by Peter Nealen
The sounds of the firefight off to the west were waxing and waning. The Army had to have the advantage of numbers, but the Kokangs were dug in; the Blackhearts had seen firsthand just how well dug in they were. They had some time before either the Army broke through, or the Kokangs repulsed the Burmese and came after the threat in their rear.
They dropped down into a depression, then they were clambering up toward the crest of the tree-swathed hill ahead. They still hadn’t seen any sign of the enemy.
Wade ducked into the trees, then abruptly slowed, then stopped, sinking to a knee and holding up a warning hand. Hancock followed suit, passing the signal on to the rest behind him. The warning got passed on as the remaining mercenaries straggled in. Hart, surprisingly, had kept up better than most; his prosthetic hadn’t slowed him down at all.
Hancock crept forward until he was next to Wade. The big man was on a knee next to a tree trunk, just on the other side of the crest of the hill, looking down. He pointed as Hancock took a knee next to him, and Hancock nodded. He had to peer through the tree trunks and the foliage, but he saw what Wade had seen.
He couldn’t see the hole that was the tunnel exit, but he could just make out the arc of armed men in jungle camouflage gathered around it, their weapons aimed inward. He could also see a few of the green-clad corpses lying in the grass and weeds behind the North Koreans.
Hancock looked back at the rest of the Blackhearts dragging themselves into the trees, and started signaling, pointing to each man as he came in and directing him to right and left, holding a finger to his lips to caution quiet, and pointing his rifle down the slope to the north, in the classic signal for “enemy sighted.” Even as the others gulped at the humid air, they slowed down and moved carefully, spreading out opposite and above the North Korean ambush.
Finally, there were eight rifles and two machineguns pointed down at the North Koreans. From their positioning, Hancock had already guessed that they were waiting for Brannigan and the rest of the tunnel rats. That they hadn’t sprung their ambush yet told him that either things had already gone very bad down below, or that Brannigan or one of the others had suspected an ambush, and were reluctant to simply walk into it.
There was still no way to contact the men underground to coordinate. So, Hancock put his red dot on the nearest North Korean machinegunner, a small man lying behind a Bren-style Type 73, and squeezed the trigger.
With the sun up, there was no visible muzzle flash, though the blast smacked at the nearby weeds and grass. He fired twice at the machinegunner, who twitched, jerked, and then lay still. At the same time, the entire patch of woods resounded with the booming, thundering roar of gunfire, as the entire team opened up on the North Korean ambush.
Curtis and Bianco did most of the killing. They played their machineguns’ cones of fire back and forth across the ambush, hammering dozens of rounds into bodies wherever they saw targets. The riflemen picked their targets and put pairs downrange, searching the North Koreans out between the trees. The Norks’ jungle camouflage was made up of just barely the wrong colors to quite blend in with the grass.
It wasn’t a clean sweep, though. Return fire started to tear through the leaves and the weeds at them, coming from off to the left. They’d missed somebody.
***
Flanagan stopped as he heard the shooting, feeling his whole body involuntarily tense as he waited for a bullet to rip through his lungs. But when none came, he let out a breath and listened.
That was definitely the heavier pitch of 7.62 NATO he was hearing, he realized, though the noises were still weirdly distorted by the echoes rolling down the passage. What exactly that meant, he wasn’t sure; part of the reason they’d brought G3s in the first place was because the Burmese Army used them. And he knew they were well away from the village and the security element.
But he wasn’t getting shot at, which meant there was a momentary advantage, regardless of what was going on up above. He didn’t wait for Brannigan; he tugged a frag out of his vest and rushed forward toward the growing light ahead, as fast as he could while still half bent-over in the tight confines of the tunnel.
As the tunnel exit came into view, he tore his NVGs off and let them fall. He could worry about retrieving them later, if he survived. He needed to see.
The scene that met his eyes was one of carnage. Bodies were strewn on the ground in front of the tunnel exit, some facing away, some facing in toward the underground passage. No one in his immediate view was still alive or in any shape to fight, as fire was pouring down on them from somewhere above and behind him, bullets whip-cracking through the air and thudding into bodies.
