Red Phoenix Burning Read online

  Kevin Little stumbled down the corpse-strewn communications trench. His combat boots skidded through a mixture of frozen blood, mud, and blackened snow. He locked his jaw tight to keep his teeth from chattering. He was cold—colder than he could ever remember being. Every movement sent pain surging through his body, as though jagged shards of ice were being driven deep through his flesh.

  He knew these dead men. They were his soldiers. They were the men he had led. Sergeants Pierce and Caldwell. Corporals Ramos and Jones. Privates Smith, Donnelly, and Jackson. They were the men he had failed.

  He blinked back tears.

  WHUMMP!

  Kevin swung around in horror. Twenty yards behind him, dirt and bits of shattered rock fountained skyward.

  WHUMMP!

  Another explosion, closer this time, knocked him to his knees. Shrapnel hissed past, ripping at the compacted earth walls on either side.

  God, he thought, fighting for breath. The North Koreans were walking a mortar barrage right down the trench. He staggered to his feet, trying to run . . . and knowing that it already was too late—

  “Colonel Little? Sir?”

  Colonel Kevin Little opened his eyes. The green, glowing numerals of the digital clock on the table beside his cot blinked from 2352 to 2353. He wiped away the rivulets of sweat running down his face. Summer nights in South Korea were hot and humid. My God, not again, he thought wearily. It was the old dream—the nightmare that had haunted him off and on through twenty-plus years and three wars.

  He focused on the here and now. He wasn’t trapped in the ruins of Malibu West, the tiny DMZ outpost he’d commanded, and lost, as a young second lieutenant so long ago. Instead, he was in the small, plainly furnished quarters set aside for any senior officer staying overnight at Camp Bonifas, right at the edge of the Demilitarized Zone on the road to Panmunjom.

  There was another knock on his door. “Colonel?”

  “Come!” Kevin sat up and swung his legs off the cot. He bent down, already pulling on his socks and boots. Then he looked up at the short, wiry South Korean officer who’d entered the tiny room. Major Lee Joon-ho was the S3, the operations officer, for the UN Command Security Battalion that kept watch over the Panmunjom Truce Village and its surroundings—otherwise known as the Joint Security Area.

  “What’s up, Major?” he asked quietly, hoping that the other man wasn’t here to check on him because he’d been screaming in his sleep.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Miller would like to see you in the CP, sir. We have a situation.”

  Kevin nodded. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  The Joint Security Area battalion, whose motto was “In Front of Them All,” was the only combined Korean-American unit in existence. Since the US was handing off more and more front-line DMZ duties to South Korea, most of its soldiers were Koreans like Lee. But the battalion commander, Mike Miller, the command sergeant major, and about forty others were Americans.

  While the other man waited outside his door, Kevin quickly finished lacing up his boots and shrugged into his battle dress uniform jacket.

  He had just taken over command of the US Eighth Army’s Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion, and the HHB provided logistics and administrative support for Miller and his troops. That provided the official reason for Little’s visit to Camp Bonifas on an inspection tour.

  The Joint Security Area was the one place where Allied and North Korean soldiers routinely came face-to-face. And over the decades since the first, and then the second armistice, it was a place where some of those daily confrontations turned violent, even deadly. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Panmunjom was also a magnet for tourists, politicians, and presidents who wanted to peer into the armed hellhole that was North Korea.

  Kevin snorted. It was the same morbid fascination that drew people to stare at the man-eating tigers in a zoo. But in a zoo, there were iron bars or wide moats between you and the tigers. At Panmunjom, there were only a few signposts and a line of concrete blocks ten centimeters high between the five small buildings that straddled the demarcation line.

  Then he smiled to himself. So how exactly was he any different from the rest of those thrill-seeking tourists? Sure, he could rattle off a list of official-sounding justifications for watching the UN Command Security Battalion handle the conflicting duties of playing VIP tour guide while staying ready for war, but mostly he was here to see how things had changed in the long years since he was last up on the DMZ.

