WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  “I wouldn’t bet on that, General.”

  “I would,” answered Freeman, turning, grinning and taking Al’s shoulder, steering his aide toward the door. “You go and get all those sky jockeys in that briefing area back there and I’ll show you. By the way,” he asked Al, “you think those young ladies were appeased by my apology for my — er — the language I used? Goddamn,” said the general, shaking his head, “the very thought of using foul language in front of the fair sex fills me—”

  “I’m sure they’re not losing sleep over it, General. Tell you the truth, I think they were rather flattered.”

  “Think so?”

  “From what I’ve heard. Word is, they think you’re ‘cute.’ “

  “Cute? I’ll settle for that. At least not everybody hates my guts for this operation.”

  “The day is young, General,” said Banks. Freeman grunted. Banks was running his eyes down the list of chopper pilots and cabin numbers on the roster. “If I could suggest, General, it might be as well to remember they’ll be called to this impromptu meeting as well. So with all due respect, sir, I ‘d watch my…”

  “I will. Appreciate the advice, Al. I’ll speak to them first— it’ll be clean as a Bible meeting.”

  As Al Banks closed the door to the general’s cabin and made his way forward along the seemingly never-ending cream passageway, with aquamarine trim — some psychologist at the Pentagon had said “pastels” increased morale — Banks knew it was going to take a lot more than pastels to get the chopper pilots to go along with the general’s dangerous plan. He made a bet with himself that they’d object loud and clear. The marines, of course, weren’t included in the bet. They would fly into hell if ordered. They thought a “request” was some kind of fatal disease. No, it would definitely be the helo pilots who’d balk — after all, they’d be the ones who would have to navigate and fly through it. Then Freeman would be forced to either order them aloft into the monsoon’s fury or wait till it had passed.

  The forty chopper pilots filed in, sleepy-eyed, resentful at being turned out at such an hour.

  “ Atten-hun!” called Banks. There was scraping of chairs and Banks saluted as the general, clean-shaven, immaculately trimmed, his general’s star bright on the drab camouflage background of his battle dress uniform, took the podium.

  “Be seated,” said the general. It was easy for the audience to do, most of the forty-odd pilots still half-asleep.

  “We are going into battle at last!” added Freeman dramatically. It had its intended effect — waking up any of those in danger of nodding off.

  “Washington’s given us the green light. As you know, there’s a storm — monsoon — heading our way. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of sitting around on this bucket—” Freeman, seeing the look of alarm sweeping across Al Banks’s face, quickly held up his hand. “No offense to a worthy ship or those who sail aboard her. Fine ship. Now,” said the general, arms akimbo, left hand resting on the holster, a pugnacious set of his chin telling everyone that he was ready, “I hear the calmest place in the world is in the eye of the storm.” He flashed a grin.

  “How ‘bout getting out again, General?”

  Banks turned his head, frowning reproachfully at the interjection. Had to be a regular army jockey; a marine pilot would never have interrupted an officer like this. But, surprisingly to Banks, Freeman, with his fast-spreading reputation aboard Saipan as a stickler for discipline, didn’t seem to mind the question. The general’s camouflage Kevlar helmet, its wider, much less rounded contour so different from the old steel U.S. helmet, rose slightly as Freeman’s eyes sought out the questioner way in the back.

  “You fly out, son. Same way as you go in.”

  Many of the pilots were shifting uneasily in their chairs.

  “Of course,” continued Freeman, “it will be strictly voluntary. No one will think any worse of you, except me, if you don’t.” Then in a flash of an eye Freeman fixed his gaze on the three women pilots in the front row. “McMurtry — how about you? Game for it?”

  “Ah — ah — yes, sir!”

  “Outstanding,” answered Freeman. “I’ll fly in with you. Chopper One. Anybody else?” He looked up, smiling, as if getting ready for a picnic, wondering who’d volunteer to bring the hot dogs.

  The two other women were putting up their hands, followed by every pilot, including the “driver” of He-26, who was shaking his head even as he was volunteering. “That son of a bitch,” he whispered to his copilot. “Fuck — we’ve got a mad general, a fucking monsoon, and fucking Dopey on the chain gun. What more could you ask for?”

