by Ian Slater
There was a roar of approval. The padre, Freeman noticed with satisfaction, was distinctly uncomfortable. The general’s voice dropped.
“Now, I’ve heard that someone says this is a hopeless mission — a suicide mission, politically motivated. Well, I don’t lead suicide attacks, and I won’t give you any BS about minimum casualties. We’re going into the enemy’s belly and I expect casualties to be heavy. But we’ll be coming out!” There was still silence.
“As for it being politically motivated — hell,” said the general, shaking his head, “I don’t know what that means. All I know is anything we don’t like — don’t care for — becomes politically motivated. We are instruments of national policy. Our profession is not peace, it’s war. That’s what we’re paid for — to go in there — not to walk softly and carry a big stick but to give ‘em the stick right up their heathen ass.”
Some whistles and a smattering of laughter. The padre was clearly angry.
“Another thing,” Freemen continued. “I know some of you have been wondering why an airborne assault when we could launch bombing runs. Two good reasons. One — Pyongyang, which here on out will be referred to in all directives and communications as ‘Crap City,’ is festooned with surface-to-air missiles and MiGs on alert. Our choppers will be going in low, and the SAMs, which are most effective at high altitude, will have extreme difficulty discriminating among low-flying aircraft with ground clutter thrown in. And we’ll be hill-hopping all the way. Furthermore, we’ll have fighter cover from Salt Lake City to help confuse the SAMs when they scramble their MiGs to meet our boys. But the most important reason for sending in this force is that we have learned, contrary to all the armchair experts, think tanks, and God knows what else, that bombing fails to cut the head from the snake, including Miss Jane Fonda.”
“Give it to her, General!”
“No comment!”
A roar of laughter. The padre’s face had now turned from anger to disgust.
“What we have repeatedly found out, and here I don’t wish to malign our comrades in arms in the air force — they do a damned fine job — but we have repeatedly found, most spectacularly with that dung heap Qaddafi, that you can send in the whole damned air force, with ‘Smart’ bombs to boot, kill everyone, and miss the son of a bitch in his tent. That is why the prime target of this foray is to take that runt out of circulation. Permanently!” The soldiers were clapping and stomping now.
“So that your families, your children, no longer have to live in a world where slime-balls rule the roost.”
There was thunderous applause. The general held up his hand.
“You’re scared. So are the boys who’ll go into Taegu and Chongju. I understand that.” He waited. “But you keep your powder dry, pass the ammunition as your forebears did, and you’ll be all right. Above all, remember this is no mixed-up slugfest inhibited by peace pansies and Fondas running riot in your country. This is a war which all true Americans, together with our allies, know is right beyond the shadow of a doubt. That monkey ‘cross the line — he has no honor, no decency, no conscience. This isn’t a mission, it’s a crusade, and you’re the bearers of the flag. God bless you.”
As the general walked down from the podium, there was the sound of over a thousand men rising, forming lines according to company and platoon. Before Freeman left the deck, Al Banks introduced him to the padre assigned to the Saipan.
“Pleased to meet you, General.”
“But you didn’t like my speech?”
The padre hesitated, “Ah — no, General. I didn’t.”
“Quite all right, Padre,” said Freeman, pulling on his leather gloves tightly. “Difference of opinion. Was there anything in particular you objected to?”
“I thought your remarks about the North Koreans — though I understand your intention — were — I mean, categorizing a whole race in—”
“Padre. We’re not going up against the Sisters of Charity. We’re going to do battle with the Philistines — NKA special forces, their best militia, best home guard… top-of-the-line killers. I mean NKA special forces. Booby-trap their own kin if they thought it would kill Americans. They hate us more than any people on earth. I understand your position, Padre, and it’s admirable — in its place. But these jokers my boys’ll be fighting have never heard of any commandment, let alone ten of them. And I don’t want any of my men thinking about loving their neighbors when they file out of those whirlybirds.” Freeman moved so close to the padre that the latter felt distinctly uncomfortable. Freeman was pulling his gloves on tighter. “I’ve seen the devil, Padre, and the son of a bitch lives in Pyongyang and I’m going after him. I’m putting a bounty on his head.” The general looked quickly at the other officers in line. “I want it known, gentlemen, that anyone who brings me the head of Kim Jong Suck will personally get a field citation and ten thousand dollars!”
