by Peter Nealen
Brannigan was starting to get the picture. The village was a fallback position, all right. And since the primary worry that the Kokang Army had faced was the Burmese Army, the entire village had been fortified. And, apparently, honeycombed with tunnels. The tunnels were going to make this difficult. He had little doubt that the Blackhearts could clear the houses. Keeping them clear with tunnels connecting them was going to be another matter.
But John Brannigan had not survived as long as he had as a professional soldier by wasting time fretting about the next step while there was a fight going on right in front of him.
He keyed his radio. Everyone should have turned theirs on as soon as they spread out on the final approach to the village. “This is Kodiak,” he said, using the last callsign he’d held before his forced retirement. “Consolidate in the first three houses. Watch for tunnels and spider holes.” Once they solidified their foothold, they could start to push forward.
This wasn’t going to be a lightning-fast hit. This was turning into a slow, careful, methodical clearing operation. With fourteen guns, against presumably several hundred.
Brannigan’s Blackhearts were going to earn their pay the hard way.
***
Curtis didn’t know what he’d done to piss the Colonel off. Their giant of a commander hadn’t said anything, but he had to assume that the fact he was stuck babysitting the two terps and the Doc meant he’d screwed up somewhere along the line. Screwing up wasn’t a foreign concept to Curtis; most of his superiors hadn’t been as entranced with his lively chatter, suave ways, and gambling as the girls he regularly…made friends with. But he usually at least had some idea of what he’d done.
Now, under most circumstances, he might not have minded. Towne, who had been reluctant to go into this mission as a combat soldier, citing how long ago he’d gotten out of the Army and his lack of combat experience, had armed himself with one of the North Koreans’ rifles. Doc was a good dude, even though he had issues. And Ma Sanda was gorgeous; he’d already subtly started working on taking her away from Aziz. Because he was what he was, and Aziz was a dick, anyway. Screw that guy.
But here he was, flat on his belly overlooking the village, with his MG 3, a good amount of ammunition, two flat-out noncombatants, and a guy whose primary role on the mission was to be a translator. It didn’t make him feel comfortable. Even if it put him in the position of being Sanda’s protector, which he figured should win him some points.
So far, all the action had been down to the south; he’d caught glimpses of Tanaka and the Colonel wasting the first react patrol. He’d heard plenty of shooting. But the north side of the village had been quiet.
He heard Brannigan’s radio call, and started to get up, intending to move down into the village and consolidate with the rest. He grudgingly began to accept that his main role was going to end up being to hold security on the houses and the roads. There wasn’t much he’d be able to do inside the houses with the bulky machinegun, and in tunnels would be worse.
Villareal suddenly hissed a warning. Curtis froze, only one knee under him, the machinegun pointed at the dirt a couple yards ahead. Behind him, he heard the click as Towne took his AK off safe, and briefly wondered why he’d still even had it on safe.
A moment later, he saw what Villareal had seen. A section of the hillside had opened up, and four men in fatigues, armed with more AKs, were crawling out of the hole and starting to move in their direction.
The Colonel had mentioned tunnels. It seemed that the enemy was going to use them to their full advantage, trying to get troops around behind the Blackhearts, to cut them off and catch them in an encirclement.
That is not going to happen. Taking a deep breath, Curtis suddenly kicked his leg out behind him, dropping flat once again and snatching up the MG 3’s grip, shifting his body to point the bell-shaped muzzle at the oncoming fighters. He mashed the trigger to the rear, and the machinegun roared its deadly greeting, flame spitting from the muzzle as he played the stream of copper-jacketed bullets across the group, keeping the buttstock tightly in his shoulder to control the bucking recoil.
From barely fifty meters away, with no cover to speak of, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The dim figures of the Kokang soldiers, or whoever they were—Curtis really didn’t especially care—were cut down like grass, falling to the dirt and weeds with screams of pain, quickly cut off as they dropped into the grazing fire skimming along the ground at knee-height.
Some of those screams, though, were strangely high-pitched, even over the hammering thunder of the MG 3’s fire. And with a sudden, sickening twist of his guts, Curtis realized why.
