Threat Level Black (14 page)

Howe was fifty miles from the coast when the radar warning receiver buzzed, picking up the two MiGs flying almost directly at him from the east at 25,000 feet. They were less than fifteen miles away, which would put them overhead in roughly sixty seconds. He pushed lower to the mountains, sliding down through 10,000 feet in hopes of avoiding their radar.

He thought he’d slid by when the RWR came up again; he’d strayed close to a ground radar. Howe held to his course anyway. There was another radar to the north closer to the coast, and maneuvering away from one would expose him to the other. The MiGs or at least their radars had disappeared.

Four minutes to the coast, then another five minutes before he’d be far enough away that nothing could stop him.

A flight of F/A-22s would be on station by now, off the coast to the south. If they scrambled north, they’d meet him over the coast, or just off it.

So, really, he only had to make it though four minutes. Two hundred and forty seconds.

Long seconds.

He got a blip: the MiGs.

Howe glanced down at the map he’d unfolded across his lap and leg. He could cut farther north and hope to avoid the MiGs by legging into Russian territory, but that would take him farther from the F/A-22s presumably scrambling to his aid. It also would stretch his fuel further and leave him vulnerable to the Russians, who surely would be interested in a plane that looked like one of theirs.

He looked up at the black night in front of his cockpit, calculating which way to push his luck. There was chatter on the frequencies used by the Korean air force.

“Ivan, be advised a second flight of MiGs scrambling from Orang to check unknown contact in your vicinity,” warned the mission coordinator in Sky. “We’re tracking them now. They’re going to be in your face in zero-two minutes. SAMs are coming up.”

“Ivan,” acknowledged Howe, his grip tightening on the sidestick.

“Another flight: You’re being targeted!”

The words were drowned out by the blare of the radar warning receiver, whose fervent bleat indicated that an air-to-air radar had just locked its grip on him.

The first bulletin took Blitz by surprise. He was actually staring at a feed from a U-2 flying near the Korean DMZ, and as the screen changed he didn’t immediately understand what he was seeing.

“They’re going to war!” exclaimed one of the officers standing nearby him in the situation room. “Oh, my God.”

Everyone around them jumped to their feet. The screens flashed. People started to shout.

Calmly, Blitz turned to his military aide. “Get the President on the line. Now.”

In the end the best they could do was push the wrecked vehicle into a ravine about fifty feet below the road. They took the two men they’d killed and carried them with them for a few miles before burying them in the rocks at a pass in the hills.

You screwed up,
a voice told Tyler as he set out just ahead of the tailgunners.
You gave the order too soon.

The muscles in his chest tightened; they felt like bands of steel clamping him together, slightly swelled like ice cramping against the sides of a hose. He concentrated on his job, on his situation, on his men, but still the muscles in his chest failed to relax.

They had to retrace part of their path, coming in on the route they had taken. Though risky by its nature—at least in theory someone who was trailing them would have the route covered—it had seemed the only way when they were laying out the plan back in D.C. Tyler had gone over it again before they kicked off; it was the only way to get across the mountains in that area while avoiding settlements and completely impassable terrain.

He second-guessed himself now, arguing that he should go a different way. Sweat poured from his neck as he walked, and by the time he finally reached the turnoff to the path beyond the pass, Tyler felt a wave of relief.

It was short-lived. They were just starting down the hill when the com system crackled with a warning: three vehicles approaching.

Silently the soldiers moved off the road.

“We can take them,” said Warrant Officer Chris Litchfield, who was fifty yards ahead on the other side of the road.

“No,” said Tyler.

Litchfield didn’t reply. The first of the trucks came into view. It was a large canvas-backed six-wheeler, probably older than its driver. The other two were close behind; none of the three trucks had their lights on.

Tyler watched through his night optical device, or NOD, as the trucks stopped. Men began piling out of the backs of all three. They were chattering. A dozen or so went to the side of the road, climbed down a short way.

It was a piss stop, nothing more. Just a stop so a few soldiers could relieve themselves midway through a long journey.

Of all the luck.

Tyler saw what would happen a few seconds before it did.

“Get the lead truck,” he managed to say before the first Korean shouted that there was someone on the hill.

The RWR screamed at Howe as he threw the Berkut into a hard turn, trying to beam the interceptor’s radar. It was too late; the Korean had launched a pair of radar-guided missiles at him.

