by Peter Nealen
A figure appeared, running back to the north. Brannigan fired a quick snap-shot at it, and the man tumbled head over heels and disappeared.
“Go!” he snapped at Flanagan. The other man didn’t need to be told twice, but heaved himself to his feet, snapped two more shots to the north, and sprinted up the hill as fast as he could lumber.
Twenty yards along, he had stopped again and opened fire off to the west. Brannigan, gasping for air in the heat, pounded past him to the crest of the hill, where he found a tree, dropped to a knee next to it, and, finding no targets, simply yelled, “Set!”
When Flanagan came up to him, he just waved him past. “Peel,” he hissed. “I’ll hold until everyone’s past.” Flanagan didn’t say anything, but ran another ten yards along before finding a spot to set up where he could similarly provide covering fire back toward the advancing Kokangs.
One by one, the rest of the team staggered past, heading for the rally point. Brannigan hoped they didn’t have to engage again; every time they did, they gave their position away to their pursuers. But there had been no choice, earlier.
Villareal passed him, supporting Jenkins, who was limping badly. He must have been the one to get hit crossing the open.
Then Santelli and Hancock were passing him, Santelli gasping out, “Last man,” in a hoarse whisper. He waited just long enough for them to gain a few yards, and then he was up and moving.
Behind them, a few probing bursts of gunfire rang out through the night, as either the North Koreans or the Kokangs tried to search out the intruders using recon by fire, or simply nervously shot at shadows. By the time they’d reached the rally point, Brannigan was fairly sure that they were outside of the encirclement.
They didn’t dare stay there, though. Picking another mountain to the east, he got them moving as soon as they had consolidated. Jenkins had a tourniquet on his wounded leg already, and while he was slower and in pain, he could move. They had to put some territory between them and the enemy, and fast.
Once they knew they had broken contact, then they could reassess finding and destroying the North Korean “advisors.”
CHAPTER 14
“What happened here, Zhong Wei?” Cao demanded.
“I do not know for certain,” Park replied, “though I suspect that it was either paramilitaries or advance scouts sent by the Army. The Army seems to be the likeliest explanation; I doubt that any paramilitaries from Lontan made it out alive, much less were able to get around behind us.”
The two men were standing in the middle of what had been a reasonably secure camp, hidden away from the Burmese in the forests and hills. Woo’s and Gwak’s corpses lay at their feet. Curiously, only Gwak’s rifle and ammunition were missing.
The sun was going to be up soon. The eastern horizon was already growing lighter.
“They escaped to the northeast,” Cao said. “One of our flanker patrols encountered them, and lost three fighters.”
“Why did they not pursue?” Park asked, risking the Kokang leader’s ire in his own frustration. He had lost nearly ten men during the night, including all four who had been left in the camp. His original detachment was nearly down to half strength.
“They were too few,” Cao snapped, “and they were scouts. Four of them were youths.” Meaning they were child soldiers of not more than ten years old.
Had he been a Westerner, Park would have found the presence of child soldiers in the Kokang Army to be reprehensible. He was not, though; the Korean People’s Army trained children as young as eleven in the Children’s Union and the Young Red Guards. Park had been a member of the Young Red Guards, himself, and been proud of it.
“We must pursue them, anyway,” he insisted. “Although they might have a lead, we know these hills better than any of the government’s puppets do. They must be eliminated.”
But Cao shook his head. “We will deal with them in due time,” he said. “For the moment, we must re-consolidate our forces. We had to fall back from Parsenkyaw in considerable disarray. The Army has not attacked us like this since the fighting in 2015. If we go running off into the hills after these paramilitaries, the Army could crush us against the Chinese border.”
“The Chinese brokered this partnership,” Park reminded him. “I do not think that you need fear straying across into Yunnan Province, at least for a little while.”
“No,” Cao repeated. “We must regroup. We will move to the fallback fortification and determine our next course of action from there.” His mind made up, the Kokang general turned and shouted for his subordinate commanders.
