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 release the Rockeye, Jolly preferred the feel of the stick pickle under his thumb as he mashed it down. The plane shuddered as the cluster bomb released. Jolly brought the stick back and throttled up.
Behind them, a cloud of Rockeye bomblets, each one powerful enough to cripple a tank, descended across the rocky terrain. The effect in the darkness was of hundreds of flashbulbs going off within the space of half a second. An instant later, a much brighter flash stained the night with orange and gold… and then another. Ammunition stores were exploding down there in a furious display of fireworks, the roar lost beneath the howl of the aircraft's engines.
"Right on the money!" Chucker craned around to see aft past the Intruder's wing. "We got secondaries!" Fresh explosions marked the disintegration of a fuel tank.
"Okay, boys and girls," Jolly announced over the tactical channel to the other Death Dealers. Inwardly he was shaking. He'd never dropped munitions on a live target before. He kept the tremor from his voice, though, and managed a dry chuckle. "That's the way it's done. Let's see you beat that!"
Behind and beneath Intruder 555, flames boiled into the night sky.
Coyote saw the orange glow as flames lit the clouds to the north. He found himself counting off the seconds before he heard the sound, a series of dull, faint thuds more felt than heard. Thirty-seven seconds… almost eight miles. Although he couldn't see the fire itself or relate it to the night-invisible landscape, that put it somewhere in or near Wonsan… possibly on the peninsula beyond the airfield.
Closer at hand a siren began wailing. The rescue was on, and Coyote felt a galloping excitement mixed with his worry about the odds the SEALs were facing.
"Do you think they have a chance?" he whispered.
Kohl, lying beside him in the hide, shifted slightly in the darkness. " Shh." The man kept his face pressed tightly against the night sight mounted on his rifle, careful to let none of the light from the optics escape to betray their presence.