Carrier c-1

by Keith Douglass

  0110 hours

  Tomcat 232, off the North Korean coast

  "Coming up on the beach, Malibu."

  "I hear you. Pickin' up some fuzz from local radars now, tryin' to burn through the Prowler jamming. Nothing serious."

  "Keep watching 'em." The HARM strike would have taken out most of the main North Korean radar stations, but there were certain to be some smaller ones untouched… any which had been shut down and therefore not emitting a homing signal for the HARMs to zero in on. The Koreans would be in a panic now, though. With the Alpha Strike again masked by jamming, they'd be desperate to see what was coming at them.

  Batman checked his speed and altitude again. The Tomcat was skimming less than eighty feet off the deck, but the ocean below was an invisible black gulf.

  "Anything in the air yet?"

  "No, sir. No MiGs. Maybe the gomers don't do nighttime."

  Batman felt the faintest of uncertain stirrings. Would he be able to line up an enemy plane, lock on and shoot? He was certain now that he could, but some irrational part of himself insisted that he would never know until the time came.

  And he knew that the inner voice was right.

  His talk with Tombstone had steadied him. For the first time since he'd joined VF-95, he felt truly a part of the squadron. He would do what he'd been trained to do… and worry about that nagging inner voice later. Gently he nudged the stick forward, keeping his eye on the altimeter as he shaved several feet from the F-14's altitude.

  In any case, a strong MiG response was not expected; night would give the technologically advanced American fighters too great an advantage over the MiG-21s, which would probably elect to sit things out until daybreak. Opposition would come from SAM sites scattered up and down the coast, especially the ones clustered along the Kolmo Peninsula near the airfield. The HARMs would have taken out the major radars, but some SAM sites would not give themselves away until U.S. planes were overhead.

  And that was where the Tomcats came in, riding in ahead of the bombers, deliberately tempting the North Koreans to turn on their SAM radars. Launch sites would be plotted by the E-2C Hawkeyes circling fifty miles off the coast, and relayed to the Hornets and Intruders following in the Tomcats' wakes. Malibu had jokingly referred to their role as PPT: Paid Professional Target.

  Lights shone across the water, drifting now to left and right as he approached the coast. There was a low ceiling this night, solid above five thousand feet. Light from Wonsan reflected from the clouds with an orange glow, back-lighting the ridge which formed the backbone of the Kolmo Peninsula. The airfield would be to the south. He brought the stick slightly to port.

  The beach flashed under the Tomcat's keel, white surf on black rock dimly seen in the night. "Two-three-two, feet dry," Batman announced over the radio. He brought the stick up to clear the rugged, boulder-strewn slope of the ridge.

  "Copy, Two-three-two," Tombstone's voice replied. It sounded as though Stoney finally had all his shit in one seabag. Batman wondered what had brought him around.

  Maybe he'd just finally come to grips with Coyote's death. What the hell, Batman thought. Flying is a dangerous game. There isn't an aviator in the Navy who hasn't known someone whose number had been called. All you could do was pick up, keep going. Or pack it in and quit. Tombstone did not look like a quitter to Batman.

  "Threat warning," Malibu said. "They've got a lock."

  Batman heard the chirp in his headphones, as a red light labeled MISSILE flashed. "Plot it." He looked from side to side, hoping for a glimpse of the enemy launch.

  "Got it!" Malibu snapped. "Tally-ho at two o'clock!"

  Batman whipped his head around in time to catch the flash. The SAM looked like a telephone pole balanced on flame as it rose above the rocky crest of the peninsula.

  The ridge flashed beneath the Tomcat, and in the next instant Wonsan spread out in front of him like a map picked out in lights. Shipping crowded the harbor, but Jefferson's aviators had carefully studied current TENCAP photos before the mission. Damage to non-Korean ships and property was to be avoided, where possible.

  Batman pushed the stick forward, dropping the F-14 toward the surface of the bay. The threat warning continued to chirp in his ear.

  "Another launch, Batman," Malibu said. "Five o'clock… by the airfield."

  "Now comes the fun. Let's have some chaff."

  The water of the bay, illuminated now by reflected light from Wonsan, swept up beneath the Tomcat's belly. The SAMs arced overhead, points of white fire in the night.

