against it. “Doors coming open… missile away! Get ready for a mil power TERFLW descent, Nance!”
“You got it, boss,” Nancy said happily, quickly configuring her autopilot switches. Patrick opened the bomb doors and commanded the ground-attack cruise missile against the MiG-29.
The Wolverine-powered cruise missile normally had a fifty-mile range, but this time it was heading up against a MiG-29 fighter, so its range was considerably less. But it was enough. Patrick and Nancy watched on the supercockpit display as the Wolverine missile flew closer and closer to the MiG. About two miles away, the MiG’s infrared search and track system must have detected the missile on a collision course, and it did a spectacular snap-turn to the right, followed by a roll and a steep dive away from the missile. The little cruise missile tried to follow, but it quickly lost track of the MiG and crashed harmlessly into the Sea of Japan.
At the same instant the MiG-29 did its wild evasive maneuver, Nancy rolled the EB-1C inverted and pulled. The bomber plummeted toward the sea in a steep thirty-thousand-foot-per-minute dive. She pulled the power to idle to keep from overstressing the plane. At five thousand feet above the ocean, she rolled upright, engaged the terrain-following system, and pushed it to full military power. They leveled off smoothly two thousand feet above the ocean, accomplished a systems check, then stepped it down until they were two hundred feet above the dark waves.
Nancy made a turn south to parallel the Korean coastline, in case the MiG tried to pursue them along their last known track, while Patrick scanned the skies around them with the laser radar. “The MiG is fifteen miles at our five o’clock, heading southeast,” he reported. “I don’t think he’s got us. Good job, Nance. Let’s work our way back to our patrol orbit and see if we can catch any more Nodongs tonight!”
“It stinks that we had to take a shot at a good guy and waste a perfectly good Wolverine just so we wouldn’t get shot down ourselves,” Nancy said. “But I guess he’s just doing his job. And we actually got two missiles tonight! Awesome!”
The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful. The Megafortress crew stayed in their patrol orbit over central Korea for another hour, easily skirting all of the search radars and fighter patrols over Korea. By this time there was a general air defense alert over the entire region, but the Megafortress crew was easily able to evade all searchers. There were no more missile launches from either side. They then broke off and hooked up with a KC-135 tanker over the Sea of Japan, 150 miles west-northwest of Kanazawa, Japan. With full tanks, they returned to their patrol orbit until an hour before sunrise, then headed back toward Japan and terminated their first successful night of antiballistic missile patrol.
They refueled again with the tanker, then flew to their “due regard” point, the coordinates in their military flight plan where they would again be back in radar contact. The Japanese military air traffic controllers on the island of Hokkaido, where the Megafortress crew checked in, might have suspected that the unidentified aircraft near Korea was this mysterious B-1 with the “Fortress” call sign, but there was nothing they could do but let the plane go on its way unmolested. Once it crossed the “due regard” point outbound outside Japanese airspace, its business was its own. As long as it crossed the proper point inbound at the proper time and squawked the proper transponder codes, it was a legal return flight and could come back without question with a valid flight plan and full air traffic control service.
With their identity confirmed and their flight plan reactivated, they continued on uneventfully and a little over two hours later set down in Adak, Alaska. Total flight time: twenty-one hours. They had taken off from Dreamland just after sunset and were landing just before arctic sunset — the sun would be up again in a couple of hours.
The ground crews immediately prepared the Megafortress for relaunch, while the flight crew made their way to the hangar where their new headquarters had been set up. David Luger himself picked up Nancy and Patrick from the plane, fed them sandwiches and drinks, escorted them to maintenance and intelligence debrief, and then to the conference room where they could sit and relax and talk about the sortie.
Waiting for them on a secure satellite videoconference hookup was Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, calling from Dreamland. “Helluva job, you two,” Samson said proudly. “Congratulations. How do you feel?”
