Ian Slater - Payback

After hours of being cooped up in the Hawkeye’s windowless, equipment-stuffed section of the fuselage and staring at nothing but their banks of computer screens and data blocks, looking for the HAN-class sub and losing contact with her in the lightning rage nor’nor’west of Ullŭng Island, the moles, as was usually the case, were blinded by the dawn’s early light, weak though it was in the storm’s eye. Only after Lynch had seen the three moles linking hands and led childlike from the plane by a white shirt did he allow himself a coffee break.

As he was watching the drama of Beach 5 unfolding on Big Blue, the hushed tones of McCain ’s EWOs unintentionally only adding to the tension rather than ameliorating it, Ray Lynch reaffirmed his conviction that no matter how heart-stopping it could be to be a fighter jock, such as aces Armstrong and Manowski, flying the most lethal war machines man has ever made, or how stressful it was for him to be the man who had to bring them safely down on the boat’s roof, surely nothing could compare with the hard, brutal work of warriors killing other warriors face-to-face.

Ironically, the white IR image of the T-55 appeared much sharper on the screen, because of the clarity of Big Blue’s computers, than it did in the NVGs of Freeman, Choir, Lee, Aussie, and Bone as they poured concerted fire through a 180-degree arc at the IR blobs of white that were the NKA soldiers using the brutish tank as protection.

Again, Freeman’s hard-driving physical training was paying off, enabling his small band of warriors to maintain a highly accurate and concerted fire on their NKA pursuers. As opposed to the excited, wild shooting by the NKA regulars, the bursts of directed fire from Freeman’s AK-47, Aussie’s and Lee’s HK submachine guns, and Choir’s and Brady’s SAWs were a rapid-moving IR study in “effective fire,” wherein no round was wasted. “If you can’t see it!” went the general’s axiom, “you can’t hit it,” and so none of his trainees ever got away with the excuse that they were merely laying down suppressing fire. “A waste of ammo!” would be the general’s terse reply. “You’re not on a Hollywood set!”

The team had taken out eight NKA before the T-55 reached the base of the big fifty-foot-high dune, the supra-athletic ability of Payback’s five shooters enabling them to move with remarkable agility in and out of the sodden brush and sea grass that covered the dune like rain-matted hair on some enormous scalp. Their extreme physical fitness also meant that when they took aim, either stationary or on the run, their heart rate was so comparatively low, around 50 per minute, that, like any champion triathlete, their “shakes” factor was at a minimum, their kill shots usually within an inch of the aiming point.

As Salvini reached the hard-packed sand at Beach 5’s shore, with the six-by-two-by-two-foot-long box marked “MANPAD” in Korean, Eddie Mervyn, hearing his harsh, dragging footsteps via the fine, catlike “nose-hair” sensors on the RS’s bow, down-geared the craft’s treads to slow ahead, and Gomez prepared to exit the hatch. “I’ll help ’im. Sounds like he’s haulin’ something heavy.”

Back in McCain ’s Blue Tile, Air Boss Ray Lynch held his breath, his mouthful of java unswallowed.

“Son of a—,” began one of the EWOs. “Tank’s on top of the dune!”

“Wish,” said John Cuso, “we had our Strikers overhead now, Ray.” Ray Lynch hadn’t realized the McCain ’s XO was aware he was still in the room. “So do I, John.”

“And start a war,” said Admiral Crowley.

“We’re already in one,” rejoined Cuso.

“I meant widen it,” retorted Crowley grumpily. “We’ve got enough mad Muslims to deal with.” There were lapel-pin-sized red crescents, possible hostile sites, all over Big Blue, from Kabul to the Russian Far East and the Russian Near East. “Last thing we need,” he said, indicating the inset map of Korea, “is an all-out brawl with these jokers on the Prick.” He saw a young EWO — a woman — glance around at him, then back at the screen.

