The North Korean seemed to be weirdly single-minded, which worked to the F-16 pilot’s advantage: if he steered away from the A-5, the Communist pilot tried to turn right toward Seoul, but if he crowded him, the pilot turned left, away from him. If he climbed over him, the Communist descended, but if he flew at the same altitude, the A-5 pilot would try to climb back to original altitude or maintain altitude. Good.
“Sapphire Control, this is Tiger lead, I have the hostile turned toward Hongch’on, and I will attempt to get him to land. Have security and special weapons maintenance crews standing by. Our ETA is fifteen minutes.”
They were over Hongch’on in a little over twenty minutes. The airstrip was illuminated by several trucks shining their headlights onto the concrete; there was more than enough light. But herding the reluctant North Korean pilot to land on the nine-thousand-foot-long runway was proving more difficult. It was as if the North Korean pilot had finally realized what the F-16 was forcing him to do, and he kept trying to turn away from the runway. Finally, the wingman got on his left side, and they boxed the A-5 in. But when the leader tried to force it lower and along the runway centerline, the plane rolled hard left, striking the wingman’s right wingtip.
“Damn! He midaired me! Tiger Two is lost wing-man!” the second F-16 pilot shouted as he climbed away from the North Korean attack plane. “Lead, I have substantial damage to my right wingtip and number ten weapon station. I am climbing, passing five thousand.”
“How is your controllability?” the leader asked. “Do you need an escort?”
“Negative,” the wingman replied. “I feel a slight vibration from the damage area and I’ve lost some airspeed, but I have no warning or caution lights and my controls feel okay. I have safed and locked all my weapons. Still showing full connectivity on all stations except number ten. I am visually inspecting my right pylon…” The lead F-16 pilot knew his wingman was fishing a flashlight out of his flight suit pocket so he could see his wingtip: “I have lost my number ten weapon. Substantial damage to my right wingtip, but very little observed damage to my right wing.”
“Good,” the lead F-16 pilot responded with relief. “Stay above us at ten thousand feet until I end this intercept, and then I’ll escort you back to base.” The wingman had over an hour’s worth of fuel remaining. More than enough.
The A-5 pilot was trying to turn back toward Seoul again. The lead F-16 moved in tight on his right side and fired its 20-millimeter cannon. The blaze of the muzzle flash made the pilot leap in shock, and he turned away exactly as before. The ROK pilot waited until the A-5 was almost in the direction of Hongch’on. Then he yanked the throttle, dropped back a few hundred feet behind it, kicked in a little left rudder, and fired a one-second stream of shells across the tail, being careful not to shoot below the wings at the thermonuclear bombs.
The shells ripped across the horizontal and vertical control surfaces, tearing them to shreds. Several rounds entered the engine exhaust, and the F-16 pilot could see sparks, then a fire spreading inside the engine compartment. The A-5’s airspeed, already limited because of the hanging gear and flaps, was cut nearly to nothing as the engine slowly began to disintegrate. The fighter dropped like a brick.
Although the Communist pilot was obviously suffering from mental lapses evidenced by flying without his gear, his instinct and training took over as the A-5 began to die. The fire was extinguished as it fell, and the plane nosed over to help build up airspeed. As it did, the pilot was able to maneuver his stricken jet toward the runway at Hongch’on. Incredibly, he nearly managed to plant it on the runway. It was in a landing attitude, nose up slightly to try to preserve some airspeed, at the moment that it slammed into the ground about three miles short of the runway, digging into the soft peat surrounding the airfield. The F-16 pilot, trying to keep it in sight as long as possible, watched in horror as it flipped upside down in the soft earth, then spun across the ground. The bombs and fuel tank scattered. He couldn’t see where they landed.
As the ROK pilot climbed away from Hongch’on, he thanked the gods that his own intended landing base was many, many miles away.
The provincial police evacuated the village of Hongch’on quickly and efficiently, and forces from the Republic of Korea Army base at Yongsan sealed off the area within twenty miles of the crash site. Village officials were simply told that a military plane had crashed, and that was good enough reason for them. Fortunately, the early morning winds were light, so the authorities anticipated no further evacuations for several hours, after the rising sun stirred the atmosphere again.
Slowly, deliberately, the Army nuclear weapons experts closed in toward the crash site. There was evidence of fire and debris everywhere, but they detected no radiation. The fires were small, probably because the A-5 had little fuel left in its tanks — just enough for a one-way suicide run over Seoul to dispense the cargo of death. There were no signs of explosion.
The wreckage of the fighter was found inverted, facing opposite from the direction of flight. The plane was almost intact, a tribute to its tough-as-nails construction. The centerline fuel tank was crushed up into the bottom of the fuselage, the cockpit canopy had been flattened — and the nuclear weapons were nowhere in sight.
While searchers fanned out to look for them, the pilot’s body was pulled out of the cockpit. His head was crushed. He was wearing a dark brown wool flight suit ringed at the collar and cuffs with lamb’s wool, typical of the North’s Air Army, but he had no other flight gear at all — not only no helmet but no gloves, no survival gear, not even flying boots. How he survived the nearly one-hour ordeal in the freezing-cold cockpit was impossible to guess. There was no name tag. Some of his insignia, including the pilot’s wings and flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, had been partially torn off. Either he was trying at the last moment to hide his identity or country of origin — or he was ashamed to reveal it.
But the most incredible revelation was the pilot’s body itself. It was as emaciated as a scarecrow. He could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds. His chest was sunken, his ribs were visible, and his skin was stretched taut across his bones. He looked like a concentration camp survivor, so skeletal that investigators guessed he might not have had a regular meal in months. The body was carried away from the crash site for further investigation.
Less than an hour later, searchers found both thermonuclear gravity bombs. By a remarkable stroke of fortune, neither had ruptured. One bomb’s housing had cracked, but there was no spill and the basketball-sized globe of fissionable material was intact. The second bomb was fully intact except for its tail fins and several dents and scrapes. The weapons were carefully packaged in lead-lined caskets and carried away for analysis.
South Korea had now acquired its first two thermonuclear weapons. Unknown to it or to the rest of the world, the tiny nation would never be the same again.
CHAPTER ONE
I hoped we’d never be facing this question again in my lifetime,” the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said, his voice serious. “But here it is. Looks like the devil’s goin’ to the prom, and we’re praying he don’t ask us to dance.”