attack were exhausted. They had to rest. They would all drive on together first thing in the morning.
Well, screw the infantry. Those damned footslogging weaklings had given the fascists a four-hour respite. Four hours to strengthen their defenses, resupply, and rest. Now he and his men would have to pay a heavier price in blood and burned-out tanks to make the same gains they could have made with relative ease in the night.
To top everything off, his battalion commander had forbidden anyone to bivouac in the small village they’d shot up. The fool had been afraid the imperialist artillery batteries might have the area zeroed-in. So instead of warming themselves inside captured houses, he and his men had shivered sleepless inside their tanks.
He slapped the side of the turret in frustration. “Come on, you puling swine. Move!”
His men raced even faster to fold and stow their white camouflage nets. Their company commander’s morning temper tantrums were infamous. All his urgings, however, couldn’t do much to speed the moment when they could start turning over their T-55s’ powerful, water-cooled diesel engines.
And when the sun rose blood-red, only five of the company’s eight remaining tanks had their diesels revving at full throttle.
The captain muttered angrily to himself as he waited for the other tank commanders to get their armored behemoths underway. His breath steamed in the frozen air. The temperature was dropping again.
Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he turned, squinting painfully into the rising sun. Nothing. Nothing. There.
He stood rooted in place for a moment, mesmerized by the oncoming shapes. Then he grabbed for the twin handles of the turret-mounted DShK-38 heavy machine gun and bellowed, “Air raid warning — EAST!”
Major Chon of the South Korean Air Force smiled beneath his oxygen mask as his American-built A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted its ugly nose above the ridgeline and dropped back down in a gentle dive toward the ice- covered rice paddies below.
He glanced quickly right and left. The three other planes of his flight were pacing him, flying in a line-abreast formation to maximize their chances of sighting a worthwhile ground target.
Chon smiled again. This was more like it. Much better than yesterday.
The first day of the war had been a disaster for the ROK’s lone A-10 ground attack squadron. Right at the start, North Korean commandos had crash-landed right on Yanggu’s runways and fanned out across the field, shooting up and grenading barracks, maintenance shops, a Vulcan antiaircraft battery, and the nearest I-Hawk SAM battery. They’d inflicted heavy casualties and damage before Air Force security troops had killed them.
The air raid that followed had been even worse. The 25th’s A-10s were still taxiing out when a squadron of MiG-23s roared in out of the mountains — laying a string of concrete-piercing bombs across the now-defenseless base and its aircraft shelters. The bombs had turned three of the squadron’s twelve planes into flaming wrecks and had grounded the rest until the base’s shattered runways could be repaired.
That was bad enough. But then the Air Force staff gurus in Seoul had given first priority to the ROK’s fighter and air defense squadrons. As a result, specialized runway repair crews hadn’t arrived at Yanggu until late in the day — near dark. And by then the crews had been so exhausted that it had taken nearly six hours to fill in the holes and restore the runways to operational status.
That was all in the past now, though, and Chon expected today’s tank-killing missions to erase the stain on his squadron’s honor. They’d been ordered up into the predawn gray to hunt down enemy armored units that had been spotted late yesterday moving into overrun some of the few troops still holding firm against the North Korean onslaught.
Chon scanned the low, undulating ground rushing toward him. Small, scattered clumps of trees, a snow- covered road and rice paddies, houses on the horizon — a tiny village. Ah. There they were. He spotted clouds of steam and exhaust smoke rising near the village where a cluster of T-55 tanks and other armored vehicles were gunning their engines to dispel the growing cold.
He broke radio silence. “Blue Dragon flight, this is Lead. Target at two o’clock. Attack in sequence.”
Chon banked right and dropped lower, lining up for a quick strafing run. The other three A-10s followed suit. He thumbed a switch on the stick, setting the plane’s internal decoy dispenser system to AUTOMATIC. NOW the A-10 would pop an IR decoy flare every couple of seconds through his attack run. With luck, any heat-seeking SAMs fired at him would be attracted to the flow of fast-burning magnesium flares instead.
The South Korean major settled his thumb back on the trigger for the plane’s GAU-8 30mm rotary cannon and watched the cluster of enemy tanks and APCs grow larger in his HUD’s target reticule. His thumb tensed, waiting.
Lying half-hidden in a nearby drainage ditch, Kevin Little and Rhee watched in amazed relief as the first dark-green, flat-winged A-10 screamed down out of the sky toward the North Korean tanks, trailing an incandescent stream of slowly falling flares.
They’d taken shelter in the ditch early in the morning, too punch-drunk to spot the camouflaged T-55 company just a hundred meters ahead. When the tank engines had coughed to life, each had known they’d had it. Their improvised hiding place was right on the enemy’s line of march, and the North Koreans couldn’t possibly miss them once the tanks started rolling.
The A-10 fired and its nose disappeared in a blaze of light as it threw a hail of heavy, depleted-uranium slugs toward its targets.
The slugs vaporized snow and threw up fountains of new-made mud in a straight line pointing right at the parked T-55s. Then the bullet stream slammed into the thin top armor of the first tank, slashed through steel, and fireballed it — throwing burning diesel fuel and armor fragments high into the air. A second tank exploded, and a third sat lifeless and immobile, shredded from end to end.
The A-10 roared overhead, picking up speed as its twin turbofans went to maximum thrust. Its companions came in close behind, completing the slaughter. More North Korean tanks and APCs were ripped apart.
Kevin’s eyes followed the lead plane pulling up out of its strafing run. As it raced low over a white-cloaked orchard, a streak of orange flame leapt out from among the dead trees — darting after the Thunderbolt. Christ, North Korean infantry must be bivouacked in the grove, he thought, and one of them had fired a hand-held SAM to try to avenge his tank-driving comrades.
Aware of the oncoming missile, the A-10 suddenly jinked hard left, climbed sharply to clear a low ridge, and spewed a new cluster of flares. The SAM veered off, closing on one of the decoys.
The cleanup Thunderbolts saw the missile launch and banked right to strafe the orchard it had come from. Short cannon bursts from each hammered the orchard into a splintered tangle of fallen trees and dead men.
Kevin heard new explosions cracking nearby and tore his horrified gaze away from the carnage in the woods. He glanced back toward the lead A-10 just as it suddenly disappeared in a wall of smoke and flame.
Alerted by the tank company commander’s last bellowed warning, the 45th’s gunners frantically swung their six S-60 towed antiaircraft guns through an arc, trying to lead Chon’s snub-nosed A-10. The jet was moving too low and fast for precise aiming. They could only try to throw a proximity-fused barrage ahead of the speeding plane and hope that it ran straight through the deadly cloud of explosions and spiraling fragments.
Each gun only had time to lob three shells toward the selected aim point before Chon’s wingman spotted their muzzle flashes and strafed the battery into oblivion.
Most of the North Korean gunners didn’t live to see it, but they got lucky.
One of the eighteen 57-millimeter shells burst just above and behind Chon’s A-10. The explosion tore the plane’s starboard engine off and sent fragments slicing through A-10’s armor, deep into its fuselage — tearing through control cabling, hydraulics, and fuel tanks. The fragments didn’t cause any fires or internal explosions that would have destroyed the jet outright, but they did damage or destroy too many vital systems for it to remain flyable for long.
Chon swore under his breath as he wrestled to regain control. The unexpected flak burst had ripped the stick out of his hands and tossed the A-10 into a dive. Now, without its starboard engine, the plane bobbled through the air like an epileptic duck.
The electronics for his HUD were out, gutted by a shell splinter, but he could see the ground rushing upward and his backup altimeter spinning down as the plane lost altitude.
