Dmz this is the future o.., p.17
DMZ: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 7), page 17
Info Wars
Yangdok Railway Station, North Korea
“Comrade Colonel, we are in position and deploying for operations,” the commander of the North Korean KN-24 rail-mobile short-range ballistic missile launcher reported to his battalion commander in Pyongyang.
He did not think twice about questioning the order he had just been given, since to do so would have been a death sentence.
Their specially constructed Chong-tae engine had pulled the launcher to a halt five miles east of Yangdok station, North Korea. The 58-year-old battery commander had been in charge of his unit for three years and with the way the political winds had been blowing had fully expected to retire when his train was retired. After all, what use was there for a tactical hypersonic missile that could only reach targets in South Korea, when all of Korea was one country again?
He had of course been curious when he had been ordered to replace his missile’s warhead. It could be fitted with everything from 1,000 lb. bunker busting conventional warheads to 5 kiloton nuclear airburst payloads and the special nature of this particular warhead could cause a man of his experience to speculate wildly, if he was a man given to speculation. But then, he reasoned, if that was true, he would not have risen to the rank of battery commander in a military which rewarded speculation with re-education.
As he watched the crane on his carriage-borne launcher lift his missile into a vertical position, while its solid fuel ignition system powered on, he folded his hands behind his back and allowed himself a moment of … introspection. To his men, the frown on his face should look like displeasure at the amount of time they were taking to achieve launch readiness. But inside, he was wondering. The discipline of rank and experience had prevented him from looking up the GPS coordinates he had been given when he received his orders, but the same experience also told him roughly what lay underneath those coordinates.
The South Korean capital, Seoul.
So he couldn’t help but ask himself … what effect would this warhead have on its target?
He had little doubt the missile would reach its target. The South Korean ‘Heavenly Dome’ anti-missile defense system might be effective against mere supersonic rockets and cruise missiles, but it was useless against short-range hypersonics. By the time it had detected the launch and tried to lock onto his missile with radar, his KN-24 would be descending toward its target at four times the speed of sound. The body of the missile would then fragment, creating decoys to confuse the defender and attract any ground to air missiles the South Koreans managed to launch.
Unmolested, the true warhead would accelerate through five times the speed of sound, to a terminal velocity of 5.9 times the speed of sound or 4,500 miles an hour.
His Lieutenant came running up, seemingly pleased with himself. “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, launcher raised, fuel, weapons and guidance systems optimal, target locked … we are ready to fire!”
He looked at his watch. It had taken his men twelve minutes and ten seconds from the moment they dismounted from the train to the moment they were ready to fire.
He knew the battalion’s best effort was twelve minutes and five seconds but decided today was not the day to make an example.
“Good enough, Lieutenant.” He reached for his radio handset again. “Comrade Colonel, we are ready to fire.” He nodded at the response and returned the handset to its cradle. “Lieutenant, you are authorized to fire.”
The man turned toward an officer standing at the door of the command carriage and waved his arm up and down. The man relayed the signal to another soldier inside.
With a building roar, the rocket ignited and a report like a cannon firing punched them in the chest before dirt, grass and smoke started billowing from under the launcher and the missile burst upward on a pillar of fire.
Small white secondary contrails radiated outward from the launch tube, but it was already folding back down onto the train carriage as the KN-24 commander gave his next order. “Mount up. We move to the next position.” He put a hand on his Lieutenant’s shoulder. “Faster next time, yes, Lieutenant?”
South Korean Prime Minister Ted Choi’s aide came running into the room, interrupting his call with the head of the Joint Chiefs by bowing and placing a tablet PC on the table in front of him.
Choi spun the tablet so that he could see it properly, and refused to look impressed. He heard muffled voices at the other end of the line.
“General, sorry … yes, I assume you are receiving the same information that I am?” Choi was a Catholic, and though not devout, the words came to him easily as he nodded curtly. “Yes. God be with you, General.”
