The Fly Boys Page 25

  “Enough about this,” Simon said sourly. “Catch me up on what’s going on with you. For instance, how’s your son doing?”

  “At the moment he’s in Texas, learning to fly jets,” Gold sighed. “Learning all about electronic navigation, principles of flight and gunnery, and so forth. He wrote to me saying that he’s finding it exciting but a whole new ball game.”

  “Well, it is a whole new ball game,” Simon chuckled. “What else would you call playing follow-the-leader in a mock dogfight at five hundred knots?”

  “Ow! Please!” Gold winced. “Erica and I are nervous enough about it.”

  “Hey, he’ll be okay,” Simon said.

  “At least I can take some comfort in the fact that he’ll be flying the finest jet fighter in the sky.”

  “What do you mean?” Simon asked, puzzled.

  “A BroadSword,” Gold boasted. “I twisted a few arms, and called in a couple of favors to set it up for Steve to go directly from training school to March Air Force Base in California. The FG at March is probably the best the Air Force has.”

  “I know that,” Simon said, “but—”

  “I figure to have some newsreel cameras rolling when my son takes possession of his BroadSword. Pretty good PR idea, huh? Herman Gold builds them, and his son flies them, so they’ve got to be the best!”

  “Herman—”

  “And believe me,” Gold continued, “the fact that Stevie is going to be stationed only fifty miles from home has made his mother very happy. And if Stevie comes home on leave more often, who knows? Maybe I can expose him a little at a time to what’s going on at GAT, and get him to agree to come work with me.” He smiled thinly. “Someday….”

  “It sounds good, Herman,” Simon shrugged. “Did Steve say when he’d changed his assignment?”

  “What?” Gold asked. “What assignment?”

  “In his letters to you,” Simon explained, “didn’t he mention when he…” He paused. “Herm, you have told Steve about all of these plans you’ve made?”

  “Well, no,” Gold replied slowly. “I figured it would be a surprise. I didn’t think there’d be any problem. I mean, what fighter pilot in his right mind wouldn’t want to fly a Broad-Sword?”

  Simon looked uneasy. “When I heard from you that your son was returning to flight duty, I asked around about him.”

  “Yeah? So? What did you find out?”

  “That Steve had his choice of assignments. He chose to take command of a squadron flying Lockheed Shooting Stars.”

  “He chose an F-80?” Gold echoed in disbelief.

  “He’s going to be stationed in Japan, Herman.”

  “Japan?” Gold was stunned, but all at once it made sense. “I guess he wants to be as far away from me as he can get,” he said softly.

  “I’m sorry, Herm.”

  Gold shrugged. “I’m suddenly feeling tired, Howie.” He signaled the waitress for the check. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go up to my room to rest.”

  Simon looked away, obviously embarrassed. “I—I thought you would have known all this.”

  Gold laughed bitterly. “You would think I would have known, given the fact that we’re talking about my son—”

  “Herman,” Simon began hurriedly, “maybe I heard wrong.”

  “But when it comes to my son,” Gold continued harshly, “I guess I don’t know anything at all.”

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  (One)

  North Korea, near the 38th Parallel

  11 October 1950

  Steven Gold’s Lockheed F-80C Shooting Star was over six miles high. His was the lead jet fighter in a finger-four formation that raked white contrails against the curved blue dome of the sky.

  Far beneath the combat air patrol the smudged gray clouds moved like ponderous elephants across the ancient Korean landscape. Down on the ground it was a pleasant sixty-eight degrees, but at 36,000 feet the razor-cold air was as thin and clear as fine crystal. The sun beating down through the Shooting Star’s teardrop canopy pleasantly heated the cockpit, taking the edge off the air conditioning. The ride was incredibly smooth and peaceful. The only sounds Steve Gold heard were his own raspy breathing, routed from the microphone in his oxygen mask into the radio earphones built into his rigid, visored helmet, and the steady, lulling roar of the airplane’s General Electric J-33-A-23 turbojet.

  Steve’s eyes flicked across the glittering array of instruments to assure himself that all of his systems were in the green, and then slowly twisted his head, surveying the thin sky above. Any physical movement was difficult. Steve was encased in multiple layers of cotton and rubberized fabrics which made up his long underwear, flight overalls, G-suit, and survival gear, and firmly trussed by his safety harness to his ejection seat.

