Battle Born pm-8

by Dale Brown

  “Sir, we kept those weapons because they were to secure our borders and guarantee our security against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army,” Kim retorted. “We knew we could not defend ourselves against China’s overwhelming numerical advantage. China is stupid enough to risk the lives of millions of its citizens and soldiers just to take Chagang Do province — well, that was their mistake. We have no choice now, sir.

  “We have to back up our threat to use weapons of mass destruction to stop the Chinese. I am requesting your launch codes for our nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons force.”

  “You… you are insane, Kim…”

  “I am realistic, sir!” Kim exploded. “I am trying to save Korea, not watch it destroyed! I am in the command center directing our troops to try to drive the invaders out, not sitting in my cozy office or in some underground secret bunker wringing my hands and hoping for peace. I have ordered twelve Scud-B and six Nodong-1 ballistic missiles targeted against the Chinese brigades in Chagang Do province and inside Jilin province in China. I have also targeted air bases in Dandong, Fushun, and Shenyang, the tank base at Linjiang, and the naval bases at Luda and Qingdao. In addition, I have targeted two Nodong-2 missiles at the People’s Liberation Army command center…”

  “Beijing?” Kwon said in horror. “You… you have targeted Beijing with nuclear weapons?”

  “I know this seems a drastic and inconceivable act, sir,” Kim said with amazing calmness, “but if we have any hope of stopping the Chinese war machine from sweeping across Korea, we must do this. I need your execution codes, sir, and I need them now. You must read them off to me over the phone — I can send someone over there immediately to help you compute the codes if you wish. The senior controller here will copy them down and authenticate them. Combined with my codes, we can proceed with the attack.”

  “I will never agree to give you those codes, Kim!” Kwon shouted. “Do you honestly believe I would authorize an attack that could kill hundreds of millions of persons? You are insane! I order you to leave that command center immediately, or I will have you placed under arrest! I am dismissing you from your post.”

  “You cannot do that!”

  “It is done already,” Kwon said. “You are no longer minister of defense. I will issue the order immediately.” And the line went dead.

  Kim Kun-mo’s head was spinning as he hung up the telephone. The bastard, he thought angrily, he actually fired me? We are in the middle of a war with Communist China, and he fired me? “He can’t do that!” he shouted. “I can’t let that happen.” He picked up the telephone to the senior controller.

  “Sir?”

  “Seal up the command center, General,” Kim said. “Go to full nuclear-chemical-biological protection mode. Full EMP protective measures. Hard-wired analog communications only.”

  “Yes, sir,” the senior controller responded. “Switching to internal power, canceling digital and high-gain communications inlets.”

  Moments after an announcement was made, the lights flickered, then died except for a handful of battery-powered safety lights. The air also smelled different — mustier, dry like the inside of a coffin. They were on the air recirculators now, completely cut off from outside air; they were also on internal batteries that would be recharged as long as outside power was still available, but would instantly switch over to internal-only power if a nuclear blast erupted outside.

  Kim got up from his desk and looked down below to the floor of the command center — it was almost completely dark, with only a few consoles illuminated. But the activity did not cease. Technicians started carrying out sound-powered communications systems, simple Korean War-era field telephones, and old-style greaseboards to replace the now-dark digital information screens. Using hard-wired analog communications systems instead of digital or broad-bandwidth systems reduced the likelihood of total destruction in case of a nearby nuclear blast…

  … but it also isolated them from President Kwon Ki-chae, at least for a short time. The question is, would it be long enough?

  * * *

  Vice President Pak Chung-chu trotted into the president’s office then. “I was just notified!” he shouted excitedly. “General Kim and General An attempted a counterattack and were swept aside, and now Chinese troops are swarming across the border!”

  “General Kim seems to have gone insane,” Kwon shouted. “He requested — no, he demanded—I give him the execution codes so he can launch a special weapons attack against China. He has already targeted several Chinese cities, including Beijing! Can you believe this? He wants to drop two three-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton nuclear warheads on Beijing! He must be crazy!”

