Lucky’s Bridge (Vietnam Air War Book 2) Read online

  "Damned politicians'll screw it up every time, Pearly."

  "When World War I came along, the only thing that kept France out of bankruptcy was their income from the Ministry of Colonies, and Doumer kept reminding them of that until they elected him president. The people here paid the price, but he got what he was after. The French kept his rules around and kept raking in the money right up to the end."

  "What happened to Doumer?"

  "A Russian anarchist killed him."

  Moss peered at the aerial photos. "The Paul Doumer bridge," he muttered.

  "The Vietnamese call it the Long Bien bridge. They think of Doumer about like we do Benedict Arnold, maybe worse."

  "Poor bastards have had it tough. First the Chinese, then the French, next the Japanese, and now Ho Chi Minh and his cronies. Slavery, imperialism, or communism. Shitty choices, Pearly." Finished with philosophizing, Moss studied the map.

  Pearly tapped the bridge symbol. "I picked this one for our debut. Hitting it should give us an example of what we'll be facing. And when we knock it down, it'll get their attention and slow down a lot of traffic."

  Moss regarded the bridge's close proximity to downtown Hanoi with a wary expression. "You know I've got reservations."

  "Still, sir?" Pearly returned to his chair.

  "It'll be expensive," said the general.

  Pearly wondered if he had to sell the campaign again, or whether Moss just wanted reassurance they were going in the right direction.

  "We're already losing men and aircraft, sir. The difference is there's no coherent campaign now." When there was no explosion from Moss, he continued. "One time we bomb a barracks, next time a truck park, next time an overpass. There's no continuity, sir. Up in pack six, most of the meaningful targets are still restricted. Every now and then we get to bomb a JCS target the President or the SecDef believes will verrrry slowly add pressure, but even then we usually don't get to follow up."

  Moss's expression darkened. He and most of the staff despised the SecDef. They felt he voiced his opinions that the war couldn't be won, then threw obstacles in their path to make his prediction come true. It was different when it came to the President. As a loyal soldier, Moss seldom came out and said that his commander in chief was a buffoon meddling in military matters he didn't understand. Instead he just said Johnson was a "consummate politician," but everyone knew his feelings toward that profession.

  Pearly spoke slowly. "This campaign would let us pursue a real interdiction program. If we can keep going after the bridges until the important ones are knocked down, the enemy will be spending a lot more time and manpower trying to get supplies through."

  Pearly paused.

  Moss was looking at the photos of the Doumer bridge. He stared for a second longer, then abruptly nodded his head. "How soon before we can get approval?" he asked.

  "I briefed CINCPAC like you said, and told them that today you'd decide which bridge to start with. The admiral's got it greased for a one-time trial strike. Once they've reviewed our OPlan, we should get approval within twenty-four hours."

  Moss spoke reluctantly. "Go ahead and put the gears in motion." He pushed the photos across the desk toward Pearly. "How close are you to being finished with the plan?"

  "Done, sir," said Pearly. He placed a spiral-bound document before Moss.

  Combat Operation Plan

  CROSSFIRE ZULU

  HQ 7 AF OPlan 67-121

  22 April 1967

  Moss absently leafed through it, nodding. "Leave this copy with me and I'll read it later."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You mention Bullpup missiles in there?"

  Pearly remembered that the general thought them a poor choice for this target. "Only as an alternative weapon, far down the list of options, sir."

  "I called the Deputy for Operations at Hickam and told him I thought they'd be a pilot-killer in a high-threat area. I think he listened, but you never know about bomber pukes."

  Pearly, being an ex–bomber puke, held his counsel.

  "Go ahead and distribute the OPlan to all the players. Looks like you're ready for 'em, Pearly." Which meant that Moss thought he'd covered the right bases.

  Pearly braced himself for what must be said. "The enemy are also ready, General. They've been stacking guns and SAMs knee-deep around every bridge between Hanoi and Haiphong. I haven't seen defenses this concentrated since we went after Thai Nguyen."

  Moss grew an unpleasant expression. "They've found out," he hissed.

  "Possibly, sir."

  "Hell, the bridges aren't even approved targets yet."

