Red Phoenix

Tony didn’t see or hear the helicopter until it was almost on top of them. It came up over a small rise, no more than twenty feet off the ground, and moved toward them. Kim pointed something that looked like a flashlight at the helicopter, but no light shone.

It had the desired effect, though. The machine slowed and altered course to head directly toward the Korean.

Tony knew it was a helicopter, but in the faint starlight it looked more like a monster or a dragon. There were bulges all over the nose of the craft, a long probe sticking fifteen feet out in front, and protuberances on the sides as well.

Kim waved him over. “This is your ride home, Major.” He shook hands with Tony, then handed him a package. “These are messages and personal letters. Will you deliver them for us?”

“Of course, Lieutenant. Can I do anything else for you or your men?”

“No sir, just kill communists. Good-bye.” They saluted.

Even now, with the helicopter landing nearby, it was nearly silent. He got a closer look as it landed and recognized it as a Pave Low special operations helicopter. He could see large drop tanks under the side sponsons, miniguns in the doors, and a Sidewinder!

He had heard about them, even seen one now and then at an airfield. They had infrared TV, terrain-following radar, armor, jamming systems, and enough weaponry to fight their way out of a jam. They were used for special operations, inserting or extracting people behind enemy lines…

Sort of like him.

The helicopter’s wheels touched the ground, and as if operated by a switch, a door opened and a red-lit interior was visible. The light seemed bright after the pitch-darkness. A crewman waved to him, and he ran over. Wind from the rotors buffeted him but he hardly felt it as he ran to the ship.

The crewman tossed out a few crates, then grabbed his arm and pulled him up and inside. The door slammed and he felt the craft rise. Almost immediately it started moving forward and didn’t seem to rise anymore.

Tony looked around. The original CH-53 was big enough to carry a small truck, but this one’s innards were filled with electronics consoles and ammo boxes.

The crewman handed him a headset and Tony put it on. A few moments later he heard, “Hello, Major. Captain Wells here. Welcome back.”

Tony was grabbing for support as he heard those words. The craft had moved suddenly down, sideslipped, then climbed. Answering as best he could, he said, “Glad to be here, Captain. Are we having problems?”

“None, sir. We are away clean and making good time. Would you like to come forward?” The machine went through a roller-coaster bump.

“Yes.” Curiosity replaced uncertainty, and he unplugged the headset. Moving forward, he pulled aside the curtain that blocked even the dim red light from reaching the cockpit.

His eyes adjusted further, and by the dim light of the instrumentation he saw the two pilots. At first he couldn’t make out their faces, then realized they were wearing masks, or goggles. Those had to be infrared goggles, designed to give the wearer vision in low light. Or no light.

He looked forward and was rewarded with the breathtaking view of the hilly landscape only fifty feet below him rushing by at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

The instrument panel was twice as complex as his fighter’s. He recognized a terrain-following radar display, a thermal-imaging TV picture, and computerized map display. It looked more like the bridge of Star Trek’s Enterprise.

He firmly believed they needed it. A hill loomed up in front of them, and the craft neatly banked without changing altitude or losing speed. In mid-maneuver the pilot reached around to shake Tony’s hand. “Glad to see you, Major.” He waved at the panel and the view out the windscreen. “Sorry this isn’t as exciting as one of your ships, sir.”

Tony forced his voice to remain calm. “That’s all right. How much more of this before we climb to cruising altitude?”

“We’ll stay at this height all the way back. The avionics can handle this easily, and we don’t like even our own side to see too much of our operations. Another hour and a half and you’ll be back at your squadron.”

The flight back was the hardest part of his trip.

CHAPTER 38 Dire Straits

JANUARY 7 — ABOARD USS O’BRIEN, IN THE TSUSHIMA STRAIT

Captain Richard Levi, USN, sneaked a glance at the barometer as he came on the bridge. It was still holding steady, a reading confirmed by the nearly cloudless sky and by the gentle, rolling motion of O’Brien as she steamed toward Pusan at twelve knots. His compact frame easily followed the motion of the deck.

His bridge crew stiffened slightly but didn’t react in any other way. Levi didn’t like a lot of fuss in normal times, and he especially didn’t like needless ceremony under war conditions. People busy saluting and clicking their heels were all too likely to miss that first crucial warning of an incoming missile or torpedo.

He nodded to his executive officer and stepped out onto the bridge wing, leaning out over the rail to look back at the three boxy cargo ships trailing placidly in his Spruance-class destroyer’s wake. One wore the dull-gray paint scheme that marked it as a Navy Sealift Command ship, but the others stood out in bright colors designed to please the eye and attract paying customers.

Together the three merchantmen carried a vital cargo — a major share of the 25th Infantry Division’s heavy equipment. The 25th’s personnel had been flown into South Korea over the preceding week, but they would remain as useless as if they were still in Hawaii until equipped with the tanks, artillery, and APCs loaded aboard USNS Andrew T. Thomas, the Liberian-registered Polar Sea, and the Danish-flagged Thorvaldsen. Seventh Fleet’s orders were clear. All three had to get through.

U.N. Forces were fighting hard on the peninsula, but they were still being forced backward, away from now- besieged Seoul. Scuttlebutt said the ground pounders needed all the help they could get to avoid being shoved into the sea. The 25th’s heavy weapons were part of that help.

Levi put his back to the chill, five-knot wind sweeping across the destroyer’s superstructure and looked east, his eyes hunting for the other part of his command — the tiny, Perry-class frigate Duncan. There she was. He could just make out a slightly darker patch of gray rolling up and down above the gray-green sea. He’d put the frigate about four miles out on the convoy’s eastern flank. Out where her hull-mounted SQS-56 sonar had a better chance of picking up an NK diesel sub moving in for a sneak shot inside the O’Brien’s “baffles,” an area aft of the destroyer where the noise of her own engines and screws deafened her sonar.

The wind veered slightly and strengthened, whining through the radar and radio antennas clustered above the destroyer’s bridge. Levi ignored the noise and squinted into the morning sun climbing skyward beyond his companion frigate. Sunlight glinted off a Plexiglas canopy. Duncan had one of her two SH-60B Seahawk helicopters up, laying a passive sonobuoy line several miles to the north and east of the convoy’s track — right along the most likely angle of approach for an enemy sub looking for an easy kill.

But not the only one. Wings winked silver at the edge of his vision and then dipped from view. Seventh Fleet had allocated a P-3C Orion to the escort and he’d stationed it well to the north — twenty miles or so ahead of the small group of UN vessels bound for Pusan. The P-3 had been systematically laying successive lines of passive buoys, trying to clear a path for the O’Brien and her invaluable charges.

North and east were covered as well as they could be under the circumstances. And Levi had brought his convoy as close to the western edge of the island of Tsushima as he possibly could without running them aground. The water was so shallow at that point that any damned NK sub trying to stay submerged would have to be half- buried in the mud. He could pretty well rule out that direction, at least until they emerged from alongside the island.