“Fuck you!” replied Thelman.
“Not to worry, mate,” rejoined Aussie. “Put cold cream on. That’ll do the trick.”
“Smell like a whore,” countered Thelman in the same easy, yet slightly forced, banter.
Lewis turned to Schwarzenegger. “Hey, Fritz. Five to two Thelma doesn’t make it back?”
“Verriickt!” said Schwarzenegger.
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“It means you are sick in the head,” said Schwarzenegger.
“All right, all right. Eight to two, but that’s it!”
Unbeknownst to any of the troops, including Laylor, Brentwood, and Cheek-Dawson, when the troops filed out for lunch, the sergeant major, with the assist of the other HQ NCOs, moved through the weapons racks with pliers, here and there slightly crimping in the magazines. This would cause those weapons to jam during the dry runs, the troopers monitored via the television cameras. It was a random check to make sure every trooper could clear a jam and, as required by SAS, change magazines on the roll. Not only their lives but the entire mission — and in this case, the entire war — might depend on it.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The tinkling noise Freeman had heard was that of water at the bottom of a well shaft that formed one of the tunnel’s exits — the exit hole in the wall of the well shaft six feet in diameter and a good eight feet above the water line. The exit ladder was a series of deep-set iron handholds.
Moving with extreme caution, he discovered that about thirty feet in from the exit whence he had come, there was another branch of the tunnel leading off to the left, to a large twelve-by-twelve-by-six-foot-high storage room, which, using his flashlight, he saw was packed high to its roof with everything from binary shells, binary mortars, heavy eighty-one-millimeter mortars, AK-47s, stick, HE, and phosphorus grenades, dozens of boxes of belt and magazine.76-millimeter and.50-millimeter ammunition. As well, there was a pile of ingeniously built assault ladders which were made of bamboo and which, with canvas strips for cross struts, collapsed like the supports of Chinese tripod clotheslines into one long, light, and easily portable shaft.
Beside the ladders there was a pile of worn brass bugles and a clutch of starter whistles. Then he discovered the room was connected to others of the same size, several of them bisected by timber supports, seven rooms in all, which seemed to radiate out from the well shaft in a spoke pattern, and which had the smell of acrid cordite that came from wooden casks of gunpowder, refilling jacks, and reloading stampers.
In four of the rooms there were dozens of tightly packed rice bags that had been set on bamboo woven palettes, foot-wide trenches running about them, filled with barbed wire, presumably to dissuade rats and other rodents from getting at the rice. In all, Freeman estimated that the complex of tunnels and rooms held enough ammunition and arms and sundry supplies to equip an attack of at least battalion, possibly regimental, strength — enough for between fifteen hundred and two thousand frontline assault troops.
He was in the fourth big storage room, reached by a thick right-angle bend and over a small pyramid of earthen stairs, more steps on the up than on the down side and leading into a deeper tunnel, the right-angled turn he’d just passed through and the difference in the tunnel levels potential impediments against any attack by enemy troops on the tunnel complex. Only under earth-shattering artillery would these tunnels cave in, and even then it would have to be a pulverizing barrage as otherwise the various levels and cunningly devised exits and entrances would act like watertight bulkheads aboard a ship, preventing any full-scale destruction.
Though he was using the flashlight sparingly, only flicking it on for less than a second at a time to take it all in, his attention was immediately attracted by the large number of binary poison gas shells along with the bugles and whistles. A binary was a “natural” for the Chinese — relatively cheap, using otherwise fairly harmless domestic cleaning chemicals which, when combined, would form the deadly nerve gas.
The bugles and whistles told him the Chinese were massing for a close-quarter attack on the American positions across the Yalu. His greatest wish was to defeat them, but the Chinese and the North Koreans — though the latter’s cruelty was an abomination to him — aroused in him the respect of a professional soldier. He held the Chinese particularly in high regard, for not only were they brave, even if they were brainwashed, but they were extraordinarily adept at combining the old with the new, and if they didn’t have the new, then improvising with what they had. In this case it was the bugles and whistles, the PLA’s answer to the exorbitantly expensive — for them — and often temperamental modern microchip radio backpacks. The battered bugles and whistles not only saved on radio and avoided technical foul-ups so prevalent in frontline fighting, but along with lots of screaming in the last hundred-yard run of a night attack, more often that not, created a dangerous confusion in the opposing ranks. Among fresh American and other Allied troops who had not seen action before, the result was invariably one of panic and on occasion mass retreat.
Entering the sixth of the seven rooms, this one piled high with binary shells, he turned toward a sifting sound and tripped over some kind of wire or cord, the flashlight on, rolling, revealing the room seething with rats, turning in panic in the cul-de-sac formed by the room and trying to race out of it, swarming over him, one attacking his face. There was an enormous crash from a pile of pots and pans, no doubt used for a double purpose: to prepare the rice rolls with which Chinese and North Korean troops could march for days and — again typical of the Chinese — to act as an alarm against any potential pilferer tripping over the cord.
Within seconds, Freeman was on his feet, blood streaming from his face, its warm, metallic taste in his mouth as he moved as quickly as possible out of the room toward the main feeder tunnel of the hub-and-spoke complex, his fingers trailing the double-walled turns toward the well shaft exit. As soon as he reached it, he heard the quick babble of voices, suddenly silenced by the barking of sharply delivered orders — Korean rather than Chinese, he thought — and then shapes appeared, one already on the ladder.
Freeman fired the flare, saw its red light blossom high above the well shaft, then fired the.45, heard the echo of his shot and saw the shape on the ladder fall back without a sound, splashing heavily into the water below, a light hail of dirt and stone splattering after the body.
He heard several shots, and the bullets thudding into the well shaft; then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing ceased and Freeman knew why. A grenade or any heavy-caliber machine-gun fire could penetrate the earthen wall of the supply rooms and set off the whole complex in a series of gigantic explosions. If he moved fast, he might make it to one of the half dozen or so manhole entrances he’d noticed along the main tunnel about a quarter mile back, where he’d left the patrol.
Gripping the flashlight firmly in his left hand, keeping it low, he used his elbow as a touch guide on his way, the.45 in his right hand. He heard the voices behind him receding, then suddenly, after a turn in the tunnel, they increased, which meant that either they had passed one of the right-angle turns or false earthen walls or were coming in from some smaller tunnel that he wasn’t aware of. His right hand struck cool, damp earth, the butt of the.45 poking him in the chest before he realized he’d come up against another abutment in the tunnel. Quickly feeling his way around it, he stuffed the.45 in his waist belt, pulled the pin from one of the five-second grenades, stepped out from the abutment, and rolled the grenade hard back down the tunnel before jumping back behind the wall.