Aviano Italian Air Force Base, Italy
Eddie Korrina struck an exaggerated pose. “Mister Ford, Major Kozlowski is ready for his close-up now.”
“You want to get banged out somewhere over Libya?” Kozlowski growled. “Nobody would miss you. Just have to report you as having become existentially divergent and that’s that.”
Ever since he’d become involved in the film industry, his leg was being pulled mercilessly. It wasn’t fair, really it wasn’t. He’s spent his first evening with Sophia Loren and her husband answering questions about SAC and Operation Jungle Hammer, the Myitkyina operation. Then, after some diplomatic strings had been pulled behind the scenes, he’d been seconded for a week as a technical advisor to the film “Mission to Myitkyina.” Then, he’d found out something that people who’d never been on a film set would find hard to believe. The first day had been fascinating, the second routine, the third and subsequent mind-crackingly boring.
The upside was he’d become firm friends with Carlo Ponti and his family.
Kozlowski had earned his keep as technical advisor though. The first thing he’d been shown was the set that was used for filming scenes in a B-58. The prop makers had done an excellent job, the nose had been built so it split in three sections so the pilot’s cockpit, the Bear’s Den and the Electronics Pit could be filmed from varying angles but somebody had done them a bad turn. The pictures they’d been given to work from were the wrong aircraft, a Navy PB5Y, not a SAC RB-58. It had circular dial instruments, not the tape gauges that SAC had adopted and the radar screens in Eddie’s Bear’s Den were completely wrong, just the single screen for the ASQ-42. He’d got them some pictures of Marisol’s instrument panels and the set had been changed overnight. They’d also missed the bulge under the nose for the ASQ-42 surface attack radar; the PB5Y carried that in the nose where the RB-58 carried its ASG-18. Still, at least they hadn’t painted it dark blue.
He’d also been amused to discover the misconceptions that Italians had about how Americans. It had taken some time to persuade Sophia that American wives didn’t spend all day wearing cocktail dresses and swilling martinis. American daytime television had a lot to answer for. Also, that bringing children up, getting them to school and doing all the other things parents did were the same the world over, even when one of the parents did fly a nuclear-armed bomber. He’d also had to give the actor playing the RB-58 pilot, an American called Eastwood who worked in Italy, a quick few lessons in how SAC officers behaved on and off duty. Well, how SAC would like the public to believe its officers behaved on and off duty anyway.
Still, his time in the wonderful world of cinema was over at last and he was back to doing what he was supposed to. Flying.
“Right guys, we’re back in the real world at last. Mission orders. The television news showed you Egypt has fallen apart, the Sudan and Somalia have joined the Caliphate and all is most certainly not well with the world. There are refugees streaming out of Egypt, by air as well as by sea and over the land frontier. Our hosts are doing their best to collect them and give them some form of refuge. I guess a refugee camp is better than what’s going on over there now. The problem is, they can’t find them all so they’ve asked us for help.
“We’re to fly recon missions over the area, land and sea, find the refugees trying to escape and steer Italian rescue teams in to get them. In case you think this is a milk run, let me tell you something. The Caliphate people are trying to find the refugees as well, and when they find them, they kill them. So we’ve got to find them first and it’s up to us to protect them until they can be picked up. We’re pretty confident that if we get in the way of the Caliphate, they won’t take too kindly to our appearance on the scene. Mind you, they don’t take too kindly to us when we are off the scene.
“We’ll be carrying four GAR-12 Sparrows and four GAR-8 Sidewinders for self defense. Plus eight GAR-9s, four air-to-air and four for anti-surface work. We probably won’t need them, our run is over the sea this time, looking for small craft and anything else that can carry people trying to escape. But Spider Woman is doing the run along the Egyptian border and Tiger Lily will be running along the Egyptian coast towards Palestine, trying to map out any military movements along there, the Caliphate may well try something with them. If they do, then we’ll come to their support. So this whole business could get very ugly, very quickly. In the future, we’ll be overflying the territory the Caliphate is in process of seizing, partly to find out what is going on, partly to show that we can. That is also likely to get ugly.
“We also have a secondary mission. Some refugees are flying out in Egyptian aircraft and the Italians are staging an airlift of their own from an airbase on the coast. They’ve got a lot of the gendarmerie and police people plus their families out that way, how long before they have to shut down, that’s anybody’s guess. Until they do, if the Caliphate threatens those aircraft, we have orders to remove that threat.
“One more thing people. The Italian military are the butt of a lot of jokes, especially after what the Brits did to them back in 1940. They don’t have many people and, compared with the kit we operate, their equipment is crap. But, they are good people who are trying hard to do the right thing here. Let’s not let them down, right?”
Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Chipan?
Kawachi had almost made it. Almost, but not quite, Even with Indian help, the pumps had lost the battle to hold the flooding perimeter about an hour out from the port. Admiral Soriva’s last action had been to take her out of the shipping lane and into the reefs where he’d beached her. In honesty, even that was a bit of an overstatement, it was an open question whether he’d beached her or whether she’d sunk far enough to hit a reef. Still, she’d settled with her main deck above water.
Soriva thought that if he was a German he’d claim she was only damaged. What was that old joke he’d heard years before? “If a German captain yells ‘scuttle her’ before his ship sinks, the Germans claim a strategic victory. If he yells ‘scuttle her’ after she’s sunk and he’s swimming, they claim an operational victory. If one of his descendants yells ‘scuttle her’ at any time he’s in the same ocean as the wreck, the Germans claim a tactical victory.” Soriva reflected that, since he’d never given a scuttle order, he’d lost.
But in a real-world sense, he’d won. Kawachi had arrived with her nuclear-tipped missiles still on board and already they’d been stripped off the wreck and moved to batteries along the coast facing mainland China. With a range of over 500 kilometers, they were a healthy deterrent against an invasion. Naval engineers were going over the wreck of Kawachi while he watched, trying to determine if she could be refloated and repaired, if not, what else could be stripped from her wreck and salvaged for future use.
The question was, what would the new regime in Tokyo do? They had the power to wipe Taiwan as thoroughly from the map as the Americans had obliterated Germany. If they chose that path there was little that anybody in Taiwan could do to stop them. They could make Tokyo pay for it, that was certain, but they couldn’t stop it. What was stopping Tsuji and his fellow conspirators from obliterating Taiwan was political, not military.