Battle Born (62 page)

Once they reached cover, they took a quick heading with their wrist compasses, then took a few moments to rest. “What happened?” the observer asked. “What hit us?”

“I don’t know,” the pilot responded. “Must’ve been rebels, maybe a detached security unit with a shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapon.” He nodded resolutely toward the south. “We need to get as far away from here as possible,” he said. “The transport carrying our commandos will be arriving soon.”

“We’ve got to warn them off!” the observer said. “Whatever shot us down will take them next!” He pulled out his survival radio and clicked it on. His pilot looked at him wordlessly, and the observer nodded. They both knew that the minute they activated the radio, the enemy could triangulate their position. But if they didn’t make the call, the deaths of thirty commandos and a C-130 Hercules flight crew would haunt them forever.

“Samtek Seven, Samtek Seven, this is Patrol Three-Four on the ground, over.”

“Patrol Three-Four, this is Samtek, we read you loud and clear, authenticate one-Zulu.”

“Charlie,” the observer responded, referring to a tiny authenticator card. He accomplished another authentication routine with the transport pilot; then:
“Samtek, we have been shot down by unknown hostile forces, possibly hostile AI or SAMs. The LZ is hot, repeat, LZ hot. Remain clear of the area and go get help. Do you copy?”

“We copy, Three-Four,” the transport pilot replied. “Air cover and strike forces are on the way, ETA four. If you can make it to extraction point Lotus, repeat Lotus, help will be waiting.”

“Roger,” the observer said. There was nothing that made a downed aircrew feel better than to know there were friendlies in the area who were willing to risk their own lives to rescue them. “Our ETA to Lotus is three.” They used a simple code for time—multiplied the number by the day of the month—to avoid giving the enemy an idea of when and where to find them.

“We copy, Three-Four,” the transport pilot said. “Good luck. Samtek is clear.”

“Now let’s get out of here,” the pilot shouted, and they took off running to the next bit of cover they could see, about two hundred yards off.

They were halfway to their next hiding place when they heard it—a deep, loud, screeching roar, coming toward them. They looked up—and realized immediately that they were dead men. It was two Chinese Q-5 light jet fighter-bombers, careening down on them in a shallow dive.

“It’s Chinese,” the observer said. “We’re well inside our own borders! China is flying attack jets over our territory!” No doubt that’s who had shot them down—and now they were coming in to finish the job.

The pilot frantically got on his handheld radio again. “Samtek, Samtek, this is Three-Four. We spotted a Chinese Q-5 fighter-bomber, repeat, a Chinese fighter-bomber, at our location. Recommend you get as far away from here as possible and send help! How do you read?”

“Loud and clear, Three-Four,” the transport pilot acknowledged. “Thanks for the warning. Get off the air and take cover!”

But it was far too late. The United Republic of Korea crew members’ last thought was that the stupid Chinese bastards sure were wasting a lot of bombs on them—both Q-5 fighters dropped cluster bombs on their attack pass. All that ordnance just to kill two arrogant Dragonfly crew members who were too stupid to check their six for signs of threats. It was an impressive attack, very accurate—but one bomb would’ve done the job just as easily.

With the cluster bombs gone, the Chinese Q-5 fighter, a copy of the old Soviet MiG-19 fighter-bomber, now flew like a jet fighter instead of like a wallowing pig. Both Q-5s climbed up from their attack pass to four thousand meters. The leader checked his wingman over and noticed he had dropped his bombs too. Well, now they were both fighters again.

“Han-301, this is Control,” their ground controller radioed. “We have detected an airborne target, slow-moving, altitude unknown, twenty-three kilometers south of your position. You are directed to intercept and destroy. Acknowledge.”

The Q-5 flight lead checked his radio range from the controller’s position beacon, cross-checked his position with some prominent landmarks, then checked his chart board. He was about thirty kilometers inside United Korea, what was once free-flying airspace of North Korea. Technically, this was a violation of UROK’s airspace, an act of war. But since China had not yet recognized the United Republic of Korea, it still considered this airspace as belonging to its ally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose president
and government just now happened to reside in Beijing to escape political persecution. Besides, when UROK fired those missiles against Chinese troops in Yanggang Do province, they technically started a war. So flying another twenty-three kilometers or so inside Korea was no big deal.

