Top Gun

by T. E. Cruise

  Greene, listening, nodded to himself. The Phantoms were carrying bombs as well as air-to-air missiles.

  “Twenty minutes to target,” Rodriguez said.

  * * *

  Wolf flight’s ride to the Cambodian mainland passed uneventfully. As they closed on the coastline, they gradually reduced altitude to five thousand feet. The escort Phantoms remained high, so they were first to spot the signs of the battle going on at Tang Island.

  “Wolf flight. Papa lead,” Lieutenant Saunders radioed. “Check out the fire works on your port side.”

  Wow, Greene thought as he tipped his wings to get a better view of the action. From his perspective. Tang Island looked like the mossy green shell of a tortoise rising up out of the blue water. Fires were sprouting all over the island, and gray clouds of smoke were wafting in the breeze across the beach: The island had taken a pounding from the Phantoms, A-6s, and A-7s that had gone in to soften the Cambodian resistance for the Marines.

  Air power did its best, Greene thought. But it’s just like Vietnam. When the planes were done shooting their wad, it still remained for the foot soldier to do the messy and dangerous mopping up.

  Despite the extensive air strikes, there was still orange 50-caliber tracer fire rising up from out of the trees near the beach. The Cambodians were shooting at the big CH-53 and HH-53 troop carrying helicopters hanging in the air above the surf in preparation for off-loading the Marines. The Jolly Green Giant helios were returning fire with with their door-mounted M-60 miniguns. People on both sides were definitely getting killed down there, Greene knew.

  “There’s the Mayaguez,’’ somebody said. Greene looked down at the rather modest-looking freighter wallowing in the ocean just offshore the island. The Mayaguez was a container ship. Her bow deck was stacked high with drab aluminum boxes, each the size of a truck trailer. Approaching the Mayaguez was a USN destroyer carrying a Marine force.

  Not much of a boat to start a shooting war over, Greene thought. Up ahead he could see the looming Cambodian coast, a line of tan beach backed by an emerald wall of jungle.

  “Wolf flight, green ’em up and go to strike frequency,” Rodriguez ordered.

  But what the hey, Greene thought as he activated his weapons systems and tuned his radio to channel seven. This was the only war he had, so he might as well enjoy it.

  “Rubber Duckie, Wolf flight’s feet are dry,” Wolf lead transmitted back to the Sea Bear as the strike force crossed over to dry land. “Wolf flight, go to angel three.”

  Greene and the rest of the A-7s dropped down to three thousand feet. The flight was traveling at five hundred knots. The Cambodians had likely been expecting an assault on Tang Island and the Mayaguez, but there was no reason for them to expect Tien Air Field to be hit. Accordingly, it was Wolf flight’s strategy to hit and run before the Cambodians could marshal their defenses. Up until now, the pilots on board the Sea Bear had been making light of what the Cambodians might have to throw back at their air assault, but after seeing the effort the Cambodians were making to defend Tang Island, Greene, for one, didn’t much feel like laughing.

  “Here we go,” Rodriguez radioed the flight.

  Greene got ready for action, dropping down with the rest of the flight to treetop level to initiate the strike. Tien Air Field was situated in a cove. The plan was for the Mud Movers to go inland and then bank around, to attack from the land as opposed to from the sea, in order to further increase the element of surprise. The order of attack would be as follows: Wolf lead, then Wolf two, and Wolf three; two passes each to drop their ordnance. Both Wolf lead and Wolf two piloted by Rodriguez and Sweeny were carrying AGM-62 Walleye TV-directed smart bombs in addition to their Snakeye load, so they were going in first to lessen the strain on their A-7s. Greene didn’t have any Walleyes because as an Air Force fighter pilot he’d never been trained to use the complex air/ ground Electro-Optical Guided Bombs, and he hadn’t had time in his abbreviated RAG tour flying the A-7 to become acquainted with the EOGB system. The Walleye was designed for surgical strikes, to take out a specific target. Wolf lead and Wolf two had Walleyes on board in case the Cambodians tried the old North Vietnamese trick of surrounding its military targets with “noncombatant civilians” in order to sway world opinion against the United States. The Walleye was a one-ton bomb with a TV camera in its nose. The camera transmitted a cross hair-type picture of what the bomb was “looking at” to the five-inch black-and-white Sony mounted on the pilot’s panel. The pilot locked the Walleye on target by sighting in on the cross hairs superimposed on the TV screen. Once the bomb was released, it guided itself to aim-point as long as those cross hairs stayed aligned. It was a good weapon, but not at its best during low-level attacks, because it needed time to make course corrections. Also, clouds could fuck it up: if the Walleye couldn’t see it, it couldn’t hit it.

