Dark Wing

by Richard Herman

  He descended even lower and laughed to himself as he raked the throttles aft to slow his Hog. He knew what was coming. Ahead of him, Maggot’s jet popped over the ridge line and rolled 135 degrees. He was poised to slice down into Pontowski’s six o’clock position—if he could find him. Pontowski popped in the opposite direction and disappeared over the Dragon’s Teeth and into the Gullet. They were still hidden from each other.

  Enough playing, he thought. He climbed out of the Gullet and rejoined Maggot. “Let’s go home,” he radioed. “This looks like the perfect area for training. You did good.” Two clicks of Maggot’s mike button answered him.

  But Pontowski still wanted to play and they cut lazy eights over the landscape, dodging an occasional karst and skirting villages. They split to avoid flying over a small collection of mud hovels. They knew what jet blast at low level could do to flimsy structures. Maggot went to the right and Pontowski left. “I’ll be damned,” Maggot transmitted as they bracketed the village. “One of our trucks is down there.”

  They slowed and flew a lazy wheel around the village. Below them they saw what looked like a fiesta in progress. The villagers waved at them and they rocked their wings. A tall, bearded figure climbed onto the truck bed and waved. They had found the missing civilian, Charlie Marchioni.

  Does everybody go crazy in this place? Pontowski asked himself. He gave himself a mental kick.

  The ramp was alive with activity when they landed. Maintenance was in the last stages of a practice load out and Pontowski counted twelve Warthogs ready to launch with full bomb loads. Hester and Leonard were waiting for him in the squadron with the results. “How long did it take?” Pontowski asked.

  “It took four hours to load out twelve jets,” Leonard answered.

  Pontowski shook his head. “Too long. Download the birds and we’ll do a repeat tomorrow morning. I want twelve jets loaded out in two hours and twenty-four in four.”

  “That’s a max effort, Boss,” Hester said. “Maintenance will bitch like crazy.”

  “Tough tortillas,” Pontowski snapped. “I want four Hogs launched to the Dragon’s Teeth.” Hester looked confused. “Maggot will explain it. Also, I want some severe training to start tomorrow with the pilots you’re training as forward air controllers. From now on, we’re flying twenty training sorties a day and we’re keeping four jets on a quick reaction alert, twenty-four hours a day.”

  Hester knew better than to argue. “Ordnance on the alert birds?”

  “Load ‘em out wall-to-wall for air to mud.”

  “Sir,” Leonard said, “we’ve got two big problems getting in the way. First, we are not getting enough fuel shipped in to fly that heavy a training schedule and keep a combat reserve. Second, we’ve got LASTE problems. For some reason, LASTE doesn’t like Guilin. Maintenance is having a hell of a time keeping the system peaked and tweaked.”

  “Is Byers back from Hanoi?” Pontowski asked. He got a nod in answer. “I want to see him. Now.”

  The meeting with Byers was short and sweet. Two hours later, he and Larry Tanaka were on their way to Nanning and Charlie Marchioni was standing in front of Pontowski. “What in hell were you doing in that village?” he asked.

  Marchioni was a throwback to the sixties, a hippy grown old. His clothes hung on his tall and slender frame, he needed a haircut, and his sandals were falling apart. His eyes smiled as his mouth spread into a big smile, proving there was life behind his bushy beard. He had sparkling white teeth and a friendly voice. “That’s where I live now. I threw a party.”

  “I needed you here,” Pontowski said. “We’ve got problems with LASTE.”

  “I’ve been around. I like to work at night.”

  “I wish somebody had told me,” Pontowski growled. Marchioni’s smile was still in place. “You’ve got one laid-back outfit here.”

  “Not anymore,” he promised. “Do you have any idea why we can’t keep LASTE aligned?”

  The transformation in Marchioni was instantaneous. He became all business. “It’s the inertial navigation unit. It doesn’t like high humidity. I told Byers to scrounge up all the Honeywell units he can find. Until we get them, I’ll see what I can do about creating moisture barriers around the black boxes.”

  “Get to it.” Pontowski stomped out of the room to set a few more fires.

