Red Phoenix by Larry Bond Read Free Book Online

all, student protests often seemed like a national sport in South Korea. The season ran from the time school opened in September until winter set in during November—and then it reopened in the spring until the summer monsoon closed it down in June. At times the protestors and the Combat Police—the ROK’s internal security force—acted as though they were simply carrying out some age-old ritual. But then somebody would get killed—hit in the head by a tear gas grenade, torched by a homemade, paint-spray flamethrower, or beaten to death in a wild street melee. When that happened, it wasn’t a game, and everybody damned well knew it.
    Combat police did not carry rifles. Whoever gave that order was scared of something. He wanted to find out what, before the kimchee really hit the fan.
    He moved back down Sejong-Ro and stood on the sidewalk watching as the streets emptied of civilian traffic and filled up with truckload after truckload of green-jacketed riot police. It was very quiet now and growing hotter as the sun climbed directly overhead.
    Then he heard it. Softly at first, but growing louder with every passing second. A rhythmic sound that seemed to echo off the tall buildings around him. Then he recognized it. It was the sound of thousands of voices chanting, yelling the same phrase over and over: “Tokchae Tado! Tokchae Tado! Down with the dictatorship! Down with the dictatorship!”
    The Combat Police at the barricades heard it too. McLaren saw their officers—including that s.o.b. lieutenant—cursing and kicking them into formed ranks. The engines of the armored cars behind them caught and roared into life. The turrets with the water cannon and tear gas launchers turned to point down the empty street.
    McLaren was tall enough to see over most of the riot police, and he could just begin to catch glimpses of the front rank of the crowd marching up the boulevard. He whistled softly to himself. There were a damned lot of them—thousands at least. And their shouts were even louder now that they’d seen the police line.
    Most of them didn’t look like the longhairs who’d taken to the streets in the States while he was in Nam. They wore clean clothes and neatly cropped hair. But they were also wearing handkerchiefs and surgical masks over their faces to block out tear gas. And there was something unnerving about their relentless approach.
    Despite the heat McLaren felt a chill run up his spine. This felt a lot like combat, but it was too mechanical, too predictable. It was like watching some kind of animated physics diagram—high-velocity mass meets immovable object. McLaren knew what bothered him most about it all. He wasn’t in charge and he couldn’t do a single thing to change the outcome.
    Suddenly he tensed. Someone was behind him. It was the same feeling he’d had just before that damned Cong sniper put an AK round into his right leg back in Nam. Without turning around, McLaren stepped into the shelter of a store doorway and chanced a look back down the street. He started and had to stop himself from laughing out loud. It wasn’t a rifle scope that he’d sensed. It was the big lens on a TV camera.
    But he ducked back into the doorway all the same as the CNN cameraman and his assistant jogged past toward the barricade line. It wouldn’t do at all for the folks back home to see an American officer in full uniform standing around in the middle of a South Korean protest. That’d be just thesort of thing that would give the nervous Nellies in the Pentagon PR office the fits.
    Twenty yards down the street the cameraman clambered onto the hood of a parked car to get a better shot of the demonstrators surging toward the police barricades.
    “Tokchae Tado! Tokchae Tado! Tokchae Tado!” The chant was even louder now, and growing more guttural, more threatening. McLaren couldn’t hear the orders being yelled to the Combat Police, but suddenly the front two ranks brought their Plexiglas shields up and drew