by Ian Slater
“Angel Leader,” acknowledged the Tomcat pilot. “Go ahead.”
“Fire Fox One at each Bogey. Repeat, fire Fox One at each Bogey.”
The RIO — radar intercept officer — behind the pilot in each Tomcat wondered what in hell Shirer was up to. Very soon each of their Fox One air-to-air radar-homing Sparrow missiles would be ready, the fast-closing Fulcrums within range, but why, they wondered, fire now — allowing the Bogeys to have at least ten to fifteen seconds to “jinx” their way out of it, particularly when the Fulcrum was so highly maneuverable?
But orders were orders, all three RIOs in the Tomcats going to “warning yellow, weapons hold” status, each of the RIOs straining to hear the tone alert — a low growl in their earpiece telling them the missile was fully armed and ready for launch.
Back in the general’s compartment, Col. Jim Norton was ill, the 747 continuing its hair-raising forty-degree dive, buffeted by so much turbulence, the whole plane seemed to be rattling to pieces, Norton convinced his stomach was now in his chest — or was it the other way around? — blocking his breathing. Glistening in the redded-out combat lighting of the aircraft, the droplets of sweat on his forehead looked like hundreds of tiny rubies.
“Now, don’t you worry about it, Jim,” Freeman assured him. “That boy up in front is gonna put this bird down in Seoul in no time.”
Norton couldn’t speak, unable even to articulate his terror, the veins in his hands standing out like dark strings as he clenched the armrests, eyes discombobulated, mouth parchment-dry, his heart thumping rapidly, doubly mortified at exhibiting such fright in front of Freeman, and painfully conscious again of the great and terrible divide between a civilian aircraft and a military one. Here the noise was at once thunderous and screaming as it fell through the blackness, the nausea, indescribable in its clammy dizziness, overtaking him in a suffocating net.
“Fix your eye on something middistance, Jim,” Freeman instructed him. “Helps keep your balance.”
It was the stupidest goddamn thing the colonel had ever heard Freeman utter — there wasn’t anything fixed! Everything was spinning out of control. Christ! He wished the general would just shut up and let him die.
In the Tomcats, the radar intercept officers got the tone alert.
“Master arm on,” announced the Tomcat leader. “Centering up the T. Bogeys twenty-one miles. Centering the dot… Fox One, Fox One!”
The next rush of conversation between the Angel pilots and their RIOs surged with static and was full of overlay so that it was difficult for Shirer to know exactly who was speaking. Battling with the yoke in heavy turbulence at ten thousand feet, he heard his copilot yelling, “There they go!” the exhaust of the 524-pound American missiles lighting the clouds nearby in a momentary and astonishingly beautiful peach glow, and then six seconds later, a fast, broken chorus of “Good kill! Good kill!… Shoot him!…”
“Haven’t got a fucking tone…”
“Shoot him… Shoot…!”
“Christ!” said Shirer’s copilot, seeing a blip on the Boeing’s radar screen disintegrating. “They got one of ours!”
Shirer was fighting to keep the Boeing in the steep dive, slipping farther away from the point of intercept, the babble of the Tomcats now interspersed with Russian: “ ‘Unichtozhit’!… ‘Unichtozhit’!”—”Finish him off!… Finish him off!”
“Lock him up! Lock him up!” a Tomcat pilot was yelling to his RIO. Then “Good kill! Good kill!” the RIO yelling, “Bogey missile… two o’clock high… two o’—”
“Jesus!…”
Behind Shirer, at the consoles, chaff and wide infrared-band flares were being jettisoned to confound the Fulcrum’s missile, which the COMCO saw wasn’t aimed at the Tomcats but was streaking toward the 747 at over twenty-one hundred miles an hour.
The console operator, his body at a down angle of thirty degrees, face bathed in perspiration, fought with everything he had to maintain control of the scrambler beam he was “coning” in on the incoming missile; any wider cone and he would interfere with the avionics in the Tomcats. The Russian missile, a quarter mile away, curled hard left and exploded, an amber blossom on the 747’s console screen. Seconds later the shock wave and debris hit the Boeing, and Shirer saw the warning light for the starboard two engine flashing, its intake fouled, temperature soaring. He shut it down but still kept diving, hard to port, down toward the sea. As long as there were Bogeys in the area, he wanted to get down low where the Boeing’s upward-looking radar could pinpoint the attackers for electronic countermeasures but where the Fulcrum’s downward-looking radar would be confounded in an electronic haze of sea scatter.