“Bring up KTV Seoul,” he told his aide. He did not have access to the same missile tracking system in Sejong as his Chief of Staff in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. But he was not so interested in the track of the missile that had just been fired at Seoul.
He was only interested in the effect of it.
His aide crossed to a wall screen, turned it on and tuned to the national broadcaster’s Seoul channel. Two TV anchors were breathlessly recapping the earlier attack on Panmunjom, the artillery barrage on Seoul, and – it seemed – interviewing a former air force officer about an air-to-air altercation over the DMZ.
None of that interested Choi.
He sat at his desk, tapping his fingertips with an impatient, rolling beat. One minute passed and then two. Finally…
“Turn that up,” he said.
The vision on the flat screen showed the skyline of Seoul taken from what was possibly the TV station’s panoramic webcam atop the Namsam TV tower. The picture was taken from one of the east-facing towers and the afternoon sky was gray. The camera was showing an apartment building which must have been set alight in the earlier artillery barrage. As it panned across the skyline, dramatically following the cloud of smoke, it jerked, and then swung back again to a massive explosion. As the flash cleared and the camera focused again, a huge mushroom cloud of smoke started boiling up into the air.
“My God,” Yeo said, genuinely shocked. “Was that … was that nuclear?”
Choi grabbed the TV remote from his desk and turned off the screen. “No, idiot. Thermobaric. You knew this was coming.” He turned to his aide. “Are the socials ready?”
“I … they will be … it’s just …”
The fool was still staring at the screen, shocked. Choi snapped his fingers. “The socials?”
“I … yes, sir. We’ll take the TV feed, mix it with some footage from the artillery barrage earlier, finish with … with the mushroom cloud. Send it out on all your platforms.”
“Read me the text again.”
He wanted to be sure he’d struck the right tone. Horrified, resolute. In command.
His aide pulled his cell phone from his pocket and paged through to the app he was looking for. “Uh … here. Seoul, minutes ago. The horror we feared for decades has been visited upon us. We will make the criminal regime pay. Seek shelter and pray for our nation…”
Choi swiveled in his chair. “Terror … the terror we feared for decades blah blah.”
“Terror, yes sir.” The man typed into his screen. “You want this on your official account?”
“Why not?”
“It will confirm you are still alive. It may be useful to keep that fact up our sleeve, until your public address.”
Choi stopped swinging his chair and grabbed his desk, fixing his security chief, Yeo, with a glare. “There will be no public address until the situation at the Peace Dam is resolved, is that clear?”
“Prime Minister.”
“Now get that fat bastard General on the line again.”
As he watched the man scamper into the room next door he felt a glow of satisfaction. He was born for this day, and he would make it his.
“Did you ever wonder,” ‘Snake-eater’ Besserman asked Kronk, “whether you were in the wrong line of work?”
They were picking their way over a rocky beach after having slid down a muddy riverbank. In the thirty minutes since knocking out the drone that had been following them, they had covered two miles, maybe three. The good news was that the dust of their pursuers had disappeared.
Kronk tried to jump between rocks, landing with one foot in mud up to his ankle. It made a sucking noise as he pulled it free. “Would you believe I never did? Until today?”
Snake hopped past him, with what he hoped was the grace of a mountain goat, but probably looked more like a circus acrobat about to lose their balance and fall into a cage full of tigers. He made it back to the riverbank.
“Cheer up, Navy. The Air Force is here now.”
“This the same Air Force that was escorting us this morning when we were shot down?”
Snake decided to change the subject. “What do they call you, Petty Officer?”
“Kronk, sir. Ryan.”
“You can call my pop ‘sir’,” Besserman told him. “Out here, I’m Snake. As in Snake-eater. For reasons you may one day learn. You got a nickname?”
“Uh, guys on Bougainville call me ‘Toes’.”
Snake grimaced. “You lost a couple? Or you got extra?”
