He knew these dead men. They were his soldiers. They were the men he had led. Sergeants Pierce and Caldwell. Corporals Ramos and Jones. Privates Smith, Donnelly, and Jackson. They were the men he had failed.
He blinked back tears.
WHUMMP!
Kevin swung around in horror. Twenty yards behind him, dirt and bits of shattered rock fountained skyward.
WHUMMP!
Another explosion, closer this time, knocked him to his knees. Shrapnel hissed past, ripping at the compacted earth walls on either side.
God, he thought, fighting for breath. The North Koreans were walking a mortar barrage right down the trench. He staggered to his feet, trying to run… and knowing that it already was too late—
“Colonel Little? Sir?”
Colonel Kevin Little opened his eyes. The green, glowing numerals of the digital clock on the table beside his cot blinked from 2352 to 2353. He wiped away the rivulets of sweat running down his face. Summer nights in South Korea were hot and humid. My God, not again, he thought wearily. It was the old dream — the nightmare that had haunted him off and on through twenty-plus years and three wars.
He focused on the here and now. He wasn’t trapped in the ruins of Malibu West, the tiny DMZ outpost he’d commanded, and lost, as a young second lieutenant so long ago. Instead, he was in the small, plainly furnished quarters set aside for any senior officer staying overnight at Camp Bonifas, right at the edge of the Demilitarized Zone on the road to Panmunjom.
There was another knock on his door. “Colonel?”
“Come!” Kevin sat up and swung his legs off the cot. He bent down, already pulling on his socks and boots. Then he looked up at the short, wiry South Korean officer who’d entered the tiny room. Major Lee Joon-ho was the S3, the operations officer, for the UN Command Security Battalion that kept watch over the Panmunjom Truce Village and its surroundings — otherwise known as the Joint Security Area.
“What’s up, Major?” he asked quietly, hoping that the other man wasn’t here to check on him because he’d been screaming in his sleep.
“Lieutenant Colonel Miller would like to see you in the CP, sir. We have a situation.”
Kevin nodded. “I’ll be with you in a second.”
The Joint Security Area battalion, whose motto was “In Front of Them All,” was the only combined Korean-American unit in existence. Since the US was handing off more and more front-line DMZ duties to South Korea, most of its soldiers were Koreans like Lee. But the battalion commander, Mike Miller, the command sergeant major, and about forty others were Americans.
While the other man waited outside his door, Kevin quickly finished lacing up his boots and shrugged into his battle dress uniform jacket.
He had just taken over command of the US Eighth Army’s Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion, and the HHB provided logistics and administrative support for Miller and his troops. That provided the official reason for Little’s visit to Camp Bonifas on an inspection tour.
The Joint Security Area was the one place where Allied and North Korean soldiers routinely came face-to-face. And over the decades since the first, and then the second armistice, it was a place where some of those daily confrontations turned violent, even deadly. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Panmunjom was also a magnet for tourists, politicians, and presidents who wanted to peer into the armed hellhole that was North Korea.
Kevin snorted. It was the same morbid fascination that drew people to stare at the man-eating tigers in a zoo. But in a zoo, there were iron bars or wide moats between you and the tigers. At Panmunjom, there were only a few signposts and a line of concrete blocks ten centimeters high between the five small buildings that straddled the demarcation line.
Then he smiled to himself. So how exactly was he any different from the rest of those thrill-seeking tourists? Sure, he could rattle off a list of official-sounding justifications for watching the UN Command Security Battalion handle the conflicting duties of playing VIP tour guide while staying ready for war, but mostly he was here to see how things had changed in the long years since he was last up on the DMZ.
And now, Kevin thought, clipping the drop-leg holster for his Beretta to his trouser leg, he would go see what the tigers were doing that had Miller worried enough to wake a visiting colonel. He grabbed his body armor off the bare floor and followed the South Korean major at a fast walk toward the camp command post.
Lieutenant Colonel Miller was on a secure phone when they came into the command post. Other officers and noncoms were busy at computers scattered around the room, scanning through feeds from the remote cameras liberally emplaced around the Joint Security Area. Major Lee went into a huddle with a couple of young-looking South Korean lieutenants typing frantically at laptops in one corner.
“Understood, Terry,” Miller said calmly in a soft West Texas drawl. “Stay on it. Keep me posted.”
He hung up and turned toward Kevin with a tight smile. “Looks like we’ll be putting on a bigger show for you than I’d hoped, Colonel.”
“Don’t go to any trouble on my account, Mike,” Kevin said, matching his expression. “I’m really just here for the golf.”
Camp Bonifas boasted that it possessed “the world’s most dangerous golf course,” a single par-3 hole surrounded by razor wire, machine gun bunkers, trenches, and minefields.
“Yeah, right,” Miller said, grinning a little bit wider. But the grin vanished as he nodded toward the phone. “That was one of my platoon leaders up at OP Oullette. They’re hearing a lot of small arms and machine gun fire from the north. They can’t see any of it, but it’s echoing off the surrounding hills.”
“Could it be some unscheduled KPA battle drill?” Kevin suggested. Under various standing agreements, each side was supposed to notify the other of any planned military exercises close to the DMZ. But the Korean People’s Army was notorious for ignoring such agreements.
Miller shrugged. “Maybe. But they don’t usually pull that kind of shit after dark.”
Kevin nodded. North Korea’s regular armed forces didn’t have a lot of the night vision gear that was widely used by the US and its allies. Without such equipment, live-fire exercises after sunset were pointless.
“Sir!” Major Lee broke in suddenly.
The two American soldiers turned toward him.
“Voice of Korea has gone off the air,” Lee reported.
Kevin felt a shiver run down his spine. Voice of Korea, the new name for Radio Pyongyang, was North Korea’s main channel for propaganda and news to both the world and to its own citizens. It never went silent. Never.
“When?” Miller asked.
“Twenty minutes ago,” Lee said. His voice was flat, unemotional, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Without any warning. There is only static on all its broadcast frequencies.”
“Crap.” Miller looked at Kevin. “I don’t like this at all, Colonel. Not one damned bit.”
“Nor I,” Kevin agreed. He fought down the urge to take command and start issuing orders. He outranked the other man, but he was here as a visitor, and this was Miller’s patch. The battalion commander knew the turf, his unit’s capabilities, and his responsibilities.
Miller looked at Major Lee. “Tell Lieutenant Colonel Sobong that I’m activating ROUNDUP immediately. He’s in charge. But let’s do this by ground only. I don’t want any helos in the air right now. There’s no point in spooking those bastards across the wire if we don’t have to.”