“Shut your face.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
NKA’s fourth divisional HQ was now situated in the shell-pocked Catholic church in what had been the bustling city of Uijongbu. The smell of the American and South Korean rout was heavy in the rain-slashed air, hulks of three-ton trucks and tanks still burning, but barely, as if even the fires were exhausted. Fresh motorized columns of NKA troops, stony-eyed but flushed with victory, wove through the wreckage of the U.S. Eleventh Corps’s fighting retreat. The bodies of American and South Korean soldiers lay strewn about beneath the gunmetal monsoon sky. The heavy cloud cover was continuing to make it difficult, despite infrared look-down/shoot-down scopes, for the few American pilots flying out of Pusan’s sabotaged and pot-holed airstrips to distinguish friend from foe beneath them— especially given the NKA’s cannibalization of U.S. trucks and jeeps.
From his crowded cell in the partially destroyed school opposite the church, Major Tae could see over fifty M-60 Pattons that had been knocked out by wire-guided tank missiles, the wires now strewn across the roadways like so many abandoned fishing lines.
General Kim was overwhelmed with logistical problems, the advance in a crucial stage. Because of the monsoons bogging down the American M-1s, he had made enormous gains in territory in the three weeks since his invasion of the South, but the supplies he needed were slow in coming. What he wanted now was to crush as many American and South Korean troops as possible by smashing through the protective triangle stretching from Yosu sixty miles away on the south coast through Taegu ninety-seven miles from Ulsan on the east coast. In all it was an arc of about 160 miles behind which the Americans, after losing Kyongju, were hastily trying to regroup their stunned and exhausted army, forming a defensive perimeter with Pusan, sixty miles away from the arc’s outermost limit, as the linchpin.
Kim was haunted by the American counterattack from the southeast corner in the war of the 1950s, and knew Pusan must be captured as quickly as possible in order to deny American reinforcements en route from Japan a beachhead. Of all the NKA commanders, their confidence further boosted by their infiltrators’ sabotage of the giant Hyundai shipyards in Ulsan, Kim had the clearest understanding of the Americans’ incontestable ability to organize a huge logistical effort on short notice. Like all democracies, the Americans were, of course, “degenerate” and “flaccid” in peacetime, Kim told his staff officers, but galvanized by war, their industrial capacity was kōch ‘anghan—” awesome.”
The only certain way was to deny the reinforcements a foothold, and for this he called for the Kim II Sung chasal putae— “suicide squads “—to spearhead the infantry and armored wedge that he intended to drive toward Pusan. Feints would be made first on the southern flank toward Yosu and on the northern toward Ulsan to dilute the American defense, the main wedge with air cover moving two hours later against Pusan.
Both Pyongyang and Moscow, which had been furious with Pyongyang for initiating the action, believed that, as in the case of Vietnam, once the Americans were driven into the sea, the American peace groups, heavily infiltrated by now-activated “sleepers,” together with public opinion, simply would not support President Mayne in any venture that would risk so many more American lives to retake the peninsula. Mayne would fight where he had to, in Europe, but not in Asia.
Despite his preoccupation with what he was sure would be the coming victory over the Americans, Kim took a minute to light a fresh American cigarette and watch Major Tae being marched out of the school to join the line of other captured ROK officers outside the interrogation tent.
“What’s his interrogation status?” Kim asked his chief of intelligence. There were only two categories of prisoners in the NKA: “cooperative” and “reactionary.”
“We do not know yet, General. He should have been questioned at Kaesong, but apparently he was incorrectly diverted…”
“Have we any leverage?” cut in Kim. “From my experience at Panmunjom, Tae was very stubborn.”
“Yes. We’re attending to that now. We’ve been able to keep close surveillance on him. His daughter’s boyfriend was an active member of the Reunification Party.”
“He’s a migook lover.”
“Yes,” said the intelligence chief. Hadn’t the general heard him? “We’re prepared.”
“Never mind about any information on Seoul,” said Kim, tapping the bone cigarette holder impatiently on an ashtray made from an American howitzer shell. “We’ll ferret out their underground units now that we’ve taken the city. What I need to know, and quickly, Colonel, is who are the KCIA’s counterespionage chiefs in Taegu and Pusan — those who could provide local leadership, sabotage, railway demolition, anything to slow our final attack on Pusan. We cannot attack yet, but as soon as we get enough supplies to Taegu, we will move. But I don’t want even a day’s delay because of sabotage. Even a day’s delay for us could be critical. You must understand the Americans are not only in disarray but thoroughly demoralized by our success in taking them by surprise. They are now at their most vulnerable. It is essential that the civilian population realize we have totally infiltrated their defenses. We must give them no hope that helping the Americans will change anything. We must discover who the chief undercover KCIA counterespionage chiefs are and execute them immediately.”
“Of course, General. I understand.”
A hundred yards away, standing in the mud outside the interrogation tent with the other prisoners, Major Tae saw Kim watching him from the church’s narthex, its canopy scabrous from the shelling, long twists of reinforcing steel rods protruding. From one of the rods the bodies of two men, one American and one South Korean, dangled, turning slowly, tongues grotesquely black, eyes bulging obscenely, signs around their necks marking them as pihyōpnyōchōkin pantongpuncha—”uncooperative reactionaries.” The thing that struck Tae was that the signs were so neatly made, it was highly unlikely they’d been painted on the spur of the moment or in the heat of the battle but rather prepared long beforehand — as part of a carefully thought-out NKA policy of terror. Tae felt weak, unsure as to how much of it was due to sheer fear, how much to hunger, trying to remember, as NKA guards moved down the line of prisoners, giving them mugs of weak tea, how long it had been since he had eaten. Two civilian women, eyes carefully avoiding any contact with the guards, were brewing the tea in a large copper washing tub outside one of the tents.
The NKA soldier handing out the tea was smiling at each man as he gave them the steaming liquid. “You help us,” he told them, “and there will be no trouble.” The carrot or the hangman’s noose.
Most of the officers in the line, Tae noticed, had removed their intelligence insignia. One of them, a captain, he recognized as one of those who had been brought up from Seoul for interrogation.
Kim had disappeared from the opening in the church. After tea, Tae thought of the American murdered before his eyes, the man’s tiny cross, and after getting the guard’s permission, he took off his boot, on the pretext of shaking out a pebble; then, putting the boot back on, he used his forefinger as he retied the lace to feel for the gumlike sliver of potassium cyanide hidden in the tongue. Christians, he thought, would feel for the cross as their talisman; he would feel for the cyanide strip. The knowledge that in this battle against the NKA he would have the final say continued to fortify him.
“Major Tae!” It was an NKA lieutenant.
Tae stood up. “Yes?”
“What are you doing?”