Battle Born (24 page)

The last twenty miles to Sukchon, traveling into the mouth of the Yengyn Inlet, were made completely submerged. Using its passive sonar detection system to clear the area of nearby enemy ships first, the lead sub raised a global positioning system satellite navigation receiver on a retractable mast just two feet above the waves to get a position fix. Once the vessels reached their preprogrammed initial point, they bottomed themselves into the thick mud of the inlet about two thousand yards off the shoreline and waited.

Every spring, the Sukchon delta region falls victim to killer floods, so the area had recently been extensively rebuilt, with assistance from Chinese military troops and engineers. At least, that was the story most of the world knew. Those Chinese engineers had made other improvements as well: they had rebuilt nearby Sunan People’s Army Air Base into the new secret Military Command and Coordination Facility of the Korean People’s Army. In just two short years, Sunan had been transformed from a minor supply and transportation
air base into North Korea’s main war-fighting nerve center.

The region was also the home of two full Army corps infantry commands, a mechanized corps command, nine artillery brigades, and five special forces brigades—over 100,000 troops stationed at three Army barracks in the immediate area. These served as the main reserve forces for the defense of the capital, Pyongyang, only thirty miles to the south. The air base facilities had also been beefed up: Sunan was the new home to one full air combat command, including a light bomber regiment, two ground-attack air regiments, five interceptor regiments, ten transport regiments, and three air defense regiments. Between one main and two auxiliary airfields nearby, more than three hundred aircraft were assigned to Sunan.

Sunan had other key forces as well. It was the new home of the Fourth Artillery Division, comprising eighteen medium-range and ten long-range ballistic missile batteries. The short-range FROG-5 and FROG-7 missiles had nonnuclear warheads, designed to blast any South Korean forces who dared move north of the Demilitarized Zone, just 120 miles to the south. Four medium-range mobile Scud-B missile batteries, designed to hit targets inside South Korea, carried chemical and biological munitions, mostly Vx nerve gas and anthrax agents. The other six longer-range rail-mobile Nodong-1 batteries, housed in concrete aboveground shelters covered with earth to camouflage them from spies, carried ten-to-one-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads and had sufficient range to reach Seoul, Taegu, even Kwangju—effectively, over 90 percent of South Korea.

But the Command and Coordination Facility, or CCF, was the most important target at Sunan, and possibly the most important in all of North Korea, for reasons
beyond its aircraft, infantry, armor, or even its deadly missiles.

It served as the main command and control facility for all of the military bases in North Korea, the Defense Ministry in Pyongyang, the Central Committee of the North Korean Politburo, and with Beijing. In times of conflict or heightened alert, the bases were linked together through the CCF so that the general staff could issue orders to all facilities at once, through one central coordinator. Although most of the world did not know it, Sunan was the tip of the spear, the key to the destruction of the Republic of Korea and the Communist occupation of the entire Korean peninsula.

That’s why Sunan had to be neutralized.

At the prearranged time, the minisubs lifted from the thick silt bottom and began cruising at minimum steerageway speed toward shore. At periscope depth, about six feet below the surface in the tiny vessels, a hatch popped open on each sub and eight commandos rose to the surface, gave each other an “okay” sign, then swam for their infiltration point. One sub’s hatch could not be reseated, and it had to be scuttled. Its crew had no choice but to swim for shore and either hide or try their best to make it back to friendly territory on their own. There was no emergency rescue plan for this one-way covert operation.

The leader swam slowly, using a minimum-effort stroke that placed him under the surface during all but a few seconds out of every minute. He stopped frequently to check his bearings, listen for danger, and check his troops. Every time he came up, the first thing to break the surface was the muzzle of his Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun.

It took twenty minutes for the team of forty-eight commandos to swim to shore and reach the wharf that was their landfall. They secured their swimming gear to
the bottom in black nylon bags, climbed up a dockside ladder until they could get up inside the framework of the wharf, then made their way ashore. They found a dark, secluded area between two noisy ventilator units and stopped to dole out equipment and to rest. While the leader checked in via satellite to his headquarters, his men began to unpack their equipment.

