by Dale Brown
“H-301 acknowledges instructions,” the flight lead responded. He turned south and activated his ranging radar. The tactical controller, based in a mobile radar trailer just north of the Korean border, kept feeding him a constant stream of position updates until it became apparent that the target had descended low enough to escape his radar.
But soon the Chinese fighter pilots didn’t need the controller’s help. Just a few minutes later the Q-5 fighter lead spotted the big transport. It was an American-made C-130 transport in black and brown camouflage, hugging the rolling, rugged terrain, flying barely a hundred meters aboveground. “Control, H-301 has visual contact on aircraft, proceeding with intercept.” There was no response — he was flying too low and too far from the radar controller now to maintain good radio coverage.
No matter. He had the target visually, and it would be an easy kill. He deactivated his range-only radar, selected his 20-millimeter cannon, armed his trigger, dialed in the proper settings on his mechanical heads-up display — no fancy electronic HUD on this thirty-year-old bird, nor was one required — double-checked his switches, and began to slide into firing range. When the C-130’s wingtips began to touch the edge of the aiming reticle, he slid his finger down to the trigger and…
“Lead!” It was the wingman frantically shouting on the interplane radio. “Incoming missile! Break left! Now!’’
The Chinese pilot ignored the warning — he was exactly at firing range. But in the blink of an eye his instruments began rolling, warning lights flashed, and his tiny cockpit immediately filled with dense black smoke. He was momentarily distracted by another flash of light — the fireball of his wingman exploding in mid-air — before he reluctantly released the grip on his throttle and control stick and pulled his ejection.
The Q-5 slammed into the ground in an inverted dive traveling almost the speed of sound. He had made the decision to eject just three seconds too late.
* * *
“Splash two,” Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan radioed. “Good shooting, Rebecca.”
What a weird feeling, Rebecca Furness thought. She had of course launched missiles and killed the enemy before — her RF-111G Vampire bomber carried Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defense, and she had to use them during the Russia-Ukraine skirmish. But that was self-defense, a means to help blow past area defenses or put a fighter screen on the defensive long enough for her to get to the target. This was different. They were the hunters this time.
Rebecca and three other crews loaded EB-1C Megafortress battleships at Dreamland and flew them to Adak, Alaska. After crew rest, the crews were briefed, and three Megafortresses launched together to take up combat air patrols over Korea, with the fourth and fifth planes launching later to begin an eight-hour rotation schedule to try to keep as many planes up over Korea at once as possible.
“You okay, Colonel?” Patrick McLanahan asked Furness. Patrick was back on the ground at Adak Naval Air Station, commanding the virtual cockpit. He and Nancy Cheshire would spend four hours in it, then man Fortress Four and relieve Rebecca on patrol in northern Korea. Four hours later another crew would launch in Fortress Five, and the rotation would continue until they were ordered to stop.
“I… I think so.”
“It doesn’t get any easier after the first or the second or the fourth kill,” Patrick said, expertly reading her mind. “In fact, it only gets more nightmarish. Probably because the technology gets so swift, so efficient. Those Chinese Q-5s were seventeen miles away. We could’ve been another ten miles farther away.”
“I guess we’re not into fair fights anymore, are we?”
“Fair fights? That was a fair fight, Colonel. That’s about as close as you want to get to a fighter, even a thirty-year-old clunker like a Q-5. If you missed and he turned around and got close enough to get a visual on you, you’d have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of making it out over the Sea of Japan and over to friendly air cover before he blew your shit away. If both of them came at you, I’d lower our odds to twenty-eighty. Fifty-fifty is generous — I’d like at least ninety-ten on our side.”
“Hey, lighten up, everybody,” Nancy Cheshire, the senior pilot back in the virtual cockpit, interjected. “Rebecca, I say, You go, girl! First air-to-air shots in anger for the Megafortress, and she scores two hits! Oh, sure, Scottie might have had something to do with it.”
