By late afternoon the situation in Seoul had deteriorated so badly, with millions of refugees now choking all nineteen bridges over the Han, that General Cahill was about to make the bravest — to some the stupidest, to others the most militarily sound-decision of his entire career.
Far to the southeast off Cape Changgi, the sea mist took on the aspect of moody ghosts rising one minute, returning the next. Inside the Blaine’s combat information center, the radar operator saw two or three more blips appear in the radar sweep. Then more. Soon they were a swarm. “Captain.”
“What have you got?” asked Ray Brentwood calmly. “Fishing fleet?”
With news of the NKA invasion flashed to all U.S. ships, the radar operator wasn’t sure whether the skipper was fooling. In any case, he pressed the computer for a readout of the unidentified blips’ speed. “Forty knots, sir.”
“Patrol boats?”
“Looks like it, sir.”
“Satellite confirmed?”
“Satellite confirmed,” answered the operator, “but no flag.”
Brentwood put down his coffee, looking intently at the small white squares with the white dots inside them signifying unknown surface ships. “Radio traffic?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Range?”
“Fifteen miles and closing.”
“Very well — send message. ‘Unknown vessels, this is a U.S. Navy warship on your zero eight five. Request you identify yourself and state your intentions.’ “
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The message was sent and the Blaine waited.
There was no answer.
“Repeat message,” ordered Brentwood.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Again there was no answer.
“Call general quarters,” ordered Brentwood.
“General quarters. General quarters. All hands man your battle stations.”
“Look for ‘skimmers,’ “ instructed Brentwood.
“Alert for skimmers,” repeated the OOD, the lookouts on the bridge’s wings lowering their binoculars, scanning the graying sea, looking for a flash in the distance, anything that would indicate a missile coming in low under the radar screen.
In Seoul, General Cahill ordered all but three of the nineteen bridges blown, and with the weather clearing, firmer ground in the offing, he could finally unleash his heavy fifty-four-ton M-1s, America’s main battle tanks, to buy time for the massive American reinforcements he was sure would come.
Major Tae had been pushed into one of the long columns of over seven thousand battle-shocked and bedraggled South Korean and American prisoners of war taken along the DMZ who were now trudging along in the mud of flooded roads, the forced march confined to side roads passing lush green paddies and brownish, shrub-covered hills, seventy miles in all, from Panmunjom east to Chorwon only a few miles south of what, just forty-eight hours before, had been the DMZ. Now they were being herded southwest again, heading back toward Uijongbu. It would have been half the distance to go straight from Panmunjom to Uijongbu, but the speed of the NKA advance was such that the administration of prisoners, always low in the priorities of an attacking army, had gone awry. Tae, like other intelligence officers, with labels about their necks ticketing them for interrogation, found himself pushed from one column to another and witnessed the mounting frustration of the NKA guards. These were fanatical young reservists who didn’t seem to know where they were going themselves and took their frustrations out on the prisoners, screaming at POWs too weak to go on as if they alone had been responsible for the guards’ confusion instead of the victims of it.
At first there were enough able-bodied men among the seemingly endless columns of prisoners to aid those too weak to go on, putting them on makeshift stretchers of bamboo poles and rain ponchos. But as exhaustion and lack of food weakened the stronger ones as well, the bayoneting began, some of the guards taking obvious relish in killing those South Koreans who had showed any signs of camaraderie with the Americans. Some of the Americans, Tae saw, were obviously being killed for their personal possessions, particularly watches and much-coveted cigarettes. Tae had wanted to help on several occasions, but fear for his own safety made him hesitate.
The warning about the watches swept through the columns but did little to stop the slaughter as prisoners were now being pulled out at random by the AK-47-toting guards and searched. If they found anyone trying to secret something away or not surrendering it immediately, the prisoner’s death came slowly and brutally, the guards using rifle butts in a fury that Tae, with his coldly objective eye, recognized as a savage product of Pyongyang’s ingrained hatred and envy of Americans in general. It also came from the lingering fear of all guards in all armies that if they aren’t tough enough, the entire mud-sloshing column of prisoners might rush and overwhelm them through sheer weight of numbers, the kind of rush the Japanese had traditionally made, preferring death to the ignominy of surrender. The best way to keep control, the guards obviously thought, was to execute any prisoner for the slightest sign of disobedience. The terror of randomly being chosen for death was so palpable in the column that every now and then there was a panicky movement, like columns of ants climbing over one another, as men on the column’s edges sought greater safety by pushing farther into it.
To Tae, who had been in the front line of the counterinsurgency war for so many years, the murders of the Americans did not come as a surprise. Of all the Communist countries, the North Korean regime was unquestionably the maddest. What did disturb him was the extent of the savagery toward the hated migooks, so that by the time the column reached Chorwon, more than forty Americans had been butchered. More than anything else, it told Tae that the Communists feared no retribution — that they were quite sure, like the North Vietnamese before them, that they were going to win, so they feared no reprisal.
An American next to Tae, his left eye bloodied and sodden, the dressing slipping down his face, tripped in a mud-filled pothole. Instinctively Tae’s right hand shot out to steady him. The next second Tae heard shouting, the mustard-colored water splashing about him, as prisoners stumbled away from him and the young American. A heavy thud and Tae’s head shot forward, a burning sensation in his shoulder blades as he sprawled in the mud. He heard the guard cock the Kalashnikov and, looking up, saw the banana-shaped magazine curving down toward the wounded American soldier. The skin around the American’s good eye crinkled in a smile as he fixed his gaze on the South Korean major. “Thanks, buddy—” he began. The Kalashnikov jumped, the sound of the bullet echoing through the lonely, rainy valley either side of the column. The guard swung the semiautomatic toward Tae, about to pull the trigger again, when he saw the label hanging from about Tae’s neck and began screaming that Tae shouldn’t be here, waving his hand back in the direction of the DMZ, shouting that Tae should have been taken west to divisional headquarters at Kaesong. Tae got up unsteadily from the mud, the white of his eyes so marked in contrast to the mud that he looked like a minstrel clown.