by Larry Bond
If the rings under his eyes were any indication, Thieu had had less sleep in the past twenty-four hours than Zeus. Yet he seemed energetic as he walked Zeus around the aircraft prior to their takeoff. A quartet of small bombs had been fastened to the wings; they supplemented the 23 mm twin-cannon mounted beneath the fuselage. Aircraft were so precious that even his recce mission would be combined with an attack sortie.
“Think those holes will be a problem?” Zeus asked, pointing to a few fresh notches in the belly.
Thieu laughed. “Ha-ha, Major Zeus, always making jokes.”
“Those are holes,” said Zeus.
“No worry. Board now.”
The Albatros was a two-seater, and Zeus sat in the rear. He had a flight stick and throttle, and Thieu insisted on giving him a quick orientation on how to use the controls if something happened.
“This way, if I am shot, you will land,” said Thieu over the plane’s interphone circuit. “Plane is very valuable.”
“What makes you think they’d get you and not me?” said Zeus.
“Ha! You are very lucky man, Major Zeus. The captain is very lucky to be flying with you today.”
“Oh yeah. I’m just oozing luck.”
The oxygen pumped into his mask gave Zeus a jolt of energy. Having flown with Thieu before, he had skipped breakfast — a decision vindicated by the roller-coaster takeoff that buried his stomach somewhere behind the tailplane.
“See — we miss all potholes!” said Thieu triumphantly as they climbed out.
The sun wouldn’t rise for another half hour. The dim sky and darker ground made it hard for Zeus to orient himself. The course Thieu laid out was due east to the sea, then north along Route 18 in the direction of Tien Yen.
Zeus strained to see out the sides of the cockpit, looking for lights or other signs of life. But there was nothing, just shades of gray.
“Do you prepare for bombing?” Thieu asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“We will drop our bombs first, then make our observations,” said the pilot.
“Are we that close to the lines already?” Zeus glanced at the compass for the heading. They were still going east.
“We turn and be prepared,” answered Thieu. “Ready?”
“Anytime.”
The plane took a slow bank. They were traveling just under seven hundred kilometers an hour by the plane’s gauges — in the area of 375 knots, or nautical miles an hour. That put them a little more than five minutes from the front line, by Zeus’s calculation.
Something red sparked in the distance. Zeus stared at it, unsure what it could be. It looked like a splash of paint on a photograph, something that didn’t belong.
More red appeared, a line of splashes.
Tracers!
They were a lot closer to the front than he’d thought. The Chinese were at Tien Yen already.
“Gunfire ahead,” said Thieu.
“Ours or theirs?”
“No matter.”
Zeus heard Thieu speaking to someone over the radio. The aircraft took a sharp bank to the left, then swung its nose back northward. The altimeter indicated they were at five thousand feet above ground level — well within the reach of whatever was firing ahead.
Probably Vietnamese antiair, thought Zeus. But what were they shooting at? Not them.
Zeus saw the answer in a string of black dots behind the flashes.
Chinese helicopters. Two of the dots were flying to the right, the others were slightly behind in echelon.
The dots at the right glowed red. They were firing rockets or something at the ground.
The antiaircraft fire intensified. Yellow-red streams leapt from the ground, bullets hosing the air. One stream turned black; another died. The ground flashed. A fire erupted.
“Hold on, Major,” said Thieu. “Our fun begins.”
The jet suddenly twisted on its wing, pushing down to Zeus’s left. The nose angled down, gently at first, but then in a flick of the pilot’s wrist almost ninety degrees. The plane became a dagger aimed at the earth. Zeus felt his stomach push toward his spine.
The left wing lifted; the nose swung hard to Zeus’s right. He strained to see, raising his head over the side of the cockpit, but gravity pushed him back down into his seat. The plane shot upward — straight up it seemed, though by this time Zeus was so dizzy he had no real idea of the direction they were going. His head slammed back against the rest. The engines surged behind him.
“I think we got him!” yelled Thieu. He could have been at a baseball game, cheering a grand slam.
“What?”
“The tank,” said Thieu. “You see it?”
Zeus struggled to look out the canopy. The ground was dark. If there was smoke or fire from the explosion it was lost in a blur of shadows as they zoomed away.
“I don’t know,” said Zeus.
“Look on next run. Will be to your left.”
“You didn’t drop all the bombs?” Zeus asked, but his words were swallowed by the engines as the pilot coaxed more power for another plunge toward the battlefield.
Everything outside the canopy blurred. The Albatros was not a particularly fast aircraft as jet fighters went, yet it seemed to be flying at the speed of thought.
Fingers of red fire appeared at the side, uncurling from black fists. Angry hands grabbed at the plane. The jet bucked ferociously as the pilot neared his target.
Crap, thought Zeus. Let’s get this over with.
He glanced at the handle he was supposed to pull if they needed to bail out. They were so low here… Would he even survive to be captured?
Hoo-rah.
They pulled up sharply, the aircraft gaining several hundred feet as the bombs were dropped. Zeus strained to keep his head where he could see outside the cockpit. There were black boxes on the ground — armored personnel carriers, he guessed, not tanks.