“Bogey contact!” Shirer heard from somewhere high above him in the night sky. “Judy at ten o’clock. Splash!” It told Shirer that one of the two remaining Fulcrums was down.
“One to go!” came an exhilarated cry.
“Angel Leader to Angel Two. That’s it. Break off… Let him go.”
“Aw, shit!”
“Let him go!” repeated the Tomcat leader. “Cover the big bird. That’s our job.”
“You see any eject?” asked the second Tomcat pilot.
“Negative.”
Sergei Marchenko didn’t know who the pilot of Freeman’s Boeing was, but whoever it had been, he knew his business. The Boeing was lost, and all that he was getting on his radar screen was the leaping “frying” static of sea clutter, like a television set gone haywire, and in the dogfight he’d used up so much fuel, he knew it was opasnoe delo—”touch and go”—as to whether he’d make it back to Vladivostok, let alone Khabarovsk. And he suspected that one of the Tomcat’s rotary-barreled twenty-millimeter cannons might have taken a chunk out of the fuselage covering his nose landing wheel. There was no warning light on, but air speed indicated there was a drag somewhere, and even if the hydraulics hadn’t been hit, the Tomcat’s short burst had made a hole somewhere — big enough to slow him down.
He punched in the coordinates for Vladivostok return, the computer telling him he’d be on empty fifty to a hundred miles before, depending on headwinds. He jettisoned his remaining 101 R Alamo air-to-air missile, which made him 350 pounds lighter. Fate willing, this might just do the trick. Alert, yet fatigued from the combat in which he had downed one of the F-14s, he thought for a moment of Alexsandra, of her long, dark hair, the slow way she unpinned it before they made love. If he got back, he was going to see her again — and to hell with Nefski. There was nothing gentle about his desire for her, no sense of protecting her from Nefski or himself, only the sheer drive, after having cheated death once more, to have her with all the force he could muster. But first he’d have to fill out a zayavlenie o poteryanom imushchestve—”lost-property report”—explaining, on the prosaic gray form, why he’d dumped millions of rubles’ worth of air-to-air radar-homing missile. Well, he asked himself, what did they want? A top ace in Far Eastern Command or an easily replaceable missile?
* * *
As the Boeing 747, still 170 miles away, below the radar screen, approached the South Korean east coast, F-16s were leaving Taegu in the south to look for it, while in Seoul, the aides of Freeman’s hastily assembled advance staff waited anxiously for word of whether or not the 747 had made it — and if so, whether the general was still alive.
Shirer maintained total radio silence as he continued over the sea, beginning his climb off Yongdok to cross over the six-thousand-foot-high hump of the Taebaek range, then descending, still on three engines, over the western lowlands, out over Inchon, using up gasoline, fuel gauges showing a leak in the left wing tanks, the gas vaporizing, streaming along on the port-side fuselage.
Shirer wanted only enough kerosene left to land and was too careful a pilot to consider himself as good as home as he let the Boeing’s nose dip, then lift, as he approached Kimpo Field, the “foamed” airstrip rushing at him in the night like a long streak of shaving cream, neither ground control, Shirer, nor his copilot able to tell from visual flyover whether th
e landing wheels were fully extended, the warning lights blinking but erratic.
His handling was as perfect as a pilot could make it under the conditions, but not until after he heard the banshee scream of the engines as he applied the brakes — enough to control the skid in the fire-retardant foam — then shut the engines down, was he satisfied.
Freeman was the first man in the cockpit, wearing a broad grin. Shirer was slightly disappointed — the least the general could have done was to have been as scared as most everybody else on the plane.
“You said you missed combat flying, Major,” Freeman said. “Hell, I bet that’s the best damn sortie you’ve flown!”
Shirer smiled politely and felt the general’s firm congratulatory handshake for a job well done. “By God,” said the general, “I’m going to recommend you and your copilot for a decoration.”
Shirer knew immediately it was one of those moments that might never come again. “General… sir. May I make a request?”
