The Fly Boys Read online

  But there was a catch—

  The only way an HVAR had a chance against the tank’s low, sloped turret or 19-millimeter thick armor was if it was fired from a thirty-degree angle, at a range of about fifteen hundred feet. Any closer and the rocket’s engine would not have the time to kick in and increase its velocity, causing the rocket to bounce off the tank. Any farther away from the target and the chances of accuracy were too slim. To further increase the odds of killing the tank, or at least hitting its treads and in that way disabling it, the recommended procedure was to let loose with a salvo, or “ripple,” of four HVARs.

  As Steve was mulling all of this over, his radio earphones suddenly crackled. “This is a fucking shit-brick run,” Steve heard DeAngelo complain.

  “Roger that,” Steve said. “Fucking Reds are going to be throwing everything including shit bricks at us, and we’re going to have to fly low and straight and take it.”

  The valley was narrow, and its walls were steep, so the strafing runs would have to proceed along the river. That meant that the hills would hem in the Shooting Stars, keeping them from taking evasive action as the Koreans shot up at them. The jets would simply have to endure this gauntlet of defensive fire until they were close enough to launch their HVARs at the tanks.

  “Bugs Three and Four will go in first,” Steve ordered.

  “Chicken, huh, Major?” Bugs Three, Lieutenant Brady, muttered.

  Steve laughed. Brady knew as well as the others that he was doing them a favor. The first element would be in and out before the commies could effectively zero in, but the enemy would be ready and waiting when it was Steve and DeAngelo’s turn to attack.

  “Okay, Bugs Four. Follow me in,” Brady told his wing-man.

  “This is the part I hate,” Molloy said as he took up his position a good ways behind and several hundred feet above Brady.

  The valley was too narrow for more than one jet to attack at a time, so the two elements of the flight would follow each other’s nose to tail to try and keep their attack constant. Molloy’s job as Brady’s wingman would be to suppress any answering fire directed toward the lead jet, until it was time for him to launch his own rockets. Meanwhile, Steve would watch Molloy’s back. DeAngelo would in turn watch his, and then Brady would be coming back in for his second run, hopefully in time to suppress ground fire for DeAngelo as he attacked the tanks. Molloy would again cover for Brady, and so on, until everyone had made his second pass.

  “Yeah, I hate this part,” Lieutenant Molloy was muttering as Brady’s jet dipped low into the valley. “Major Gold, have I ever mentioned that I hated this part?”

  “You’ll get no sympathy from the major,” DeAngelo cut in. “He’s still a bitter man from having lost command of his squadron.”

  Steve clicked on his mike so that the others could hear his laughter. DeAngelo’s ribbing was meant in good fun, and Steve took it that way.

  Back in April, after successfully completing jet fighter training, he’d received his promotion to major. He’d immediately shipped out to join up with the Eighth, and take command of the 19th Squadron.

  His command hadn’t lasted very long. Steve served as CO only until the end of July, when squadron command was transferred to a full bird colonel named Billings. Steve had not been much upset about losing the squadron. He’d understood that the change had nothing to do with him personally. FEAF had been considered a backwater post until Korea had turned hot, and then the organization quickly became top-heavy with senior officers wanting a piece of the action. Billings was a good guy, and he’d had experience running a wartime squadron from the last war. Steve had been assured that an outstanding evaluation of his brief tenure as CO would be inserted into his record. Anyway, relinquishing command had allowed him more time to fly. All the tedious paperwork that Steve had been saddled with as CO had kept him pretty much grounded.

  Evans’s T-6 scout plane had climbed out of the valley as Bugs Three and Four went in fast and low. The commie troops along the riverbank scattered as Brady opened up with his six nose-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. The armor-piercing, phosphorous-loaded incendiary rounds stitched geysers of mud toward a truck, which abruptly exploded in a ball of orange flame. Tendrils of fire reached out to lick another truck, and that one went up as well. A machine-gun nest dug into the hill began to track Brady. Molloy instantly veered toward the muzzle flash, and opened up with his own half-dozen .50s. The machine-gun nest went silent.

  “Thanks,” Brady muttered.

  “No problem,” Molloy answered calmly.