“Thanks a bunch, Chessie,” said Major Paul Scott, Rebecca Furness’s mission commander in the Megafor-tress’s right seat. Like Cheshire, he was a longtime veteran of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and had flown many sorties in the old EB-52, the B-52 version of the Megafortress. He double-checked that his weapons were safed and added, “Maybe a little — but I’ll still give all the credit to the Megafortress.”
“You’re allowed to show a little pleasure now and then, Scottie,” Cheshire said. “Just a little ‘hot-diggety-damn’? We just saved that Korean cargo plane and probably a few dozen of their commandos.”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Nancy,” Paul said. “Scope’s clear. Give me forty left and let’s get back in our patrol orbit, Rebecca.” Their assigned orbit was over Kanggye itself, monitoring the movement of Chinese forces across the border into Chagang Do province.
“Fortress, Fortress, this is Iroquois,” a call came in moments later. “Bogeys at one-one-zero at one-one-zero bull’s-eye, angels thirty, heading northwest toward Fortress One at four-eight-zero knots.” “Iroquois” was the call sign of the EB-1’s “back door,” the USS Grand Island, a 9,500-ton Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, escorted by the USS Boone, a Perry-class guided missile frigate, in a patrol position about fifty miles off the Korean coast. “We count eight, repeat eight, bogeys. They are going to cross south of SAM range.”
The Grand Island, named after the large island just south of Niagara Falls that was the scene of Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battles with the British Army, guarded the Sea of Japan and the Megafortress’s exit path. It used its long-range three-dimensional SPY-1B radar to scan the skies from the surface into near space for two hundred miles in all directions. Its surface-to-air weapons included SM-2MR Standard antiaircraft missiles and Standard Block 4A antiballistic missile interceptors; it was the first Navy warship to carry these weapons. The cruiser also carried Tomahawk land-attack missiles and Harpoon antiship missiles. The Boone carried Standard and Harpoon missiles, but it was along as an antisubmarine warfare vessel, carrying two ASW helicopters and a total of twenty-four air-launched and six ship-fired torpedoes.
“Looks like the Japanese are coming back to play,” Patrick commented.
“Hey, guys, I got something,” Patrick reported. “Aircraft lifting off from Pyongyang North airfield, heading for Kanggye. Low altitude. Probably attack jets. I’m picking up a formation of fast-movers lifting off from Seoul as well. Looks like the two formations are going to join up.”
“And here’s their target, I’ll bet,” Paul Scott on Fortress One reported. He had just updated his own laser radar scan with recent data from a NIRTSat reconnaissance scan. The scan detected a long line of heavy vehicles on the principal highway between Kanggye and Anju. “The Chinese tanks are moving fast. They’re twenty miles south of Holch’on, almost at the southern edge of the province. They’re… wow, the computer says they’re main battle tanks. A line of tanks probably three miles long on the principal highway. I’ve also got main battle tanks going cross-country along a ten-mile-wide front on either side of the highway. At least two hundred vehicles spread out over twenty miles.”
“Can the system identify them?”
The LADAR ran the laser-derived dimensions through the computer’s large database of vehicles, but the results were inconclusive. “We got everything in the book out there: Chinese Type-59s and-69s, ex-Soviet T-53s and BMPs, self-propelled artillery, the works. I’d want to get a little closer. Ten miles the other way should do it.”
“I’ll pass the contact along to HAWC and to NRO anyway,” Patri
ck said. “It looks like you picked up something else on that last LADAR image.” Patrick had expanded his virtual cockpit display to show the entire fifty-mile LADAR image. Sure enough, it had detected several Chinese fighters heading south. “Computer identifies them as a large flight of J-6s, heading across the border too,” Patrick said. The J-6, a copy of the old Soviet MiG-19 “Farmer” tactical fighter, was the most numerous attack jet in China’s large aircraft arsenal. “Looks like four flights of four. China is definitely looking for trouble.”
“If those units on the ground aren’t firing up antiaircraft systems,” Nancy observed, “we can assume that either those vehicles don’t know they’re there — in which case they could’ve been bombed pretty easy — or the vehicles on the ground are Chinese as well.”
