Dmz this is the future o.., p.39
DMZ: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 7), page 39
Though ancient, the two North Korean J-7s had functional radar warning receivers. Guided in the first phase of their flight by the combined data from the AWACS, the Shikaka and Bunny’s Kingsnake, when the four Patriot missiles got within thirty seconds of their targets the US missiles switched on their own onboard radars to fine-tune their flight trajectories and alarms started screaming inside the cockpits of the J-7s.
The Korean flight leader was not scared, he was furious. Trap. His wingman had been right. They’d been lured into a trap.
How could he have been so stupid!?
“Tornado two, evade!” He rolled his machine and pointed its nose at the earth in a desperate attempt to outmaneuver the incoming missiles. He couldn’t see them, didn’t even know what bearing they were coming from, all he could do was make their task as hard as possible by putting himself into a supersonic death dive.
Captain Goh could see the slower LMADIS ahead of him now. He could not see the South Korean column yet, but he knew it could not be much farther ahead of them.
It was going to be close. But eyeballing the closing distance between themselves and the fleeing North Koreans, he began to hope. He even closed his eyes, as his officer school instructors had taught him to do, and saw the glorious future that could be.
They would catch the target vehicle. A simple nudge from their heavier LTV would flip it, to land on its roll cage. If they weren’t killed outright, the two occupants would be dazed or unconscious. He would approach the passenger side, because she would be hanging there, and he would put a bullet in the brain of the Supreme Leader of North Korea. And then he would turn his vehicle around, speeding ahead of the South Korean column to escape North into the DMZ.
And in less than two days he would be sitting in a first class seat, bound for a life of luxury, having delivered to his masters the North Korean nuclear trigger and the elimination of both traitors, Si-min Shin and Yun-mi Kim.
Then he opened his eyes in horror as the vehicle behind him exploded.
“Splash one,” Bunny called, watching the fireball engulf the rearmost of the three vehicles. Noname had staggered the missiles so that the optical infrared seekers of following missiles would not be blinded by the fireball of the exploding targets preceding them.
But only by seconds.
“Swan two, Hammerhead, abort your attack,” the voice of the controller from the AWACs broke in urgently. “Swan two, abort ground attack!”
What? “Noname! Abort!” Her gut falling through the cockpit floor, Bunny knew even as she spoke his name, she was too late.
Goh was staring at the rising cloud of flame of smoke that had been the vehicle behind him, still with the warmth of his glorious vision tingling in his mind.
As though time itself slowed to a liquid honey stickiness, he saw a trail of brown smoke, a missile with a tail of fire, arrowing down from on high, straight at him.
It was the last thing he saw.
Ri saw the rearmost pursuing vehicle cartwheel out of a ball of flame in his mirror, before he heard the explosion. The road ahead was straight, and in the distance he could see … vehicles? They were blocking the road.
Head screwed over his shoulder, he watched the second vehicle, saw the missile this time, spearing in from behind it before it too disappeared in a tumbling ball of flame and smoke.
He knew without doubt they would be next.
In the seat beside him, Yun-mi Kim sat with eyes shut, but no expression on her face. Not terror. Not fear. He took his foot off the accelerator but kept his eyes on her. He would die with the vision of her face burned into his retinas.
Bunny saw the fireball as the second vehicle in the line detonated.
“Splash two,” Noname said in his usual flat monotone. “Enemy J-7 directly below, altitude 500…”
“Noname, no, abort…” Bunny said. Wait, enemy J-7 …what?! She reacted instinctively, hauling her machine into a tight banking turn.
But it was too late. Too late.
“Unable to abort ground attack,” Noname reported. O’Hare’s violent evasive maneuver had momentarily cut their link to the last outbound missile. And monitoring the biosigns of his pilot, Noname could see O’Hare had entered a state of information saturation and impaired judgment. He assumed temporary control of the aircraft.
Zero tolerance for error.