Park ground his teeth and went looking for Lau. With Jeon dead, the stocky little man had needed to take over as his second in command.
***
The sun was glaring red through the smoke and mist when they finally halted. It had been a struggle to get up the last hill, especially with a bullet hole in Jenkins’ leg, but the steep terrain would be an advantage once day fully dawned. Few people would have any reason to want to climb up there, lessening the chance of compromise, which would inevitably lead to having to fight their way out again. If they had to break contact a second time, without having accomplished their mission, Brannigan had already decided, they were going to have to simply break for the Chinese border and make for extract. There wouldn’t be any more chance to search out the North Koreans at that point; they’d be running for their lives.
He realized, as he crouched in the thick vegetation at the top of the hill, that they technically were already in China. They’d passed the border in the dark. The fact that the hill was the most thickly wooded one around was a matter of some concern, as it was an obvious hiding place, but he was hoping that the Norks wouldn’t want to start a firefight on Chinese soil. Not yet, anyway.
He looked back at where Villareal had Jenkins’ pantleg rolled up, and was packing the wound with gauze. It looked like a relatively clean hit; the bullet had gone through the meaty part of the outside of Jenkins’ thigh. It had missed the bone and the femoral artery. He’d be hurting for a while, and infection was a very real worry, but he’d live. And with the tourniquet off, he’d actually be able to use the leg.
Hancock stepped around a tree and sank down to sit against his ruck next to Brannigan. “Well, that didn’t exactly go according to plan,” he said.
Brannigan glanced over at the other man. Hancock had already refreshed his camouflage paint, though his now-green-and-brown face was already glistening with sweat.
Ever since their conversation at the racetrack, Brannigan had noticed a change in Hancock. It was subtle, but it was there. He was taking more of a leadership role, trying to stay on top of the situation, making sure he knew as much as possible. He’d taken what Brannigan had said about him being the next man on the totem pole if Brannigan went down seriously.
Brannigan had known that he would. He’d known Roger Hancock for a long time, and trusted him. That was why he’d decided to tap him as the next commander, instead of Santelli. He trusted Carlo Santelli, too, but for different reasons.
“No, it didn’t,” he replied, as he turned his gaze back toward the west. The forest was thick enough that he couldn’t see much, but he could imagine the swarming activity over there, on the other side of the hills and the border. He looked back at Hancock. “I’ll be honest; I think we’ve got one more shot at this.”
“You’re still determined to go through with it?” Hancock asked. It wasn’t a leading question; Hancock didn’t ask those sorts of leading questions. He was genuinely trying to understand Brannigan’s thoughts on the mission as it was. And he was right to; the risks were already plenty high.
“As far as it’s still possible, yes,” Brannigan replied. “I know that the paycheck might not cover the risk we’re running, but I think at this point, we’re committed. And I think Van Zandt is thinking the same thing.”
Hancock looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “You think he’d leave us hanging if we don’t accomplish the mission?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know,” Brannigan admitted. “That might be a step farther than he’d be willing to go. I don’t think he’d sell us out, necessarily, but the risk he’s running is pretty non-trivial, at least from his point of view. I know, it’s nothing compared to what we’ve taken on, but he’s going to be thinking about what it would look like if a bunch of American mercenaries got caught in or just outside of northern Burma, and he’s going to be looking to cover his ass and the asses of any of his superiors who might have even peripherally been involved.”
“If that’s the case, then he might just be setting us up anyway,” Hancock observed.
“Maybe, but again, I don’t think it’s quite his way,” Brannigan said. “I don’t like him; I think he’s a careerist and a politician. But Hollywood to the contrary, it’s rarely good tradecraft to sell your assets out. After all, what if they talk before they’re killed?”
“Good point,” Hancock agreed.
