Warriors (45 page)

Cho pulled Hawke aside.

Hawke’s men were all still well hidden inside the copse of trees. Ahead of them, a wide stretch of barren ground with little or no cover. No-man’s-land. No one could survive crossing that killing ground beneath the withering fire from the guard towers. The NKs used Type 73s, based on old Soviet machine guns, but updated and still effective.

Beyond the open ground stood the high walls of Camp 25.

“That open ground,” Hawke said to Cho. “Was it mined at the time of your escape?”

“No, sir. Should have been, my opinion. Should have had heat sensors, pressure plates, all that and more. But the guards here are usually drunk and always lazy. This is the last stop in an NK People’s Army officer’s career. The only way to go from here is down. They’ve got nothing to lose, and they take it out on the prisoners.”

“The worst kind.”

“You been there, sir?”

“Some. Once when I got shot down over northern Iraq. Did about a month in one of Saddam’s desert charm schools before I broke out. A longer stretch another time in a jungle hellhole on mainland China. Met some lovely chaps along the way. Unforgettable, really.”

“Fitz says you’re Royal Navy, Commander.”

“Semiretired. I used to fly.”

“What aircraft?”

“Harriers, mostly. But a lot of newer stuff more recently.”

“Wait until I introduce you to Babyface,” Cho said.

Hawke said, “You don’t mean the Dear Leader himself? I thought he lived in some sick palace in Pyongyang.”

Cho laughed.

“No, sir, I mean the camp commandant. That’s what we called him. Babyface. Angelic little shit with the soul of a scarab. Likes-to-throw-babies-down-deep-wells kind of human being. You know the type.”

“I take it you’re not fond of him.”

“He’s the reason I’m standing here, Commander Hawke. He ripped my baby brother from my mother’s arms and threw him down a well. Then he put a knife in my mother’s stomach and twisted it until he found the uterus, killing both my mother and my unborn sister, too.”

“Good God. I’m very sorry, Colonel.”

“It’s war, isn’t it, Commander?”

Hawke looked away for a moment and said, “Colonel, as you know, after Chief’s demolition guys blow the main gates, you and I will be first through the breach. As I said earlier, I want you to take me directly to the commandant’s residence. We’ll take a squad of four, including Froggy and the Alsatian gunner. One heavy machine-gunner fore and aft.”

Cho nodded. “Babyface knows where the American hostages are. Based on what I know, the children will be aboveground and the mother below. Please leave that part to me, sir. I’ll make sure he sees the sense in taking us right to them. He won’t resist. He’s actually a terrified little gnome playing God, lording it over this squalid corner of hell.”

“All cruelty starts with fear. Or something like that. Seneca.”

“Seneca. A great philosopher.”

“Right,” Hawke said, pulling out his hand-drawn map of the camp. “Show me his residence again.”

“It’s right here. The two-story house with his precious orchard of cherry trees around it. We called it the Teahouse of the August Moon. Guarded twenty-four hours a day. He sleeps on an outside sleeping porch located here. “

“You said there were land mines around his house?”

“Yes. But I know the clear path to his door. You’d think they’d move them around occasionally, but they don’t. Lazy bastards.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Colonel. From the gate, that’s, what . . . half a klick to his quarters?”

“About that.”

“Stokely, Chief, Froggy, and Brock, you know what to do. Start searching the barracks one by one. Maybe you’ll get lucky. I’ll radio you as soon as we get their precise location out of the commandant. Meanwhile, keep looking. Capture a guard and make him talk. Find out in which barracks they’re keeping all the children. Get them out, not just the hostages, all of them. Alive. Whatever it takes. Yes?”

“Yes, sir,” Froggy said. “Count on it, Hawke.”

“All right then. As soon as Fitz has taken out those towers, we move out. Get your heads on straight and don’t make any bloody mistakes. You guys are the best at this on the planet. You’re number one. Go do it.”

AT PRECISELY 0400, FITZ AND
the other two snipers began the process of reducing the six guard towers to smoking heaps of splinters. Their actions initiated a swift but confused retaliation. Unwisely, the main gate was now swinging open to expel an armored vehicle with twelve heavily armed troops in the rear.

“I’ve got zee muzzafookah!” Froggy said. He stepped from the woods hefting the shoulder-launched ATGM, an antitank guided missile light enough to be fired by one soldier.

