The door swung open seconds later. Lin glimpsed dim red lighting, the amber glow of radar screens, a young private's expression of horror as he saw the Uzi in Lin's hands. The private tried to slam the door shut, but Lin squeezed the Uzi's trigger. Firing full auto, the SMG sent 9-mm slugs chopping through door and private alike, the sound somewhat quieter than the earlier suppressed pistol shots.
Lin rammed his way past the splintered door and burst into the room. A railed walkway circled the tower chamber above the level of the door, with stairways leading up at two points. Another private sat at a radar console, already turning in his swivel chair as Lin fired again. The private staggered to his feet, then pitched forward over the railing as Lin extended the burst, sweeping across a corporal who was rising from his chair at another console nearby. Glass popped and crazed as bullets smashed through window panels.
A fourth man, the duty officer, was lunging toward an alarm button when Lin's deadly scythe of gunfire cut his legs out from under him and sent him tumbling to the floor.
The Uzi's slide locked open, the magazine empty. Drawing the pistol, Lin climbed the stairs, then paced along the walkway. The lieutenant and the corporal were both still alive. He killed each of them with a single shot through the head. Both privates were already dead.
From the control tower's upper deck, he could look through the huge, slanted windows which gave a view out across the jungle in all directions. A half-moon illuminating scattered clouds low in the west gave light enough to distinguish the jungle's edge. Nearer, but still a couple of hundred meters off, floodlights bathed a portion of the tarmac off the main runway where a maintenance crew was working late on a That F-5 down for repairs. Lin studied the workers through a large pair of binoculars sitting on the console. There was no sign of alarm, no indication that they'd heard the gunfire.
Fortunately, the windows were still intact save for a chain of white-starred bullet holes. If one of those panels had shattered completely, he could have had the whole base coming out to investigate.
So far, then, so good. Lin went to the tower radio and turned the channel selector to a carefully memorized frequency, then picked up the microphone and began speaking. 'Victory, this is Arrow. Victory, this is Arrow. Do you copy?'
There was a nerve-grating delay filled with the hiss of static. Then a voice replied, 'Arrow, this is Victory. We receive you. Go ahead.'
'Victory, Arrow. Execute. Repeat, execute.'
The voice on the other end acknowledged and the channel went dead. Lin picked up his Uzi, dropped his empty magazine, and replaced it with a loaded one from the pouch riding on his hip. He rolled the corporal's body out of its chair and sat down, facing the sunken doorway through which he'd just come. All he had to do now was wait.
The E-2C Hawkeye was an ungainly-looking aircraft, driven by twin turboprops and mounting a twenty-four- foot-wide, saucer-shaped radome above its spine. The saucer, rotating at the rate of six revolutions per minute, was the housing for the aircraft's powerful APS-125 UHF radar. Despite its strange appearance, the E-2C was widely regarded as the single most capable radar-warning and air-traffic-control aircraft in service, able to track more than two hundred and fifty air targets at a time, and to control as many as thirty friendly interceptors. On board were five men, the two pilots, a CIC officer, an air controller, and a radar operator. Jefferson routinely kept at least one of her four Hawkeyes airborne at all times, where they served as the long-range eyes of the carrier battle group.
The CIC officer was Lieutenant Dave Dunning. He braced himself against the overhead as he leaned over the shoulder of the radarman first class for a closer look at the bogies.
'There they are, sir,' the radarman said. 'They come and go. I think they're hedgehopping.'
The amber screen showed a confusing tangle of blips, most identified by their IFF transponders as commercial flights or That military aircraft. Clear at the top of the screen, though, was a tiny cluster of lights. They showed no ID, and they appeared to be moving southeast.
'Keep on 'em, son.' Dunning opened a channel and began speaking into his helmet mike. 'Homeplate, Homeplate, this is Victor Kilo Two.'
'Victor Kilo, Homeplate. We copy.'
'Homeplate, we have multiple unidentified targets, bearing three-four-four, range approximately two-three- zero. They appear to be inbound, relative bearing one-three-zero, speed three-five-zero, over.'
'Roger that, Victor Kilo. How many contacts, over?'
'Homeplate, hard to call it.' The targets were at the extreme limit of the Hawkeye's radar range. 'Estimate eight to ten bogies. They…
Homeplate, they appear to be coming across the border, probably at extreme low altitude.'
'Copy that, Victor Kilo. Stand by.' There was a long silence. Then: 'Victor Kilo, come to three-five-zero. CIC wants a continuous track of your targets.'
'Rog.' Dunning stared at the blips on the amber screen for a moment longer. Like everyone else in the carrier air wing that day, he'd heard about the MiG attack, knew that Batman Wayne and his RIO had been shot down up there. 'Someone back there better pass this on to the Thais,' he added. 'It looks to me like they're about to get dumped on.'
'Roger that.'
He listened as the Hawkeye's pilot confirmed the course change instructions. Jefferson was sending Victor Kilo Two farther north, hoping for a better look at those intruders. As he watched, one of the small blips in the cluster split as the E-2C's radar got a better look at it, then merged once more. There were at least eleven of the bastards… probably a lot more. What the hell were they doing up there?
The alert telephone was buzzing, and Major Lin ignored it. That air defense radars had probably detected Victory and someone in Bangkok was passing on the warning, but it was too late now. Already he could hear the clatter of the approaching helicopters. They were clearly visible on the radar, a triangular formation of blips coming in from the northwest. Other blips circled more quickly in the distance. Those would be the MiGs providing air cover.
'Arrow, this is Victory,' a voice said over the headphones Lin was wearing. 'Commencing final approach.'
'Victory, Arrow,' he said. 'All clear. You have complete surprise.'
On the field, several of the RTAF personnel working on the down-checked F-5 had stopped and were staring into the night. The rotor noise was much louder now.
A dazzling beam of light stabbed out of the sky, casting an oval circle of illumination across the tarmac. Lin could just barely make out the dark mass of the helicopter behind the searchlight as it drifted down out of the night. Behind it a second helo approached… and a third. As they moved into the illumination cast by the work-lights on the field, their hulls became more distinct… the familiar shapes of UHI Hueys, RTAF rounders prominent on their tails. Several air force men began walking toward the first helo to help secure it, stooping as they moved to avoid being caught by the rotors.
The lead Huey's cargo bay hatch slid back. Soldiers began piling out.
Gunfire stuttered from a pintel-mounted machine gun, the muzzle flash a jagged flicker in the darkness. The air force men began dropping, mowed down by the sweep of an invisible blade. Small-arms fire was added to the machine gun's chatter. Someone screamed.
More helicopters were touching down all over the base, their cargo doors sliding open, troops jumping out. Overhead, the first escorting MiG shrieked low across the airfield. There was a sudden flash, then the dull whump of an explosion. Flame boiled into the sky, illuminating the field as a dozen Thais scattered in every direction. The F-5 burned furiously.
Lin turned when he heard the pounding of boots coming up the control tower steps. 'Lieutenant!' a shaky voice screamed in That. 'Lieutenant!
It's an attack!'
The soldier stumbled through the door and into the tower chamber. He saw the bodies on the floor and gaped. Lin's burst of fire caught him an instant later, slamming him backward into a wall in a splatter of blood.
More explosions thumped in the night, these from the direction of the barracks. Already, the volume of fire
