“How do you know that?” interjected General Gray. “Oxen carts?”
“New York Times.”
Wexler looked out the window at the Potomac.
“And,” continued Freeman, “that’s why he’s raping the goddamned countryside. Feed ‘em as you go.”
“Well, he’s getting a lot of civilian support, I’d say,” put in Gray.
“Don’t buy it, General.”
“Well, I do. We’re not seeing any scorched-earth policy from the satellite photos. All the fires are the result of military action. He’s getting help from South Koreans, Douglas. I know that mightn’t be palatable, but you of all people surely aren’t blind to the—”
“Disagree, General.” Freeman’s bifocals were sweeping the air. “That fink is getting support because the son of a bitch has had over fifty years to plan underground networks right across the country. All his goddamned spies doing the spade work. He’s getting food and water from those civilians same way as Napoleon did in Dubrovnik in the Balkan campaign. That’s why, other than Uijongbu and Seoul, you’re not seeing too many cities on fire in the satellite photos. Like Napoleon. Sent his boys ahead, infiltrated the city. City fathers did a deal. We’ll feed you — leave our city and us alone. Quid pro quo. That’s why you can still walk around the walls of Dubrovnik. Message gets out fast. But we hit him with those airborne attacks just when he least expects it, and we’ll get civilian support as well. Everyone knows — the Americans come back.”
“We didn’t in Vietnam,” put in Wexler.
“By Christ—” began Freeman, “that’s because we put up with that Fonda woman and all her cronies. When she sat on that NVA gun and told our boys they were war criminals for bombing those sons of bitches, we shoulda dropped her from a B-52 right in the middle of the goddamned—”
“As soon as the B-52s are patched up in Guam,” interjected Gray, “then we won’t have to use any troops at all. We can go in and bomb his supply lines and—”
“No time, General. That’s what the board tells me. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? No time. Nothing more we can scrounge from NATO-designated supplies. Besides, Kim’s no dummy. He might overextend his supply line — almost everyone does when he gets the bit in his mouth, sees the other side hightailing it. But it’s my guesstimate, general, that he’s just about shot his wad. Biggest mistake he made was destroying that oil pipeline outside of Taegu. Caused us a lot of damage, but now he’s got no oil for a while at least. Oh, he’ll hold, but he won’t be advancing for a week or two. His supply lines are well over two hundred miles south of Pyongyang now. I say chop it in two at the places I’ve indicated and we’ll stop him for a week or two instead of a few days. Give us time to rush troops into that perimeter. Is the strip at Pusan operational?” He looked at Wexler.
“It’s rough, but it’s operational.”
“Hell, even if it isn’t. We could ferry a lot of Hercules across from southern Japan under Seventh Fleet umbrella in twenty-four hours — use pallet if they can’t land. Around the clock. Christ, that’s what we’re best at. But—” He held his finger up. “The coup de grace, gentlemen. Clear an air corridor for me up here—” his hand shot north of the Seventh Fleet’s battle group, beyond the brown spine of the Taebaek range “—and I’ll turn this thing around. Christ — I’ll take prisoners!” He was pointing deep into North Korea. At Pyongyang.
General Gray sat still for several seconds, leaning forward in his chair. “You have any idea of the casualties, Douglas? I mean — what would you expect?”
“Seventy — eighty percent.”
Gray glanced quickly across at Wexler, then back at Freeman. “Douglas, I think the Seventh Fleet could give you that corridor — for five or six hours anyway — enough time for your air jumps. But to lose men at that rate is simply unacceptable—”
“General,” said Freeman, his voice even, unhurried, “we’ll lose sixty times that number if that perimeter’s punctured.”
“We,” General Gray said, “we won’t be losing our lives, Douglas. It’ll be the men in those choppers and Hercules that will—”
Freeman was stunned. “I assumed I’d be in command, General.”
Freeman’s audacity left General Gray speechless. “You’re a colonel, Douglas. This would be brigade.”
“Sir,” said Freeman. “I think we can solve that problem right here and now.”
“How?”
“Promote me.”
Gray looked across at Wexler, who was biting his lip.
“The president,” said Wexler, “would have to authorize it.”
Freeman wasn’t sure whether Gray meant the promotion or the plan but quickly cut in, “I’m sure he will, General.”
Gray shook his head and looked down at his watch. “Douglas, you wouldn’t by any chance know the Korean phrase for ‘You have three minutes to surrender,’ would you?”
“Sampun inaeē hangpokhae.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
In the rough ballet of the Salt Lake City’s flight deck, danger was everywhere.
The Seventh Fleet’s battle group’s heart was the carrier itself, and the heart would need protection from aerial and sub attack. To provide early warning, prop-driven Hawkeye AWACS, their rotodomes giving 360-degree, sixty-target-at-once capability, were already in the air together with the relatively slow but long-range and effective Grumman A-6 Intruders, each of these armed with twenty-eight five-hundred-pound bombs and sophisticated antisubmarine detection and attack systems. The Intruders’ periscopic booms for in-flight refueling glinted in the late afternoon sun as they passed over the advance screen of destroyers and frigates that surrounded the Seventh Fleet on its mission to “secure the integrity of the sea lanes” from Japan to Korea’s east coast — in other words, to tell the Soviet Eastern Fleet it came south at its peril.
Aboard the carrier, as one Hawkeye AWAC was pushed off the elevator amid the scream of jets and hundreds of other pieces of equipment, crewmen in padded brown vests were already unfolding the plane’s wings, its pilot engaging the hydraulic line that lifted the two-thousand-pound “pancake” dome from flat storage to raised position. In the cramped rear of the plane, its three “moles,” electronic warfare operators, were already going through their preflight checks amid banks of consoles.
It all seemed chaotic to any new men on the ship, but out of the six thousand sailors aboard the carrier, those who worked the flight deck had of necessity to develop the ability to work calmly yet quickly in the sustained roar of sound, yet stay attuned to alarms of their own equipment in conditions where one missed step or the slightest reduction in concentration could cost a man his life. It was a world of screaming engines, of planes taking off and coming in, flashing lights, rising steam from catapults, hot, stinking engine exhausts, and a maze of hand signals from different colored jackets, a world of hookup chains and “mule” tractors.
Inside the carrier’s island, to starboard, it was less noisy but every bit as stressful as anticollision teams in primary flight control, or “prifly,” had to know where any plane on their computer screen was at any moment while staying in contact with the pilots as they were guided in by flight deck control.
As the pilot of one of the returning Hawkeyes brought his aircraft down in the controlled crash the navy calls a landing, its hook seeking the two wire, or arrester cable, the Hawkeye’s twin Allison turboprops were roaring at full power, the plane’s flaps down, ready to lift off if his alignment, or any one of a hundred other things, was not right. The pilot’s concentration was on centering his plane in the “meatball,” the big orange-lit mirror on the carrier. If it came in sight, he was halfway there; if he saw the meatball arrangement of lights was too low, he would have to ease the nose up to center and maybe go for the three wire. He saw the meatball was askew. A green jersey, “A” on its back, turned and waved a “no go.” In a split second the LSO — landing signal officer — pushed the button for vertical red, cutting through the meatball, sending the Hawkeye screaming past the island as the pilot kicked in maximum power, pulling the plane off the deck with only inches to spare. The three wire was showing a stress split visible to only one of the catapult and arresting crew, whose thick ear protectors and jersey disappeared momentarily in the cloud of kerosene exhaust and salt particles that flew up from the deck, stinging his face, the Hawk-eye climbing, a blast deflector now going up on the starboard catapult in preparation to launch a jet fighter to begin its patrol even as the Hawkeye was turning for the rerun.