'Coming up on the beach, Malibu.'
'I hear you. Pickin' up some fuzz from local radars now, tryin' to burn through the Prowler jamming. Nothing serious.'
'Keep watching 'em.' The HARM strike would have taken out most of the main North Korean radar stations, but there were certain to be some smaller ones untouched… any which had been shut down and therefore not emitting a homing signal for the HARMs to zero in on. The Koreans would be in a panic now, though. With the Alpha Strike again masked by jamming, they'd be desperate to see what was coming at them.
Batman checked his speed and altitude again. The Tomcat was skimming less than eighty feet off the deck, but the ocean below was an invisible black gulf.
'Anything in the air yet?'
'No, sir. No MiGs. Maybe the gomers don't do nighttime.'
Batman felt the faintest of uncertain stirrings. Would he be able to line up an enemy plane, lock on and shoot? He was certain now that he could, but some irrational part of himself insisted that he would never know until the time came.
And he knew that the inner voice was right.
His talk with Tombstone had steadied him. For the first time since he'd joined VF-95, he felt truly a part of the squadron. He would do what he'd been trained to do… and worry about that nagging inner voice later. Gently he nudged the stick forward, keeping his eye on the altimeter as he shaved several feet from the F-14's altitude.
In any case, a strong MiG response was not expected; night would give the technologically advanced American fighters too great an advantage over the MiG-21s, which would probably elect to sit things out until daybreak. Opposition would come from SAM sites scattered up and down the coast, especially the ones clustered along the Kolmo Peninsula near the airfield. The HARMs would have taken out the major radars, but some SAM sites would not give themselves away until U.S. planes were overhead.
And that was where the Tomcats came in, riding in ahead of the bombers, deliberately tempting the North Koreans to turn on their SAM radars. Launch sites would be plotted by the E-2C Hawkeyes circling fifty miles off the coast, and relayed to the Hornets and Intruders following in the Tomcats' wakes. Malibu had jokingly referred to their role as PPT: Paid Professional Target.
Lights shone across the water, drifting now to left and right as he approached the coast. There was a low ceiling this night, solid above five thousand feet. Light from Wonsan reflected from the clouds with an orange glow, back-lighting the ridge which formed the backbone of the Kolmo Peninsula. The airfield would be to the south. He brought the stick slightly to port.
The beach flashed under the Tomcat's keel, white surf on black rock dimly seen in the night. 'Two-three-two, feet dry,' Batman announced over the radio. He brought the stick up to clear the rugged, boulder-strewn slope of the ridge.
'Copy, Two-three-two,' Tombstone's voice replied. It sounded as though Stoney finally had all his shit in one seabag. Batman wondered what had brought him around.
Maybe he'd just finally come to grips with Coyote's death. What the hell, Batman thought. Flying is a dangerous game. There isn't an aviator in the Navy who hasn't known someone whose number had been called. All you could do was pick up, keep going. Or pack it in and quit. Tombstone did not look like a quitter to Batman.
'Threat warning,' Malibu said. 'They've got a lock.'
Batman heard the chirp in his headphones, as a red light labeled MISSILE flashed. 'Plot it.' He looked from side to side, hoping for a glimpse of the enemy launch.
'Got it!' Malibu snapped. 'Tally-ho at two o'clock!'
Batman whipped his head around in time to catch the flash. The SAM looked like a telephone pole balanced on flame as it rose above the rocky crest of the peninsula.
The ridge flashed beneath the Tomcat, and in the next instant Wonsan spread out in front of him like a map picked out in lights. Shipping crowded the harbor, but Jefferson's aviators had carefully studied current TENCAP photos before the mission. Damage to non-Korean ships and property was to be avoided, where possible.
Batman pushed the stick forward, dropping the F-14 toward the surface of the bay. The threat warning continued to chirp in his ear.
'Another launch, Batman,' Malibu said. 'Five o'clock… by the airfield.'
'Now comes the fun. Let's have some chaff.'
The water of the bay, illuminated now by reflected light from Wonsan, swept up beneath the Tomcat's belly. The SAMs arced overhead, points of white fire in the night.
'Negative tone,' Malibu said. 'They lost us in the wave scatter.'
'Shotgun Leader, Two-three-two,' Batman said, his voice held level and unconcerned. 'Feet wet. We are engaged.'
The fight over Wonsan had begun in earnest.
Lieutenant Commander Isaac Greene, 'Jolly Green' to his running mates, was not particularly well-liked by the others, but then he didn't care for most of them and that, he felt, made everything even. Loud, given to outbursts which made him seem somewhat obnoxious, Greene had few friends. The other members of the squadron were convinced he had a genuine talent for picking fights.
Liked or not, however, he was respected by every man in the wing and regarded with a perverse sense of pride by the members of his squadron, VA-89's Death Dealers. When he was guiding his A-6 in for a strike, the boasting and sarcasm vanished, replaced by the ice-cold professionalism which made him a superb Intruder pilot.
Unlike the Tomcat with its front seat-rear seat configuration, the Intruder seated the pilot and the bombardier-navigator almost side by side. It took a certain icy calm to fly the A-6 in on a run. Instead of a HUD the aviator had a Heads Down Display, a Kaiser AVA-1 Visual Display Indicator, or VDI. An electronic picture of everything in the aircraft's path was painted on the VDI monitor, together with weapons cues and basic flight data. It was the bomber's sophisticated avionics which made it so useful in the all-weather attack role, capable of carrying out pinpoint attacks in fog, rain, or snow… or in the middle of a moonless, overcast night. With the VDI, Jolly could literally fly the Intruder without bothering to look forward through the canopy at all, a feat which earned him both scorn and head-shaking admiration from the fighter jocks who pretended to trust their eyes more than their avionics.
As Intruder 555, 'Triple Nickle,' slid into its approach vector, Lieutenant Chucker Vance, Jolly's BN, kept his face buried in the black hood shielding his radar scope from extraneous light. 'Contact,' he said. 'Ground lock!' He switched his display to Forward-Looking infrared for an ID. 'Looks like a SAM park on FLIR.
Jolly watched the shifting patterns on his VDI. As Chucker switched the plane's computer to attack mode, new symbols giving relative target bearing, drift, time, and weapons status flicked on. 'Let's give him some rock-a- bye.'
Chucker set the ordnance panel to deliver a pair of Rockeye II CBU-59 cluster bombs, each a five-hundred- pound canister which would scatter two hundred fifty separate bomblets across an oval of death three hundred feet long.
The Intruder lurched once, forcing Jolly to correct slightly, bringing the steering bug on his VDI back into line with the nav pipper. He glanced up once, noting with mild surprise that the sky was filled with red and orange tracers, long lines of fiery dots reaching into the night sky. The plane lurched again.
'Pretty heavy triple-A.'
'Uh,' Chucker grunted in noncommittal answer. He kept his face buried in the radar hood. 'Weapons hot, safe off. Uh-oh. Threat signal. They're tracking, Jolly.'
'I don't give a rat's ass what they're doing.' He opened the tactical channel. 'Feet dry! Lead's going in hot!'
The A-6 hurtled in low over the Kolmo Peninsula, jagged rocks clawing for the Intruder's belly out of the darkness. With the target tagged by radar and fed into the aircraft's computer, the target appeared on the VDI as a green, computer graphic square, the bombsight as a tiny cross crawling up a straight line from the bottom of the screen toward the release point. The A-6 was slow, strictly subsonic, but even at 460 knots the Intruder shrieked toward the cluster of antiaircraft guns like a thundering cavalry charge. While he could have set the computer to
