The Tomcat leader switched on his air-to-air Sidewinders, heard their growl, and called to the flight, “Tomcat leader. Five Bogeys, maybe more, one o’clock — twelve thousand. Strikers go!”
These were the six Tomcats in front of the diamond, now going down behind the Prowlers, who were already starting to pour down their rain of powerful beams to overwhelm the SAM radars, and dropping chaff as well.
In the semicircle of twelve three-missile-apiece SAM sites east of the city, NKA operators hit the siren buttons as their radars suddenly turned to snow, the eleven Prowlers coming down guided by their red TERCOM — terrain-contour-guided radars. With a constant video feed of mountains, dips, and rivers flashing by, the pilots and crew in their blinkered canopies, windshield wipers on overtime and no use at all, the planes effectively flew themselves. This allowed the two EWOs in the rear section of the plane to direct their jamming beams at any energy source distinct enough to look as if it might be trying to “burn” its way through the heavy-duty beam screen of the Prowlers. Three of the Prowlers were destroyed in twelve seconds, balls of curling orange as the MiGs, now twenty in all, screamed in from the west, another seven from the north, the squadron of MiGs on the ground at Pyongyang Airport all but wiped out by three of the Tomcats striking with two-thousand-pound laser slide “walleye” bombs.
A MiG, unable to come out of the turn, smashed into the flatland west of Turu Islet on the bottom left-hand stretch of the S made up of the Potong River and the much wider Taedong. Halfway up the S, where the river straightened between two islands and flowed under Taedong and Okryu bridges, it passed Kim Il Sung Square. Beyond the square was the wing-tipped Grand People’s Study House, and near the riverbank, framing the square, the Korean Art Gallery to the south, the History Museum to the north. But now none of this was visible except as sharp angular shapes on the helos’ video displays. Several SAM sites sprang to life, firing blindly, radars jammed but hoping to bring down the “American pirates,” as a hysterical Pyongyang Polly was describing them on state radio before it, too, went dead.
“Think they’ll expect troops, General?” Lt. Sandy McMurtry asked Freeman in the lead Chinook.
Freeman tightened his helmet’s chin strap, smacking her affectionately on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Lieutenant — they just think it’s a bombing mission.” He pointed at the Chinook’s radar. “Moment those helo gunships break for perimeter defense, you take me right on down where I told you.”
McMurtry had already keyed in the square that she and the others had gone over so often in their minds during the pre-op discussions on the LPH while Washington had whiled away the time, or so it seemed to them, making up its mind. For a second McMurtry saw the distinctive shape of the ninety-foot-high Arch of Triumph, a slavishly brutal imitation of the Parisian original, and south of it the outline of the Chollima, the famed winged horse of Korean legend. Then momentarily everything was lost as stalks of searchlights exploded from the defensive circle ringing the city and now crisscrossed the sky, reaching up, feeling the rainy darkness for the enemy bombers who, Pyongyang Polly had said, were trying to pollute the sacred birthplace of “our dear beloved leader.”
Amid the chaotic sound of rain, intermixed with antiaircraft fire and the never-ending electronic beeping of warning and centering indicators, McMurtry’s earphones were nothing but a garble of noise as Prowlers and the NKA AA batteries engaged in a war of the beams, for without targets, the huge twelve-finned Soviet SAMs were useless.
In the torrential downpour of the monsoon, which lowered visibility to zero, it was all instrument flying and landing for the helos, and here the American know-how was overwhelmingly superior, the Prowlers “frying” the NKA’s radar screens clean of any targetable image, allowing the Tomcats streaking in behind to drop their five-hundred-pounders with a devastating accuracy not seen since the Vietnam War.
“Bogey on your tail,” yelled a wingman, the striker leader, his bomb gone, hitting the button, going from air-to-ground to air-to-air in milliseconds, screaming up deep into the monsoon, and gone in a crimson flash, a collision with a MiG on the cross vector.
“Aw shit!” said the wingman, going into a roll, locking on to a MiG’s afterburner and engaging his own, his Tomcat now on full war power, its fuel consumption ten times its pre-afterburner phase, heading into the three-minute zone in which he’d use up a third of his total fuel, his wing automatically sweeping back now that the bomb load had been dropped from the more stable wings-out position. He saw the MiG in his sights, pressed the cannon. The MiG was gone — not hit — quickly reducing speed, the American overflying him so that now he was up again behind the American, his air-to-air Aphid waiting for the growl, not sure whether he heard it in the confusion, waiting for the light. The American broke, so did he, both into scissors at the same time, their reaction times to this point exactly on par. The American popped four incendiary flares and dropped, the Aphid catching one of the flares, exploding. The wingman looked for the MiG, but he’d vanished, another missile, American or Russian, he couldn’t tell, passing well ahead.
As the Prowlers completed their turn south, one of the city’s searchlights, having given them up, lucked out on one of the Apaches. Suddenly all the searchlights converged on the Apache. The helo pilot tapped down his sun visor, put the Apache’s nose down, and fired both pods: thirty-eight 2.75-inch rockets. Four of the beams died to pale yellow, then nothing. The Apache was still coming down fast in the strange white-black river of night and searchlights, the copilot picking up a SAM site in a searchlight’s spill.
“Let ‘em go!” said the chopper pilot, the copilot firing all eight Hellfires, the helo’s underchin chain gun spitting a long, bluish-white tongue down at the NKA’s SAM site. The SAM site exploded, the chopper, its rear rotor’s pitch-change spider damaged by AA fire, canting crazily to seventy degrees, the small blades chopping into the tail drive gearbox. The pilot glanced across at the copilot — he was dead, head slumped, lolling in the turbulence of low air currents, the rain so hard it sounded like a hose on the fuselage as the Apache’s pilot braced for the crash. The helo smashed into the dark blanket that was Changsan Park on the city’s northern outskirts. Its explosion terrified the well-to-do Party administrators celebrating the imminent victory, in a day or so at the most — when General Kim’s komtbt— “bear trap”—would clang shut on the Yosu/Pusan pocket. They had just drunk to the extermination of the mikuk chapnomtul— “American bastards”—and their ROK lackeys.
The thirty-seven remaining troop transports, three taken out by MiGs, were now chopping air, settling down on the big square, using infrared, Freeman having already selected the huge concrete bulks of the Art Gallery and History Museum as flank protection, as well as the thickly treed parks about the square, which would give added protection from the small-arms fire that was bound to open up.
Though he would never know it, the pilot of the downed Apache, in panicking the second and third searchlight batteries, allowed fourteen of the thirty-seven big Chinooks following Freeman’s to land in Kim II Sung Square virtually unseen.
The American troops, to the utter astonishment of only a few janitors and museum night watchmen, poured out from the long, black shapes in a circle of machine-gun, rifle, and other small-arms fire that was quite audible, even over the rolling thunder of the aerial combat high above. And it was at that moment, with the SAM sites impotent because of the still-falling parachute chaff from the striker Tomcats, and the city militia excited and startled, that Freeman’s plan saw its first success: an unopposed landing of his troops.