“Shoot!”
“Well, sir, I know I’ve been seconded to fly Air Force One VIPs, but—”
“Permission denied, Major,” said Freeman, but without rancor, and as dispassionately as his gratitude for Shirer’s outstanding flying would allow. “You ordered those Tomcats to fire missiles when the enemy was barely in range. Why was that?”
There was a spurt of air traffic control talk from Kimpo tower and Shirer hit the squelch button, shrugging with professional nonchalance. “Thing to do, General. Figured they must be carrying drop tanks, given the return distance to Vladivostok, and before they’d go into action, they’d drop ‘em. Those tanks weigh you down a ton, General — reduce speed down to — well, like I say, I figured if we got away a few Sparrows at ‘em, they’d have to start maneuvering pretty damn quick, otherwise they’d be blown out of—”
“So you forced ‘em to drop the tanks?” cut in Freeman. “Dump a whole bunch of fuel — reduce their attack time to hell and gone.”
“Yes,” said Shirer matter-of-factly. “That was the idea. Why do you ask, sir?”
Freeman shook his head, but it was a gesture not of incredulity but of admiration. “Shirer, you realize how many 747 jockeys would have thought of that? And as fast as you did? Only a combat pilot — look, I’ll give it to you plain and simple. I know you’re not as happy on board this airborne bunker as everyone here thinks you are, right?”
Shirer’s answer was tight with passion. “Sir, I wasn’t trained to run away from MiGs. My job — my whole reason for — sir, my job’s to splash ‘em. That’s what I’m paid for — not to—”
“You’re paid to do what you’re told. Request for retransfer to fighter command denied. If everything suddenly goes to hell in a handbasket and the president has to go up in his Taj Mahal, I can’t think of a better man to be driving it.”
Shirer’s jaw clenched. “Yes, sir.” Shirer saluted Freeman, who returned the salute and moved out of the cockpit, Colonel Norton standing outside by the first console with a goofy grin, in stunned wonder at his deliverance. He hadn’t stopped shaking but was looking about the plane as if seeing it for the first time, as if God had descended. Aides from Seoul HQ were now pouring into the aircraft. Suddenly Freeman turned back to look at Shirer, still strapped into the pilot’s seat, his shirt soaked with sweat. “Major?”
“Sir?” Shirer’s tone was militarily correct but bordering on “carrier sulk,” the kind of pretantrum dog-in-the-manger mope that carrier pilots went into when the deck boss, for whatever reason, grounded them.
“How long do you think it’ll take them to fix this bird up?”
“No idea, General,” said Shirer, indicating the copilot, who was in dreamland over the possibility of a decoration from the legendary Freeman. “Ah—” began the copilot, “ah, three to four days, sir — if we’re lucky. Maybe more. There’s the engine, leaking gas, wing patch—”
“All right,” said Freeman impatiently, holding up his hand to thwart the copilot’s apparently endless list, and looking back now at Shirer. “If we can get you a fighter, you can keep your hand in until this bird is ready.” Shirer’s face was transformed — a schoolboy flush.
“Now, just hold your horses,” Freeman warned him. “First I need to know—” He stopped. “Goddamn it, I’m the Supreme Commander Korea—” With that, he shouted above the bevy of aides. “Air Force liaison?”
“Me, sir. Richards.”
“Richards! Doug Richards! By God, I thought you were dead. Someone told me you got an assful of shrapnel up around Nampo.”
“Just half an assful, General.” Loud laughter filled the plane.
“Well, Richards, can we get a Tomcat, F-16—anything fast enough for this gentleman? And I don’t mean those ladies around Itaewon Barracks.”
“Think I can dig one up, sir — a plane, I mean.”
“Good. Because this man wants to shoot Communists. Doesn’t like the idea of being fired on without being able to fire back. Reasonable enough, seems to me. And by God, we can help him partway at least. Flew cover for us at Pyongyang!”
“In that case, I’ll guarantee it, sir,” said Richards. He called through the narrow passageway to Shirer. “See me after debriefing, Major.”
“Yes, sir!” said Shirer, even though Richards, a captain, was a full rank below him. Making their way out of the plane toward the gangway, Colonel Norton thought it prudent to remind the general that his impetuous ad hoc order to let Shirer get his hand back into fighters might not go down well with the Pentagon brass who’d had him transferred for Taj Mahal duty.
