Carefully, he raised his M-760 and slipped off the safety. At his side, Han brought his Uzi up. Seconds slipped by as they waited for Vespasio to get in position.
But there was no more time to waste. Four of the guards were already going through the gate, heading toward the building Chimera's crew had named the Wonsan Waldorf. It was now or never.
He squeezed the trigger, holding the weapon's barrel down and dragging the muzzle back along the line of KorCom soldiers visible through his night sight. The suppressed weapon bucked and kicked in his hand, the staccato roar muted to the sharp, slap-slap-slap of the bolt as it ratcheted back and forth. Empty brass cartridges spun and danced, clinking as they struck the underside of the tank inches above his head. Han opened up with the silenced Uzi, loosing precisely controlled three-round bursts into the enemy troops.
The Koreans walking toward the POW building twisted, spun, and fell, or collided with one another as it registered on them that they were under fire. One man gasped, a sound more of surprise than of pain, and then a second round spun him about and slammed him to the ground seconds before one of his comrades dropped across his body. The captain staggered as three rounds stitched up his spine, marking his back with spreading patches which looked black through the starlight goggles. A soldier next to the officer turned and stared, mouth open, not realizing the man had been shot until one 9-mm round punctured his throat and a second crushed his skull. The smash and tinkle of shattered glass was louder than the gunfire. In the cab of the truck, the driver threw hands over face, then tumbled sideways out the open door.
Huerta ceased fire long enough to drop an empty magazine and slap in a fresh one. Vespasio's Colt Commando opened up from across the street at the same moment, chopping into two soldiers who had taken cover behind the truck. One man screamed, a sharp, shocking yell above the hammer of 9-mm rounds striking the truck's side.
"Chosin!" the major shrieked, and then he went down as well. The last soldier managed to unsling his AK-47 and drag the bolt back as he searched wildly for a target. Rounds slammed into his chest and knocked him down.
And then it was over, the North Koreans sprawled dead behind the still-idling military truck. The entire firefight had lasted less than four seconds, so brief a time that the Koreans had not even been able to shoot back. Huerta rolled out from under the tank, stood, and raced across the street, drawing his hush puppy as he ran. By the time Vespasio and Han joined him, he was already putting silent mercy rounds into the skulls of the men sprawled on the ground. There was no time now for prisoners, and the risk of taking them was too great.
Huerta didn't know if the men he shot were still alive or not. Han helped finish the job with a silent, thin-lipped ferocity, while Vespasio stood guard.
The street was deserted, except for the three SEALs and the bodies. Even the Wonsan Waldorf was silent and dark. Despite the yells, the clatter of falling weapons, the thump of rounds striking the side of the truck, no one seemed to have noticed the brief and savage firefight which had just taken place. Perhaps they'd just bought the op a precious few minutes more.
Huerta gave orders to the other two. Swiftly, they began picking up bodies and tossing them one by one into the back of the truck. He stepped aside and kept his eye on the surrounding, darkened buildings as he opened his radio's tactical channel. "Bushmaster One, this is Bush Five," he whispered, using the code-name which would identify him to Sikes. He received two clicks for answer: Go ahead. "Sentry point secure. No alarm."
"Keep it that way," the lieutenant replied. "We need more time."
"I'm leaving Han on guard here. I want to check the motor pool with Vespasio." He was thinking about the trucks the KorCom officers had mentioned. "Things may be going wrong over there."
Sikes clicked the squelch twice for answer and Huerta signed off. Han had already found a jacket and pants unmarred by bullet holes or blood and was pulling them on over his combat blacks. An AK-47 and a soft, shapeless cap with a red star above the brim completed the impromptu disguise. He was still wearing black combat boots instead of the soft, high-topped boots usually worn by KorCom soldiers, but it was unlikely that anyone would get close enough to him to notice. Han should pass any casual inspection for the few minutes that Huerta and Vespasio would be away, and his knowledge of Korean and his Oriental features should let him field questions by anyone wondering where the small army guarding the POWs had gone.
"I'll tell them that everybody else went to get the trucks," Han said, grinning.
Which was exactly what Huerta had in mind. Nine bodies ― six guards, a driver, and two officers ― lay on the truck's flatbed, concealed by a roll of camouflage netting found in the back. The SEALs would park the vehicle near the motor pool, where the bodies should remain undiscovered until it was too late.
Without another word, Huerta brushed broken glass from the driver's seat and climbed in behind the wheel, ignoring the blood splattered across the upholstery. Vespasio got in on the passenger's side.
The motor pool was less than a hundred yards across the darkened compound. Huerta gunned the motor to life and turned into the road. Behind them, Han waved once and took the position of a lone sentry on a boring night watch.
Anbyon was a fair-sized city in the mountains south of Wonsan, and the location of an important military reserve depot located on the single highway running south across the Taebaeks toward the Demarcation Line, seventy-five kilometers away. Captain Sun Dae-jung of the People's Air Defense Forces climbed onto the aft deck of his ZSU-23-4 and scanned the darkness of the northern sky.
Wonsan was twenty kilometers away and he didn't really expect to see any sign of the air attacks which the port city had reported. Still, his orders carried a sense of raw urgency. Every available reserve unit in the area was to be mustered for the defense of the city.
The four ZSU's of Sun's company could get there within the hour. Sun had been born and raised in Wonsan, and he knew the area well. From the hills south of the harbor, where the road from Anbyon joined the coastal highway, they would have a splendid command of the skies over the harbor.
And he knew his vehicles, deadly looking antiaircraft vehicles which Sun knew by their Russian name: Shilka. Their quad-mounted 23-mm cannon would be only marginally effective against supersonic aircraft such as the American Tomcats and Hornets, but their radar-controlled precision, their sheer volume of fire would spell doom for any helicopter or subsonic ground attack that came within range.
The engine spat and roared as the driver cranked it to life. Behind him, the other three Shilkas shuddered and rumbled, exhaust fumes roiling across the pools of light cast by the Anbyon base's lights. Elsewhere, trucks and small military vehicles scurried about like insects. Every soldier in the People's Democratic Republic would be awake by now, Sun thought, ready to defend the fatherland.
But his company would be on the spear-point of that defense.
"Kapsida!" he shouted over the engine roar to his driver. "Let's go!"
With a lurch, the tracked vehicle thundered ahead, making Sun grip the edge of the open hatch to keep from being thrown. He hoped the American aircraft were still over Wonsan by the time he reached the city. In the pre-dawn darkness, his squat vehicles would be next to impossible to see ― a real surprise for the overconfident Imperialists.
Sun smiled to himself as his column clanked ahead toward the mountain pass at Nyongch'on.