Dark Wing

by Richard Herman

  “Tango, Jake,” Moose Penko’s distinctive voice called, “snap zero-seven-zero. Bandits on your nose at eighteen, angels three. Kill, repeat, kill.”

  Pontowski explained the radio call to Waters. “Moose gave them a heading of zero-seven-zero degrees into the bandits, who are eighteen nautical miles away and at three thousand feet.” He didn’t need to explain the “kill” order. Waters’s face paled and her lips were compressed into a tight line. They waited.

  “Tallyho,” Leonard radioed. His voice was staccato sharp. “Fantans. Maybe twenty. We’re engaged. Jake, shoot ‘em in the face and blow on through. Head for the deck.”

  “Good thinking,” Pontowski muttered to no one.

  “I’m on the lead,” Jake transmitted. He was yelling.

  “Rog,” Leonard answered, much calmer but still speaking very fast. “I’ll stuff number three.” They could hear a growl in the background when Leonard transmitted—the seeker head on his Sidewinder was tracking.

  Almost simultaneously they heard a double-barreled “Fox Two. Fox Two.” Both men had launched a missile at the oncoming bandits.

  “Splash one!” Jake radioed. His Sidewinder had blown an A-5 Fantan out of the sky.

  “Splash two,” Tango added. “They’re jettisoning their loads. Holy shit! They’re on us. Jake, break left, take ‘er down.”

  Pontowski was on the mike. “Tango, drag the fight over the base. We can nail some of the bastards.” He was looking at the ceiling, trying to visualize the fight that was going on above them. He heard the sound of running feet. Waters was running up the stairs.

  Anxiety and fear drove her outside and she ran through the sandbagged zig-zag that protected the bunker entry from bomb blasts. She burst into the open, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She was panting, not from the exertion but from the fear that was pounding at her. It was irrational but she had to be with him, to see him. By sheer willpower, she would keep the man she loved safe from harm.

  An A-10 flew over her, so low that she fell to the ground. The jet blast blew dirt over her. She raised her head in time to see it climb sharply to the left and reverse course, still below a hundred feet. Its nose erupted in smoke and a loud growl washed over her as the pilot squeezed off a short burst of cannon fire at a Chinese fighter, a Fantan, maneuvering above him. He missed and the Fantan climbed skyward as the Warthog turned back to the right. Another Warthog flashed over the field, also below a hundred feet. Which one was Leonard?

  Above her, she counted at least six, maybe seven Fantans, silhouetted below a thick cloud deck moving over the field. The Fantans were sandwiched below the clouds at two thousand feet, going in every direction. Now she realized the two Warthogs were on opposite sides of a big circle on the deck, daring the Fantans to come down and engage in their environment. She sucked in her breath as one rolled up on a wing and turned sharply. For a moment, she was certain its wingtip had brushed the ground. It accelerated straight ahead, breaking out of the circle.

  A streak of smoke reached up from the ground toward the Fantans—a Stinger missile. A Fantan flared and tumbled to earth, exploding on the far side of the runway.

  The Warthog that was going straight ahead pulled up and a Sidewinder leaped from under its wing. The speed of the missile surprised her as it homed on a Fantan. The Warthog twisted on its axis, diving for the ground, as the second Fantan exploded. Two more Stingers leaped skyward from their bunkered positions—positions she had helped site. A third Fantan disappeared in a fireball.

  To her horror, a Fantan swooped down on one of the Warthogs in a hit-and-run attack. This time, she heard a machine gun-like rumble as the Fantan fired its twenty-three-millimeter cannon. The Warthog tumbled into the ground and exploded in a long trail of fire and smoke. She couldn’t move—was it Leonard or his wingman, Jake Trisher? She didn’t know.

  The other Warthog turned into the escaping Fantan that was turning hard to the right at five hundred feet above the ground. This time, the fight was farther away and she saw smoke bloom from the Warthog’s nose and the Fantan come apart before she heard the cannon fire.

  Then it was over. The Warthog was alone in the sky.

