North Koreans around the clock. And if that meant that he and his men had to take unexpected risks, then Chon would see to it that those risks brought results on every mission.
Their prey this time was a North Korean supply convoy that had been spotted late in the afternoon by an RF-5A photoreconnaissance aircraft. Even though the NK trucks had been carefully camouflaged and concealed among some trees, their still-warm engines had shown up clearly on the recon plane’s infrared film. Intelligence believed the communists were moving only at night to try to avoid detection.
Chon’s flight had been readied immediately as part of the ongoing effort to interdict all supplies heading for the Taejon area.
“Phoenix Flight, this is Voodoo, over.” A quiet voice came through his headphones. There was his signal. Voodoo was an observation plane, an OV-10D Bronco. It had the low-light and thermal-imaging sensors that Chon’s attack aircraft lacked, and the slow-moving spotter had been launched at dusk, an hour before Chon’s jets. The radio contact meant his A-10s were approaching the most likely area now.
“Phoenix Flight, location Alpha X-ray four seven three seven, over.”
There wasn’t any need for the spotter plane to say what was at that location. Chon looked at the map taped to his knee and made some rapid calculations. The A-10’s avionics weren’t all that sophisticated, and a lot of the navigating was still done by the pilot.
“Roger, Voodoo, ETA three minutes.” Chon flashed his navigation lights twice to alert his subordinates and banked a little to the left. Once on course he stole a quick glance behind. The other A-10s were still with him.
He checked his armament panel, then glanced at the map. The terrain stayed hilly, with a highway winding around the highest elevations. The best approach route was across the road, moving from east to west, but they would have to do some fancy flying to avoid slamming into a hill at three hundred knots.
He clicked his mike. “Phoenix Flight, this is Lead. Standard attack from the east. Voodoo, our ETA is one minute.”
The spotter plane pilot came back on the air immediately. “Roger, Phoenix. Prepped for illumination on your call.”
Chon answered with two clicks and flashed his lights again. He broke hard left, knowing that his wingman, Captain Lee, would follow him. He looked right and saw the other pair moving away, off to the north.
There was the highway, a thin black line against an irregular gray-and-white landscape. “Voodoo, this is Phoenix Lead. Now, now, NOW!”
Chon kept his eyes on the surface of the road. Even so, the sudden bright, white light cast by the OV-10- dropped string of flares ruined his night vision. Their harsh, flickering illumination wasn’t easy to see by. He blinked, looking for patterns, regular shadows or shapes along the road.
There.
A row of boxy shadows, still moving in column down the road.
Chon’s thumb reached for the cannon trigger as his A-10 dropped lower toward the road.
The flares swaying down out of the sky could mean only one thing. Disaster.
“Get off the road! Disperse!” Major Roh In-Hak screamed into his radio, then leaned out of the truck cab. He waved his arms frantically, motioning the drivers behind him off to either side of the road. Most stared uncomprehendingly back.
It was too late. Roh heard a howling whine and looked back and up. Two dark, cruciform shapes were roaring down out of the sky — heading directly for him. Death on the wing.
The major panicked and threw himself out of the truck cab. He pinwheeled down a steep embankment and landed hard against the frozen earth of a rice-paddy dike. He lay motionless, gasping for air.
Roh looked up at his still-moving truck just as the first attacking aircraft fired. Its bulbous nose was illuminated by a blaze of light even brighter than the flares drifting overhead, and a stream of fire reached out and ripped into the earth near his truck. Then it leaped toward the vehicle as the pilot corrected his aim.
The North Korean major buried his face in the ground as the truck exploded, sending a searing sheet of orange-and-red flame just over his head. It had been carrying artillery ammunition destined for the heavy guns bombarding Taejon. He knew his driver was dead.
More explosions rocked the earth, lighting up the hills on either side of the narrow valley they were in. Roh stayed down as fragments whined all around, trying to shut out the awful sounds as screams blended with the roar of jet engines and the rippling thunder of high-velocity aircraft cannons.
The noise faded and then died away entirely. The enemy planes had finished their strafing runs.
Roh raised his head cautiously and then scrambled to his feet. He ran back toward the rest of the column to check the damage and was relieved by what he found. Only the first three trucks had been hit — all carrying ammunition or food. The supply convoy’s precious fuel tankers were still intact.
But they were trapped on this road. His vehicles couldn’t possibly escape over the rough countryside. And Roh knew the enemy pilots would be back to finish what they’d started. He went from truck to truck, banging on cab doors and screaming, “Deploy! Deploy! Troops take up positions in the trees! Get the antiaircraft vehicles operational!”
The column’s air defenses were pitiful. Every one of the People’s Army’s remaining mobile antiaircraft guns were stationed up at the front. As a result, all Roh had to defend his trucks with were a few locally manufactured guns, clumsy 37-millimeter weapons mounted precariously on flatbed trucks, and a sprinkling of shoulder-launched SA-7 SAMs carried by the convoy’s small infantry detachment. He knew it wouldn’t be enough.
Roh heard the jets thundering back and started running away from the road.
As he banked hard right to come around again, Chon armed his cluster bombs. They would drop all their ordnance in one pass, and there would be no second chance.
“Phoenix Flight, this is Lead. Attack in echelon.”
Clicks acknowledged his order, and Chon started concentrating on his flying. More flares went off ahead, lighting up the rugged countryside, and he pulled the A-10’s nose higher to clear a hill just ahead.
As he popped over the tree-lined hill’s jagged summit, Chon saw what looked like a cloud of fireflies and streaks of light zipping past his canopy. Tracers. He tried to avoid flinching. The A-10 was armored, but no sane pilot trusted in armor to keep his airplane flyable. He’d already been shot down once by enemy flak and he wasn’t about to let it happen again.
Chon punched his flare dispenser to automatic and set his HUD for a cluster bomb drop directly over the center of the road now coming up fast.
One concentration of tracers attracted his attention. His eyes narrowed. They were coming from some sort of flak vehicle, and he was tempted to give it a quick cannon burst after he’d made his pass. Chon fought the temptation. Attacking alerted defenses wasn’t wise. The mission was to destroy what they were trying to defend.
He reached for the bomb release.
Roh told the men near him to fire, and purely for effect, he emptied his own pistol at the dark shapes streaking overhead. He could see their undersides clearly in the light cast by his burning vehicles.
As his pistol clicked empty, the North Korean swore to himself. He’d identified the attackers. They were American A-10s and pistol bullets wouldn’t bother them any more than they would a tank. Each spewed a trail of incandescent flares as it roared past.
His motionless truck column disappeared in a blinding series of rippling detonations. Hundreds of flashes tore up and down the line of now-abandoned vehicles and blossomed across the frozen paddies on either side of the road. A cluster of furnace-white fireballs rising in the air told him that the fuel tankers needed at Taejon were gone.
Temporarily blinded, Roh blinked and looked away from the flames, trying to spot the American-made aircraft as they fled the scene of their victory. He was gratified to see that some of his men were still firing at them.
A shoulder-launched SAM flashed up into the night sky, darting after one of the fleeing jets. Roh urged it on silently, hoping that his troops might achieve some small success by at least downing an enemy plane. But then the SAM veered away, tracking a decoy flare instead of the vanishing A-10. He cursed and threw his pistol into the snow.
