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.
"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.