“No, sir. Short for ‘Toes-up’. Because my idea of a good night out always ends with me passed out, I guess.”
“That’ll do it.” Snake had decided the best way to travel was with the Shikaka’s transceiver switched on, an earpiece in his ear, and the radio tuned to the Hawkeye AWACs channel so that he could at least follow what was happening in the skies around them.
When he heard their call sign, he stuck a hand in the air and pulled up fast, then pressed the ‘speak’ button on his earpiece. “Hammerhead, Envy. Please repeat?”
“Envy, we are picking up a broken South Korean radio signal five miles south-southeast of your position. It sounds like they are reporting they are under enemy fire but we can’t get a good read. Can you make an ISR run over the source of the signal and report back?”
He looked back in the direction they had just traveled and saw no sign they were still being pursued. Could they make an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance run with their Shikaka?
That would be a ‘hell yes’.
Snake motioned to Kronk and pointed at the riverbank. “Hammerhead, Envy, can do. I will need five mikes to set up and then maybe another ten, fifteen to get eyes on your boys. I may even be able to get our bird close enough to pick up that radio signal. What is the frequency?”
If he was going to be providing ground support to a South Korean ground unit, he needed to speak directly with their joint terminal air controller.
“Uh, Envy … that radio is calling in the clear in the 462 MHz range. It could be nothing, could be a decoy. Be careful.”
“Good copy, Hammerhead, give us that location.”
He had climbed up the sandy embankment to a plateau of dirt and spiky grass and Kronk had dropped his duffel bag beside him. “Wassup?” he asked.
“Unpack that,” Snake told him. “And then keep an eye out for unwanted attention.”
Kronk assembled the control modules with practiced speed and Snake was soon at the stick, bringing their Shikaka down to 40,000 feet and within five miles of the signal’s position, the top of a spiny ridge, simply labeled Hill 205.
He had clear skies under the Shikaka and a 20/20 view of the situation below. He picked up the two South Korean soldiers at the crossroads, in cover behind a troop transport and trading fire with two groups of attackers.
There was just one problem. Both groups of combatants were wearing the same damn uniforms!
Corporal Mike Chang had more than one problem.
His only real marksman was dead, his body slumped at the rocks behind the ridge. After the grenade had gone off without fragging either of them, he’d left Nam under the truck, unable to shoot uphill at the North Korean troops, but unlikely to get himself shot unless they charged his position.
He lay on the ground beside the hapless private, checking his field of fire. “Alright kid, stay under here. Don’t be afraid to pull back further if the enemy targets you. Your job is to keep their heads down, try to stop them pushing on us. Conserve your ammunition, just shoot when you have a clear shot.” He clapped the boy on the back. “You got that?”
“Yes, Corp,” Nam said.
Meanwhile he clambered out from under the truck and into its cabin, where he got onto the radio and started broadcasting a mayday across every damn band he could find.
Suddenly, his radio crackled to life.
“South Korea unit at the base of Hill 205, this is US Navy Envy flight, we have your vehicle in sight, available for close air support, what is your situation?”
He rolled on his back, squinting out the windscreen into the glare of the sky, listening and looking for an aircraft but seeing nothing. Then flinched as a line of bullets stitched across the passenger door behind his head.
He raised his voice above the sound of incoming and outgoing fire. “Envy, it’s good to hear a friendly voice. Emergency, two groups of enemy troops attacking our position – northeast and southeast, range 50 to 100 yards out. Estimate two groups of two or three combatants. Can you assist?”
Sensing a pause in the volume of incoming fire he rolled to a crouch and sent a few rounds in the direction of the North Koreans through the passenger window before ducking down again.
“South Korea unit, Envy flight. I see what looks like a blue on blue engagement down there. Can you clarify?”
Clarify? “Envy, my unit was ambushed by a North Korean border patrol, they stole our uniforms, we tracked them here and re-engaged … we are outnumbered and taking casualties. Need help, now!” He bobbed up, let fly a couple of rounds as Nam did the same.
