Here, he thought, was another application of the guerrilla tactics of Mao applied to the arena of air combat. The successful guerrilla fighter, Pak knew, made use of local terrain, especially terrain with which he was familiar.
And that was precisely what Plan Vengeance was about to do.
Korea's backbone was the Taebaek Sanmaek, the mountain range which separated the east coast from the rest of the country, rising in places to over two thousand meters above sea level. The search radar of the American Hawkeyes had a range of almost four hundred kilometers, twice the distance from Wonsan to P'yongyang.
That range was limited, however, by the terrain it was attempting to scan. Flying low, weaving among the ridges and rugged uplands behind the up-thrust Taebaeks, the thirty-four aircraft should escape detection… at least until they emerged from the mountain passes at Majon-ni, a scant twenty-five kilometers from Wonsan. And by then, it would be too late.
The North Korean fighters would suffer heavy losses in the coming battle, but Pak had already dismissed the matter from his mind. A good commander learned to accept losses in exchange for tactical advantage. The PDRK could not possibly hope to match the Americans plane for plane, and so, losses would be enormous. There was no helping that.
Pak had a single advantage, however, which should even the odds considerably, an advantage which was yet another application of Mao's strategy. When the guerrilla fighter is prepared to die to strike at an invader, then the invader has already lost.
The MiGs would come on in two groups, one high to attract the American radar, the other low, hugging the mountains, slipping through the well-mapped passes, to emerge practically on top of the American ships. This time, the battle would be decidedly in Pak's favor.
CHAPTER 29
"Now hear this, now hear this." The voice boomed from the 5-MC speakers across the flight deck. "Commence FOD walkdown. That is, commence FOD walkdown."
On board a carrier, FOD stood for Foreign Object Damage, and it was a special nightmare for every pilot, every plane captain, every sailor who worked on the flight deck, where a scrap of metal, a wrench, a dropped bolt could get sucked into an engine intake and cripple a very expensive airplane. An FOD parade was conducted immediately before every flight operation.
The walkdown was especially vital now. Crewmen had hosed down the deck, but it was always possible that a loose bit of wreckage had been missed. A line of over two hundred men stood shoulder to shoulder across the flight deck walking aft, eyes on the deck at their feet. The men moved slowly, stooping to pick up each bit of wreckage scattered by the explosion.
Admiral Magruder watched from the Flag Bridge high above the flight deck. Operations had been suspended for over an hour now, and that had left him mighty thin in the air. Ops had been able to get a KC-135 tanker deployed north out of Ch'unch'on, and that had kept Jefferson's airborne planes in the air, but the crews were getting tired now, stretched to the limit and ready to break.
Worse, an F/A-18 squadron, the Fighting Hornets of VFA-173, and an A-6 squadron, the Blue Rangers, had both been trapped on board by the accident, unable to rotate with squadrons already in the air. With the Javelins now deployed south to refuel with the tanker and the War Eagles flying CAP for the fleet, there were only the eight Tomcats of VF-95 to cover Cavalry Two over Nyongch'on and the bomber strikes still going on around Wonsan.
It wasn't enough, not by a long shot.
Disaster, Magruder knew, was less likely to come as a single, catastrophic blow than as a series of minor incidents, each contributing its little bit of Murphy's Law until things were well and truly out of control. He had the feeling now that things were beyond his reach, that the prisoners and Marines at Nyongch'on, the Marines and rescue helos at Kolmo Airfield, the eight Tomcats of Tombstone's Vipers were all game pieces, pawns at the point of being sacrificed.
And having set the game in motion, there was nothing whatsoever that he could do to set things right.
Thirty minutes after sending the code phrase "Cavalry roundup," they heard the second flight of Sea Stallions approaching from the east at treetop height, closely escorted by six SeaCobra gunships and four F14 Tomcats tagging along overhead, flying cloverleafs above the camp.
For Lieutenant Morgan, the thrill of seeing those four RH-53Ds was like a dream realized, like the charge he'd gotten as a boy watching a magician produce a bowl of fire from beneath a cape. He saw it, yet he could not quite believe it. The plan, complex, demanding, was actually working.
Now all they had to do was pull off the rest of it without losing the helos to ground fire or MiGs.
The Chimera crewmen were already loading their wounded on the three Cav One helos grounded at the camp's airstrip. Each RH-53 had room for twenty-one men on stretchers stacked three high on the cargo deck.
According to the plan, three helos carrying Chimera's wounded would depart Nyongch'on first, flying under escort straight across the Marine perimeter on the beach and on to the Chosin, now eight miles out at sea. Tarawa-class LPHs like the Chosin boasted enormous sickbays, with three operating rooms and bed space for three hundred patients.
The remaining Chimera crewmen, almost one hundred of them, plus twelve SEALs and nearly one hundred eighty Marines, would be ferried out in piecemeal fashion. They needed eight helicopters to get them all out… an impossibility since there simply weren't that many free passenger-carrying helos in the task force. Besides, the flight all the way out to the Chosin and back could take as much as thirty minutes, counting landing and turn-around time and taking into account the crowded state of the sky above the LPH's flight deck. A better scheme was to ferry the men forty at a time from Nyongch'on to the Kolmo Airfield, the four newly arrived helos each making two trips.
The first of the medevac choppers was full. A Marine on the ground signaled, the pilot saluted from the window, and the machine's rotors increased their shrill beating as it rose, clumsy now with a full load, and hovered in the sky. Then the pilot dropped the nose and the Sea Stallion's nose swung toward the northeast. The Marine perimeter at Kolmo was only about five miles away. The helo raced for the safety of the sea at top speed, skimming treetops and burned-out buildings.
"This is the part that's been making' my mouth dry, Lieutenant."
Morgan turned and saw Gunnery Sergeant Walters standing behind him. "'Lo, Gunny. Why's that?"
"Desert One, 1980," Walters replied. "The helo crash, remember?"
Morgan didn't know the details, but he knew the story in general. The Delta Force raiders in the Iran hostage rescue were already pulling out, their mission aborted, when a Sea Stallion identical to these had risen from the desert… and collided with a grounded C-130 Hercules. The crash had claimed the mission's only casualties: eight dead.
"I guess we've learned a few things since then, Gunny."
"Mebee." He did not sound convinced. "It's not the men I worry about, though. It's never the men. Machines, those are something else."
Morgan did not agree but saw no point in arguing. Across the airstrip, Chimera's unwounded crewmen were lining up to board a Cavalry Two chopper, filing up the rear ramp and into the darkness of the cargo deck. Morale was high. There was a lot of good-natured bantering between the sailors and the Marines, and few signs of the strain the Navy men had been going through for the past four days.