  Pearly remained silent.

  "Are your people secure, Pearly? The leak could be right here in this building."

  "It's not in my branch," Pearly said quickly. He had faith in his hardworking crew.

  "No one wants to think it's their people." Moss gave him a sharp look. "Treacheries like this brew distrust, and we can't have that."

  Pearly blew a sigh. "We'll need a diversion target, sir. Something important enough to get the enemy to draw their guns away from the bridge before we give the go-ahead."

  Moss's angry look dissolved like a balloon with a slow leak, and a grin again began to tickle the corners of his mouth. "A diversion?" he asked slyly.

  He obviously knew something Pearly did not. As a staff officer, that concerned him.

  "Yes, sir."

  "What kind of . . . ah . . . diversion would you suggest?" asked Moss, cocking his head and grinning and making Pearly wish he would go ahead and tell him what he knew.

  He joined the game. "Maybe one of the targets off the new authorized list?"

  "Have we received it yet?" Moss asked, too innocently.

  "No, sir. I checked with the comm center this morning."

  Moss tapped the Top Secret document before him. "Here's the list, couriered from CINCPAC in Hawaii. Same with the copies for General Westmoreland and Seventh Fleet."

  Pearly was surprised.

  "When the Smith Brothers confirmed the leak, General Westmoreland and Ambassador Lodge were appalled. They agreed that we have to take emergency measures. Until the problem's corrected, all critical information will be sent by courier."

  Pearly thought about that for a moment. He wondered if that was really any better than the normal way of matching classified code words with a classified target list. Certainly it was not as timely, and he doubted the gomers had broken the cryptographic codes.

  Moss was leaning forward now, an excited glitter to his eyes. "Let's talk about MiGs."

  It was a subject Pearly knew well.

  "How many do they have?" asked Moss.

  It was a good question, for the estimates varied. They were restricted from bombing the enemy's military airfields, so the numbers had grown as the Soviets and Chinese granted North Vietnamese requests for more and more aircraft. But in the past few months the North Vietnamese had grown bolder with their tactics, and the Phantoms and Thuds had been steadily bagging MiGs. And for some reason the Soviets had recently stopped replacing the ones their clients lost. Those factors, combined with the fact that the North Vietnamese often hid or camouflaged their aircraft, made the problem difficult.

  "Total aircraft, or just interceptors, sir?" The North Vietnamese had small numbers of light bombers and transports.

  "Just MiGs."

  Pearly calculated for a few seconds before he spoke. "CIA says sixty-seven, and our intell says eighty-nine. That's MiG-17's, -19's, and -21's."

  "What's your estimate, and how'd you get it?"

  "Ninety-two, with six more based in China for pilot-refresher training. They shuffle them around a lot, so I got my count by using multiple recce bird and satellite photos at a single, specified time. Then I added the ones Motel radar said were in the air and others intell said were probably hidden in hangars and under camouflage nets. I did that three different times and got very close to the same answer."

  Moss wrote the number 92 on his pad, then frowned and under
lined it.

  "Did I authorize those reconnaissance requests?" he asked, and Pearly realized he was treading on treacherous ground. Moss had mood swings caused by God knew what, and too often the staff officer who happened to be before him suffered.

  "Yes, sir." Pearly had buried the special request for recce sorties in a bundle of others for prestrike photos.

  Damn, he thought. Moss hated to be given bad news and had been known to shoot the occasional messenger. What would he do to someone who manipulated him?

  Moss shook his head ominously and his voice rose. "Next time tell me what the hell I'm authorizing. I'd have let it through." He paused and muttered, "Probably."

  "Yes, sir." It was time for such a response.

  "Be straight with me, and don't pull any of that junior-officer connivery. Don't start acting like a fucking navigator, Pearly."

  "No, sir." Moss had surprised him with the light admonishment.

  Moss's look brightened, so the dangerous time was over.

  Change the subject, Pearly told himself. "When will we be cleared to bomb the diversion target, sir?"

  "Tomorrow soon enough?" Moss was cheerful, as if the ass-chewing had been tonic.

  Pearly Gates nodded. "Yes, sir. That should catch them with their defenses still bunched around the bridges."

