“I’d put up a buck says they do, Cheetah, if you put up ten thousand.”
“Let’s adapt then, Frog. Put Bengal Three on the ground to hole the runway. The minute that happens, we’re bound to see SAM radars lighting up. Four and Five take out the SAM sites. One and Two jettison bombs and take on the Mirages.”
“I’m thinking about it, Cheetah. Okay, I’ve got my mind wrapped around it. I can’t let you jettison the dummy bombs, though.”
They would have to have them for the run on the demonstration target.
“Gotcha, Hawkeye. We can manage the aerial with the dummy’s intact.”
“Roger that. Okey-dokey. Everybody give me a half-second squawk, so I’m sure my computer’s still got you in the right place.”
Kimball reached down for his transponder, flipped the toggle upward, counted to himself, “One thousand and,” then snapped it off.
“Right on, Bengals. Speedy, split your two and station them northeast and southeast of the target, ready to hit SAMs. Three, go to angels four, heading three-five-four.”
“Three.”
Kimball checked over his left shoulder and saw Cad well drop out of the formation. His lights went dark.
“Kill the lights, Two,” Kimball ordered and shut down his own guidelights.
“All weapons are free,” Billingsly said. “One and Two, jettison aft bombs.”
Kimball raised the protective flap on the armaments panel, selected Center Line Two, and released the bomb. He selected his live Sidewinders and AMRAAMs and armed them.
“One, this is Two,” Keeper said. “I’m armed and ready to kick ass.”
“One, take heading zero-one-two. I’m going to hold you until the Mirages pounce.”
“Roger that,” Kimball said.
He eased out of his right turn and swung back to the left until the heading appeared on the HUD. The altitude held steady at 14,000 feet.
“Three,” Billingsly said, “you’re thirty seconds out. Commit when ready.”
“Three.”
Kimball scanned the skies. The stars were clear. The moon was dim and low in the west. Below, the landscape was blacked out. A few thin threads suggested waterways or possible roads. On his left, the peak of Doi Pha Hom Pak was a dark smear against the stars lining the horizon.
He watched the area he thought was the base of the mountain.
Abruptly, he saw tiny pricks of light blossom. They were nearly ten miles away.
“Three’s clear. Got the runway and a couple trucks. No aircraft on the ground.”
“SAMs lighting up,” Billingsly warned.
“Triple-A, also,” Bengal Three reported. “They’re shooting blind.”
Kimball saw the trail of a surface-to-air missile leap from the jungle. The tracers of antiaircraft rounds began to poke upwards, like the quills on a porcupine.
“They’re firing SAMs without targets, too,” he said. “Trying to hit something by accident.”
“Speedy just sent Four and Five,” Billingsly said. “Okay, One. Here come the Mirages. Diving hard from twelve thousand. You want three-four-zero.”
“One. We’re gone.”
Kimball flashed his guidelights once for Keeper, then rolled over into a diving left turn. He pulled out on Billingsly’s heading and eased in more power.
“Two, space it out.”
“Roger, One.”
“Hawkeye here. They’re radiating to beat hell, looking for any kind of target.”
“Paint ’em, Frog.”
Kimball selected his AMRAAM radar seekers while Billingsly locked his computer onto the transmitting radars of the Mirages. Transmitted to the Alpha Kat by the data-link, four red blips appeared on the CRT.
“Two, I’ve got the right pair,” Kimball said.
“Roger, One.”
Locating the search stud on the controller, Kimball pressed it. The radar seeker of the first AMRAAM came to life and an orange target symbol appeared on the CRT. He pulled the nose up and to the right.
The target rose passed over the closest red blip. He depressed the stud.
LOCK-ON appeared on the screen.
Kimball squeezed the firing button.
The missile left the pylon with a blaze of fiery white trailing it.
He forgot about it, jinked the nose down and left.
LOCK-ON for the second target.
A missile screamed by on his left, departing Keeper’s fighter.
Fired.
Second missile away.