“H-301 acknowledges instructions,” the flight lead responded. He turned south and activated his ranging radar. The tactical controller, based in a mobile radar trailer just north of the Korean border, kept feeding him a constant stream of position updates until it became apparent that the target had descended low enough to escape his radar.

But soon the Chinese fighter pilots didn’t need the controller’s help. Just a few minutes later the Q-5 fighter lead spotted the big transport. It was an American-made C-130 transport in black and brown camouflage, hugging the rolling, rugged terrain, flying barely a hundred meters aboveground. “Control, H-301 has visual contact on aircraft, proceeding with intercept.” There was no response—he was flying too low and too far from the radar controller now to maintain good radio coverage.

No matter. He had the target visually, and it would be an easy kill. He deactivated his range-only radar, selected his 20-millimeter cannon, armed his trigger, dialed in the proper settings on his mechanical heads-up display—no fancy electronic HUD on this thirty-year-old bird, nor was one required—double-checked his switches, and began to slide into firing range. When the C-130’s wingtips began to touch the edge of the aiming reticle, he slid his finger down to the trigger and . . .

“Lead!” It was the wingman frantically shouting on the interplane radio.
“Incoming missile! Break left! Now!’’

The Chinese pilot ignored the warning—he was exactly
at firing range. But in the blink of an eye his instruments began rolling, warning lights flashed, and his tiny cockpit immediately filled with dense black smoke. He was momentarily distracted by another flash of light—the fireball of his wingman exploding in mid-air—before he reluctantly released the grip on his throttle and control stick and pulled his ejection.

The Q-5 slammed into the ground in an inverted dive traveling almost the speed of sound. He had made the decision to eject just three seconds too late.

“Splash two,” Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan radioed. “Good shooting, Rebecca.”

What a weird feeling, Rebecca Furness thought. She had of course launched missiles and killed the enemy before—her RF-111G Vampire bomber carried Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defense, and she had to use them during the Russia-Ukraine skirmish. But that was self-defense, a means to help blow past area defenses or put a fighter screen on the defensive long enough for her to get to the target. This was different. They were the hunters this time.

Rebecca and three other crews loaded EB-1C Megafortress battleships at Dreamland and flew them to Adak, Alaska. After crew rest, the crews were briefed, and three Megafortresses launched together to take up combat air patrols over Korea, with the fourth and fifth planes launching later to begin an eight-hour rotation schedule to try to keep as many planes up over Korea at once as possible.

“You okay, Colonel?” Patrick McLanahan asked Furness. Patrick was back on the ground at Adak Naval Air Station, commanding the virtual cockpit. He and Nancy Cheshire would spend four hours in it, then man Fortress Four and relieve Rebecca on patrol in northern
Korea. Four hours later another crew would launch in Fortress Five, and the rotation would continue until they were ordered to stop.

“I . . . I think so.”

“It doesn’t get any easier after the first or the second or the fourth kill,” Patrick said, expertly reading her mind. “In fact, it only gets more nightmarish. Probably because the technology gets so swift, so efficient. Those Chinese Q-5s were seventeen miles away. We could’ve been another ten miles farther away.”

“I guess we’re not into fair fights anymore, are we?”

“Fair fights? That
was
a fair fight, Colonel. That’s about as close as you want to get to a fighter, even a thirty-year-old clunker like a Q-5. If you missed and he turned around and got close enough to get a visual on you, you’d have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of making it out over the Sea of Japan and over to friendly air cover before he blew
your
shit away. If both of them came at you, I’d lower our odds to twenty-eighty. Fifty-fifty is generous—I’d like at least ninety-ten on our side.”

“Hey, lighten up, everybody,” Nancy Cheshire, the senior pilot back in the virtual cockpit, interjected. “Rebecca, I say, You go, girl! First air-to-air shots in anger for the Megafortress, and she scores two hits! Oh, sure, Scottie might have had something to do with it.”

“Thanks a bunch, Chessie,” said Major Paul Scott, Rebecca Furness’s mission commander in the Megafor-tress’s right seat. Like Cheshire, he was a longtime veteran of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and had flown many sorties in the old EB-52, the B-52 version of the Megafortress. He double-checked that his weapons were safed and added, “Maybe a little—but I’ll still give all the credit to the Megafortress.”

