He stood up and slapped Mark on the back. Mark thought his eyes would fall out and roll away across the floor and under the table.
“But I’m not —”
“Yes, you are,” J. Bob said. “Congratulations. You always said you wanted a revolution. Now you’ve got one.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Su-25 strike aircraft — what NATO called a Frogfoot — began to rock in the ground effect as Podpolkovnik Sharagin lowered his flaps for landing. The stubby little Sukhoi, with its two jet engines set on the wings just outboard the fuselage, was not exactly a pulsing mass of power like its sexy cousin the Su-27 Flanker, but it felt light and inclined to skate compared to how it had handled on takeoff, with its hard-points crammed with napalm canisters and rocket pods for delivery against supposed rebel positions in the rugged Giai Truong Son.
And supposed is just the word for it, Sharagin thought. The People’s Army had a worse Vietnam War complex than the Americans did. Vietnamese officers remembered how much they’d dreaded American air-strikes, and so every time their patrols got fired up, they shrieked for air support. Which meant the lieutenant colonel and the ground-attack air company he commanded were running up a lot of time on their engines.
The problem was the rebels were probably smart enough not to hang around for the air-strikes to come in on their heads. Sharagin would have been that smart. The Viet Cong were that smart, like the black-asses in Afghanistan, where Sharagin won a chestful of medals to wear on the breast of his walking-out dress when he went drinking — like every pathetic soak in Moscow — and the dubious honor of this command.
Of course the People’s Army had not been; they gathered in vast Warsaw Pact-emulating clumps where the Yank bombers could find them, pursuant to the vision of that nitwit Vo Nguyen Giap, who based his entire strategy on building for a one-two punch: a massive popular uprising in support of the heroic Liberation Forces — which never materialized — and a single great standup knockout battle with the enemy, which worked exactly once, at Dien Bien Phu, and consistently got the Viets’ yellow asses kicked every last time they ran it on the Americans.
Of course the Americans finally beat themselves, and everybody called that turtle-headed old quack Giap a genius. Then the Vietnamese went into Cambodia and spent the last twelve years proving the Americans weren’t the only ones who hadn’t learned a fucking thing from the Vietnam War. And today’s People’s Army savants thought their current crop of opponents would be just as idiotic as they had been and wait obligingly for their nice napalm showers. Nyekulturnyy assholes.
The runway had been scraped in the red clay of a Central Highlands plateau and surfaced with perforated steel plating. Western analysts always went into raptures about the ability of Soviet aircraft to land and take off under highly vile conditions. Sharagin was proud of his ship’s ruggedness, too, but it didn’t mean it was fun to land on an airfield this wretched. The way you bounced around when you set down, you just knew a wheel strut was going to come jamming through the bottom of the plane and straight up your bunghole…
“Be advised runway damaged is not yet repaired, Kulikovo Leader,” the tower informed him. Only his passion for radio as well as other species of discipline kept him from cursing the Vietnamese controller out loud. The rebels had dumped a half-dozen mortar rounds on the runway’s end before dawn. Of course the holes hadn’t yet been repaired. Sharagin was used to the standards of Soviet Army Frontal Aviation — which was to say he hadn’t exactly learned to regard efficiency as his birthright — but these slant-eyes were simply ridiculous.
He wasn’t even sure what he and his boys were doing flying their planes into harm’s way in support of a regime that even lowly strike jocks like him knew his own government was not going to stand behind if the rebellion truly caught. Rodina Mat’ had let Eastern Europe go without a peep. The Baltic republics looked as if they might make their self-proclaimed secession stick. What beyond a weird macho Evil Empire nostalgia made STAVKA think it was worth screwing around in this humid hellhole? It wasn’t as if the slope-heads were ever going to come close to paying the USSR what they owed her for their War of Liberation, let alone —
Frenzied Vietnamese blasted through his headphones like static. “Speak English, you yellow monkeys,” he snarled at the tower, discipline momentarily forgotten.
Then he heard the voice of his wingman, who trailed him by half a kilometer, yelling something about the colonel’s left wing.
A glance at the board. No red lights. No pre-corded feminine voice. If something was wrong, the bloody plane didn’t know it. Were his circuits so screwed up that his port engine was on fire without any telltales lighting? He turned his helmeted head to look.
A man dressed in orange flew formation with Sharagin. He was just drawing even with the cockpit, barely beyond the wingtip. He smiled and waved.
The problem was he’d neglected to bring a plane.
“Yob tvoyu mat’!” the colonel yelled.
The flying man held out an open palm. Sharagin saw an orange flash.
An explosion rocked the airplane.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, glanced back over his right shoulder. The Froggie must’ve had a short run to its target; it blew up into a wonderfully gratifying yellow fireball before it splashed down on the runway and went hurtling down it like a flame tsunami. Above his head a green canopy with one red panel blossomed as the airplane’s zero-altitude ejection seat reached the top of its arc and popped its chute.
He clucked and shook his head. Clearly communists weren’t big on color sense.
Great big glowing green balls went whipping by to the right of him. That Frogfoot behind him was obviously trying out its 25mm Gatling. Ooo, I’m sooo scared, he thought. The stars on these boys’ tails were blood red, not Socialist Republic yellow. Soviet marksmanship didn’t impress him any more than the Vietnamese version did.
He dropped till the runway was whipping right below him and he could feel the morning sun heat off the metal warming his belly. He was pleased to see the cannon shells going off among the hangars. He wasn’t so jealous of his job that he hated to see the bad guys do it for him.
I’m so glad we wound up on the other side from these buttholes, Mark. I didn’t like the War either, but it never meant I loved the commies.
Following Soviet doctrine, the airfield’s planes were well reveted, with U-shaped earth berms shoved up around each aircraft in its parking place to protect it from blast damage. The open sides all faced the runway. It had never occurred to anybody that this would be a problem: aircraft weapons fire straight ahead, as a general thing…
Flash just flew, slowly, right down the line, squirting sizzling jolts of flame right into those puppies in passing. He could not tarry long enough to make sure of slagging any individual target — guys in khaki shorts and pith helmets were starting to run around and shoot at him with Kalashnikovs. But he heard explosions behind him and felt their quick, hot pressure. And exposure to super-hot plasma was not going to do sensitive avionics any good, even when the plane didn’t go up…
With a rushing roar the trailing Frogfoot passed overhead, tucking its landing gear up as it accelerated.
To one side of the runway’s far end a pair of attack craft sat with their canopies up, waiting the word to take off. J. J. gave each of them a blast through the tails. He circled left for another pass.