“True. But we can try to get into cover in a gully or a patch of brush. Somewhere out of sight and out of the way. After that?” The Korean shrugged and moved away from Kevin up onto a firing step to study the ground around Malibu West’s small, rocky hill.
Kevin followed him.
North Korean tanks and troop carriers were still pouring south over the open fields around them — the passage marked by the sound of rumbling engines and squealing, clanking treads. Canvas-sided trucks followed, bouncing and lurching across the torn, roadless ground.
Suddenly sunlight flashed off a canopy as a jet roared low over them and then dropped even lower, screaming west toward the closest North Korean column. The plane pulled up sharply and banked as its bombs found their targets. A pair of trucks disappeared in searing, orange-red explosions.
The jet dived again for the safety of the hills and vanished, pursued by streams of tracers and by airbursts from larger-caliber antiaircraft guns. Oily smoke from the flaming trucks billowed into the sky above the North Korean column, but other trucks and tanks were already detouring around them — still driving south.
Kevin and Rhee slid back down to the bottom of the trench. Kevin raised an eyebrow at the South Korean, his question silent but clear. Well? Which way should they go?
Rhee jerked a thumb to the southeast, and Kevin nodded his agreement. There’d been fewer North Korean troops visible in that direction.
The two men grabbed their weapons and hauled themselves over the lip of the trench, staying low. Then they crawled down the hill to the southeast, looking for somewhere to lie hidden until the sun went down.
Malibu West lay abandoned behind them.
Kevin clutched his M16 tighter and crouched lower in the snow-choked ditch, scanning the darkness. Where was Rhee?
The South Korean had gone on ahead nearly ten minutes ago to scout out the little village and side road their maps showed right ahead beyond the small rise to his front. What was keeping him?
Kevin knew that he and Rhee had been lucky so far. They’d lain undetected in a clump of dead brush through the rest of Christmas Day while a North Korean assault column rumbled south just a few hundred meters away. Once night had fallen, they’d wriggled out of the brush and jogged southeast, guiding themselves by Rhee’s compass and by the bright flashes of the North Korean guns still firing from beyond the DMZ.
Late at night, clouds had rolled in from the north, covering the sky and raising the temperature enough for a light snow to begin falling, settling in over the whole battlefront. They’d welcomed both the relative warmth and the cover from prying eyes it provided.
Now, though, the snow was a hindrance. Fast-falling flakes made it almost impossible to see anything more than a few meters away. Kevin peered out into the swirling darkness, alert for the slightest sound or sign of movement.
Snow crunched somewhere off to the right. Kevin twisted toward the sound, his fingers seeking the M16’s safety.
“Little?” Rhee’s voice sounded even more hoarse and strained than it had before.
“Here.”
Rhee dropped down into the ditch beside him.
“Well?”
“We can cross through the village safely enough. There’s no one there to …” Rhee faltered for a second and then went on, “Come, you’ll have to see it for yourself, and we have no time to waste.”
The Korean lieutenant clambered out of the ditch and moved off into the night. Kevin followed.
He understood what Rhee meant when they reached the outskirts of the lifeless village. A North Korean tank column must have rolled right through the middle of the place, machine guns blazing. The killing had been indiscriminate, wanton.
Old men, women, and children lay scattered in and around their wrecked homes, cut down without reason or pity. The new-fallen snow mercifully covered most of the torn bodies and hid much of the horror.
But not all of it. Kevin’s face tightened when he saw the huddled figures of a mother and her three children lying still against the bullet-riddled wall of the village shrine. Bastards. They’d pay for this. And for his men.
He shook Rhee’s shoulder, pulling the Korean lieutenant away from the nightmare around them. They had meant to look for food, but all he could think of was leaving this place. Rhee wiped the tears from his face and led the way out of the village into the rice paddies and orchards beyond.
They had to find a place to hide before the sun came up. Artillery continued to thunder off to the north.
The North Korean company commander watched impatiently as his crews stripped the camouflage away from their T-55 tanks. It was all taking too long for his taste. The sun would be up in a matter of minutes, and he’d wanted to be on the way well before first light.
The North Korean captain frowned. If he’d had his way they would never have stopped for the night. His T-55s had infrared searchlights mounted beside their 100-millimeter guns. They could have pressed the attack onward through the darkness and snow. And he was quite sure that kind of unrelenting pressure would have cracked the imperialist defenses ahead of them wide open.
The captain’s lip curled. But no, his battalion commander had explained, the infantry units accompanying the attack were exhausted. They had to rest. They would all drive on together first thing in the morning.
Well, screw the infantry. Those damned footslogging weaklings had given the fascists a four-hour respite. Four hours to strengthen their defenses, resupply, and rest. Now he and his men would have to pay a heavier price in blood and burned-out tanks to make the same gains they could have made with relative ease in the night.
To top everything off, his battalion commander had forbidden anyone to bivouac in the small village they’d shot up. The fool had been afraid the imperialist artillery batteries might have the area zeroed-in. So instead of warming themselves inside captured houses, he and his men had shivered sleepless inside their tanks.
He slapped the side of the turret in frustration. “Come on, you puling swine. Move!”
His men raced even faster to fold and stow their white camouflage nets. Their company commander’s morning temper tantrums were infamous. All his urgings, however, couldn’t do much to speed the moment when they could start turning over their T-55s’ powerful, water-cooled diesel engines.
And when the sun rose blood-red, only five of the company’s eight remaining tanks had their diesels revving at full throttle.
The captain muttered angrily to himself as he waited for the other tank commanders to get their armored behemoths underway. His breath steamed in the frozen air. The temperature was dropping again.
Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he turned, squinting painfully into the rising sun. Nothing. Nothing. There.
He stood rooted in place for a moment, mesmerized by the oncoming shapes. Then he grabbed for the twin handles of the turret-mounted DShK-38 heavy machine gun and bellowed, “Air raid warning — EAST!”
Major Chon of the South Korean Air Force smiled beneath his oxygen mask as his American-built A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted its ugly nose above the ridgeline and dropped back down in a gentle dive toward the ice-covered rice paddies below.
He glanced quickly right and left. The three other planes of his flight were pacing him, flying in a line-abreast formation to maximize their chances of sighting a worthwhile ground target.
Chon smiled again. This was more like it. Much better than yesterday.
The first day of the war had been a disaster for the ROK’s lone A-10 ground attack squadron. Right at the start, North Korean commandos had crash-landed right on Yanggu’s runways and fanned out across the field, shooting up and grenading barracks, maintenance shops, a Vulcan antiaircraft battery, and the nearest I-Hawk SAM battery. They’d inflicted heavy casualties and damage before Air Force security troops had killed them.