Ian Slater - World in Flames

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.

Cautious though he was, an apparatchik through and through, Suzlov also told his aides that if at the meeting the Politburo and STAVKA endorsed him and decided to go nuclear, he wouldn’t pussyfoot like the Americans in Vietnam, who procrastinated — and who could have won the Vietnam War in a day had they had the smelost’ —”balls”—to drop an A-bomb on Hanoi.

He, Suzlov, would go all out, and with the indisputable advantage his people had with nuclear bunker defenses, he would have the decisive edge.

Ray Brentwood’s IX-44E chugged back into San Diego Harbor as the sun was sinking in a tangerine sky, the great towering silhouettes of the warships even more impressive than when Ray and his barge crew had left that morning. In the distance he could see the sleek, black lines of a fast frigate heading out to sea, her bow slicing the water like a knife, and the phosphorescence of her wake the only visible sign of her progress to war.

As they tied up, Ray took the sample bottle of the spill, as he had done more than a dozen times since his sludge-removal barge had been mopping up small spills here and there up the coast. While the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington wasn’t overly concerned with “chicken-shit” spills, as one Washington official bluntly put it, EPA had a master data bank into which all oil companies were required to register their cargo’s “fingerprints” in the form of having particular isotopes added to each cargo so that polluters could be identified. But EPA was loath to press either IMCO — the intergovernmental maritime consultative organization — or TOVALOP — the tanker owners’ voluntary agreement on liability for oil pollution — to discipline their own members when the oil being spilled by enemy subs sinking Allied tankers was astronomically larger than that of local spills. The problem was that EPA hadn’t taken into account what they later dubbed the NP, or “nagging power,” of local residents up and down California’s more affluent coastline who demanded the names of the offending companies and captains who had vented bilge oil at sea, so that they could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

And so it was that once a week, Ray Brentwood took his sample bottles of the spills his barge had sucked up to the harbor pollution control office, where he could clip the bottle into the analyzer, flick on the switch, and wait for any matchup with the EPA’s master computer isotope list. When the matchups occurred, the terminal beeped, and like an accusing finger pointing at an overdue library book borrower, it kept up until it had stopped spitting out its printout of the matchup between sample and master list.