Scottie might have had something to do with it.”
“Thanks a bunch, Chessie,” said Major Paul Scott, Rebecca Furness’s mission commander in the Megafor- tress’s right seat. Like Cheshire, he was a longtime veteran of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and had flown many sorties in the old EB-52, the B-52 version of the Megafortress. He double-checked that his weapons were safed and added, “Maybe a little — but I’ll still give all the credit to the Megafortress.”
“You’re allowed to show a little pleasure now and then, Scottie,” Cheshire said. “Just a little ‘hot-diggety- damn’? We just saved that Korean cargo plane and probably a few dozen of their commandos.”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Nancy,” Paul said. “Scope’s clear. Give me forty left and let’s get back in our patrol orbit, Rebecca.” Their assigned orbit was over Kanggye itself, monitoring the movement of Chinese forces across the border into Chagang Do province.
“Fortress, Fortress, this is Iroquois,” a call came in moments later. “Bogeys at one-one-zero at one-one-zero bull’s-eye, angels thirty, heading northwest toward Fortress One at four-eight-zero knots.” “Iroquois” was the call sign of the EB-1’s “back door,” the USS
The
“Looks like the Japanese are coming back to play,” Patrick commented.
“Hey, guys, I got something,” Patrick reported. “Aircraft lifting off from Pyongyang North airfield, heading for Kanggye. Low altitude. Probably attack jets. I’m picking up a formation of fast-movers lifting off from Seoul as well. Looks like the two formations are going to join up.”
“And here’s their target, I’ll bet,” Paul Scott on Fortress One reported. He had just updated his own laser radar scan with recent data from a NIRTSat reconnaissance scan. The scan detected a long line of heavy vehicles on the principal highway between Kanggye and Anju. “The Chinese tanks are moving fast. They’re twenty miles south of Holch’on, almost at the southern edge of the province. They’re… wow, the computer says they’re main battle tanks. A line of tanks probably three miles long on the principal highway. I’ve also got main battle tanks going cross-country along a ten-mile-wide front on either side of the highway. At least two hundred vehicles spread out over twenty miles.”
“Can the system identify them?”
The LADAR ran the laser-derived dimensions through the computer’s large database of vehicles, but the results were inconclusive. “We got everything in the book out there: Chinese Type-59s and-69s, ex-Soviet T-53s and BMPs, self-propelled artillery, the works. I’d want to get a little closer. Ten miles the other way should do it.”
“I’ll pass the contact along to HAWC and to NRO anyway,” Patrick said. “It looks like you picked up something else on that last LADAR image.” Patrick had expanded his virtual cockpit display to show the entire fifty-mile LADAR image. Sure enough, it had detected several Chinese fighters heading south. “Computer identifies them as a large flight of J-6s, heading across the border too,” Patrick said. The J-6, a copy of the old Soviet MiG-19 “Farmer” tactical fighter, was the most numerous attack jet in China’s large aircraft arsenal. “Looks like four flights of four. China is definitely looking for trouble.”
“If those units on the ground aren’t firing up antiaircraft systems,” Nancy observed, “we can assume that either those vehicles don’t know they’re there — in which case they could’ve been bombed pretty easy — or the vehicles on the ground are Chinese as well.”
“Good point,” David said. “Looks like we got a Chinese ground invasion under way, supported by some air cover. We might get some action tonight, after all.”
“Great,” Rebecca said, tightening her straps even more. “I felt pretty good up here — until now. I feel totally naked now.”
“Your fuel looks good — about an hour before you bingo,” Patrick said. “Electrical, hydraulics, pneumatics, CG in the green. Looks like the fighters are going to stay at midaltitudes. Want to go up high?”
“Sounds good to me,” Rebecca said.
“Let’s do it,” Patrick said. In less than five minutes they had climbed up to thirty-four thousand feet, at least ten thousand feet higher than the Chinese fighters. The Japanese MiG-29s had descended below the Megafortress bombers as well. “HAWC has acknowledged our data transmissions and passed along a tactical alert to Space Command and Pacific Command,” Patrick went on. “We saw it first — good work, guys. The
“Okay, we’re picking up a full-scale air defense alert being broadcast in the clear to all Korean military units,” Patrick reported. “Air defense radars are lighting up… we should be able to tap into them any minute. We’ll have peninsula-wide radar coverage pretty soon.”
As the battle developed, it was obvious the Korean defenders were on the defensive all the way. Even combining the old North Korean air assets — a mixture of a few modern MiG-23 attack jets and MiG-29 fighters and many more older, obsolete ex-Chinese aircraft — with South Korea’s Western-designed aircraft, the Korean forces were at least numerically outgunned.
The Korean F-16CJ aircraft led the main attack group. They stayed at fifteen thousand feet, flying high enough to stay away from antiaircraft artillery, presenting themselves as inviting targets. The idea was that they should have drawn fire from Chinese surface-to-air missile batteries, at least a squeak on radar, enough so that they could open fire on any enemy search or tracking radars with their AGM-88 HARMs (high-speed antiradar missiles).
But the Chinese armor and infantry units were smart enough not to take the bait. They knew that if they didn’t activate any radars, the Korean F-16CJs did not have anything to shoot at. The Korean F-16s flew right up to the Chinese tanks — and never even received a rifle shot in their direction. They could do nothing but orbit over the area and wait for targets to pop up. A few tried to go low to drop cluster bombs on tanks and self-propelled artillery, and those planes were hit by optically and low-light TV-guided antiaircraft artillery and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. The Koreans lost four aircraft to enemy fire before being forced to retreat.
The F-16 Block 52 attack jets went in next, armed with infrared-imaging AGM-65D Maverick antitank missiles, followed by MiG-23 fighter-bombers carrying gravity bombs and target-marking rockets. But the Chinese J-6 fighters had arrived over the battlefield by now, outnumbering the Korean fighters by six to one. Even with those odds, the Korean jets were racking up impressive kills, but soon they began to run out of missiles and the numbers of Chinese jets just didn’t seem to be diminishing. Before long the Korean jets were on the defensive and forced to run south. Several formations of Korean F-4E Phantom II bombers tried circumnavigating the entire Chagang Do battlefield and tried to cut in from the west, but they were intercepted by Chinese fighters out of Dandong and chased off as well. Both sides lost a handful of planes, but it wasn’t a stalemate or tie — every plane Korea lost composed a major percentage of the fleet, while four fighters could replace even the most obsolete Chinese fighter.
Even though both the Koreans and the Chinese lost a fairly equal number of planes, the first Korean counter- offensive was a complete failure. The massive numbers of Chinese armor and mobile infantry units in the three Korean northern border provinces were barely scratched.
Five F-16s and six F-4s lost or damaged, sir,” the command operations officer summarized. “We have reports