Twelve commandos carried the waterproof weapons bags for all of them. Each man was armed with a submachine gun, with a shoulder harness and five-cell pouch system that strapped onto his calf, plus a 9-millimeter SIG Sauer P226 autopistol carried on the shoulder harness. The leg pouch contained three thirty-round magazines of subsonic ammunition plus the sound suppressor for the submachine gun.

Twelve other commandos, two per squad, carried the electronics, including target markers, radios, remote-control detonators, and night-vision equipment. Two commandos carried radios; two others carried medical gear. Six commandos were the “mules,” carrying the explosives—an assortment of plastic explosives, shaped cutting charges, antipersonnel mines, incendiary explosives, and Primacord, plus detonators and timers. When they were all loaded up, checked, their timing established, and their objective identified on the map and compared to their surroundings, they set off.

Sunan was actually a conglomeration of several bases, spread out over most of western Pyongan Namdo province. In peacetime, all the facilities were independent, run by several different branches of the military. Two South Korean commando squads were detached from the group and dispatched to set charges and electronic target markers on several other key targets on base, including the early-warning and fire control radars, surface-to-air missile sites, and the Scud-B and Scud-C missile sites. Another squad was
dispatched to set explosives that would act as diversions and create panic and confusion in other areas of the base.

The CCF was the commandos’ main target. The remaining three squads, twenty-four highly trained commandos, moved toward this important objective.

The CCF compound was a sprawling one-hundred-acre site with a drab gray bunkerlike building in the center. Sneaking onto the compound itself was simple. The outer-perimeter security was in poor repair and had already been broken down by bands of roving citizens looking for food or trying to sell food to starving soldiers, or by soldiers on base sneaking supplies off base to sell to local black marketers. Ironically, the best place to penetrate the outer security zone was right in front. Since heavy road traffic from the main base often set off the motion and trembler alarms, they were usually deactivated during base-wide alerts when there was a lot of vehicle traffic. A few silenced gunshots took care of the lights they could not avoid. They saw signs indicating canine patrols inside the outer security ring, but they knew there were no dogs on duty—the soldiers on base had long ago sold or butchered the guard dogs for food.

The Command and Coordination Facility itself was a squat steel and concrete building, two stories above-ground but four belowground. A long concrete tunnel controlled access to the entrances, so a frontal assault was next to impossible. The guard tower on the roof and the two guard towers around the building were dark, but the commandos could not assume they were unmanned—in fact, they had to assume that a response team was already on the way, so speed was imperative. A short chain-link dog fence protected a twelve-foot-high electrified fence. There was no doubt that the fence was on—the deadly current flowing through it could be
heard and felt from ten feet away, like waves of heat from a nearby furnace.

They were hamstrung—they could not go forward unless they blew the electric fence apart, nor could they retreat. The leader hunched down with his second-in-command, set to discuss their dilemma . . .

. . . when suddenly they heard a noise ahead of them. In a matter of moments, several dozen heavily armed soldiers rushed out of an access tunnel on the north side of the squat concrete structure before them, headed right for the South Korean commandos.

And the mission had barely begun . . .

RENO-TAHOE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT,
RENO, NEVADA
THAT SAME TIME

E
ven in his earliest days as a B-52 navigator and bombardier, Patrick McLanahan never remembered moving this fast. Was it because these young guys just liked to hustle, or because the schedule was that compressed? It
couldn’t
be a function of age—or could it?

Precisely at the prebriefed time, the crews loaded up the old bumpy two-gear blue school bus (at least that hadn’t changed—it seemed like the same old noisy school bus he had ridden in on the way to the B-52 flight line almost twenty years ago) and headed off. First stop was the life support shop, where they grabbed their flight and survival gear and checked oxygen masks and night-vision goggles. Rinc Seaver helped Patrick find his stuff and showed him how to operate the NVG tester, but they couldn’t dawdle because Rebecca Furness, her copilot, Heels Dewey, and the other crew were out the door and loading up. The next stop was base
operations, where the crews received a weather briefing, filed their flight plans, checked Notices to Airmen, verified the maintenance status of the planes, got their box lunches from the in-flight kitchen, and took one last nervous pee.