“Good copy, South Korea, getting strike approval…”
Chang snuck a look uphill. The troops there would soon get tired of taking potshots at them. He had seen the North Korean sergeant in action once already today, and she was not the patient type. She didn’t have as many men anymore, but sooner or later she would decided to rush the truck. Come on, Navy, come on, dammit.
“South Korea, you are broadcasting in the clear. I need your service ID, immediately.”
“My what?”
“Army service ID. Now, soldier.”
What insanity was this? He rattled off his ID number.
“Hang in there, South Korea,” the US pilot said and his earpiece went dead again.
Seconds later it crackled to life. “South Korea, strike is approved. Buckle your helmet, we’re coming in hot, five mikes.”
“Good copy, South Korea out.” Five minutes? He watched Nam with closed eyes squirt several rounds into the air over the North Koreans’ heads, not even aiming anymore. On Nam’s side of the hill, he saw a North Korean soldier rise and sprint forward ten yards before throwing himself behind cover again.
He doubted they would be alive five minutes from now.
Snake was sending the vision of the firefight to the Navy Hawkeye, but what had complicated his request for permission to engage the attacking force was … they were in the same uniforms as the men at the truck. Both attackers and defenders were wearing South Korean Army uniforms!
Snake imagined there had been a heated discussion inside the AWACS aircraft about whether they should even trust the request for air support. What if the troops by the truck were the bad guys and the ones attacking downhill were the good guys? How could they know? It wouldn’t be the first blue on blue engagement of the day.
After thirty long seconds Snake couldn’t take the silence from the Hawkeye any longer. “Hammerhead, the attacking force is now about fifty yards from overrunning our troops’ defensive position. I have targets locked and Locusts spun up for the strike.” Snake had boxed the two attacking groups and allocated three Locusts at each. The attackers were in cover … enough to protect them from light arms fire, but not from the blast of the precision-guided Locust’s fragmentation warheads.
“Envy, Hammerhead. We need you to get confirmation of the identity of the troops on the hilltop. Get a service ID and we’ll look for a match in our database.”
Snake had cursed. “Good copy, Hammerhead, getting an ID.”
As he opened the channel to the soldier below, he could hear the bark of assault rifles through his headset. The soldier had rattled off a number and he relayed it to the controller on the Hawkeye.
“Envy, Hammerhead. That ID is solid. You are cleared to engage.”
Snake had the shot set up, all he had to do was twitch his thumb on the laptop’s mousepad. “Roger that, Hammerhead. Rifle, rifle.”
Six vertically racked Locusts dropped from the belly of the Shikaka, fell behind their mothership and started steering toward their targets. Though they possessed a solid fuel rocket for longer-range attacks, they would not need it this time. By the time the Locusts neared their targets, gravity would have accelerated them to twice the speed of sound, or 1,447 miles an hour.
“They’re assaulting!” Chang yelled into the radio over the noise of Nam underneath the truck, hammering away in panic as the North Korean troops rose to their feet and led by their maniacal Sergeant, charged the truck. Rounds from a squad machine gun began punching into the K-311 transport’s door. A window over Chang’s head exploded.
He tumbled out of the cabin through the open driver’s door, huddled behind the rear wheels of the K-311, and stuck his rifle out, firing blindly in the direction of the North Koreans, before ducking back into cover. He’d seen enemy troops advancing to his left and right and looked desperately behind himself. There was no convenient riverbed to retreat to this time – behind them was a bare hillside. To their left and right, open road.
Bullets spattered off the road and into the suspension of the transport. He’d known the assault would come, and now there was nothing he could do about it.
He looked at his watch. One minute since he’d spoken with the Navy pilot. Four minutes to run. They just had to stay alive four more minutes.