  After the A-7s were done dropping their ordnance, the Phantoms would go in to drop their bombs. Then, if there was anything left of Tien Air Base, the Mud Movers would go back to mop up with cannons and rockets.

  Wolf flight was approaching Tien Air Field. It was a compound cut into the dense jungle. There were a half-dozen rusting, white and orange hangars and several interlocking tan airstrips angled to lead out over the water. There were maybe a dozen U.S.-built, dark-green, combat-modified, prop-driven T-28 trainers parked in muddy, earth-embankment revetments along the runways, but none of the airplanes looked to be in a state approaching takeoff status.

  That was too bad, Greene thought. He knew the combat-modified T-28. The Air Force had used them during the Vietnam War for close ground-support work when the job called for a rugged bird that could operate out of a primitive airfield. The T-28 had self-sealing fuel tanks, armor plating around the cockpit, and underwing pylons capable of mounting 50-caliber gun pods, napalm, bombs, rockets, and so on. The T-28 could be an agile and dangerous bird at low altitude in the hands of a competent pilot. Knocking the enemy’s planes out of the sky one by one would have been challenging, enjoyable work for Greene and his buddies in their gun-toting, subsonic A-7s.

  The Cambodian airfield began bustling with people and battered-looking, olive-drab military vehicles as the strike force closed in. Beyond the field Greene saw the timeless, peaceful, blue-gray ocean lapping the sandy beach.

  “Looks like we got us a welcoming committee,” Ensign Sweeny said matter-of-factly as the Cambodian antiaircraft emplacements around the airfield commenced firing.

  Greene said: “Not surprising now that I think about it. The Cambodians must have anticipated we’d try something, and put this base on alert.”

  He stared mesmerized at the tracer fire lanquidly reaching up to caress his bird. The incendiary display was as lovely as it was frightening, and watching it, Greene was immediately enveloped in an intense déjà vu. It was 1965, and he was back over Hanoi in his Thud, about to put the hurt on Uncle Ho—Watch out for SAMs!

  “Wolf lead, Papa lead.”

  “Go ahead, Papa lead,” Rodriguez told Lieutenant Saunders in the lead Phantom circling high above them.

  “We picked up a mayday transmission,” Saunders said. “A couple of Marine choppers went down off the coast of Tang Island.”

  “Enemy fire?” Ensign Sweeny in Wolf two asked, concerned.

  “Negative,” Papa lead replied. “Both went down from rotor malfunction.”

  Goddamn, Greene thought, listening. If God had wanted helicopters to fly. He would have given them wings.

  “The rescue operation could use our help flying RES-CAP,” Papa lead said. “We thought we’d mosey along that way… ?”

  “You do that,” Rodriguez agreed. “We’ll be fine here. It’s obvious the Cambodians have no planes ready to fly” Wolf lead paused as the duo of Phantoms banked away from the airfield to join the air net searching for survivors from the copter crashes. “Okay, Wolf flight. Let’s do it. I’mgoing in.”

  Greene watched as Wolf lead’s A-7 attacked fast and low. Rodriguez expertly weaved
his way through the antiaircraft tracer and cannon fire arcing up like scarlet, jeweled beads from the sandbag emplacements scattered around the airfield and from the gun sites hidden in the surrounding jungle. When Rodriguez was over the runways he released his load of Snakeyes, which fell leisurely toward the target. The Snakeye retarded bomb was especially designed for low-level delivery. It was equipped with automatically extending tail fins that acted as air brakes on the falling bomb, slowing its descent so that the aircraft dropping it would have time to clear the explosion.

  The Snakeyes erupted in fireballs and gray smoke well after Wolf lead had banked away from the airfield. The initial explosions began a chain reaction of blasts as the parked T-28s’ fuel tanks began to ignite.

  “Your turn. Wolf two,” Rodriguez said.