  "That's precisely what I want, to catch the bastards with their pants down for once. Hop on a T-39 and go out and brief the wing commanders so they can prepare, Pearly."

  Pearly did not look forward to shuttling back and forth between the bases as he'd done when they'd bombed previous hot targets. "Yes, sir," was what he said.

  "Tell the commanders about the whole scheme, about this being a diversion target and about the bridges, but tell them to damn well keep it close to their vests. Tell them we won't officially release the supplementary air tasking order until in the morning, a couple of hours before takeoff, but that there won't be any surprises. And you can tell them to expect more of your visits while we get the CROSSFIRE ZULU bridge campaign going."

  "Yes, sir, I will."

  "Now I suppose you want me to pick a worthwhile diversion target from this list they've sent us." Moss was showing off again.

  "Is there a suitable one, sir?"

  Moss told him the target they'd been given. "You think that might get their attention?"

  Pearly's grin widened until it matched the one Moss was wearing. "Yes, sir, it just might."

  0815 Local—Kep PAAF Auxiliary Base, DRV

  The dartlike silver jets made long, straight-in approaches toward the distant runway, flying with a kilometer's separation between aircraft. The Tumanskii turbojets were characteristically loud and high-pitched, and their sounds shattered the morning quiet. Flocks of birds flushed from freshly planted rice fields as each jet passed overhead. The six aircraft were so spaced that as the birds began to settle, another would scream overhead and rally them into yet another fervor.

  At ten kilometers from the end of the runway, a position marked by the crossing of a wide irrigation canal, each pilot activated a paddle-shaped switch on his console, and the wing-flaps began to squeal and chatter as they slowly moved down grooved tracks.

  The tracked flaps were one of several weaknesses in the early-production models. The MiG-21's aerodynamic design was clean, basic, and sound, a blowpipe with a small tail and a delta wingform. The engineers at the Mikoyan-Guryevich bureau had built an aircraft prototype; the bureau and military test pilots had flown it in 1956; and the engineers had made minor changes and so forth until the first MiG-21's were approved for production due to their superb speed and maneuverability at altitude. But when the mainline unit pilots received them, the first production runs of the sleek jets proved unstable and difficult to fly, and the flap mechanisms archaic and dangerous.

  Because of the small surfaces of the tracked flaps, the early MiG-21's landed hot and fast and used an inordinate amount of runway for both takeoff and landing. The flaps also gave cause for another concern; if you did not watch carefully when they were activated and chattering along in their channels, you might end up with a "split-flap condition," meaning one had hung up while the other continued moving down. With split flaps you cannot fly straight and level or land. Instead, the aircraft will enter a constant and increasingly violent roll, and if you don't immediately correct the condition, you will crash.

  The early MiG-21's, with their undersized tail assemblies and tracked flaps, were alternately called "small-tails" and "spin machines" by the pilots. The problems had been solved on big-tail MiG-21's like the PF and PFMA models. Their redesigned tails made them more stable, and their more powerful engines had been modified so air could be diverted to blow down their much larger flaps. Big-tail MiG-21's flew faster, landed slower, were easier to handle, and were equipped with radar and improved instruments.

  The dangerous early-production models were shuffled off to the satellite nations, and the new big-tails given to the Soviet Air Force. The MiG-21's provided to the Vietnamese People's Army Air Force fell somewhere in between. They had been equipped with newer, more powerful afterburning engines, but they still had the small tails and the tracked flaps.

  It took a special touch to fly small-tails well, and a number of the North Vietnamese pilots had great difficulty converting from the much simpler MiG-17's. Although they were daily engaged in mortal combat, no one had yet been able to convince the Soviet generals to provide big-tail MiG-21's. Moscow had felt the problem could be solved through better training and provided a cadre of experienced pilots to train the VPAAF until they came up to speed. They'd also requested volunteer pilots from their satellite nations in Eastern Europe.

  German, Czech, and Polish volunteer pilots who had experience flying them made up one of the two MiG-21 air battalions at Phuc Yen, to be replaced by Vietnamese pilots as they gained experience and confidence. A cadre of Soviet pilot-advisors were assigned to assist the North Vietnamese pilots of the other battalion.