So did Villareal.
Curtis knew all about Villareal’s past, and so he knew why Doc was suddenly sprinting forward, his med bag already halfway off his shoulder, running for the crumpled forms of the men and boys that Curtis had just gunned down.
“Dammit, Doc!” Curtis hissed, picking himself up off the ground. “Get back here!”
Towne didn’t know what was happening, but he was quick enough on the uptake that he understood that Villareal was unarmed and running right at a spider hole that had already spouted several enemy soldiers. He was picking himself up off the ground and following Villareal, though the doctor already had a pretty good head-start.
Ammo belt jingling, Curtis hauled the MG 3 off the ground and ran forward, grateful for the glove that was shielding his hand from the heat of the barrel under its perforated shroud. He ran after Towne and Villareal, his short legs pumping.
***
Villareal had skidded to a halt over the writhing form of one of the Kokang soldiers. The kid couldn’t be more than twelve, probably less than that. He was cradling his guts in his hands, screaming and wailing. Villareal couldn’t see enough detail in the low light with his NVGs, but he could see the tears of pain and shock streaming down the boy’s face in his mind’s eye, anyway.
That wasn’t all he was seeing, even as he dropped his med bag to the grass beside him and started pulling bandages out. He was seeing another crumpled form, this one with a bullet hole beneath his left eye, the eye bulging half out of its socket from the overpressure, blood being washed down the muddy Afghan canal from the back of a shattered skull. Another that had been simply slumped back against the far wall of the canal, seemingly asleep, except for the blood drenching his front. And the last one, that had been lying face down in the water, wedged against the muddy wall and the sitting body of the second.
He hadn’t had the courage to turn that one over then. He’d certainly dreamed about what he might have seen often enough, in the years that followed.
“I’ve got you,” he said quietly, barely audible over the kid’s screams, as he tried to pry shaking hands away from the wound. He knew the kid couldn’t understand a word he was saying; he was just hoping that the tone of his voice would calm him, give him something to focus on besides the pain. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Lying to the patient. Just what the doctor ordered. He savagely suppressed the thought. He was a doctor. It didn’t matter if the patient was likely to die or not. His duty, his sacred duty, was to fight Death off as long as he could and as hard as he could, and if that meant telling a white lie to give the patient something to fight for, then that was what it meant. Stranger things had happened.
The kid was trying to fight him off, but was weakening fast. “No, you don’t,” he snarled. “Don’t you fucking dare.” He slapped the bandage over the gut wound, batting the kid’s hands away so he could tie it around his torso.
He was completely focused on his patient. Focused to the point that he hardly noticed Towne running up behind him. He didn’t notice the straggler, who had ducked back down into the spider hole as soon as Curtis had opened fire, rising up out of the opening, a grenade in his hand.
“Doc!” Towne yelled. “Get down!”
Villareal looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of what might have been something flying through the air toward him, a
small, dark object. Instinctively, he threw himself flat, covering the wounded boy with his body. A moment later, the grenade detonated, barely a foot away from where he lay.
***
Curtis had seen Towne throw himself flat, and didn’t bother to take the time to wonder what was going on. He followed suit, hitting hard and almost knocking the wind out of himself. At least he managed to avoid cracking his chin on the MG 3’s buttstock. Then an explosion shattered the jungle night ahead of him, the overpressure wave slapping him against the ground, shrapnel whispering overhead, and mud and debris showering down on him.
He dragged his suddenly aching head up off the ground, looking around frantically for the rest of his little element of lost sheep. Towne was picking himself up off the ground, and Sanda was flat on her stomach behind him, looking up at him, apparently still alive. Curtis, all too aware of the threat that that spider hole presented, got his feet under him and charged forward, holding the MG 3 at waist height, pointed roughly toward the hole. Fighting the recoil, he sprayed a long burst at the tunnel entrance, trying to keep the grenade thrower’s head down.
Towne had shied off to the right to avoid the spray of bullets, and was closing on the tunnel, his AK in his shoulder. As soon as Curtis ceased fire, he darted forward, and fired a long burst of his own, straight down into the spider hole. “Clear!” he called hoarsely.
