We had picked up some altitude and then had let our birds fall off on a wing and drop back toward the clouds. This way we could keep our speed up and cover the entire area where I expected our Mig to pop back on top. “Let’s go back up again, Kingpin. He’s still down underneath it.” “Say again?”
“He’s right down here underneath us, but he won’t come back up again.” Then up he came, right where we wanted him. We had plenty of speed, and we had a couple of thousand feet altitude on him. It was only about a 20-degree turn for me, and I was on him and closing fast from his eight o’clock. He didn’t see me at first and I don’t know if his ground controllers gave him the word or if he saw me when he made a little 20-degree check turn to the left. Regardless, he was plenty smart and realized that a pair of Thuds hurtling down on him was less than desirable. It was time for him to disengage and get out of there, and he wrapped his little beauty into a vertical 180-degree turn to the left and was gone. Just like that. I couldn’t come close to staying with him, and he was gone. It must be great to call the shots like that.
As Bing had passed the top of the clouds, he had been doing Mach 1.2 and he caught a glimpse of Don through the wispy cloud and knew that he was finally closing on him. When you get one of these bombs going that speed, the process of slowing down could be as painful as the process of accelerating to that speed, and he yanked the power-, back to avoid overshooting his mysterious leader. He needed to get close to him and herd him out of there before they both bought a piece of the local real estate. As he raced through the bottom of the layer, he was blinded. The sun was down low in the west and it was richocheting off the rice paddies flooded with water like an orange and yellow searchlight focused on a mirror. It was worse than Bing had expected. They were low, dangerously low, and down in the range of even hand-held guns. The nose was still pointed down toward the paddies, and they were much too fast to be in a nose-down attitude and still pointed toward the ground. Collision with the ground was imminent and he couldn’t see where he was going. Bing did a great job in maintaining control of his craft, and anyone with lesser skill and determination could well have been finished right then and there. Where was Don?
“A-RAAAH, A-RAAH, A-RAAH!” A stinking beeper, the loneliest and most pitiful cry in the world. A call for help that you most often can’t answer. A wail from men and women you don’t even know telling you their world has just been torn asunder. You can’t cry back, you can’t help, you can’t do a damn thing but save your own behind.
“Kingpin three—this is four. Kingpin three, you still this frequency? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin three, you read four? Kingpin lead, do you read four?”
“Five by. Kingpin three, do you read lead?”
“This is Kingpin four, how do you read lead?”
“Loud and clear, how me?”
Bing got his numbers and voices mixed up for a few seconds and let himself believe what he so much wanted to believe, what he knew he couldn’t believe. Had he found his squadron commander? Was that Don on the radio? Had this all been some horrible mistake that he had imagined? He almost jumped through the radio. “Rog, this three?”
“Lead.”
“Three, how do you read?”
Rod was still flying the perfect wing, protecting me as I hoped against hope that I could find Don and knowing that I had to get Bing back in the fold before we had another beeper. “Kingpin lead, we got bogies, far out at ten o’clock.” I didn’t have to tell him to keep track of them. He knew that I was down too low over nasty territory, and he knew that I had to try and put the pieces back together. Those bogies were his worry for the next few minutes. “Kingpin three, you on your way out?” Damn it. I knew I was too low, and I knew I wasn’t positive of our exact location and I had dragged us right over the river and that rotten Yen Bai. Flak, bad flak, they almost got us—too close—trouble.
“Shooting, Kingpin.” When you stumble into .a trap like that and your wingman tells you what you already know, you almost feel like saying something real stupid like, “Oh, really?” but you know it is serious. That was the kind of spot where you could lose one or two so fast you wouldn’t know what happened. When those red streaks reach up from the ground and the black puffs spit at you and shake the aircraft and when you can hear the stuff cracking and shrieking all around you, you know that you screwed it up by being there and you know that the next few seconds could be your last.
“OK, let’s go over hard, burner, keep it moving. Watch it down there on my left. Ten o’clock. WATCH IT1”
“Still shooting, Kingpin.”
“Rog, keep her moving.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe it when it stops. “Kingpin three, how do you read lead?”
“Kingpin four here, read you loud and clear.” By now Bing should be past the worst of the shooting and at least we still had three of us in operation. We should have put a special strike effort on Yen Bai a long time ago and cleaned that dump out. There’s nothing there but flak, and we have known that for years. Yet we have to piddle our people away on dry runs instead of spending a couple of days eliminating that thorn.
“Rog, four, you lose three?”
“Kingpin lead, two’s bingo.”
“And four’s bingo.”
I was bingo myself and then some, and I knew that there was no time to waste in getting us to that tanker. You can’t imagine how fast that fuel gauge falls when things get hectic.
“Kingpin four, you with three?”
“Negative, I lost him.”
“Kingpin four, do you read three—correction—three do you read four?” It had been a hard afternoon and you could tell by the chatter that we were all pretty well beat out.
“Kingpin, we got a couple of bogies out front, low. Take a look at them.”
“Kingpin three, do you read four? Kingpin three, do you read four? Lead, four is going to emergency frequency for a minute.”
I rogered with “We’ll stay this frequency until you get back,” and Bing switched his radio equipment over so that it would transmit on our operating channel and on the emergency channel at the same time, making another attempt that we knew would not work.
“Hello, Kingpin three, do you read four? This is Kingpin four on emergency, three, do you read?”
The next wing was well on the way into the area and their leader, Baltic, wanted to know what was up. He switched his flight to our frequency and they sounded fresh and crisp as they checked in. “Baltic.”
’Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Kingpin—this is Baltic.”
“Go ahead, Baltic—Kingpin.”
“Rog, how’s it look?”
“No good, there’s a—it’s broken, ah, broken coming down the Ridge, but in the target area itself, it’s solid. There’s no chance on it and, ah, it’s loaded with, ah, Migs.” I was amazed at how tired I sounded on the radio.
“OK, have y’all called it off?”
“Yeah, we called it off. We went in with a couple and came back out. We called it off. Abort.”
“OK, ah, Kingpin, ah, what’s your position now?”
“Ah, I’m headed back out now. The first three flights are pretty well spread out.”
“OK, we’ll come up there in case you need our help, and we’re almost up there now.”
I appreciated it, but I sure hoped we didn’t need any more help today. Part of my job was to give him any ideas I had on where he might be able to do some good. “Rog, there’s a little open area between the rivers, and it’s stretching out toward the west and the northwest—there’s an open area and you might find something in there, but it’s down low and pretty solid over the target itself.”
“OK, no chance of getting in.”