Altitude 7,540 feet.
Kimball hauled the controller back and rotated upward.
Shoved the throttle to its forward stops.
“Scratch two SAMs,” Billingsly reported.
“Two missiles gone,” Kimball said.
“Make that four,” Keeper added.
“I’ve got the tracks,” Billingsly said. “Two more SAMs out.”
Altitude 11,600.
Kimball pulled on over until he was inverted and looked up through the canopy.
He saw the tracers from the antiaircraft guns rising up toward him, but stopping thousands of feet too soon.
An orange and red and blue flower suddenly appeared against the earth.
Then a second flower.
And a third.
Seconds passed.
Only a three-flower bouquet tonight.
“Scratch three Mirages,” Hawkeye reported. “The fourth one dodged out on us. Good damned work, guys. And Five got the last two SAMS.”
“Where’d the fourth one go, Hawkeye?” Kimball asked. “I’ve still got Sidewinders.”
“He’s on the deck, headed for China. Let him go.”
Kimball glanced at the chronometer. Billingsly was right. They couldn’t waste more time and still get to the demonstration site as scheduled.
“Form us up, Frog.”
After Billingsly gave each of them new headings and brought Four and Five back on Tac Two, Kimball asked, “Bengals, how you doing?”
“Four’s A-one.”
“Five. Do we get to do victory rolls?”
“Three. I’m a little pissed. What’s it going to look like, two trucks painted under my canopy?”
“Two. Who cares? We kicked us some ass.”
Nineteen
Lujan called from the airport at eleven o’clock.
“Hey, Emilio, what’s up?” Crider asked.
“They ain’t come back, man.”
“Who?”
“The planes.”
Crider spilled his bourbon sitting up on the bed so fast. “You’re sure?”
“They’re hard to miss, man. The honchos, they all come back twenty minutes ago. In two helicopters. But none of the KAT airplanes have shown up.”
“None of the KAT people?”
“Oh, sure, there’s a couple of them, and one of the Starlifters is still here, but everything else, gone.”
“Goddamn! Get the plane ready to go, Emilio.” Crider slammed the phone down, crawled out of bed, and headed for the shower.
*
Jimmy Gander and Mel Vrdlicka had made all the arrangements with the Don Muang Airport operations people, who weren’t unhappy about having the Kimball Aero Tech aircraft show up a day early. They liked the landing and parking fees as much as any fixed base operator.
They had been assigned space near the domestic terminal, which was the old airport terminal. The new international terminal next door was modern and bristling with traffic. United Airlines had a large array of aircraft snugged up to the jetways, and there were planes sporting Singapore Airlines, British Airways, and Finnair logos as well.
Gander was happy they hadn’t been shunted off to Ubom or U-Tapeo, the military airfields that had supported U.S. tactical and strategic units during the Vietnam debacle. He hadn’t been to Thailand in ten years, but he could tell, just by breathing deeply, that the air pollution in Bangkok had gotten progressively worse.
After the American dollars started surfacing in Bangkok during
the Vietnam era, flowing from military people either stationed nearby or R&R-ing in the city, Bangkok had grown from a million-and-a-half people to six million in twenty years. There wasn’t room enough for them, but they packed themselves in anyway.
He longed for Phoenix.
The quiet serenity of the desert.
The smell of sage and mesquite.
In fact, he was thinking about hitting Mollie with the idea of selling their two-story off Indian School Road and looking for a small acreage much farther out of the city. Raise some horses, maybe. Timmy should learn to ride soon.
“You know what I heard?” Walt Hammond asked. They were all sitting around the opened ramp of the Starlifter. That ramp was getting old as a home, too.
“What’d you hear?” Wagers asked.
“I heard that that doc in Riyadh got Kim some scotch.”
“He probably needed it,” Wagers said.
“I’d like a shot of scotch. Or something.”