  Brady fired a ripple of four HVARs at a tank. The rockets seemed to hang in the air, and then abruptly picked up velocity as their own engines kicked in. They streaked down, trailing contrails of gray smoke, impacting to erupt in four terrific explosions that quickly united into a curtain of destructive force around the tank.

  “Bugs Three, you all right?” Steve called out. He was just entering the valley as Brady’s F-80 streaked past the enemy position and climbed to come around in a wide, banking turn.

  “Everything’s green,” Brady announced. “I think I got a tank.”

  “Affirmative,” Molloy said. “I see it burning. I’m beginning my run now. Jesus Christ! It’s a regular shit-brick storm down here, all right! Those machine-gun nests on the slope have me bracketed!”

  “I’ll suppress,” Steve firmly cut him off. He quickly veered toward the slopes to rake the nest with his nose guns. He didn’t want Molloy getting distracted. Shit-brick runs could unnerve even the most aggressive of pilots, which, in Steve’s opinion, Molloy was not. He was a World War Two fighter pilot veteran, but he wasn’t an ace. Like DeAngelo, he’d been called back by the Air Force, and like DeAngelo he was just as pissed off about it. DeAngelo had not let his resentment toward the Air Force blunt his tiger instincts, but Molloy was a pussy by fighter pilots’ standards. He had more balls that average, of course, otherwise he wouldn’t be in a cockpit, but he was no tiger. Steve had recognized the fact the first time he’d flown with Molloy. He knew that when it got really hairy—like now—Molloy would need calm, steady encouragement to keep from losing it.

  “Major! Where are you, dammit!” Molloy cursed. “I’m taking small-arms fire!”

  “I’m on it,” Steve said as he dropped his fighter’s nose to strafe the commie troops who were firing into the sky with rifles and submachine guns.

  The small-arms ground fire coming up at them was definitely intense. The commies had to some extent countered last summer’s air offensive by developing a devastating technique of putting up a curtainlike pattern of small-arms fire at low-flying attacking planes. They’d even been known to throw stones, sticks, and, for all anybody knew, their own shit into the sky—hence the term “shit-brick run.”

  Back in July the commies’ tactic had seemed funny, but the Air Force stopped laughing when their prop-driven attack bombers began to go down. Rumor had it that the Air Force brass back at the Pentagon were busy conducting a reassessment of the Air Force’s capabilities and limitations in a guerilla war. The stopgap solution to the problem had been to restrict the relatively slow prop-driven bombers to high-and-medium-altitude missions, leaving the on-deck action to the jets, which were supposed to be fast enough to get in and out before the commie duck hunters could draw their beads.

  Steve had stayed as close as was possible behind Molloy, and had kept hammering away with his nose .50s, scattering bodies and torching another truck. “Okay, Molloy, do your job and get on out.”

  “Firing rockets now,” Molloy said.

  Steve watched the HVARs streak down and explode around a tank.

  “Watch yourself,” Molloy whispered as he came out of the valley. “Down there is one stirred-up hornet’s nest.”

  “Affirmative,” Steve said absently. He was concentrating on his flying. Wafting clouds of smoke from the burning trucks were now moving across the valley floor. The smoke hid the enemy, but even worse, obscured the slopes. A slight miscalculation o
n approach and the Shooting Stars could find themselves cartwheeling against the rocky hillside.

  The smoke momentarily lifed from around the tank that Molloy had attacked. “Molloy,” Steve radioed, “you got his treads.”

  “Sorry….”

  “Don’t be. That was good shooting.”

  “He’s not dead,” Molloy pointed out. “He can still bite.”

  “Yeah, but he can’t go anywhere, which makes him almost as good as dead,” Steve replied. “Bugs Two,” he called as he began his attack dive. “You with me, Bugs Two?”

  “I’m here,” DeAngelo replied.

  The twisting, turbulent ribbon that was the river slid beneath the Shooting Star’s nose as Steve careened through the valley. The high slopes on either side whipped past as the smoking target site loomed.

  A flicker of fire coming at him from his port side caught Steve’s attention.

  “I’m pulling heavy machine-gun fire from the hillside—”

  “I’m on it for you, Steve,” DeAngelo said.

  Steve forced himself to concentrate on his run and forget about the machine-gun nests. Suppressing them was his wingman’s job. His job was to kill a tank.

