There was thunderous applause. The general held up his hand.
“You’re scared. So are the boys who’ll go into Taegu and Chongju. I understand that.” He waited. “But you keep your powder dry, pass the ammunition as your forebears did, and you’ll be all right. Above all, remember this is no mixed-up slugfest inhibited by peace pansies and Fondas running riot in your country. This is a war which all true Americans, together with our allies, know is right beyond the shadow of a doubt. That monkey ‘cross the line — he has no honor, no decency, no conscience. This isn’t a mission, it’s a crusade, and you’re the bearers of the flag. God bless you.”
As the general walked down from the podium, there was the sound of over a thousand men rising, forming lines according to company and platoon. Before Freeman left the deck, Al Banks introduced him to the padre assigned to the Saipan.
“Pleased to meet you, General.”
“But you didn’t like my speech?”
The padre hesitated, “Ah — no, General. I didn’t.”
“Quite all right, Padre,” said Freeman, pulling on his leather gloves tightly. “Difference of opinion. Was there anything in particular you objected to?”
“I thought your remarks about the North Koreans — though I understand your intention — were — I mean, categorizing a whole race in—”
“Padre. We’re not going up against the Sisters of Charity. We’re going to do battle with the Philistines — NKA special forces, their best militia, best home guard… top-of-the-line killers. I mean NKA special forces. Booby-trap their own kin if they thought it would kill Americans. They hate us more than any people on earth. I understand your position, Padre, and it’s admirable — in its place. But these jokers my boys’ll be fighting have never heard of any commandment, let alone ten of them. And I don’t want any of my men thinking about loving their neighbors when they file out of those whirlybirds.” Freeman moved so close to the padre that the latter felt distinctly uncomfortable. Freeman was pulling his gloves on tighter. “I’ve seen the devil, Padre, and the son of a bitch lives in Pyongyang and I’m going after him. I’m putting a bounty on his head.” The general looked quickly at the other officers in line. “I want it known, gentlemen, that anyone who brings me the head of Kim Jong Suck will personally get a field citation and ten thousand dollars!”
The padre’s eyes widened. “General, none of us have the authority—”
“Padre. I need you in the field. A lot of my boys are going to die. Are you coming along or going to rest your butt in the officers’ lounge?”
“The padre’s already volunteered,” put in Captain Al Banks.
Freeman murmured, nodding approvingly, but the fierceness was still in his eyes. “Good. I need brave men.”
“That padre,” said Freeman as he left the hangar with his aide. “He’s a good man.”
“Yes, General, I think he is.”
“I say he is. Only one thing wrong with him.” They were walking back past the helicopter crews in the forward hangar area.
“What’s that, General?”
“Didn’t you see it? Stood out a mile.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Egg on his vest. I won’t tolerate that, Al. You get the word out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I ever tell you my father was a keen sportsman?”
“Not that I—”
“Baseball, football, of course. Golf — God, he even liked tennis.”
“I like tennis, General.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, can’t be helped. Never took to it myself. Son of a bitch sitting on that high chair, yelling out every shot. ‘Course, my father wouldn’t have it any other way. And dress code— that’s what I’m getting at, Al. Uniform instils pride in a man. First thing you learn in basic training. Now, that padre, you see, he thinks he’ll get closer to the men more laid-back, more slovenly he appears. Doesn’t work.”
“It was only a very small piece of egg, General.”
Freeman ignored the captain’s comment. “You play baseball?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I notice you’re a sou’ paw — left-hander.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. We’ll make a good team, Al.”
The captain was nonplussed. Freeman stepped out into the cold night air, the blackness all around them like a great velvet blanket; not a light could be seen. “You on my left, me on the right. It’s my intention to be in the first chopper. I don’t want anyone saying Freeman freeloaded — took the last chopper in.”
“I don’t think anyone would, General.”
“I’ve got enemies, Al. Say I’m too flamboyant. Too full of myself. Waiting for me to take a fall. You think that? — I’m a windbag?”
“No, sir-I-”
“Yes you do, you son of a bitch. Well, Al, tomorrow at cockcrow we’ll find out.”
Above them they could hear a faint squeaking as the concave dish on the main radar mast passed through a 180-degree sweep, its signal pulsing out into the darkness toward the enemy’s shore.
Inside the hangar, in the long line of soldiers approaching the padre, who had now commandeered a second helmet, a private, first class, a helo side gunner, who, like most of the soldiers in the hangar, had never been in combat before, was veering between sheer fright and the bravado instilled by the general’s speech, asking his comrades imploringly whether a packet of nasal decongestant capsules qualified as a pill he should surrender.
“What’s it do to you?” asked a corporal from one of the Saipan’s Medevac choppers. “Slow you down or jack you up?”
The worried private nipped over the packet. “… Says might cause drowsiness, not to operate machinery.”
“Aw, shit,” said the medic, “take the fucking lot. Any luck, you’ll sleep through it all.”
“What’s your helo number?” asked a marine.
“Twenty-six. Why?”
“Good number to stay away from,” the marine said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
In Germany, the British Army of the Rhine was fighting for its life in the fifty-five-mile-wide pocket between Bielefeld and Dortmund, where swarms of Sukhoi-24 Fencer ground-attack fighters were wreaking havoc on the British tanks.
The Sukhois, chosen in part for the relatively narrow swept wing width, and painted in green-brown blotch camouflage, had been crated by rail through Poland and the GDR weeks before, reassembled, parked and maintained in the vast Nordhausen tunnel complex in the eastern part of the Harz Mountains, where Hitler had made his V–Is and V-2s out of range of Allied bombers. Rising swiftly, behind a semicircular screen of SAM sites in the Harz foothills between Nordhausen and what had been the West German frontier, the Fencers streamed northeast over Stolberg. Swooping down through cloud over the tranquil bluish green of the Harz, they reached the British army’s defensive position a hundred miles west along the Bielefeld-Dortmund line in less than nine seconds, their terrain-avoidance radar and laser target-seekers cutting through the battlefield’s smoke cover, setting the Challenger tanks ablaze.
When the Challengers fired, their aim was deadly, and they fought hard, even as they fell back northward behind the Weser and Mittelland Canal. The British were taking terrible punishment as well on their southern flank, where East German motorized shock troops were now crossing in force, so that in the depression between Bielefeld and Dortmund, what had been a fifty-five-mile-wide defense base now shrank to thirty-five miles.
As the Russian Fighter/Interceptors streaked down, pouring a deadly hail from twin-barreled twenty-three-millimeter cannons, a British commander watched his battalion of forty tanks and support infantry being systematically destroyed. Here, unlike Fulda, where American and Russian tanks were too close, the Soviets’ gasoline bombs tumbled down — and with such apparent aimlessness, it seemed they could do no harm. Then the big silver “jelly beans” would burst, the saffron fireballs rolling over the velvet green hills. To the men inside the Challenger tanks, whose reactive armor had worked so efficiently in blowing up the Soviets’ earlier high-explosive antitank bullets, the napalm was an agony worse than any gunfire, their bodies becoming torches, all but impossible to extinguish. As one man would try to smother a comrade to snuff out the flame, the jellied gasoline would fly onto the would-be rescuer, the droplets of red-hot mercury sticking to flesh and clothing — often as not, killing two men instead of one. On many occasions British infantry caught by the napalm not only died a screaming death themselves, but proved deadly to comrades as the heat from their burning bodies set off their own ammunition.