Louis fanned the woman and kid with his carbine, looking down the barrel capped by the black military-issue silencer.
Thwump. Thwump.
And she and her kid would be gone—and he’d be out of harm’s way and back on his mission.
God damn you, woman!
Less than twenty-four hours ago, Louis and other select combat paratroopers were summoned to a group briefing at battalion HQ where recon officers displayed large photos of a small village with a cluster of buildings around a pavilion that was HQ of high-ranking North Korean officers who had fled Pyongyang. Because American POWs were believed housed in the same locale, they couldn’t carpet-bomb the site. So, their mission was to make a surgical combat parachute assault—their drop zone being a mountain clearing northwest of Jinan. Their assigned target was that pavilion.
At Kimbo Airfield, Louis and the others boarded the Dixie Dame, a C-119 transport piloted by Captain Mike Vigna. They would take the plunge from six hundred feet up, knowing that if anything went wrong, they were seconds away from an abrupt death. Each man had been issued ammunition, rifle, grenades, pistol, extra ammo, three days’ assault rations, and a T-7 parachute. Louis must have weighed over 250 pounds with all that was strapped to him. But he didn’t mind, since among the attendees ID’d by recon was NK 23rd Brigade commander Lieutenant Colonel Chop Yong Jin and Russian military advisor Gregor Lysenko. Who made Operation Buster special. What Louis had been waiting for all these months.
Colonel Chop Chop was the most hated man in the NK command—the same guy who had ordered his soldiers to pillage South Korean villages and massacre unarmed civilians. Same guy who had disregarded all international conventions on the treatment of POWs. Same bastard who had captured five GIs from King Company and left their bodies in a railway tunnel. And the same guy who had ordered the mutilation and death of Fuzzy Swenson and the summary execution of Louis’s buddies from the first platoon.
That was four months ago, and since then Louis had declared his own private war against Colonel Chop Yong Jin and General Gregor Lysenko. Although Command had given him a copy of those men’s photos, their faces had permanently scored themselves into Louis’s memory banks that night in the Red Tent.
He checked his watch. Right now, Marie was in bed in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and here he was in the middle of a gook village on the Yesong River. It had been a bad drop.
Unexpectedly, Jinan was being defended by automatic weapons, including forty-millimeter ack-acks. At 20:15, just fifteen hours ago, under a clear, moonlit spring night, the Dixie Dame took off. The plan was to fly due north along the usual C-119 route, then break off over the sea and drop to seven thousand feet, where they’d make a left correction, drop again toward the water until they were at eight hundred feet, then bank right until they made landfall.
All went according to plan as Vigna pulled up off the sea and rode the contours of the land. At about five minutes before target, the jumpmaster gave his command to hook up to the cable running down the aisle of the plane and face the door. But as they were doing equipment check on the next man’s chute, antiaircraft batteries opened up at them. Within seconds, Louis felt the plane get punched. In moments, they began bucking wildly.
The jump door flew open, and Louis felt the 120-mile-an-hour rush of air. He could barely register the fire ripping at the right wing or the groan of the plane or the other bodies pressing him against the opening. All he remembered was the green light and the shout: “Go?”
Hours later he woke up to morning light feeling stiff but unhurt. He had passed out under a thick willow, its branches stretching to the ground like a curtain—a perfect blind. He had just buried his chute among some tulips, when a village woman happened by with her son, a kid about eight or ten. Hard to tell with Asians.
Slowly the woman backed away, shielding her son with her body.
The kid said something to his mother. Louis had no idea what, but he lowered his gun because the kid looked terrified. He couldn’t shoot them. But he raised his fingers to his lips to warn them not to blow his cover. The woman nodded and took off with her kid.
A quick surveillance of the area told Louis that he had landed in the People’s Garden. He could see lots of manicured green grass, some sort of garden park with flowers, fountains, walkways, even a footbridge—right on the banks of the Yesong River. Although he couldn’t see enemy troops, he could hear the din of their armored vehicles on the move toward Highway 1 to Kaesong. His heart sank because it meant Chop Chop and company were miles away by now. They had given him the slip.
Louis crawled out from under the tree. He had no idea where the other crew members were or where the plane went down. He hoped they’d made it to the sea where allied patrol boats could pick them up.
He made his way on his belly toward the river’s edge. Villagers were walking about, but Louis’s attention was fixed on a small fleet of boats. They were clearly Chinese because they were painted green with red trim, and the pilot’s cockpit was camouflaged as a large white waterbird. He also noticed that the pilot was actually peddling.
Shit! The bastards were sporting a U.S. flag at the stern, and the troops were all disguised as US. civilians—which meant they were heading downriver to sneak up on allied warships for a midnight raid.
God in heaven! He had to stop them.
Louis positioned himself at the base of a large bronze lantern. Over his shoulder was a statue of a rider on a horse facing the other way. Maybe Chop Chop. This was his region, his town, his people. Louis steadied his weapon at the patrol boat emerging from the low bridge. It passed noiselessly in front of him, the troops playacting normal, like it was a typical day in the park. He had studied the movement of the previous boat, so he knew it was going to round the island, then head downriver. And as soon as it did, he’d open up with everything he had.
In a matter of seconds, the patrol boat rounded the island. Louis tracked the pilot in his crosshairs. Plug him then blow enough holes in the port side to beach the bastards. Do the same with the next one just nosing its way under the bridge. He knew he’d go down, but he’d take a lot of Reds with him. Slowly he began to squeeze his finger.
“Hey, what the hell you doing?”
Louis froze.
Over his shoulder were two North Korean cavalry regulars on horseback. He rolled on his back with his gun raised.
“It’s a hockey stick.”
One Commie got off his mount and grabbed Louis’s gun barrel.
Thwump, thwump.
Louis squeezed off two shots, but the soldier didn’t flinch. Probably wearing a bulletproof vest.
“What the hell you think you’re doing?”
“I think he’s been in the sun too long,” the other soldier said, taking Louis’s gun out of his hands.
After two years of duty Louis knew some Korean. “Kop she-da mamasan!” he said, telling the gook to go screw his mother.
“What he say?”
The mounted soldier shrugged and took hold of the reins of the other’s horse. “It’s all right, folks,” he said to the small crowd of villagers that was gathering. “You can leave.”
“Poor guy,” one of the peasants said. And he took a picture of him with his camera.
Louis held his arms high in the air. “Go ahead, shoot me, you Red bastards. Get it over with.”