“Good point,” David said. “Looks like we got a Chinese ground invasion under way, supported by some air cover. We might get some action tonight, after all.”
“Great,” Rebecca said, tightening her straps even more. “I felt pretty good up here — until now. I feel totally naked now.”
“Your fuel looks good — about an hour before you bingo,” Patrick said. “Electrical, hydraulics, pneumatics, CG in the green. Looks like the fighters are going to stay at midaltitudes. Want to go up high?”
“Sounds good to me,” Rebecca said.
“Let’s do it,” Patrick said. In less than five minutes they had climbed up to thirty-four thousand feet, at least ten thousand feet higher than the Chinese fighters. The Japanese MiG-29s had descended below the Megafortress bombers as well. “HAWC has acknowledged our data transmissions and passed along a tactical alert to Space Command and Pacific Command,” Patrick went on. “We saw it first — good work, guys. The Grand Island and the Boone are listening in with us on real-time and have gone to general quarters.” Patrick and Nancy looked at each other at the exact same moment. They could both feel the excitement and tension running hot.
“Okay, we’re picking up a full-scale air defense alert being broadcast in the clear to all Korean military units,” Patrick reported. “Air defense radars are lighting up… we should be able to tap into them any minute. We’ll have peninsula-wide radar coverage pretty soon.”
As the battle developed, it was obvious the Korean defenders were on the defensive all the way. Even combining the old North Korean air assets — a mixture of a few modern MiG-23 attack jets and MiG-29 fighters and many more older, obsolete ex-Chinese aircraft — with South Korea’s Western-designed aircraft, the Korean forces were at least numerically outgunned.
The Korean F-16CJ aircraft led the main attack group. They stayed at fifteen thousand feet, flying high enough to stay away from antiaircraft artillery, presenting themselves as inviting targets. The idea was that they should have drawn fire from Chinese surface-to-air missile batteries, at least a squeak on radar, enough so that they could open fire on any enemy search or tracking radars with their AGM-88 HARMs (high-speed antiradar missiles).
But the Chinese armor and infantry units were smart enough not to take the bait. They knew that if they didn’t activate any radars, the Korean F-16CJs did not have anything to shoot at. The Korean F-16s flew right up to the Chinese tanks — and never even received a rifle shot in their direction. They could do nothing but orbit over the area and wait for targets to pop up. A few tried to go low to drop cluster bombs on tanks and self-propelled artillery, and those planes were hit by optically and low-light TV-guided antiaircraft artillery and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. The Koreans lost four aircraft to enemy fire before being forced to retreat.
The F-16 Block 52 attack jets went in next, armed with infrared-imaging AGM-65D Maverick antitank missiles, followed by MiG-23 fighter-bombers carrying gravity bombs and target-marking rockets. But the Chinese J-6 fighters had arrived over the battlefield by now, outnumbering the Korean fighters by six to one. Even with those odds, the Korean jets were racking up impressive kills, but soon they began to run out of missiles and the numbers of Chinese jets just didn’t seem to be diminishing. Before long the Korean jets were on the defensive and forced to run south. Several formations of Korean F-4E Phantom II bombers tried circumnavigating the entire Chagang Do battlefield and tried to cut in from the west, but they were intercepted by Chinese fighters out of Dandong and chased off as well. Both sides lost a handful of planes, but it wasn’t a stalemate or tie — every plane Korea lost composed a major percentage of the fleet, while four fighters could replace even the most obsolete Chinese fighter.
Even though both the Koreans and the Chinese lost a fairly equal number of planes, the first Korean counter-offensive was a complete failure. The massive numbers of Chinese armor and mobile infantry units in the three Korean northern border provinces were barely scratched.
MASTER CONTROL AND REPORTING CENTER
OSAN, UNITED REPUBLIC OF KOREA
(FORMERLY SOUTH KOREA)
THAT SAME TIME
Five F-16s and six F-4s lost or damaged, sir,” the command operations officer summarized. “We have reports of confirmed hits on just thirteen Chinese main battle tanks and nine artillery pieces. Our weapons list was in excess of two hundred Maverick missiles, forty antiradar missiles, and over one hundred sticks of gravity weapons. Our surviving forces are rearming and refueling.”