But someone was shooting back from somewhere off to the left, and it was the distinctively lighter sound of the enemy AKs, or AK clones. So, as he plunged out into the sunlight, Flanagan pulled the pin and flung the grenade to the left, even as he threw himself flat, hitting the dirt with a jarring impact.
He had no idea exactly where the bad guys were, or how close he was with that frag, but when it detonated with a heavy thud that vibrated through the ground, some of the 5.45 fire ceased, and somebody started screaming. A moment later, a long, stuttering burst of an MG 3 silenced the screams.
Then there was no more shooting. Flanagan stayed on his belly, though he got his rifle back around to where he could use it, as he waited and watched, his heart pounding, his breath rasping in his lungs.
There was movement behind him, and then Brannigan was at his side, facing back up the hill, his rifle held ready. Flanagan scrambled up to a knee, trying to see better and therefore be better able to cover the Colonel’s back.
“Friendlies!” Hancock’s voice drifted down from the hill above them. Flanagan breathed a sigh of relief. Brannigan lowered his rifle and started to turn back toward the kill zone in front of them.
“Bring it in,” he called.
***
It took a few moments to complete the link-up; they were still in hostile territory, there was still a raging battle going on less than two klicks to the west, and they still couldn’t be certain that there weren’t North Koreans or Kokangs hiding in the weeds, waiting for them to let their guard down. They had to stay cautious and alert.
“I thought I told you to hold the end of the tunnel complex,” Brannigan said, as Hancock took a knee next to him and dropped his extra pack. He was squinting in the sudden light after the darkness of the tunnels.
“And if I had, you’d have walked right into that ambush,” Hancock countered. He was looking at the bodies strewn across the clearing. “Fortunately, we heard shooting, presumably when the Norks decided to double-cross their allies. I had a hunch, flipped a coin, and acted on it.” He shrugged. “It worked out.”
“It was a good call,” Brannigan agreed.
With Bianco and Curtis on overwatch with the machineguns, and Towne and Hart covering back toward the village and the fighting, the rest of the Blackhearts carefully started to advance across the clearing, checking the bodies. Brannigan was counting as he crossed the killing field.
The gruesome litter across the clearing was starting to paint a picture in his mind. Most of the Kokangs had been shot in the back, and he was reasonably sure that Hancock’s assessment had been correct. Several of the dead had packs on their backs, and more than one was leaking white powder onto the grass. The North Koreans must have decided to keep the drugs for themselves, figuring that the op was over.
He frowned, and looked back at the remains of the Nork ambush. Something wasn’t right. Sure, they’d never been entirely sure of how many Norks were in Burma, but the count seemed off to him. That was when Gomez pointed.
There was a track trampled through the grass, leading down the mountain and off toward the northeast, toward China. Someone had gotten away, after all.
Brannigan looked back, circled his arm over his head, then pointed after it. They weren’t done yet.
And it was looking like they were going to have to invade the People’s Republic o
f China to finish the job.
CHAPTER 21
Baek could not remember ever being so frightened in his life. He had never been so close to the violent part of Bureau 39’s operations, though he had certainly known that dealing in organized crime often involved a great deal of violence. He was a planner and a bureaucrat, not a soldier or an enforcer. He’d already been shocked by Park’s insistence that he carry one of the packs full of drugs. That was not his role. He was far too highly connected within the Party to be subject to such a menial task. But the sudden, murderous light in the Chungwi’s eyes had convinced him that arguing the point was going to be a very bad idea.
He’d seen Park die, seen the bullet crash through the Chungwi’s temple and exit out the back of his neck in a spray of blood and pulverized meat. Any satisfaction he might have felt at seeing the man who had ordered a Party member in good standing around like a prole was immediately extinguished by the pants-wetting fear as he watched most of the entire surviving Light Infantry Guide Bureau contingent get slaughtered to a man.