The padre’s eyes widened. “General, none of us have the authority—”
“Padre. I need you in the field. A lot of my boys are going to die. Are you coming along or going to rest your butt in the officers’ lounge?”
“The padre’s already volunteered,” put in Captain Al Banks.
Freeman murmured, nodding approvingly, but the fierceness was still in his eyes. “Good. I need brave men.”
* * *
“That padre,” said Freeman as he left the hangar with his aide. “He’s a good man.”
“Yes, General, I think he is.”
“I say he is. Only one thing wrong with him.” They were walking back past the helicopter crews in the forward hangar area.
“What’s that, General?”
“Didn’t you see it? Stood out a mile.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Egg on his vest. I won’t tolerate that, Al. You get the word out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I ever tell you my father was a keen sportsman?”
“Not that I—”
“Baseball, football, of course. Golf — God, he even liked tennis.”
“I like tennis, General.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, can’t be helped. Never took to it myself. Son of a bitch sitting on that high chair, yelling out every shot. ‘Course, my father wouldn’t have it any other way. And dress code— that’s what I’m getting at, Al. Uniform instils pride in a man. First thing you learn in basic training. Now, that padre, you see, he thinks he’ll get closer to the men more laid-back, more slovenly he appears. Doesn’t work.”
“It was only a very small piece of egg, General.”
Freeman ignored the captain’s comment. “You play baseball?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I notice you’re a sou’ paw — left-hander.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. We’ll make a good team, Al.”
The captain was nonplussed. Freeman stepped out into the cold night air, the blackness all around them like a great velvet blanket; not a light could be seen. “You on my left, me on the right. It’s my intention to be in the first chopper. I don’t want anyone saying Freeman freeloaded — took the last chopper in.”
“I don’t think anyone would, General.”
“I’ve got enemies, Al. Say I’m too flamboyant. Too full of myself. Waiting for me to take a fall. You think that? — I’m a windbag?”
“No, sir-I-”
“Yes you do, you son of a bitch. Well, Al, tomorrow at cockcrow we’ll find out.”
Above them they could hear a faint squeaking as the concave dish on the main radar mast passed through a 180-degree sweep, its signal pulsing out into the darkness toward the enemy’s shore.
* * *
Inside the hangar, in the long line of soldiers approaching the padre, who had now commandeered a second helmet, a private, first class, a helo side gunner, who, like most of the soldiers in the hangar, had never been in combat before, was veering between sheer fright and the bravado instilled by the general’
s speech, asking his comrades imploringly whether a packet of nasal decongestant capsules qualified as a pill he should surrender.
“What’s it do to you?” asked a corporal from one of the Saipan’s Medevac choppers. “Slow you down or jack you up?”
The worried private nipped over the packet. “… Says might cause drowsiness, not to operate machinery.”
“Aw, shit,” said the medic, “take the fucking lot. Any luck, you’ll sleep through it all.”
“What’s your helo number?” asked a marine.
“Twenty-six. Why?”
“Good number to stay away from,” the marine said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
In Germany, the British Army of the Rhine was fighting for its life in the fifty-five-mile-wide pocket between Bielefeld and Dortmund, where swarms of Sukhoi-24 Fencer ground-attack fighters were wreaking havoc on the British tanks.
The Sukhois, chosen in part for the relatively narrow swept wing width, and painted in green-brown blotch camouflage, had been crated by rail through Poland and the GDR weeks before, reassembled, parked and maintained in the vast Nordhausen tunnel complex in the eastern part of the Harz Mountains, where Hitler had made his V–Is and V-2s out of range of Allied bombers. Rising swiftly, behind a semicircular screen of SAM sites in the Harz foothills between Nordhausen and what had been the West German frontier, the Fencers streamed northeast over Stolberg. Swooping down through cloud over the tranquil bluish green of the Harz, they reached the British army’s defensive position a hundred miles west along the Bielefeld-Dortmund line in less than nine seconds, their terrain-avoidance radar and laser target-seekers cutting through the battlefield’s smoke cover, setting the Challenger tanks ablaze.
