Phantom Leader Part 42

"Yes. Hurry up. What do you want to talk about?"

Flak walked as casually as he could to the small table and put his eyes back on the Embajada Sueca as he slowly poured some more soda. He started a circular search pattern. The streets were small, the Spanish writing cramped. He had just spotted the word britfinica when Ceballos snapped at him.

"Get over here. What about mathematics ?"

Flak walked back. "One equals two," he said to Ceballos.

"What? You are a crazy man today."

"One equals two. Let me have some paper and a pencil."

"What do you mean?" He handed Flak a pencil and tore a page from a large yellow notepad.

Flak wrote some letters and figures. "See, 'a' equals W equals one. You go along with that?"

Ceballos nodded, still frowning.

"Now," Flak said, "multiply 'a' equals 'b' by 'a' on each side of the equation and what do you have?"

"You have'a'squared equals'a'times'b'," Ceballos said, no longer frowning.

"Very good." Flak could see he was getting interested.

"Now subtract W squared from each side, then factor each side. What do you have?" He pushed the paper to Ceballos and walked back to the soda tray. He found the Embajada Britdnica and began mentally tracing the route back to the Hoa Lo prison, which he discovered was on avenida Hoa Lo.

Ceballos spoke in a proud voice. "Here. Look at this."

Flak walked to the desk. He needed more time to imprint the map and exact route from the prison through the myriad of twisting routes and small streets. The general direction was north if the map was oriented to the north. Ceballos spun the yellow paper for Flak to see his equation.

a = b = I a' = ab a'-bl = ab-bl (a + b) (a b) b (a b) "That is very, very good, Mister Ceballos. You are an educated man. Now let's divide each side by 'a' minus W and what do we have?" When Ceballos slid the paper back under his pen, Flak walked back to the tray. He noted the map was oriented to the north. By now he was slos.h.i.+ng in soda, so he started filling his s.h.i.+rt pockets with peanuts as he memorized the streets and alleyways.

"Hey, man," Ceballos said. "This is no good." Flak stayed at the wall.

He almost had what he needed. Just a few more seconds. "What is this?"

Ceballos said in a louder voice. "Come here. You did something wrong.

Come here."

As Flak walked back to the table, he kept repeating in his mind which street was which, what direction they should turn after how many blocks.

Ceballos tapped the yellow paper. "Come on now, what is this nonsense?"

"We agreed 'a' equals W equals 'one,' didn't we?" Flak said. Under the factored remainder of "a" plus "b" equals "b," he wrote "one" plus "one"

equals "one." Under that he wrote "two" equals "one," then casually put the pencil in his s.h.i.+rt pocket.

(a + b) (a - b) b (a - b) a+b b 1+1 I.

2 = I He pushed the paper to Ceballos and prayed Ceballos would react as he wanted. Ceballos did. He studied the equation, went over the points with his pencil, muttering about something being wrong. "Bah," he said, sat back, and flipped the paper to Flak, who casually put his hand on it.

"This is nonsense. Get on with it. What did you want to talk about? It can't be this." He waved his hand at the paper, which Flak desperately wanted.

"Yes, actually," Flak said after a pause, during which he ran over the streets and turns one more time in his mind.

"Actually I wanted to talk to you about the Geneva Convention. North Vietnam signed it, you know. So did Cuba."

"What about the Geneva Convention?" Ceballos said, nearly grinding his teeth.

"I think you should be treating all of us in accordance with the Geneva Convention." As Ceballos erupted, Flak abstractedly folded the yellow paper into squares.

"Geneva Convention?" Ceballos yelled in puzzlement.

"You dare talk of Geneva Convention?"

"Yes. Treat us as prisoners of war are supposed to be treated under the Geneva Convention. You have our cards."

Flak almost smiled. All USAF crews flew with their blue USAF ID cards and a small white card that said the bearer should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention if captured. The card was a source of great cynical merriment to all. Flak casually pocketed the folded paper.

Ceballos burst out from behind his desk and slapped Flak across the mouth.

"You are insane!" he yelled. "You are not a prisoner of war. Your El Presidente Lyndon s.h.i.+t Johnson never DECLARED war. You are a CRIMINAL.

You have committed crimes against the peace-loving people of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam." He slapped Flak twice more. "Back to your cell," he bellowed. "Think about your crimes."

He pounded on his desk. "Guard," he yelled. "Take this criminal away."

8th Tactical Fighter Wing UDORN ROYAL AIR FORCE BASE KINGDOM OF THAILAND When Court and Howie Joseph had debriefed the location of the big gun that had fired at them, Hostettler had transferred the coordinates to a larger map, then checked his foreign-weapons book made up by the specialized Foreign Technologies Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

"About like this," he said as he drew a circle around the point. "This circle represents the maximum range the gun could be from the bursts at 15,000 feet. There are certain areas within that circle we can discount because of terrain features. It couldn't fire from the backside of a mountain, for example." He pointed to a karst peak at WE84524475. "This is where I think it is. This peak is 4,900 feet high, and see here, just under the northwest tip, would be a perfect spot for a gun platform. It's level, firm, and big enough for a gun of that size."