  “What got under his saddle?” Marchioni asked.

  Sara Waters looked at him. “A war,” she answered. Marchioni didn’t believe her.

  Charlie Marchioni was trudging toward the end hangar when he saw the KC-10. He stopped and watched the Air Force version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 as it turned final. “No way,” he mumbled to himself. The tanker was too big to land at Guilin. Still, it came down final at 150 knots, its huge size making it appear to be flying much slower. The pilot set it down on the main gear at 140 knots and threw the reverse thrusters into the jet exhaust, dragging it to a halt.

  The big tanker paused at the turnoff to the taxiway and let two wing walkers off to guide the pilot. Marchioni was fascinated by the big jet and followed it to the fuel pits, the only place it could park. It was a tight fit and one of the wings blocked the taxipath to the main runway. The engines were still spinning down when the main cargo door popped open and Ray Byers stuck his head out. “Hey, Ray!” Marchioni shouted. “Is this all you could find in a week?”

  “Blow it out your ass,” Byers shot back. He was smiling as the KC-10’s crew chiefs started to defuel the tanker, pumping 135,000 pounds of JP-4 into Guilin’s fuel storage tanks. “We got ourselves one gen-you-ine flyin’ fuel truck,” Byers yelled. The KC-10 was Byers’s solution to the fuel shortage problem. He had convinced Mazie that if an airborne tanker could off-load into fighters, it could off-load into fuel bladders on the ground at Guilin. She had forwarded the idea in her daily report to Carroll and he had made it happen. Besides the fuel, there was another benefit—inside the KC-10 were twenty-three pallets of cargo for the wing.

  Marchioni walked under the jet, examining its main gear, thinking. He talked to one of the crew chiefs and learned they were the California Free Style, the seventy-ninth AFRES out of Travis Air Force Base in California. When he asked what base they were staging out of, the reply was a startling “Cam Ranh Bay.” The old air base in southern Vietnam had been opened up for the Americans by the Vietnamese government.

  Byers joined Marchioni. “Fuel delivery problem solved,” Byers said. “We’re scheduled for two, maybe three a day.”

  “These babies take up a lot of room,” Marchioni said. “Nobody moves while one is on the ground. We better get some ground support equipment in case one breaks and can’t take off.”

  “I can’t think of everything,” Byers grumped. He promised to take care of it. “I got four of the Honeywell units you asked for,” he said. “They’re on the last pallet.”

  The fuel and supply problem for the wing had been solved and a modern version of “flying the Hump” from World War II was underway. But this time, there was no hump, only a short hop from Vietnam.

  As Marchioni had predicted, the KC-10 stopped all movement on the ramp and Frank Hester had to delay his takeoff until the tanker was airborne. He chafed at the delay, anxious to go play as a forward air controller. He loved flying as a FAC, controlling A-10s on close air support missions. It gave him a rare feeling of independence and freedom.

  The close air support procedures that Trimler had worked out with the First Regiment were classic NATO and Hester calculated he would have four pilots checked out as forward air controllers within a week. But today, he had to train ALOs, the air liaison officers the FACs talked to on the ground. A big smile crossed his face as he lifted off and headed for the training area east of the Dragon’s Teeth.

  He never saw the Chinese J-6 fighter that blew him out of the sky with a PL-2 air-to-air missile. The PL-2 was a clone of the Soviet-designed Atoll missile, which in turn was based on the first-generation Sidewinder—a U.S. missile.

  This time, there
was no SIB to investigate the crash, only a small ground party made up of Leonard, Maggot, and Skeeter Ashton. They examined the wreckage, thankful the Chinese had removed the charred remains of the pilot before they got there. But they did have to transport what was left of the body back to Guilin. It was three in the morning when they arrived and Pontowski was waiting for them.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Without a full-blown SIB,” Maggot answered, “we’ll never know for sure.”

  “We got some clues,” Leonard added, drawing on his experience as a safety officer. “Normally, the engines are pretty much in one piece in a crash like this one. The left one was blown all to hell.”