  “What did you order him to do instead, sir?” Pak asked.

  “I ordered him to get out of the command center because I have removed him from his office!” Kwon shouted. “I don’t want that madman in my military command center! I will find a replacement for him right away.”

  “But what about the Chinese, sir?” Pak asked, the panic rising in his throat. “The report said that three brigades of tanks are on the highway from Kanggye heading south toward Anju — they say Anju could be captured in three days! They have total air superiority above the fortieth parallel. What are we going to do?”

  “We negotiate with President Jiang,” Kwon said. “Trying to fight the Chinese People’s Liberation Army will only result in more casualties on our side. Besides, reports from the Americans say that China only wants to destroy the nuclear weapons labs in Chagang Do province, and they will withdraw once that mission is accomplished. To tell the truth, I am not unhappy about that plan.”

  “Mr. President, you cannot allow this to happen — you cannot simply let the Chinese march into Korea unopposed,” Pak said. “It is an act of war already for China to step across the border, no matter what we’ve done to them. But for us to do nothing and simply let them destroy our military facilities and labs and take whatever they please is not right! They must be stopped!”

  “And how can we do that, Mr. Pak?” Kwon asked. “I have already appealed to the United Nations. The United States has asked for a special emergency meeting of the Security Council to discuss the invasion. The United States has again asked us to remove all of our weapons of mass destruction, and has agreed to set up a border monitoring system — without using American troops on Korean soil. I am going to ask the legislature to approve this measure…”

  “That is all well and good for the future — if the Chinese Army will allow us to have a future!” Pak interjected. “Sir, you must retaliate. You promised the Korean people—my people, we from North Korea, the people that you promised would be safe from tyranny and dictatorship — that you would protect them. You have no choice but to act. Even if you fail, as General Kim has tonight, you must act.”

  “But what if Korean soldiers and airmen are killed trying to stop the Chinese horde?” Kwon asked. “Their deaths would be needless and tragic. They—”

  “You are wrong, Mr. President,” Pak told him sincerely. “Those soldiers and airmen are there because they want to be there, fighting for their country. They trust that we will direct them in defense of their homeland. We cannot, we must not, abdicate that responsibility, not to the United Nations, not to the United States, to no one. You have to give the order, sir.”

  “What order? I have been in contact with the service chiefs and the director of National Security Planning. They offer no solutions other than appealing for aid.”

  “You know the order that must be given,” Pak said in a low voice. “You know. You must attack with special weapons.” Kwon’s eyes bugged out as if he had just seen a ghost rise out of a grave. “You have to target China’s war machine, both on Korean soil and on Chinese soil. General Kim is not crazy. He knows we must act. You are the only one…”

  “I will not!” Kwon shouted. “I will never give those codes! I would rather die than let myself be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of souls.”r />
  Pak stared at Kwon for a moment, then slowly shook his head. He stepped over to the telephone on Kwon’s desk. “Send in the attaché, please.” A moment later, an Army officer entered the president’s office, carrying an average-looking black briefcase. He set the briefcase on Kwon’s desk before the president, turned it to face him, withdrew a key on a band around his left wrist, then stepped back a pace. “Mr. President, open the briefcase,” Pak ordered.

  “I will not,” Kwon replied. The Army officer looked puzzled, looking at both leaders in growing confusion.

  Pak Chung-chu reached into his jacket and withdrew a North Korean Type 64 automatic handgun with a six-inch sound suppressor attached. The Army officer gasped and tried to reach for his own sidearm, but Pak turned and fired a single round into his heart from ten feet away, killing him instantly.

  “You… you killed him!” Kwon exclaimed. “You bastard! He was innocent! He was a courier…”

  “Many will die tonight — he was just one more,” Pak said coldly. He went over to the body, picked up the key, and inserted it into a lock on the briefcase. “Now you, Mr. President. Unlock the briefcase.”

