He closed his eyes, trying to recall all the information shown on the chart back in the plot office. They were still sixty kilometers from their objective, and he had only a little more than twelve hours to reach it. There wasn’t much margin for error built into the mission timetable, and he couldn’t waste a lot of time lying doggo like this. Even arriving as little as half an hour late would force him to abort the mission. And that was something the admirals in Pyongyang would probably not forgive.
“Contact now bearing three zero five degrees and fading. It seems to have missed us, Comrade Captain!” The sonar operator’s voice was jubilant.
Min opened his eyes and smiled. Another barrier passed. He clapped a fatherly hand on the sonar operator’s shoulder. “Good work, Comrade. Keep it up and we’ll all avoid becoming Heroes of the Revolution for a long time to come!”
The captain made his way back to the main control room and motioned to his first lieutenant. “Sung, go tell our passengers to start preparing their gear. I now estimate that we’ll arrive at the objective on schedule.”
Min watched the man scurry aft and hoped his confidence was well placed. They still had a long way to go.
Anne woke up suddenly, not sure at first what had startled her. Then she heard it again. A deep, menacing rumbling off some distance, but moving closer fast. She sat up and gasped as she saw the cause. Artillery shells were bursting in the fields ahead off to one side of the road, flinging dirt, smoke, and flame into the air.
She could see Korean civilians abandoning their stalled cars and trucks and streaming off to either side, taking shelter inside farm buildings and ditches along the road. Hutchins jumped down off the cab and pounded on the door. “Out! Get out! Take cover!”
He sprinted back down the length of the convoy, with PFC Bell right beside him. Anne scrambled out after them, feeling her heart pounding fast.
“Shit!”
“Get outta my goddamned way!”
The soldiers poured out of the truck, swearing at each other in their haste. One groaned and collapsed, clutching a sprained ankle. Sergeant Evans and another man grabbed the moaning private and dragged him away as the explosions moved closer.
Anne followed them as they half-ran, half-skipped over to a low earth bank that marked the edge of a frozen rice paddy.
She’d barely clambered over onto the other side when there was a roaring, whooshing sound. She didn’t need to be a veteran to know what was coming, and she fell flat to the ground.
WHAAAMMM! The shell exploded just as her body hit the cold earth, and she felt the ground buck beneath her. Heat and air rushed over her head, deflected by the earth piled to one side. The combination of the shock wave in both the air and the ground pushed and pulled at her body, and for a split second, it bounced her into the air. The force of the explosion surprised her. It reminded her of being caught by a strong wave at the beach and driven facedown into the sand.
She opened her eyes and mouth and immediately discovered another similarity: she was coated with dirt and dust. Most of the troops were already kneeling, looking at the other side of the bank. She got to her knees and followed their gaze. The shell had come down just fifty meters off the road and torn a still-smoking crater two meters across out of a rice paddy. The snow had been blasted off an area more than twice as large.
Sergeant Evans saw the look on her face and grinned. “The good news about being so far behind the lines is that they don’t shell you very often. The bad news is that when they do, only the big stuff can reach far enough.”
WHOOOOSSH.
“Down!”
WHAAAMMM! WHAMMM! WHAAMMM! More explosions rocked the ground all around the road. Anne lay flat, praying. She’d never been particularly religious, but it seemed like a logical thing to do at the moment.
The noise faded, leaving behind an eerie mixture of crackling flames, moans, and the whistling wind.
Evans raised his head and cocked an ear, waiting. When nothing more hit the ground for a couple of minutes, he stood up and shouted, “Okay, people. All clear. On your feet. Check yourselves and your buddies. Let’s go!”
Anne rose to her feet and stared at the scenes around her. The six trucks in their convoy looked unscathed, but the artillery had found the range farther back along the road. She saw a blazing pile of scrap metal canted over in a field and took several seconds to realize that the wreckage was a Hyundai that had been blown off the road by a North Korean shell. Several bodies lay motionless around one crater, the white snow rapidly turning blood red. She could hear children sobbing from somewhere ahead.
Anne swallowed hard and started toward the cries, but Hutchins stopped her with an outstretched hand. “There’s nothing you could do up there, Miss Larson. Look after your own people.”
She started to protest and then stopped. Hutchins was right.
The captain kept talking. “Go on, count noses. Make sure you see every person in your group. If people ran off by themselves and got hurt, nobody may have seen it.” He turned away to do the same thing for his own men.
As her staff filtered back from their hiding places, Anne walked from truck to truck, checking off each person’s name on the transportation order as she saw them.
They’d been lucky. Only one of her people had been hurt. Ed Cumber had taken a shell fragment in his chest. He lay along the side of the road, clutching his chest and swearing. Gloria crouched beside him, looking worried. Anne knelt beside her and with shaking fingers peeled away Cumber’s jacket to look at the damage. Fortunately the splinter had been slowed down so much by his winter coat and other clothing that it was only a superficial wound. Gloria didn’t seem very relieved, and it suddenly struck Anne that there were other reasons for her concern.
She pushed the thought out of her mind. Interoffice romances didn’t seem very important with people lying dead and dying all around them. Together they helped load the wounded man into one of the trucks where Hutchins’s medic could inspect the injury more thoroughly. He slapped a bandage on over the wound and shook his head. “Hell, I’ve gotten worse cuts shaving.”
Anne moved away from the truck slowly. Up till now she’d never really thought about how her responsibilities had changed with the transition from peace to war. Normally she supervised her staff’s office work and left it at that. But now, suddenly, she found herself responsible for their safety, for making sure they were fed and had places to sleep. She shook her head. This wasn’t the kind of job that she’d trained for. Anne decided she’d start watching Hutchins and Evans more closely. She had a lot to learn.
Except for the PFC with the sprained ankle, Hutchins’s men hadn’t suffered any injuries, but one of the convoy’s six trucks had been laced with fragments. Two tires were flat, and it wouldn’t start. She asked the captain if it would be a problem.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. We can get it fixed. The concussion probably knocked loose some of the…”
A Korean officer, a lieutenant, appeared out of the crowd and saluted Hutchins. The American straightened up and returned his parade-ground salute. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
The Korean’s English was word-perfect. “Sir, can your people board immediately? My men will have cleared a path for your vehicles in a few minutes.” Even as he spoke, a group of soldiers in battle dress appeared out of the crowd. They started shoving people off the road in both directions. Under their direction cars were driven off the road and carts were dragged off into the open fields. They were efficient, and any Korean civilians who argued suddenly found themselves looking into the muzzle of a bayonet-tipped rifle. Watching, Anne felt guilty that so many people were being threatened to clear the way for her group.