of two young men and a boy, all armed and all very dead. Well, the young men had been dead. The boy had still been breathing, but a single shot had ended that.

  The dead boy had not particularly bothered Park. The Kokangs and the paramilitaries both used child soldiers. And as a proper Communist, Park knew that it was never too early to begin the revolutionary struggle. This boy had simply been on the wrong side.

  ***

  So it had gone, house to house, muddy street to muddy street. Ultimately, they might have found half a dozen paramilitaries, scattered throughout the village.

  They might not have been paramilitaries. They might have been militia. None of them were wearing the usual pseudo-uniforms the paramilitaries had worn. But Cao called them paramilitaries, so that was what they were.

  Two of his men were dead. Seo had been killed on the initial advance into the village. How Yim had died was still uncertain; it was possible that he’d been ambushed and killed by paramilitaries at the southern edge of the village. It was also possible that he had been killed by friendly fire; Lontan had been the first action for several of Cao’s youngest soldiers, some as young as eight. The boys were jumpy and quick to shoot. Cao had dismissed the loss as a paramilitary ambush, and under the circumstances, with a warning glance from Commissar Lee, Park had held his peace.

  He was breathing shallowly through his mouth as he walked up to what had been the Lontan school. Several of the houses, those that hadn’t been half-destroyed by the mortars, had been torched after the Kokangs had looted them. The fact that they were probably looting the belongings of their own people hadn’t seemed to bother them.

  Stepping inside, Park made his way toward the principal’s office, which Cao had taken as a temporary command post. He entered, stamped his boots together at attention, and saluted.

  Cao returned the salute lazily. He was poring over a map spread on the principal’s desk, the school supplies having been shoved onto the floor. “What is it, Zhong Wei?” he asked curtly.

  “The men have completed the sweep of the village, Sojang,” Park reported. If Cao insisted on using the Mandarin version of his rank, he would use the Korean version of Cao’s nominal rank. “They have not found enough of the paramilitaries to account for all of those that were supposed to be in the camp up on the mountain.”

  “Yes, I know,” Cao said brusquely. He seemed distracted and irritated. “We will move on the camp shortly, once we are certain that the village is secure.” He looked up at Park. “Your men did well this morning, Zhong Wei,” he said, “but I still did not see anything particularly special. Perhaps the attack on the camp will provide you with a better opportunity to demonstrate your tactical prowess.”

  Park kept his lips tightly pressed together, lest he tell the Kokang general what he thought of that. It was clear that Cao was hoping to use the North Koreans as shock troops, to keep his own men out of the line of fire, while also looking for an excuse, any excuse, to cut Bureau 39’s share of the heroin supply.

  Instead of saying as much, Park simply saluted, turned on his heel, and marched out of the office. Commissar Lee would have been proud.

  Lee was waiting on the porch outside, watching two trucks trundle up to the schoolyard. Several of the Kokang soldiers were marching up from the burning village with heavy packs on their backs. These packs were hoisted into the backs of the trucks.

  Park’s eyes narrowed as he watched the transfer. He knew drug shipments when he saw them; those were some of the same sort of packs the traffickers had used at the border crossing into Thailand. He glanced at Lee, who was watching impassively, then spared a quick glance back toward Cao’s makeshift command post.

  The paramilitaries had never really been in Lontan, he suspected. This had something to do with Cao’s control over the heroin production in the area. He did not know what, for sure. But when he turned back to Lee, he saw the same knowledge in the Commissar’s eyes.

  “Our mission remains the same, Chungwi,” Lee said quietly. “By any means necessary.”

  Park nodded in resignation. Sometimes, sacrifices had to be made. If the people of Lontan had proved to be that sacrifice, it would all be worth it later.

  They watched the heroin being loaded up for a moment longer, and then Park went looking for Jeon. They would have to prepare if they were going to be assaulting the paramilitary camp as well.

  CHAPTER 10

  Huddled in the trees and the bushes, the Blackhearts continued to listen to the rising and falling thunder of gunfire and explosions off to the south. A quick check of the map had confirmed that the village down that way was called Lontan, though they didn’t know for sure whether it was a Kokang village, or under government control. Whatever was going on, someone down there was taking a hell of a shellacking.