A few heads turned toward the city. Many of them had been there before, but some had not. They had heard the stories, though, of Patpong Road and the live sex shows, young girls racked like pots and pans behind windows with numbers painted on their breasts, free-flowing booze and drugs. The VD clinics were almost as numerous as the bars named Miami and L.A. and Manhattan.
“Forget it,” Vrdlicka said. “It’s fifteen miles to town, but that’s a ninety-minute taxi trip.”
Warren Mabry stood up and moved out from under the tail.
“There they are. Lights off to the west.”
Everyone clambered to their feet and moved to where they could watch the runway.
The Kappa Kat touched down.
Two Alpha Kats followed.
And three more.
They yelled and screamed.
The mood became more exuberant as the Kimball Aero aircraft turned off on the taxiway and crawled across the field toward them.
“About all we need now,” Jimmy Gander said, “is four more people.”
*
A.J. Soames woke to the smell of coffee.
He groaned and rolled over.
His back was bent out of shape, literally, and ached. With some trepidation, he pushed himself upright and rolled to his feet. The parachute packs he had been sleeping on were dented in all the wrong places.
Alex Hamilton, who had started the coffee on a hot plate, was digging through the box of MREs.
“You’re not going to find any Danish in there,” Soames told him.
“Hell, A.J., I’m just looking for American.”
Tex Brabham pushed himself halfway out of his sleeping spot on the canvas sling seats and pushed his hat back on his head. He had his arms wrapped around an M-16.
When they had flipped coins last night, McEntire and Hamilton had won the two bunks in the crew compartment. Getting to sleep, though, had been difficult. The Burmese troops had shown up again, prepared to guard, or detain, the KAT aircraft. When the aircraft didn’t return, there had been some yelling and apparently some telephone conferences by the officer in charge with bigwigs.
A harried senior lieutenant demanded to know where the planes were.
Bangkok, McEntire told him.
That is not right, the lieutenant said.
McEntire had insisted that the flight to Thailand had been part of their plans all along. What’s the big deal? he had asked the lieutenant, who didn’t seem to know.
“Where’s Sam Eddy?” Soames asked Hamilton.
“Still asleep.”
Soames walked forward, skirting packing cases, passed through the hatch, and found McEntire sitting on the side of the lower bunk. He appeared fatigued. He sat with his chin in his hand. A black forest of stubble coated his cheeks.
“I don’t sleep well on airplanes either, Sam Eddy.”
McEntire looked up and grinned. “Hell, A.J., it’d be all right if the thing was moving, and I was at the controls. I sleep all right then.”
“Alex has coffee brewing.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Soames went back to join the others and take a cup of strong, strong coffee from Hamilton.
Brabham opened a tin of soda crackers and passed them around.
Soames looked at them for a second and decided he wasn’t hungry.
Ten minutes later, after a session with an electric razor, McEntire came back.
He looked a hell of a lot better, but there were still dark rings under his eyes.
“Well,” he said, “this may be interesting.”
“You don’t think our hosts are going to be ecstatic?” Soames asked.
“Doubt it. A.J., I want you to stay here with Tex. Have this hummer ready to roll by ten o’clock. Alex and I will cover the debriefing.”
“And if they don’t want us to roll?”
“We’ll play it by ear. We’ve got a radio on our side, and we could raise Bangkok and get the Embassy involved. Without the airplanes here, though, I don’t think Mauk’s going to raise a lot of hell. They don’t know anything they can prove, and if they say something about the attacks on Lon Pot’s little retreats, the world’s going to wonder who’s protecting whom. I think we’ve got them aced.”
Colonel Kun Mauk showed up at eight o’clock in a staff car to pick up McEntire and Hamilton. There was fire in his eyes and a dark suffusion covering his cheeks, but he struggled with, and achieved, civility.
Soames and Brabham spent the next two hours tying down cargo and getting the Starlifter ready for flight.
When those chores were done, Soames sat in the pilot’s seat, and Brabham took the flight engineer’s position. They ran through the checklist as far as they could.
And waited.
10:30 A.M. slid by.