  And now, Kevin thought, clipping the drop-leg holster for his Beretta to his trouser leg, he would go see what the tigers were doing that had Miller worried enough to wake a visiting colonel. He grabbed his body armor off the bare floor and followed the South Korean major at a fast walk toward the camp command post.

  Lieutenant Colonel Miller was on a secure phone when they came into the command post. Other officers and noncoms were busy at computers scattered around the room, scanning through feeds from the remote cameras liberally emplaced around the Joint Security Area. Major Lee went into a huddle with a couple of young-looking South Korean lieutenants typing frantically at laptops in one corner.

  “Understood, Terry,” Miller said calmly in a soft West Texas drawl. “Stay on it. Keep me posted.”

  He hung up and turned toward Kevin with a tight smile. “Looks like we’ll be putting on a bigger show for you than I’d hoped, Colonel.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble on my account, Mike,” Kevin said, matching his expression. “I’m really just here for the golf.”

  Camp Bonifas boasted that it possessed “the world’s most dangerous golf course,” a single par-3 hole surrounded by razor wire, machine gun bunkers, trenches, and minefields.

  “Yeah, right,” Miller said, grinning a little bit wider. But the grin vanished as he nodded toward the phone. “That was one of my platoon leaders up at OP Oullette. They’re hearing a lot of small arms and machine gun fire from the north. They can’t see any of it, but it’s echoing off the surrounding hills.”

  “Could it be some unscheduled KPA battle drill?” Kevin suggested. Under various standing agreements, each side was supposed to notify the other of any planned military exercises close to the DMZ. But the Korean People’s Army was notorious for ignoring such agreements.

  Miller shrugged. “Maybe. But they don’t usually pull that kind of shit after dark.”

  Kevin nodded. North Korea’s regular armed forces didn’t have a lot of the night vision gear that was widely used by the US and its allies. Without such equipment, live-fire exercises after sunset were pointless.

  “Sir!” Major Lee broke in suddenly.

  The two American soldiers turned toward him.

  “Voice of Korea has gone off the air,” Lee reported.

  Kevin felt a shiver run down his spine. Voice of Korea, the new name for Radio Pyongyang, was North Korea’s main channel for propaganda and news to both the world and to its own citizens. It never went silent. Never.

  “When?” Miller asked.

  “Twenty minutes ago,” Lee said. His voice was flat, unemotional, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Without any warning. There is only static on all its broadcast frequencies.”

  “Crap.” Miller looked at Kevin. “I don’t like this at all, Colonel. Not one damned bit.”

  “Nor I,” Kevin agreed. He fought down the urge to take command and start issuing orders. He outranked the other man, but he was here as a visitor, and this was Miller’s patch. The battalion commander knew the turf, his unit’s capabilities, and his responsibilities.

  Miller looked at Major Lee. “Tell Lieutenant Colonel Sobong that I’m activating ROUNDUP immediately. He’s in charge. But let’s do this by ground only. I don’t want any helos in the air right now. There’s no point in spooking those bastards across the wire if we don’t have to.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kevin nodded to himself. Miller’s move made sense. One of the security battalion’s chief duties was guarding Daeson
g-dong, the only village inside the DMZ. In exchange for the risks they ran just by living so close to the border with North Korea, the two hundred or so civilian farmers were well paid—but they had to accept a number of restrictions like nighttime curfews and obedience to military orders. ROUNDUP was the code word for an emergency evacuation of Daesong-dong. Sobong, Miller’s South Korean second-in-command, and the unit’s civil affairs company knew the drill. It was an operation they rehearsed with the villagers every three months.

  “Now that is weird. Just wild-ass weird,” one of the young officers manning a computer console said abruptly. He swiveled around to face Miller. “Sir! None of the guys at our checkpoints or watching the remote cameras have eyes on any KPA guards inside the JSA.”

  “What?”

  “They’re gone, Colonel,” the lieutenant said. “Or they could be sheltering real deep. But we’ve got no visual contact or thermal trace on anyone on their side of the line.”

  “How long have they been gone?” Miller demanded.

