Battle Born

Korean, not a foreign, flag. That had been the dream of all Koreans since the Chinese and Japanese occupations. But what he wanted didn’t matter right now. Right now his homeland was under attack, and it was his sacred responsibility to stop it.

He scanned an authentication encoder-decoder card strapped to his left thigh. Even though the pilots and the controller were on a secure frequency and had already verified each other’s identity, they were entering a critical phase of this mission. Careful coordination and verification was an absolute must. The card was changed every twelve hours and would provide positive command validation for all upcoming orders: “Sapphire Command, this is Tiger flight, authenticate Tango-Alpha. Over.”

“Sapphire authenticates Alpha.”

“Authentication received and verified. Tiger flight requests final intercept instructions.”

“Stand by, Tiger flight,” the controller responded. The wait was not long. “Tiger flight, you are ordered to attempt to make visual contact to verify the target’s identity. If it is a hostile aircraft, or if identification is not possible, you are instructed to attempt to force the aircraft to land at a category Charlie, Delta, Echo, or Foxtrot airfield, military or civilian. If the hostile will not respond, or if you are approaching any category Bravo airspace, you are authorized to destroy the hostile aircraft.” Then the controller read the current date-time group and authentication code, and it matched.

The F-16 lead pilot called up the coordinates of the closest category Bravo airspace, which happened to be Seoul itself. They were only fifty miles north of the edge of the thirty-mile Buffer Zone around the South Korean capital. At their current airspeed, the pilot had only about seven minutes to convince the Communist invader to turn around or land before he had to shoot him out of the sky.

He tried the radio first. In Korean, then in broken Chinese, he radioed, “Unidentified aircraft seventy-eight miles northeast of Seoul, this is the Republic of Korea air defense flight leader. You have violated restricted airspace. I have you in sight and am prepared to destroy you if you do not reverse course immediately. I warn you to reverse course now.” No response. He tried the universal emergency frequencies on UHF, VHF, and HF channels as well as several known North Korean fighter common frequencies, but there was still no response.

It took two minutes for the F-16 pilot, with his wing-man flying high cover position, to maneuver alongside the hostile aircraft. Thankfully, it was only a single plane, not an entire attack formation. It was easy to intercept the intruder visually because he had all of his outside navigation and anticollision lights on — and, the ROK pilot soon realized with surprise, he had his landing gear and takeoff flaps still down too! Incredibly, this pilot had launched and flown hundreds of miles with his gear and flaps down. He was sucking fuel at an enormous rate, and at over three hundred knots had probably overstressed them both to the breaking point. The ROK F-16s were equipped with three-thousand-candlepower spotlights on the left side of the plane, and when the pilot was close enough to see the plane’s shadowy outline in the darkness, he flicked them on.

“Sapphire, this is Tiger flight lead, I have visual contact on the hostile,” the ROK pilot reported on the secure HAVE QUICK channel. “It appears to be an A-5 Qian attack plane.” The A-5 was a Chinese-made attack plane, a thirty-year-old copy of the ancient Soviet Su-7 attack fighter. It was a mainstay of the North Korean People’s Air Army. “Configuration as follows: single engine, single pilot, small cylindrical fuselage, with short delta wings, large nose intake, and a small radome in the center of the intake. I see a red and blue flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on the side, along with a tail code, ‘CH,’ and number one-one-four.” The “CH” stood for Ch’ongjin, a North Korean air-attack base.

Ch’ongjin was known to have large stores of chemical and possibly nuclear weapons.

“The A-5 is carrying three external stores: one one-hundred-deciliter centerline fuel tank and another one- hundred-deciliter fuel tank under each wing.” He steered the searchlight across the weapons, gulped in shock, then added in a barely controlled voice, “Correction, Sapphire, correction. The stores under the wings are not fuel tanks, repeat, not fuel tanks. They appear to be gravity weapons, repeat, gravity weapons. I see four purple stripes around the center of the starboard gravity weapon.”