  “I talked to some villagers,” Skeeter said. The time she had spent learning Cantonese was paying dividends. “They saw two other aircraft in the area about the same time. What they described sounded like a Farmer.” The J-6 was a Chinese copy of the Soviet MiG-19, which carried the NATO code name Farmer.

  The men said nothing but Skeeter wouldn’t let it go. “Sir, I’m positive Major Hester was jumped by two Farmers. They got him with an Atoll.” She had her missiles mixed up but not the sequence of events. “If we had an AWACS …” She didn’t need to finish the thought. They all understood that without early warning, even an old fighter like the J-6 could eat the Warthog alive.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Pontowski promised. He looked at Leonard. “Tango, you’re the new ops officer. Maggot, you step into Tango’s old job in training. Starting tomorrow, we train in air-to-air. Hit the sack and get some rest.” He studied their faces. Which one would be next? “This little war is going to get very hot,” he warned them. “Very soon.”

  After they had left for the hotel, Pontowski sat at his desk and tasted a bitterness he had never experienced. Hester was his first loss. He reached for a piece of paper to write the obligatory letter to the dead pilot’s wife. Please, he thought, let me say the right thing. He didn’t know it, but he was praying.

  Dear Lorraine,

  Frank was a good man, one of the best we had, and I know there is little I can say to help with the pain of losing him. Perhaps it helps to know that he believed in what we are doing here, even though some people say it is senseless to be fighting in a foreign country for a people we don’t really know or understand.

  But they are wrong. There is the same basic goodness in these people you find in your neighbors. They hurt and cry the same as we do when their children die, they long for peace as we do, and they have the same hopes for the future. Perhaps that is the best gift we can give them—a future.

  Frank was willing to risk his life for that.

  Sincerely yours,

  Matthew Z. Pontowski

  He fell asleep on the couch in his office.

  Sara Waters walked into the office just after sunrise and saw the dark shape stretched out on the couch. She picked up the letter and read it in the harsh light of day. “Matthew Zachary Pontowski,” she said, “you got it right.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Wednesday, August 14

  Pingnan, China

  With an iron will, Kamigami forced himself to remain calm as more situation reports filtered into the command bunker of the First Regiment. He listened to the reports and his misgivings eased. Operation Dragon Looks East was underway and progressing smoothly. As Trimler had warned, the New China Guard was moving on Wuzhou and his First Regiment was the spearhead.

  Fifty miles, he thought, fifty long miles to Wuzhou. On the map, it looked simple: The New China Guard controlled Pingnan and blocked the PLA from advancing up the Pearl River into the regions controlled by Zou Rong. On the other hand, the PLA controlled Wuzhou and blocked Zou’s forces from threatening Canton and Guangdong Province. It was a classic standoff and for Kamigami, the distance was a no-man’s-land.

  He glanced at the master clock—six hours into the operation. More reports came in and his operations staff updated the situation map. The arrows and small rectangular boxes that identified the units kept advancing on the map with precision toward Wuzhou. They were ahead of schedule.

  A major handed him a note from Trimler in the ASOC, air support operations center. “No enemy activity reported in the vicinity of Teng Xian. Recommend holding A-10s on ground alert and scramble when troops in contact.” Teng Xian, Kamigami thought, the small town that marked the halfway point. He considered Trimler’s recommendation. The AVG had four attack aircraft and two FACs airborne at all times to fly cover for the First Regiment. As of now, the attack birds were just burning fuel. He gave the order to make it happen.

  A deep worry settled over Kamigami. It was too easy.

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to move. He had to see for himself. “Send the headquarters advance party to Teng Xian,” he ordered. He wanted his command post nearer the action.

  “Once they’ve got a new command post established, move the main headquarters unit there. I’m going to the visit the battalions.”

  Kamigami called for the old Huey helicopter that Trimler had found for the headquarters unit and headed for the field. Now he was doing what he wanted.

  The plan called for three of his battalions to advance on a front toward Wuzhou, one south of the Pearl, one along the Pearl, and one to the north. The fourth was held in reserve. He found the headquarters of the First Battalion on the road and landed in a field. The only problem the CO reported was with cheering villagers and PLA soldiers surrendering.

