The roar was deafening, followed by screams and a pattering sound as dirt kept falling in the tunnel, the acrid smell of the explosive causing his eyes to water as he moved farther on, away from his pursuers, hearing an AK-47 rattling in the background, the dull thud of bullets and then the sound of footsteps drowning the groans as others kept coming.
Suddenly up ahead of him, about fifteen yards, he saw a shaft of moonlight. It disappeared, but not before he’d glimpsed two figures dropping down softly from it into the tunnel. Without breaking his stride, Freeman pulled the pin and rolled the grenade forward, going down on one knee like an indoor bowler to keep it as centered as possible, continuing his drop and covering his head. There was an enormous purplish-white flash, a whistling sound, and he felt a sting, or rather several, as if hornets had bitten him in several places along the right arm, which had been protecting his forehead, and he knew he’d been hit by shrapnel. But what the shrapnel had done to the two enemy soldiers, both Chinese, was much worse. One lay dead in the glow of his burning clothing while the other staggered about like a drunk, hand clasped to his face. Freeman went to squeeze off two more shots, but nothing happened. His finger wouldn’t obey his brain. By the time he’d reached the wounded Chinese, he’d transferred the.45 into his left hand. The man ran at him, stumbling. Freeman fired, the man crashing into him, knocking him against the wall before falling dead at Freeman’s feet.
It seemed to take Freeman an eternity to extract his left boot from under the corpse, and finally he was moving again down the tunnel, but something was happening to his vision. He was confused and could hear nothing but the high whistle of the grenade’s explosion still reverberating in his ear, drowning all other noises.
Another shaft of moonlight — blurred — and a sparkler, like the kind he’d waved around as a kid. He stopped, shook his head as if this might clear it, and tried to replace the.45 in the left holster until he realized that it was the right holster he needed. Shoving the flashlight in his left pocket and leaning against the wall of the tunnel, he moved his hands as quickly as he could to put on the gas mask against the spitting phosphorus grenade that was now lighting up the tunnel in the dancing, ghostly light. He felt better, clearer-headed, and pulled the headband tight as he raced on through the white, choking cloud, a red-hot needle sensation in his left leg no doubt a fragment of phosphorus burning its way in. He could smell his flesh. Then the smell was gone and he knew that as long as he kept moving down the tunnel, tossing a few grenades back whenever he made a turn, he might just make it to an exit before they did. He felt the gas mask crumpling, like cellophane, and suddenly his feet were gone from under him, the rifle butt smashing bone. Everything stopped.
The reconnaissance patrol now under the command of Private Wezlinski, retreating, as they’d been ordered, after seeing the red flare fired by Freeman, were cut down on the ice, heavy mortar rounds exploding about them, sending great shards of ice-shrapnel whistling through the air, one of which decapitated Wezlinski as a radioman frantically begged air support, screaming that “Charlie” depots had been found by Freeman, who had obviously been too far away from them to return in time and so had fired the flare. Whether or not Freeman had been seen by the Chinese before or after he’d fired the flare and whether or not he’d been killed or captured by them was not known. The only thing anyone could be certain about was that Freeman had found the Chinese.
Even though the LORY — low radioactivity yield — atomic shells were on the way, however, it was by no means certain that they would stop the Chinese. If the Chinese had tunneled in, Seoul knew that with the radiation yield and explosive power of the atomic shells being far less than A-bombs, they would not necessarily thwart the attack — only ten shells being fired initially in an effort to convince the Chinese that if they did not stop using gas, the Americans, though poorly equipped insofar as CBW defenses were concerned, were prepared to escalate to full-scale A-shell attacks.
In Seoul HQ, Col. Jim Norton, his face reflecting the soft hues of the operations board, kept hearing Lin Biao: “So we lose a million or two?” He closed his eyes and prayed it would net escalate out of control — and prayed for the safety of Douglas Freeman.
The 122-millimeter Chinese shells ripping open the moonlit sky over the Yalu were “binaries.” These consisted of two harmless liquid chemicals separated by a membrane that, upon rupturing during flight, allowed the two liquids to mix so that when the shells struck the American positions, a deadly aerosol of nerve gas was released.
The gas was not detected by any of the enormously expensive and advanced CBW “Kraut” detector wagons moving up to the Yalu, nor by any of the CAM/Sprites — small, remote-controlled helicopters equipped with laser altimeters and onboard chemical processors capable of detecting gas as close as one meter above ground. Instead the gas’s presence was witnessed by a GI at Outpost Delta, who, after seeing all nine men in a section falling after the first explosions a hundred yards to his left, donned his cumbersome CBW suit and ran, or rather waddled, over and used the oldest detector of all, a strip of litmus paper stuck on the end of his knife. As he dragged it through the snow around the corpses, the paper changed color, from a navy blue to a salmon pink. Some of the bodies lay crumpled, arms outstretched, hands, more like claws, stiff, others looking as if they had been tearing at their chests in the final moments of paralytic asphyxiation. The remainder of the bodies were in the fetal position, faces buried in vomit.
The GI, as quickly as the cumbersome suit would allow, returned to Outpost Delta’s bunker and informed the major, who in turn donned his CBW suit and went over to verify the GI’s report as the Chinese artillery barrage, intermixed with shell flares, continued. As the major headed back, picking his way through craters that moments before had been an outlying network of trenches, the GI began vomiting uncontrollably, tearing at his suit, which, like tens of thousands of others, provided by the lowest bidder, failed to keep out the gas and became his tomb even as the major signaled to Seoul HQ that Delta was under nerve gas attack.
What he did not mention, because he did not know, was that in snow conditions, the dispersal of the gas was delayed more than normal, increasing its persistency and therefore making it even more deadly. The major got the call through to retaliate with atomic shells and died in a violent spasm of diarrhea and vomiting as he in turn was asphyxiated by the gas, only dimly hearing the first atomic shells of World War III whistling through the wintry night into the Chinese artillery positions across the Yalu.
From his tunnel position above the Yalu, General Kim, supreme commander of NKA forces, and his Chinese cohorts reported to Beijing that the Americans were using “nuclear” shells. This information, though encoded for transmission to Beijing, was picked up by Soviet satellite, and Chernko’s Sino-Soviet KGB units, already knowing the Chinese code, informed Moscow.
The information convinced Suzlov that seeing Pandora’s box had been opened, if, at the meeting that night, the Politburo and STAVKA agreed, he would order a first strike of nuclear, as well as chemical, weapons in Europe before the American-Asian policy could be adopted by NATO. And it would not only be atomic shells but missiles — for no other reason than that is what Soviet forces had most of. This, Suzlov told his aides, was a direct result of the cutback of conventional arms during Gorbachev’s disastrous tenure, for such cutbacks had meant that without enough conventional weapons to stop NATO’s advance, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons became inevitable if the Americans were to be defeated.