“How much time do we have?” Ballard asked Jang-mi.
“Maybe one day,” she said. “The enemy should be here tomorrow.”
“Should be here?” Ballard pressed. “We don’t have supplies for more than a few days.”
“Tomorrow if we are lucky,” she replied. “We can make some preparations. If we are not so lucky, the enemy will be here tonight.”
Ballard nodded. “All right, then. I can see we need to get to work. Sergeant, get those Puerto Ricans busy clearing brush from the top of the fort’s walls. I hope they can handle that much, at least. I’ve got to say that I’m surprised they made it here.”
“Yes, sir. Also, I would suggest having a detail build a barricade across the road to the south.”
“Sergeant, isn’t that the wrong direction? The enemy will be coming from the north.”
“Sir, the last thing we want is for them to use the barricade we built as a defensive position. If we block the road on the far side of the clearing, we’ll keep them penned in our field of fire from the fort, just where we want them.”
Ballard nodded at the logic of it. “Good thinking, Sergeant. Get to it!”
The name that Lieutenant Ballard had given the old fort had made the rounds. Some thought Outpost Alamo had a nice ring to it, while others pointed out that things had not ended well for the Alamo’s defenders.
Whatever abilities they may have lacked as soldiers, the Borinqueneers quickly demonstrated that they were not afraid of hard work. Putting their weapons aside, they used everything from bayonets to trenching tools to clear brush from the top of the fortress walls. The debris was tossed to the clearing below. Another detail dragged the brush to build the barricade that the sergeant had suggested. Without any heavy equipment, the men struggled to move logs and even boulders to create a foundation for the barricade.
Cole and the other men of his squad joined the Puerto Ricans in building the barricade. It was back-breaking work and the men were soon soaked with sweat, but the makeshift barricade grew quickly. The barricade did not need to be impregnable. It just needed to slow down the enemy.
Cole saw with satisfaction that this barricade, along with the thick brush ringing the clear, as well as the fortress itself, had the effect of turning the clearing into a corral. If taken by surprise, the lead elements of the Chinese army would be trapped in a killing field. Cole always had liked a good trap, and while this one was bigger than what he had used to snare rabbits and other game back home, he reckoned that it would do nicely.
“I have to say, this is the last thing that I thought I’d be doing in Korea,” said Lieutenant Commander Miller, who had joined in building the barricade. He grunted with the effort of helping to move a log into place. “They don’t exactly prepare you for manual labor in flight school.”
“You could have avoided all this if you hadn’t gone and gotten yourself shot down,” Cole pointed out.
“What, and miss all the fun?”
“That’s not all you would have missed, sir,” the kid said, grinning as he nodded in Jang-mi’s direction. She, too, had joined in the effort to build up the barricade and was some distance away, dragging a load of brush that had been tossed down from high above.
“You’ve got me there, soldier. I didn’t know it was that obvious.”
“Just be sure to invite us to the wedding, sir.”
“All right, all right.” The pilot laughed good-naturedly. “But that’s enough of that. Let’s get this barricade built. Like Jang-mi said, we might have less time than we hoped.”
As soon as he said it, they all glanced nervously at the road, half-expecting to be greeted by the sight of hundreds of enemy troops marching toward them. So far, the road remained empty. But for how long?
Cole paused to take a long drink from his canteen, studying the fortress walls as he did so. Although the Puerto Ricans were clearing brush from the top, most of the foliage had not been growing for long. According to Jang-mi, the villagers gathered here from time to time to tend the ancient stone fortress, and that included clearing the walls of the weeds and small trees that inevitably took root. To the nearby villagers, the fort was sacred in its own way and tending it honored their people’s history and traditions. After all, their ancestors had surely been among those who fought and died on these walls, defending their homeland.
Cole felt reassured that they would be defending the fort; he would not have wanted to attack these walls. The stone walls rose twenty feet from the surrounding landscape, the giant blocks stacked without mortar, but fitting one against the other almost seamlessly to create an intimidating stone face. Time and moss had darkened the walls, giving them a brooding appearance. Short of scaling the walls, the only way in or out was a heavy wooden gate. A square watchtower, no more than twenty feet high, with slits for archers, rose from the center of the fortress walls.
The clever builders of the fort had incorporated the landscape itself as part of the defenses. The high fortress wall linked two adjoining cliff faces, curving slightly like a grim smile. One of the cliff faces rose much higher than the fortress wall, like an impregnable citadel. It was easy to imagine that more than one last stand had taken place on that cliff. A lower wall encircled the rest of the hilltop, but the back part of the hill was so steep that it was hard to imagine an enemy even attempting that approach.
From the fortress walls, defenders in ancient times could pelt the road with arrows or stones. They could rush out to attack an enemy attempting passage through the gap.
The current defenders could do a lot more than shoot arrows at the enemy. In addition to their rifles, mortars, and machine guns, Task Force Ballard had two tanks.
Of course, it was impossible to get the tanks through the fort’s gate or to place them on the walls. Instead, the tank commander placed them at the base of the exterior wall, giving the tanks a clear field of fire across the clearing and down the road flowing toward them from the north. When they arrived, the enemy would be met by shells and even machine gun fire from the two tanks.
On the march, Jang-mi had shared some of the history of the fort. As it turned out, the Korean hills were dotted with similar forts. Some were now little more than ruins, but some of the more elaborate fortresses closer to Seoul and other cities had been well-tended and were now tourist attractions during peacetime.
It was hard to know it now, with the Korean people so divided and beleaguered, but they had a proud history. Jang-mi had told them about Jumong, the great warrior king who had founded a kingdom that extended not only across the Korean peninsula, but also deep into China. The nation itself had taken its name from the kingdom of Goguryeo, the dynasty founded by Jumong that had proudly endured for centuries.
However, the growing wealth and influence of the Koreans in ancient times had attracted enemies and sparked rivalries. From time to time, the Chinese emperors had raised armies and invaded. Then came the Japanese. Ever a warlike people bent on conquest, the Japanese had repeatedly attacked the Koreans.
In times of war, the local villagers had for centuries retreated to fortresses like this. It was a place to halt the enemy or to shelter in place while a more powerful army ransacked the country, and then moved on. The Japanese Empire had finally occupied Korea as a colony in 1900. With the defeat of the Japanese, the influence of China spawned the growth of communism.
Through it all, despite the ravages of armies, and sometimes in victory and sometimes in suffering, the people had endured.
“If these walls could talk, huh?” Miller commented, reaching for Cole’s canteen to take a drink. “Do you think this place will do the job?”