sure he’d unstalled the wings, he pulled back to start regaining height.
As he climbed away he looked at his altimeter, realizing he’d lost over eight thousand feet. Then he swiftly checked everything else, but as far as he could tell the Harrier was undamaged.
‘Cobra Leader from Two. You still with me?’
‘Affirmative, just about. Break, break. Viper One, Cobra One.’ Nothing. ‘Viper Two, Cobra One. Radio check.’ Nothing.
‘I don’t think they’re still around,’ Richter said. ‘They were both chasing that cruise missile, and I guess their ‘winders hadn’t reached it when the warhead detonated. At best, their electrics are probably fried.’ He didn’t need to explain the worst-case scenario – that the two Harriers might have been caught within the fireball itself when the weapon detonated.
‘Cobra One, November Alpha. Request sitrep.’
‘Cobra One and Two are still flying but we’ve lost contact with both Vipers. We shot down two of the cruise missiles but the third detonated. It was a small nuclear air burst and it’s possible Vipers were caught in the blast.’
‘Roger. I’ll relay that to Mother. Intentions?’
‘Unless you’ve any better ideas, we’ll RTB.’
‘Flash signal, sir.’
Rodgers thanked the yeoman and scanned the text. Then he stood up and walked across the CIC to the officer who was controlling the E2-C AEW aircraft.
‘Where’s the Hawkeye?’
‘Here, sir.’
‘Right, tell him to call those British aircraft – on Guard if necessary – and pass this message.’ Rodgers took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and rapidly wrote a few lines on a sheet of paper. ‘Then tell him to send the Prowlers and Hornets directly to this position’ – he wrote down the geographical coordinates of the Chiha-ri base – ‘the Prowlers going in first to clear the path. They’re to render whatever assistance the British aircraft need. On my orders, they can engage any target, and respond to any attack against themselves or the Harriers with whatever force they feel is necessary. As from this moment, North Korea is a free-fire zone.’
Rodgers turned away and walked out of the CIC for a quick visit to the officers’ heads. The next few minutes were going to be very interesting, and he didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
‘Cobra One, Alpha Three on Guard. Do you read?’
‘Loud and clear. Go ahead.’
‘I’ve a message for you from Langley, relayed by Starbase. Understand?’
‘Alpha Three, this is Cobra Two. Understood. Go ahead.’
‘Message reads: “Chiha-ri base at coordinates thirty-eight degrees thirty-eight decimal two five north; one two six degrees forty decimal forty-eight east preparing to launch six times Scud missile with chemical or biological warheads. Can you attack?” Message ends.’
‘That’s about fifty miles north of the DMZ, boss,’ Richter said, ‘and it’s what we came out to do in the first place.’
‘Agreed. And we owe these bastards for Charlie and Roger. Break. Alpha Three from Cobra One, that’s affirmative. Turning starboard now.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Monday
The Scud B missile dates from 1962, and is an improved and enhanced version of the type A, itself essentially a scaled-down copy of the German V2. Designed from the first to be fully mobile, the Scud is normally fired from a purpose-designed Transporter-Erector-Launcher, a four-axle, eight-wheel road vehicle that tips the scales at thirty-seven tons when fully loaded. The tactic envisaged for the weapon was that it would be fired, and the TEL itself would then be driven some distance away, reloaded from a trailer carrying additional missiles, and launch a second Scud.
The North Koreans had modified several aspects of the missile’s operation because of their unique ‘underground’ military strategy. The launch process for a standard Scud B takes about one hour, and there wasn’t a great deal they could do to reduce this. But what they had done was to rejig the sequence of actions so that almost all of the preparations for launch took place before the missile was raised in its cradle into the vertical firing position. This meant they could prepare the weapon in the safety of their hardened shelters and only expose it to danger in the open air immediately before launch.
All the preparations had paid off. The Scud missiles had passed their pre-flight checks with no major problems. Twelve minutes after the last missile had been driven out of the shelter and lifted into the vertical position by the two hydraulic rams on the TEL – this phase of the operation itself taking almost five minutes – the technicians began leaving the area.
In the control bunker, the commanding officer watched the last man walk off the launch pad and waited impatiently for the call from the chief technician. When the phone rang, he snatched it up before the first ring had completed.
‘Yes?’
‘All missiles are fully checked and prepared, sir.’
‘Good. We will commence firing preparations immediately.’
He replaced the receiver and nodded to his assistant. ‘Begin the countdown,’ he ordered. ‘Launch at thirty- second intervals, targets as designated.’
Richter’s aircraft hadn’t even reached the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone before his Radar Warning Receiver began screaming. It was picking up multiple transmissions from almost all around him. The ‘frying pan’ on the HUD was showing over a dozen lines.
‘I’m detecting Spoon Rest and Fan Song radars,’ Dick Long reported on their discrete radio frequency, ‘and that means SA-2s. No problem at this altitude.’
The two Harriers were in battle pair formation, keeping low and fast, no more than five hundred above the ground. The SA-2 surface-to-air missile, NATO reporting name Guideline but known as the S-75 Dvina inside Russia, is optimized to attack high-level aircraft. It was originally designed by the Soviets to counter American B-52 bombers, and is essentially powerless to intercept targets below about three thousand feet, because of constraints in the radar and guidance systems.
Knowing that was one thing, but believing it another. The HUD in Richter’s GR9 kept identifying even more fire-control radars as the two aircraft swept across the four-kilometre-wide DMZ.
The boundary between the two countries is marked not by customs posts or duty-free shops, but by a narrow strip of temperate wilderness, seeded with an uncountable number of landmines, that’s been virtually untouched for over half a century. Running precisely down the middle of the Demilitarized Zone is the Military Demarcation Line, which marks the frontline that existed when the ceasefire was agreed between the warring states in 1953.
The moment they crossed it, North Korean anti-aircraft gun batteries opened up, and the air in front of the Harriers was suddenly filled with puffs of black debris as the shells began exploding. Both men knew that the chances of being hit by a round from these unsophisticated weapons was very slight. Their worry was SAMs – not the cumbersome SA-2s, but the possibility that some North Korean soldier on the ground below them might be