  The lone A-10 climbed to a thousand feet and circled to land. Waters fell to her knees as uncontrollable tremors wracked her body. An arm was around her, holding her tight. It was Pontowski. “Tango’s okay,” he said. He had followed the fight over the radios in the bunker.

  She looked at him, relief flooding her eyes. “Not again,” she whispered. “Please, God, not again.” He held her tight, not saying a word.

  Tango Leonard was standing in the bunker next to Pontowski. His flight suit was streaked with dark sweat lines and the marks left by his oxygen mask were imprinted in his face. He held a half-empty water bottle. He had flown less than fifteen minutes and fatigue weighed heavily on him, yet his voice was normal as he recounted the mission. “They don’t want to come below a thousand feet,” he said. “My best guess is that they don’t train for low level.” For a Warthog driver, flying low was a way of life. “Also, they didn’t really rack up the gs in turns. I’d say they don’t wear g-suits. Both give us an advantage, but I got to tell you, they are gutsy jocks.”

  “They’ll learn fast,” Pontowski replied. “We’ll have to stay clear of them.”

  “We’ve done okay so far,” Leonard said. “One for six is not a bad exchange. And they didn’t get a single bomb off.”

  Waters wanted to shout at him. “That ‘one’ you mentioned,” she finally said, “was Jake Trisher.” No one answered her. The radios squawked as Maggot recovered from the first mission and four more Warthogs taxied out. The war was going on and they would have to grieve later for their lost comrade.

  For Pontowski, the numbers were back: 45 pilots, 29 aircraft. Will there be more? he thought. He knew the answer. He scanned the boards, looking ahead. When would he send Leonard back into the maw of combat? When would he go? “Tango,” he said, “take a break. I want you to lead the eleven hundred Go. Goat Gross will be on your wing.”

  “You bet, Boss,” Leonard said, leaving the bunker. Waters followed him out, needing a fresh breath of air. “You okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered, “I’m not okay. I saw it and for a moment, I thought it was you.”

  “No way,” he told her. Like all fighter pilots, he trusted his ability to get him through.

  “But Jake …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Jake had a very bad day,” he said.

  She stared at him, not understanding. She had heard his words but failed to understand the deep hurt they masked.

  “John, I love you—” She bit her words off, not saying what she thought. She did love him, but she couldn’t watch him die. He didn’t need to hear that, only the first.

  Wednesday, October 16

  Near Jingxi, China

  Lieutenant Colonel Sung Fu swore at the driver as the wheels of the truck spun in the mud. The paved road had ended less than fifty feet behind them and they were already stuck. He ordered the driver to stop before the wheels were buried up to the rear axle and climbed out of the cab to check on the road conditions for himself. The other eleven vehicles of his convoy were halted on the paved road.

  He slogged down the road, the rain soaking through his cheap raincoat. He muttered the Chinese equivalent of “Bugger me” and returned to the convoy. As usual, his orders were crisp and clear. One squad of men was ordered back to the town of Jingxi to requisition tractors, and failing that, oxen or water buffalo. Another squad was sent to the nearby village to gather a work detail, and a scouting party was sent ahead to reconnoiter the road.

  The scouting party returned first, with the good news that the dirt road improved a half kilometer ahead when it started to climb into the hills. The drainage was better. The squad sent to the village returned with a hundred villagers and within moments, his lead truck was pushed out of the mud and was grinding forward.

  Sung talked to the head villager, an old man
named Li Jiyu, who swore the rain was unusual and normally they were well into the transition from the wet summer monsoon to the dry winter monsoon. Li Jiyu was very convincing and led Sung to believe the rains would soon pass. But Li Jiyu knew better. Li was Zhuang, not Han Chinese like Sung, and only wanted the foreigners out of his village. Unlike his granddaughter, Jin Chu, he could lie easily to foreigners.

  When the lead truck was well clear of the mud, Sung motioned the next truck forward. It was one of the transporters, pulling a single thirty-five-foot Guideline missile. The tractor had no trouble pulling the five-thousand-pound missile through the mud and Sung was hopeful they could make up some lost time. They had only come eighty kilometers in twenty-four hours and the intelligence liaison officer sent from Kang’s headquarters to spy on him was writing furiously in his notebook whenever he thought Sung was not looking. The fool, Sung thought, only knows how to criticize and shout slogans. Let him get his fine boots dirty.