He and the other three chosen porters had been hiding in the trees just north of the ambush, waiting for Park to finish off their pursuers and join them. When the ambush had been attacked and slaughtered from the hill above, Baek had turned to the three soldiers and said, “We must go. Delivering the product for the Supreme Leader is all that is important now.” He’d hoped to sound commanding, like a proper Party leader. Instead, his voice had come out in a hoarse squeak.
None of the three soldiers had argued, however. They had simply shouldered their packs, lifted their rifles, and led the way down the mountain, toward the Chinese border.
Baek was not worried about getting back to Korea, provided they could escape the attackers who had slaughtered Park and his men. He was the primary contact for the entire operation; the coordination had all gone through him. He knew the passphrases to get past the Chinese border guards, and he knew how to find the contacts with the local Party officials in Yunnan that would get him and the three other survivors back to Pyongyang.
He was keeping right in the middle of the little knot of drug-toting soldiers. He neither wanted to be in front, possibly to face an extra-trigger-happy Chinese border guard, or in the rear, closer to the unknown enemy that had just torn through Park’s troops.
The gunfire from behind died down. Baek did not think that it was because the surviving Korean soldiers had won. He sped up his pace.
***
The track of flattened grass was easy enough to follow, and Childress was on it, not quite at a jog, but not moving slowly, either. Brannigan, Gomez, and Flanagan were close behind.
The border wasn’t far, and Brannigan suspected that the border guards, who couldn’t have missed the noise of battle just a few short miles away, were going to be on alert. He’d have liked to intercept the last of the North Koreans before they reached the border, but realized that it probably wasn’t going to happen. He drove on behind Gomez and Flanagan, his throat raw with thirst, his palms slick with sweat and dirt, his head pounding from the exertion in the heat and humidity.
Ahead, they were getting glimpses of movement. Their quarry hadn’t gotten as far away as he’d feared, but they were still beyond a sure rifle shot. They had to close that distance.
And they were closing it. Whatever the Norks were carrying, it was heavy, and it was slowing them down. Childress was on the hunt, breaking into a dogtrot whenever the vegetation and terrain were open enough to permit it.
They continued southeast, going up and down the fingers and draws around the crest of Pingshan Mountain, and in and out of the trees. Twice, they were close enough to have perhaps risked a shot, but the forest got in the way, hiding their quarry in the trees and the undergrowth.
The enemy was flagging, the one in the center starting to stagger under his load. But they were also getting closer and closer to the border.
Childress finally stopped right at the crest of the last hill before China, dropped to a knee, carefully steadied his rifle in a textbook shooting position, let out a long breath, and squeezed off a shot. There were about four hundred meters between them and the North Koreans by then.
The rifle boomed, and Childress rocked back slightly with the recoil, the single brass shell casing winking in the sun as it spun away over his shoulder. The lead North Korean, who had turned back to look at the rapidly slowing man behind him, staggered, then crumpled.
Gomez hit the ground next to Childress. The silent, dark-eyed man didn’t even seem to be breathing that hard. He leveled his own rifle and started squeezing off shots. A moment later, Brannigan and Flanagan joined in.
Two of the North Koreans were returning fire, but their 5.45x39mm rifles were outranged by the heavier G3s. The bullets were hissing and buzzing overhead; some of them had obviously gone subsonic and started tumbling by the time they got all the way to the hill where the Blackhearts had set up. The smaller man, the slow one, hadn’t stopped, but was still staggering toward the border.
Then Curtis caught up, dropped flat with a grunt, got behind his MG 3, and ended the conversation with three long bursts. The machinegun chugged rapidly, and the first Nork who was shooting back dropped, screaming. The second got up and tried to run, and Curtis cut him nearly in half, the bullets punching through the backpack with little puffs of white powder.
Curtis then got down a little bit flatter, trying to elevate the muzzle just a little more, and ripped off a third burst. The little man who had been leaving his friends behind fell, his legs chopped out from under him. A faint scream reached the hill a moment later.
