Twenty minutes later, the three 130s lowered themselves to 3,000 feet and began to pass under the cloud layer. Visibility was about ten miles and they hoped to see the flares or at least be heard from the ground. Ten miles out, they saw flares through the infrared scanning systems and they quickly brought the three aircraft to the correct course and began their landing checks. The two gunships would go in first, and then the tanker, who could still get to Korea without refueling.
The bright and welcomed landing lights formed into two lines in front of them, and with less than 30 minutes of flying time left in their tanks, they went in and touched ground for the first time in 12.5 hours.
Four hours later, fully fueled and totally out of the salmon they had brought with them, they took off and headed on their 3-hour trip to Osan, South Korea 840 miles away. It had taken an extra two hours for the tanker to suck the fuel out of the dead tanker trucks, transfer the fuel to the gunships, and then take on her full load. While they were being refueled, the men stationed there had emptied the Misawa Air Force Base’s armored bunker of all the 105mm HE rounds, which amounted to 120 projectiles per gunship. General Allen knew that there would be more in South Korea, but he wanted to go in with twice the ammunition he would normally have on board.
Fresh pilots had taken over the flying duties. The relieved pilots got a couple of hours of sleep, and the general started thinking about these old birds. They had been flying for nearly 40 years, had gone through several wars, and still they just flew and flew and flew. A third gunship was expected to be located at Osan, and the Japanese bases, now behind them, had absolutely nothing flying. At least they had used their clean and readied runway for a few landings and take offs.
Three hours later, the radio operator got into contact with Osan. They were flying low, at less than 1,000 feet to stay out of any North Korean coastal radar systems and again, they were guided in with flares, before their infrared scanners found the operating runway lights.
There were heavy, pulsating bursts of light through the thin snow on the horizon to the north, and it looked like there was military conflict around Seoul, 40 miles north of the Air Force base they were flying into. The pilots could very faintly see large lights, which meant that large buildings must be on fire.
They landed in an inch of snow and the weather was beginning to close in around this part of Asia. They couldn’t waste any time getting over to China.
Osan was a large base that included the 51st Fighter Wing and the 7th Air Force. The base had two generals and five colonels who were waiting for him with fuel tanker and generators as they drew up to the hangar. Refueling would only take 30 minutes, due to the short haul from Misawa, and the general asked about ‘Easy Girl’. To his relief, she was ready and operational, had a full crew and just needed to be topped off and armed. She was in a hangar and the brass gave orders to have her brought out and for her crew to get ready. General Allen asked for two back-up pilots and they were found. The only working jeep and one old troop transporter were started up, and his armaments crew drove out to the underground bunker to load all the ammunition they needed.
“Gentlemen,” Pete Allen spoke to a two-star general, a one-star general, three colonels and seven majors as they all stood about the aircraft. “I need a sitrep about the fighting to the north, and in return I can fill you in on our worldwide problems. I will need some coffee and whatever you have to eat, as will my men. We have been flying now for 24 hours. I want to get out of here within two hours—my AC-130 weapons chief will fill your guys in on what we need.”
They went into a large and relatively warm conference room. Several men had obviously been sleeping in here, and the room was immediately cleared for the meeting.
“Okay, so tell me what happened here at Osan,” the general asked Base Commander General Hal Whitelaw.
“I assume you know everything went dark here at 1400 hours on January 1st,“ replied General Whitelaw.
“Actually, midnight East Coast time was what the perpetrators were aiming for,” General Allen replied. “It was dark, freezing and we believe that at least 10 million North Americans are already dead or dying.” The men around the table looked at him, many with their mouths open and white faces.
“We had the usual 20 defense fighters and five armed bombers up, as well as eight C-17s on their way to Misawa,” continued General Whitelaw. “We had three Stratotankers about 300 miles out in different directions, and we lost the lot. Not one aircraft made it back to base. Even the two Apache helicopters patrolling 30 miles north of here just disappeared as the radar went down and all of our millions of electrical components just stopped working. We are sitting here with 400 pieces of junk that used to be called aircraft, and one Vietnam-era AC-130 gunship, two old operational F-4 Falcons, and three Vietnam-era Bell helicopters. How did this happen, Pete, and when is somebody going to turn the power on again?”
“Never guys—or not for a long time. All the Chinese-made electronic gadgets and parts worldwide—billions of them, trillions of them, I don’t know how many—were all built to fail and there are no spares or replacements until we set up new manufacturing facilities. These parts were made by the same company—Zedong Electronics.”
For half an hour the general told them everything he knew. He was tired, unshaven, and had bags under his eyes, but after tonight he would have a little more time to sleep.
“So you all now know as much as I do. My next stop is to attack the Zedong headquarters. Hopefully my actions will turn off their lights, too. We don’t believe the Chinese or Russian governments are involved, since Beijing is as dark as the United States is, as well as all of Russia. I’m hoping to get to both capitals in the next 24 hours and let both governments know that it wasn’t us.
“To see for myself, we travelled as far west as we dared on the way down here from Misawa. There were lights visible on the coast of North Korea. We have seen them on our screens back in the United States. On the simple screens that we have gotten operational again, we have seen lights in Shanghai, Pakistan, north of Kabul, parts of North Africa, Syria and all of Iran. Everybody who we are in a conflict with has lights on, and we don’t. The engineers traveling with me are showing your techs how to set up satellite communications by bouncing off the same satellites the enemy is using. They don’t know we are doing it, however, and I’m just hoping that when I blow their headquarters into little pieces around midnight tonight that we all don’t lose communications.”
“Hal, since you are so close to the fighting, I will give you the cell phone I had reserved for Ramstein. I left the other one I had in Misawa, so you guys now have worldwide communications, even with the president who got one just like it several hours ago. Here is a list of numbers to call, and the list of numbers will be updated and phoned through to you every 12 hours as new phones are handed out. We have just short of 200 phones, and these are our entire world communications until further notice. Just remember, these might all become useless in a few hours when we hit their building in downtown Nanjing.”
General Whitelaw explained Osan’s current situation to him. Apart from several 105 mm howitzers, a hundred or so rocket launchers, a dozen machine guns, and 4,000 fully armed men, there was little they could do against a full-on attack on the base by North Korea. The enemy outgunned the base by far, if all their modern equipment was still working.
“My mission tonight, gentlemen,” continued General Allen, “is to take out their headquarters and show them that we, the United States of America are not defeated. I believe the whole Chinese Air Force could be grounded, just like ours. Maybe they are in control of sections of it, but I’m 100 percent sure that they do not expect a blue-water attack from us. I’m going in to flatten Zedong Electronics headquarters and then fly on to Beijing to try and land at the international airport there. ‘Easy Girl’ still has the old flare system we used in Vietnam, the one that lights up landing zones for the Hueys so they can take in troops. The other two don’t have the flare system, but have their infrared fire-control systems still operational so each gunship has a definite purpose in my operation. I believe that with the flares we can pinpoint Beijing International Airport and get in if there is not too much snow.”