  The commie troops had formed defensive groups around the surviving trucks and tanks and were now steadfastly holding their positions. As Steve looked down at the massed soldiers, a glittering orange winking like that of fireflies flickered in his eyes.

  Rifles and submachine guns, Steve thought grimly.

  You had to give the Reds credit. Their side definitely had its share of heroes. Not even the Japs in the last war had been so fanatical.

  Steve centered his guns on the clustered enemy and thumbed his trigger. A heavy rain of fiery lead peppered the soldiers as they crumpled away, some of the bodies rolled down the bank into the river.

  “God, I hate it when they just stand there and take it like that,” DeAngelo said weakly as the soldiers went down beneath Steve’s chattering guns.

  “I hear you,” Steve said.

  “What kind of political system is it that makes them into human ants like that?”

  Steve fired a salvo of rockets at a tank. His Shooting Star shuddered as the HVARs tore loose. Their own engines lit at the very moment their target opened up with its cannon and machine guns. Steve watched his rockets seem to cage the tank with smoky contrails and then explode. As he whipped past, he glimpsed a sudden, fifth explosion, one that sent a column of fire reaching up into the sky.

  “How’d I do?” he demanded as he climbed out of the valley and veered to starboard, crossing the river. “I must have hit something?”

  “I’ll say!” DeAngelo cried. “You cracked him open like he was a bug!”

  “All right!” Steve laughed as he came around in a starboard circle. “Your turn, Mike. Go to it!”

  As he flew back along the river in the opposite direction, he watched DeAngelo begin his attack dive. Suddenly the two remaining machine-gun nests sparked to life, effectively broadsiding DeAngelo’s jet.

  “I’m taking hits!” DeAngelo called.

  Fuck, Steve thought. “Bugs Three! Where are you?” he demanded savagely.

  “I’m on my way—” Brady began.

  “Negative!” Steve ordered. “You should have been here! Now there’s no time! You hang back, Bugs Three.”

  “Wilco,” Brady replied, sounding affronted.

  “Mike!” Steve called as he flung his jet back across the river toward the machine-gun nests. “I’m coming in to fly cover for you.”

  The diving turn was sharp. Increased gravity tore at him. Steve was on the verge of blacking out, but the bladders sewn into his G-suit mercilessly squeezed his thighs and abdomen, forcing the blood back up into his torso and brain. He got one of the commie gun emplacements in his sights and opened up with his nose guns, pelting it, and then veered to get the other. The nest had moved off DeAngelo and was now firing at Steve in an attempt to defend itself from his attack.

  By now Steve was too close to the slopes to use his fixed-mount nose guns. The hills were looming up at him, which meant that he had to get his nose up if he was going to clear the crest.

  As he streaked past the gun emplacement, he impulsively fired off an HVAR, and had time to glimpse the smoking rocket corkscrew to earth. The HVAR exploded about fifty feet above the machine-gun nest, burying it in an avalanche of debris.

  “Great shooting!” crowed Brady, who was just beginning his second run.

  Steve gritted his teeth against the increased G’s as he wrenched his F-80 out of its dive and climbed, desperate to clear the valley. The G-suit was tightening around him like a vise as he was flattened against the back of his seat. He could hear the engine screaming as his Shooting Star struggled to regain that high perch in the sky for which it had been born.

  Steve looked down through the side window of his canopy as his plane scraped past the ridge with less than a hundred feet to spare. Below him he saw a single commie soldier draped in that quilted uniform that they wore, standing at the top of the slope. The commie, his rifle in the crook of his arm, was staring back at Steve. The soldier looked close enough to touch. The Red was likely feeling the scalding buffeting of the Shooting Star’s exhaust.

  As Steve stared down, time seemed to stand still. The shrill roar of the F-80’s engine receded. The smoke and fire from the valley floor dropped away. There was just Steve, strapped into the great six-ton silver bird that was struggling to find purchase in the air.

  And there was that lone communist foot soldier who was now shouldering his weapon.

  Steve never actually saw the soldier shoot at him, but he felt those three ridiculously puny rifle rounds pelting his jet, and by the third plink! the world rushed back with a vengeance. A trembling ran through the aircraft like a dog shaking off water. On the instrument panel warning lights began flashing like rubies.