When the Challengers fired, their aim was deadly, and they fought hard, even as they fell back northward behind the Weser and Mittelland Canal. The British were taking terrible punishment as well on their southern flank, where East German motorized shock troops were now crossing in force, so that in the depression between Bielefeld and Dortmund, what had been a fifty-five-mile-wide defense base now shrank to thirty-five miles.
As the Russian Fighter/Interceptors streaked down, pouring a deadly hail from twin-barreled twenty-three-millimeter cannons, a British commander watched his battalion of forty tanks and support infantry being systematically destroyed. Here, unlike Fulda, where American and Russian tanks were too close, the Soviets’ gasoline bombs tumbled down — and with such apparent aimlessness, it seemed they could do no harm. Then the big silver “jelly beans” would burst, the saffron fireballs rolling over the velvet green hills. To the men inside the Challenger tanks, whose reactive armor had worked so efficiently in blowing up the Soviets’ earlier high-explosive antitank bullets, the napalm was an agony worse than any gunfire, their bodies becoming torches, all but impossible to extinguish. As one man would try to smother a comrade to snuff out the flame, the jellied gasoline would fly onto the would-be rescuer, the droplets of red-hot mercury sticking to flesh and clothing — often as not, killing two men instead of one. On many occasions British infantry caught by the napalm not only died a screaming death themselves, but proved deadly to comrades as the heat from their burning bodies set off their own ammunition.
The Soviet Fencers supporting the GDR advance did not have it all their own way as the NATO air forces rose to meet them. But the overwhelming numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact fighters meant that the NATO fighters trying to contain breakthroughs on the Northern Plain, in the center along the Fulda axis and in the south on the alluvial flats of the Danube, were stretched too thinly, the NATO commander not knowing where the twenty Russian divisions held in reserve would be thrown in, therefore unable to concentrate wholly on any one sector.
It was a Soviet-Warsaw Pact strategy designed for the quick win, to push NATO so far, so quickly, that in the case of a ceasefire ranovato—”early in the game”—the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would have in its possession at least a third of West Germany and a sizable strip of Holland 50 miles wide and 130 miles long north of NATO’s air-control center at Gelsenkirchen.
The NATO pilots were exacting a high price, but against all the other intangibles of battle was the stark mathematical fact, known for years before the war, that NATO could not outlast sheer quantity, even with a kill ratio in the air of two to one in the first seventy-six hours.
On the ground the situation was worse, the tank commanders facing Sergei Marchenko and the other ten thousand Soviet tanks having had to maintain a four-to-one kill ratio merely to hold ground.
In the wake of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact three-pronged attack, the old confident air among NATO commanders about Western quality versus Russian quantity took on a decidedly hollow ring.
* * *
Leading three other F-16s, one of the NATO pilots, Colonel Delcorte, his F-16 still climbing though getting low on fuel, was in his fourth sortie within seven hours. Based in Hahn with the U.S. Tenth Tactical Wing, Delcorte now had only fourteen of his twenty-six-plane squadron left. Ten were downed outright; two had managed to return to Hahn but were badly shot up.
Of the ten downed planes, three reported bailouts: one’s chute was seen high above Fulda Gap, presumably drifting down over East Germany, the other two pilots picked up southwest of the Bielefeld-Dortmund basin in a heavily wooded section serving as revetment areas for the battered Chieftains. The British-made battle tanks, which, though first-rate and well armed with 120-millimeter cannons and assisted by crack British infantry regiments from the Army of the Rhine, were doomed because of their slower speed compared to the Russian T-90 A’s seventy-five kilometers per hour. Had the Chieftains more time to dig in, it might have been a different story, for as Sergei Marchenko and fellow S-WP tank commanders quickly realized, the breakdown rate of the Soviet tanks was much higher than for those of the Allies. But though the British Chieftains were well served by their appliqué Chobham armor packs and first-rate crews, they could not overcome the Russians’ three-to-one superiority in tanks.
At Fulda Gap, where the Russians had been unable to use their jellied gas bombs, the latest British Challengers, German Leopard IIs and American M-1s lasted much longer in battles where foam-filled, self-sealing rubber fuel tanks took many direct hits from armor-piercing shots without exploding.