  “Where are their weapons?” Kamigami asked. The embarrassed officer told him the soldiers were part of construction crews and didn’t have any. He climbed back into the helicopter and told his pilot to find the two other battalions.

  The story was the same with the other two battalions, and he flew to Teng Xian in time to meet the headquarters advance party. Trimler was with them and motioned Kamigami aside. “Damn it, Victor,” he complained, “you can’t go off and leave your headquarters every time you get a bug up your ass. Especially when you’re relocating your command post. That’s a sure way to shoot off your own foot.”

  “I know,” he admitted. “But I’ve got to be with my men, in front.”

  Trimler understood only too well. It was the age-old question of where. Does a commander lead from the front or from the rear? Kamigami knew modern warfare required a commander to be at the hub of command and control at the rear. But his heart was with his men.

  A captain hovered just out of earshot for them to finish talking. Kamigami recognized the symptoms and motioned for him to come forward. “Miss Li is here,” the young man said in Cantonese. Kamigami thanked the man as he headed for his new command post. He felt better and the intense worry he felt whenever Jin Chu disappeared on one of her expeditions into the countryside subsided.

  Early the next morning, advance elements of the First Regiment entered Wuzhou unopposed. The general commanding the PLA surrendered the city and immediately pledged his allegiance to Zou Rong and the Republic of Southern China.

  That evening, Kamigami ate a quiet meal with Jin Chu. “I don’t understand it,” he told her. “It was a walk in the sun, nothing. We only experienced token resistance from a few units.”

  “Why are you so worried?” she asked.

  “Because we captured very few weapons,” he answered. “We didn’t get a single tank and only a few crew-served weapons. The soldiers who did surrender were mostly from production or construction crews, not combat units.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “that is because Kang is going to attack another place.”

  “I know. But where?”

  “I dreamed of many fires around our house at Nanning.”

  Friday, August 16

  Nanning, China

  General Kang Xun provided the answer to Kamigami’s question at four o’clock the next morning when a rocket and mortar attack pounded the airfield at Nanning. The empty building the wing had occupied and the J-STARS communication module were leveled in the first barrage. A large commando force swept
across the field, killing everyone they encountered.

  Within minutes, the field was secured as a smaller force hit the combined headquarters building in downtown Nanning. The commandos slaughtered the security guards and the four Americans on duty in the communications section. They searched through the offices, blowing open safes, before torching the building and withdrawing. Von Drexler’s new headquarters compound was not touched.

  Another commando team attacked the compound where Zou Rong lived. But they encountered stiff resistance from his bodyguards and were not able to penetrate beyond the outer wall. They retreated after sending four mortar rounds into the big house.

  Von Drexler learned of the attack when his majordomo woke him with the news.

  Friday, August 16

  Over the South China Sea

  “We have multiple unidentified tracks over the mainland,” the ASO announced over net one of the intercom. The announcement sent a shock wave through the AWACS. Major Marissa LaGrange stood behind his scope and watched as two more bogies were tagged up, bringing the total to nine. “None are hostile,” the ASO said. “All appear to be transports. No fighters.” The red, upside-down Vs that tracked each aircraft changed to green.

  Three more bogies were tagged up. “More of the same,” the ASO announced. They now had twelve tracks. “Definitely not routine traffic,” he said. “But not hostile.”

  “As I recall,” LaGrange muttered, “you said that last time.” The ASO cringed at the prospect of another tongue lashing and changed the green inverted Vs back to red.

  The week before, he had tagged up two Farmers as a routine training mission and then watched as they closed on Frank Hester’s A-10. He had told LaGrange and she had tried to warn the A-10 over Guard, the frequency reserved for emergencies. But the A-10 was out of radio range. The J-STARS aircraft had passed the warning to Nanning for relay to the wing. Even that hadn’t worked. LaGrange had watched helplessly as the Farmers gunned Hester out of the sky. Her profanity had reached epic proportions that day.