“We need to get some more-comfortable chairs in that plane,” Nancy said. “And we need to get the microwave oven and hot cup working again too.”
“Why bother, Nance? You never unstrap or even lower your oxygen mask anyway,” Patrick said with a smile. To Samson, he said, “What’s the word from Korea, sir?”
“The word, thank God, is ‘what the hell happened?’” Samson replied. “Both China and Korea observed the exact same thing: two ballistic missile launches originating in southern Chagang Do province, followed by two large explosions, one a nuclear burst, high in the atmosphere. Very little damage and few injuries to anything or anyone on the ground. No response from China this time, no further action by Korea except to declare an air defense emergency. Japan claims it intercepted and attacked a bomber over the Sea of Japan and chased it away. Officially, they did not speculate on its identity. Unofficially — well, my phone’s been ringing off the hook. State Department. Pentagon. Gold Room. Oval Office. They all wanted a briefing.”
“And?”
“And I told them we had a winner on our hands, and we needed to fully implement it.” Samson beamed. “They virtually handed me a blank check. We got tankers, manpower, weapons, whatever we need ready to go. It’s our show too. No argument this time — Pacific Command was never even considered. The operation stays black all the way — we still don’t want to send any more carriers or combat aircraft into the region until things cool down. Except for the two carriers already stationed around Korea, we’ll be the only other combat unit in the entire northern Pacific. So just tell me what you need, Patrick, and it’ll be on its way.”
“The first thing I’ll need, sir,” Patrick said, “is the 111th Bomb Squadron, Nevada Air National Guard, and their planes, modified and flown up here as quickly as possible.”
“What?” Samson asked incredulously. “After what you went through with that bunch, you still want to use them? You can have their planes, Patrick — that’ll be a no-brainer. But the Nevada Air National Guard?”
“Sir, they are still the best Bone drivers in the business,” Patrick insisted. “When I did my evaluation of that unit, I was thinking like a BUFF or B-2 bomber guy — low, slow, and fly the blue line. I realized that once we got over Korea, Operation Battle Born won’t work if we fly that way. This mission calls for crews who can think and react like close-air-support attack planes, not bombers. They have to drive down the enemy’s throat to do this mission. Those guys are the best because they fly like that all the time — they don’t know any other way.”
“Then you got ’em,” Samson said. “What else do you need? Tanker support, AWACS, fighter cover?”
“We need Takedown,” Patrick replied.
“You need who?”
“Takedown — that’s the Navy version of Coronet Tiger,” Patrick said. “Brad Elliott originally got Coronet Tiger from the Navy, and they still have patrol planes modified with the system — on P-3 Orions, I believe. We need that plane, plus its support teams. I also need the
“You mean the USS
“Yep,” Patrick said. “We need someone to watch our backsides and to provide some air defense support. Besides, they know a lot of our secrets anyway — might as well make them part of the team.”
“Well, that might be a tough sell, but I’ll do it,” Samson said with a smile. “What’s the plan?”
“I plan on flying missions or manning the VC with other crews flying the EB-1 until someone orders me to stop,” Patrick said. “I’ll send Dave back to base to supervise the retrofit of the four Bones at Dreamland, and I’ll send Nancy and Wendy out to Patuxent River to supervise the Takedown flight crew setup. In less than seventy-two hours, we’ll be fully operational here. I just hope this region doesn’t blow up in our faces before then.”
The news about Korea was so nonstop and so shocking that, even after just a few days, it seemed as if it was already old news. Rebecca Furness was hardly paying attention to the TV tuned to CNN in her office as she took pictures, plaques, and other assorted memorabilia off the walls and stacked them neatly in boxes.
At first, it did appear as if the Korean people’s revolution was going to hold. Led by the United States, foreign troops started moving off the Korean peninsula within hours of the formal request. At several times, Russian, Chinese, and American transport and cargo vessels shared the same waters, packed full with troops, dependents, and equipment. In fact, it appeared as if all three nations had actually
