“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
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
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 the 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