This was the worst possible news. The purple stripes around the bomb, a standard marking in both the Communist Chinese and the old Soviet military from which all of North Korea’s weapons came, meant that they were thermonuclear bombs. They were the old-style Yi-241 weapons, disguised to look like fuel tanks — the Chinese and Soviets had once even stored them outside secure areas to try to convince Western intelligence analysts that they were not nuclear bombs. But each of these “fuel tanks” had the explosive power of 600,000 tons of TNT — more than enough to level Seoul or any other city in the world. Because they were considered unreliable, two of them were dropped on a single tar-get — if the first one detonated, the second would “fratricide” in the fireball.

There was a moment’s tense pause. Then the controller ordered, “Tiger leader, this is Sapphire; you are instructed to attempt to divert the hostile away from category Bravo airspace in any way possible.” The F-16 pilot could hear the quiver of fear in the controller’s voice. “You must not allow the hostile aircraft to close within fifty miles of category Bravo airspace, but you are instructed to shoot down the hostile only as a last resort.” The reasoning was clear: if the pilot put a missile into the A-5, at best the explosion would scatter nuclear material; at worst, the devices could detonate, causing widespread destruction. The ex-Chinese and ex-Soviet weapons did not have the numerous safety features of Western nuclear devices — they were designed to explode, not designed to safe themselves.

“Tiger flight copies,” the leader acknowledged. “Check.”

“Two copies,” his wingman responded immediately. With the safety radius now increased to fifty miles, they had less than three minutes to get this intruder turned around.

The lead pilot shined the searchlight into the A-5’s cockpit canopy from a distance of less than fifty meters. What he saw shocked him yet again: the North Korean pilot was not wearing a helmet! It looked as if he had simply climbed in the plane and blasted off without any of his flight gear. This was astounding, although it did explain why he never heard the radio or configuration warnings.

The North Korean pilot shielded his eyes from the searchlight — and, thankfully, turned away from the F-16. Good — they were no longer heading directly for the heart of the capital. The ROK pilot edged closer to the A-5 and again shined the light into the cockpit; again, the A-5 turned away. He was heading almost southeast now, well away from Seoul. This time the F-16 pilot flew slightly above and closer to the North Korean plane. As the A-5 descended and turned away, he saw that the pilot appeared to be screaming, gesturing wildly at the ROK plane while trying to shield his eyes from the blinding light.

The F-16 pilot called up a list of nearby category Echo airfields and found a deactivated military base, Hongch’on, less than thirty miles away. It was isolated; the nearest populated area was a small town over twenty miles distant. There was no time to search for a better choice.

The North Korean seemed to be weirdly single-minded, which worked to the F-16 pilot’s advantage: if he steered away from the A-5, the Communist pilot tried to turn right toward Seoul, but if he crowded him, the pilot turned left, away from him. If he climbed over him, the Communist descended, but if he flew at the same altitude, the A-5 pilot would try to climb back to original altitude or maintain altitude. Good.

“Sapphire Control, this is Tiger lead, I have the hostile turned toward Hongch’on, and I will attempt to get him to land. Have security and special weapons maintenance crews standing by. Our ETA is fifteen minutes.”

They were over Hongch’on in a little over twenty minutes. The airstrip was illuminated by several trucks shining their headlights onto the concrete; there was more than enough light. But herding the reluctant North Korean pilot to land on the nine-thousand-foot-long runway was proving more difficult. It was as if the North Korean pilot had finally realized what the F-16 was forcing him to do, and he kept trying to turn away from the runway. Finally, the wingman got on his left side, and they boxed the A-5 in. But when the leader tried to force it lower and along the runway centerline, the plane rolled hard left, striking the wingman’s right wingtip.

“Damn! He midaired me! Tiger Two is lost wing-man!” the second F-16 pilot shouted as he climbed away from the North Korean attack plane. “Lead, I have substantial damage to my right wingtip and number ten weapon station. I am climbing, passing five thousand.”

“How is your controllability?” the leader asked. “Do you need an escort?”

“Negative,” the wingman replied. “I feel a slight vibration from the damage area and I’ve lost some airspeed, but I have no warning or caution lights and my controls feel okay. I have safed and locked all my weapons. Still showing full connectivity on all stations except number ten. I am visually inspecting my right pylon…” The lead F-16 pilot knew his wingman was fishing a flashlight out of his flight suit pocket so he could see his wingtip: “I have lost