  He left three soldiers to wait for the squad sent to Jingxi to requisition tractors or oxen. They had orders to catch up with him as soon as possible, but no later than tomorrow morning. With the proper scowl to insure the three didn’t desert, he ordered the convoy forward, into the mountains.

  The convoy made good time until it hit the first of the switchbacks. Worried about the condition of the road, Sung sent the lead truck ahead. The sound of the truck’s laboring engine as it ground up the steep road echoed over them. Then he heard it stop and the unmistakable sound of shifting gears as it tried to rock its way out of a mudhole. The engine revved and Sung heard shouting followed by a crashing sound.

  The sound grew louder and the truck tumbled out of the heavy foliage, twisting and flattening everything in its path as it rolled down the hill. Sung watched in horror as it slammed into one of the transporters, knocking its valuable missile off the cradle. Before he could react, the truck burst into flame, engulfing the transporter in a wall of fire.

  The men dived for cover as the missile’s three-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead exploded and sent a shower of fragments into the transporters next to it in line, destroying them. The heat from the fire forced Sung back into the trees. The rain came down harder, and a cloud of steam rolled off the burning trucks and into the valley below them.

  Sung’s face was frozen granite hard as he watched his convoy burn. Of the six missiles he had started with, only two were left. As best as he could tell, the fuel truck and Fan Song radar van were undamaged. Through the smoke and steam, he caught a glimpse of the liaison officer from Kang’s headquarters snapping a photo of the destruction.

  “Bring the driver to me,” he yelled. Men hurried up the road to do as he ordered. The liaison officer worked his way past the burning hulks and stood back, waiting to see what would happen next. Sung Fu was the most unfortunate man he had ever met.

  Within minutes, the men were back, carrying the injured truck driver. “He was thrown out of the truck when it rolled over the edge,” a sergeant explained. “But it crushed his legs.”

  Sung knelt beside the driver and questioned him, his voice flat and toneless. It had been a stupid thing. The driver was maneuvering around a tight hairpin turn and the truck had lost traction. He had tried to break free by shifting from reverse to forward, rocking the truck. He had started to move and gunned the engine. But the truck had slipped sideways and tumbled over the edge. Sung stood up and looked at his men. His eyes finally came to rest on the liaison officer. He pointed at the hapless driver on the ground. “Throw him in the cab of his truck,” he ordered.

  “It’s still burning,” a sergeant said.

  “Do it now,” Sung barked.

  The driver’s screams carried over the hillside as the men carried him over to his burning truck. Sung walked down to the liaison officer, drew his pistol, and shot him in the head. “Throw him in also,” he commanded. “They both died in this unfortunate accident. Go to the village and bring every man, woman, and child who can work.” He had two missiles left and they would complete his mission—no matter what.

  Wednesday, October 16

  Near Bose, China

  The two men stood side by side outside the hilltop observation post, casually talking, gesturing at the wide, low valley below them, oblivious to the misting rain. They could have been surveyors measuring the land as one held a folded map and made constant reference to it. Their words were calm and relaxed and carried no hint of the tension swirling around them. They were the eye in the center of a typhoon.

  Spread out on the valley floor was a scene reminiscent of the battlefields of World War I. Thousands of bodies were lying in grim contortions of death. Closer, on the slope in front of them, and entangled in rows of barbed wire, were hundreds more. “We first heard bugles,” the commander of the First Battalion told Kamigami. “It was the signal to attack. They came from there.” He pointed to a low ridge behind a village. “Nothing we did stopped them. They just kept coming, wave after wave. Then the Americans arrived with their Silent Guns.” He made a chopping sign with his hand. His meaning was obvious, and the carnage in the valley was mute testimony to the effectiveness of CBU-58s against troops caught in the open.

