The excitement extended to every man on the flight deck crew, visible in the crisp motions, signals and gestures, the jaunty grins, the two-fingered V-for-victory signs raised above their heads in salute. One yellow shirt stood in a pool of light from a nearby work lamp, looked up at Tombstone, and rammed his fist into the air. Tombstone grinned and returned the greeting with a thumbs-up as the yellow shirts began breaking down his Tomcat, releasing the chocks and chains which held her to the deck. Morale aboard the Jefferson had never been higher. We're going in this time, Tombstone thought. And this time nothing's going to stop us!
'How you feeling back there, Snowball?'
'Never better,' his RIO replied. He sounded self-assured, businesslike. 'Radio frequencies set, nav guidance punched in. We're ready to roll, skipper.'
'Here she goes.' He started up the Tomcat's engines, first the left, then the right, feeling the surge of power shudder through the airframe. Gently, he set the gray-white throttle handles by his left hand to idle, waiting until the breakdown was complete. A yellow shirt waved his colored wand, directing Tombstone out of his parking space.
Slowly, the F-14 moved toward the catapult. Above the thrumming roar of his engines, Tombstone heard the sudden, howling thunder of an A-6 Intruder's twin Pratt and Whitney turbojets revving to full throttle, then the shuddering blast of sound as a catapult hurled the aircraft out over the ocean. The building excitement was tangible. This was it!
The order to assemble for a briefing had come through from CAG less than three hours earlier. As before, Tombstone would be leading the tactical CAP for the ground attack aircraft, Hornets and Intruders. The Alpha Strike would be going in low, hard, and fast, skimming the waves almost all the way in; their primary targets included most of the objectives of the aborted mission of the day before, SAM sites and coastal radars, AA batteries and communications centers, as well as the airfield at Kolmo across the bay from the Wonsan waterfront.
It was imperative that the Strike, code-named Desperado, knock out the SAMs and radar. If it didn't, the entire op would almost certainly fail. For the first few hours, the operation's success would be riding on the A-6 Intruders of VA-84 and VA-89, the Blue Rangers and the Death Dealers. The Hornets of VFA-161 and VFA-173, the Javelins and the Fighting Hornets, would be following close behind, taking down what the Intruders missed.
Meanwhile the F-14s, code-named Shotgun, would provide cover for Desperado.
As CAG had laid it out at the briefing, Righteous Thunder would go down in a series of stages. The air-to- ground strikes were Phase One. Phase Two would begin approximately two hours later with CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters in their minesweeper role, using towed sleds to clear the approaches to the landing beaches for the Marines. At about the same time, a special flight of four RH-53D Sea Stallion helos designated Cavalry One would depart from the U.S.S. Chosin. The Marine landings were scheduled to begin with high tide, at approximately 0545 hours in the morning.
Tombstone checked his cockpit clock. Two hours to go before the helo ops began, six until the landings began. Jefferson's air wing had that long to open the way for the Marines. It was a tall order.
In the darkness of the flight deck, colored lights probed and clustered, darted and winked, like workers attending a queen bee. Blue shirts checked flaps and control surfaces. A red shirt held high the red-tagged wires which had safed the Tomcat's air-to-air missiles until he'd removed them. Tombstone checked the wires, verifying the count. This time his load mix was six Phoenix and two Sidewinders. The rules of engagement for this mission were to hit the other guy before he hit you… which meant the long-range Phoenix could be used to best advantage.
What surprised him most was the realization that he had no questions about his own part in things, despite his failure the night before. He felt the familiar, rapid hammering of his heart beneath his harness, sure, but the doubts were gone. It was strange how his talk with Batman had steadied him.
Fight to fly, fly to fight, fight to win. He owed it to the other men in the squadron to see the Top Gun slogan through. He owed it to himself.
And to Coyote.
The F-14 moved into place on catapult one. A green shirt standing to the left of the aircraft held up the lighted board: 68,000. Tombstone unclipped a penlight from the clipboard on his thigh and held it against the cockpit canopy, describing a circle which indicated that he agreed with the figure for the Tomcat's weight.
The familiar succession of clanks, rattles, and thumps followed as the hook-up men clipped the launching bar on the Tomcat's nose gear to the catapult shuttle ? riding in its slot on the flight deck. The catapult officer waved his green-filtered flashlight horizontally, signaling Tombstone to bring his throttles up to military power.
He checked the control stick and rudder pedals: Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Amen. All correct. The cat officer signaled again, up and down this time. Tombstone responded by sending the throttle the final notch forward to full burner, then switched on his navigation and running lights. The green light shone from the carrier island.
'They're givin' us the word, Stoney!' Snowball said.
'Hang onto your stomach, Snowball. It's go. Go!'
The deck officer touched his light to the deck, then raised it, pointing off the bow. There was a second's pause, and then the Tomcat slammed forward into the night.
DAY FIVE
CHAPTER 22
The first blow fell against the island of Yo-do, a rocky islet twelve miles off the Korean coast. There was little of interest there: a fishing village, a small military base ? and the seaward-facing radar arrays for Yo-do's SAM sites.
At 0048 hours, the base went on full alert. The jamming which had been fogging Yo-do's radar for the past several days had cleared, and in the unaccustomed clarity a number of targets could be made out to the east, crossing into North Korean airspace.
Word was flashed back to Wonsan, and from there to P'yongyang. Uncertainty about American reactions to the Wonsan crisis was now resolved. It was evident now that the Yankees planned to strike at North Korea with a seaborne air strike, similar to the nightmare F-111 raid they'd mounted against Libya in 1986.
Yo-do's main radar arrays tracked the oncoming Americans. The smaller tracking radars used to direct the SAM batteries switched on, picking their targets.
Minutes later death fell, unheralded and unsuspected, from the skies, shredding the concave latticeworks of the Korean radar antennae in the searing detonation of missile warheads, each packing 145 pounds of high explosive.
The HARM AGM-88A had been launched from Navy carrier aircraft against Libyan radar sites in 1986, where it had proved its worth against Qaddafi's SAMs. Each HARM ? A High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile ? was over thirteen feet long and weighed nearly eight hundred pounds. The only weapon ever carried by the Navy's EA-6B electronic warfare Prowler, it had a range of eighty nautical miles and a radar profile so narrow the Korean operators literally never knew what hit them.
Minutes after the destruction of Yo-do's radar eyes, similar outposts on the Kolmo Peninsula, on Sin-do outside of Wonsan Harbor, and on the rugged coasts north and south of Wonsan itself all vanished in savage explosions as their own radar emissions called down the death which hurtled in at nearly Mach 1.
The explosions were still echoing across the waters of Wonsan Harbor when the air armada assembled above the Yonghung Man completed its refueling from orbiting tankers and began descending on the Korean coast.
