The Tin Man (49 page)

The lead F-16 pilot shined the searchlight into the A-5’s cockpit canopy from a distance of less than fifty meters. What he saw shocked him again: the North Korean pilot was not wearing a helmet! It looked as if the pilot had simply climbed in the plane and blasted off without any of his flight gear! That explained why he never heard the radio or configuration warnings.

The North Korean pilot shielded his eyes from the searchlight—and, thankfully, turned away from the F-16. Good—they were no longer heading directly for the heart of the capital. The ROK pilot
edged closer to the A-5 and shined the light in his cockpit again, and again the A-5 turned away. He was almost heading southeast now, well away from Seoul. This time, the F-16 pilot flew slightly above and closer to the North Korean A-5, and the intruder descended and turned away again. The Communist pilot appeared to be screaming at the F-16, gesturing wildly while shielding his eyes from the blinding light.

Dare he hope this would actually work? The ROK pilot called up a list of nearby Category Echo airfields and found a deactivated military base, Hongch’on, less than thirty miles away. It was isolated, with the nearest populated area a small town over twenty miles away. There was no time to search for a better choice.

The F-16 pilot found the North Korean pilot to be manically single-minded, which worked to his advantage: if he steered away from the A-5, the Communist pilot tried to turn right toward Seoul, but if he crowded him, he turned left away from him; if he climbed over him, the
Communist
descended, but if he flew at the same altitude, the A-5 pilot would try to climb back to original altitude or maintain altitude. Good.

“Sapphire Control, this is Tiger Lead, I have the hostile turned toward Hongch’on, and I will attempt to get him to land,” the lead F-16 pilot radioed. “Have security and special weapon maintenance crews standing by. Our ETE is fifteen minutes.”

They were over Hongch’on in a little more than twenty minutes. The airstrip was being illuminated by several trucks shining their headlights onto the concrete, and it was more than enough light. Herding the reluctant North Korean pilot to land on the long nine-thousand-foot runway was proving more difficult. It was as if the North Korean pilot finally
realized what the F-16 was forcing him to do, and he constantly tried to turn away from the runway. Finally, the wingman got on the A-5’s left side, and they boxed him in. But when the leader tried to force the A-5 lower and onto the runway centerline a third time, the A-5 rolled hard left, striking the wingman’s right wingtip.

“Damn! He mid-aired me! Tiger Two is lost wingman!” the second F-16 pilot shouted as he climbed away from the North Korean attack plane. “Lead, I have substantial damage to my right wing-tip and number ten weapon station. I am climbing, passing five thousand.”

“How is your controllability?” the leader asked. “Do you need an escort?”

“Negative,” the wingman replied. “I feel a slight vibration from the damage area, and I’ve lost some airspeed, but I have no warning or caution lights and my controls feel okay. I have safed and locked all my weapons. Still showing full connectivity on all stations except number ten. I am visually inspecting my right pylon …” The lead F-16 pilot knew his wingman was fishing a flashlight out of his flight suit pocket so he could see his wingtip: “I have lost my number ten weapon. Substantial damage to my right wingtip, but very little observed damage to my right wing.”

“Good,” the lead F-16 pilot responded with relief. “Stay above us at ten thousand feet until I end this intercept, and then I will escort you back to base.” He got a fuel status from his wingman—he had over an hour’s worth of fuel remaining. More than enough.

The Communist A-5 was trying to turn back toward Seoul again. The lead F-16 moved in tight on his right side and fired his 20-millimeter cannon. The blaze of the muzzle flash made the A-5 pilot
nearly flip over in shock and fear, and he turned away exactly as before. The ROK pilot waited until the A-5 had turned almost all the way around toward Hongch’on. Then he yanked the throttle, dropped back a few hundred feet behind the A-5, kicked in a little left rudder, and fired a one-second stream of shells across the A-5’s tail, being careful not to shoot below the wings at the chemical-weapon bombs.