  “Hey, buddy — if you can’t take a joke—”

  He-26’s pilot nodded.”Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’a joined. I didn’t. I was drafted. This gung ho son of a bitch is gonna get us all killed.”

  “You volunteered, my friend,” said a tall Negro pilot to his left, the LPH’s resident slam-dunker at the basket.

  “Well,” said He-26, “Whatcha gonna do? Three pussies put up their mitt—’yes, sir, I’ll go and get killed with you.’ “ He-26 turned to the basketball player. “Whatcha gonna do?” he repeated.

  “Then,” said the basketball player, all smiles, “he isn’t such a dumb son of a bitch after all.”

  “Well — he’s a son of a bitch.”

  “That goes with the star,” said Basketball.

  “I guess. Jesus, I could do with a Bud.”

  Down below in what the marines had dubbed the “dungeon,” the assembly deck, marines were buckling up, getting ready to go after hearing the first news of the pilots’ “volunteering. “ The marines were glad to be on their feet; at least they were doing something. The regular army platoons drafted from Freeman’s infantry support company were grouching, tabbing the three women pilots who had started the “mass hysteria,” as they called it, “Lippy, Hippy, and Titty.” Despite the grumbling, most of them, like the marines, were glad to be heading off shortly from the rolling, vomit-stinking LPH, quite a few of the men having been sickened by the constant yawing and dipping of the ship and by breathing in fuel exhaust as choppers were warmed up, the wind gusting so badly that often fumes were driven back down the stacks.

  “Wait until you get airborne,” said one of the marines, clicking on his Kevlar flak vest. “Make this rockin’ and rollin’ down here seems like kids’ stuff.”

  “Bullshit!” said one of the regulars, taking his place on the parallel chalk lines, his platoon assembling. “I’ve been in a chopper before. Think I’m green or something?”

  “A mite green about the gills, I’d say,” said the marine.

  “Bullshit!” the man repeated. “I’ve been airborne before.”

  “In a monsoon!” asked the marine, now checking his MIRE freeze-dried, ready-to-eat meal pack. “Care for some beef stew?”

  “Animals,” said the regular. “They’re animals, those marines,” he told his buddy.

  “Yeah,” said the other regular. “Have to be, where we’re goin’.”

  Suddenly they heard a boom, like some huge doors on a warehouse opening, and a Klaxon alarm — the elevator warning — the ship’s platform ready to take up the first load of Apache gunships. The transporter choppers would follow.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  The twin-engined Prowlers, six of them, with Tomcats covering, were now crossing the North Korean coast, their ECM jammers in the wing pods and in bulging rear fin tips ready to do battle with “Charlie’s”—in this case, the North Koreans’—beams, airborne or ground.

  It was hoped that by the time the subsonic two-seater Prowlers with their Tomcats cover were approaching Pyongyang, pulsing down their countermeasure beams from the ALQ-99 jammers, Shirer’s wave of Tomcats would be ready to “clear the lanes” of any MiGs that might try to intercept Saipan’s chopper force. Hauling field-pack 155 howitzers, two 125-ton Galaxies were being escorted across the sea of Japan by six Phantoms, each carrying a “buddy” refueling pod.

  A
t sixteen thousand feet above the weather, the first diamond of Tomcats, riding shotgun for the unarmed Prowlers at nine thousand feet, were on radio silence. Seventy-one miles in from the North Korean coast, over Changdori, the Tomcat leader saw a blip, one of the twelve Prowlers dribbling to the right off his NEPRA — his nonemitting passive-mode radar — screen. There was no call for help from any of the twelve electronic countermeasures aircrafts, for that would have meant breaking the radio silence, and the Tomcat leader assumed, correctly, that the lone Prowler in the monsoon was experiencing mechanical difficulties. Its gap in the Prowler wedge was filled, the rest of the Prowlers closing up as if guided by some invisible hand. It gave the Tomcat leader a quiet sense of pride in the professionalism of the carrier’s family of pilots. The Prowler might be forced to ditch, but rather than emit a giveaway signal, it had simply turned off into the monsoon-torn night alone, any call for help calmly stifled until the plane returned to the carrier’s patrol zone — if it got that far.