“Take him out, Froggy!” Rainwater said.

The missile streaked upward trailing yellow fire, reached its apogee, and nosed over into a steep dive toward the oncoming armored troop vehicle. The driver swerved wildly but the missile was smarter: the impact was immediate and incredibly destructive. A loud
crack
, a blinding ball of fire, and thick black smoke rising from the unrecognizable hulk of wreckage. No survivors.

“C’est bon?” the Frogman said, smiling at Hawke.

“C’est tres bon,” Hawke said, peering at the destruction through his binoculars. Suddenly, he pivoted left. “Heads up. Frogman! There’s a second armored vehicle inside the compound speeding for the gate. Waste it, Froggy, while it’s still within the compound. We’ll use the chaos inside to cover our infil.”

Hawke swept his glasses back and forth, assessing the unfolding situation.

Froggy lit off a second missile, and seconds later, another explosive
CRACK
and heavy flames and black smoke rising above the walls from within the camp. The two heavy gates slammed shut. Whatever resistance this “secret” death camp was capable of putting up . . . was now being implemented. The no-man’s-land obstacle had been overcome. It only remained to be seen how much fight these desolate men had in them.

Hawke looked up. There was a new tinge of pink in the charcoal skies.

It was time.

“Go, go, go!” Hawke said, leaning in and giving each man a solidarity hit on the shoulder as he passed by. He was saying in their ears exactly what he had always said to them in times like this.

“Use this time, son . . . use the time . . . use it to get your head on straight . . . use this time . . . get your head on straight . . . yeah, that’s right . . . focus, focus . . . you’ve got it . . . now keep it on straight . . . you too . . . okay . . . give ’em pure hell down there . . . okay . . . that’s it . . . go . . .”

And so on they went.

C
H A P T E R
  6 2

T
here was sporadic fire from atop the wall, but without the lethality of heavy tripod-mounted machine guns from the towers, it was mostly ineffective. Hawke, who, with Rainwater, was leading the Bravo squad, and Stoke, with Fitz and Alpha squad, approached the wide gates from opposite directions. They feinted once or twice, zigzagging as they ran, firing continuously at anything that moved along the wall.

“Alpha, this is Bravo,” Hawke said into his headset.

“Copy, Bravo,” Stoke said.

“Alpha, lay down heavy suppressive M-60 and mortar fire while we go in to blow the gate. Chief says give him three minutes to set the charge, another minute to breach. Follow us in.”

“Roger that, Bravo.”

“On my mark . . . four minutes . . . mark!”

HAWKE THOUGHT CHIEF RAINWATER HAD
packed enough Semtex on Camp 25’s front door to blow the gates of hell wide open. And when Thunder Team lit the fuse, he knew he’d been right. The massive steel slabs were blown right off the hinges, blown inward by the sheer force of the explosion. They gates themselves were lethal flying objects now, by-products of Thunder and Lightning’s standard method of gaining entry to a hostile compound.

“Welcome to Norkland,” Chief said, smiling at Hawke. “You can bet the Norks are shitting sizable bricks at the moment, sir.”

Hawke flipped his helmet mike down. “Alpha, copy, Bravo is going in.”

“Alpha, copy, got your six. Right behind you, boss,” Stoke said.

It really was hell. Mobs of skin-and-bones prisoners dressed in rags, stumbling aimlessly around the compound in thin felt shoes or barefoot across the frozen rocky soil, zombies seemingly oblivious to the firefight going on around them. Already dead, Hawke supposed. If not, then certainly ready to die.

In the center of the camp parade ground, the flaming hulk of the armored carrier belched black smoke. There was some small-arms fire directed toward the invaders, mostly from windows in the buildings surrounding the square. And more serious machine-gun fire from the rooftop of a three-story building directly opposite the main gate.

Beyond the camp’s main square, endless rows of grim wooden barracks stretched seemingly to the horizon. Somewhere in that warren of misery were two young American children who didn’t belong there. Check that.

No one belonged here. No creed. No color. Nobody.

Bravo went left. Alpha went right, full run-and-shoot mode, laying down withering fire as they raced toward the bleak city of barracks.

Hawke’s team took cover between two corrugated steel buildings facing onto the central square. He saw Stoke and Brock do the same thing, running alongside Fitz through a scraggy stand of trees toward a narrow street on the opposite side of the parade ground.