  Greene watched as Ensign Sweeny made his pass. The airfields were now pockmarked with smoking craters, but there was still plenty of antiaircraft activity tearing up the sky. Greene was amused when Sweeny took the time to go chasing after an olive-drab truck careening around the airstrip complex with maybe half a dozen twin .50-calibers bolted to its flatbed. It wasn’t as if Sweeny was in danger from the truck. The flatbed gunners didn’t have a chance in hell of hitting anything as long as their chauffeur kept driving his frantic circles. The gunners were bouncing like jumping beans and hanging on to their guns for dear life. Greene guessed that Sweeny just wanted to have a little fun….

  Wolf two popped his speed brakes so as not to overshoot the truck too quickly. When the gunners saw that their truck had attracted the A-7’s attention, they jumped ship, hopping off the flatbed. Greene thought Sweeny would open up with his cannon, but instead Wolf two rippled off a salvo of 100MM rockets. The rockets left the pod trailing flame, which transformed to wiggling tails of white smoke as the rockets streaked toward the truck, which was entirely sans gunners now; the silent .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the flatbed were swinging in the breeze. The truck driver must have seen the rockets coming. He tried to get out of their way, but he didn’t have a chance since the salvo had spread out to effectively cage his vehicle. The rockets impacted in a high-explosive curtain around the enemy truck, transforming it to tortured, flaming scrap metal.

  “Somebody better call the Automobile Club of Cambodia.” Sweeny chuckled gleefully as he dropped his Snakeyes on the hangar complex. “Something tells me that truck’s got a flat tire or two.…”

  What a wise guy. Green thought, smiling. Thanks to Sweeny’s precision bombing, the hangar complex had vanished in smoke and fire. It was now time for Greene to begin his own run. Remarkably, despite all the destruction that had been caused to the airfield, there was still defensive fire coming up from it, and especially from the surrounding jungle.

  A stream of tracers cut across the nose of Greene’s bird: .50 cal, he guessed. When the rounds were coming at you, they looked like white hot Ping-Pong balls lobbed in rapid succession.

  Greene felt his bird shudder and heard a rattling like pebbles being thrown against the A-7’s skin: Several .50-cal rounds had impacted. Greene didn’t like being hit, but he wasn’t terribly worried. The A-7 was tough as nails. The cockpit and all vital systems were armored, with critical flight components and systems duplicated or triplicated to make sure a shot-up Mud Mover had what it took to get its job done and then get on home to its Rubber Duckie.

  However, I wouldn’t want to take too many of those, Greene thought as a flurry of what looked like red golf balls floated up at him from out of the jungle. Those were 37MM cannon rounds.

  Greene resisted the urge to drop some Snakeyes on the foliage in an effort to silence the more potent gun. Letting the enemy seduce you into expending your ordnance on defenses instead of the primary target was one of the oldest ruses in the Indochinese Commies’ bag of tricks.

  “Wolf three, Wolf lead,” Rodriguez radioed.

  “Rog, lead,” Greene replied.

  “Three, drop all your bombs in an extended run, then we’ll get out of here. This field is history, and with all that defensive fire coming up from the palm trees there’s no point in us repeatedly exposing ourselves to it just to break big pieces of wreckage into little pieces.”

  “Rog lead.”

  Greene flew his attack trajectory, doing the best he could to ignore the fiery AA net of death the Cambodians were weaving to pluck his bird from out of the sky. Fortunately, billowing clouds of oily black smoke were now rising up from the burning airfield. As Greene entered into it, he felt relieved. He couldn’t see his dick in front of him, but at least now the enemy gunners couldn’t spot him.

  He watched his instruments, letting his navigation/weapon delivery computer select the opportune moment to drop his bomb load. When he did trigger off his bombs, he felt his bird rise up, unfettered from over three tons of ordnance. Behind Greene, the roiling smoke cloud cleared just long enough for him to see his bombs going off in a rapid succession of blinking light. From his vantage point, the dozen Snakeyes exploding looked like an oversize string of Chinese firecrackers. Abruptly the field was shaken by a tremendous explosion that sent an anvil-shaped orange fire cloud high up into the sky. The shock wave from the blast buffeted Greene’s bird, and for a moment he thought he was going to lose control, but then he had his A-7 reined in. He arrowed out of the smoke cloud, up into the clear blue upper reaches of the sky.

  “Woo-whee!” Rodriguez yodeled cowboy style. “That’s getting some bang for the buck, Air Force!”

