Ghost War (48 page)

“I hope you die with that money in your pocket,” Buk said through gritted teeth as the lone Foxbat roared up and away.

Then he ran for the air raid shelter.

“Calvary One, we are seven minutes from target.”

“Roger, Cowboy … confirm seven minutes.”

Hunter unkeyed his lip mic and did a visual check of the aircraft around him. Right behind him and slightly below were the first six B-52s of Calvary One, flying in a loose chevron pattern. Behind them was Frost’s F-20, riding point for the second half-dozen Stratofortresses. Behind
them
was ZZ Morell’s
Triple-X
, and
Football One
, with Crunch at the controls. Bringing up the rear were Ben and JT.

They were all flying at 42,000 feet, about 32 miles from the center of Hanoi. Hunter had to admit the small air armada looked impressive. The earlier path-clearing operations had been highly successful. Since turning into North Vietnamese airspace, they hadn’t encountered a single MiG or any AA fire, or heard so much as a SAM warning tone.

Hunter could only pray the rest of the mission would go as smoothly.

He was certain the Minx knew they were coming—but at this point, it really didn’t matter. He knew the Minx were undoubtedly preparing to defend every major target in the city—every one, he guessed, but the one he was intending to hit.

“Cowboy One—this Calvary One … I read six minutes to target … clock for ECM activation.”

“Roger Calvary,” Hunter replied. “Engage in ECM now.”

Hunter flipped a series of switches to the left of his instrument panel, activating his array of electronic-countermeasure devices. He knew the pilots of the B-52s were doing the same. They were sure to see some SAMs the closer they got to the city, but the radio/radar jamming devices inside his XL and the big Strats would reduce the problem significantly.

“Five minutes to target …”

Hunter checked his own weapons load. He was carrying four 1000-pound GP bombs, a pair of 750-pounders, plus a complement of six Sidewinders. As always, his quad-pack of M-61 cannons was full of ammo.

Behind him he knew each B-52 bombardier was checking his own weapons load. Each of the Strats was carrying an awesome payload of seventy 1000-pound HE bombs. Combined with his bomb load, as well as the push-off bombs in
Triple-X
and
Football One
, they were about to drop more than 500 tons of ordnance on Hanoi.

“Four minutes …”

Hunter couldn’t help but think of the men so many years before who had done almost the exact same mission as they were attempting now. Linebacker One. Linebacker Two. Rolling Thunder One. Rolling Thunder Two. Mission names were all that remained now. Gone were the successes and failures of these missions. Gone were the screwy politicians on both sides which had made them necessary.

Gone were the men who had given their lives in carrying them out….

And now here they were again. Approaching the same target, with some of the same planes, carrying some of the same type bombs, and trying like hell to avoid the same type of SAM and AA fire. Sometimes Hunter thought he was trapped in some kind of strange science fiction world or bad paperback novel, where everything just keeps repeating itself. Good versus evil—over and over again they battle. But no matter how many times the good guys win, the bad guys always come back to haunt them. Why? What did it mean? Were all their efforts in vain?

Hunter didn’t know. These were questions for the ages.

“Three minutes to target …”

He banked slightly and gazed at the city coming up below. He was certain it looked just this way to American pilots years before, blocks upon blocks of uninspired buildings, crossed by dull roads and railway lines, strung with power lines and telephone wires, and dotted with military installations, thatched houses—and SAM sites.

“Two minutes …”

Hunter activated his threat warning radar and soon was looking at a ghostly image of Xa Ha Ho airbase just outside the city. Oddly, he could still see the heat signatures of nearly a squadron of MiGs, yet he was sure they hadn’t taken off. Not all of them anyway. Why would the Minx warm up eighteen airplanes and then not launch them? He hadn’t the foggiest idea, but then again, there were few rational explanations for much of what the Minx did.

“One minute to target,” he heard himself say into his lip mic. “Let’s go through pre-bomb run checklist.”