  Brannigan and Hancock huddled together, dripping sweat as the sun mounted in the sky and the temperatures with it, and quietly discussed their next move.

  “That fighting down there worries me,” Brannigan admitted. “This was supposed to be a surprise attack against rear-area advisors. If the noise they’re making down there is any indication, this isn’t really a ‘rear area’ at the moment. Which means that anyone and everyone with a gun is going to be on the alert.”

  “On the other hand,” Hancock pointed out, “it could also mean that anyone with a gun is down there by Lontan, and we can get in, hit the Nork camp, and get out before they know what hit ‘em. I know, I know,” he said, as Brannigan raised an eyebrow. “Having a fight that close means that anyone remotely competent is going to have their security wired tight. But if their main reinforcements are tied up down south…”

  “There’s another thing,” Brannigan mused. “From what Van Zandt told us, the Norks were only supposed to be advisors. But what if they’re down there with the Kokangs, or whoever is doing the fighting in Lontan?”

  Hancock’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it. “You think they’re getting a little front-line action after all?” he asked.

  “How often have our advisors gone out with the locals they’re training?” Brannigan asked rhetorically. “Look at how many SF guys have gotten smoked by the Afghans they were partnered with. And I seriously doubt that the North Koreans are going to have the kind of stringent rules of engagement and operational restrictions that our Special Forces do, especially not when they’re in the middle of rebel territory in northern Burma, where they really don’t have to worry about any Western powers noticing that they’re on the ground.”

  “So, what’s the plan, then?” Hancock asked.

  Brannigan looked down at the map, frowning as he thought. The sweat was burning his eyes and trying to melt tracks in his camouflage face paint. Several drops spattered the map, which was, fortunately, waterproof.

  “We’ll have to continue as planned, for now,” he said. “We’ll hold our position here until nightfall, unless we start getting walked on by either the Kokangs, the Army, or the North Koreans. Once it’s dark, we’ll move up to the target, reconnoiter real quick, and then hit it. Then we head for Yunnan.”

  Hancock nodded. He didn’t have any better ideas. Brannigan carefully folded up his map and stuffed it back in the sleeve in the front of his vest, then leaned back against his ruck, adjusting the G3 across his lap. He scanned their hide site.

  The sixteen of them were huddled together in the bushes and trees, eyes and weapons trained outward, rucks packed up and ready to move. It had taken a bit of a warning word from those with Recon or other SOF experience to make sure that some of them kept their packs and their gear prepped to move at a moment’s notice. Towne had been especially bad, having spread half of his gear out within a few minutes of stopping, taking his boots and his socks off to air out his feet. Childress had corrected that pretty quickly, with a hissed, profanity-laced tongue-lashing that had illustrated that for all the young man professed to be “working on it,” the filter between his brain and his mouth was still…imperfect, at best
. Not that anyone in the squad except maybe Towne minded, on that particular occasion.

  Sipping from his hydration bladder, Brannigan set in to wait.

  ***

  “Colonel?” Wade whispered. “I think you’d better see this.”

  Brannigan carefully and quietly turned and rose, slipping his one arm out of his pack strap as he did so. Wade was standing beside a tree, nearly invisible among the fronds, looking off to the southeast. He’d been set in that way for a while, having swapped places with Hart, since “the bad guys are more likely to come from that direction.” Wade was nothing if not eager for combat. With most men, Brannigan would have found it a cause for concern, but he’d seen enough of Wade to expect that, while he was itching to get stuck in, he was far too much of a professional to deliberately go looking for trouble just for its own sake.

  “What is it?” he asked quietly, as he loomed next to the other man.

  Wade pointed carefully. “You’ve got to kind of burn through the veg,” he said, “but there’s a new plume of smoke going up, and it looks to me like it’s not coming from Lontan itself. It’s farther east.”

