Before leaving South Korea, we grabbed Shep’s helicopter and stowed it aboard. The number two hold had a platform similar to numbers one and four, except it was outfitted as a hangar rather than a weapons station. The domed hold cover kept the helo concealed and out of the weather.
The North Korean Navy was largely composed of aging Soviet and Chinese ships. None could match our level of technology, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous.
I tried to form a battle plan in my mind. Should we give them a chance to surrender first? They probably wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t if I were in their shoes.
The opposite end of that spectrum was a surprise attack from maximum range. Given how far our weapons could travel, we would need a lot of verification to confirm it was actually a North Korean ship before firing.
We might be able to create a lot of chaos by attacking shore targets. Unfortunately, we only had the six Tomahawks that we could actually fire. We could use the guns, but that required us to be much, much closer to land. That exposed us to return fire and limited our maneuvering ability.
As we cleared port, a call came in on the radio from a South Korean frigate that had discovered a submarine not more than two miles from our position. It was a bit of a wakeup call, as no one had suspected that the North Koreans would be able to slip a sub so close to a major shipping port so early in the conflict.
Luckily, the submarine was unable to put up much of a fight once pinned down and we were able to get by without incident. The South Korean ship reported killing the sub a short while later.
I went up to the bow to place the jack flag. It was the historical design with horizontal red and white stripes and a picture of a rattlesnake. While a jack was really only supposed to be used while in port, it looked too badass to waste. I thought that the caption, “Don’t tread on me” was exactly the image we wanted to project.
The stern of the ship flew the stars and stripes. We had various registrations and flags aboard, but the rules of war dictated that couldn’t use that kind of subversion.
We headed up the west side of the Korean Peninsula. The coastline wasn’t very uniform. If we tried to hug the beach, we'd be constantly swerving back and forth. We decided instead to hang out to sea and observe. We were running without radar so it would be harder to pick us up. The downside was that we couldn’t see what lay beyond the horizon and would have to rely on information supplied to us.
Andy was trying to get a deal set up with the Naval Reconnaissance Office to get us real-time satellite support. That would allow seeing the ocean around us without using the radar. It was high-demand technology, but it’s not like any other ships were around at the moment to use it.
The CIC had two workstations that controlled the radar, weapons, navigation, damage control, and our unfortunately primitive sonar. It was also internet-connected so Andy and Hawker use it for gaming. Now that we were running low-profile, all emissions off the ship, including internet, had been temporarily shut down.
The rest of the ship hadn’t suffered any due to the electronic blackout. Well, maybe the wireless internet in the crew cabins, but that was about it.
Below decks, Jeff had his four turbines to operate although they were so new and smooth-running they probably didn’t need supervision. The ship’s electrical system could automatically switch power between the generators and whatever needed the electricity they produced.
Shep’s helicopter was an old Huey that had been owned personally by him before he was hired to the company. It was mostly for utility airlift work, but we’d gotten our hands on a pair of M240 machine guns that could be mounted to it. When we had no reason for him to fly, he filled in as a regular crew member.
Jones spent most of her time in the CIC waiting for something to happen. There were a few secure communications radios that would from time to time bring us some news. We didn’t transmit back, because even if it was encrypted and the message couldn’t be deciphered the signal might still be noticed and used to find us.
To keep everyone alert, we had begun standing four-hour watches. Four hours on, four hours off. This left us with only half the crew on duty at any given time, but it was the closest thing to sustainable shifts we could do.
The night after the submarine incident, it started to rain. Some kind of weather system was moving across the East China Sea and picking up strength. It couldn’t reach the full potential of a mid-ocean storm, but the weather report said it was going to be big.
The weather was a two-edged sword. It would help us stay hidden, but it would also hurt our own ability to spot enemies. Luckily, we knew where they would all be.
We had received a tip about a North Korean convoy that was massing up to resupply their fighting units. They would be using a coastal road. Andy had managed to get the satellite link set, and we would be able to tap into it. The only problem was, we didn’t know a good place to catch them, or exactly when they would be there.
Going over some of the data supplied to us, I picked a spot that appeared to have low population. There was a radar site a short ways down the coast that for some reason wasn’t operating. Either it had been hit early on or had simply been turned off, I didn’t know.
The satellite that had been loaned to us was in a longitudinal orbit. This traced a vertical track between the poles. At the moment, it was on the other side of the Earth, but it should be in position by the time we needed it.
We slid up to the coast. Fifteen miles out, I ordered the number one and number four hold covers opened to unmask the weapons. The rain continued hard enough that I couldn’t actually see if they were open. The indicator lights on the controls were all I had to go by.
At the moment, we were proceeding by dead-reckoning and inertial guidance. GPS used signals broadcast to satellites, and we couldn’t afford to be detected by anything at the moment. Our passive electronic sensors did pick up the beams of a coastal radar further up the shore, but it was too far away to concern us.
Running around without radar in the middle of a storm was a sure recipe for a collision. There might be a small boat out there that we couldn’t see. I’d pulled Jeff from below decks to help us scan the outside. Even with night vision and thermal sensors, the rain limited the distance we could see.
