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
At 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