The shells ripped across the horizontal and vertical control surfaces, ripping them to shreds. Several rounds entered the engine exhaust, and the F-16 pilot could see sparks and then a fire spread into the engine compartment. The A-5’s airspeed, already at absolute maximum because of the hanging gear and flaps, was cut nearly to nothing in the blink of an eye as the engine slowly began to disintegrate. The North Korean A-5 dropped like a brick.

Even though the Communist pilot was obviously suffering from some mental lapse for flying without his gear, fortunately his instinct and training took over as his fighter began to die. As the A-5 fell, the fire was extinguished, and the fighter nosed over to help build up airspeed. As it did, the pilot was able to maneuver his stricken, jet toward the runway at Hongchon.

Incredibly, the pilot almost managed to plant his fighter on the runway. The A-5 was in a landing attitude, nose up slightly to try to preserve some airspeed, when it slammed into the ground about three miles short of the runway, onto the soft peat earth surrounding the airfield. The F-16 pilot, trying to keep the stricken Communist plane in sight as long as possible, watched in horror as the fighter-bomber flipped upside down in the soft earth, then spun across the ground. The bombs and fuel tank scattered—he couldn’t see where they landed.

As the F-16 pilot climbed away from Hongch’on, he thanked the gods that his intended landing base was many, many miles away.

T
he provincial police evacuated the village of Hongch’on quickly and efficiently, while forces from the Republic of Korea Army base at Yongsan sealed off the area within twenty miles of the crash site. Thankfully, the early morning winds were light, so they anticipated no more evacuations for several hours until the rising sun stirred the atmosphere again. Village officials were simply told that a military plane had crashed, and that was good enough for them all.

Slowly, deliberately, the army nuclear weapons experts closed in toward the crash site. There was much evidence of fire and debris everywhere, but they detected no radiation. The fires were small, probably because the A-5 fighter had little fuel left in its tank—just enough for a one-way suicide run over Seoul to dispense its cargo of death. There were no signs of explosion.

The wreckage of the A-5 was found inverted, facing opposite from the direction of flight. The plane was almost intact, a tribute to the tough-as-nails construction of the little attack jet. The centerline fuel tank was crushed up into the bottom of the fuselage, the cockpit canopy had been flattened … and the nuclear weapons were missing.

While searchers fanned out to look for the bombs, the pilot’s body was pulled out of the cockpit. His head was crushed. He was wearing a dark brown wool flight suit ringed at the collar and cuffs with lambswool, typical of the DPRK’s Air Army, but indeed he had no other flight gear—no helmet, no gloves, no survival gear, not even flying boots.
How he had survived the nearly one-hour ordeal in the freezing cold cockpit was impossible to guess. There was no nametag. Some of his insignia, including the pilot’s wings and flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, had been partially torn off. Either the pilot was trying at the last moment to hide his identity or country of origin—or he was ashamed to reveal his homeland.

But the most incredible revelation was the pilot’s body itself. It was as emaciated as a scarecrow’s. He could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds. His chest was sunken, his ribs were visible, and his skin was stretched taut across his skeleton. He looked like a concentration camp survivor, so thin that investigators guessed he might not have had a regular meal in weeks. The body was carried out of the crash site for further investigation.

Less than an hour later, searchers found both thermonuclear gravity bombs. By an incredible stroke of fortune, neither had ruptured. One bomb’s housing had cracked, but there was no spill and the basketball-sized globe of fissionable material was intact. The second bomb was fully intact, minus its tail fins and with several dents and scrapes. The weapons were carefully packaged in lead-lined caskets and carried away for analysis.

South Korea had thus acquired its first two thermonuclear weapons—and, unknown to them or the rest of the world, that tiny nation would never be the same again.

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED
.

THE TIN MAN

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition / 1998
Bantam mass market edition / April 1999

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1998 by Target Direct Productions, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-10254
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42982-7

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