Brannigan looked back. Hancock and Santelli had the rest catching up. Jenkins, Bianco, and Sanda were the slowest, though it looked like Hart had taken Sanda’s pack. Aziz was still trying to walk next to her, but she didn’t appear to be paying him much mind. Santelli, Wade, and Tanaka were in the rear, regularly turning to check behind them, making sure they weren’t being followed.
“Let’s move,” Brannigan said. He started down the hill, Childress and Flanagan rising quickly to get ahead of him.
He didn’t need to say anything; both men were heading for the bodies. They wanted to know that they’d gotten the last of their targets just as much as he did. He’d seen the Kokang body with the epaulets that had to have belonged to a “general,” which meant that the Kokangs, at least, had paid for using kids as cannon fodder to buy time. Brannigan still wanted to know that they’d made as clean a sweep of the Norks as they could be sure of.
Keeping alert, moving warily, they started up the hill toward the Chinese border. The corpses were all but invisible in the grass until they were right on top of them.
The first two were clearly dead, each with four or five bullets through the vitals. One was lying at the end of an eight-foot blood trail; he’d apparently tried to crawl away in his last few moments of life.
The first one that Childress had killed was lying on his side. He almost looked like he was simply asleep, until he was carefully turned over. Childress’ bullet had gone under his arm, through his armpit, and come out the other side. The exit wound had bled freely, and the side that he’d been lying on was soaked with blood.
There was a faint moan from a few yards away. Rifles came up, and they moved toward the last one.
The little man hadn’t had the presence of mind to drop his pack. He still had thick, round-lensed glasses on, though his face was scratched and he was crawling, dragging one leg clearly badly mangled by Curtis’ bullets. The leg was pumping blood, leaving a stuttering blood trail in the grass behind him. The arterial flow had obviously slowed, the pumps becoming more and more sluggish. He clearly didn’t have long.
Flanagan and Childress fanned out to either side of the dying man, keeping their rifles trained on him. Childress’ finger was already on the trigger. After what he had seen in the tunnels, mercy was the farthest thing from his mind.
But before either of them could shoot, Flanagan turned back toward Brannigan. �
�What do you want to do, John?” he asked. “He ain’t a threat to anybody, anymore.”
Childress suddenly snatched his finger out of his trigger guard at Flanagan’s words, shooting the other man a glance that might have been a bit guilty. Childress was the same man who had ventured to object to Santelli executing one of the Iranians they’d found torturing a Saudi prisoner on Khadarkh. But losing Doc and seeing the kids being used as cannon fodder had drowned his compassion in righteous fury, at least for a moment. It had taken Flanagan’s question to remind him.
Before Brannigan could say anything, though, the decision was made for them. With a groan, the North Korean tried to roll over, as more blood drizzled out of his leg. Flanagan lifted his rifle, his own finger tightening on the trigger, as Brannigan saw what looked like a CZ pistol in the North Korean’s hands. He started to lift his own weapon, but the Nork put the pistol to his own chin and fired.
He missed. Not his whole head, but the bullet punched out of the top of his forehead with a bloody spray, as one eyeball bulged halfway out of its socket from the overpressure. He was still alive, but definitely not for long.
Flanagan shot him between the eyes, before he could decide to try to use the pistol to take one of the rest of them with him.
It was over. Mission accomplished.
Now they just had to get out of there.
***
“Still nothing.” Brannigan slapped the satphone’s antenna shut and tossed it back on top of his pack. “Not even a ring tone.”
“You think he hung us out to dry?” Hancock asked quietly. The rest of the team was on security or trying to sleep, set into a tight perimeter in the trees. They’d gotten to a mountaintop overlooking a Chinese village, that didn’t look all that different from the one that the Kokangs had fortified, before setting in to rest and recoup before beginning the long trek to extract. But they needed to be able to contact Van Zandt to get their extract platform moving to the rendezvous. The timeline had been vague enough to make setting a drop-dead time next to impossible.