“Those losses are completely unacceptable!” Minister of National Defense Kim Kun-mo shouted. “Five percent! Five percent of our strike fleet was destroyed or damaged in just the first wave! How can we expect to drive out the enemy with losses such as this?”
“Sir, we are gathering more tactical reconnaissance and rebuilding the target list,” General An Ki-sok, chief of the general staff, replied. “But the Chinese Air Force has simple numerical superiority over Chagang Do province right now. The Chinese fighters do not engage our F-16 fighters — they merely shoot and run, shoot and run. They do this because they know there are four or five more fighters entering the battle for every one that retreats. Why risk being shot down in an engagement with a superior force?”
“What are you planning on doing about it, General?” Kim asked.
“We can do little at night without better photo intelligence,” General An replied somberly. “Only one-third of our F-16s can carry Maverick missiles, and they cannot do their job very well if we do not control the skies. In daytime, we can use the F-5 Chegong-ho fighters for air defense and the Hawks and Mohawk planes for attack.” He paused, then looked at his commander with a painful expression. “But it will do little good, sir,” he admitted. “China’s Air Force is qualitatively far inferior to ours, but they will have the numbers on their side no matter how good our pilots are. We may never get control of the skies over Chagang Do province.”
“This is unacceptable! Completely unacceptable!” Kim shouted. “We have struggled too hard and have come too far to be turned back. If we cannot defend our own land from attack, what good are we as a nation?” The hot line phone began to ring. Kim ignored it for several long moments, and a stern glare warned General An not to touch it either. Finally, Kim answered it:”
“What is it?”
“This is the president,” Kwon Ki-chae said angrily. “What is going on? My staff tells me we are attacking the Chinese troops!”
“I had no choice, Mr. President,” Kim said. “I assembled a strike package and executed a conventional weapons attack against the spearhead of the Chinese armored units. I also conducted a probe to try to determine what kind of air defenses they had set up in Chagang Do province.”
“This was completely without authorization!” Kwon shouted. “You will launch no more attacks tonight! Is that understood?”
“Sir, we lost eleven aircraft to the Chinese,” Kim said bitterly. “They continue to move south and are threatening to break out of Chagang Do province. By this time tomorrow they can have four brigades of tanks on the outskirts of Pyongyang. If we do not stop them, they will be knocking on your door at the Blue House in three days.”
“General, don’t you
realize we cannot hope to defeat the Chinese People’s Liberation Army by military means?” President Kwon asked incredulously. “Don’t you realize what happened here? We achieved a major victory over the Communists not by the use of force, but by the use of reason and truth. North Korea fell because the people threw off the dictatorship that was slowly killing them, not because we used our military might to subdue them.”
“I am well aware of how we defeated the Communists, sir,” Kim said, his voice a low monotone.
“Then under what delusions of grandeur are you suffering, General Kim?” Kwon asked. “Did you think that just because we captured some jets and artillery pieces and nuclear weapons we can scare China? The smallest military district in China has twice as many men, planes, and tanks as our entire country!
“We are a nation of peace, Kim, not because we are small and defenseless, but because we are Koreans, bred for peace,” Kwon went on. “We do not have an offensive striking force because we never wanted one! We should have given those special weapons away. We never should have kept them!”
“And let China overrun us again?” Kim asked. “Did we fight to win reunification, only to roll over and die just a few short weeks later?”
“This is a different world than that of 1895 or 1945,” Kwon said. “Don’t you realize this? The conquest of land is less important than technological and economic competition. China never wanted our land. But you — we — acted as if the Ming dynasty ruled China, or the Imperial Japanese warlords wanted to annex us again. The Chinese would have been perfectly happy to wait and watch to see if stability and peace would take over the Korean peninsula — as long as they were not threatened by nuclear weapons. When we kept those weapons, we became a threat to them.”