Service before self.
Righting the aircraft with a snap roll, he allowed the data link to the missile to stabilize and sent the abort command.
Zero tolerance for error.
What mattered most was the mission.
The North Korean pilot of aircraft Tornado 1 had heard his wingman being swatted screaming from the sky by the enemy missiles. In a red mist, he had watched his altitude plunge from 20,000 feet to 10,000 in seconds. Hauling back on the joystick between his legs he felt his machine shudder as though it was going to tear itself apart.
Come on, you stinking bucket of rust, pull out! he yelled in his mind. As though it had heard him, the conical nose of the J-7 began to lift, one small degree at a time. Then two. Then ten.
Somewhere about the time his nose lifted above the horizon, the North Korean pilot blacked out.
When he came to, he heard a high whining pitch in his ears. His chin was on his chest. He was drooling into his mask.
The whining continued. It was trying to tell him something.
Target … target lock?
He blinked, staring at his instruments. Infrared target lock. Reacting by instinct, he reached out and flipped the switch that armed his two Russian-made short-range missiles, about the only things on the whole aircraft that were made in the 21st century.
Missile lock. Fox 2, you bastard.
For a fifty-year-old J-7 to kill a two-year-old F-36 Kingsnake was impossible. For a start, it would have to get past the Kingsnake’s picket of one or more Ghost Bats. It would have to close to within ten miles, the maximum range of its antiquated radar system. And its missiles would have to be sophisticated enough to ignore the decoy flares and radar-defeating chaff that the Kingsnake would automatically fire into its wake as soon as it detected a missile launch.
But the suicidal maneuver of the North Korean pilot had taken him down into the ground clutter and momentarily out of sight of both the AWACS and Shikaka radars. The radar operators on the Hawkeye had assumed he had planted his machine in the hills.
By the time he popped back up onto radar, zooming into the sky underneath Bunny and Noname’s Kingsnake, he was already firing his missiles.
Still in control of the Kingsnake, Noname wrenched it into a zooming climb and killed the engine’s thrust, putting the metal of their 4,000 lb. Pratt and Whitney engine between O’Hare and the incoming missile but leaving them hanging in the sky, waiting for gravity to pull them to earth. The tactic cut their infrared signature, but left them a sitting duck if the North Korean missiles didn’t take the decoy bait.
Service before self.
Drawn by the heat still radiating from the rear nozzle of the jet, both missiles ignored the decoys being pumped into the sky around the Kingsnake and detonated as their warheads flew right into the Kingsnake’s exhaust. They blew the engine right out of its housing.
As soon as Noname took control of her machine, Bunny O’Hare knew her number was up. Her flight stick went slack in her hands, her helmet-mounted display flashed a missile impact warning and she heard the booster rockets beneath her flight seat ignite.
She didn’t even have time to grab the handholds alongside her legs before her world dissolved into a roaring ball of flame and metal.
Like a burning autumn leaf, Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare’s Kingsnake shed flaming debris as it entered a violent flat spin toward the hills below.
Games of State
Peace Dam, South Korea
Their LMADIS buggy hadn’t even slowed to a halt before Ri realized a) he was still alive and b) his protectee was already out of the vehicle, running down the road toward the South Korean troops like her tail was on fire.
He sat, still stunned, watching as she tore off first one shoe, then the other, threw them to the side of the road and continued running.
Move your ass, Ri, he heard a voice say. She could get shot!
Rolling over the open side of the buggy, he set after her, but the few seconds head start she had and the proximity of the South Korean vehicles slewed across the road told him immediately he had no hope of catching her before she got within rifle range of the South Koreans.
And which damn South Koreans were they? The rescuing kind, or the killing kind?!
When she got within 50 yards without being shot, he dared to hope. When she got within 20, an officer stepped in front of one of the LTVs that was blocking the road and held up his hands, motioning her to stop.
Ri heard Kim yelling at the man, but could not catch her words.