Andy got on the intercom. “We’re four miles out,” he said. “The satellite is coming up now.” That was much closer to shore than I was comfortable, but the terrible weather would help hide us. We’d already decided to use guns for this and save the Tomahawks for another time. One missile was preprogrammed with the coordinates of the quiet radar site, just in case.
Far above the Earth, the recon satellite had passed the north pole and was starting on its way back towards the south. It wasn’t directly overhead of Korea, instead looking down from a low angle. The picture would get better until it was directly overhead and then it would fade again until the satellite disappeared around the other side of the world.
Andy shouted, “We’re going to be late! They’re already here!”
The supply convoy had started sooner than expected and by the time the satellite had appeared, we had nearly missed our window. At the helm, I shoved the speed control up to full.
Another reason for getting so close was that we didn’t have confidence in our aim. The guns had not been designed for what we were trying to do, and other than a few practice shots here and there they hadn’t been perfectly calibrated.
We drove towards the coast at a forty five degree angle to maximize closing speed and also try to keep us ahead of the convoy. From the satellite feed that Andy beamed to the screen on the bridge, it looked like a dozen or so trucks.
The fore gun fired at three miles. The shell was packed with high explosive and it slammed into the beach, short of the road by a quarter of a mile.
The aft gun fired, sending the next shell two hundred yards past the road and just behind the convoy. By now, the North Koreans knew they were being shot at and the vehicles sped up, driving erratically.
The muzzle flash of the guns was not bad at all considering their size. Through the storm, it probably could not even be seen from shore.
The sixth shot finally found the range and bit off the last three trucks in the convoy. It appeared to land directly on one of them, and the resulting fireball consumed the next two before they could stop.
“Oh yeah!” shouted Andy, loud enough to hear even without the intercom.
The rest of the convoy had to be taken care of quickly. Each gun only carried twenty shells in its magazine, and it needed a crew to keep it loaded for continuous operation, once again something we couldn’t do with our present manpower.
The next two shots were misses, and then one slammed down on the road in front of the convoy. The lead truck skidded and fell into the crater. The rest stopped and tried to turn around.
Just then, the dormant coastal radar kicked on and it was so close that there was no way they didn’t have a return off of us. I had no idea if it was connected to weapons or not, but we were lit up like a Christmas tree for anyone to observe.
I threw the wheel hard over than the ship rotated, pointing back out to sea. “Kill that thing,” I shouted at Andy. “Port side, Tomahawk.” We hadn’t completed our turn yet, and the radar was closest to that side. Demonstrating his ability to multitask, Andy kept the aft gun firing as the ship swung around.
Without hesitating, I transferred control to Jeff and made for the stairs. He grabbed my shoulder.
“Hearing protection,” he said, giving me a pair of earmuffs. Despite still hearing steady gunfire, I had forgotten all about it. Out on the deck it would be deafening.
I went down the stairs from the bridge to the deck and dashed out into the rain. I had no doubt that the box launcher could stillopen with the covering tarp in place and I didn’t think scraps of tarp would affect the missile, but better safe than sorry.
I had just gotten the tarp peeled back when the launcher began to open. There was going to be a lot of smoke and fire, so I flew back inside and went up to the bridge. The seal on the missile tube broke open and the Tomahawk shot out on a column of fire. The booster burned out and the missile’s turbofan engine activated.
The radar operators must have seen the missile launch because they shut down. The Tomahawk was GPS guided and didn’t care. It had enough fuel to go quite a distance, but the radar site was only about eleven miles away. When the missile impacted, all the unburned fuel added to the conflagration.
We ran hard to the west for close to an hour. Other radar sites in the area were turning on, but most had only faint signals. I was still soaking wet, but helped reload the guns because there was a chance we might need them again soon.
Everyone who had been sleeping had awakened by the gunfire. We all gathered to watch the replay of the satellite footage. Every single truck in the convoy had been disabled, and fires still burned among the wreckage of the radar site. Our first raid had been a solid success.
We didn’t immediately get the chance to press our advantage. The Navy asked us to move south for escort duty. I didn’t mind a bit, because it seemed less dangerous than actively looking for trouble, and because I got them to agree to pay us a daily rate.
There was a problem, though. We had to get to friendly waters. On the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, there are several islands that were considered South Korean property, despite lying above the 38th parallel. We’d ducked inside North Korean waters for our attack and now were heading south as close to the islands as possible. There hadn’t yet been a North Korean offensive to land troops there yet, but it seemed like they would try soon. This was not lost on the South, and we passed more than a few warships.
We kept to the shallows trying to stay in places where submarines couldn’t go. Subs were probably our biggest threat. According to the information that we had, worse case would be a Sang-O class loaded with Russian-made 53-65 torpedoes. The Sang-Os themselves weren’t very impressive, but they were small enough to slip into fairly shallow water, and the weapons they carried were very difficult to fool.