  "Negative tone," Malibu said. "They lost us in the wave scatter."

  "Shotgun Leader, Two-three-two," Batman said, his voice held level and unconcerned. "Feet wet. We are engaged."

  The fight over Wonsan had begun in earnest.

  0115 hours

  Intruder 555, off the coast of North Korea

  Lieutenant Commander Isaac Greene, "Jolly Green" to his running mates, was not particularly well-liked by the others, but then he didn't care for most of them and that, he felt, made everything even. Loud, given to outbursts which made him seem somewhat obnoxious, Greene had few friends. The other members of the squadron were convinced he had a genuine talent for picking fights.

  Liked or not, however, he was respected by every man in the wing and regarded with a perverse sense of pride by the members of his squadron, VA-89's Death Dealers. When he was guiding his A-6 in for a strike, the boasting and sarcasm vanished, replaced by the ice-cold professionalism which made him a superb Intruder pilot.

  Unlike the Tomcat with its front seat-rear seat configuration, the Intruder seated the pilot and the bombardier-navigator almost side by side. It took a certain icy calm to fly the A-6 in on a run. Instead of a HUD the aviator had a Heads Down Display, a Kaiser AVA-1 Visual Display Indicator, or VDI. An electronic picture of everything in the aircraft's path was painted on the VDI monitor, together with weapons cues and basic flight data. It was the bomber's sophisticated avionics which made it so useful in the all-weather attack role, capable of carrying out pinpoint attacks in fog, rain, or snow… or in the middle of a moonless, overcast night. With the VDI, Jolly could literally fly the Intruder without bothering to look forward through the canopy at all, a feat which earned him both scorn and head-shaking admiration from the fighter jocks who pretended to trust their eyes more than their avionics.

  As Intruder 555, "Triple Nickle," slid into its approach vector, Lieutenant Chucker Vance, Jolly's BN, kept his face buried in the black hood shielding his radar scope from extraneous light. "Contact," he said. "Ground lock!" He switched his display to Forward-Looking infrared for an ID. "Looks like a SAM park on FLIR.

  Jolly watched the shifting patterns on his VDI. As Chucker switched the plane's computer to attack mode, new symbols giving relative target bearing, drift, time, and weapons status flicked on. "Let's give him some rock-a-bye."

  Chucker set the ordnance panel to deliver a pair of Rockeye II CBU-59 cluster bombs, each a five-hundred-pound canister which would scatter two hundred fifty separate bomblets across an oval of death three hundred feet long.

  The Intruder lurched once, forcing Jolly to correct slightly, bringing the steering bug on his VDI back into line with the nav pipper. He glanced up once, noting with mild surprise that the sky was filled with red and orange tracers, long lines of fiery dots reaching into the night sky. The plane lurched again.

  "Pretty heavy triple-A."

  "Uh," Chucker grunted in noncommittal answer. He kept his face buried in the radar hood. "Weapons hot, safe off. Uh-oh. Threat signal. They're tracking, Jolly."

  "I don't give a rat's ass what they're doing." He opened the tactical channel. "Feet dry! Lead's going in hot!"

  The A-6 hurtled in low over the Kolmo Peninsula, jagged rocks clawing for the Intruder's belly out of the darkness. With the target tagged by radar and fed into the aircraft's computer, the target appeared on the VDI as a green, computer graphic square, the bombsight as a tiny cross crawling up a straight lin
e from the bottom of the screen toward the release point. The A-6 was slow, strictly subsonic, but even at 460 knots the Intruder shrieked toward the cluster of antiaircraft guns like a thundering cavalry charge. While he could have set the computer to release the Rockeye, Jolly preferred the feel of the stick pickle under his thumb as he mashed it down. The plane shuddered as the cluster bomb released. Jolly brought the stick back and throttled up.

  Behind them, a cloud of Rockeye bomblets, each one powerful enough to cripple a tank, descended across the rocky terrain. The effect in the darkness was of hundreds of flashbulbs going off within the space of half a second. An instant later, a much brighter flash stained the night with orange and gold… and then another. Ammunition stores were exploding down there in a furious display of fireworks, the roar lost beneath the howl of the aircraft's engines.