Court and Toby examined the spot. "Okay, Toby," Court said, "here's your chance to show me what you know about the Trail." He pointed to the 1:50,000 map Hostettler had made up for them. He put his finger on the WE coordinate Hostettler had marked. It was at the southwest tip of a high karst outcropping called Rho Magna.

"h.e.l.l of a name for a hunk of karst," Toby said. He stepped back. "If we get there early enough we'll have light fog. We will be able to see through it well enough to avoid smacking into anything, but the gunners won't yet be able to see us until it burns off."

"Sounds good. Gives us a chance to get oriented." Court traced the name Rho Magna on the map. "Strange," he said.

He felt a strange tickle at the base of his spine. "Rho is the funny 'p' letter of the Greek alphabet and magna means 'great' in Latin. No comparable meanings in Lao. Pha or phu means mountain."

They gathered their gear and headed for the door. "I've never seen it in the daytime," Court said. "Just flew around it at night. Flew down the river, past those bends that look like a hatchet, and there it was.

Howie Joseph and I are positive the big gun is there. All I want to do today is make sure of its location, then we'll see about putting it down."

"Ah, Court, just how do you plan to make sure of its location?" Toby asked as they rode in the crew van to the airplane.

"We'll have to drag it a few times to make it come up."

"That's what I thought," Toby said with a sigh. "You know, in O-2s all we dragged was the home drorne before we landed. Anything more than that and we'd get sawed in half."

"That's not what I hear about you, Tobes old buddy. You dragged that SF detachment in South Vietnam with an O-1, and then you dragged Mu Gia with an O-2 last November when the PJs were fis.h.i.+ng me out."

"Yeah, dumb, wasn't it? That's when I was young and foolish."

Forty minutes later, at first light, they were four miles above the light mist blanketing the area north of Rho Magna. Sharp brown-and-green karst peaks protruded through the gauze cover like moss-covered rocks through snow. Court checked in with Invert, their radar control, then took a second to examine his map. The universal code name for this section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was Delta 32. Their call sign was Phantom.

They were silent for a few miles, then Court spoke.

"Okay," he said, A think it's that odd-shaped karst south of AL us. Starting down," he said as he pulled the throttles back and told Invert they'd be on the deck for a while, hence out of sight below their radar sweep.

"Cleared," Toby said in his official FAC voice. "INS readout agrees.

Check gun switches on, fuel-tank selector set to external."

"Roger, switches on, tanks set."

Wind noise built up as Court lowered the nose of the big Phantom fighter. They were carrying a gun in the centerline station; a rocket pod and a fuel tank under each wing. They had topped off with fuel from the Peach tanker. Heading south now, Court leveled at 2,500 feet and followed the thin thread of the Xe Ban Fai River, barely visible below the mist. He pushed the throttles up to maintain the 500 knots airspeed he had obtained in his dive.

"There's the Hatchet under the right wing," he called to Toby.

"Tally."

"Let's check the doughnuts," Court said. On the ground before takeoff, each man had inscribed a circle with a grease pencil on each side of his canopy in the ten o'clock and two o'clock position. The small circles were drawn around their view of a preselected object at a distance of 1,000 feet. Whenever either pilot wanted to put the eyes of the other on an object too small to point out readily, and he had the time, he would take the controls and position his doughnut over it.

Court dipped the right wing and put his doughnut over a river bend.

"Roger on the river bend," Toby said from the backseat.

The early mist flitted under the racing fighter as Court jinked from side to side while gaining and losing several hundred feet of alt.i.tude to spoil an eager gunner's tracking solution. While aware of his tall karst objective straight ahead at two miles, Court's eyes flicked all over the terrain on both sides of the aircraft, searching for muzzle flashes while at the same time logging in memory the dips and peaks of the rugged terrain. This was not a time to be consulting a map.

He was not even conscious of moving the flight controls.

He was the airplane, the airplane was him: one ent.i.ty. He desired to be one place and he was there, he desired another and he was in that place.

A pilot, a good one, is always conscious of where the switches in the c.o.c.kpit are positioned, what radio and navigation frequency he has tuned in, his fuel state, how his engine is performing, and what his heading, alt.i.tude, and airspeed are. The same pilot is not conscious of moving the controls this way or that. They get moved and that's all there is to it.

Court pulled tight over a karst outcropping. "Everything I look at seems a good place to hide a gun," he said against the G-force pulling at his body.

"Roger that. Glad none of them are shooting at us."

"They will be, soon enough," Court said. He swung his eyes forward. "Oh my G.o.d," he breathed.

Directly in front, Rho Magna towered black and green a half-mile above his head, like a crouching dragon. Court was in line with the razor-sharp karst ridge that ran north from the wide top of Rho Magna, then abruptly descended into the mist in front of Court's airplane like the crenellated neck of the dragon. Court stared with mesmerized horror at the dominating ma.s.s, his mind suddenly filled with a revulsion so primal it made his whole body recoil and try to shrink into itself, like an early hunter seeing his first charging dinosaur.

