“Lead!” It was the wingman frantically shouting on the interplane radio. “Incoming missile! Break left! Now!’’
The Chinese pilot ignored the warning — he was exactly at firing range. But in the blink of an eye his instruments began rolling, warning lights flashed, and his tiny cockpit immediately filled with dense black smoke. He was momentarily distracted by another flash of light — the fireball of his wingman exploding in mid-air — before he reluctantly released the grip on his throttle and control stick and pulled his ejection.
The Q-5 slammed into the ground in an inverted dive traveling almost the speed of sound. He had made the decision to eject just three seconds too late.
“Splash two,” Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan radioed. “Good shooting, Rebecca.”
What a weird feeling, Rebecca Furness thought. She had of course launched missiles and killed the enemy before — her RF-111G Vampire bomber carried Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defense, and she had to use them during the Russia-Ukraine skirmish. But that was self-defense, a means to help blow past area defenses or put a fighter screen on the defensive long enough for her to get to the target. This was different. They were the hunters this time.
Rebecca and three other crews loaded EB-1C Megafortress battleships at Dreamland and flew them to Adak, Alaska. After crew rest, the crews were briefed, and three Megafortresses launched together to take up combat air patrols over Korea, with the fourth and fifth planes launching later to begin an eight-hour rotation schedule to try to keep as many planes up over Korea at once as possible.
“You okay, Colonel?” Patrick McLanahan asked Furness. Patrick was back on the ground at Adak Naval Air Station, commanding the virtual cockpit. He and Nancy Cheshire would spend four hours in it, then man Fortress Four and relieve Rebecca on patrol in northern Korea. Four hours later another crew would launch in Fortress Five, and the rotation would continue until they were ordered to stop.
“I… I think so.”
“It doesn’t get any easier after the first or the second or the fourth kill,” Patrick said, expertly reading her mind. “In fact, it only gets more nightmarish. Probably because the technology gets so swift, so efficient. Those Chinese Q-5s were seventeen miles away. We could’ve been another ten miles farther away.”
“I guess we’re not into fair fights anymore, are we?”
“Fair fights? That was a fair fight, Colonel. That’s about as close as you want to get to a fighter, even a thirty-year-old clunker like a Q-5. If you missed and he turned around and got close enough to get a visual on you, you’d have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of making it out over the Sea of Japan and over to friendly air cover before he blew your shit away. If both of them came at you, I’d lower our odds to twenty-eighty. Fifty-fifty is generous — I’d like at least ninety-ten on our side.”
“Hey, lighten up, everybody,” Nancy Cheshire, the senior pilot back in the virtual cockpit, interjected. “Rebecca, I say, You go, girl! First air-to-air shots in anger for the Megafortress, and she scores two hits! Oh, sure, Scottie might have had something to do with it.”
“Thanks a bunch, Chessie,” said Major Paul Scott, Rebecca Furness’s mission commander in the Megafor-tress’s right seat. Like Cheshire, he was a longtime veteran of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and had flown many sorties in the old EB-52, the B-52 version of the Megafortress. He double-checked that his weapons were safed and added, “Maybe a little — but I’ll still give all the credit to the Megafortress.”
“You’re allowed to show a little pleasure now and then, Scottie,” Cheshire said. “Just a little ‘hot-diggety-damn’? We just saved that Korean cargo plane and probably a few dozen of their commandos.”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Nancy,” Paul said. “Scope’s clear. Give me forty left and let’s get back in our patrol orbit, Rebecca.” Their assigned orbit was over Kanggye itself, monitoring the movement of Chinese forces across the border into Chagang Do province.
“Fortress, Fortress, this is Iroquois,” a call came in moments later. “Bogeys at one-one-zero at one-one-zero bull’s-eye, angels thirty, heading northwest toward Fortress One at four-eight-zero knots.” “Iroquois” was the call sign of the EB-1’s “back door,” the USS Grand Island, a 9,500-ton Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, escorted by the USS Boone, a Perry-class guided missile frigate, in a patrol position about fifty miles off the Korean coast. “We count eight, repeat eight, bogeys. They are going to cross south of SAM range.”
The Grand Island, named after the large island just south of Niagara Falls that was the scene of Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battles with the British Army, guarded the Sea of Japan and the Megafortress’s exit path. It used its long-range three-dimensional SPY-1B radar to scan the skies from the surface into near space for two hundred miles in all directions. Its surface-to-air weapons included SM-2MR Standard antiaircraft missiles and Standard Block 4A antiballistic missile interceptors; it was the first Navy warship to carry these weapons. The cruiser also carried Tomahawk land-attack missiles and Harpoon antiship missiles. The Boone carried Standard and Harpoon missiles, but it was along as an antisubmarine warfare vessel, carrying two ASW helicopters and a total of twenty-four air-launched and six ship-fired torpedoes.
“Looks like the Japanese are coming back to play,” Patrick commented.
“Hey, guys, I got something,” Patrick reported. “Aircraft lifting off from Pyongyang North airfield, heading for Kanggye. Low altitude. Probably attack jets. I’m picking up a formation of fast-movers lifting off from Seoul as well. Looks like the two formations are going to join up.”
“And here’s their target, I’ll bet,” Paul Scott on Fortress One reported. He had just updated his own laser radar scan with recent data from a NIRTSat reconnaissance scan. The scan detected a long line of heavy vehicles on the principal highway between Kanggye and Anju. “The Chinese tanks are moving fast. They’re twenty miles south of Holch’on, almost at the southern edge of the province. They’re… wow, the computer says they’re main battle tanks. A line of tanks probably three miles long on the principal highway. I’ve also got main battle tanks going cross-country along a ten-mile-wide front on either side of the highway. At least two hundred vehicles spread out over twenty miles.”
“Can the system identify them?”
The LADAR ran the laser-derived dimensions through the computer’s large database of vehicles, but the results were inconclusive. “We got everything in the book out there: Chinese Type-59s and-69s, ex-Soviet T-53s and BMPs, self-propelled artillery, the works. I’d want to get a little closer. Ten miles the other way should do it.”
“I’ll pass the contact along to HAWC and to NRO anyway,” Patrick said. “It looks like you picked up something else on that last LADAR image.” Patrick had expanded his virtual cockpit display to show the entire fifty-mile LADAR image. Sure enough, it had detected several Chinese fighters heading south. “Computer identifies them as a large flight of J-6s, heading across the border too,” Patrick said. The J-6, a copy of the old Soviet MiG-19 “Farmer” tactical fighter, was the most numerous attack jet in China’s large aircraft arsenal. “Looks like four flights of four. China is definitely looking for trouble.”