Richter waited until the Foxbat was just ahead of him, then pulled up into a steep climb. Almost immediately he heard the growl as the Sidewinder detected the MiG-25’s jet exhaust.
He saw the flare from the aircraft’s port wing as the pilot fired an Acrid at Dick Long’s climbing GR9. At the moment of release, the Harrier was only about three miles from the Foxbat. The R-40T would cover that distance in roughly six seconds.
‘Missile fired!’ Richter called. ‘Stand by. Evasive action now, now, now.’
One of the problems with a heavy, very fast missile like the Acrid is that it’s not particularly agile, but in most cases this doesn’t matter because no aircraft currently flying can outrun its Mach 4.5 maximum speed, and few can manoeuvre fast enough to get out of its path. But the Harrier could.
Long waited until he heard Richter’s call. Then he rotated the nozzles fully forwards, almost stopping the aircraft dead in mid-air, and chopped the throttle back, a virtual repeat of Richter’s manoeuvre just minutes before. The Harrier dropped like a stone and the Acrid punched a hole through the air where the GR9 had been three-tenths of a second earlier.
Richter’s Harrier was a thousand feet below the Foxbat when the broken circle in the HUD solidified, showing that the ‘winder had locked on. He didn’t hesitate, and immediately fired the missile. The solid-fuel rocket motor ignited and boosted the Sidewinder to two and a half times the speed of sound in a matter of seconds.
Richter watched critically as it curved away from his Harrier and angled towards the Foxbat, already travelling close to Mach 2. Then he turned his aircraft away, heading back towards Chiha-ri, where Dick Long should also be heading. If the missile killed the ‘bat, they might just get away unscathed. If it missed, they were in deep trouble.
Gennadi Malakov wasn’t entirely sure he believed his eyes. The grey Harrier had apparently stopped dead in mid-air, then dropped straight down into a valley as his R-40T had been about to impact it. Now he’d either have to reacquire it and use another missile, or simply forget about it and catch up with the American Hornet.
But before he had a chance to make a decision, Richter’s Sidewinder smashed into his starboard engine exhaust at a relative speed of about three hundred miles per hour and the twenty-pound warhead exploded.
When they designed the MiG-25, the Mikoyan-Gurevich team had included a firewall between the two engines, but this was intended to protect against an engine failure, not the impact of a missile, and offered little resistance to the high-explosive detonation.
For the briefest of moments, Malakov thought his aircraft might have suffered some kind of mechanical problem, then he realized what must have happened. The Foxbat lurched sideways and the cockpit came alive as fire-warning klaxons sounded and engine instruments began showing the extent of the damage. If it had just been the starboard engine that the missile destroyed, he might have been able to save the aircraft, but the warhead’s detonation had also blown lumps of steel through the firewall and into the combustion chamber of the port engine, which almost immediately caught fire.
With both engines destroyed, the MiG-25 was going nowhere but down, and Malakov had no intention of staying with it, so he did what any prudent pilot would have done – he ejected.
Fifteen seconds later, the burning Foxbat crashed into a hill eight miles east of Chiha-ri. And, ninety seconds after that, Gennadi Malakov landed hard, but unhurt, two miles away. An army patrol found him four hours later and automatically shot him as a deserter.
‘Now can we go home?’ Long asked, as he pulled his Harrier up to join Richter.
‘Yes,’ Richter said, with a final glance back towards the burning wreckage of the MiG-25. ‘Now we can go home.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Monday
Ten minutes later the two aircraft crossed the DMZ into South Korean airspace and turned west. They knew they wouldn’t make it back to the ship with what they had in their tanks, so instead landed at Seoul to refuel.
The airport was in a state of chaos, to put it mildly. The nuclear weapon in the Seersucker had detonated twenty miles away at around nineteen thousand feet, and the EMP had done considerable damage. Radars and radios weren’t working properly and, before they approached, the two Harriers had been forced to use Guard frequency, which someone in the Control Tower was monitoring on a standby radio. Fortunately, the pumps on the fuel bowsers were simple electrical devices, and so had been unaffected by the blast.
Just over four hours after they’d taken off from the
When Kim Yong-Su had explained the reality of the situation to the ‘Dear Leader’, he’d received the most explicit instructions.
Clearly they couldn’t proceed with the invasion. They’d utilized almost all the plutonium in their vaults and, as two of the three EMP weapons had been destroyed, the ability of the South Korean forces to repel them was only slightly affected. To proceed would have virtually guaranteed that the Americans would land troops in South Korea, because obviously the Taep’o-dong bluff hadn’t worked. Within minutes of the attack starting, US Navy aircraft had entered North Korean airspace and destroyed fourteen of their MiG-25s and badly damaged three others, for the loss of just two of the Super Hornets.
With his plans in ruins, the ‘Dear Leader’ was looking for someone to blame, and he didn’t have to look very far. The plan had been suggested and conceived by Pak Je-San, and so its failure was clearly his fault. Which explained why Kim Yong-Su had just landed at T’ae’tan with a squad of soldiers in two Mil Mi-8 transport helicopters.
Twenty minutes after it touched down, one of the helicopters was airborne again, heading north with one extra passenger on board, the man lying bound, gagged and blindfolded on the floor. Fifteen minutes after that, the second aircraft took off and followed the first, a woman and two young children lashed together and secured to one of the fuselage side strakes.
‘We paid a very high price, gentlemen,’ Captain Alexander Davidson said, ‘but, thanks to the two of you, I think the end result was better than we had any reason to expect in the circumstances.’ He was standing in the Main Briefing Room, with Roger Black beside him. Dick Long and Richter were slumped in the front row of seats, both looking exhausted.
‘We’ve had confirmation from Seoul,’ Black said. ‘Their patrols found the wreckage of both Harriers on the ground below the site of the airburst. The bodies of Charlie Forbes and Roger Whittard were still strapped in. The initial medical evidence suggests they were killed instantly by the blast when the weapon detonated.
‘According to the latest signals from CINCFLEET, based on American technical intelligence, North Korea’s now abandoned the invasion attempt. They’ve started withdrawing their additional troops from the area close to the DMZ, and their forces appear to be reverting to normal readiness. Despite the detonation of the North Korean nuclear weapon, it looks as if both sides are going to maintain the status quo. It’s possible that the cruise missiles
