“Fast as you can.”
“We…”
Freeman didn’t hear the rest — young Brentwood had opened up with his SAW, taking out the first two militia to make it through the door, a third tripping over them, the rest breaking either side, lost to the darkness behind the huge marble columns.
“Brentwood — Brooklyn?” Freeman’s voice took on the tone of a basso profundo, its echo bouncing off the nearest statue of a hero worker. “Alternate fire! I’ll start the next one. Brentwood?”
“Sir?”
“You got a PRC?”
“Yes, sir!”
Suddenly the darkness was split by the flash and telltale staccato of AK-47s, glass breaking behind Freeman and Brentwood, bullets singing as they struck marble. Brentwood squeezed off a burst, quickly moving to the next column, every nerve raw, not knowing how far up the hall they’d gone.
“When our boys start moving up those steps,” Freeman yelled, moving toward the balustrade, “we go up to the first floor. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Brooklyn?”
There was a squeaky reply — Brooklyn so terrified, he could hardly find voice.
“More gooks, General,” Brentwood called out, and fired at the door, seeing there were too many for alternate fire if they were to stop them. He thought he got one or two, but the rest had disappeared like the first group, left and right of the cavernous foyer, behind the columns.
His ears still ringing, heart thumping, David crossed the hall, letting off another burst as he reached a marble column close to the balustrade. He felt something stinging him — his left leg-momentarily wondering whether or not it was a bullet but having no time to dwell on it. Soon, he knew, the enemy, now over the initial surprise, must figure out a rough plan of fire without hitting one another.
Now the Koreans were shouting instructions to one another, adding to the sense of increasing chaos. A second later two grenades shattered the air with purplish white. There was a scream, and in the flash Freeman glimpsed three militia coming up his side, rolled a fragmentation grenade, turned about the nearest column, and let off a quick burst from the SAW. Next instant he was on his back, Kevlar helmet hitting the marble floor, a needlelike pain down his neck, the NKA troops shooting wildly, hitting windows and turning the water-slicked floor that had caused Freeman to fall into a gallery of elusive running shadows.
The moment he saw the brilliant light, David, his training overcoming instinct, froze as another militiaman fifty feet away fired a second flare inside the building. David knew what they were looking for would be movement, not shapes, as he pressed himself hard against the pedestal of a peasant woman at harvest.
Brooklyn forgot his training, swung out between the columns with his SAW, and crashed to the ground as a dozen militia cut him down. The flare now fizzing in the far corner, Brentwood snapped into the prone position and swept the floor with a full magazine, hitting four of the militia, sending the others racing back behind the columns toward the door, the general getting one man silhouetted in the penumbra of the flare’s light.
“Brentwood!” he yelled. “Go for the balustrade. Back of it there’s the auditorium. Give ‘em a burst and head back!”
As the general fired the covering burst up the stairs, David ran between the columns, heading beyond the foyer toward the faint outline of the auditorium door, plate glass collapsing from the windows either side of the assembly hall from ricochets. When he reached the auditorium he turned hard right inside, sweeping the SAW in front of him — astonished to see the emergency lights down by the stage were on, casting a soft glow over the two thousand seats that smelled like a new car’s upholstery.
The door burst open and the general came in, almost taking Brentwood with him, the hot barrel of the gun striking David’s flak vest, the general swearing, his SAW’s sling having got caught in the breech, jamming the gun. He yanked hard at it, but it wouldn’t budge. His PRC surged to life, Freeman still uttering oaths, cursing himself now for having left the volume switch up. “Forty-dollar fine,” he said to Brentwood, who tried to smile but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get enough saliva to swallow. Freeman turned the volume down and heard Banks. “General, this is square one.”
“Reading you,” said the general. He was disappointed it wasn’t his mortar crew outside.
“General,” Banks went on in an excited voice, “one of our ROK interpreters has plugged into Charlie traffic — seems—” Banks’s voice rose and fell in waves of interference, and Freeman could hear the gunfire around the square. “Seems, General… the runt’s in Mansudae Hall.”
“For Christ’s sake!” hissed the general. “Why the fuck you think we’re here? Intelligence confirmed he’s been holed up here since…” There was more static, but this time it seemed like the tearing sound of a machine gun in the background.
“That all?” said the general.
“Yes, sir. Mortar crew should be there soon.”
The general turned the volume switch off. It had suddenly become very quiet. They heard the patter of sandaled feet. He yanked at the SAW strap again, but it wouldn’t come free. As David drew his bayonet from its scabbard, handing it to the general to cut the strap loose, Freeman saw the boy’s hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“Don’t you worry about it, son,” the general said, in a barely audible voice, his breathing slowing for the first time since they’d entered the great hall. “You’re doing just fine. We’ll get the son of a bitch.” Brentwood began to speak, but Freeman held up his hand, motioning above with his thumb. “Some of the monkeys are going up the stairs. Good.”
David guessed there’d been about half a dozen or so, and when they didn’t find any Americans upstairs, they’d be coming back down. His apprehensive gaze upward conveyed his fear to the general. “Don’t worry,” said Freeman, smiling. “We’ll be all right.” He nodded his head down toward the stage. “You like the front seats or the mezzanine?”
David couldn’t think straight, let alone respond to a joke. All he knew for certain was that he was down to his second to last clip and that whenever anyone told him everything was going to be all right — it never was.
At latitude fifty-six degrees north and longitude seven degrees ten minutes west, a hundred feet below the sea’s hard blue, USS Roosevelt was eighty miles west of Scotland and thirty miles north of Ireland.
“Any upwelling here?” the captain asked.
“No, sir. Salinity, temperature look fine.”
“Look or are?”
“They’re normal, sir.”
“Very well. Ahead five knots, roll out VLF to two thousand.”
“VLF rolling, sir.”
At the Sorbonne in Paris, over five thousand leftist students, some of them anarchists, were rioting, fighting police, protesting France’s decision to “defend the borders.”
In Whitehall, the new minister of war was on the scrambler to 10 Downing Street.
“Agreed, Prime Minister, it’s not a declaration of war per se. But I should have thought that a ‘defense of one’s borders’ means…” The minister grimaced. “No, Prime Minister. Yes, it is possible. Very well. Yes. Right away, Prime Minister.”
When the minister of war put down the phone, his hand went to his forehead in an effort to remember what he’d been saying to Under Secretary Hoskins. But his mind was still on the prime minister’s unsettling reservation about the French action. “PM’s office can’t seem to understand,” began the minister, “that while the French response means we can’t use their rapid deployment force in NATO as yet, we will be able to the moment any foreign troops violate French soil. And—” he looked across at his secretary “—that has to happen — otherwise what’s the bloody point of the Russians fighting the bloody war? If we have the French ports for resupply, we still stand a chance. We don’t have the Chunnel, and if we don’t have the ports and the Bolshies continue to hold Holland, Hamburg, and Bremen, and take Rotterdam, then I should think we’re in very deep. Wouldn’t you agree, Hoskins?”