But it appeared he had overestimated his own chances… or underestimated the alertness of his guards. The camp perimeter was well lit here, and Coyote could see the shadows of guard towers behind the lights. Everything depended on surprise.
Deliberately, he staggered, clutching himself across his belly. The guards turned, then closed in. "Irona!" one snapped. "P'palli ose yo!"
Coyote straightened, the improvised knife firmly grasped in his right hand as he drew it from his sleeve, slashing out and up. The stake entered the guard's throat at the angle beneath his jaw and rammed through into the back of his mouth. The man gave a strangled cry and clawed at his face. Coyote's thrust hadn't been deep enough to kill, but the guard lost all interest in Coyote.
And Coyote was already grabbing for the guard's rifle.
Coyote had guessed that the rifle would be charged ― no guard walked into a room occupied by almost two hundred angry prisoners without chambering a round first ― but with the safety on. He didn't bother to take it from the Korean, but dragged his hand down over the selector switch, then closed his finger over the trigger while the weapon was still slung from its screaming owner.
He fired, a flat burst that stabbed flame into the night and shattered the silence of the camp with hammering autofire. Driving his left shoulder into the guard's chest, he pivoted gun and man together, dragging the flashing muzzle into line with the second guard. The man pitched backward, arms spread, as Coyote smashed the first guard with all the strength at his command before he could pull the wooden knife free. The soldier went down, stayed down.
Coyote could hear excited shouts as he untangled the AK-47 from the guard's body. He had his surprise. Now he needed to make the most of it.
Stooping, he unhooked one of the grenades from the guard's belt. It was a Soviet RGD-5, bright apple-green in color with an oversized cotter pin ring and a tall, thin detonator rising from the round body. He yanked out the pin, sent the grenade bouncing toward the fence, and hit the dirt facedown.
"Chogi!" someone yelled. Searchlights swept across the compound now, and the thin, ragged howl of a siren was starting to wail. There was a brief stab of gunfire from the darkness, then another. "E yop e ult'ari!"
A long burst of autofire blasted from one of the towers a hundred yards away. Coyote felt something like a hammer blow in his leg, halfway up his thigh. The impact was hard enough to slap his leg aside but, strangely, there was no pain. Then the night erupted in flame.
"What in the hell is that crazy bastard doing?" Sikes pressed his eye to the night-vision device, straining to gather more information from the oddly flattened, monochrome image it gave him. The flash of the grenade had seared the device's optics for a moment, leaving a fuzzy blind spot which slowly cleared. He could see the bodies of two guards on the ground, could see the American POW scrambling forward on his belly, an AK clutched in his arms. The grenade had twisted the chain-link fence, punching it out from the base enough to offer a determined man a way out.
"He's making a break!" Kohl said, his face still pressed close to his Pilkington scope's eyepiece. "He's trying to wiggle under the fence!"
"Shit!" Huerta said, "He's hit…"
Sikes had only seconds to make a decision which could well spell disaster for his team. If the SEALs tried to help the POW, there was every possibility that the North Koreans would discover their presence.
But he also knew there must be one god-awful important reason for the man to be trying to escape.
That decided him. "Kohl! Give him cover!"
The G3 was fitted with a sound suppressor, and the shots would not be heard over the shouting, gunfire, and sirens sounding in the camp now. The wound inflicted by the 7.62-mm NATO round would be close enough to that caused by an AK-47 round that the Koreans would never know the difference ― certainly not without an autopsy. By the time the Koreans got around to that it would be too late.
Kohl held the sniper rifle steady on its bipod for a moment, then squeezed the trigger. Even with the suppressor, the shot sounded unnaturally loud among the rocks, and Sikes had to tell himself again that, if the camp guards heard it, they would never be able to tell where it came from.
In the camp, a guard pitched headlong from one of the wooden guard towers. Kohl selected a new target and fired again. A North Korean guard, running full-tilt toward the disturbance, staggered and dropped.
"Huerta!" Sikes snapped. When the SEAL faced him, the lieutenant signaled, pointing down the slope. Huerta nodded and slipped over the rim of the hide. Kohl took aim once more.
CHAPTER 21
Coyote fired the AK-47 again, a wild spray directed in the general direction of the gunfire probing toward him from the advancing Korean soldiers. He had no idea whether he hit any or not. His single hope was to make them keep their heads down long enough for him to get through the gap under the fence.
Bullets tunneled into the clay close by, sending up spurts of wet earth almost in his face. The rifle clicked empty and Coyote tossed it aside. Lying on his back, he began wiggling under the skirt of the chain-link fence.
His plan had already gone sour. He couldn't feel much of anything in his left leg, but there was a deadness there, a gone-to-sleep numbness. When he touched it, his hand came away slick with blood.
How far could he get, in the dark, in hostile country, with gomers on his heels, and him not even able to stand on his leg, much less run on it.
But there was no turning back, not now. He kicked out with his right leg, pushing himself backward under the fence. A fresh burst of gunfire splattered the ground close by, and something spanged off the metal of the fence a few feet above his head. A ragged edge of fencing caught his flight suit, pinning him. Nearly panicking, he kicked harder.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a Korean soldier thirty feet away. Illuminated by the beam of a searchlight, the man was moving forward relentlessly, AK raised, his eyes already locked with Coyote's. The AK came up, aiming.
The top of the Korean's head exploded in a spray of blood and chips of bone and the man lurched heavily to one side, then collapsed. A moment later, the searchlight flared and went out, leaving Coyote in near darkness.
He kicked again and felt his flight suit tear free. The ground outside the fence dropped away sharply, and Coyote rolled down the hill into the brush at the bottom.
It was then that the pain hit him, a searing fire in his thigh, midway between hip and knee. He grasped his leg between both hands, squeezing hard. The bone, miraculously, did not seem to be broken, but the wound throbbed and ached like hell. He found he could stand on it ― barely ― that he could hobble forward if he didn't put too much weight on his left leg.
Coyote's eyes were still dazzled by the camp's lights and he could see little of his surroundings. There were rocks and trees nearby, though, and the black shape of a hillside facing him. He could make out the trees in the illumination spilling from the camp and decided that they offered him his best chance of hiding. Continued shouting from the other side of the fence suggested that the Koreans had lost him, but that wouldn't last for long. Soon they'd be on his trail, possibly with dogs.
How was he going to find the SEALs before he was run to earth?
He was limping past the gnarled trunk of a pine tree when hands snaked out and grabbed Coyote's collar and mouth, yanking him to the ground. The shock jarred his leg and he bit his lower lip hard to keep from screaming.
"You stupid, sorry son of a bitch!" a voice snarled in his ear. "What in the hell do you think you're trying to pull!"