“Holy shit!” said Ray Lynch. It was a sight to behold for those watching Big Blue and for the six Americans — Freeman, Choir, Aussie, Lee, Sal, and Brady — on the beach, for as the RS’s bulbous, cigar-tube-shaped bow became visible in the third surf line of the storm-driven sea, dawn was breaking. Bone, his loss of blood and energy causing him to falter, was struck by two succeeding ten-foot waves, going under, Salvini dragging the six-foot-long, steel-band-wrapped box. Gomez, his left hand on the RS’s forward starboard stabilizer wing, lunged out to grab the rope handhold of the box that Salvini was dragging. Gomez knew it probably weighed no more than thirty-five pounds, if there was a launcher and missile inside, but whatever its weight, it was hard to handle in the surf.

For a moment, visible via satellite to all in Blue Tile, but ironically not to those on the beach, Gomez lost his grip as he tried to help Salvini, the box tumbling about so rapidly in a wall of surging foam that he could have sworn it was empty, until Salvini, straining and up to his waist in the surf, body-pressed the box over the foam’s crest, where Gomez took hold of it again and felt its weight on his left arm, a deep gash in his bicep, unnoticed by him till now, having been caused by one of the box’s metal binding straps, but noted by the EWOs and others in Blue Tile hundreds of miles away whose computers were being fed the SATPIX’s IR camera relay feed.

Mervyn, the RS’s state-of-the-art computers notwithstanding, did a superb job keeping the craft stable enough to allow Sal and Gomez to haul the long box down through hatch one.

Back on the beach, because of the storm’s residual force, Freeman, Aussie, Choir, and Lee became momentarily hidden in a thick fog that, had they not been temporarily caught in the windless eye of the storm, the wind would have blown asunder and revealed them naked, as it were, on the beach, trying to reach the RS. The fog didn’t stop the NKA’s pursuit, but in the early dawn the pale sunlight diffused in the thick fog created a glare that defeated all efforts of the NKA pursuers, except for Lieutenant Rhee, to see the escaping Americans.

Rhee, having spent the last twenty minutes in pain and anguish at not being able to contact his troops because of the Americans obviously jamming the NKA frequencies, and unable to take part in the fight, now dragged himself up to the eye slit of the stench-filled bunker and with considerable effort raised his head and the big ChiCom IR binoculars level with the bunker’s slit. He almost blacked out from the effort. Pausing a moment to get his breath, Rhee focused on the down slope that led like a bushy apron to the beach. The fog that had swept in to fill the vacuum of the storm’s eye naturally obscured his field of vision, but failed to entirely blanket out all infrared radiation, most of this appearing to him in the IR lenses of the ChiCom binoculars in the form of short spits of light as weapons were fired by his pursuing NKA comrades and by the withdrawing Americans, but as to who was whom, he couldn’t be sure, exacerbating his frustration. He sat, hunched and wounded, behind a 79G “Sky Arrow,” the clumsily nicknamed but extremely hard-hitting NKA version of the ChiCom’s 12.7mm antiaircraft machine gun, which could and often did double up against South Korean state-of-readiness patrols across the DMZ as a heavy infantry machine gun, which, as Rhee well knew, was capable of meting out horrific damage to any ground target within a mile of the shoreline.

When he glimpsed an umbrella of radiant heat hovering just above the roiling gray wall of the surf, he felt his throat contract, his tongue dry and rough as sandpaper, the stench of his two dead comrades momentarily evicted by his excitement. The umbrella of heat above the water had to be a U.S. helicopter, whose noise was either baffled by the plastic, sound-suppressing blisters that the Migooks often used in SpecOps or was being drowned out by the feral roar of the T-55, which, in spite of the sound of its throaty menace, was achieving little more, it seemed to Rhee, than being a fifty-five-ton shield for the twenty to thirty NKA infantry trying to stop the Americans, the tank’s machine-guns’ fire traversing the beach, but as yet apparently not hitting anyone.