With a reflex barely under control, he pulled the trigger and started firing his 20mm cannon at the neck of the dragon. He delighted in the sparkling of the high-explosive incendiary rounds as he marched them up the neck to the heart of the Rho Magna dragon.

"Pull up, pull up!" Toby hollered from the backseat.

In a flash Court released the trigger, rolled left, and pulled back on the stick, converting his hundreds of knots into alt.i.tude. He slammed the throttles into afterburner at the same time. In seconds they leveled at 15,000 feet, two miles above Rho Magna, in a left-hand orbit, circling the huge karst mountain. From the sides it looked even more like a two-mile-long dragon sleeping with its long crenellated neck stretching north, curving down to the low mound of its head, which was a rounded hill a few hundred feet in height. Court estimated the base width of the Rho Magna dragon at a third of a mile. The razor back of the dragon rose to nearly 5,000 feet, then sloped down to the south into a line of rock that could be taken as a curled tail. A section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail split at the nose, then ran along each side to rejoin at the rear.

"Sorry, Tobes. Guess I wanted a closer look at that rockpile. This is the first time I've seen it in the daylight. Had no idea it looked like that." Court spoke in as calm a voice as he could manage.

"That is one spooky place," Toby said. "Did you know you were shooting at it?"

"Ah, sure," Court said, barely aware he had pulled the trigger. "Sure.

Indeed. Now let's figure out the best place to hide that big gun.

Hostettler thinks it's under the northwest tip of the thing."

Court settled down and began varying his alt.i.tude between 15,000 and 17,000 feet and made varying angles of bank in his turns. He selected that alt.i.tude because the deadly twin- and quad-barrel ZSU 23mm rapid-firing guns were effective to 9,500 feet, and the 37mm could shoot its clips of 5 to 7 rounds up to just over 13,000 feet.

"See there," Toby said, taking the controls for a minute and placing his left doughnut over a plateau barely visible in the northwest corner.

"Got it," Court said. The small plateau commanded a field of fire to the north and west and appeared bare of vegetation. The mist had burned off and the whole area was clear. "Let's go down and take a closer look."

"Okay, but move it. It's too d.a.m.n quiet around here."

In answer, Court rolled the big Phantom on its back and pulled the nose down in a Split-S maneuver that looked like the last half of a loop. He left the throttles up and was soon pointing straight down, with the airspeed needle approaching 550 knots, which was 630 miles per hour.

Pa.s.sing through 10,000, he eased back on the stick and brought the nose up to a 60-degree dive angle. He was west of Rho Magna, headed north to parallel the beast. At 7,000 feet he started back on the stick so as to flash past the plateau at 5,000 feet of alt.i.tude a few hundred feet off to one side. That way he and Toby could take a good look at the possible gun site from a slant range of less than 1,000 feet.

"Five seventy-five," Toby called out against the roaring of the 660-mile-per-hour wind outside their canopy. "That ought to give us zipper protection." A good ZPU gun crew could manually track an airplane indicating 500 knots at a range of 1,000 meters.

In seconds they were just off the plateau, staring down at a 20-by-40-foot clearing made brown by rocks and sand.

"No tracks, no ruts, no bent vegetation, no blast marks, no gun," Toby said as Court pulled west and started to jink and zoom to alt.i.tude.

"Toby, I saw-"

Suddenly four black-and-orange 37mm bursts bracketed the speeding jet, a terrific bang from underneath blew them into a vertical bank to the left, and the c.o.c.kpit pressure dumped with a blasting roar, sucking the air from their lungs. Court righted the airplane, put his regulator to 100 percent oxygen, and did what every pilot whoever took a hit did immediately: he let someone know what and where as fast as he could in case he went down.

"Invert," he gasped against the pressure from his mask, "Phantom Leader is. .h.i.t, five miles west of Delta 32." There was no answer. "Toby, you okay?" he asked as several warning lights came on in the c.o.c.kpit.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Man, look at that right wing. We done took a solid hit." The right wing had a hole several inches in diameter through the trailing edge. "I think it blew the wing tank clean off."

"It sure as h.e.l.l did," Court said, holding heavy right rudder against the drag from the ]one tank on the left. "And the tailpipe temp is climbing on the right engine. See any smoke?"

Toby looked through the rearview mirror mounted on the right of his canopy bow. "Yeah, a thin stream. Can't see any flames. How does she handle?"

Court did a rapid damage check by moving the controls while checking the hydraulic gages. "Number One flight control is a little low, but Number Two is full up. Right generator is out. The right-engine oil pressure is low." He pulled the throttle back to midrange. "But I've stabilized the temperature."

"No more smoke," Toby said.

Court leveled at 15,000 feet, heading west toward the safety of Thailand and Udorn. "I've got to punch off that left tank," he said. "Too hard to handle." He centered the needle EEL_ and ball in an instrument on his panel that depicted the degree of bank angle and skid, and hit the b.u.t.ton to jettison the left fuel tank.

Immediately he could release right rudder pressure.

"That's better," he said. "She'll hold okay on just one engine, and we've got one and a half. Fuel level looks okay for the moment, but we need to top off on a tanker to make Udorn. How about trying to contact Invert for me?"