Arc Light (3 page)

What do I do? What do I do?
he thought as his head spun and he forced himself to breathe. But his mind froze up, and the muscles and sinews of his body, highly conditioned and tested by relentless Special Forces training, sat on the ground waiting motionless for orders from the one organ that could never be fully prepared.

In those few seconds everything grew unreal. He was alone. Nothing came through to disturb the blankness that filled his brain, that blotted everything else out. The sound of sliding and of falling dirt and the sight of motion in Weaver's peripheral vision, however, drew his attention; the cold settled around him and he began to shiver. Pouring over the front edge of the trench on both sides of him were scores of North Koreans. Time slowed until it was almost
frozen. The flares had ceased falling as the mortar crews packed up to flee less than a mile to the rear of the breakthrough, and Weaver watched in the darkness as the men to his left picked themselves up off the dirt floor of the trench. The first men to stand upright threw their rifles up onto the lip of the opposite wall and began clawing at the dirt, rising up and out of the trench to continue their advance. Weaver watched in horror as one by one they all followed suit, turning his head slowly as he sat with his back to the trench wall to see the men to his right—not fifteen meters away—doing the same.

In a few seconds they had all left and it was still again. Weaver was alone. He felt his mind thaw ever so slightly, sufficient to realize what had just happened.
First wave—keep on moving,
he thought.
Second wave . . .

More bodies began to pour over the wall, and the icy dread coated him completely this time. He was shaking badly and his stomach muscles cramped from their clench. The taste of acid and steel nearly gagged him as he tried to force his dry mouth to swallow. The new men stayed on the floor of the trench. To his left Weaver saw the butt of a rifle rise up into the air, silhouetted for an instant against the still glowing fires that lit the night sky down the line of the trenches. He watched as the butt then followed the rest of the rifle to earth, thrust straight down in a line. The sound, like a burp, that followed completed the picture of a bayoneting, of the death of one of the fallen machine gunners. There was a brief, weak shout—a plea in a language that Weaver did not know but that was known to the attackers—as the bayoneting was repeated for the second man.

On hearing the man's plea—just the sound of the voice of another who found himself lying at the end of his life, like Weaver—a profound sense of resignation finally overcame the dread that had seized him just a few moments before when he had been counted among those still living. He had, in those few seconds, done what all but the very old never seem able to do. He had absorbed the fact of his own demise. He had accepted that his fate that warm summer evening would be death, here in this place—now. It was abrupt, and he had not until that very moment foreseen it, but it was done. It was a fact.

Almost as if it were a pointless detail, Weaver took a deep and ragged breath and pulled his now heavy rifle up to his shoulder. He took aim down the trench to his left at the forming squad of “mop up” troops. He tried not to think, to hold back the tide of last thoughts that could do nothing more than torment him. Moving lethargically, his motions were not detected. The stability of his sitting position overcame the shaking of his hands. He pulled on the
trigger, but he couldn't force himself to pull hard enough to release the carbine's sear and start the process of death, theirs and his own. Pictures—if it wasn't for the pictures that flashed before his closed eyelids . . .

Come on, Bernie,
his conscious self urged, mouthing the words that stopped just short of being spoken out loud.
Just get it over with, man. Do it. Come on.

Opening his eyes to ensure that his aim was true he saw the dark figures moving toward him down the trench. He filled his lungs to bursting with air. His skin crawled as he closed his eyes again and pulled the trigger all the way.

Humanity has been compared . . . to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

—H.G. W
ELLS
“The World Set Free”
1914

A single red light blinked on the desk phone's panel of twenty separate lines. It was not, General Andrew Thomas made sure, the President, the Pacific Command, or any of the other dedicated lines along the bottom row. It was just an ordinary outside line.

Thomas, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rubbed his bleary eyes and returned to the logistics report from Eighth Army Command that lay in a puddle of light beneath his desk lamp.
Not the time for sleep,
Thomas thought, yawning.
I can sleep after the war.