“No, the concern I’ve got is that he’ll go ahead and extract us, then string us along and set us up to be hit with some kind of terrorism charges, and then disappeared into a black site somewhere, if we don’t come through,” Brannigan mused. “It’d be an easy enough way to cover up a shit-show that he doesn’t want to ever see the light of day.”
“And if he decides to do that anyway?” Hancock asked.
Brannigan chuckled humorlessly. “It’s a little too late to worry about that at this point. There comes a time where you can think of all the paranoid ways that higher, or the client, or whoever, can screw you over, and it becomes paralyzing. Frankly, it’s an option that I already thought about. I don’t think Van Zandt will stoop quite that low. Not yet. But I guarantee that if we just pop smoke and show up in Yunnan looking for extract, it’s going to be a lot easier for him to start thinking along those lines.” He sighed. “If we were a ‘legit’ SOF unit, I’m sure he’d feel a bit more of a moral imperative to get us out, regardless. Since we’re not…”
“So, what’s the plan?” Hancock asked.
“Lie low for the day, get some rest,” Brannigan replied. “Once it’s dark, I’ll take Flanagan and Childress and go do some reconnaissance. If the Norks have settled back down in their camp, we need to know, and we need to know what their defensive posture looks like. If they haven’t, well, then we need to find where they went.”
“Should you be going out on that, or staying here?” Hancock ventured.
Brannigan glanced over at him. “There’s no TOC here, and there’s no support to coordinate,” he said. “So, yeah, I’ll be going on the recon patrol. If I’m going to lead, dammit, I’m going to lead.”
“Fair enough.” Hancock glanced over his shoulder, then lowered his voice still further. “Fair warning, in case you didn’t get a chance to notice on the way out. But we might have a bit of a…morale problem. A very specific one.”
“Who?”
“Doc.”
“We’ve been over this, Roger,” Brannigan said.
“No, this is different,” Hancock said, before Brannigan could get going. “I got a look at one of the corpses of the bunch that you and Joe tangled with on the way out. They were kids, John. Couldn’t have been much more than ten or eleven. They were armed; it was a good shoot, but child soldiers weren’t something that got mentioned in the briefing materials, and if we run into ‘em again, I think it’s going to mess with Doc’s head. And he’s wound a little too tight already.” He got up. “Like I said, just fair warning. We’re all stuck in this together until we’re feet-wet over the Pacific again, and there’s no way to replace him. I know. But you needed to know before it blindsided you.”
Brannigan nodded grimly. “Thanks, Roger.”
Hancock only returned the nod, then moved away, back to his own spot in their hide site.
Brannigan looked out over the border at the wooded hills of Burma. He forcibly rejected any thoughts of what to do better on the next job, or if there even would be a next job. He had to focus on the here and now, the situation they were presently in. Any other considerations were going to get them all killed, thousands of miles from home, in a jungle where no one but a handful knew they had even set foot.
He suddenly remembered another task. This wasn’t going to be pleasant. He got up and moved toward the center of the perimeter.
Sanda had brought the Burmese “comfort girl” with them, and she was currently curled into a ball at the older woman’s feet, apparently exhausted by the strain and the effort of the movement. That she’d stuck by Sanda even under fire said a lot about what she’d already been through; she hadn’t bolted in panic, and apparently, going with the strange soldiers through gunfire had been preferable to staying where she could be further abused by the Kokangs and the North Koreans.
But they were going back into that, and a gunfight was no place for a battered slip of a Burmese girl.
He crouched over her, and met Sanda’s eyes. The woman’s face went still, as she suddenly understood why he was there. There was pleading in her eyes, but Brannigan forced himself to harden his features and shake his head. He nodded toward the girl.
Reluctantly, Sanda reached down and shook her awake.
The girl started awake and started to freak out. Brannigan didn’t want to think about what kind of horrors she had been reliving in her sleep, only to awaken somewhere strange, huddled in the jungle. Sanda grabbed her wrists, holding her still and speaking softly and soothingly in Burmese until she calmed down. Finally, the girl, who was gaunt and filthy now that Brannigan could see her in daylight, stopped struggling, though she was still looking around at the camouflaged soldiers with her eyes wide and frightened.