Or maybe they were tanks, or armored cars, or infantry fighting vehicles, or just trucks — it was too dark and they flitted by so quickly, who could tell?
Something hit the right wing. Zeus heard a screeching sound, something like metal being torn in two. The plane bucked for a moment, then righted itself. He pushed himself up against the restraints, craning his neck to see the wing, but he couldn’t quite see anything.
“Close one, Major,” said the pilot.
“Were we hit?” asked Zeus.
“Two bullets, maybe. Nothing. It would take many to harm us.”
Zeus doubted that. Just one bullet in the right place would surely be enough.
“Now we ready look on your mission,” said Thieu. His English got shakier as he became more excited, and he was clearly in the middle of an adrenaline rush at the moment. “We go to north.”
“More to the northwest, right?”
“Oh ho, Major, you are remember your compass.”
Thieu sounded absolutely high, as if he were stoned on cocaine. It was just adrenaline — and the excitement of survival. Some men pressed down under the continuing strain. For others, the stress became a drug, something you almost lived for.
Had Zeus been craving that high when he decided to take on the tanks at the border?
“Are you still with me, Major?” asked Thieu.
“I’m here.”
“Do you see the river on the right? That is Ky Cung.”
Zeus looked out the side of the cockpit. The sun was just below the horizon, and the ground still blurred into different shades of gray. But as his eyes adjusted and his mind focused, the dark blotches turned into colors, the shapes into objects that he had some hope of recognizing. He saw hills first, then a road they were passing, and finally the river, a surprisingly straight slit of black almost parallel to the aircraft’s path.
The Chinese border lay a few miles beyond the river. Zeus stared from the aircraft, straining to see activity.
“I am going to fly up Highway three-one,” said the pilot. “We will see what we can see.”
Zeus held
his breath as the plane turned almost ninety degrees in a matter of seconds. Thieu dropped lower, edging the plane down toward the mountain that the highway ran through. This wasn’t so Zeus could get a better look — the lower the plane was, the harder it would be for any Chinese patrols or radars to spot.
The road tucked left and right, disappearing under the canopy. Zeus examined the terrain, trying to get a feel for how it would be to run a division through it. This was the real reason he’d come — it was one thing to stare at satellite photos and Global Hawk images, and quite another to see the land in person, even from three or four thousand feet.
What puzzled him was the fact that the Chinese had not come through here. But now it was clear. If you attacked on this route, you would be limited to the main road. The road net was limited and the sharp terrain made it exceedingly difficult to find an alternate route. Unlike the area farther east, there were no interconnected farm fields that could be used as temporary passages.
“Border is near,” said Thieu. “We may have shots.”
The pilot laughed. The aircraft had been steadily slowing; they were now doing only a bit more than a hundred knots, closing in on the plane’s stall speed — the speed at which it stopped staying in the air. But the low altitude made it appear as if they were going much faster.
There were houses ahead, on both sides of the road. The war seemed not to have reached here; smoke curled in thin lines, breakfast fires only.
Jungle.
Thieu raised his nose slightly. Zeus saw a line ahead — a fence, he thought, but it turned out to be a power line, or maybe telephone wires.
More houses, buildings. There was a barrier in the road.
“Guns on the right,” said Thieu.
Zeus raised his head, staring. He spotted what looked like tanks on a hilltop. They were ZSU-57-2s, ancient Russian-made antiaircraft guns. They didn’t fire. The Albatros continued northward, deeper into China. Its straight-line path took it away from the road, which curved left.
The ground was thick jungle, a deep green that undulated with the hills. Just as they started to bank westward, the color changed from green to a dark brown. The trees were dead, killed by a three-year drought — the rainfall pattern changed dramatically on the other side of the hills.
A good place to stage armor for an attack, Zeus thought. But he couldn’t see any.
“Uh-oh,” said Thieu.
“Problem?”
One of the warning systems began to bleat.
“They are finding us on their radar. No worry,” said Thieu.
Zeus’s stomach jumped very close to his mouth as the pilot put the plane into a sharp dive and turn. The sensor stopped beeping.
“We have to turn south,” said Thieu, reluctance creeping into his voice. “Pingxiang is ahead.”
Pingxiang was the largest Chinese city in the area, and it was ringed by sophisticated air defenses.
“Have you seen what you want?” added Thieu.
“I guess.” Zeus hadn’t seen much.
Thieu kept the Albatros pitched about thirty degrees after they came out of the turn. The Vietnamese city Lang Son was ahead, on their right as they approached the border. The entire area around the city was well developed — until the war, the area had been popular with Chinese men looking for a very quick vacation from their wives. It was like a Vietnamese version of Las Vegas: what happened there, stayed there. A good portion of the businesses there were owned by Chinese businessmen — obviously the reason it hadn’t been attacked.
“Fly over 1A, will you?” asked Zeus, naming the major road south.