  On the ground Steve’s movements were slow and cumbersome, like those of a medieval knight in armor. But his ungainliness fell away once he was strapped into and hooked up to his Shooting Star. In the air the steel dart became an extension of his body, and he became its brain—its soul.

  Steve punched his mike button. “Bugs Flight, this is Bugs Leader.”

  “Ehhh, what’s up, doc?” Bugs One—Lieutenant Mike DeAngelo—radioed in.

  Steve glanced to his starboard side. DeAngelo was Steve’s wingman. His fighter, Miss Mischief, was flying close by. Viewed from the side, the Lockheed F-80C Shooting Star’s fuselage was shaped like a stainless-steel cigar tube. Coming at you, the “Shooter” had a pair of intake air ducts that flared out like a shark’s gills. The F-80 had stubby, non-swept wings tipped with teardrop-shaped auxiliary fuel tanks. This particular flight of F-80s wore the three concentric orange nose rings and the tic-tac-toe pattern of orange slashes on their vertical tail fins that identified them as members of the 19th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. The 19th was attached to the Eighth Fighter Bomber Wing, based at Itazuke Air Base on Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese Islands.

  Steve clicked his throat mike. “Time to go downstairs and bust up some commie tanks—”

  “Talk about ‘cwazy wabbits,’” DeAngelo muttered darkly.

  “You gonna be okay, Mikey?” Steve asked, concerned.

  “Yeah, sure,” DeAngelo said in his flat New England accent. “Gonna be a day at the beach. Chowda and clam cakes at Rocky Point….”

  No harm in letting DeAngelo run off at the mouth, Steve thought as he led his flight in a spiraling dive down toward the river valley. Do Mikey good to expend some nervous energy before the flight tackles the dirty job at hand.

  Mike DeAngelo was new. He’d rotated into the squadron a few weeks ago, as the big push against the commies began at Inchon. DeAngelo was in his early thirties, short and stocky, with a round face and eyes as small and black as California olives. He was an ace who’d flown a P-51 Mustang over Europe during the last war.

  DeAngelo was the son of an accountant in Providence, Rhode Island. After the war, he’d finished his education to become a CPA, and had gone into partnership with his father. He was married, and had two kids. When this Korean thing had flared up, DeAngelo was called back by the Air Force to take jet fighter training.

  Steve knew that Mike had answered that call grudgingly. During a late night bull session over a bottle of scotch, Mike had bitterly complained that he’d already done his part for his country. Why was he again being asked to risk his life? After all, this was not a real war, like the last one. This Korean thing was only a vaguely understood battle of wills between East and West over some obscure patch of ground, a patch that the United States had already pretty much admitted was relatively unimportant in terms of American security.

  It was one thing for Steve to be here, DeAngelo had explained. Steve was a professional. War was his job. What DeAngelo could not understand was why he and a few others had again been plucked out of their lives by the military and told to fight to the death for Korea, when so many back home who had never fought for their country were continuing on like nothing was happ
ening.

  The CPA from New England didn’t much believe in this war, but he was here nonetheless, flying against a savage enemy obsessed with wiping him from the sky. The bottom line was that the Air Force had told him to do the job, so DeAngelo was doing it.

  Steve loved Mike like a brother for that.

  Steve’s radio crackled. “Bugs Flight, Bugs Flight, come in. This is Super Snooper.”

  Thanks to their morning briefing, Bugs Flight knew that Super Snooper was a captain named Joe Evans. Evans was based at K-32, an advance airfield a bit north of Chongju that was known as Chau-Chau to the Koreans and Cha-Cha to the Americans.

  Steve keyed his mike. “Super Snooper, this is Bugs Leader. Soupie, baby, talk to me. You got any nasty old weeds we can dig out of MacArthur’s garden?”

  Evans was assigned to Tactical Control Group. He flew a piston-engined T-6 trainer armed with nothing but harmless smoke rockets. It was TCG’s job to fly low over enemy-held ground in order to find and pinpoint targets for bombing-strafing runs. TCG usually found such targets by taking ground fire and then coming around for a second pass in order to fire a smoke rocket to mark the spot where the ground fire came from. Not surprisingly, the pilots of TCG were widely considered to be the meanest tigers in the Air Force.