At 10:45 A.M., Soames saw the staff car approaching. Except for the driver in front, McEntire and Hamilton were alone in the backseat.
They got out of the sedan, crossed to the entry hatch, and climbed aboard.
Brabham called down to them, “You guys all right?” Hamilton crawled up the ladder. “Yeah. It was a little hairy there for awhile. Mauk wanted us to bring the planes back after the Bangkok demonstration, so he could take another look at them. He suggested strongly that we hang around here until that happened. 1 know damned well he was on the verge of ordering us detained.”
“And?” Soames asked.
“And Sam Eddy was mercifully brief. Invited Mauk to Arizona, all expenses paid, for another look.”
“And?”
“And the defense minister, who may or may not be able to overrule Mauk, said he’d think about it.”
McEntire called up from the crew compartment. “You want to get us up a few thousand feet, A.J., so I can take a nap?”
*
Ben Wilcox hadn’t been out of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi for hours, and it felt like weeks. He needed a shave and a shower. He had stayed close to the secure room since talking to Simonson five hours before, when he had first learned of the attack on Chiang Base.
He had just stepped out into the corridor and used a wall-mounted house phone to order a roast beef sandwich for lunch when the communications technician called him. “Washington, Mr. Wilcox.”
“Thanks.”
He went back into the claustrophobic room and picked up a phone.
“Wilcox.”
“We’ve confirmed that three Mirages were shot down, Ben. One pilot bailed out. The airfield was torn up a little and they lost six Samsong radar sites. We understand there were a dozen fatalities among the radar crews, but that’s an iffy number.”
“Kimball’s goddamned airplanes work, don’t they?”
“Yeah, it looks like they do.”
“Maybe our brothers down the river are making a mistake, Ted.”
Simonson wasn’t going to comment on the military mind. “There’s a new deadline date. The first of August.”
“And Kimball keeps shoving them back into a comer. Jesus, Ted, have you talked to
the people upstairs?”
“Yeah, and they’re still unhappy. They don’t mind looking at the pictures and hearing the reports, but they don’t like having somebody out there with lethal weaponry who won’t follow their orders.”
“Sounds like LBJ, Ted.”
“Micromanagement, that’s right. Still, we’re supposed to abort the mission. Some of the civilians think that Lon Pot can’t succeed at this point anyway.”
“That’s bullshit,” Wilcox said.
“Maybe. Have you talked to Kimball?”
“He’s not answering the phone. I believe he might be mad at us,” Wilcox said.
“Then, there’s something else. Donegal called.”
“Damn it, I need to talk to him.”
“He just left a message. Lon Pot got himself six new Mirages. Pot’s also aware that Bryce Kimball is the man causing him problems. He’s also rigged up some kind of trap for Kimball.”
“Trap? What trap?”
“There’s no detail, Ben. Just that the Alpha Kats have been tampered with, and every one will go down if they fly against Pot again. Sounds to me like a hint that we should stop interfering with Pot’s life.”
“Shit! It’s not possible.”
“Now you sound like Kimball.”
“I’m going to have to stop him, Ted.”
“Yeah, Ben. You’ve done very well at stopping him, haven’t you? As I remember, you set up the scenario because you knew you couldn’t stop him.”
*
On his flight back to Fragrant Flower in Lon Pot’s Aerospatiale, Henry Loh counted his blessings.
His blessings had just been enriched by another half million American dollars, now residing in Singapore. Lon Pot’s journey into politics was making Loh an even richer man.
And the latest deal had also made Micah Chao a close ally. That could never hurt.
No matter, which way it turned out, however, Loh thought that his future might best be served by resigning his title of Chief soon after the battle was won or lost. He could buy himself an airplane of some kind and tour Indonesia. Perhaps he would go on to South America.
He had never been to South America before.
There was just one niggling, irritating, little detail.
Henry Loh had never lost before, not if he did not count Vietnam, which he did not. He had bailed out of there long before the end.
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