  Brannigan squinted. There were a lot of trees in the way, but after a moment, he found a narrow window through the foliage, where he could see what Wade was talking about. There did indeed appear to be another tower of smoke rising to the southeast, from beyond the shoulder of the ridgeline they were currently laid up on. It was black and evil-looking, and considerably thicker than the slowly dispersing pall of smoke from the village.

  He listened. “Doesn’t seem to be as much shooting going on, either,” he commented.

  Wade shook his head. “It died down a couple of hours ago. Just a few sporadic single shots and short bursts lately.” He looked at Brannigan, his eyes bright points of blue in his mask of green and brown face paint. “Mopping up, you think?”

  Brannigan nodded thoughtfully. “Entirely likely,” he said. “The question is, who’s mopping who up?” He resisted the urge to rub his chin. “An even more pressing question is, are they going to consolidate and hold what they’ve got, or come north?” It was a rhetorical question more than anything else; there was no way to know, sitting in a hide site in the woods, and they had no other assets to draw on in the region that might be able to report. They were deaf, dumb, and blind beyond their own lines of sight.

  Remind me never to take this kind of job again. At least not on these terms. Next time, we work out more support first. He knew that any kind of ISR or other support would have been difficult at best where they were; far from Thailand, and way, way too close to China. But he was increasingly aware of just how far out in the breeze they were. If anything, this was worse than Khadarkh had been.

  He moved back to his ruck, passed it, and crouched over Santelli, who was asleep, his mouth slightly open. They were on a fifty-fifty rotation, trying to get as much rest as possible while maintaining security.

  He shook the shorter man’s shoulder, and Santelli’s eyes snapped open, then promptly squinted against the glare of daylight filtering down through the trees. It took him a moment to focus, and he visibly stifled a groan. “Yeah?” he managed, tried not to cough, and grabbed his hydration hose.

  Brannigan mused that they were going to have to watch water consumption. Heat exhaustion was a real concern, but so was running out of clean water in the Burmese highlands. “Wade spotted more smoke down south,” he whispered. “It sounds like whatever was going on down there might be wrapping up. We need to watch for hostiles coming north, possibly in force.”

  Santelli nodded. “Do we want to switch to three up, one down?”

  Brannigan thought about it. “No, I don’t think we need to, yet,” he said. “But make sure everyone knows what’s going on, then those on rest cycle can go back down.”

  Santelli nodded again, then rolled painfully over and reached for Jenkins arm.

  Brannigan returned to his ruck as the warning was passed around. It was still at least four hours until sunset.

  ***

  Park stood on the hillside above the furiously blazing remains of the paramilitary camp, watching Jeon get final head counts and get the rest of their platoon ready to move. They should be able to return to the camp by early morning. It would be quicker if they simply conducted a forced march up the road, but Park was suddenly reticent to do that. By attacking the paramilitaries, they had just fired a shot past the Burmese government’s nose, and Park was certain that there would be a response.

  He was equally certain, by then, that there had not been paramilitaries in Lontan itself when they’d attacked. Judging by the dispositions in the now burning, corpse-littered camp, there might have been within the day, but he was convinced that the attack on Lontan had had considerably more to do with some internal conflict among the Kokang’s over heroin supplies. Cao had simply used the threat of the paramilitaries to cover his attack under the auspices of “defending the people.”

  Park did not especially care. Life was often cheap in East Asia, and nowhere was it cheaper than in the DPRK. He might despise the Kokang general’s corruption on an ideological level; the drug trade was dangerously close to capitalism, and there were signs that Cao and any number of the other Kokang leaders were far more interested in getting rich than in furthering the Communist Revolution. But the deaths were simply footnotes to the mission to him.

  He had lost two more men in the paramilitary camp; the Burmese had put up a far more ferocious fight than the militia down in the village had. He had had Jeon retrieve their weapons and ammunition, then the bodies had been tossed onto the fires with the Burmese and Kokang corpses.

  Park was not a sentimental man by nature. And if he had been, it would not have served to allow the likes of Commissar Lee to see it.