As he heard a call and reply of each of the airplanes’ commanders checking with their crews, he kept his eye on the read-out from Xa Ho Ha. He knew they were expecting the bombers to go there—the place was obviously hunkered down, just waiting for an attack. Because there were few military barracks inside the city itself, and even fewer communications centers, he didn’t blame the airbase commanders for assuming they were the target of the impending B-52 strike.

But they were wrong.

“Thirty seconds,” Hunter called out, looking behind him and seeing the Stratofortresses tighten their formations. “SAM activity to the south. ECMs on high. Flares out. Chaff dispensers on high …”

Just as the words left his mouth he could see a trio of SA-2 SAMs rising up towards them from his left. The ancient weapon looked just as many American pilots had described it before: like a telephone pole with fire coming out the back.

“Hold positions …” he told the others.

Then, he deftly angled the Cranked Arrow thirty degrees to the left while still maintaining course, an aerial maneuver that could only be accomplished by the XL’s unique shape and canard wings. He waited for the SAMs to close within 400 feet of the B-52s and then he squeezed off three precise bursts from his quad-pack cannons.

With incredible precision, his three streams of tracer rounds met the SAMs head-on. The trio of missiles blew up like three enormous firecrackers, sending three quick shock waves rumbling through the surrounding airspace. When the smoke cleared, the SAMs were gone.

“Hold positions…” Hunter repeated, pulling the XL’s nose back to center. “We’re out twenty seconds…”

Another pair of SA-2s were launched at them from the middle of the city, but these were instantly fooled by the small storm of metallic chaff and flares exuding out of the bottom of each B-52. Confused and overheated, the SAMs began corkscrewing and quickly plunged back to earth.

“Fifteen seconds … hold steady,” Hunter told them. The air was now filling with the bright orange streaks of AA fire. But most of it was either way off target—due to the combined-effort ECM affecting the radar-controlled guns—or too shallow to affect the group way up at 32,000 feet.

“Ten seconds now …”

They were right above the center of the city, nowhere near the airbase, or the weapons repair shops, the communications building, or the Minx High Command headquarters.

“Five seconds to target …”

More SAMs were coming up through the thin clouds, but they were flying erratically and of no consequence. The skies below were simply filled with streaks of AA fire, reminiscent of bombing Baghdad, but just like then, nearly all of it was falling back to earth, not nearly as high as to affect the bomber force.

“Three seconds …” Hunter called out. As the group leader he was doing dozens of calculations in his head per nanosecond, concentrating on the target below and basically eyeballing it.

“OK …
two … one
…
Bombs away!
”

He pulled his own weapons release lever and felt the corresponding jolt as the two and half tons of bombs dropped from his wings. Cranking around, he could see the enormous stream of bombs falling from the Strats. Behind them, the pair of enormous, 35,000-pound Big Boy bombs came tumbling out of
Triple-X
and
Football One.

He followed the bomb fall all the way down through the thin clouds to the center of the city below. They all seemed to hit at once, the pair of Big Boys providing the exclamation point to the massive carpet bombing. Almost immediately one huge sheet of flame arose from the target, the shock wave hitting the bomber force a few seconds later.

Though they would run a photo-recon for bomb damage evaluation later on, Hunter already knew the target had been totally destroyed. It would have been hard not to be. For the target was not a military installation per se, not an airfield, or barracks or communications center. Rather it was the one place whose destruction would most seriously disrupt the Viet Minx expansionist plans, and probably harken their demise.

What the American bombers had left in smoke and flame and ruins was the Central Bank of Hanoi.

“Group left and clear!” Hunter yelled into his microphone.

As one, the combined bomber-fighter force banked hard left and turned for home.

All except JT.

Hunter knew something was wrong as soon as he saw his friend’s Tigershark dive down towards Hanoi.

The front of the sleek F-20 was alight with smoke and fire, and following JT’s tracers it was easy to see that he was strafing an AA gun atop of one of the dreary government buildings.

The gun post immediately exploded in a flash of fire and metal and bodies. JT immediately pulled up and typically did a low-altitude victory roll. Then he put the F-20 on its tail and booted his afterburner to rejoin the bomber group.

And that’s when something went terribly wrong.