The weapons were R-77 air-to-air missiles, known to NATO as AA-12 Adders and sometimes called AMRAAMSKIs. The Russian-made air-to-air missiles were roughly comparable to American AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

Howe hit his electronic countermeasures, or ECMs, jinking back hard and then pushing the plane through a mountain pass that loomed to his left. It was a good move: Not only did he lose the missiles but the MiG that had launched them continued on its course blithely, flying away from him. But Howe was in no position to gloat: He had two more MiGs coming hot and heavy in his face.

Had he been sitting in an F/A-22 or an F-15 Eagle, both aircraft would be dead meat: He’d punch-button the bastards to death with a pair of AMRAAMs without losing a breath. But he wasn’t. He had only the cannon and its 150 shells. And he had only one engine to work with.

Three minutes to the coast. One hundred and eighty seconds.

Howe leaned the plane on its right wing, ducking through a second break in the mountains. He had someone on his tail; he sensed it before the RWR began shouting that a fresh radar was trying to lock him down.

The S-37/B had a small stock of chaff, metal shards that confused radars and made it hard to target an aircraft. As the MiG fired its weapons, Howe unleashed his tinsel and tossed the Berkut wildly left and right in a series of zigs and zags that were nearly as disorienting to him as to the weapons tracking him. Struggling to keep his head clear, he got a fresh warning—another MiG, this one coming from the south—and jagged back to the north.

One of the missiles exploded a half-mile away, its proximity fuse confused all to hell by his zigzags. It was one of the most beautiful sights Howe had ever seen.

“Missiles in the air!” warned Sky.

Jeez, no shit,
thought Howe.

Howe yanked the stick and tried to head east, stomping on the throttle as he temporarily forgot he was on one engine. The Berkut didn’t complain, but she also didn’t move any faster.

Meanwhile an SA-2 battery began tracking him near the coast. The high-altitude, long-range missiles would be more an annoyance than anything else.

The Russian-made S-300s were another matter. Only a few months old, the missiles could be considered knockoffs of the American Patriot. A battery of four sat between him and the sea.

And their radar had just turned on, trying to track him.

One hundred and twenty seconds.

A mountain peak looked ahead. Howe pulled hard on his stick, just barely clearing the rocks. As he rose, his radar caught two contacts flying about three miles ahead. His first thought was that they were the F/A-22s, come to rescue him, but within a few seconds their speed gave them away as MiGs.

The enemy planes were not quite on a parallel course, seemingly unaware of where he was—or at least their radars hadn’t locked onto his plane. He could swing behind them as they passed, then shoot them down.

One at least.

But that wasn’t his job. His mission was to get his passenger out in one piece. Stopping to take potshots was more than foolish: It was a dereliction of duty.

Howe let them go, tucking south. He could see the glow of a city to his right, knew from the shadows that the water was just the head.

A launch warning: S-300s in the air.

He gave up the last of his chaff, hit the ECMs, and waited.

One of the missiles fell off but another dogged him. Howe started a turn south, desperate to do something.

The sky flashed above him. The missile had missed by a good distance.

A Korean MiG came up off the deck, then another: The two planes had been waiting for him out over the sea.

He cleared the coast at just over 5,000 feet.

Another pair of MiGs were running down at him from the north. They may have been the planes from before, since they didn’t seem to be carrying radar missiles. In any event they were trying to close, either for a shot with a short-range heat seeker or their cannon.

There was no question of running away. Howe jerked hard to the left, then back. The red oval of a fighter jet appeared ahead.

He pushed down on the trigger. The Russian cannon spit its big slugs out. A dozen, two dozen, hit the plane. The rear of the MiG—it turned out to be an older MiG-21, scrambled without missiles—caught fire and then unfolded, a yawning mouth of death. Howe pushed right, trying to get his gun on the flight leader, but as he did, tracer rounds flashed across his windscreen: The MiG was on his tail.

Howe tucked downward momentarily, half-rolling his wings and then cutting back, making the slinky Berkut into a skyborne corkscrew. The maneuvers were far tighter than anything the MiG—a decent knife fighter itself—could manage, and within a few seconds the plane appeared above and then beyond his canopy. The MiG driver pushed right, but Howe wasn’t about to let him turn inside him; he stayed glued to his tail.