“Hell, Jim,” Freeman responded, “don’t be such an old woman. I know it’s a risk. Could lose him. But if we don’t let a man like that fight — he won’t get the shame of turning tail out of his system. I know exactly how he feels. It’s everything to a warrior. That was his job. His raison d’être. He gets a crack or two at those Commies over the Yalu the next few days— he’ll be back to his old self. Come back and drive this monster without resentment. Method in my madness, Jim.”
“The president,” said Norton, “has specifically ordered us not to antagonize the Chinese. I mean, that goes for our pilots as well as our men on the ground. We’re only supposed to push them back to the Manchurian border and that’s it. Not to go over the Yalu.”
“And let ‘em shoot at us with impunity from the other side?” said Freeman, shaking his head with incredulity. “No, Jim. Last time we tried pussyfooting around with those sons of bitches, we had our boys freezing to death all along the Yalu— facing Chinese regulars — thousands of the bastards — sitting across the river, and we couldn’t fire — by presidential decree. And our boys died — by the bushel. No, Jim—” He caught his breath in the icy blast that funneled its way up from the tarmac as they started down the steps. Freeman buttoned up his coat and saluted the assembled dignitaries below. “Don’t worry, Jim. It’ll be all right. We are going to launch air reconnaissance patrols in force across the Yalu. Purely reconnaissance, you understand. Course, if any Son of Heaven shows his ass, we’re gonna shoot it off. Jim, we’ve got to maintain the Yalu as a moat — if they get close to us…”He stopped as he saw the provisional president of South Korea, Rah, moving forward to greet him.
Freeman was all smiles and diplomacy, thanking the president for his personal greeting, and genuinely touched that he had come out himself, but Freeman was really only interested in General Kim: the commander in chief of the NKA army now recouping and massing troops behind the protection of the North Korean-Chinese border along the Yalu and Tamur, and attacking, mainly at night. The most forward American line, he was told, had collapsed and was now no more than a series of outposts, while General Creigh continued to fall back to Ku-song, with over 70 percent casualties. It had been the worst American retreat anywhere in the war.
“Tomorrow morning,” the South Korean president was informing the general, “we have arranged an official reception—”
“Mr. President,” Freeman interjected. “
I thank you kindly, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend. I’ll send a representative, of course, but I’ll be heading for the front.”
“But, surely,” began President Rah, “the general will need to rest—”
“With all due respect, Mr. President, my boys aren’t resting on the Yalu front. My place is with them. I thank you all the same. And Mr. President, I’ve been told by President Mayne to convey his best wishes to you and Madame Rah.”
“Thank you, General. Of course I—”
Freeman’s car had arrived.
* * *
As regulations demanded, the 747’s debriefing was attended by Shirer, the copilot, and all console operators, as well as by Jim Norton, who joined in watching the Boeing’s infrared video replays of the attack with a strange combination of relish and exhilaration that owed as much to the safety of the underground bunker they were viewing it in as to Norton’s euphoria at having come so close to death and surviving. Though he would have been loath to admit it, he had never experienced such a high.
“There they are,” said one of the console operators through the haze of tobacco smoke. “You were right, Freddie. MiGs — definitely Fulcrums.” Another fighter was blurred by the heat wash of the missile it was firing. Shirer noted “1931 hrs” registered in the bottom right-hand corner of the video frame, the time the copilot had told him a missile was inbound.
“Hold it!” Shirer called out. “Can you run that back?” The hazy number on the fuselage under the Fulcrum’s wing was due not only to angle of the 747’s camera but to the fact that the MiG had been on full afterburner, further blurring the image. But running the frame back, freezing it, and going in with the zoom, you could see it was number nine — Russian Cyrillic lettering next to it: “Ubiytsa Yanki”.”
“What the hell’s that?” asked one of the operators.
“Number nine, you hayseed!”
“I know that. I mean that other crap — Jimmy?”
Jimmy, one of the 747’s four Russian-speaking intercept operators, had nodded off but said he couldn’t see because of the guy in front of him. They ran back the video. He walked up close to the screen.