  The lieutenant swallowed hard. “Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more. Maybe less.” He gestured at the screen in front of him. “We were focused on spotting any infiltrators trying to sneak across the line . . .”

  And not paying enough attention to the normal goons who stood guard, Kevin realized. It was a form of target fixation; the less technical term was tunnel vision.

  He saw Miller’s jaw tighten. The officers and men at those checkpoints and those monitoring the remote cameras were going to catch hell during the morning debriefing on this incident.

  If any of them are still alive when the sun comes up, Little thought grimly.

  There were a number of scenarios that might explain why North Korea’s radio station would go off the air around the same time its soldiers at Panmunjom vanished. Unfortunately, none of them seemed likely to do much for the life expectancy of anyone at Camp Bonifas.

  Kevin shook his head, half-amused and half-disgusted by his own sudden fit of pessimism. Maybe, just maybe, he should have pulled his twenty and gone back home to run the family ranch in eastern Washington like his parents had always wanted. Hell, he’d seen a lot of combat over multiple tours in Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. His luck had to be running mighty thin by now.

  Then he shrugged. He’d make a lousy rancher. You had to like cows and horses to be a good rancher. And he hated cows. And horses. Especially horses.

  Miller’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Captain Shin! Call the MAC Joint Duty Officer and tell him to report here, pronto. I don’t want him caught outside the wire if this situation turns sour.”

  The UN’s Military Armistice Commission kept specially trained officers on duty twenty-four hours a day to monitor a telephone hotline linking the two sides at Panmunjom. Their office was just thirty feet away from a North Korean guard post and right in the line of any fire.

  “Checkpoint Three reports lights moving on the Reunification Highway, near Kaesong!” Major Lee said suddenly, listening to one of the CP’s secure phones. “Many lights.”

  Christ, Kevin thought, not really believing it. Here they come. Again. The Reunification Highway was bound to be a major axis for any new North Korean armored offensive into the south.

  “Get me a count,” Miller snapped. “And ID those vehicles.”

  “Yes, sir!” Lee said. He spoke urgently into the phone, dropping into Korean while he demanded more information from the soldiers manning Checkpoint Three, a blue-painted building perched on a hill overlooking the western perimeter of the JSA. Anyone stationed there had North Korean territory on three sides.

  Kevin watched the South Korean major’s face closely. For a moment, Lee stayed calmly professional, listening to the reply. Then he blinked once. His eyebrows rose in astonishment. At any other time, his expression would have been funny as hell.

  “The lights are from automobiles,” Lee said slowly, as though he couldn’t really believe what he was saying. “A group of at least six civilian cars driving out of Kaesong on the highway. They are coming toward the DMZ at fifty or sixty kilometers an hour. With their headlights on.”

  “You have got to be fricking kidding me, Major,” Miller said.

  “No, sir,” Lee said stubbornly. “I am not kidding you.”

  Miller shook his head in disbelief. He glanced at Kevin. “This is getting stranger and stranger, Colonel Little. What in the name of God’s little green earth is going on? Could this be some kind of hush-hush diplomatic thing that Seoul and DC forgot to tell us about?”

  Kevin shrugged helplessly and shook his head. He hadn’t heard a thing, and he doubted there was anything to hear. The striped-pants folks in the US and South Korean state departments could be slow to tell their respective armed forces what they were up to, but even they had to know that running an unannounced diplomatic mission up to the DMZ in the dead of night was asking for major-league trouble. That kind of trouble could get people killed and wreck a lot of promising bureaucratic careers.

  “Well, whatever the hell this is, I’m going up to Checkpoint Three to see for myself,” Miller decided. He turned toward another of the South Korean officers. “Captain Shin, I want the ready platoon mounted and on the way to Checkpoint Three in five minutes. And tell my driver I’m on the way.”

  Miller looked at Kevin with the hint of a sardonic smile. “You want to ride along, Colonel? Things could get . . . interesting.”