If the North Korean had just put the pedal to the metal, he probably could have escaped. But he didn’t realize Howe was working with only one leg, and as he cut back to the left in a kind of modified scissors escape, the American pilot laid on the trigger. His first shots flew wide right, but he stayed with it, nudging his nose and the stream of bullets into the starboard wing of the enemy fighter. Something flashed, and then his target disappeared.

“You going to leave some for the rest of us?” asked one of the F/A-22 pilots, finally reaching the area.

“Only if I have to,” he answered.

“Ivan, be advised Koreans are turning south. You’re clear. You’re clear.”

“Ivan acknowledges,” said Howe. “Bring that tanker up. I’m getting mighty thirsty.”

The Korean troops were caught completely by surprise; the Americans destroyed their lead and rear trucks before the enemy could organize their return fire. But there were at least a dozen men in each vehicle, and two-thirds of Tyler’s people were spread out along the road well beyond the trucks, not in a position to attack.

Tyler saw two Koreans advancing with rifles and immediately shot both, catching them mid-body with bursts from his AK-47. He jumped up and ran to the roadway, covering another member of the team who was firing at the men near the last intact truck. Something hit the vehicle and it exploded, flames bursting skyward in a bright arc of yellow and orange. The light silhouetted four Korean soldiers; by the time Tyler turned his gun on them the other SF soldier had gunned them down.

Tyler ran to a large rock at the right side of the road, sweeping the ditch with gunfire and then jumping down. The position allowed him to cover the road ahead of the convoy and gave him an angle on the trucks as well. The Koreans, meanwhile, were shouting in confusion. They knew there were soldiers around them but they weren’t sure where exactly the enemy was; their return fire was disorganized, but it
was
return fire. A heavier weapon began firing from near the wrecked lead truck, set up by two or three of the Koreans and hidden from Tyler’s side.

We should have taken them out when they were on the road ahead,
Tyler thought to himself as he took out a Russian-made antipersonnel grenade.
I fucked up again.

He pulled the pin and did a half step, whipping the grenade as if it were a baseball at the side of the truck. The grenade exploded with a loud echo because of the hills, but the machine gun continued to fire. Cursing, Tyler reached for another grenade and was just rising when another grenade, thrown by someone else from his patrol, exploded by the truck. He ducked down, then realized he’d already pulled the pin. He threw the grenade anyway, and this time saw it land behind the cab—or thought he saw it, because as it fell he tossed himself down for cover, and besides, everything around him was a blur. A stream of bullets ripped across the road in front of him, and the major found himself eating dirt, unsure for a moment where his rifle was, even though it was in his hand. Someone screamed something in English that he couldn’t understand. Tyler began crawling forward along the trench, parallel to the road. A flare went up—obviously from the Koreans—and a fusillade of bullets rained on the three trucks, which were now mere wrecks.

“All right,” said Tyler over his com system, “I’m in the ditch. I’m in the ditch on the south side of the road. Let’s get positions. Sound off.”

He got a garbled reply. Tyler leaned across the dirt, trying to puzzle out how many Koreans were left and where they were. When he couldn’t see any soldiers who were still firing, he started to crawl up from the ditch. The two men he’d shot earlier were sprawled nearby, their uniforms thick with blood. Only one man had a rifle; Tyler kicked it back toward the ditch, then continued toward the trucks. Something moved at the far end;Tyler saw the squat figure raise his weapon at him and fired a burst. The man crumpled downward, a house whose foundation had evaporated.

“All right, all right,” he heard someone say. The gun-fight was over. “All right, all right.”

He turned around, not realizing at first that he had been the one who’d spoken.

There was no way to hide this, and Tyler didn’t bother. His immediate concern was two casualties. One of the men had been shot in the shoulder; the wound was relatively light and the sergeant joked about having had bee stings that hurt more. Tyler appreciated the lie.

The other man had been shot through the face and was dead. The A team captain took his shirt off and wrapped it around the dead man’s face;Tyler thought he should have been the one to do this.

“We’ll take him out with us,” he said softly. One of the others had already begun to set up a litter.

Warrant Officer Litchfield looked at him but said nothing. He didn’t have to.

Tyler’s orders dictated that he call in about the firefight. The reply was brief:
Proceed to Pickup Zone 1 as planned.

They did.