  Despite all the alarms aboard his F-14, the Tomcat pilot’s eyes kept monitoring the instruments, moving from altimeter, bottom left of the HUD assembly, to the banks of dials below the compass on his right.

  Aboard the Prowlers it was rough going, the black torrential downpour shot through with pockets of less dense air, the unarmed planes having a bumpy ride that irritated the two ECM officers in the rear compartment, for as good as the ALQ-99 jammers were, the turbulence didn’t help.

  A hundred miles behind them, coming westward over the Sea of Japan, was the small armada of forty Chinook choppers, led by an arrowhead formation of five fierce-eyed Apache helos. Each of the helos sprouted wing pods of nineteen 2.75-inch rockets apiece, an infrared TV masthead sight, and laser range finder for eight Hellfire missiles and the Hughes chain gun.

  As the lead Apache rose from a thousand feet above sea level, its copilot saw the red light go on above the “check on systems” display and heard the accompanying buzzer warning them they had insufficient power for the steep climb over the Taebek Mountain range, invisible in the rain but not more than five miles away. The pilot glanced across at the terrain-contouring-map video display confirming they were getting too close to the peaks around Konjin to make any shallower-angled approach, which, in any case, would require breaking formation.

  “Lose the port Sidewinder!” ordered the pilot.

  “Done,” replied the copilot.

  “That was quick.”

  “Red light’s still on.”

  “Lose the other one,” said the pilot. The light went off, the chopper’s rate of climb increasing. “You were next,” he told the copilot.

  “Thanks.”

  They had just sacrificed their two best antiaircraft defenses in order to better protect the troops following them in the Chinooks.

  Ten minutes from Pyongyang on the Tomcat’s NEPRA screen, a blip was appearing on the far right. Very fast. Then another. Three more — the dots heading for the eleven Prowlers.

  The Tomcat leader switched on his air-to-air Sidewinders, heard their growl, and called to the flight, “Tomcat leader. Five Bogeys, maybe more, one o’clock — twelve thousand. Strikers go!”

  These were the six Tomcats in front of the diamond, now going down behind the Prowlers, who were already starting to pour down their rain of powerful beams to overwhelm the SAM radars, and dropping chaff as well.

  In the semicircle of twelve three-missile-apiece SAM sites east of the city, NKA operators hit the siren buttons as their radars suddenly turned to snow, the eleven Prowlers coming down guided by their red TERCOM — terrain-contour-guided radars. With a constant video feed of mountains, dips, and rivers flashing by, the pilots and crew in their blinkered canopies, windshield wipers on overtime and no use at all, the planes effectively flew themselves. This allowed the two EWOs in the rear section of the plane to direct their jamming beams at any energy source distinct enough to look as if it might be trying to “burn” its way through the heavy-duty beam screen of the Prowlers. Three of the Prowlers were destroyed in twelve seconds, balls of curling orange as the MiGs, now twenty in all, screamed in from the west, another seven from the north, the squadron of MiGs on the ground at Pyongyang Airport all but wiped out by three of the Tomcats striking with two-thousand-pound laser slide “walleye” bombs.

  A MiG, unable to come out of the turn, smashed into the flatland west of Turu Islet on the bottom left-hand stretch of the S made up of the Potong River and the much wider Taedong. Halfway up the S, where the river straightened between two islands and flowed under Taedong and Okryu bridges, it passed Kim Il Sung Square. Beyond the square was the wing-tipped Grand People’s Study House, and near the riverbank, framing the square, the Korean Art Gallery to the south, the History Museum to the north. But now none of this was visible except as sharp angular shapes on the helos’ video displays. Several SAM sites sprang to life, firing blindly, radars jammed but hoping to bring down the “American pirates,” as a hysterical Pyongyang Polly was describing them on state radio before it, too, went dead.

  “Think they’ll expect troops, General?” Lt. Sandy McMurtry asked Freeman in the lead Chinook.

  Freeman tightened his helmet’s chin strap, smacking her affectionately on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Lieutenant — they just think it’s a bombing mission.” He pointed at the Chinook’s radar. “Moment those helo gunships break for perimeter defense, you take me right on down where I told you.”