She was running so hard she ran straight into his arms, and collapsed, breathless. Ri arrived a second later and grabbed her as she fell.
“Who the hell…” the South Korean officer was saying. “Is that who…”
Ri lifted her in his arms and stood, panting himself. “This is … the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s … Republic of North Korea,” he told the officer. “I need a vehicle with a radio.”
The man stood with his feet planted, mouth open like a carp in a pond.
“Now!!” Ri yelled at him, snapping the man out of his shock.
They wasted precious minutes getting the Major in charge in of the South Korean mechanized infantry columns to appreciate his priority was not to find out what the hell was going on. But Madam Kim had been very good at explaining this to him, once she recovered her breath.
His priority, she explained, if he wanted to help avert a global nuclear war, was to give the Supreme Leader of North Korea a damned radio, a comms tech who knew his stuff and then get the hell out of her face.
He cleared the troops out of a K21 infantry fighting vehicle and left her and Ri with a radio operator. Ri closed the rear ramp and door of the IFV behind them. Suddenly it was quiet, and very claustrophobic inside the vehicle. The only sounds were the still heaving chests of himself and Madam Kim.
The operator was a wide-eyed youth. Ri tried to calm him. “Her Excellency will tell you who she needs to speak with. You won’t be able to help her directly, but your job is to connect her to people who can. Is that clear?”
He nodded, and swallowed. “Battalion HQ,” he said. “I can connect you to Battalion…”
Ri slapped his knee. “Good lad.”
“Too slow,” Kim shook her head. “I need to talk to the White House, not the South Korean military.”
The boy looked stricken. “Your Excellency … I can’t…”
Ri put a hand on his shoulder. “That air attack on the vehicles pursuing us. Are you in contact with the US Air Force?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “We are coordinating close air support with a US AWACS over…”
Ri stopped him. “Please contact the US Air Force and explain your situation.”
“Tell them I need to speak with the President of the United States, urgently,” Kim said.
The poor kid looked like he was going to blow a cooler fan. Ri talked slowly. “It’s all right. You get the AWACS on the line, I will do the talking.”
The call to the 48th President of the USA, Stuart Fenner, had been routed via Kronk’s Shikaka to the Hawkeye over Hwacheon, to a satellite over Sri Lanka, then Hawaii, a ground station in San Diego and then optical fiber cables to Washington and then via satellite again to Air Force One, where the President was currently outbound Andrews Air Force Base, as per DEFCON 1 protocols. After Ri convinced the commander of the Hawkeye of his bona fides, the entire process took less than 12 minutes, including the time needed to get an AI voice translator patched into the call.
Two things worked in Yun-mi Kim’s favor in getting the President to take the call despite all that had happened that day. The first was that he had been in frequent contact with her over the five years leading up to the decision to go forward with a Peace Accord.
The second was that this was not Stuart Fenner’s first rodeo. By A Long Margin. Many had doubted his military credentials having served only as a platoon leader for the 3rd US Infantry Regiment, guarding Arlington National Cemetery in Northern Virginia. But he had demonstrated a cool temperament as Secretary of State in a Turkey–Syria conflict, cutting loose the Emirates as allies when they refused to allow him to base US aircraft there. He had shown resolve when facing off against Russia in a dispute over the Bering Strait in which Russia tried to occupy the US island of Savoonga, and prescience in pulling US troops out of the Middle East and repositioning them in Europe to face an anarchic Russia and newly aggressive China.
The sound of the President’s voice was loud inside the confines of the armored vehicle. “Your Excellency. We were not sure you were still alive,” the President said.
“Yes, but please, Stuart, there is no time for formalities.”
The relief in the President’s voice was palpable. “Yun-mi, it is you. My people wanted that test, so we could be sure.” Ri was also relieved. The North Korean and US leaders had been on first name terms in private for at least two years, but it was not known outside their innermost circles.
