and I mean
The chief looked at Brentwood, and then staggered him. “Hell, I can’t take it anywhere. I can’t leave my post. Hey — I’ll use a walkie-talkie link to patrol. Get ‘em down here to run it up for us.”
Brentwood sat back on the hard cell mattress, letting his head roll against the cold brick. “You keep this up, Chief, and they’ll make you an admiral.”
The chief of naval intelligence for San Diego base was down in the cells fifteen minutes later. He listened to Brentwood and told the shore patrol to get the lab technician out of bed to verify it. “Drag him here if you have to.”
When the patrol knocked on the technician’s door, he had just convinced his wife to give him some “relief.” He swore a lot when they barged in on him and told him he’d have to go back with them.
“Right now?” he asked incredulously. “Damn near midnight.”
“My God!” said his wife. “What’s he done?”
“Can’t say, ma’am.”
“Then you can’t take him — if there’s no charge.”
“It’s all right, Norma. I know what it’s about.”
“What? Tell me.”
“Can’t tell you, hon,” said the technician, struggling to get into his pants and nearly falling. “It’s classified.”
“What’s her name?” called Norma.
When they got him out to the Humvee, it was ten after midnight, and Norma was sure he was mixed up with some other woman. An admiral’s wife. He was always telling her he needed “it” more than most men. Maybe she should have let him have his way more often. Lord — maybe it was
“What’d I tell you, Norma? I told you. He’s a bum. But oh no — you knew better. He’s a bum, Norma!”
On the other side of the world, Frank Shirer was flying as left wingman in a finger-four formation of four F-14 Tomcats out of Kapsan Air Base, thirty miles south of the Yalu. He was regretting he had broken one of the cardinal rules for combat pilots in not having a substantial breakfast before going up on the border patrol, but the problem was he had never been a breakfast man — early mornings not his forte. But normally he would have grabbed at least a continental: juice, toast, and coffee. It wasn’t enough for a pilot who might have to go into a sustained high G-turn, and he hadn’t slept well.
During the night he’d had dreams of the Russian fighters out of Vladivostok attacking the 747 in which he had flown Freeman to Korea. He was also a little nervous and almost regretted — heresy for a pilot — having accepted Freeman’s offer of a few days of combat patrol to keep his hand in before flying the repaired 747 back to the States tomorrow. The skills of the fighter pilot never left you, but the sudden switch from the big 747 to a Tomcat was like going from a bus to a sports car, and the morning before, he’d been a little slow as the Tomcat leader’s left wingman. He’d been only a fraction of a second late in a breakaway, but a fraction of a second could mean you were dead when you were flying over the “fence”— the Yalu. More and more MiG 29A’s had been seen in Manchurian air space — riding range on the other side. And sometimes they looked identical to U.S. planes on the radar. Two F-15 Eagles and an F-16 had been “splashed” off the coast by fellow U.S. Navy fighters because IFF — identification friend or foe — had been made on radar alone.
As a result, the American rules of engagement now stated that all U.S. pilots could not engage before IFF had been established by “visual fix”—a radar blip insufficient to assume a Bogey, or unidentified aircraft, was in fact a “Judy”—an enemy plane. Even the normally swashbuckling Freeman, before he’d disappeared across the Yalu, had endorsed the rule, but the necessity of having to make a visual fix imposed a serious tactical disadvantage on the American pilots. It meant that the long-range missiles, such as the nine-mile-range infrared homing Sidewinder, which needed time — even though this was measured in milliseconds — to lock on to an enemy’s exhaust or side heat patch, couldn’t be used to anywhere near their full effectiveness. At shorter ranges, the missile could be evaded by the tight-turning MiGs before the Sidewinder had time to “lock on.”
For this reason, the Sparrow missile was preferred. Ironically it had a longer range at twenty-four miles than the Sidewinder, but did not require heat exhaust to lock on and could be fired from any angle. But at 514 pounds, it was more than twice as heavy as the Sidewinder, and this meant fewer missiles could be carried.
“Bogeys two o’clock high!” It was the wingman — right side of the finger-four formation of Tomcats — the four blips coming out of the northwest behind and to the right as the Tomcats headed southwest over the Yalu. The blips were fourteen miles away. The Tomcats’ leader had a choice to either break left, south, away from the Yalu into the U.S.- and-South-Korean-held North Korea, or to go north for a visible fix, with the possibility of engagement if the Bogeys turned out to be Judys. The Tomcats had already consumed half their fuel.
“Go for IFF,” announced the Tomcat leader, and the F-14s turned tightly, pulling seven Gs, Shirer already feeling the effect of his heart literally distending under the pull of the G forces, wishing now more than ever that he’d had the toast. Behind him, his radar intercept officer had gone to “warning yellow, weapons hold” status, his active radar frantically hipping and the Northrop TCS — long-range television camera set — unable to identify the blips because of heavy cumulus, which the blips were now entering.
The four Tomcats had split into two combat pairs, Shirer still on his leader’s left and back, covering him, the Tomcats’ wings now coming in from the extended, fuel-conserving position to the tight V for greater speed at the cost of increasing fuel consumption. Shirer heard the Pratt and Whitney turbofans screaming as he and the leader went to afterburner.
“Bandits!” It was the leader’s radar intercept officer, and now Shirer’s RIO was telling him that from the computer-enhanced radar cross-section image, the Bogeys were in fact Russian fighters. “Fulcrums,” he advised Shirer, “A’s.”
Shirer, still close to his leader, saw a puff of smoke, and the two Tomcats broke, leader to the right, Shirer to the left, the Soviet missile passing between them. The next instant Shirer’s RIO was yelling, “Tally-ho one! Behind us, behind us!” telling Shirer a Fulcrum had been sighted penetrating their cone of vulnerability. Shirer went into a knife-edged turn and dropped, the Fulcrum passing over him and down, Shirer slowing, trying to go into a “scissors,” trying to reverse fee situation, putting his Tomcat behind the Fulcrum.
“Master arm on,” said Shirer, readying to fire a Sparrow.
“We’re behind him, we’re behind him!” called the RIO.
“Centering up the T! Centering up the dot!” said Shirer.
The Fulcrum, on afterburner, was already two miles ahead, still on the Tomcat’s radar, the other Tomcats having broken up into individual dogfights with the remaining three Fulcrums.
“Fox One! Fox One!” Shirer announced, then felt the tug on the plane as the Sparrow missile streaked ahead, the Fulcrum now only 1.6 miles away.
“He’s climbing!” said the RIO. Then suddenly, “He’s gone.” The RIO’s voice was incredulous. “Shit! He’s gone!” His tone was one of utter astonishment.
“Can’t be!” said Shirer. “We had a lock on.”
“Yeah — but he’s gone, man.”
Sergei Marchenko was in a near-vertical, eighty-two-degree climb, going “up the wall” on afterburner in the plane that even Western experts acknowledged had “no unnatural positions.” After two seconds, he had climbed another two thousand feet.
Suddenly he reduced thrust to idle on the two eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust Tumanskys, bleeding off speed, the plane’s attitude a hammerhead stall/slide in the vertical plane — the effect of this on the enemy’s Doppler radar calculated to be one of utter confusion, for without relative speed measurement, no target would appear on the enemy plane’s screen.
Shirer remembered the Russian maneuver, reduced thrust, went into a climb, broke cloud, and glimpsed the Fulcrum still above him sliding backward into his HUD sight. It was only for a fraction of a second. Shirer’s thumb