  He had wanted to head back to the camp as soon as the paramilitary resistance collapsed, but he didn’t dare turn his back on Cao so easily, and the Kokang general had not given the North Koreans leave to depart. So, he stood on the hill, trying not to breathe too deeply of the smoke rising from the huts and the piles of bodies, and waited, as the sun began to dip toward the western horizon. The light was already shifting to a deeper gold as it had to penetrate the haze of smoke and humidity that hung over the hills and the valleys.

  It was nearly sunset before Cao was ready. With the North Koreans at the head, the winding column departed the wreckage of Lontan and the paramilitary camp, heading back up into the hills above Marish and Parsenkyaw.

  ***

  Bo Hmu Gyi Moe Tint Man Go was not happy. He had plenty of things to be unhappy about, getting transferred to Tarshwetan Base not the least. There had been considerably better selection among the whores down south, and it had always been possible to go take some of the girls from a Karen village if he didn’t want to pay one of the Thai or Burmese girls in the cities. Here in the north, it was all Kachin and Shan, not to mention the Kokang, and just not to his tastes. Not to mention that the Kokang Army tended to be even more vicious than the Karen militias, and he had to tread lightly, especially given the current “peace” between the government and the Kokangs.

  He also wasn’t happy about having to supervise the paramilitaries. Technically, they were completely unofficial militias, thereby offering the government some distance while they terrorized the ethnic-Chinese Communists. In reality, he was there specifically to guide them, if only through cutouts. Which was also not to his taste.

  And to make matters worse, when the fighting had broken out down by Lontan, it had taken hours to finally mobilize his men and get them ready to start moving south to deal with Cao and his rag-tag soldiers. The odds that the Kokangs were still in Lontan, waiting to be massacred by his troops, were getting worse and worse as he paced in front of his headquarters building. He was chain-smoking the entire time, getting more and more irritable, until Bo Gyi Khin Oo San Thiha ran up and saluted.

  “All the troops are mounted and ready to go, Bo Hmu Gyi,” the junior officer reported breathlessl
y.

  “It is about time,” Moe Tint Man Goe snapped, as he tossed his still-smoldering cigarette into the damp grass. “Let’s go; hopefully the damned Kokangs haven’t disappeared into the hills by the time we get there.” He stepped down off the steps, then stopped and squinted at the position of the sun, doing some calculating in his head. Then he cursed. “There is no way they will still be there by the time we reach Lontan,” he said. “But if we attack Parsenkyaw, we will either cut them off, or bring them running to where we can kill them all.” He waved impatiently at Khin Oo San Thiha. “What are you waiting for, dog? Let’s go!”

  ***

  Childress halted in the trees, one hilltop over from where the North Korean base was supposed to be. Brannigan moved up next to him, taking a knee in the vegetation and peering through the fronds toward the far hill. He could see a faint, flickering glow, as if from a small fire, but otherwise there were no lights visible, though that might just mean the Norks had good light discipline after dark.

  Brannigan scanned the hillsides in front of them. There was a road off to the left, leading up toward the camp, but the rest was undisturbed and empty. Unfortunately, it was mostly open grassland, with only a few scattered stands of trees to provide concealment on the approach.

  “Never thought I’d wish there was more jungle,” he muttered to himself. He looked over at Childress. “You got a route picked out, Sam?” he whispered.

  Childress nodded fractionally, and pointed. “If we follow that line of trees, it’ll limit the amount of open ground we have to cross, and should get us within a couple hundred yards of the target,” he said.

  Brannigan saw what he had in mind. It was a good route; probably the best one they had to get across that valley and get close to the North Korean camp. He turned back to Hancock.

  “You take Curtis, Bianco, Wade, and Jenkins,” he whispered. “Set up the base of fire along the southern edge of the camp. We’ll move in from the east.”

  Hancock indicated that he understood, and started getting his element separated. The file had gotten a bit mixed on the movement, mainly because Towne and Sanda had needed help over some of the obstacles along the way, and had gotten out of the planned order of movement. Plus, the two belt-feds had been separated along the length of the line, mainly to have a wider field of fire if they ran into trouble.