Ian Slater - Payback

The second burst from Freeman’s AK-47 as he ran forward from the brush wasn’t aimed at the wounded NKA lieutenant, who’d dropped behind the cover of the bunker, but into the bunker, from which he could hear the screams of the two men within as Freeman’s next burst of AK-47 fire ricocheted noisily inside the bunker, the burst’s white tracer rounds whizzing about like bits and pieces of white-hot metal, chopping up everything and everyone inside even before the general drew level with it, Aussie popping in two high-fragmentation grenades as the coup de grace, Freeman’s AK-47 now sweeping the ATVs, most of whose drivers hadn’t yet had a chance to bring their “back-slung” weapons to bear.

Several of the ATVs’ fuel tanks were spewing gas, the remaining tanks already spouting leaks as Choir Williams discharged his SAW, its rounds ripping the Red Dragons’ seats apart, creating a kapok snowstorm in the rain, puncturing the remaining gas tanks with multiple perforations. Surprisingly, what Aussie expected to be spurts of gasoline coming from the Red Dragons’ shot-up tanks were nothing more than trickles, indicating that the tanks were near empty, some barely leaking at all. He tossed another grenade at the clump of three-wheeled vehicles. There was an enormous, jagged purple X that momentarily lit up the ATVs in a surreal flash of light, and the crash of the grenade, immediately followed by several of the Red Dragons’ gas tanks exploding, threw the NKA into further confusion.

But the NKA’s return fire, wild at first because of their surprise, quickly became more focused, and Bone Brady, sprinting toward the strip of coast road that ran by the warehouse’s northern end, was knocked clean off his feet by a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, as were Johnny Lee to his left and Salvini on his right. Ironically, it was the thorn-thick brush that had threatened to impede their advance up the slope from the beach that now saved them, the tangled mass of roots and thorn branches absorbing the fragments of RPG that had exploded only feet away. As Brady fell, his SAW clattered noisily to the ground, despite the cushioning effect of the rain-soaked path. His obscenities, heard only by Salvini, were lost to the others in the deafening noise of the firefight. Johnny Lee, his ears ringing from the explosion of the RPG and feeling nauseated from the gut-punching concussion, nevertheless managed to get off three cartridges of number 00 buckshot at the RPG duo huddling by the northern entrance. The twenty-seven pellets blew the two Koreans back with such force into their two Red Dragons that they seemed to be executing backflips from a standing position.

By now, Freeman, Aussie, and Choir, to Freeman’s left and right respectively, were past the mauled ATV group and Lieutenant Rhee, who, hit in the left thigh by Freeman’s AK-47 in its first sweep, lay bleeding profusely. Having sought cover quickly, Rhee had dragged himself so close to the rear of the bunker, which Freeman and Aussie had silenced, that in the darkness, swirling with curtains of rain and sea spray, he couldn’t be seen. But he could see three of the attackers running past him toward the warehouse only seconds away, most of the NKA defenders having withdrawn into the building itself to protect its stores against the assault troops, who, despite their lack of insignia, Rhee was sure must be Americans, because of their size. They looked like giants. Of course, he realized the fact that they wore Kevlar American-style helmets meant nothing, because, like the ubiquitous Russian-made AK-47, the American “Fritz” was readily available to terrorists et al. in the underground arms and armor bazaars worldwide. He heard the sound of splitting wood, his enemies presumably already at the sliding doors at both the southern and the northern ends of the building.

Rhee saw six or seven of his remaining ATV soldiers returning fire from several gun ports situated in the door, but he knew that without the advantage of what obviously must be the enemy’s passive night-vision goggles, his men could aim only at the muzzle flashes of the enemy commandos. Growing weaker and realizing that the round he’d taken in his thigh had probably done more damage than he’d first thought, he knew that if he didn’t hurry and rig a tourniquet, he’d die. Perhaps he could use one of the two dead bunker crewmen’s belts.

Under cover of the noise of a group of his ATV men, who’d remained bunched up outside the building, using the gutted hulks of their three-wheeled vehicles as an ad hoc defensive barrier, he dragged himself a few feet along the rear of the eye-slit bunker rock. With enormous effort, biting his left hand to mute his involuntary gasps of pain, his nervous system going deeper into shock, he pushed against the bunker’s small but craftily camouflaged rabbit-hutch-like iron door, but it wouldn’t open. Mustering all his waning strength, he pushed again, and felt it give way, though there was still considerable resistance. Finally he managed to squeeze himself through the partial opening into the protective rock cave of the bunker, from where he was determined to command his counterattack, and where he felt the attackers would least expect him to be.

In the pitch-black interior he found it difficult to breathe, and the stench of feces and urine from the grenade-gashed night pail was suffocating. He managed to rig a tourniquet by using one of the dead men’s belts without, he hoped, being seen by the marauders, who had seemingly come out of nowhere. Despite the agony he was in, the Korean lieutenant never doubted for a moment that the enemy would be either killed or captured. Every one of them. Though he felt nauseated from the cloying combination of spent cordite, body odor, and defecation, and despite the noise of the battle raging outside, Rhee willed himself to concentrate, pulling out his cell to call in the remaining thirty of his men who formed the crescent-shaped patrol zone around Beach 5. And he was especially keen to contact Sergeant Moon, to make sure that the ten men stationed on the beach itself would cut off any escape down the Y from the warehouse by the enemy — Americans, South Koreans, or whoever the attackers were.

There was a loud bang, which Rhee heard even in his rock-encased gun pit. He guessed it was one of the warehouse doors giving way.

The big reinforced-brass warehouse lock, however, hadn’t yielded to the two HAL rounds Choir fired at near point-blank range into the doors’ “Dear Leader” lock. The HAL, a hardened lead slug, encased in its polyethylene sabot, had become as legendary in its effectiveness against hard targets as Freeman’s leadership was in the matter of tactics, the HAL a favored assault round in SWAT and SpecFor teams fighting terrorists from Kentucky to Kabul. But, as Freeman was first to see through his NVGs, the lock was still intact. The famed slugs, though capable of passing clean through an engine block, had proved no match for the lock’s double casing and reinforcing rods behind the two sliding doors at each end of the football-field-sized warehouse. Disappointed, Choir saw that while the lock’s keyway had been blasted out by a HAL, its all-important casing, though scarred, was infuriatingly intact, its horseshoe-shaped shank still holding the two sliding doors together.

“Give ’em the Play-Doh!” Choir yelled to Aussie. Having already decided that this was the only alternative course, Aussie was ready with a beige baseball-sized glob of Semtex C4 plastique, which he pushed hard against the lock, the Semtex’s adhesive, doughlike consistency making it a malleable recipient of the black-striped, reddish-orange det cord that Aussie pushed into it.

“Back!” he shouted, sticking another detonator into the soft explosive to reduce the one-in-ten chance of a fail to one in a hundred. He lit the two det cords’ fuses, stepping back smartly with Freeman and Choir behind the southwest corner of the warehouse as each cord’s firing-train sequence began, each ignition charge setting off the aluminum-shelled intermediate charge and then the base charge against the lock. The explosion shook the entire building, and sent up a huge cloud of dust that immediately became sodden in the downpour and turned to mud.