  Kamigami asked a few questions before returning to the four Humvees that made up his mobile command post. He huddled with his operations and intelligence officers, checking on the location of Kang’s tanks and field guns. The intelligence officer keyed his radio and spoke directly to the J-STARS module at Bose Airfield. The tanks and heavy artillery were still well to the rear and not moving forward. The lowering weather explained why no enemy aircraft had been detected.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Kamigami said. “What is Kang up to?” He studied a chart before making his decision. “This is the most direct route to the bridge.”

  The First Battalion’s commanding officer looked worried as a lone bugle call sounded from across the valley. It was picked up by two others. “That is the way it started last time,” he said.

  Kamigami told his ASOC officer to call for A-10s. The man spoke into his radio and listened to the reply. He scribbled some numbers down, jerked off his headset, and ran over to Kamigami. “Two A-10s are launching now. Two more will follow and then two more.” Panic spread across his face and he pointed to the sky. “The weather is a problem. Visibility is down to three miles and the ceiling is dropping.” The dull whomp of outgoing mortar rounds silenced him. Kamigami nodded and headed for the battalion’s observation post, his radio/telephone operator and operations officer right behind him.

  He had to bend over in the low bunker to see through the observation ports. The scene stunned him. “My God,” he said in English.

  “Exactly,” the First Battalion’s CO replied.

  A dark, moving mass was coming toward them. It was a tide of humanity flowing in their direction. He watched, fascinated, sure he was caught in a time warp. This was not modern warfare but right out of the history books. “Korea,” he muttered, drawing the only analogy he could. The mortars laid a continuous mortar barrage, chewing up the attackers. But still the mass surged forward. This was not the way he fought.

  His operations officer was glued to the radio and told him the first two Warthogs had checked in with the ASOC. In the distance, over the mortars and clatter of machine guns, he heard the jets. On cue, the mortars stopped as an A-10 swooped into the valley and pickled off two canisters of CBUs. Bright flashes sparked in the moving mass—the bomblets exploding. Still the mass moved forward.

  The second Warthog rolled in and walked its entire load across the moving front. Did he see a pause in the mass of humanity? He wasn’t sure. The first Warthog was back and pickled off the remainder of its ordnance. Accuracy didn’t matter. A machine gun next to the observation post started to rattle as the first wave came into range. And still they came.

  A Warthog made a strafing pass, its nose wrapped in smoke. Kamigami heard the sharp crack of the bullets breaking the sound barrier as they passed the observation post befor
e he heard the cannon firing. The men on the receiving end of the cannon died before they heard either.

  The second flight of Warthogs checked in and repeated the massacre. What was left of the first wave reached the barbed wire and tried to cut through it. The battalion’s CO spoke into his own radio to organize his defenses as the first attackers broke through. Kamigami fought the urge to get involved in the fighting, to lead men into the maw of death. But that was not his job.

  He detached himself from the actual fighting and forced himself to take the big view. A few Warthogs made the difference and as long as they were overhead, the attack was doomed to failure. So why do it?

  He put the question aside and concentrated on the battle that was playing out before him. The defenders had wiped out the few men who made it through the wire and were regrouping for the second wave that was coming toward them. Kamigami hated being a spectator.

  The attack was an hour old when a fourth flight of Warthogs flew overhead. The ceiling was so low that they barely cleared the hilltops as they dropped into the valley for the attack. One popped to roll in on a target and disappeared into the overcast.

  Forward movement in the valley ground to a halt and small, narrow currents of movement started to flow in the opposite direction. The tide had turned and the attack was over.

  What kind of general wastes his men like this? Kamigami thought. He tried to get into Kang’s head, much as Trimler had taught him. “Why?” he muttered aloud, in English. He was also thinking in English.

  The First Battalion’s CO answered in the same language. “Kang drives them with fear. These are not his best soldiers, but cannon fodder he has dredged from the big cities—Canton, Shanghai.”

  Kamigami switched back to Cantonese. “Kang is a better general than this. He wants to focus our attention here.” He checked his watch. “It took them ten hours to regroup and mount a second attack. I expect the third attack to come in ten to twelve hours, probably around two o’clock this morning.”