“Loose guttering!” the lieutenant said hurriedly.
Tae was watching the jagged circle of steel-gray sky. Why would they want him? Surely the names of the ROK’s top counterinsurgency agents in Pusan, Taegu — wherever — wouldn’t be any use to them now. Unless, like a long line of conquerors before them, they wanted to teach a quick lesson to the occupied population — to show unequivocally that whoever opposes the Party in thought, word, or deed, whoever dared oppose the beloved leader, would be publicly denounced and executed. To demonstrate conclusively that underground resistance was futile. Tae vividly recalled old villagers telling him how the British and American soldiers had feared the North Korean guards more than the Japanese, the cruelty of the North Koreans so infamous that the mere threat of handing prisoners over to the NKA had been enough for the NKA’s allies at the time, the Chinese, to quiet their most intransigent American and British POWs.
“They’re waiting,” said the lieutenant, sweat trickling down his neck.
“I know.”
“Tae Soryong! Major Tae!” came the tinny voice. “You have five minutes to surrender — or your comrades will die.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In a revetement area six miles south of Uijongbu, tank troup commander Lt. George Clemens, field glasses scanning the luxuriant green of paddies and blue mountains beyond, felt his skin itching, an infallible sign, as if he needed to be reminded, that he was in an acute stage of excitement. After all, this moment was what he had been trained for, dreamed of, and wanted all his adult life. Since he was a boy, the behemoths of the battlefield, from the huge, cumbersome monster pillboxes on tracks that were the first tanks in World War I, lumbering across the fields of France, to the blitzkrieg Panzers of Rommel’s North Africa Corps churning up the sand in the Western Desert, had awed him. They were for him like a ship, self-contained, an island of war — above all, free to move. And everyone knew the tanks would decide the ground battles, despite what all the air boys said about the deadly saturation fire they could unleash from choppers and ground support fighters. He was sure that once the battle was joined, the confusion of smoke and dust cloud would mean, particularly at night, that for all the fancy arsenal of the air-to-ground missiles, the fight would end up like that of a dogfight in the air, tank against tank, the very kind of dogfights the experts said would never happen again after World War II because the planes were so fast, so modern. Until it happened all over again in the skies over Vietnam. One on one.
His M-1 tank, the Abrams, was the best main battle tank in the world. The Brits had tried to better it with the Challenger, the West Germans with the Leopard, but in the last five years it had been the M-1 that had consistently won NATO’s Canadian Cup, the top tank gunnery competition. It was enough for Clemens that the tank’s design, from its long 105-millimeter gun to its low profile and sloping armor plate hull which mitigated all but a direct hit, put it ahead of the others in its class. Other features that made it exceptional were the C02 laser range finder and air-conditioning to insure longer crew endurance times. Clemens had grown up with the M-1, from the early days of congressional heat because of cost overruns, the months of the temperamental test engines, till now. He had kept the faith. Above all — and this, rather than any technical explanations, is what had won most congressmen over — there was the experience of sitting in an Abrams, its fifty-four tons accelerating from zero to twenty miles per hour in six seconds, moving over rough terrain at forty miles an hour, dust flying, the engine roaring but not screaming, and that turret, steady as a billiard ball on green baize, its low body, hence low silhouette, riding on a cushion of independent suspension, the likes of which had never been seen before. It was a thrill not easily forgotten. Apart from the sheer ascetic beauty of it, it meant that the M-1 at top speed, fifty miles per hour, could fire as if it were standing still when in fact racing at a speed that had once merely been a dream in what some experts had thought was a mad designer’s eye.
As Clemens waited, then saw the green-brown camouflage of the first P-76, the “tin can” of the NKA, appear on the Uijongbu road, he almost felt sorry for them, until he remembered how murderously and mercilessly they were shelling Seoul, killing American and Korean women and children indiscriminately.
Tae had always been prepared for invasion, and as he had a plan for his family, he had one for himself, his plan predicated on the assumption that in most men’s lives the glass would be half-empty rather than half-full. Even so, it was no comfort amid the rage and dust of battle that he had long predicted an all-out attack by the North, for in the end each man who had taken the oath of loyalty to the ROK would have to make his own decision, the line between surrender and cowardice often so nebulous in the split second of combat as to have little meaning. He saw the lieutenant in front of him quaking at the thought of surrendering. Now only one hope remained: not that the ROK or U.S. Army would counterattack — both were in disarray — nor did he suppose the NKA would treat him kindly. The war within a family was the most ferocious, the most unforgiving.
His only hope, he believed, lay in the cyanide issued to all front line intelligence officers. The safest place for this, Tae had discovered, was not the teeth — most people ground their teeth at night — or in the wristwatch, for the Communists would take this, not so much for its material value but because a watch in solitary confinement was a comfort. Often it was the only thing by which one could measure the passing of the hours and seasons — sometimes the years. The very act of measurement, of recording a day at a time, was a way of staying sane. The orifices of the body, too, were unreliable, not only because they were often searched by the enemy, but there would always be danger of a capsule or, in this case, a small chewing-guM-1ike strip of concentrated potassium cyanide, breaking in the body, releasing its poison accidentally.
Tae had studied the problem as diligently as he had the matter of the different lengths of chopsticks. In this case it was a German research project into tunneling, mine, and avalanche disasters that had caught his eye, wherein German scientists had tried to find out the most reliable place to insert a small microchip “beeper” to send out a signal in the event of a cave-in. It had been discovered that the most reliable place on the body was a worker’s boots, for unlike shoes or any other form of clothing, these nearly always remained, no matter how many tons of debris or harsh treatment the body had suffered. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, of course; in battle, boots were often claimed as bounty, particularly in peasant armies, and besides, a man without footwear was more a prisoner than if you put him behind barbed wire, unable to run very far in bare feet. And Tae also knew that footwear was sometimes removed for purposes of torture, but generally, except for their laces, which, like a prisoner’s belt, were removed as possible instruments of suicide, boots, he knew, were left to prisoners of war for a very down-to-earth reason — namely that in the heat of battle, moving captives quickly required it.
At considerable expense, Tae had a fake heel made, and in it placed a cyanide capsule, the NKA knowing that such was the prerogative of any ROK intelligence officer privy, as Tae was, to sensitive counterinsurgency material. Tae then had a small, flexible, gumlike sliver of potassium cyanide, developed by the Americans, sewn within the double-layered tongue of the boot, where, even if his NKA captors searched the boot, flexing it, feeling for hidden razors and the like, the gumlike strip would bend as one with the leather. It was for this reason that, despite the shock and smell of battle, the clouds of phosphorus tear gas and the hiss of spent shell casings in the monsoon rain, an extraordinary island of calm lay within him, for the major carried with him, if it became necessary, the ultimate choice in any man’s life, the choice of the moment he would die. He prayed he might not have to, of course, but if, as American colleagues were fond of saying, things got “too rough” and he felt he couldn’t keep the names of the top antiinsurgency agents in the South from being given to his NKA captors, then it would be his moment, not theirs.