  “Or you will kill me too, Mr. Pak?” Kwon asked. “You seem to be in the mood for killing tonight.”

  “I suppose I am,” Pak said — and he shot Kwon Ki-chae in the heart. After the initial pain of the 7.65-millimeter slug, Kwon’s face actually looked peaceful, relieved, as he collapsed to the floor and died.

  Pak retrieved the second key to the briefcase from Kwon’s wrist and unlocked it. There were a series of twenty-five cards inside. Pak searched Kwon’s body until he found a small card with a series of instructions on it. Whoever was responsible for the briefcase was given a code number at the beginning of the day; his task was to apply the day’s code number and the current date-time group and come up with a code corresponding to one of the twenty-five cards in the briefcase.

  Kwon had never taken this exercise too seriously — after all, the minister of defense had to do exactly the same procedure, and then it had to be entered into the computers in the command center; enough checks and balances were involved. So when he was assigned the day’s code number, he usually wrote it right on the day’s decoding instruction card — a serious violation of security procedures, since anyone with the code number could issue the execution code. But that was Kwon Ki-chae, unconcerned about such details. Sure enough, the code number was right on the card. Kwon, Pak decided, just didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to play this game.

  After selecting the current date-time group, applying the numbers to the instruction card, and coming up with the correct execution code card, Pak had to contact the command center and give them the execution code and the date-time group he used to choose the card. The minister of defense then had to use the same date-time group to come up with his execution code. Then both codes had to be relayed to the command center senior controller, who entered them into the prearming computer. If the codes matched and were within six minutes of the original date-time group, the computer would allow launch commands to be issued on the special communications network to all missile units.

  Pak dialed the direct line to Kim Kun-mo’s office in the command center. “It is done, General,” he said solemnly. “The execution code follows…” and he read off the execution code and the date-time group.

  “You have done the right thing… Mr. President,” Kim said excitedly, and he hung up the phone to get to work on his own decoding task before time ran out.

  The right thing… Mr. President. The right thing… Mr. President. Pak Chung-chu smiled at the words. They sounded good. They sounded very good. He had a lot of work to do, a lot of pieces to pick up, a lot of promises to fulfill, a lot of fears to dispel.

  His first official act was to kneel beside the body of the brave visionary Kwon Ki-chae, first president of the United Republic of Korea, put the muzzle of his Type 64 pistol into his own mouth, and blow his brains out.

  OVER CENTRAL KOREA

  THAT SAME TIME

  Hey, boss, why don’t we go down there and do something?” Rinc Seaver asked. The Americans had been watching the air battle unfold below them on their supercockpit displays, amazed at the waste of men and equipment in such an incredibly short period of time. “Let’s lob a few Wolverines in there — that’ll stop that Chinese armor cold.”

  “I agree, Major,” Patrick said. “Genesis, this is Fortress Zero, how do you read?”

  “Loud and clear, Fortress,” Lieutenant General Terrill Samson responded. Samson was listening and watching the patrol on his own office-sized version of the virtual cockpit system from back at Dreamland. “Just about to call you guys. You got the green light, repeat, green light. Stand by.” As they watched, one by one small triangle target symbols appeared on their supercockpit displays and on the virtual cockpit displays at Adak. Each target symbol represented a column of vehicles within the kill pattern of a Wolverine cruise missile. The computer quickly calculated the proper attack axis of each target so the warheads in each Wolverine had maximum effect, and then the target list was divided by aircraft. All of this flight planning was done in a matter of moments, then presented to the crews.

  “Looks like we’re putting rocket-killing on hold for a while,” Rebecca said.

  “Just remember, you need to high-tail it out to air cover as soon as you release,” Patrick told them over the virtual cockpit communications net. “You guys are fairly undetectable, even with your bomb doors open, but Wolverines are not, and it’ll take over half a minute to pump out your missiles. The bad guys will be on you like stink on shit.”

