suddenly crossed his vision and merged with the fleeing MiG. The Sparrow exploded in a ball of orange-red flame and the frantic voice in his radio stopped.
He came wings level and looked all around. The sky was crisscrossed with smoke trails and dodging aircraft. He looked down and saw another burning MiG tumbling out of control toward the water. Damnit.
Borodin counted noses quickly as his squadrons reformed, still heading for the American fighters. They’d lost three MiG-29s and another two MiG-21s. Eleven planes lost without knocking a single American bastard out of the sky.
He felt a cold rage gripping him and fought it down. Don’t go berserk, Sergei, he told himself, your turn is coming. As if in proof, a box suddenly appeared on his HUD, up and to the right. His radar had at last locked on to an American aircraft! The range was now eighteen miles — inside his AA-7 envelope. Borodin tapped the trigger twice and smiled as his own missiles flared off toward the enemy. Now they would hit back and hit hard. Other Fulcrums were launching as well.
“Oh, shit!” Bouchard spun the Tomcat up and away as an Apex streaked past and started turning after him. “Do something, Mike!”
“Doing it!” Esteban was already busy punching out a stream of chaff to confuse the incoming Russian-made missile.
Bouchard tightened his turn and saw his airspeed bleeding away. Crap, they might dodge this missile, but they’d be dangerously slow if another one came after them. He went to afterburner.
Other Tomcats and Hornets were busy dodging, too, spiraling away from the radar missiles launched by the MiG-29s. Esteban had his head craned practically all the way round, watching the Apex turning after them. “It’s still coming, Corky!”
Fuck this. Bouchard rolled back out of his right turn to the left and pulled up even more sharply. The missile lost track of the F-14 and veered off into nowhere.
Two Tomcats and an F-18 weren’t so fortunate and fell into the ocean wreathed in flames. The score was evening out. Now there were nineteen American fighters left to tangle with the thirty-one NK planes closing on them. The Hornets reduced speed to let the F-14s catch up. They would go in together.
Eight miles. Borodin throttled back slightly. They would be in IR missile range shortly, and he didn’t want to have too big a heat signature when the missiles started flying. He glanced back behind him and made sure that Moskvin, his wingman, was still in position. Satisfied, he brought his eyes back to the MiG-29’s HUD, searching the box his radar had placed around the closest American plane. Six miles.
Ah. Borodin’s mouth tightened as the enemy fighter came into view, rushing toward him at over five hundred knots. Twin tails, swept-back swing wings. An F-14! It would be his fifth confirmed kill. He slid his thumb over to the switch that would fire an AA-11 Archer right into the Tomcat’s face.
Three miles. The missile warbled in his earphones. Its seeker head had found the enemy and was tracking. He fired and saw a similar streak of flame pop out from under the F-14’s starboard wing.
“God!” Bouchard couldn’t believe it. The MiG-29 had fired an IR missile at him from the front and it was guiding on him. Where’d these bastards get those things? He pulled hard left, grunting as his weight quintupled in seconds, trying to follow the MiG and line up for a shot while Esteban popped flares to decoy away the enemy missile. It swung away and exploded one hundred yards behind the turning Tomcat. Bouchard felt the shock wave ripple through the F-14 and ignored it as he fought to bring the plane around on the MiG’s tail.
C’mon round, baby. C’mon round. Almost. Bouchard’s thumb reached for the firing button.
“Left!” Esteban’s frantic shout brought his head around as orange-white tracers sprayed across the Tomcat’s flight path. He jerked the stick hard left, turning toward the new threat. There. A gray-white camouflaged MiG flashed past and rolled away. He’d lost the first MiG somewhere in the sun. Jesus, this was turning into a mess.
Jets were all over the sky, turning, diving, climbing, weaving, and falling in flames. The air battle between the MiGs and the American fighters had turned into a constantly changing series of deadly, short-range duels. Move and countermove. Shot and return shot. At such close range the North Korean and Soviet edge in numbers more than made up for their slightly inferior aircraft and weapons.
An F-14 blundered into the path of an AA-11 and blew up, throwing pieces of itself in an arc hundreds of yards across. Seconds later an F-18 avenged its counterpart with a quick cannon burst into the belly of a rolling MiG-21. A second MiG soon fell prey to a Tomcat-launched Sidewinder, and another nine lima tore the wings off a scissoring Fulcrum.
The edge shifted back quickly, though, as a Soviet-piloted MiG-29 turned inside an F-18 and got off a high deflection shot that shredded the Hornet’s cockpit and sent it spiraling down into the sea.
As the air battle continued, more planes on both sides tumbled away on fire or simply blew up. Losses, fuel consumption, and missile and cannon ammo expenditure were all appalling. But the American F-14s and F-18s were doing their job. They were keeping the MiGs fully engaged, protecting the heavily laden strike aircraft now approaching the Korean coast.
Commander John “Smokey” Piper, USN, glanced down out the cockpit of his A-6E Intruder as it crossed the coast, six thousand feet above the spray-marked merger of slate-gray seas and white, snow-covered land. He clicked his mike and said, “Duster is feet dry.” His message confirmed to the carriers at sea and the E-2C aloft that the strike planes were over land and just fifteen miles away from their targets.
Piper looked ahead into a maelstrom of white, gray, and black smoke puffs dotting the sky as North Korean antiaircraft guns sought out the incoming strike. He saw hundreds of tiny flashes on the ground and watched an F- 18 pull up and away from its bursting cluster bombs. Another far off to the right fired a HARM missile toward some unseen, but still-operating radar site. The missile ignited on the rail, then seemed to disappear as it flew forward and climbed. It would dive on its victim from high altitude. The Iron Hand flak suppressors had their hands full on this one.
Voices over the radio told their own story.
“Strawman, this is Comanche. You’ve got a SAM launch in your six, break left now! I’ll hit the site.”
“Breaking! Can you see any others?”
“Nega… SAM! SAM! Five o’clock low. Keep breaking left!”
Piper heard the second pilot’s voice quavering under the heavy g’s he was pulling. “Can’t shake it! Can’t — ”
There it was. A flash low on the horizon, followed by a searing orange ball of flame as the American plane slammed into the ground at over five hundred knots.
“Pirate, this is Comanche. Strawman’s down. No chute.”
“Affirmative, Comanche. Watch the Triple-A on that hill to the left. I’m rolling in on it now.”
A new INS prompt came up on Piper’s HUD, and he turned his attention away from the radio. They were within seconds of starting their attack run. He glanced across the Intruder’s crowded cockpit and his eyes met those of his bombardier, Lieutenant Commander Mitch “Priest” Parrish. Parrish lifted his oxygen mask for a moment and grinned at him. Then the bombardier bent forward again to stare at the A-6’s radar screen, while one hand stayed busy configuring the attack computer for their run.
Piper checked to make sure his wingman was still in position just aft and to the right. “Orca” Jones would stay there through the whole attack to watch for SAMs or unexpected flak positions.
He pulled the Intruder into a gentle left turn, aware that behind him nineteen other pairs of A-6s and A-7s were arcing around to come in on the target area from all points of the compass. The “wagon wheel” attack had worked well for the Navy over Vietnam. Now they’d see how well it did over Korea.
Piper started searching the rolling hills and open rice paddies ahead for signs of the truck-mounted pontoon bridges and GSP amphibious ferries they’d come to destroy.
Lieutenant General Chyong crouched lower in his slit trench as an American attack plane roared low overhead, streaming flares behind it. Another followed seconds later. He cursed when he saw that they were aimed