“What’s that building?” Hawke asked Cho. “Machine guns on the roof.”

“Officers’ barracks. Married. Members of the ‘loyal’ class. Citizens with ‘pure’ family histories, no ancestral ties to South Koreans, capitalists, or Christians.”

Hawke smiled at him. “The Great Cho: Google of Norkland.”

“Guilty as charged.” Cho laughed.

Machine-gun fire chewed at the dirt not thirty feet away.

“Chief, you and Froggy take out those gunners on the roof, lob some mortars up there. Then go in there and blow it. I mean level that building down to the ground. Colonel Cho and I are going to visit the commandant. We’ll take two M-60 heavy guys to cover our asses. Your squad clears the immediate area. Basic search and destroy until we return. Ça va?”

“Mais oui, mon capitaine!”

“Teahouse?” Hawke said to Cho.

“Teahouse. Right this way.”

They turned right at a dead end and hadn’t gone a hundred yards when they found an abandoned jeep. Not a real American “Jeep” but one of the thousands the Norks had copied for their military. Hawke jumped behind the wheel, and the rest leaped over the side. Rainwater sat facing aft, a big M-60 cradled in his arms. He loved this gun. Officially the United States machine gun, the 7.62mm fires several types of live ammunition: ball, tracer, and armor-piercing rounds.

Cho sat up front with Hawke. They raced across the bumpy ground, swerving to avoid loose rock and random boulders.

“We’re expected, right?” Hawke asked.

“Probably. Because of the twin explosions. But not necessarily.”

“Why not?”

“Babyface doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of bad news. He once shot a house servant on the spot for telling him the bacon was burned. So you’d think twice before informing him that nearly twenty armed mercenaries were taking down his camp piece by piece.”

Hawke laughed.

“Twilight at the Teahouse?”

“Something like that.”

THERE WAS A LOW CONCRETE
wall around the commandant’s residence that Hawke had not noticed on the grainy satellite photos. Nor was he prepared for the size of the place. Surrounded by forests of black stunted trees, and a cherry orchard, it was like a large square blockhouse. Rather forbidding.

There was a winding and rutted dirt road leading through the cherry orchard. When the jeep drew within a hundred yards of the main entrance, Babyface’s imperial guards popped up and began firing at them. Rounds found the jeep’s hood and tires. Hawke cut the wheel hard right, hauling up on the emergency brake at the same time, creating a 180-degree switch in directions.

That put Chief Rainwater facing the opposition in position one: head-on.

He and Froggy opened up with both of the M-60s, and the effect was devastating. The deep bass
thump-thump-thump
of the 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds was enough to make strong men turn tail and hide, but the rounds slamming into the wall wreaked hell and havoc, turning the wall to a pile of rubble around the ankles of the few guards still remaining on their feet.

Just as the incoming fire from the residence ceased, gunners in the upper-floor windows threw open the heavy wooden shutters and trained their weapons on the jeep.

“Shit!” Cho said. A round had caught him in the deep right shoulder and almost spun him out of the jeep. Hawke jammed into first gear, his wheels spinning on the hard ground as he raced away and out of range. When the incoming rounds ceased, he swerved wide and returned to the Teahouse, staying out of range and circling around to the rear of the house and fishtailing to a stop.

Cho was bleeding badly.

“Froggy, field dress the colonel’s wound, then follow us in. Cho, where the hell do I find Babyface?”

“His sleeping quarters are upstairs on the rear. No windows. But he has a secure office in the basement. Only his personal security is allowed down there.”

“Chief, blow the rear door. We’re going in. Clear left and right, then up the stairs. Move!”

Rainwater took the door out.

They went in low. Half dove left, half right. They caught a couple of guards shouldering their automatic weapons and took them out instantly with head shots. Rainwater was heaving smoke grenades, and the ground floor was filling up fast. He threw in a couple of stun grenades to add to the confusion.

Hawke found the staircase leading up near the front of the house. He flattened himself against the wall and did a quick-pick up the stairs. The plaster next to his cheek exploded, a big piece slashing a flap of skin loose. He put his head back against the wall, counted to three, and swung round with his automatic pistol at the ready.

He must have surprised the Nork because the guy was just going eyes wide when Hawke put two into him between the lamps and watched him tumble forward all the way to the bottom.