“I understand. Mr President, please know this. My first call since escaping was to you. I heard about the nuclear attack, but I have not contacted my own General Staff yet. We must stop this madness now.”
“Yun-mi, my question to you is, can you stop this madness?” Fenner asked. “Do you have control of your nuclear arsenal?”
“Yes, I can,” Madam Kim said, trying to regain her composure. “The conspirators stole a one-time code giving them missile launch authority. As soon as I conclude this call, it will be rescinded. There will be no further attacks, Stuart.”
“There already have been, Yun-mi,” Fenner said. He told her about Guam.
“But not nuclear? Please, not nuclear?” Ri saw that his leader’s face was ashen.
Ri heard voices on the President’s end of the call before he replied. “No. There was damage to our facilities and multiple casualties from the impact of the re-entry vehicles, but no, no nuclear detonations.”
Kim could not hide her relief. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”
“Another question. Is the South Korean President with you?”
Kim looked at Ri, hesitating before answering. “Stall,” he whispered.
She leaned closer to the microphone. “President Shin is dead. He died in the fighting at the Peace Dam. The circumstances are … unclear.”
Fenner cursed. “Dammit. Yun-mi, our infrared satellites have picked up indications of combat in the vicinity of your Yongdoktong arsenal. My people here want to know…”
“Stuart, I am sorry. I will answer all of your questions later. Now, I must call my Chief of General Staff and regain control of my military. Can I have your commitment the USA and its Korean allies will do nothing precipitous before we speak again?”
“I can’t promise you anything; our strategic missile forces are on a hair trigger,” Fenner said. “Russia and China have put their armed forces on high alert and I delayed a call to the Chinese General Secretary to speak with you. South Korea’s military is mobilizing from West to East. I have three carrier task forces moving into position off the coast of Korea. If the lunatics in your military launch more ballistic missiles, if they threaten our bases or population centers…”
“I understand, Stuart. And because of that, I must go, I am sorry.”
There was muffled conversation at the other end of the line, then Fenner came back on. “Yun-mi, I can give you thirty minutes. If you don’t get back to me within that time I am going to authorize air and cruise missile strikes on targets inside North Korea. Today’s events have left me no choice unless you can show you are regaining control of your military. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Stuart. I will be in touch again inside thirty minutes,” she said, nodding at Ri, who realized he had just been appointed de facto White House liaison.
She handed the handset back to Ri, who handed it to the South Korean communications officer. Ri turned to Kim. “Your Excellency, your next call?”
“Chief of Staff Khang in Pyongyang,” she said. “I need to understand who is loyal and who is part of this insane conspiracy. We need to immediately ground all air force aircraft, as a signal to the Americans and only Khang can do that.”
Ri nodded and turned to the South Korean again. “All right, this is going to be harder. Let’s talk through it…”
Two hours later, on the highway outside the Peace Dam, Captain Ri opened the ramp at the rear of the K21 IFV and stumbled out.
Sometime in the last two hours, the sun had set. The crew of the IFV was sitting on their butts on the side of the road. The rest of the South Korean column was gone, no doubt on to the Peace Dam.
Ri felt his legs going, and sat before he collapsed. His protectee was inside, lying across the bench seat with her hands folded over her forehead.
A South Korean officer stood and approached Ri. “All right. We have orders to…”
Ri held up a hand wearily. “Your orders are irrelevant,” he told the man. “There is a helicopter inbound from North Korea to pick us up. The flight was approved by your acting President, So-wa Yoon. Have your superiors consult with your headquarters if you wish.”
The man frowned, turned and waved to his comms operator to bring him a field radio.
Ri folded his arms across his knees and rested his head on them.
North Korea’s Chief of Staff had not been among the conspirators. Though he protested strongly, he agreed to Kim’s order to ground all North Korean air force aircraft and order all naval vessels, including submarines, to return to port. She’d called the US President back immediately.