Up by the front wheels of the transport, Nam was pulling the magazine out of his rifle. The spare magazines they had recovered from the truck cabin were in a satchel at Chang’s feet. Nam started crawling for the satchel…
Yangdok Railway Station, North Korea
“Comrade Colonel, we are in position and deploying for operations,” the commander of the North Korean KN-24 rail-mobile short-range ballistic missile launcher reported to his battalion commander in Pyongyang.
He did not think twice about questioning the order he had just been given, since to do so would have been a death sentence.
Their specially constructed Chong-tae engine had pulled the launcher to a halt five miles east of Yangdok station, North Korea. The 58-year-old battery commander had been in charge of his unit for three years and with the way the political winds had been blowing had fully expected to retire when his train was retired. After all, what use was there for a tactical hypersonic missile that could only reach targets in South Korea, when all of Korea was one country again?
He had of course been curious when he had been ordered to replace his missile’s warhead. It could be fitted with everything from 1,000 lb. bunker busting conventional warheads to 5 kiloton nuclear airburst payloads and the special nature of this particular warhead could cause a man of his experience to speculate wildly, if he was a man given to speculation. But then, he reasoned, if that was true, he would not have risen to the rank of battery commander in a military which rewarded speculation with re-education.
As he watched the crane on his carriage-borne launcher lift his missile into a vertical position, while its solid fuel ignition system powered on, he folded his hands behind his back and allowed himself a moment of … introspection. To his men, the frown on his face should look like displeasure at the amount of time they were taking to achieve launch readiness. But inside, he was wondering. The discipline of rank and experience had prevented him from looking up the GPS coordinates he had been given when he received his orders, but the same experience also told him roughly what lay underneath those coordinates.
The South Korean capital, Seoul.
So he couldn’t help but ask himself … what effect would this warhead have on its target?
He had little doubt the missile would reach its target. The South Korean ‘Heavenly Dome’ anti-missile defense system might be effective against mere supersonic rockets and cruise missiles, but it was useless against short-range hypersonics. By the time it had detected the launch and tried to lock onto his missile with radar, his KN-24 would be descending toward its target at four times the speed of sound. The body of the missile would then fragment, creating decoys to confuse the defender and attract any ground to air missiles the South Koreans managed to launch.
Unmolested, the true warhead would accelerate through five times the speed of sound, to a terminal velocity of 5.9 times the speed of sound or 4,500 miles an hour.
His Lieutenant came running up, seemingly pleased with himself. “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, launcher raised, fuel, weapons and guidance systems optimal, target locked … we are ready to fire!”
He looked at his watch. It had taken his men twelve minutes and ten seconds from the moment they dismounted from the train to the moment they were ready to fire.
He knew the battalion’s best effort was twelve minutes and five seconds but decided today was not the day to make an example.
“Good enough, Lieutenant.” He reached for his radio handset again. “Comrade Colonel, we are ready to fire.” He nodded at the response and returned the handset to its cradle. “Lieutenant, you are authorized to fire.”
The man turned toward an officer standing at the door of the command carriage and waved his arm up and down. The man relayed the signal to another soldier inside.
With a building roar, the rocket ignited and a report like a cannon firing punched them in the chest before dirt, grass and smoke started billowing from under the launcher and the missile burst upward on a pillar of fire.
Small white secondary contrails radiated outward from the launch tube, but it was already folding back down onto the train carriage as the KN-24 commander gave his next order. “Mount up. We move to the next position.” He put a hand on his Lieutenant’s shoulder. “Faster next time, yes, Lieutenant?”
South Korean Prime Minister Ted Choi’s aide came running into the room, interrupting his call with the head of the Joint Chiefs by bowing and placing a tablet PC on the table in front of him.
Choi spun the tablet so that he could see it properly, and refused to look impressed. He heard muffled voices at the other end of the line.
“General, sorry … yes, I assume you are receiving the same information that I am?” Choi was a Catholic, and though not devout, the words came to him easily as he nodded curtly. “Yes. God be with you, General.”