  “Oh, I’ve got a lot of nasty weeds for you to pull,” Evans responded. “They’re big, tough red ones. I’m looking at six tanks, plus maybe a dozen trucks and a lot of troops. The whole shebang is strung out along the riverbank. Now, you cats gonna plow some dirt or what?” Evans demanded, feigning disgust.

  “Coming down through the cloud cover now,” Steve responded.

  “Kerrist,” Evans growled. “Why dontcha wait a little longer? Maybe these commies will die of old age.”

  Okay by me, Steve thought. This had turned out to be a nasty little war. Not a fighter pilot’s kind of war at all, even if it had begun grandly enough….

  Back in June, in the days following the commie invasion from the North, Steve’s squadron had helped to fly high cover escort during the evacuation of American citizens from Seoul. Steve’s F-80 had been among the Shooting Stars flying high above Seoul’s Kimpo Airfield on the afternoon of June 27, when a trio of North Korean prop-driven Yak fighters made the mistake of bouncing a flight of P-82, twin-boomed, twin-engined Mustangs. The Twin Mustangs had been flying low for cover for the USAF transports on the ground to pick up American citizens.

  The NKAF Yaks had come in low from out of the clouds to shoot up one of the Twin Mustangs. Steve had heard the excited chatter among the Mustangs’ pilots, and had descended to get a better view of the action. He’d felt like a spectator watching a sporting event from high up in a stadium’s bleachers as beneath him the Mustangs swirled like hungry sharks around the Yaks, blowing the commies out of the sky.

  Because of limited fuel capacity—each F-80 Shooting Star had only a short time above Seoul, so Steve had not been present when later that afternoon some F-80s from the 35th Fighter Bomber Squadron had chopped up a gaggle of Russian-built NKAF IL-10 fighters over Kimpo.

  That had been the first time that U.S. jets had engaged in combat. Steve had cursed himself for having missed it, and cursed the Reds for not having seen fit to attack when he’d been around.

  At the time, Steve and the other pilots who’d missed out had taken some solace from their belief that this was only the beginning of aerial combat in Korea. They’d been sure that commies would give those American pilots who’d racked up high scores in World War Two the opportunity to become aces in two wars.

  It hadn’t turned out that way. The NKAF had folded out of the game early on, leaving the battle to the communist ground forces. Throughout July and August the North Korean People’s Army had made a southward push, spearheaded by battalions of Soviet-built T-34 tanks. The commies were well trained, and vastly outnumbered the U.S. and South Korean ROK forces, which lacked the weapons to pierce the thick armor that protected the enemy’s tanks. It had quickly become evident that it was going to be up to American air power to slow the commies down long enough for the ROK-U.S. ground forces to regroup and rebuild. If the fly-boys couldn’t do it, democratic freedom could kiss its ass good-bye in Korea.

  The NKPA needed bridges and railways to move their tanks and men, so air power proceeded to deny the enemy what he needed, despite the miserable flying conditions of the rainy Korean summer. The USAF’s B-29 light bombers tore up the bridges and rail tracks. Its F-82 Twin Mustangs and F-80 Shooting Stars, and the Navy’s Panther jet squadrons flying from offshore carriers, went after the commie tank and troop carrier convoys that were lined up at those ruined bridges.

  Steve had taken part in many of those ground-support missions, and was proud of the job he had done killing tanks and trains, but on-deck strafing missions, no matter how successful, did not earn a pilot ace status. With NKAF combat planes as rare as hen’s teeth, it looked like the Korean war was going to be a bust as far as dogfighting was concerned. For Steve, that made it hardly a war at all.

  Toward the end of summer, the commie advance bogged down as they were denied their armor, supplies, and communications. The respite allowed the UN the time to rally, and allowed American forces to get their second wind. In September, General MacArthur’s daring landing at Inchon took the Reds completely by surprise. Since then, slowly but steadily the UN forces had rolled back the commies.