  "Right on the money!" Chucker craned around to see aft past the Intruder's wing. "We got secondaries!" Fresh explosions marked the disintegration of a fuel tank.

  "Okay, boys and girls," Jolly announced over the tactical channel to the other Death Dealers. Inwardly he was shaking. He'd never dropped munitions on a live target before. He kept the tremor from his voice, though, and managed a dry chuckle. "That's the way it's done. Let's see you beat that!"

  Behind and beneath Intruder 555, flames boiled into the night sky.

  0120 Hours

  In the hills above Nyongch'on camp

  Coyote saw the orange glow as flames lit the clouds to the north. He found himself counting off the seconds before he heard the sound, a series of dull, faint thuds more felt than heard. Thirty-seven seconds… almost eight miles. Although he couldn't see the fire itself or relate it to the night-invisible landscape, that put it somewhere in or near Wonsan… possibly on the peninsula beyond the airfield.

  Closer at hand a siren began wailing. The rescue was on, and Coyote felt a galloping excitement mixed with his worry about the odds the SEALs were facing.

  "Do you think they have a chance?" he whispered.

  Kohl, lying beside him in the hide, shifted slightly in the darkness. " Shh." The man kept his face pressed tightly against the night sight mounted on his rifle, careful to let none of the light from the optics escape to betray their presence.

  Coyote gave a mental shrug and went back to studying the landscape below. The SEALs were awfully particular when it came to security discipline, and Coyote was not going to be allowed to settle any of his inward doubts through conversation.

  Another flash lit up the northern sky. Coyote could make out the flicker of antiaircraft tracers now, could faintly hear the thunder of jets, the sharper, harsher cracks of bombs. Someone was getting an earful up there tonight.

  Coyote moved, wincing with the flash of pain in his leg as he reached for a pair of binoculars lying nearby. He could see little more through the binoculars than he could with his own eyes. The camp was still brilliantly lit, and he could plainly see soldiers moving around inside in small groups.

  There was no sign of the other SEALs who had vanished into the darkness with their weapons and packs hours before. The excitement in the camp had died down somewhat, though ten men remained on guard in front of the POW compound, and the roving perimeter patrols had been beefed up.

  How could the SEALs hope to infiltrate the place with the base on alert?

  He was also worried about Chimera's crew. Would their captors punish them for his escape? Would the general who'd arrived last evening order them all to be moved at once? He shifted his attention to the Hip helicopter, still resting on the small airstrip on the west side of the camp. Those big transports couldn't carry more than twenty-five or thirty people at a time, but suppose the Koreans decided to herd just Chimera's officers aboard and fly them off? That could happen at any time, and until the SEALs got into position, there was nothing to stop the gomers from doing whatever they wanted.

  Sikes had not seemed worried at all. The enemy, he believed, was unlikely to do anything so long as they were kept confused and off-balance. Coyote's first assessment of these men came back to him. Dangerous. All he could do was try to stay out of their way.

  The sounds of explosions in the north seemed to be stirring the enemy camp once again. Lines of men trotted out of the three-story barracks at the north end of the camp. The men standing guard outside the Wonsan Waldorf stood and shuffled about uncertainly, their eyes on the sky.

  To the north, the thunder continued, increasing in intensity. Searchlights probed the clouds as tracer rounds floated through the darkness.

  "They're going to think this is Libya '86," Sikes had said during the planning earlier. "That'll be our edge. They don't know they've got an invasion on their hands."

  That made sense. The crash and thunder of the attack would alert North Korean troops on the ground, of course ― there was no way to avoid that ― but they would assume that it was only an air raid, and that would give the SEALs the surprise they needed.

  With the suddenness of a thrown switch, the Nyongch'on camp was plunged into darkness. Someone down there had decided to black out the base to avoid becoming a target for the American planes.

  Coyote smiled. Maybe the SEALs knew what they were doing after all.

  0132 hours

  Nyongch'on-kiji

  Lieutenant Sikes held his breath, wondering for at least the hundredth time this night if the SEALs hadn't finally bitten off more than they could chew. They'd been in position for over thirty minutes, sheltered in a defile below the outside perimeter fence. Huerta had led them to the spot where he'd let himself in earlier that evening.

  But it appeared that Huerta's handiwork had been discovered.