“Bring up KTV Seoul,” he told his aide. He did not have access to the same missile tracking system in Sejong as his Chief of Staff in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. But he was not so interested in the track of the missile that had just been fired at Seoul.
He was only interested in the effect of it.
His aide crossed to a wall screen, turned it on and tuned to the national broadcaster’s Seoul channel. Two TV anchors were breathlessly recapping the earlier attack on Panmunjom, the artillery barrage on Seoul, and – it seemed – interviewing a former air force officer about an air-to-air altercation over the DMZ.
None of that interested Choi.
He sat at his desk, tapping his fingertips with an impatient, rolling beat. One minute passed and then two. Finally…
“Turn that up,” he said.
The vision on the flat screen showed the skyline of Seoul taken from what was possibly the TV station’s panoramic webcam atop the Namsam TV tower. The picture was taken from one of the east-facing towers and the afternoon sky was gray. The camera was showing an apartment building which must have been set alight in the earlier artillery barrage. As it panned across the skyline, dramatically following the cloud of smoke, it jerked, and then swung back again to a massive explosion. As the flash cleared and the camera focused again, a huge mushroom cloud of smoke started boiling up into the air.
“My God,” Yeo said, genuinely shocked. “Was that … was that nuclear?”
Choi grabbed the TV remote from his desk and turned off the screen. “No, idiot. Thermobaric. You knew this was coming.” He turned to his aide. “Are the socials ready?”
“I … they will be … it’s just …”
The fool was still staring at the screen, shocked. Choi snapped his fingers. “The socials?”
“I … yes, sir. We’ll take the TV feed, mix it with some footage from the artillery barrage earlier, finish with … with the mushroom cloud. Send it out on all your platforms.”
“Read me the text again.”
He wanted to be sure he’d struck the right tone. Horrified, resolute. In command.
His aide pulled his cell phone from his pocket and paged through to the app he was looking for. “Uh … here. Seoul, minutes ago. The horror we feared for decades has been visited upon us. We will make the criminal regime pay. Seek shelter and pray for our nation…”
Choi swiveled in his chair. “Terror … the terror we feared for decades blah blah.”
“Terror, yes sir.” The man typed into his screen. “You want this on your official account?”
“Why not?”
“It will confirm you are still alive. It may be useful to keep that fact up our sleeve, until your public address.”
Choi stopped swinging his chair and grabbed his desk, fixing his security chief, Yeo, with a glare. “There will be no public address until the situation at the Peace Dam is resolved, is that clear?”
“Prime Minister.”
“Now get that fat bastard General on the line again.”
As he watched the man scamper into the room next door he felt a glow of satisfaction. He was born for this day, and he would make it his.
“Did you ever wonder,” ‘Snake-eater’ Besserman asked Kronk, “whether you were in the wrong line of work?”
They were picking their way over a rocky beach after having slid down a muddy riverbank. In the thirty minutes since knocking out the drone that had been following them, they had covered two miles, maybe three. The good news was that the dust of their pursuers had disappeared.
Kronk tried to jump between rocks, landing with one foot in mud up to his ankle. It made a sucking noise as he pulled it free. “Would you believe I never did? Until today?”
Snake hopped past him, with what he hoped was the grace of a mountain goat, but probably looked more like a circus acrobat about to lose their balance and fall into a cage full of tigers. He made it back to the riverbank.
“Cheer up, Navy. The Air Force is here now.”
“This the same Air Force that was escorting us this morning when we were shot down?”
Snake decided to change the subject. “What do they call you, Petty Officer?”
“Kronk, sir. Ryan.”
“You can call my pop ‘sir’,” Besserman told him. “Out here, I’m Snake. As in Snake-eater. For reasons you may one day learn. You got a nickname?”
“Uh, guys on Bougainville call me ‘Toes’.”
Snake grimaced. “You lost a couple? Or you got extra?”
“No, sir. Short for ‘Toes-up’. Because my idea of a good night out always ends with me passed out, I guess.”