Hunter felt before he saw it. A glint of silver and black, streaking out of smoke and clouds, its cannons ablaze with gunfire. It was a Foxbat—and it was obvious that its pilot had been laying low waiting for the bombers to drop their ordnance and looking for something to pounce on. A distracted JT, showing off, was the perfect target.

The Foxbat’s cannonfire raked the F-20 front to back, severing its left wing and igniting its fuel tank. The Tigershark immediately went into a spin, flames and smoke pouring out its perforated fuselage.

Hunter was on the scene in a matter of seconds; the Foxbat had already turned to escape. But it was too late. In an unusual moment of uncontrolled anger, Hunter unleashed two Sidewinders
and
sprayed the Foxbat with a long barrage of cannon fire from his quad-pack. Both missiles hit the Foxbat almost simultaneously with the arrival of the cannon barrage.

The resulting explosion was enormous; the fireball even bigger. When the debris blew away, only a few engine parts remained, tumbling to earth, trailing a few wisps of black smoke.

By this time, JT’s Tigershark had already crashed onto the streets of Hanoi.

Outside Hanoi

24 hours later

N
EVER HAD THERE BEEN
such gloom inside the huge mansion that served as headquarters for CapCom.

There was no darker place than the mansion’s boardroom. Those lights that had not yet gone out were certainly dimming. Less than a third of the huge TV sets were still online, and two of those were mostly static. Even the phones were dead.

The chairman of the board looked out on his once-prosperous stable of members and saw nothing but death and profit loss. Two members had already blown their brains out, a third was soon to follow.

Where did they go wrong?
the chairman asked himself. They’d undercut all of their suppliers and overcharged all their customers. They had neglected their own citizenry. With each new battle they had achieved the perfect balance between an evershrinking work force and higher rate of asset acquisition flow. This was supposed to be capitalism’s Nirvana.

So what happened?
the chairman wondered, pulling out his own Beretta and placing the barrel in his mouth.

He would never know.

The muffled sound of the chairman’s gun going off barely echoed off the sides of the cavernous boardroom. Two more members followed their leader to hell via pistol shots to the temple. Another man simply decided to slit his wrists and go slowly.

This left only two members who were afraid of ending their own lives.

So they made an agreement: one would shoot the other and them himself. A quick toss of a South African 110-mark gold coin decided who would be the triggerman. Grimly, the men embraced for the last time.

Without much hesitation, the shooter did his work, blowing half the skull off his colleague, and adding a bullet to the heart for good measure. He checked the pistol—there was one bullet left. Would it be enough? the man wondered.

It would have to be, he finally decided.

He put the pistol barrel in his mouth, and pulled the hammer back. Just as he was about to let go however, he heard a strange noise off in the distance. It was peculiar enough to cause him to take the gun out of his mouth momentarily and look outside.

The noise was coming from a quartet of huge helicopters landing just outside the mansion’s east wing.

No sooner were they down, when scores of white-uniformed troops began pouring out, their weapons poised, their demeanor obviously one of shoot-on-sight. One chopper had landed in the middle of the other three, and from this aircraft a man in a black uniform emerged.

The last CapCom member squinted in an effort to get a better look at the man. He was extremely tall, maybe 6-10, thin but powerful looking. He was a white man, though his face was dark from the sun. He wore his hair long and bunched into a ponytail that reached halfway down his back. A small stiletto-sharp goatee adorned his face.

This man drew a long cape around himself and then began a quick march towards the mansion. The CapCom member wasn’t quite sure what to do. Who was this? Who was
he
to arrive with such arrogance? The board member was curious—so much so, he felt death could be put off for a moment or two.

He watched as the tall man in black walked right up to the huge picture window anchored to the southern end of the boardroom and delivered a vicious kick of the boot. The huge pane simply shattered away, scattering thousands of small shards of glass all over the boardroom, the bright sun making them glisten like diamonds.

The man in black walked quickly through the hole in the window, followed by a squad of heavily armed soldiers. They stopped to study the boardroom itself. The man in black counted out the twelve dead bodies and then held back his head and laughed.