  The Wolverine runs were all done from high altitude. Seaver and Long had to fly north to catch up with the others, and Furness and Scott had to fly eastbound, then back around to the west, to coordinate their release as well; but all three EB-1 Megafortress bombers reached their release points within ten seconds of each other. They unreeled their towed emitter arrays from each Megafortress’s tail just before reaching the lethal range of the mobile surface-to-air missiles below them.At the optimal range for the attack profile, the bomb doors opened, and they started raining Wolverine cruise missiles down on the Chinese armored columns rolling across southern Chagang Do province. Each Megafor-tress released six Wolverine missiles every nine seconds from a rotary launcher in the aft bomb bay, leaving two Wolverines each for reattacks or for rocket-hunting.

  Each AGM-177 Wolverine cruise missile steered itself slightly away from the target as it descended and started its small turbofan engine. As it got closer to its first target, it leveled off less than a hundred feet above the terrain, guided by a satellite navigation computer, a terrain-comparison computer, and a millimeter-wave radar. Thirty seconds before impact, the missile’s radar took a snapshot of the target area, refined its steering, then began transmitting pictures of the target back by satellite to McLanahan and two other Megafortress bombardiers in the virtual cockpit at Adak Naval Air Station. This way, the flight crews would not have to divert attention between helping to fly the aircraft and finding targets. If the missiles needed a slight aiming tweak, the techs could do it right from their control consoles at Adak.

  The Wolverine missiles each had three bomb bays. Each bomb bay was loaded with the same weapon — ten BLU-108/B “Shredder” sensor-fused weapon submunitions. Each Shredder had four projectiles that, once released, would search out their own target and shoot a slug of molten copper into it with enough force to pierce even heavy armor.

  As the Wolverine approached each column of ground vehicles, it made a slight climb, then ejected the sub-munitions one by one from about three hundred feet above the column before descending back to treetop altitude. The ten submunitions would spin as they were ejected, extending four skeets with tiny heat-seeking sensors, which would lock onto a vehicle below. At the right moment, the skeets would detonate, sending the molten copper slug at the target at twice the speed of sound.

  The effect was devastating. Each slug ha
d a range of one-half mile, so the submunitions did not have to be directly over a target to hit it. Any vehicle smaller than a tank within a half mile of the projectiles was destroyed. The molten copper slug easily penetrated metal up to an inch thick, but after it cut through the metal, it had cooled enough so that, once inside the vehicle, it couldn’t act as a penetrator again. When the still-molten copper slug hit the next piece of metal — usually the floorboards — the molten copper spattered into a thousand tiny hot copper bullets traveling at the speed of sound. Anything inside the vehicle would be cut apart in the blink of an eye. Tanks fared a little better. Unless a slug hit the very top of the tank, which is usually made of thinner metal and is more vulnerable, the copper slug simply bored through the outer armor plating and stopped — usually causing fuel tanks to explode, setting off ammunition magazines, or turning transmissions into twisted blobs.

  The death dance was repeated over and over again as the Wolverine missiles flew down the long columns of tanks and infantry support vehicles. Little escaped their detection: Jeep-sized four-wheel vehicles were hit, along with mobile antiaircraft weapons, supply trucks, and troop transports. A Shredder skeet hitting a diesel-powered vehicle’s engine compartment instantly turned the engine and its fuel supply into a gigantic white-hot fireball, engulfing it and its occupants within seconds.

  When the last bomb bay was empty, each Wolverine missile located one last large target using its millimeter-wave radar. The techs back in the virtual cockpit got a last look through the imaging infrared camera, made minor course adjustments if necessary, then flew the missile into the last target. Even empty and without an exploding warhead except for a small amount of unexpended jet fuel, a nine-hundred-pound Wolverine missile traveling at over three hundred miles an hour packs a devastating punch.