  “Bugs Flight, this is Bugs Leader,” Steve began calmly as he left the ridge behind. “I’m hit. I’m hit.”

  Whatever damage he had sustained seemed minor, so he immediately began to climb, to give himself as much sky as possible to work with should things go radically wrong. He studied his instruments. Everything seemed normal, but his warning lights were still on. He still had some rockets left, so he was tempted to make another run through the valley, but he decided against it. It was more important to get his jet home in one piece than try to kill another tank.

  “Brady, I’m on my way home,” Steve radioed. “You and Molloy stick around and take your final pass.”

  “Wilco,” Brady replied.

  “Major, what do you want me to do?” DeAngelo broke in.

  “Keep me company on the way home, will you, Mike?”

  “Wilco, I’ll chaperon,” DeAngelo said genially. “But I’m warning you now, I expect a kiss at the front door.”

  “If I get to the front door,” Steve said as he streaked away from the valley on a course for home. “Japan seems a long way off at the moment.”

  “Do you think you need to bail out?” DeAngelo asked.

  Steve studied his instruments. “Negative… plane seems to be responding all right. But I’ve got warning lights flashing all over the place. I just don’t know….”

  “Bugs One, this is Super Snooper,” Evans cut in. “Bugs One, come in please.”

  “Snooper, this is Bugs One,” Steve replied, relaxing a little as his altimeter read twenty thousand feet. “Soupy, you still around?”

  “I’m on my way back to Cha-Cha,” the TCG pilot said. “Listen now, Bugs Leader. You don’t want to be ditching anyplace around here. There’s a whole bunch of commie stragglers wandering around these parts, and they don’t know they’ve lost their war. They get hold of you, Bugsy, they’re gonna cook themselves up some winged jackrabbit stew in one of their Mongolian hot pots. You read me?”

  “Affirmative,” Steve said as he leveled off at 25,000 feet. The North Koreans were not known for their kind and merciful treatment of prisoners, and e
specially not pilots. “Some neighborhood you’ve got here, Evans.”

  The TCG pilot’s deep, melodious laughter filled Steve’s helmet. “Bugsy, this ain’t nothing compared to where I grew up in Philly….”

  “Steve, I’m coming up behind you,” DeAngelo cut in. “Stay level and I’ll look you over.”

  “Affirmative. My hydraulics and fuel readings seem okay,” Steve said, and laughed. “Good thing, too. I never would have lived it down if some commie with a squirrel gun had salted my tail.”

  “Steve, you sure your hydraulic pressure is reading okay?” DeAngelo asked, sounding concerned.

  Steve felt his stomach clench. Shit—shit—shit— he thought. “What’s up, Mikey? What do you see?”

  “You’re leaking something.”

  “Hydraulic fluid?”

  “Some sort of fluid,” DeAngelo replied vaguely. “Fuck, Major, they taught me how to fly’em, not fix’em—”

  “That makes two of us,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you this much—this bird is going into the shop when we get back.”

  At that moment, as if to perversely contradict him, Steve’s engine died. He felt the jet seem to stumble in flight like a fly abruptly hindered by the sticky strands of a spider’s web.

  “Christ! Steve!” DeAngelo suddenly shouted. “You’ve got a flameout!”

  I kind of know that, Steve thought. In the sudden, sickening silence there was only the mournful keening of the wind against his canopy, mixing with his own harried breathing. The red lights of the instrument panel cast crimson reflections against Steve’s visor. The warning lights glowed bale-fully, as if to say, “we told you so.”

  With his engine out, his hydraulic boost had dropped, making his flight controls feel like they’d been soaked in molasses and then dredged in sawdust. The jet’s forward glide speed would keep the engine’s turbine blades wind-milling at sufficient speed to keep up hydraulic pressure, but Steve would have to keep his use of the controls to a minimum to avoid exhausting the accumulator pressure supply.

  “I’m attempting a relight,” Steve said, thinking that the windmilling engine should have evaporated the excess fuel by now. He went through the relight procedure, but it didn’t work. He switched from his main fuel flow control system to the emergency system and again went through the restart procedure, with no luck.