Three miles. The missile warbled in his earphones. Its seeker head had found the enemy and was tracking. He fired and saw a similar streak of flame pop out from under the F-14’s starboard wing.
“God!” Bouchard couldn’t believe it. The MiG-29 had fired an IR missile at him from the front and it was guiding on him. Where’d these bastards get those things? He pulled hard left, grunting as his weight quintupled in seconds, trying to follow the MiG and line up for a shot while Esteban popped flares to decoy away the enemy missile. It swung away and exploded one hundred yards behind the turning Tomcat. Bouchard felt the shock wave ripple through the F-14 and ignored it as he fought to bring the plane around on the MiG’s tail.
C’mon round, baby. C’mon round. Almost. Bouchard’s thumb reached for the firing button.
“Left!” Esteban’s frantic shout brought his head around as orange-white tracers sprayed across the Tomcat’s flight path. He jerked the stick hard left, turning toward the new threat. There. A gray-white camouflaged MiG flashed past and rolled away. He’d lost the first MiG somewhere in the sun. Jesus, this was turning into a mess.
Jets were all over the sky, turning, diving, climbing, weaving, and falling in flames. The air battle between the MiGs and the American fighters had turned into a constantly changing series of deadly, short-range duels. Move and countermove. Shot and return shot. At such close range the North Korean and Soviet edge in numbers more than made up for their slightly inferior aircraft and weapons.
An F-14 blundered into the path of an AA-11 and blew up, throwing pieces of itself in an arc hundreds of yards across. Seconds later an F-18 avenged its counterpart with a quick cannon burst into the belly of a rolling MiG-21. A second MiG soon fell prey to a Tomcat-launched Sidewinder, and another nine lima tore the wings off a scissoring Fulcrum.
The edge shifted back quickly, though, as a Soviet-piloted MiG-29 turned inside an F-18 and got off a high deflection shot that shredded the Hornet’s cockpit and sent it spiraling down into the sea.
As the air battle continued, more planes on both sides tumbled away on fire or simply blew up. Losses, fuel consumption, and missile and cannon ammo expenditure were all appalling. But the American F-14s and F-18s were doing their job. They were keeping the MiGs fully engaged, protecting the heavily laden strike aircraft now approaching the Korean coast.
Commander John “Smokey” Piper, USN, glanced down out the cockpit of his A-6E Intruder as it crossed the coast, six thousand feet above the spray-marked merger of slate-gray seas and white, snow-covered land. He clicked his mike and said, “Duster is feet dry.” His message confirmed to the carriers at sea and the E-2C aloft that the strike planes were over land and just fifteen miles away from their targets.
Piper looked ahead into a maelstrom of white, gray, and black smoke puffs dotting the sky as North Korean antiaircraft guns sought out the incoming strike. He saw hundreds of tiny flashes on the ground and watched an F-18 pull up and away from its bursting cluster bombs. Another far off to the right fired a HARM missile toward some unseen, but still-operating radar site. The missile ignited on the rail, then seemed to disappear as it flew forward and climbed. It would dive on its victim from high altitude. The Iron Hand flak suppressors had their hands full on this one.
Voices over the radio told their own story.
“Strawman, this is Comanche. You’ve got a SAM launch in your six, break left now! I’ll hit the site.”
“Breaking! Can you see any others?”
“Nega… SAM! SAM! Five o’clock low. Keep breaking left!”
Piper heard the second pilot’s voice quavering under the heavy g’s he was pulling. “Can’t shake it! Can’t — ”
There it was. A flash low on the horizon, followed by a searing orange ball of flame as the American plane slammed into the ground at over five hundred knots.
“Pirate, this is Comanche. Strawman’s down. No chute.”
“Affirmative, Comanche. Watch the Triple-A on that hill to the left. I’m rolling in on it now.”
A new INS prompt came up on Piper’s HUD, and he turned his attention away from the radio. They were within seconds of starting their attack run. He glanced across the Intruder’s crowded cockpit and his eyes met those of his bombardier, Lieutenant Commander Mitch “Priest” Parrish. Parrish lifted his oxygen mask for a moment and grinned at him. Then the bombardier bent forward again to stare at the A-6’s radar screen, while one hand stayed busy configuring the attack computer for their run.
Piper checked to make sure his wingman was still in position just aft and to the right. “Orca” Jones would stay there through the whole attack to watch for SAMs or unexpected flak positions.
He pulled the Intruder into a gentle left turn, aware that behind him nineteen other pairs of A-6s and A-7s were arcing around to come in on the target area from all points of the compass. The “wagon wheel” attack had worked well for the Navy over Vietnam. Now they’d see how well it did over Korea.
Piper started searching the rolling hills and open rice paddies ahead for signs of the truck-mounted pontoon bridges and GSP amphibious ferries they’d come to destroy.
Lieutenant General Chyong crouched lower in his slit trench as an American attack plane roared low overhead, streaming flares behind it. Another followed seconds later. He cursed when he saw that they were aimed straight for a small stand of trees occupied by some of his precious bridging units.
The lead American plane climbed sharply and then banked away, flinging a pair of bombs off its racks. Both flew straight into the woods and exploded. The second aircraft began its turn away and then shuddered as shells from a nearby ZSU-23-4 battery found the mark at last, though too late to save their engineer comrades in the woods.
The wounded American jet flew on for several seconds with heavy, black smoke pouring out of its belly, then rolled over onto its back and nose-dived into a hill. Its companion accelerated away, chased futilely by several shoulder-launched SAMs.
Chyong rose from his crouch, staring at the bomb-splintered woods. Four more of his invaluable PMP bridge sections had been destroyed. How many more had fallen prey to the gray-painted American jets crisscrossing his operations area?
He started to climb out of the trench to find out, but an aide knocked him down as another American plane suddenly appeared out of a small valley to the left and turned toward them. Chyong and the young captain clung to the bottom of the trench while the jet’s cannon roared, smashing a camouflaged radio van parked less than fifty meters away.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the plane disappeared. And as Chyong’s hearing came back to normal, he was conscious first of the fading sound of jet engines from the west and then of the crackling flames consuming his bridges. The American air raid was over.
Piper keyed his mike. “Duster is feet wet.”
Then he scanned the air around his Intruder, counting noses as the strike planes, Iron Hands, and flak suppressors reformed for the flight back to the carriers. Five were gone, counting Orca Jones, and another seven trailed smoke, showing that they’d been hit by North Korean guns or SAMs.
Piper was shocked by their losses. Seven of Corky Bouchard’s defending fighters had also been splashed, and several others had been recovered on board either Nimitz or Constellation in a near-crippled condition. His A-6s and A-7s had hit their assigned targets, hit them real hard in fact. But the results were Pyrrhic to say the least. With twelve aircraft downed and an unknown number of others permanently wrecked, the two carrier air wings operating off Korea were going to be mighty fragile instruments of war until they got replacements.