Brannigan took a deep breath. “What is your name?” he asked the girl. Sanda translated.
“Aye Hla Mya,” the girl said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Aye Hla Mya,” Brannigan said, as gently as he could, “I’m afraid we’ve got a bit of a problem. You see, we’re going back in there. We still have a job to do, and it’s going to be dirty, nasty, and violent.
“And we can’t take you with us. It would be putting you back in the line of fire, and there are too few of us to look after you in the middle of a firefight.” The girl was just staring at him, her face still and frightened. This was harder than he’d expected. But it had to be done. “We’ll give you some food and water,” he continued. There wasn’t much they could spare, but they couldn’t just leave her in the jungle with nothing. “Your best chance is probably to head that way,” he pointed south, “to Thailand.”
The girl still had not reacted, even as Sanda translated his words into Burmese. With a twisting feeling in his gut, Brannigan realized that this kid had no good options ahead of her. This wasn’t a part of the world where orphan girls could have good lives. There were plenty of pimps and human traffickers in China, as well as Burma and Thailand. The odds were pretty good that she’d be preyed upon wherever she went.
But the fact remained that they couldn’t take her with them. On her own, she might have a chance. Going back into a firefight in Burma would be a death sentence, either for her, or for whoever had to try to protect her. Or both.
Sanda had almost choked on the words as she’d translated, and she was looking at Brannigan as if he was a monster. But he kept his expression stony. There was no other choice. He rummaged in his pack and pulled out a ration; it was a backpacker’s meal, not an MRE. Nothing they had with them could be US issue. He held the meal out, and after a moment’s hesitation, Aye Hla Mya took it.
“You don’t have to go now,” he said. “You can stay here until we leave. But when we leave, we’re going back into Burma, back to fight, and you can’t come with us. You need to stay here when we leave tonight.”
Sanda translated, tears starting to gather in her eyes. She knew the girl’s prospects just as well as Brannigan did. When she finished, she embraced the girl, still staring at Brannigan as if he wasn’t human.
He didn’t feel especially human at
that point. But hard decisions sometimes had to be made, and if there was one thing that warfare in the Middle East and Asia taught a man, it’s that you can’t save everyone.
That fact was not a consolation, as he moved away and sat against a tree, facing back toward Burma.
He pulled out his map. He needed to get the night’s recon planned before he tried to sleep.
***
It was midday by the time the combined force of Kokang rebels and North Korean soldiers reached their fallback position. From the air, and to any cursory examination on the ground, it was simply a tiny village of cinderblock houses and bamboo huts, nestled in a hanging valley on the western flanks of Pingshan Mountain. It did not even have a name on the map. Park frankly did not care what the locals called it, either.
He and Cao had coordinated the considerable effort to fortify it as a fallback position from Parsenkyaw and Marish. While the Kokang Army had a considerably more open presence in those two towns, here they could dig in and put up a ferocious defense. The North Koreans had been able to lend considerable expertise to the construction of the tunnel and bunker system that now honeycombed the village. The Korean People’s Army had been digging in like moles both behind and under the DMZ for decades. The North Koreans knew tunnels.
Cao had set up his headquarters in one of the cinderblock houses, which appeared relatively normal from the outside, but was heavily sandbagged on the inside, with machinegun positions covering the front and flanks. A tunnel entrance had been dug in the back of the house, just inside the back door. He was presently ensconced inside, consulting with his subordinate commanders.
Park and his men had a bunker of their own, just outside the village. It was part of a branch of the tunnel system, with defensive positions and the aboveground entrance carefully concealed with vegetation. Inside, the only illumination came from a hissing propane lantern that sat on a low table in the center of the main room. Park was currently leaning over it, peering at the map spread out on the bamboo tabletop.