“That’ll do it.” Snake had decided the best way to travel was with the Shikaka’s transceiver switched on, an earpiece in his ear, and the radio tuned to the Hawkeye AWACs channel so that he could at least follow what was happening in the skies around them.
When he heard their call sign, he stuck a hand in the air and pulled up fast, then pressed the ‘speak’ button on his earpiece. “Hammerhead, Envy. Please repeat?”
“Envy, we are picking up a broken South Korean radio signal five miles south-southeast of your position. It sounds like they are reporting they are under enemy fire but we can’t get a good read. Can you make an ISR run over the source of the signal and report back?”
He looked back in the direction they had just traveled and saw no sign they were still being pursued. Could they make an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance run with their Shikaka?
That would be a ‘hell yes’.
Snake motioned to Kronk and pointed at the riverbank. “Hammerhead, Envy, can do. I will need five mikes to set up and then maybe another ten, fifteen to get eyes on your boys. I may even be able to get our bird close enough to pick up that radio signal. What is the frequency?”
If he was going to be providing ground support to a South Korean ground unit, he needed to speak directly with their joint terminal air controller.
“Uh, Envy … that radio is calling in the clear in the 462 MHz range. It could be nothing, could be a decoy. Be careful.”
“Good copy, Hammerhead, give us that location.”
He had climbed up the sandy embankment to a plateau of dirt and spiky grass and Kronk had dropped his duffel bag beside him. “Wassup?” he asked.
“Unpack that,” Snake told him. “And then keep an eye out for unwanted attention.”
Kronk assembled the control modules with practiced speed and Snake was soon at the stick, bringing their Shikaka down to 40,000 feet and within five miles of the signal’s position, the top of a spiny ridge, simply labeled Hill 205.
He had clear skies under the Shikaka and a 20/20 view of the situation below. He picked up the two South Korean soldiers at the crossroads, in cover behind a troop transport and trading fire with two groups of attackers.
There was just one problem. Both groups of combatants were wearing the same damn uniforms!
Corporal Mike Chang had more than one problem.
His only real marksman was dead, his body slumped at the rocks behind the ridge. After the grenade had gone off without fragging either of them, he’d left Nam under the truck, unable to shoot uphill at the North Korean troops, but unlikely to get himself shot unless they charged his position.
He lay on the ground beside the hapless private, checking his field of fire. “Alright kid, stay under here. Don’t be afraid to pull back further if the enemy targets you. Your job is to keep their heads down, try to stop them pushing on us. Conserve your ammunition, just shoot when you have a clear shot.” He clapped the boy on the back. “You got that?”
“Yes, Corp,” Nam said.
Meanwhile he clambered out from under the truck and into its cabin, where he got onto the radio and started broadcasting a mayday across every damn band he could find.
Suddenly, his radio crackled to life.
“South Korea unit at the base of Hill 205, this is US Navy Envy flight, we have your vehicle in sight, available for close air support, what is your situation?”
He rolled on his back, squinting out the windscreen into the glare of the sky, listening and looking for an aircraft but seeing nothing. Then flinched as a line of bullets stitched across the passenger door behind his head.
He raised his voice above the sound of incoming and outgoing fire. “Envy, it’s good to hear a friendly voice. Emergency, two groups of enemy troops attacking our position – northeast and southeast, range 50 to 100 yards out. Estimate two groups of two or three combatants. Can you assist?”
Sensing a pause in the volume of incoming fire he rolled to a crouch and sent a few rounds in the direction of the North Koreans through the passenger window before ducking down again.
“South Korea unit, Envy flight. I see what looks like a blue on blue engagement down there. Can you clarify?”
Clarify? “Envy, my unit was ambushed by a North Korean border patrol, they stole our uniforms, we tracked them here and re-engaged … we are outnumbered and taking casualties. Need help, now!” He bobbed up, let fly a couple of rounds as Nam did the same.
