nothing, just shades of gray.
“Do you prepare for bombing?” Thieu asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“We will drop our bombs first, then make our observations,” said the pilot.
“Are we that close to the lines already?” Zeus glanced at the compass for the heading. They were still going east.
“We turn and be prepared,” answered Thieu. “Ready?”
“Anytime.”
The plane took a slow bank. They were traveling just under seven hundred kilometers an hour by the plane’s gauges — in the area of 375 knots, or nautical miles an hour. That put them a little more than five minutes from the front line, by Zeus’s calculation.
Something red sparked in the distance. Zeus stared at it, unsure what it could be. It looked like a splash of paint on a photograph, something that didn’t belong.
More red appeared, a line of splashes.
They were a lot closer to the front than he’d thought. The Chinese were at Tien Yen already.
“Gunfire ahead,” said Thieu.
“Ours or theirs?”
“No matter.”
Zeus heard Thieu speaking to someone over the radio. The aircraft took a sharp bank to the left, then swung its nose back northward. The altimeter indicated they were at five thousand feet above ground level — well within the reach of whatever was firing ahead.
Probably Vietnamese antiair, thought Zeus. But what were they shooting at? Not them.
Zeus saw the answer in a string of black dots behind the flashes.
Chinese helicopters. Two of the dots were flying to the right, the others were slightly behind in echelon.
The dots at the right glowed red. They were firing rockets or something at the ground.
The antiaircraft fire intensified. Yellow-red streams leapt from the ground, bullets hosing the air. One stream turned black; another died. The ground flashed. A fire erupted.
“Hold on, Major,” said Thieu. “Our fun begins.”
The jet suddenly twisted on its wing, pushing down to Zeus’s left. The nose angled down, gently at first, but then in a flick of the pilot’s wrist almost ninety degrees. The plane became a dagger aimed at the earth. Zeus felt his stomach push toward his spine.
The left wing lifted; the nose swung hard to Zeus’s right. He strained to see, raising his head over the side of the cockpit, but gravity pushed him back down into his seat. The plane shot upward — straight up it seemed, though by this time Zeus was so dizzy he had no real idea of the direction they were going. His head slammed back against the rest. The engines surged behind him.
“I think we got him!” yelled Thieu. He could have been at a baseball game, cheering a grand slam.
“What?”
“The tank,” said Thieu. “You see it?”
Zeus struggled to look out the canopy. The ground was dark. If there was smoke or fire from the explosion it was lost in a blur of shadows as they zoomed away.
“I don’t know,” said Zeus.
“Look on next run. Will be to your left.”
“You didn’t drop all the bombs?” Zeus asked, but his words were swallowed by the engines as the pilot coaxed more power for another plunge toward the battlefield.
Everything outside the canopy blurred. The Albatros was not a particularly fast aircraft as jet fighters went, yet it seemed to be flying at the speed of thought.
Fingers of red fire appeared at the side, uncurling from black fists. Angry hands grabbed at the plane. The jet bucked ferociously as the pilot neared his target.
He glanced at the handle he was supposed to pull if they needed to bail out. They were so low here… Would he even survive to be captured?
They pulled up sharply, the aircraft gaining several hundred feet as the bombs were dropped. Zeus strained to keep his head where he could see outside the cockpit. There were black boxes on the ground — armored personnel carriers, he guessed, not tanks.
Or maybe they were tanks, or armored cars, or infantry fighting vehicles, or just trucks — it was too dark and they flitted by so quickly, who could tell?
Something hit the right wing. Zeus heard a screeching sound, something like metal being torn in two. The plane bucked for a moment, then righted itself. He pushed himself up against the restraints, craning his neck to see the wing, but he couldn’t quite see anything.
“Close one, Major,” said the pilot.
“Were we hit?” asked Zeus.
“Two bullets, maybe. Nothing. It would take many to harm us.”
Zeus doubted that. Just one bullet in the right place would surely be enough.
“Now we ready look on your mission,” said Thieu. His English got shakier as he became more excited, and he was clearly in the middle of an adrenaline rush at the moment. “We go to north.”
“More to the northwest, right?”
“Oh ho, Major, you are remember your compass.”
Thieu sounded absolutely high, as if he were stoned on cocaine. It was just adrenaline — and the excitement of survival. Some men pressed down under the continuing strain. For others, the stress became a drug, something you almost lived for.
Had Zeus been craving that high when he decided to take on the tanks at the border?
“Are you still with me, Major?” asked Thieu.
“I’m here.”
“Do you see the river on the right? That is Ky Cung.”
Zeus looked out the side of the cockpit. The sun was just below the horizon, and the ground still blurred into different shades of gray. But as his eyes adjusted and his mind focused, the dark blotches turned into colors, the shapes into objects that he had some hope of recognizing. He saw hills first, then a road they were passing, and finally the river, a surprisingly straight slit of black almost parallel to the aircraft’s path.
The Chinese border lay a few miles beyond the river. Zeus stared from the aircraft, straining to see activity.
“I am going to fly up Highway three-one,” said the pilot. “We will see what we can see.”
Zeus held his breath as the plane turned almost ninety degrees in a matter of seconds. Thieu dropped lower, edging the plane down toward the mountain that the highway ran through. This wasn’t so Zeus could get a better look — the lower the plane was, the harder it would be for any Chinese patrols or radars to spot.
The road tucked left and right, disappearing under the canopy. Zeus examined the terrain, trying to get a feel for how it would be to run a division through it. This was the real reason he’d come — it was one thing to stare at satellite photos and Global Hawk images, and quite another to see the land in person, even from three or four thousand feet.
What puzzled him was the fact that the Chinese had not come through here. But now it was clear. If you attacked on this route, you would be limited to the main road. The road net was limited and the sharp terrain made it exceedingly difficult to find an alternate route. Unlike the area farther east, there were no interconnected farm fields that could be used as temporary passages.
“Border is near,” said Thieu. “We may have shots.”
The pilot laughed. The aircraft had been steadily slowing; they were now doing only a bit more than a hundred knots, closing in on the plane’s stall speed — the speed at which it stopped staying in the air. But the low altitude made it appear as if they were going much faster.
There were houses ahead, on both sides of the road. The war seemed not to have reached here; smoke