For now. “Doc!” Curtis rasped. He really wasn’t feeling too good after being that close to an exploding grenade. “You all right?”
There was no reply. Curtis staggered a little as he neared the last place he’d seen Villareal.
The doctor was clearly dead. The grenade blast had thrown him half off the body of the kid he’d been trying to save. Half his fatigues had been blasted to tatters, and the flesh beneath flayed to hamburger. It was a small mercy that he wasn’t moving; if he’d felt any of it, it had only been for a brief moment.
“Hold on that fucking hole,” he told Towne. Kevin Curtis was ordinarily a chipper, obnoxiously cheerful man. Seeing Doc Villareal torn up like that, trying to save another kid the enemy had brainwashed into becoming a killer, had turned him as grim as Flanagan. He keyed his radio. “Kodiak, this is Gambler,” he called. “We just got jumped from a spider hole on the north side.” He paused, trying to swallow the sudden, hard lump in his throat before he could continue. “Doc is down.”
There was a long, pained silence. “Copy,” Brannigan finally acknowledged. “Hold what you’ve got; you won’t have much to do down here with that belt-fed, and I want that rat-line closed up.”
“Roger,” Curtis replied. He moved closer to the hole and started looking for a spot to set up where he could cover it and the rest of the hillside. After all, who knew where the bad guys might have more tunnel entrances?
He didn’t want to look at Doc’s body. Didn’t want to be near it. There was no way they could bring it out with them, and he knew it. And he hated himself, Burma, the North Koreans, and everything else for it.
***
After that explosion, the sounds of combat from inside the village died down. At almost the same time, several whistle blasts sounded from the woods south of the road, and then Hancock and the rest had nothing more to shoot at.
“Now’s our chance,” Hancock whispered. “Fall back to the village. Vinnie, you’re first.” The big machinegunner was acting a little woozy; Hancock wanted to get him to cover where he could be checked over. He suspected that Bianco was leaking more blood than he thought.
He tried not to think too much about how Villareal could no longer help them.
“We’ll hold until you get there,” Flanagan whispered. “Go!”
Hancock helped haul Bianco to his feet, and the two of them dashed for the nearest house. They had to circle around one side to get to the door. “Friendlies!” Hancock called. There was no way he was going to risk either Aziz or Jenkins blowing Bianco’s head off through miscommunication.
“Come ahead,” Jenkins replied from inside. Hancock shoved Bianco through the door.
“Get in there and have one of those guys check you over,” he said. Then he was moving back to the far corner, to where he could just barely make out where Wade and Flanagan were waiting.
“Turn and go,” he called. Without a word, the two men were up and moving, dashing toward the house. They pounded past him and around the corner, heading for the door, and he peeled off to follow.
The sandbag barricade inside the door wasn’t what he’d been expecting, but it took scant seconds to get over it. Jenkins was looking Bianco over, and already pulling bandages out of the bigger man’s individual first aid kit. Aziz was standing over a hole in the floor, his G3 pointed down into the blackness.
“Kodiak, Surfer,” he called on the radio. “I’ve got six in Building One.”
“Roger, Surfer,” Brannigan replied. “Leave two, and come to Building Three.” They’d hastily numbered the buildings after the initial reconnaissance. “We’ve got some tunnels to clear.”
CHAPTER 18
Park had pulled his men back as soon as he heard the fighting die down inside the village. He didn’t think that either side had won anything; the sudden quiet had to be due to Cao evacuating his headquarters to flee into the tunnels. The man was nothing if not predictable; he’d deliberately sited his quarters in the fallback village as far from the Tarshwetan Burmese Army Base as possible. He’d been expecting an attack to come from the west, not from the east, over Pingshan Mountain. As soon as he’d found himself on the wrong side of his defense in depth, he’d doubtless dropped underground and headed for the central defense node, under the next patch of village that rested in the saddle on the mountain’s flank.
Park had already lost half his force. He was not going to risk throwing the rest away to retake Kokang territory. Let Cao’s far larger Kokang Army do that.