His eyes strayed up to the map table across the plush, seal-emblazoned carpeting of his office. The plastic overlay pressed onto the map of Korea, showing the latest North and South Korean troop dispositions. The light that shone indirectly on the table changed suddenly, and Thomas looked at the cabinet on the wall beside it to see “NBC News Special Bulletin” splashed across the television screen. The scene switched to the White House Briefing Room for the President's address, and Thomas felt a sharp pain shoot through his jaw as he ground his teeth. He had just returned from the National Security Council meeting where he had received his orders, and the frustration and anger were still fresh.

“Dear God.” Thomas pulled a deep and ragged sigh and sat back in his padded, oversize chair, rubbing his temples and shutting his eyes. He felt a rising fear about what was coming and looked at the large wall map behind the table. The blue unit markers dotting Eastern Europe were barely visible on the map. Thomas shook his head. On his first tour at the Pentagon in the mid-1980s, the Reagan buildup had equipped them to fight two and a half wars at once—two major wars and one regional skirmish. By the time of the Gulf
War, the Bush Administration had scaled back to a two-war capability. When he returned from his command of III Corps in southern Germany during the Clinton term, they had moved to a “win-hold-win” policy—force levels designed to win wars in succession rather than simultaneously. “Win-lose-recover,” the planners called it bitterly behind the politicos' backs.

He shook his head again; III Corps, V Corps, VII Corps—nearly all of the regular army's heavy forces and six of her ten heavy divisions on the ground in Germany, Poland, and Slovakia and of no use to him in Korea. It had been a purely political decision after the military coup in Russia. The secret security agreements from the Bush era with Poland and, at that time, Czechoslovakia, had forced President Livingston's hand—“put up or shut up,” Secretary of State Moore, more hawkish than any of the Joint Chiefs, had said. “If you abrogate those agreements in the face of a Russian redeployment to Byelarus, there isn't a country in the world that will take us at our word when we extend our security umbrella to them. Besides, all we're talking about is a show of force.”
Force,
Thomas thought,
that we now need somewhere else.

And so now, what do they want? We told them. We told Congress in the hearings what our capabilities would be at the current appropriations levels. “You heard the President,” the White House Chief of Staff Irv Waller had said at the NSC meeting earlier. “Find a way.”

The red light shone steadily; his secretary had picked up the line and would get rid of the caller, probably some brass-balled reporter thinking, “I'll just call the Pentagon and ask.” As he sat in the stillness of his office, the familiar surroundings suddenly seemed alien, as if he was seeing them for the first time. The glass-enclosed cases of mementos, the unit flags with their campaign streamers, the framed commendations—they seemed to be from a life he hadn't lived. It was the photographs from the distant past that began the thread that ran through all the disparate objects and linked them to the present. Grainy, sloppily taken photos of grimy young men slouching under the weight of their own limbs—back from “the shit.” You took pictures when you came back because you had survived, and you always took them in groups because that was the way you wanted the memories to be—always together. He felt a great sadness as he looked at the succession of photos that hung on the wall, feeling each loss again as the group grew smaller. Thomas had been too tired then to feel the pain.

The buzz of the intercom surprised him. He looked at the phone and then poked the speaker button. “I told you—no interruptions.”

“Sir, I'm sorry, sir, but . . . it's General Razov—on line one.”

“What?”

“General Razov . . . s-someone who says he's General Razov, sir, is on line one.”

Thomas's eyes focused on the photo taken the year before. The charisma of Razov—the dashing hero of the first Russo-Chinese War who, at the unheard-of age of forty-six rose to command a Russian tank army with his bold, slashing drives into the flanks of the Chinese attack—shone brightly through the glass cover. And Thomas, graying and tired but jubilant over the younger man's string of stunning victories for which Thomas secretly, inwardly felt some measure of shared pride after near constant counsel during the forty days and nights of the war. “Get the duty officer up here on the double,” he ordered, “and trace the call.”

“Yes, sir.”

Thomas rested his finger atop the button on the telephone. The blinking light shone blood red through his fingernail. He rubbed the smooth plastic for a second and then pushed.

“Who the hell is this?” he asked loudly, anticipating the laughter of an old classmate from the Point with a poor sense of timing and humor.

“I am General Yuri Vladimirovich Razov, commander of Far Eastern Military District of Republic of Russia.” Thomas was stunned. “Hello, Andr-rusha.” The faint white noise in the background hinted at the distance of the source.