“Good copy, South Korea, getting strike approval…”
Chang snuck a look uphill. The troops there would soon get tired of taking potshots at them. He had seen the North Korean sergeant in action once already today, and she was not the patient type. She didn’t have as many men anymore, but sooner or later she would decided to rush the truck. Come on, Navy, come on, dammit.
“South Korea, you are broadcasting in the clear. I need your service ID, immediately.”
“My what?”
“Army service ID. Now, soldier.”
What insanity was this? He rattled off his ID number.
“Hang in there, South Korea,” the US pilot said and his earpiece went dead again.
Seconds later it crackled to life. “South Korea, strike is approved. Buckle your helmet, we’re coming in hot, five mikes.”
“Good copy, South Korea out.” Five minutes? He watched Nam with closed eyes squirt several rounds into the air over the North Koreans’ heads, not even aiming anymore. On Nam’s side of the hill, he saw a North Korean soldier rise and sprint forward ten yards before throwing himself behind cover again.
He doubted they would be alive five minutes from now.
Snake was sending the vision of the firefight to the Navy Hawkeye, but what had complicated his request for permission to engage the attacking force was … they were in the same uniforms as the men at the truck. Both attackers and defenders were wearing South Korean Army uniforms!
Snake imagined there had been a heated discussion inside the AWACS aircraft about whether they should even trust the request for air support. What if the troops by the truck were the bad guys and the ones attacking downhill were the good guys? How could they know? It wouldn’t be the first blue on blue engagement of the day.
After thirty long seconds Snake couldn’t take the silence from the Hawkeye any longer. “Hammerhead, the attacking force is now about fifty yards from overrunning our troops’ defensive position. I have targets locked and Locusts spun up for the strike.” Snake had boxed the two attacking groups and allocated three Locusts at each. The attackers were in cover … enough to protect them from light arms fire, but not from the blast of the precision-guided Locust’s fragmentation warheads.
“Envy, Hammerhead. We need you to get confirmation of the identity of the troops on the hilltop. Get a service ID and we’ll look for a match in our database.”
Snake had cursed. “Good copy, Hammerhead, getting an ID.”
As he opened the channel to the soldier below, he could hear the bark of assault rifles through his headset. The soldier had rattled off a number and he relayed it to the controller on the Hawkeye.
“Envy, Hammerhead. That ID is solid. You are cleared to engage.”
Snake had the shot set up, all he had to do was twitch his thumb on the laptop’s mousepad. “Roger that, Hammerhead. Rifle, rifle.”
Six vertically racked Locusts dropped from the belly of the Shikaka, fell behind their mothership and started steering toward their targets. Though they possessed a solid fuel rocket for longer-range attacks, they would not need it this time. By the time the Locusts neared their targets, gravity would have accelerated them to twice the speed of sound, or 1,447 miles an hour.
“They’re assaulting!” Chang yelled into the radio over the noise of Nam underneath the truck, hammering away in panic as the North Korean troops rose to their feet and led by their maniacal Sergeant, charged the truck. Rounds from a squad machine gun began punching into the K-311 transport’s door. A window over Chang’s head exploded.
He tumbled out of the cabin through the open driver’s door, huddled behind the rear wheels of the K-311, and stuck his rifle out, firing blindly in the direction of the North Koreans, before ducking back into cover. He’d seen enemy troops advancing to his left and right and looked desperately behind himself. There was no convenient riverbed to retreat to this time – behind them was a bare hillside. To their left and right, open road.
Bullets spattered off the road and into the suspension of the transport. He’d known the assault would come, and now there was nothing he could do about it.
He looked at his watch. One minute since he’d spoken with the Navy pilot. Four minutes to run. They just had to stay alive four more minutes.
Up by the front wheels of the transport, Nam was pulling the magazine out of his rifle. The spare magazines they had recovered from the truck cabin were in a satchel at Chang’s feet. Nam started crawling for the satchel…