  “I must have hit an underground fuel tank,” Greene chortled excitedly. “Back in ’Nam, the POL sites used to go up just like that!”

  Greene’s A-7 was still rising. Now that he’d dropped his bombs, Greene could have flown rings around Wolf lead and Wolf two, both of which were still burdened with heavy, cumbersome. Walleye TV bombs.

  “Okay, Wolf three,” Rodriguez radioed to Greene. He and Wolf two were already winging out over the cove. “Come on down into formation and let’s get out of here.”

  “Roger, lead,” Greene began, but then, as he leveled out at 10,000 feet and prepared to descend, he was distracted by movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He gasped, thinking he was seeing things, that he was having another Viet flashback. “Wolf lead. We’ve got bogies.”

  “What? Where?” Rodriguez demanded skeptically. “Air Force, check your oxygen level. You sound a little loco to me, muchacho.”

  “I’m telling you I see three of them!” Greene chattered excitedly. “Check it out! They’re at my four o’clock low! You’re ten o’clock level. See them? They’re skimming the trees, heading out from the jungle—yeah!—they’ve crossed the beach and now they’re over the water!”

  “Got them!” Sweeny said.

  “Roger, I see them now,” Rodriguez agreed. “Where the fuck did they come from?”

  “Who knows?” Greene replied. “Maybe the Cambodians have underground hangars.…”

  Rodriguez said, “I can see plenty of ordnance dangling from their wings. Those bogies are obviously on their way to Tang Island to lend air support to the Cambodians.”

  Greene suffered through a high-G turn in pursuit of the planes. The bogies were painted in a jungle camo pattern: tobacco brown with wavy green mottling. As Greene got closer to the low-flying, relatively slow-moving enemy jets, he recognized their teardrop canopies, needle noses, dual jet intakes, and swept wings/swept tail configuration. Then he made out their insignia: yellow-outlined red stars and bars on their upper wings.

  “Holy shit, fellas,” Greene radioed to the rest of the flight. “Those are Chinese aircraft—”

  “Bullshit!” Rodriguez exploded. “Now I know you’re loco!”

  “Listen up, lead!” Greene cut him off. “Before I came aboard the Sea Bear, I spent a year testing out flight simulators. I had to study up on just about every kind of non-friendly airplane there is, because I had to fly against computer-generated versions of them. I’m telling you that these three airplanes are Nanzhang Q-5 Qianjiji attack aircraft, the
Commie Chinese answer to our own fighter bombers like the F- I I I.”

  “Lead, he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about,” Sweeny said.

  “I guess,” Rodriguez admitted grudgingly. “Damn, first the fall of Saigon, then the Mayaguez, and now this. Fucking Commies must all be working together. Stay out of their way, Wolf three. I’m radioing a warning to our guys over Tang. The Phantoms will take them out.”

  Greene was still closing on the Q-5 trio from behind, from six o’clock high. None of the gomer pilots had spotted him, or, if they had, they were ignoring him. Greene wondered why. Maybe the Q-5s were being distracted and reassured by the sight of Rodriguez and Sweeny’s bomb-laden A-7s flying so unthreateningly low and slow out over the water…? Or maybe the Q-5s had spotted Greene behind them, but they were thinking that he had expended all his ammo on the airfield?

  Then the obvious answer occurred to Greene: These Q-5s intended to strafe the Marines landing on Tang Island’s beach. That was their primary mission, and if they wanted to complete it successfully, they would have to continue to fly skimming the waves, because they were overloaded with heavy ordnance.

  That might be your mission, but you’re not going to complete it if I can help it, gomers, Greene thought, busily flipping switches on the armament panel of his A-7 to go from air-to-ground bombing mode to air-to-air gun mode.

  “Wolf three, I know what you’re up to!” Rodriguez transmitted. “Don’t do it! Let the Phantoms have them! Do you read. Wolf three? Over!”

  Greene’s mind raced back to all those flight-simulator battles he’d fought and won on the ground at Wright-Patterson. Yeah, sure, he was an electronic ace, a master war gamester, but in real life he’d never shot down an enemy plane. His grandfather Herman Gold had been an ace in World War I. His uncle Steve had been an ace in World War II and in Korea, and had even scored a couple of MiG kills during his limited-combat tour in ’Nam, but not Robbie Greene, who’d flown well over a hundred combat missions in his Thud, but who’d never been in the right place at the right time to score an air kill—