Ian Slater - World in Flames

“Got it.”

“And Aussie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No gold souvenirs on the way.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“Not half.”

“Too bloody heavy anyway.”

“See you at the helos.”

“Right.”

With that, in their SPETS overlays, the remaining sixteen SAS men, all that was left of the three troops, were gone, moving quickly, silently, behind Aussie toward the Hall of Facets.

Choir, invisible by the wall of the Patriarchal Palace, moved up closer in the darkness, then used the side of the Church of the Twelve Apostles for cover. He could hear the lead tank, about a hundred yards away to the left of the Great Bell Tower.

Choir lifted the Arpac, its barrel so short that aiming it made him feel as if he were playing with a toy. The tip of the shaped charge warhead with its point-detonating fuse was barely visible as he leaned against the ancient stone of the Church of the Apostles, waiting for the next glimmer of flare light to illuminate the tanks, their creaky, unoiled sound coming closer.

But there were no flares. There was no light. But Choir, his eyes growing more accustomed to the snow-curtained darkness outside the cathedral, began to make out the hump of the first T-90, then its machine gun opened up again and he could hear its rounds cracking into and about the cathedral’s door to his far right. He needed only a second for the tank to fell the peep sight. He inhaled, held his breath, and fired. The sliding barrel recoiled, and the missile’s motor, which gave off no flash, blasted from the barrel at over seventy-six meters a second. Less than one second later, the tank was belching flame, the crew screaming, the charge having penetrated the cupola, flame from the tank lighting up the snow so that Choir feared that he’d be spotted in the short sprint back to the cathedral.

But then the tank’s 135-millimeter shells began exploding, and as he ran back through the cathedral’s side door, the lead T-90 and the two behind it exploded, sending white-hot shrapnel whistling into the infantry behind the tanks and the jumble of smoking concrete that had been the Council of Ministers.

“Good work, Choir!” yelled David. “Fourth of July out there!”

Choir didn’t get the reference but he understood it was congratulatory, as Brentwood smacked him on the back, pointing him toward the doorway leading from the Assumption Cathedral to the Hall of Facets.

“You coming, sir?”

“Be along in a second,” said David. “Have to give Cheek-Dawson a shot.”

“But—” began Choir.

“Well, we can’t take him with us, can we?” said David.

“No, sir.”

“Go! See you at the choppers.”

“Yes, sir.”

David knew that Choir knew, but the Welshman didn’t linger and did as he was told.

In the Arctic grayness around the ice-locked Roosevelt, the Sea Harrier, though having left East Spitzbergen, two hundred miles to the north, well before the five Sea King helicopters, was having difficulty finding a suitable spot to land.

The Harrier’s forward-looking infrared radar showed such an uneven chaos of jagged ice that even for the versatile vertical-takeoff-and-landing fighter, putting down on the ice would have been a risky venture, so that the pilot couldn’t justify risking the multimillion-dollar plane. In any case, his very presence circling the sub, riding shotgun for the approaching helicopters, was message enough, in the radio silence, for Capt. Robert Brentwood and his crew that they were about to be rescued.

As the five choppers neared, two fore and aft of the Roosevelt, the fifth helicopter starboard midships, all five about fifty feet away from the sub’s hull, they began lowering their rope ladders, while Zeldman and the five chief petty officers, their voices battling the steady roar of the rotor slap, began dividing the crew into their various departments and then into groups of twenty, for each of the Sea Kings.

Robert Brentwood went back aboard Roosevelt to Control, and set the scuttling charges, double-checking that all code books and deciphering coils were destroyed. After he pushed the timer, he would have five minutes to clear the sail and get on the last chopper.

While the chopper pilots fought to keep hover position in the unpredictable gusts and sudden shears that were caused by the wind blowing over the jagged serrations of the ice pressure ridges, Zeldman and several others struggled to steady a stretcher containing one of the men who was too badly wounded to either climb or be winched up in harness. The chopper, rising suddenly in a gust, shifted only two feet or so, but in doing so, tore the stretcher from the grasp of the ground party, who, as they stood helplessly by, saw the man would have been lost had it not been for the restraining straps. After the chopper steadied enough to allow them to snap on the backup safety ring and began to haul the injured man up, Zeldman walked down the line, his fur-lined parka stiff with ice particles, the rising wind and the sway of the choppers combining to create a wind-chill factor of minus sixty degrees as he shouted above the noise of the rotors, making sure every man understood that if a chopper should suddenly rise in a gust or drop in a wind shear, they must stop climbing immediately and hang on until it steadied itself. Otherwise, as the Royal Air Force corporal who had climbed down to assist told Zeldman, a man who continued to move on the rope ladder could start a swinging motion in concert with the chopper, resulting in a sudden lurch. This could cause a man to either lose his grip or, in the extreme case, as the chopper tried to right itself, create a pendulum effect that could throw him into the rotors. Soon after Zeldman had returned to the head of the line to help the chiefs, whose hands, like his, were frozen despite their gloves, one of the petty officers slipped on a rope rung and lost his grip. Fortunately he fell only a few feet onto the hard ice, his worst injury appearing to be a bruised ego from the severe ribbing he got from the waiting crewmen, who from then on would forever call him “Ice Man.”

In Taipingshao, thirty miles north of the Yalu, the North Korean Army’s General Kim’s personal interrogator made his way down through the deep subterranean tunnel HQ into the dank interrogation room — or rather, the six-foot-square mud pit with a three-foot boardwalk and bare table.

“Mikuk chapnomtul” —”American bastard!”—he yelled. “You kill our people with gangster weapons.” His breath was steaming in the frigid tunnel air, his short, lean frame in the drab olive green of the baggy NKA uniform barely visible in the light of the lantern which he placed on the bare table. “If you do not confess, it will make the general very angry.”

The prisoner, who had been kept sitting naked for hours, lashed to a rough bamboo chair, didn’t answer. He couldn’t sleep, for then they would wake him with a bayonet. He was forbidden to use anything, not even a bucket for a toilet so that he was forced to sit, chained as he was, in his own urine and excrement.

Three of Kim’s earlier interrogators had been women, and throughout the questioning and persistent demands for a confession of war crimes, they would make derisive remarks about the prisoner’s genitals, warning him that where he was going, he would have no need of his member even if he knew how to use it, which, they taunted, was doubtful. It was this kind of adolescent brutality that was easiest for Freeman to withstand. What was far more deadly was the lack of sleep.

Other things were bearable. Sitting in your own shit wasn’t as bad as the gooks thought it was — besides, no one was as repulsed by the smell of his own ordure as were other people. In fact, as a young soldier at Camp Lejeune, he had been told by the drill instructor that people secretly liked it. In any event, this was the kind of humiliation most men could bear — at least for the first few days or so. Lack of sleep was the killer, physically and spiritually. That and their damned stinking “facecloth” torture — during which a large piece of sodden calico was slapped over his face so that every breath he took sucked it tighter against his face. Then they’d jerk the chair back to the point of tipping, and on the already supersaturated cloth they would drip water from a gourd, its rope cradle attached to a hook jammed hard into the semifrozen earth above him. The feeling of panic, of being unable to breathe, the single drops of water creating the sensation — indeed, the reality — of drowning, was almost too much for him, and the hero of Pyongyang wondered how much longer he could last without publicly — on TV for all the world to see — abjectly confessing his part in “the conspiracy of U.S. warmongers to wage chemical warfare on the peaceful, loving peoples of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”