  Aleks Ivanovic of the Soviet Air Force flew the small-tail very well and was one of the most skilled of the advisory group. In fact, he was very sure he was the best of them all.

  Kapitan Aleksandr Viktor Ivanovic

  Aleks flew last in the formation by choice, so he could see and monitor the five other silver aircraft strung out before him. Two were flying a couple of hundred meters higher than the rest, likely because they'd forgotten to readjust their altimeters for landing.

  "Reset altimeters to seventy-five point four centimeters," he reminded the two three-ship flights. After a second thought he added, "And check that flaps and landing gear are down." He spoke Vietnamese, however poorly, for they were ordered to do so to keep the Americans from learning what they undoubtedly already knew, that foreign pilots were flying in North Vietnam. The Europeans in the other battalion spoke even poorer Vietnamese than Aleks, for they hadn't attended the four-week language course, but they tried to comply with the directive. When things got busy, the airwaves were filled with a polyglot of languages.

  The fact that he'd found it necessary to make his last transmission was troublesome, for he'd done the job normally assigned to ground-radar controllers. The controllers at Phuc Yen should have advised them to descend and prepare to land at Kep and then should have followed them down carefully, barking out instructions as they passed through 8,000, 6,000, and 4,000 meters. Then he should have advised them about the altimeter setting, next to descend to 2,000 and then 1,000 meters altitude, and then to extend flaps and gear and prepare to land. But they'd not been instructed to descend, nor given any advisories or instructions. Which showed just how poor the radar control had grown. During the past month they'd retreated from highly centralized control, manned by Russian and North Korean pilot-controllers at the helm of the system they'd called "Wisdom," to the complete noncontrol they were now experiencing.

  A flight of American F-105's had attacked and strafed the Wisdom control center. Since then aircraft accidents and mishaps had risen, and their
combat effectiveness had been sharply reduced. It was a sad thing that the flight leaders now had to remind their pilots to check their altimeters so they could tell their proper height above the ground.

  The rumor among the pilot advisors was that the Wisdom system had been dismantled because the Vietnamese hierarchy distrusted the foreigners who had been controlling North Vietnamese pilots. After Wisdom was damaged, the rumors said, the radars were placed under the command of a "politically reliable" officer who knew nothing about fighter aircraft. Soviet tactical doctrine demanded that controllers be fighter pilots. To have someone in charge who knew nothing about fighter operations ran counter to everything the pilots had been taught.

  Aleks came from a family with strong party loyalties. Both parents were relentless workers for the regional political apparatus. Aleks was himself political, and his personal ambitions would increasingly require party support as he rose in rank and stature. Yet he despaired at the ways the party interfered with day-to-day operations in the Russian military, and in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam it was even worse. The Lao Dong party influenced every aspect of military life, regardless of the impact upon operational success.

  Ahead, the first aircraft dropped from his vision, descending to land at the Kep auxiliary airfield.

  The six MiG-21's, two three-ship cells from Phuc Yen, were replacing a contingent of MiG-17's. The VPAAF's two regiments of interceptors, one headquartered at Kien An and the other at Phuc Yen, kept a number of aircraft deployed at auxiliary airfields—most often at places like Kep, Hoa Lac, and Gia Lam, Hanoi's international airport, but occasionally even at smaller airfields like Yen Bai, Thanh Hoa, and others near the Chinese border. Aircraft could be launched more quickly from several runways and locations, but the dispersion was primarily a matter of force survival. If the Americans received permission to attack the MiG bases, they wouldn't find all the chickens in a single coop.

  Aleks was last to land. He slid the throttle back, rotated and held his MiG's nose up in a high angle of attack, and began a slow descent. Twenty seconds later the main landing gear made a mouse's squeak, kissing the runway less than five meters from his intended touchdown point. He dragged the throttle to idle and pushed the stick forward. The aircraft settled on its tricycle gear and rushed down the runway. He did not deploy the drag parachute, so there was only the friction of rubber against concrete to slow him. When the momentum was sufficiently drained, he used the brakes. A loud, squealing sound issued, another irritating quality of the small-tail MiG-21.