In the Bielefeld-Dortmund area, The Russian T-90s, built to accommodate the shortest Russian tank crews and so presenting the lowest silhouette of any main battle tank, swung out wide through the British Chieftains’ heavily laid white smoke screens and regrouped in ambush, isolating several Chieftains at a time. In the process, the smoke- and dust-filled battleground confused the pilots of the American Thunderbolts, who had to make split-second differentiation between Russian and British tanks — this becoming increasingly difficult in the dense smoke as the day wore on. It was, Delcorte thought, his F-16 leveling out high above the smoke, as terrible, or from the Russian point of view, as good, an example of using superior numbers as you could get, quite literally mugging the opposition with sheer brute force and size.
The only hope, Delcorte knew, was to keep going up, keep engaging them until the Juggernauts’ attack was blunted, when finally there would be so many tanks off tread, so many automatic shell extractors in the T-90s out of alignment due to overheating and crews’ fatigue, that the West’s overall superiority in technology, including more tank transports, would start to pay off. Delcorte took some hope from the fact that NATO’s Medevac and air crew rescue units were of uniform high quality. This was a crucial factor if NATO pilots were to fly and fight again. Delcorte and the other three F-16s in the finger four formation, resembling the spacing of a right hand’s four fingertips, the little finger farther back, entered heavy cloud. At six thousand, Delcorte was still in it, the other three pilots in the clear, the wingman on his left advising him there were “Bogeys — six of them at one o’clock. Seven thousand.”
“Keep going for the top,” Delcorte instructed, the prearranged ceiling having been ten thousand feet, from wh
ich they hoped they could dive down upon the funnel leading to the Fulda Gap.
“Bogeys below — nine o’clock,” came the next report.
“Go for the top,” Delcorte repeated evenly, though in fact he had a multiplicity of incoming messages and warning signals, all of them conflicting, during his effort to outclimb the Bogeys coming in from the east, ignoring those passing below en route to shoot up the withdrawing Americans of the Black Horse division.
It was tempting to Delcorte to break the four-plane formation and go into two fighting pairs, a leader and wingman, the latter watching the leader’s COV — cone of vulnerability. This would leave him, as the flight leader, free from blind side attack if he dove in to break up the enemy formation. He was also tempted to go to a fluid four formation, having two of the F-16s a thousand feet abreast in front, the other two, ten thousand feet apart behind. All these options sped through Delcorte’s head in a split second, then, seeing the Soviet fighters still climbing, trying to get an advantage over the Americans, he forgot Fulda Gap and decided to attack.
Once the combat began, the geometry of flight formations was lost, two Soviet Foxbats winking orange, then gone in cloud, the air-to-air Acrid missiles streaking toward the American Falcons in excess of fourteen hundred meters a second, the faster F-16s already breaking, their pilots hitting the superchargers, climbing fast, trying to expose only their cold side to the Foxbats to deny their afterburners’ exhaust to the heat-seeking Acrids. One American turned too late, and a dirty orange burst lit up inside a cloud, followed by broken thunder. The other three Falcons were on the northern flank of the Foxbats, who now had separated, three going ahead to Fulda Gap, three remaining to engage.
Watching his HUD — head-up display — afterburners on full, going air to air, Delcorte saw the green impact line on the HUD, where graphics condensed a thousand variables to a single display. The target vector was arcing right, cutting through three parallel lines. There was such a jumble of chatter, radio cuts from the Technicolor spread of the tank battles far below him, fragments of other NATO feed-ins, aerial and ground control, a smattering of Russian, that Delcorte, feeling he was ODing on noise, shut them all down except for that of his own formation. He rolled the Falcon, tried for a scissors, turning hard left, and was on a Foxbat’s tail. One hundredth of a second later, the HUD’s three green horizontals were cut by a green arc ending in a dot. Delcorte flicked the stick again. The dot moved toward center. The Foxbat banked hard left, Delcorte’s lines altered, the dot slipping below the line, Delcorte cursing, flicking the stick again, not worrying about sighting the Russian’s afterburner, sliding in with the cannon. He flicked one, twice more, but held his fire — at this angle the Foxbat could outrun his bullets. The green dot shifted, centered. He pressed the red, the.20-millimeter cannon sounding like a rip in the fuselage. He saw parts of the Foxbat breaking off, pulled away before any more came at him.