“You’re allowed to show a little pleasure now and then, Scottie,” Cheshire said. “Just a little ‘hot-diggety-damn’?
We just saved that Korean cargo plane and probably a few dozen of their commandos.”

“I’ll take that under advisement, Nancy,” Paul said. “Scope’s clear. Give me forty left and let’s get back in our patrol orbit, Rebecca.” Their assigned orbit was over Kanggye itself, monitoring the movement of Chinese forces across the border into Chagang Do province.

“Fortress, Fortress, this is Iroquois,” a call came in moments later. “Bogeys at one-one-zero at one-one-zero bull’s-eye, angels thirty, heading northwest toward Fortress One at four-eight-zero knots.” “Iroquois” was the call sign of the EB-1’s “back door,” the USS
Grand Island
, a 9,500-ton
Ticonderoga-class
guided missile cruiser, escorted by the USS
Boone
, a
Perry
-class guided missile frigate, in a patrol position about fifty miles off the Korean coast. “We count eight, repeat eight, bogeys. They are going to cross south of SAM range.”

The
Grand Island
, named after the large island just south of Niagara Falls that was the scene of Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battles with the British Army, guarded the Sea of Japan and the Megafortress’s exit path. It used its long-range three-dimensional SPY-1B radar to scan the skies from the surface into near space for two hundred miles in all directions. Its surface-to-air weapons included SM-2MR Standard antiaircraft missiles and Standard Block 4A antiballistic missile interceptors; it was the first Navy warship to carry these weapons. The cruiser also carried Tomahawk land-attack missiles and Harpoon antiship missiles. The
Boone
carried Standard and Harpoon missiles, but it was along as an antisubmarine warfare vessel, carrying two ASW helicopters and a total of twenty-four air-launched and six ship-fired torpedoes.

“Looks like the Japanese are coming back to play,” Patrick commented.

“Hey, guys, I got something,” Patrick reported. “Aircraft lifting off from Pyongyang North airfield, heading for Kanggye. Low altitude. Probably attack jets. I’m picking up a formation of fast-movers lifting off from Seoul as well. Looks like the two formations are going to join up.”

“And here’s their target, I’ll bet,” Paul Scott on Fortress One reported. He had just updated his own laser radar scan with recent data from a NIRTSat reconnaissance scan. The scan detected a long line of heavy vehicles on the principal highway between Kanggye and Anju. “The Chinese tanks are moving fast. They’re twenty miles south of Holch’on, almost at the southern edge of the province. They’re . . . wow, the computer says they’re main battle tanks. A line of tanks probably three miles long on the principal highway. I’ve also got main battle tanks going cross-country along a ten-mile-wide front on either side of the highway. At least two hundred vehicles spread out over twenty miles.”

“Can the system identify them?”

The LADAR ran the laser-derived dimensions through the computer’s large database of vehicles, but the results were inconclusive. “We got everything in the book out there: Chinese Type-59s and-69s, ex-Soviet T-53s and BMPs, self-propelled artillery, the works. I’d want to get a little closer. Ten miles the other way should do it.”

“I’ll pass the contact along to HAWC and to NRO anyway,” Patrick said. “It looks like you picked up something else on that last LADAR image.” Patrick had expanded his virtual cockpit display to show the entire fifty-mile LADAR image. Sure enough, it had detected several Chinese fighters heading south. “Computer identifies them as a large flight of J-6s, heading across the border too,” Patrick said. The J-6, a copy of the old Soviet MiG-19 “Farmer” tactical fighter, was the most
numerous attack jet in China’s large aircraft arsenal. “Looks like four flights of four. China is definitely looking for trouble.”

“If those units on the ground aren’t firing up antiaircraft systems,” Nancy observed, “we can assume that either those vehicles don’t know they’re there—in which case they could’ve been bombed pretty easy—or the vehicles on the ground are Chinese as well.”

“Good point,” David said. “Looks like we got a Chinese ground invasion under way, supported by some air cover. We might get some action tonight, after all.”

“Great,” Rebecca said, tightening her straps even more. “I felt pretty good up here—until now. I feel totally naked now.”

“Your fuel looks good—about an hour before you bingo,” Patrick said. “Electrical, hydraulics, pneumatics, CG in the green. Looks like the fighters are going to stay at midaltitudes. Want to go up high?”