They angled eastward. There were patrols and emplacements all along the highway. They flew over the road at about six hundred feet, following the highway for about ten minutes until black puffs appeared in front of them. Thieu laid on the fuel, deepening the angle right as he took a very sharp turn and began to climb.
“They think we’re Chinese,” he said.
“Can we go back east?” said Zeus. Now that it was light, he wanted to see where the armored brigade General Tri commanded was.
“I will have to go north,” said Thieu. “It will take a few minutes.”
“North? Why?”
Thieu didn’t answer.
“Thieu?”
“Restricted. We cannot fly the area.”
Zeus reached to the pocket on the leg of his flight suit and took out the map, folding it open on his lap. What were they avoiding?
They’d flown south of the Yen Tu Mountains on the way out, and were now flying north of them. Was that the Luc Nam River below?
Zeus studied the map, trying to triangulate their position by what they had passed.
Why would the mountains be restricted? It wasn’t part of the defense zone around Hanoi.
“We are ten minutes from Tien Yen,” said Thieu.
“I wanted to be farther north, along Route 4B,” said Zeus, turning his attention back to the armored brigade.
“Ah.”
Thieu immediately began a turn. Within a minute or two, Zeus spotted a highway clogged with traffic — it was the armor brigade and part of the infantry division, rushing toward the battle at Tien Yen.
They turned and followed the highway back in the direction of Lang Son. There were two columns of vehicles along the road, then nothing.
Now would be the time to attack Lang Son. Blow through the crust of the defenses, then sweep down the roads parallel to IB.
Except the Chinese saw no reason to destroy a city they in effect already owned.
Of course, that also meant that they were not on their guard here. They thought so little of the Vietnamese.
Not without reason, Zeus reminded himself.
“Our fuel becomes low,” warned Thieu.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Zeus. “We can go back whenever you want.”
“Very good, Major.”
Thieu bent the nose of the plane upward. Zeus felt his blood rushing from his head. How did pilots learn to live with this?
As they leveled off, an alarm began to blare. The plane jerked hard left, then pointed toward the ground.
“Major, we are being tracked by Chinese fighter,” snapped Thieu. “Watch out!”
Before Zeus could reply, the warning tone went two octaves higher.
“Launch warning!” intoned an English voice.
The Chinese fighter had fired a pair of missiles at them.
21
Beijing
“We can crush the American destroyer offered Lo Gong, the defense minister. “If that is what you wish.”
Cho Lai put his hands together on the desk. Yet another move by the American President to thwart him.
This one he should have anticipated. But it was ingenious — the American ship would claim it was inspecting cargo. It was a matter of enforcing neutrality — a position China itself had encouraged. The fact that the ships were registered in the Philippines — what could the Chinese possibly object to?
Simple, yet ingenious. And of course, as soon as the Americans went aboard the ships, they would see they were filled with Chinese soldiers.
And so what? Besides a public relations coup, what would the Americans win, exactly?
Public support to interfere. That was Greene’s real aim.
If they stopped the ships, that would be disastrous. That would ruin the plan to take Hai Phong.
Sink the destroyer and be done with it. That was Cho Lai’s true wish. But it would invite open conflict with America. A shooting war. And if his generals and admirals were timid now, what would they do against the Americans?
It would be a fiasco.
Time. He needed time. Eventually, the Vietnamese would collapse. And eventually, his generals would gain the confidence they needed.
“The destroyer seems very far from the ships,” said Cho Lai.
“On the present course and speed, the ships will beat the destroyer to Hai Phong,” said the defense minister. “But that assumes the dri
ve in the east will proceed on schedule.”
“You told me it is ahead of schedule,” said Cho Lai.
“It is.”
“Well, then, there is no problem,” said the premier, somewhat more relaxed. “The ships will beat the destroyer to the port, and that will be the end of it.”
“And if something delays them or the operation?”
Cho Lai ground his back teeth together. Now he was the one being forced to act as a coward. But he must take the long view. He must take the long view.
“Make sure that it doesn’t,” he said darkly. “Take Hai Phong. And make sure those ships return with rice.”
Lo Gong bowed his head.
22
In the air over northern Vietnam
Zeus lurched against his restraints as Thieu threw the Albatros toward the earth, trying desperately to lose the missiles on their tail. Buzzers and bleeps and voices warned of their impending doom. Zeus felt as if his stomach and lungs were being torn into several pieces inside his body. Gravity crunched against his chest, and his face mask felt as if it were edged with a steel knife, cutting deeply into his face.
The Albatros jerked right, heading straight for a huge rock outcropping. Then it spurt back left. Something popped behind Zeus. He thought they’d been hit. But as the plane hurtled ahead, he realized Thieu had launched decoys — ”tinsel,” or chaff, the pilots called it, pieces of metal shards that confused radar.
The Albatros shot straight up, then turned upside down. Zeus caught a red flash in the corner of his eye — one of the missiles that had been chasing them, blowing up harmlessly a mile or more away, suck-ered by the decoy.
The other missile mysteriously vanished, just gave up as its radar lost contact. The cockpit went silent.