As he and his men slipped through the vegetation, leaving Yoon’s and Cha’s bodies lying on the road, Park began to wonder if he was going to survive this at all. His suspicions that the attackers wreaking havoc through the Kokang rear area were not just Burmese paramilitaries were hardening into certainty; these enemies were far too persistent and far too effective. No, there was something else going on. He was starting to wonder if the imperialists hadn’t gotten wind of the North Korean presence in northern Burma and sent commandos.
He briefly considered simply leaving Cao to his fate and leading his men north, toward Yunnan. He quickly dismissed the idea. While it might keep them alive a little while longer, even if Lee did not execute him for it, he doubted that the Supreme Leader would look upon a Chungwi who abandoned his mission with mercy. He and his entire family would pay the price if he left now. The Supreme Leader demanded nothing but absolute loyalty, and Park reminded himself that his own life was a small price to pay for the sake of the Supreme Leader and the People’s Revolution.
It didn’t occur to him to think any other way. Twenty-five years of indoctrination had hard-wired his thought processes, made him wholly a disciple of the Supreme Leader and the Workers’ Party of Korea.
He knew where there was a secondary tunnel entrance that would allow him to link up with Lee, Comrade Baek, and Cao. Then they could plan their next move.
He was determined that his KPA soldiers were not going to be Cao’s main effort again, though. And he would convince Lee of that. They were there to advise, not to do the Kokang’s fighting for them. Cao had plenty of cannon fodder to throw at the enemy.
***
Brannigan was standing over the tunnel entrance in Building Three when Hancock, Flanagan, and Wade came in. He glanced up, frowning a little when he only counted three.
“Bianco took some frag,” Hancock explained. “I left him with Aziz on security, and Jenkins is patching him up.”
Brannigan nodded, turning his attention back to the hole at his feet. He’d prefer to have more of an assault force to go into the enemy’s lair, but at the same time, he reflected, tunnel rat work wasn’t
really for a large force.
If he gave himself a chance to think too much about it, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to go down there. For one thing, he was a very big man to fit into tunnels dug for poor ethnic Chinese and North Koreans. He’d never have been picked for tunnel rat duty in Vietnam, even if he’d been crazy enough to volunteer for it.
But, like it or not, he would hold to his “First in, last out” ethos. He wasn’t about to stay above ground and send his boys down into those catacombs without him.
“Well, gents,” he said. “I think we’re about to wish that we’d brought pistols.” He’d taken a look around the inside of the room, in case the enemy had left some weapons behind. “We could grab a couple of these AKs. They’re not the folding-stock versions, but they’re still more compact than the G3s.”
Flanagan grimaced, the expression barely visible in the dimness. “I’ll stick with the G3,” was all he said.
“Awfully bulky to be carrying down there in tunnels,” Hancock pointed out.
“Maybe,” Flanagan said. Joe Flanagan was generally a practical man, but had a known dislike for Eastern Bloc weaponry. He didn’t trust “Communist” arms. “And maybe they’d work. But we know our ammo’s good. Personally, I don’t want to trust my life in close quarters to ammo that’s probably been sitting in the jungle since Vietnam.”
“It’s probably newer than that,” Brannigan rumbled, “given how much fighting’s been going on in this part of the world. But you do have a point. A malf down there at the wrong time could be disastrous.” He sighed. “I’ll leave it up to you guys, but we’ve got to move.”
Flanagan’s words seemed to have given everyone second thoughts about trading known quantities for weapons and ammo of unknown provenance. Everyone held on to their G3s.
Rather than give himself any more time to think about it, he pointed around the room, as Childress and Gomez entered. “Tanaka, Wade, you’ve got security on this position. Don’t let any of ‘em come in behind us. Roger, you’re in overall command back here. I’ll take lead; the rest back me up.” He tried to crack a grin, but the awfulness of what he was about to climb down into, coupled with the still-lingering shock of Villareal’s death, turned it into more of a death’s head expression. “I’ll try not to block too much of the tunnel if I go down.”