  Are you willing to stick your head out of the cozy, relative safety of Camp Bonifas and play headquarters tourist at the most exposed site on the whole DMZ . . . right as the proverbial shit is flying toward the fan, Kevin silently translated. He snorted. The smart move would be to head back to Seoul right now. Going with Miller was just an excuse to stare again at the tigers prowling around right across the line. Then again, he decided, sometimes that was the safest thing to do. It was usually the predator you didn’t see who pulled you down.

  He grinned back at the other man. “I wouldn’t miss it, Lieutenant Colonel Miller.”

  Checkpoint Three, Joint Security Area

  The entire Panmunjom Truce Village was brightly lit by floodlights mounted on buildings and tall metal lampposts. Once past the entrance to the UN side of the compound, the convoy of trucks and Humvees carrying the security battalion’s ready platoon swung left onto a two-lane road heading west, and then turned sharply onto an even narrower one-lane road heading uphill toward Checkpoint Three. Trees and underbrush lined both sides.

  “Stop here, Harmon,” Miller told his driver. They were near the top of the hill and within a hundred meters of the demarcation line, but still just out of sight of the closest North Korean guard post.

  Kevin swung himself out of Miller’s Humvee, stifling a grunt as his knees and feet briefly took on the full weight of his body armor, ammo, and other gear. Counting the M4A1 rifle one of the security battalion’s sergeants had issued him before they drove out of Camp Bonifas, he was probably carrying around forty-five to fifty pounds of extra weight. That wasn’t the full load carried by an infantryman on an extended foot patrol, but it was more than enough—especially for someone who was closer to fifty years old than to forty.

  “Better leave that in the Humvee, sir,” Miller said quietly, nodding at the assault rifle. “This close to the line, we only carry sidearms. Our KPA pals get nervous if they see heavier firepower.”

  “And if we see some of those ‘pals’ are toting something a bit bigger?” Kevin asked.

  “Then the rules have changed.”

  “Swell.” Kevin slid the rifle back into the Humvee but left the door slightly ajar. If the rules had suddenly “changed,” he didn’t want to have to fumble with the latch.

  The two 6×6 trucks carrying the ready platoon pulled in behind them and parked. South Korean soldiers dropped off the back of the trucks, quickly forming up in the shadow of the trees. Their camouflage gear had more pixelated greens and browns than the US Army pattern did, and they blended well with the tangled woods on either side
of the road.

  “Keep your men below the crest for now, Lieutenant Kim,” Miller told the officer commanding the platoon. “Colonel Little and I will go up to Checkpoint Three first. I don’t want to escalate this situation unless I need to. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” The South Korean lieutenant turned and began issuing low-voiced orders to his NCOs.

  Satisfied, Miller took his helmet off, clipped it to his tactical vest, and donned a soft, camo-patterned patrol cap. He watched as Kevin did the same. “No point in putting on our war paint if we don’t have to,” he said, his drawl deepening.

  Together, the two officers walked up the road. It struck Kevin as surreal to step out into the fully illuminated patch of short-cropped grass and gravel in front of Checkpoint Three. During his time on the DMZ, light discipline was strictly enforced. Back then, if you were lit up, you were a target. Old habits die hard, he thought grimly, especially if those habits kept you alive. Just seeing their elongated shadows rippling across the grass ahead of them made his skin crawl.

  He moved out toward the western edge of the hill, in front of the lights, and peered through his night vision binoculars. About two kilometers to the southwest, he could make out the huge, 160-meter-high flagpole the North Koreans had erected at the fake village they had built for propaganda purposes opposite South Korea’s Daesong-dong. He swung right, scanning across the landscape of low hills and fields beyond the woods and brush that marked the DMZ. The night vision binoculars showed everything in an eerie green. The highway came into focus, running straight through the fields outside Kaesong toward Panmunjom.

  Miller joined him. “That damned caravan is about five klicks out and still coming this way.”

  Kevin raised his binoculars higher and saw them. Six, no, seven cars were driving east with their headlights on. This far away it was hard to tell for sure, but they looked like a mix of luxury models—big Russian-made ZiL limousines and Mercedes sedans. His jaw tightened. In North Korea, vehicles like that were restricted to high-ranking party officials and top army brass.