  McMurtry had already keyed in the square that she and the others had gone over so often in their minds during the pre-op discussions on the LPH while Washington had whiled away the time, or so it seemed to them, making up its mind. For a second McMurtry saw the distinctive shape of the ninety-foot-high Arch of Triumph, a slavishly brutal imitation of the Parisian original, and south of it the outline of the Chollima, the famed winged horse of Korean legend. Then momentarily everything was lost as stalks of searchlights exploded from the defensive circle ringing the city and now crisscrossed the sky, reaching up, feeling the rainy darkness for the enemy bombers who, Pyongyang Polly had said, were trying to pollute the sacred birthplace of “our dear beloved leader.”

  Amid the chaotic sound of rain, intermixed with antiaircraft fire and the never-ending electronic beeping of warning and centering indicators, McMurtry’s earphones were nothing but a garble of noise as Prowlers and the NKA AA batteries engaged in a war of the beams, for without targets, the huge twelve-finned Soviet SAMs were useless.

  In the torrential downpour of the monsoon, which lowered visibility to zero, it was all instrument flying and landing for the helos, and here the American know-how was overwhelmingly superior, the Prowlers “frying” the NKA’s radar screens clean of any targetable image, allowing the Tomcats streaking in behind to drop their five-hundred-pounders with a devastating accuracy not seen since the Vietnam War.

  “Bogey on your tail,” yelled a wingman, the striker leader, his bomb gone, hitting the button, going from air-to-ground to air-to-air in milliseconds, screaming up deep into the monsoon, and gone in a crimson flash, a collision with a MiG on the cross vector.

  “Aw shit!” said the wingman, going into a roll, locking on to a MiG’s afterburner and engaging his own, his Tomcat now on full war power, its fuel consumption ten times its pre-afterburner phase, heading into the three-minute zone in which he’d use up a third of his total fuel, his wing automatically sweeping back now that the bomb load had been dropped from the more stable wings-out position. He saw the MiG in his sights, pressed the cannon. The MiG was gone — not hit — quickly reducing speed, the American overflying him so that now he was up again behind the American, his air-to-air Aphid waiting for the growl, not sure whether he heard it in the confusion, waiting for the light. The American broke, so did he, both into scissors at the same time, their reaction times to this point exactly on par. The American popped four incendiary flares and dropped, the Aphid catching one of the flares, exploding. The wingman looked for the MiG, but he’d vanished, another
missile, American or Russian, he couldn’t tell, passing well ahead.

  As the Prowlers completed their turn south, one of the city’s searchlights, having given them up, lucked out on one of the Apaches. Suddenly all the searchlights converged on the Apache. The helo pilot tapped down his sun visor, put the Apache’s nose down, and fired both pods: thirty-eight 2.75-inch rockets. Four of the beams died to pale yellow, then nothing. The Apache was still coming down fast in the strange white-black river of night and searchlights, the copilot picking up a SAM site in a searchlight’s spill.

  “Let ‘em go!” said the chopper pilot, the copilot firing all eight Hellfires, the helo’s underchin chain gun spitting a long, bluish-white tongue down at the NKA’s SAM site. The SAM site exploded, the chopper, its rear rotor’s pitch-change spider damaged by AA fire, canting crazily to seventy degrees, the small blades chopping into the tail drive gearbox. The pilot glanced across at the copilot — he was dead, head slumped, lolling in the turbulence of low air currents, the rain so hard it sounded like a hose on the fuselage as the Apache’s pilot braced for the crash. The helo smashed into the dark blanket that was Changsan Park on the city’s northern outskirts. Its explosion terrified the well-to-do Party administrators celebrating the imminent victory, in a day or so at the most — when General Kim’s komtbt— “bear trap”—would clang shut on the Yosu/Pusan pocket. They had just drunk to the extermination of the mikuk chapnomtul— “American bastards”—and their ROK lackeys.

  The thirty-seven remaining troop transports, three taken out by MiGs, were now chopping air, settling down on the big square, using infrared, Freeman having already selected the huge concrete bulks of the Art Gallery and History Museum as flank protection, as well as the thickly treed parks about the square, which would give added protection from the small-arms fire that was bound to open up.