“You fly out, son. Same way as you go in.”
Many of the pilots were shifting uneasily in their chairs.
“Of course,” continued Freeman, “it will be strictly voluntary. No one will think any worse of you, except me, if you don’t.” Then in a flash of an eye Freeman fixed his gaze on the three women pilots in the front row. “McMurtry — how about you? Game for it?”
“Ah — ah — yes, sir!”
“Outstanding,” answered Freeman. “I’ll fly in with you. Chopper One. Anybody else?” He looked up, smiling, as if getting ready for a picnic, wondering who’d volunteer to bring the hot dogs.
The two other women were putting up their hands, followed by every pilot, including the “driver” of He-26, who was shaking his head even as he was volunteering. “That son of a bitch,” he whispered to his copilot. “Fuck — we’ve got a mad general, a fucking monsoon, and fucking Dopey on the chain gun. What more could you ask for?”
“Hey, buddy — if you can’t take a joke—”
He-26’s pilot nodded.”Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’a joined. I didn’t. I was drafted. This gung ho son of a bitch is gonna get us all killed.”
“You volunteered, my friend,” said a tall Negro pilot to his left, the LPH’s resident slam-dunker at the basket.
“Well,” said He-26, “Whatcha gonna do? Three pussies put up their mitt—’yes, sir, I’ll go and get killed with you.’ “ He-26 turned to the basketball player. “Whatcha gonna do?” he repeated.
“Then,” said the basketball player, all smiles, “he isn’t such a dumb son of a bitch after all.”
“Well — he’s a son of a bitch.”
“That goes with the star,” said Basketball.
“I guess. Jesus, I could do with a Bud.”
Down below in what the marines had dubbed the “dungeon,” the assembly deck, marines were buckling up, getting ready to go after hearing the first news of the pilots’ “volunteering. “ The marines were glad to be on their feet; at least they were doing something. The regular army platoons drafted from Freeman’s infantry support company were grouching, tabbing the three women pilots who had started the “mass hysteria,” as they called it, “Lippy, Hippy, and Titty.” Despite the grumbling, most of them, like the marines, were glad to be heading off shortly from the rolling, vomit-stinking LPH, quite a few of the men having been sickened by the constant yawing and dipping of the ship and by breathing in fuel exhaust as choppers were warmed up, the wind gusting so badly that often fumes were driven back down the stacks.
“Wait until you get airborne,” said one of the marines, clicking on his Kevlar flak vest. “Make this rockin’ and rollin’ down here seems like kids’ stuff.”
“Bullshit!” said one of the regulars, taking his place on the parallel chalk lines, his platoon assembling. “I’ve been in a chopper before. Think I’m green or something?”
“A mite green about the gills, I’d say,” said the marine.
“Bullshit!” the man repeated. “I’ve been airborne before.”
“In a monsoon!” asked the marine, now checking his MIRE freeze-dried, ready-to-eat meal pack. “Care for some beef stew?”
“Animals,” said the regular. “They’re animals, those marines,” he told his buddy.
“Yeah,” said the other regular. “Have to be, where we’re goin’.”
Suddenly they heard a boom, like some huge doors on a warehouse opening, and a Klaxon alarm — the elevator warning — the ship’s platform ready to take up the first load of Apache gunships. The transporter choppers would follow.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
The twin-engined Prowlers, six of them, with Tomcats covering, were now crossing the North Korean coast, their ECM jammers in the wing pods and in bulging rear fin tips ready to do battle with “Charlie’s”—in this case, the North Koreans’—beams, airborne or ground.
It was hoped that by the time the subsonic two-seater Prowlers with their Tomcats cover were approaching Pyongyang, pulsing down their countermeasure beams from the ALQ-99 jammers, Shirer’s wave of Tomcats would be ready to “clear the lanes” of any MiGs that might try to intercept Saipan’s chopper force. Hauling field-pack 155 howitzers, two 125-ton Galaxies were being escorted across the sea of Japan by six Phantoms, each carrying a “buddy” refueling pod.
At sixteen thousand feet above the weather, the first diamond of Tomcats, riding shotgun for the unarmed Prowlers at nine thousand feet, were on radio silence. Seventy-one miles in from the North Korean coast, over Changdori, the Tomcat leader saw a blip, one of the twelve Prowlers dribbling to the right off his NEPRA — his nonemitting passive-mode radar — screen. There was no call for help from any of the twelve electronic countermeasures aircrafts, for that would have meant breaking the radio silence, and the Tomcat leader assumed, correctly, that the lone Prowler in the monsoon was experiencing mechanical difficulties. Its gap in the Prowler wedge was filled, the rest of the Prowlers closing up as if guided by some invisible hand. It gave the Tomcat leader a quiet sense of pride in the professionalism of the carrier’s family of pilots. The Prowler might be forced to ditch, but rather than emit a giveaway signal, it had simply turned off into the monsoon-torn night alone, any call for help calmly stifled until the plane returned to the carrier’s patrol zone — if it got that far.
Despite all the alarms aboard his F-14, the Tomcat pilot’s eyes kept monitoring the instruments, moving from altimeter, bottom left of the HUD assembly, to the banks of dials below the compass on his right.
Aboard the Prowlers it was rough going, the black torrential downpour shot through with pockets of less dense air, the unarmed planes having a bumpy ride that irritated the two ECM officers in the rear compartment, for as good as the ALQ-99 jammers were, the turbulence didn’t help.
A hundred miles behind them, coming westward over the Sea of Japan, was the small armada of forty Chinook choppers, led by an arrowhead formation of five fierce-eyed Apache helos. Each of the helos sprouted wing pods of nineteen 2.75-inch rockets apiece, an infrared TV masthead sight, and laser range finder for eight Hellfire missiles and the Hughes chain gun.
As the lead Apache rose from a thousand feet above sea level, its copilot saw the red light go on above the “check on systems” display and heard the accompanying buzzer warning them they had insufficient power for the steep climb over the Taebek Mountain range, invisible in the rain but not more than five miles away. The pilot glanced across at the terrain-contouring-map video display confirming they were getting too close to the peaks around Konjin to make any shallower-angled approach, which, in any case, would require breaking formation.
“Lose the port Sidewinder!” ordered the pilot.
“Done,” replied the copilot.
“That was quick.”
“Red light’s still on.”
“Lose the other one,” said the pilot. The light went off, the chopper’s rate of climb increasing. “You were next,” he told the copilot.
“Thanks.”
They had just sacrificed their two best antiaircraft defenses in order to better protect the troops following them in the Chinooks.
Ten minutes from Pyongyang on the Tomcat’s NEPRA screen, a blip was appearing on the far right. Very fast. Then another. Three more — the dots heading for the eleven Prowlers.