There was no time to think of any of this. He saw a squat something moving off the road ahead and squeezed the trigger. The thunderous hammer of the Vulcan Gatling gun filled the Tomcat's cockpit.
Captain Sun heard the roar of the jet an instant before he saw it, a pale gray, cruciform shape against the night sky. Then the aircraft was gone, trailing thunder.
He could hear the rattle of an automatic thunder above the engine noise, the sound of explosive rounds striking the road a few hundred meters behind him.
"Driver! Come left!"
The ZSU wallowed across a ditch at the side of the road, then slewed around, turret traversing. It was too late to fire at the lead jet, but there would be others.
"Comrade Captain!" the radar operator shouted. "Two and Three report they are being strafed!"
"Have they been hit?"
"No casualties, sir!"
"Have all units switch on their radars." There was nothing to be gained by hiding now.
"Three targets, Comrade Captain. Incoming, range three thousand…"
"Lock on!"
The turret traversed slowly, the quad guns rising to firing position.
"Target locked! Tracking!"
"Chigum!" Sun shouted. "Now! Fire!"
The firing of the four 23-mm cannons sounded like paper tearing or a buzz-saw, but impossibly loud. A shower of empty shell casings arced golden into the night, and the ZSU's turret shuddered with the force of the gunfire. Brilliant green tracers streamed into the night.
Tombstone pulled back on the stick. His chances of hitting anything were practically nil, but his pass might have broken the gomers' concentration.
"Three Intruders coming down behind us" Snowball reported. "They report target lock. They're into their run."
"Hang tight, Snowy. We'll loop back and give them cover."
Jolly saw the tracers arcing toward him from the ground, intermittent streams of green pinpoints which swelled to grapefruit size as they snapped past his cockpit. Instinctively, he hauled the stick right and kicked in his rudder, standing the A-6 on its right wing to avoid the wall of fire.
A glance back at his VDI showed the targeting pipper almost on the target. They were already committed.
Then the Intruder buffeted wildly as something slammed into the hull. Shit!
Jackhammer blows crashed along the starboard side of the aircraft, and there was a searing, metallic ricochet sound that felt suspiciously like a turbine blade chopping through paper-thin hull metal.
"We're hit!" Chucker yelled.
"Damn it, don't you think I know that?"
Power died on his starboard engine. The VDI was dead, the computer off-line. The annunciator panel was lit up like a Christmas tree with warning lights: hydraulic pressure; right generator; right engine; fuel pumps two, three, and four.
Almost without thinking, Jolly switched the weapons release to manual and jettisoned the entire load. They'd swung east of their attack path and had lost the target now. The one consolation was that they were no longer near the Nyongch'on LZ. With a thump, the bomb rack broke free and tumbled into the night. There was a flash from somewhere behind, and Jolly hoped their bomb rack had landed on something important. The aircraft leveled off at eight hundred feet, still in a shallow turn to port. They had to buy some altitude. The coast was only a few miles away. If they could just reach the sea…
The fire warning light for the right engine glared at him. He shot out his hand and snapped off the master fuel switch to the starboard engine. The Intruder's fuel readings were plummeting anyway. Jolly could imagine raw fuel spraying into the damaged right engine.
"Jolly," Chucker said, twisting in his seat to look aft. "We got real problems."
Jolly leaned forward, looking past his BN. He caught the yellow glare of open flames licking from the root of the wing. The wing itself had half a dozen holes punched in it, and he could see liquid streaming aft from the punctures.
"That's it," Jolly said. The Intruder could explode any second. "Punch out!"
Chucker leaned back in his seat, reached up over his head, grabbed the primary ejector handle, and yanked it down.
There was a blast, a whirlwind storm of raw noise and shattered Plexiglas. Emptiness yawned at Jolly's right side as he reached for his own ejection handle and pulled it down with a hard, clean motion.
The universe exploded in a thunderclap.
CHAPTER 26
Lieutenant Sikes heard the thunder of the first jet, heard the ratcheting fire from the ZSU. Moments later, the second jet roared overhead farther to the west. There was a flash beyond the road and to the south, and he felt the concussion of high explosives seconds later.
ZSUs! Damn! That was just what they did not need at the moment. From his position at the Nyongch'on airstrip, he could see the ZSU's green tracer fire streaming into the sky in short, precisely targeted bursts, but he couldn't locate the vehicle itself.
He reached for his tactical radio. "Bushmaster Seven, this is Bushmaster One!" There was no answer. "Bush Seven, Bush Seven! Kohl, come in! Over!"
And still there was silence. Kohl and the Navy flier would have shut the big radio down before leaving the hide, but Kohl ought to be picking him up on his tactical set. Something bad was going down out there, though. He'd lost his radio link with the outside world… and that included Cavalry One, which ought to have arrived by now. ZSUs sitting on top of the LZ could blow the whole op. The Navy would have warned Cavalry One off before attacking the Korean armor… which explained why the Marines were late in touching down. But how much later would they be?
"Bushmaster Five, this is Bushmaster One. Do you copy, over?"
"One, this is Five," Huerta's voice replied. "Go ahead."
"Situation report!"
"Bush Six is with us, Lieutenant. POW compound secure and we've got the prisoners. We're sorting them out now."
"Any casualties?"
"One POW dead, three wounded. The bad guys tossed a grenade before we got there."
"How about your force?"
"Han is dead. And Vespasio's wounded. One of the POWs winged him when we moved in."
Sikes frowned. In any combat action accidents were bound to happen, but he needed every man now. If the Marines didn't come in damned soon… "Okay, Five," he said at last. "You know the drill. Ask for volunteers and pass out AKs. Things could be getting rough here pretty quick. Bushmaster One, out."
Operation Righteous Thunder was teetering on the brink between success and disaster. It didn't matter that the SEALs had freed Chimera's crew. If an NK counterattack overwhelmed them in the next few minutes, if half of Chimera's sailors were killed while defending themselves in what was supposed to be their rescue, it would look nasty in the news headlines.
Of course, that wouldn't matter to Sikes personally, because he would be dead, along with his entire command. The SEALs had only their personal weapons, what little equipment they'd been able to haul in on their backs, and whatever they could scrounge from the base. They had no Dragons or TOWs or even LAWs with which to attack enemy armor. Things were getting serious.
He could hear the shriek of another Navy plane, coming in low. If they didn't clear those ZSUs fast, there was going to be one hell of a butcher's bill.
Lieutenant Jake "Blondie" Shaw squeezed the commit trigger and watched the display change on his VDI. "Desperado Two, coming' in hot!" he announced on the radio. Behind him, Intruder 532 was falling into line for its attack run.