  There were six of them, North Korean special-purpose troops who had come along the outside of the fence out of nowhere, apparently inspecting it carefully for signs that someone had broken out… or in.

  Sikes had hoped the enemy would assume that the American pilot had escaped on his own by wiggling under the fence a hundred yards down the line, but it appeared that this time they were taking nothing for granted. The soldiers, carrying large flashlights, had spotted the place where the chain links had been clipped away from a fence pole, then hastily wired back into place. Now the men seemed to be talking it over in harsh, animated whispers.

  Gently, Sikes reached up and pulled his M927 night-sight goggles down and in place. Wearing the things for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time caused a temporary eye strain called "scope burn." He looked left and right, meeting the otherworldly, twin-tubed stares of the other men in the team. The lieutenant raised one hand, silently flicking his fingers: You and you, circle around.

  On the slope above them, two of the KorCom soldiers turned their flashlights on the defile, probing its recesses with the beams. Sikes looked away. Unlike early-generation starlight goggles, his M927s didn't shut down when exposed to bright light, but he could still wreck his night vision by looking into the glare.

  The fact that those soldiers had already dazzled themselves with their own lights was a factor in the SEAL team's favor. Perhaps for that reason, the beams did not linger on any of the men hiding in the defile, but passed on, sweeping uselessly across the rugged slope behind them. The SEALs lay still, waiting. The Koreans were moving now. One ― possibly the leader ― pointed down the defile, almost directly in Sikes's direction. "Aphuro t'tok paro kase yo!"

  Sikes did not understand Korean, but the man's gesture and tone were unmistakable. He was sending men down to search for anything out of the ordinary. Four soldiers started forward cautiously, testing the footing with each step.

  The lieutenant moved his hand again. Get ready. With no waste motion at all, he lowered his M-760 and quietly slipped his Mark 22 pistol from its holster. The other SEALs did the same. From this angle, the missed rounds from a submachine gun burst might strike the fence or one of the compound buildings and raise the alarm.

  Even with suppressors, it was too great a risk. His grip tightened on the pistol as he snicked off th
e safety. They were about to be discovered and they weren't even inside the damned perimeter yet.

  Silently, the SEALs waited as the Koreans drew closer.

  CHAPTER 23

  0135 hours

  At the Nyongch'on perimeter fence

  Huerta watched the approach of the North Koreans. They were less than twenty feet away now. One stumbled as loose stones gave way beneath his boots.

  Any time now…

  Even through the M927 goggles, the attackers rising out of the shadows near the fence were nearly invisible. The two Koreans still examining the fence never knew what hit them. Black arms encircled from behind, black hands clamped down on mouths just opening to yell, black knives sliced through skin, muscle, and vein in simultaneous thrusts as the soldiers were dragged back and down.

  A slight noise ― the scrape of boot heel on rock, perhaps ― alerted one of the Koreans halfway down the defile. "Muos imnikka?"

  Three feet to his left, Lieutenant Sikes raised his Mark 22 hush puppy to eye level and fired, the heavy suppressor cutting the sound to a sharp clack.

  Huerta fired in almost the same instant… and again, and again. The other SEALs were shooting as well, the sound a chorus of hard, muffled slaps. Bullet holes appeared as if by magic in each of the KorCom soldiers, marring faces, bloodying jackets, tearing throats. One man pitched forward and rolled down the defile, his AK-47 scraping rock with a metallic rasp louder than the volley of suppressed shots. Then the night was silent once more.

  The SEALs waited, listening to the stillness. If anyone had heard…

  One of the SEALs by the fence raised his hand in a cautious all-clear. Swiftly the other black-suited commandos hurried up the defile to the fence. Then, one by one, they lay on their backs and slid under the gap in the fence and into the compound.

  The lieutenant signaled again, not risking words. Each man knew his assigned target in any case, and speech was unnecessary. The raiders divided into two-man teams: Copley and Krueger for the communications shed and microwave tower, Bonner and Smith to the airstrip where a pair of sentries were guarding the grounded Mi-8 helicopter, Halliday and Austin to the headquarters building, Robbins and Pasaretti to the motor pool, and Sikes and Gordon to the barracks and the nearby trenches which served as bomb shelters. The last three men, Vespasio, Han, and Huerta, would head for the POW compound.