This was the first opportunity Patrick had to take a breather and check out the other crewdogs as they made last-minute preparations before heading out to the flight line. The differences in the modern-day military kept surprising him. They made him feel a little—check that, a
lot
—out of place and, well, pretty goddamn old.

Because the first thing he noticed was how young these guys were. Even though the Air National Guard usually employed veteran aviators, and this unit was definitely top-heavy with field-grade officers, these guys still looked damned young. Their slang and references—mimicking characters like Bart Simpson, Austin Powers, and Beavis and Butt-head seemed to be the big thing—made them seem younger still. They all had very short haircuts, wore perfectly clean flight suits and spit-shined boots, none of them smoked cigarettes (cigars, yes—even the women), and none of them used vulgarity routinely in conversation. They ate like ravenous wolves—all but Heels ordered two box lunches, one to eat in base ops and the other to take along on the flight—but they all seemed trim and fit, so lean, most of them, that they bordered on the anorexic.

Rinc Seaver was not typical of the new breed. While the others were chatty, chummy, and casual, Seaver was quiet, businesslike, and not very sociable. While the others had
Playboy
pictures downloaded off the Internet stuck under plastic page protectors in their checklists, Seaver did not.

What was it with this guy? Patrick wondered. He didn’t need to give Seaver a full-blown check ride to
know he was more than competent—he was an expert in every aspect of the Bone. The other crew members in the squadron certainly didn’t resent him or resent his expertise, and it was plain that despite the crash, the feeling of detachment, of ostracism, even outright anger toward Seaver was pretty much in Seaver’s own mind. The other crewdogs didn’t resent anyone as long as he pulled his weight and supported the unit.

Furness motioned to Patrick, and they walked out into the hallway to talk without being overheard. “With all due respect, sir—this really sucks,” Furness said. Her voice was low but angry. Well, at least the
crews
didn’t use vulgarity as a part of normal conversation; the commanders were different. “My guys worked damn hard to gin their birds up on time without a glitch, and then you reward them by forcing everybody to replan. It’s unfair to my troops.”

“Relax, Colonel,” Patrick said. “We take all this into account when we tally the score. But you know as well as I do that flexibility and replanning are standard operating procedure. ‘Flexibility is the key to air power.’”

Furness nodded, though her face was still rigid. “My boys will do fine, General, no matter what you toss at us.”

“That’s what I want to hear, Colonel . . .”

“But if I or any of my troops feel that any of this violates crew safety, I’m calling it off, and then I’ll gladly go nose-to-nose with you on who’s right,” Furness said. “Rank or no rank, no one endangers my crews.”

“My first concern is always crew safety, Colonel—but I’m also authorized to run this exercise any way I choose in order to fully evaluate your unit’s performance. That means I set the limits here, not you. I’m risking my own career by doing what I’m doing. If you
squawk, you’d better be prepared to risk your career over it too. Clear?”

“No, sir, it’s not clear. Not one bit.”

“Things will become clearer to you as we go on, Colonel,” Patrick said.

Rebecca Furness squinted at the one-star general, trying to piece together what she had just heard. “General, what in hell is going on here? This isn’t about a pre-D or a check ride for Seaver, is it?”

“Don’t try to second-guess me, Colonel,” Patrick snapped. “This is my exercise. You do it my way, or you prepare to give up your command over your protest. Do you understand?” Furness had no choice but to agree. “Good. I suggest you let the game proceed, even though it might weird you out. Don’t turn your back on anything until you’re sure you have nothing to learn from it.” Furness did not argue, did not agree—she only looked more confused, although a tiny hint of intrigue and curiosity began to creep over her face. “Carry on.”

“Yes, sir,” Furness said. “We penetrate, decimate, and dominate. We never give up.”

“Ho-rah,” Patrick said, not smiling. They went back into the room, and he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “The unit is looking real good so far, Colonel. I’m looking forward to shacking some targets today. Anything else for me?”