  On the first of October, ROK forces, acting on the orders of US commanders, had crossed the 38th parallel. A few days ago, on the ninth, as B-29s bombed the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and South Korean troops rolled through the mountains of the North, meeting little resistance, MacArthur informed the commies that he expected all of North Korea to surrender, not just those Reds still on South Korean soil.

  It looked as if the war was almost over, but meanwhile there were still scattered pockets of enemy resistance, such as the tank convoy in the valley below that had been spotted by TCG. Steve and his flight had been dispatched from Itazuke Air Base to destroy this concentration of enemy armor.

  As the Shooting Stars descended beneath the cloud cover, the river below became visible: a gunmetal-blue snake wriggling through its rugged valley. The hills were carpeted with scrub oak and pines. Summer was fading into the dry winter season. The terrain was fading as well. The hills had gone from mottled green to several different shades of brown. Sometimes the land was the color of mud, sometimes it was the texture and hue of tobacco leaf, and sometimes it was as deeply burnished as an old leather A-2 flight jacket.

  About a mile distant, at twelve-o’clock low, Steve spotted the speck in the sky that was Evans’s T-6 trainer.

  “Bugs Flight, check your systems,” Steve ordered his pilots.

  “All green,” DeAngelo said.

  “All green,” echoed Lieutenants Molloy and Brady, who made up the flight’s second element.

  “Evans,” Steve called, his eyes fixed on the tiny prop-driven olive drab painted airplane that was hopping like a flea over the brown-hide hills.

  “Super Snooper here,” Evans replied.

  “We’re closing on you.”

  “About fucking time.”

  Each pilot would have only enough fuel for two passes if he wanted to make it back home to Japan. The F-80 had been designed as a short-range jet interceptor, not a ground-support airplane. Its internal fuel supply gave it an operating radius of only one hundred miles, and that was when it was flying at the altitudes for which it was designed: above fifteen thousand feet.

  Even with its original equipment auxiliary fuel tanks there was no way a Shooting Star could be running a mission like this, but back in July some engineers attached to the 49th Fighter Bomber Wing over at Misawa Air Base had come up with a way to increase the Shooting Stars’ range by cutting in half a standard wingtip auxiliary fuel tank and welding in a couple more sections to make an elongated tank. A pair of these overgrown “Misawa” tanks shackled to the F-80’s wingtips strained the airplane’s structure, but it
gave the jet up to an extra hour of flying time. Steve’s flight was equipped with “Misawas,” but in a situation like this, where the jets were going to be gulping fuel attacking ‘on deck,’ the extra-large tip tanks only afforded a few extra minutes on target.

  “X marks the spot,” Evans said as he began to fire off his smoke rockets. “Watch your assess coming through, boys. I count three machine-gun emplacements on the slopes. I’ll mark them for you.”

  It’s going to be a rough day’s work, all right, Steve thought. The commies were dug in deep. Evans’s T-6 was darting and swooping like a butterfly as it fired off smoke rockets to mark the positions of the machine-gun nests. The smoke plumed off the rocky slopes and swirled like dust devils around the scrub and tall golden weeds that led down to the water’s edge. There, scattered in among the slow-moving but powerful Russian-manufactured, canvas-sided GAZ trucks churning up mud on the riverbank, were the six T-34 tanks.

  The Soviet-built T-34—Steve and the other pilots had learned all about the monsters at briefings, and through hard experience. It had been the T-34 that had allowed the Russians to beat the Germans back in ‘45, and it was the T-34 that might still allow the North Koreans to win this war. The tank was twenty feet long and ten feet wide. It carried a crew of five and was specially designed for travel over mud and snow. Its diesel engine could take it hundreds of miles thanks to the auxiliary fuel drums strapped to its rear decking, and its armor plate could deflect a direct hit from a 105-millimeter howitzer, as the American forces had learned to their sorrow this previous summer. When it was time to hit back, the T-34 carried an 85-millimeter antiaircraft gun and two 7.62-millimeter machine guns. The weaponry was quite capable of reaching out to swat an F-80 out of the sky the way an ox might twitch its tail to rid itself of a pesky fly.

  The only weapon an F-80 could carry that was capable of killing a T-34 was a five-inch high-velocity aircraft rocket. Each of the F-80s in Bugs Flight had eight such HVARs mounted on racks beneath their wings.