He folded his hands behind his back. “All right then. We’ve already ordered the evacuation of American noncombatants and unattached civilians. It’s time for the next logical step. Put out the word to all U.S. installations in Seoul to prepare for evacuation. Headquarters and command functions will go to Taegu, all the support stuff to Japan.”
He looked over at the Air Force liaison officer. “Jim, your boys have done well so far, but I’m gonna need everything they’ve got.”
The colonel nodded. “Yes, sir. We have thirty aircraft shuttling between Kimpo and Japan now. There’ll be twice that many in eight hours, and we’ll double that again in sixteen. We’re even calling up Reserve C-130 units.”
“Good, but see if you can even push that. Given the current pace of the NK advance, I can’t guarantee the safety of the airfield for more than two or three days, and there’s a lot of people to move.”
He heard helicopters clattering overhead, growing louder, and saw Hansen signaling him from the back of the tent. His “guest” was arriving. Time to wrap the brief up with a quick pep talk. “Okay, gentlemen. That’s it for now. But I want you to keep this in mind. They got the drop on us, but we can hold these bastards. Every hour we can delay the enemy buys time for our reinforcements to arrive. And when we get enough troops on hand we’re gonna kick these s.o.b.’s back across the Z with their tails between their legs.”
McLaren looked around the tent. Everyone was writing, looking at the map, or looking at him. They looked slightly less unsettled, and that was about all he could expect right now.”Anybody got anything else?”
Nobody spoke.
“All right then. Let’s get down to it.”
The assembled officers scattered back to their duties. McLaren pushed through the crowd toward Hansen.
“General Park and his entourage are here, sir.”
“Great. Okay, Doug, separate out all the ass-kissers and bring ’em here for a mini-brief on the overall situation. Make ’em feel like they’re doing something.”
Hansen grinned and asked. “What about the general?”
“Get him up to my command trailer. Park and I have a few things to go over in private. Mano-a-mano.”
Hansen grinned wider, sketched a quick salute, and left. McLaren followed him out the tent and then headed for his trailer. This was going to be touchy.
The Chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs showed up on his doorstep a few minutes later. Park wore impeccably tailored combat fatigues, a cold weather parka, holstered.45, and a helmet he took off as soon as he stepped inside the narrow-bodied trailer.
McLaren met him with a firm handshake and led the Korean over to a canvas-seat director’s chair. He settled into a similar chair and willed himself to be patient through the next several minutes of meaningless pleasantries as Park conveyed his government’s gratitude for the aid being sent by the United States and repeated the ROK’s firm commitment to the unified command structure.
That was what McLaren had been waiting to hear, and he used it to raise a crucial issue: the release of the South Korean officers being held in detention camps for their part in General Chang’s abortive coup. He wanted them back in the field, commanding their units.
Park was outraged. “What you ask is impossible! These men are traitors, conspirators.”
McLaren kept his tone level, but he spaced his words out enough to let Park hear the determination behind them. “I’m not — asking — anything, General. The situation we face is critical. Meeting it is going to take a one-hundred-percent effort from every man in this country — Korean and American alike. And without the officers you’ve got rotting in those camps, a lot of my ROK units aren’t operating up to par. I don’t want any more fiascos like the one up at Kangso this morning.”
The word on that had come through just before the staff briefing. A South Korean infantry battalion commanded by a major whose only obvious military credential was unquestioning loyalty to the Seoul government had been ambushed enroute to the front. The major had panicked and fled — leaving his troops to try to fight their way out of the trap without any command coordination or support. Three hundred of them had been killed by a force of North Korean commandos probably mustering less than half of that number. A total of twenty-three NK bodies had been recovered from the ambush site.
“We can’t afford that kind of exchange ratio, General Park. Hell, we just plain can’t afford to let a bunch of political amateurs try to play combat soldier while there’s real shooting going on.
“Now I’m not talking about the officers that were actually conspiring with Chang. They can hang. They should hang.” McLaren leaned forward. “But we both know that DSC cast its net pretty wide after the coup attempt. You know many of the men being held. A careful reevaluation of the information that led to their arrest should show that most of them are loyal to the government.”
Park frowned. He’d been around long enough to know that what McLaren saidmadesense. He had fought inVietnamand knew how valuable experienced leaders were. He sat quietly for a moment, obviously considering his response. McLaren waited, knowing he held the upper hand on this one.
A minute passed in uneasy silence until Park said, “Very well, General McLaren. I’ll speak to the President and present your case to him. I think I can get them released.”
The Korean looked up from his folded hands. “But I must warn you, General, that my government will hold you responsible for their actions should they betray us again.”
McLaren nodded calmly. “I wouldn’t expect anything else.” He stood abruptly. “Now that’s settled, let me show you what we’re up against.”
He led the way back to the Operations Center.
Anne Larson looked at chaos. The systems programming division could be a little crazy, especially if the computer went down, but this went beyond all reason.
First there were the phones. North Korean commando targets in the Seoul area had included communications centers and automated switchboards, and now the phone service was all snarled up. Her people were spending five minutes just trying to get through to someone on the other side of town. And a lot of the phone numbers for supply and combat units were unusable, because the troops were in the field and there was no way to reach them.
On top of that, and despite the lousy communications, it seemed like every logistics officer in the ROK was determined to get a complete list of everything in his inventory. She scowled. If they’d been doing their jobs, they wouldn’t have to ask her. One low-level idiot had even called demanding a data dump of everything stockpiled in Korea! She’d hung up on him, hard.
Anne punched a button on her terminal, sending a main-gun-barrel spares list for the 1st of 72nd Armored into the already overloaded print queue. She rolled her desk chair back and stretched, wincing slightly at the pain in her lower back.
It had been a long night and an even longer day. Tony hadn’t been able to get leave from Kunsan so she’d had to make an appearance at the office Christmas party by herself. An hour surrounded by buzzed, hard-up, and horny junior staff officers had seemed like an eternity. She’d stuck it out long enough to avoid being talked about and then left — half-angry with Tony for not being able to be there and half-angry with herself for feeling lonely. Three months before she would have taken the whole thing in stride.
It had taken her a long time to go to sleep. She was deeply disappointed in not spending the evening with Tony. She missed him and missed sharing the holiday with him. She hadn’t even been able to give him his present. As she tossed and turned her last thoughts were of him.