Back in reasonably safe territory we rendezvoused with USNS Observation Island. It was a naval auxiliary ship operated jointly by the Air Force, Navy and various intelligence agencies to track missile tests, both ours and other countries’. It was not a great ship to take into battle. It had been built in the 1950s and was painted bright white with a blue and gold band around the funnel that denoted that it belonged to the Naval Reserve. I had once read that on a dollar per ton basis, it was the most expensive non-combat vessel operated by the Naval Auxiliary. It didn’t carry any defensive weapons, but it had something we needed.
On the aft deck sat the enormous AN/SPQ-11 “Cobra Judy” radar array. It was twenty two feet in diameter and mounted on a turret so that it could be turned to point in any direction. It was the only one that had ever been built, and it was worth close to a billion dollars.
While Observation Island had been due for replacement a few years ago, for some reason she had been kept around. The crew and technicians aboard seemed skeptical of our capabilities. I couldn’t really blame them. I would have liked to have been escorted by a whole fleet too, but that wasn’t going to happen. We had been promised the help of one South Korean corvette, but it wouldn’t arrive until the next day. There might be some other friendly units out there, but we hadn't gotten clearance to break radio silence to contact them. Until then, we would just have to make it work.
We ventured north again, leading the radar ship. It couldn’t make the same headway as Heinlein, and we had to slow down. On deck, I noticed a camera crew that didn’t appear to be wearing the standard uniform. I wondered if they were civilians and why they were there.
Night was falling before we got near our destination. It had taken a little time to put together a strike plan for getting directly at the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, but now it was ready. We would screen Observation Island while the powerful radar did its thing. Its purpose that night was to create a distraction so a wing of Air Force strike fighters could hit Pyongyang.
The exact details on Cobra Judy were classified, but it was reasonable to assume that it produced several million watts of power. Its big brother, Cobra Dane, located at a ground facility in the Aleutians, was said to be able to detect a basketball at distance of two thousand miles.
If we could get reasonably close to the large bay at the mouth of the Taedong River, we would be less than fifty miles from Pyongyang. The blast of radio waves would get the attention of every radar and signals installation in the area. There was even a chance of damaging some of the delicate components by overloading them with input. At the very least, it would occupy so much bandwidth to effectively jam most of their systems. Cobra Judy had a high-powered surprise for the North Koreans.
It was here that we received word of backup. Help was on the way, and we watched expectantly. Out of the night came a sleek grey warship. I thought for a moment that it might be an old Spruance-class destroyer, but suddenly realized its true identity. It was TMS Ponyville, the Earth-based cruiser of the Equestrian Navy.
"Sorry we aren't authorized to stay long," came the Commanding Officer's voice over the radio. "We were told that there was an Equestrian citizen somewhere around here and that she needed protection."
I glanced at Penny, who looked somewhat bewildered. While I had heard that Princess Celestia was reluctant to engage in the Korean conflict, citing political unpopularity in her country, a protection mission was perfectly fine. Granted, one citizen of Equestria purposely going with a mixed-nationality crew into a hostile zone just barely qualified, but Celestia was good enough at the chess game of politics to pull it off. I was glad.
Ponyville formed up with us to escort the radar ship. The costal radars around the mouth of the river were not operating. They must have been easier targets than Pyongyang. We stealthily slipped into the bay, and it seemed that our luck was going to hold. No lights showed on shore, and there were no enemy ships.
The operation was coordinated by the clock. At a certain time, the radar would come on, and a flight of F-16 fighters would pass overhead on their way to the target. I waited, counting down the seconds.
Heinlein and Ponyville were positioned to seaward of Observation Island so we weren’t getting blasted with the radar. As the time approached, the deck crews went indoors because when Cobra Judy finally came to life, the air almost shimmered with the pure power radiating from the antenna.
The radar used a phased array system that allowed operators to “steer” the beams in order to focus and aim them wherever they wanted. This allowed the beam to remain tight and low to the ground in order to disturb the North Koreans while not interfering with the Air Force planes.
It didn’t take very long before we started getting some resistance. Due to the focused beam, there was an area on either side of us that wasn’t getting saturated. Communications started to pick up.
Suddenly, a few new radars that hadn’t been there before lit up. They must have been portable sets mounted on trucks or something. They had the profile of an attack guidance radar.
Without much choice, we lit up our own tracking radar. The North Koreans had some nasty anti-ship missiles to worry about. We were less than ten miles from shore. I swung the wheel over to expose the RAM launcher. The hold covers had been open since we’d entered North Korean waters earlier.
If we’d had a satellite to use at the moment, the hostile radar and whatever it was attached to would have already been toast. As it was, we were going to have to hunt and guess with some long range gunfire.
On the low power radio link to the other two ships, I stated my intentions. There was a decent chance Cobra Judy might interfere with our defensive missile shots, but we couldn’t shut it down in the middle of the operation and back out on the strike planes.
And then—incoming. A launcher on our side of the shore had fired at us. It was probably a Soviet “Termit” missile or its Chinese derivative “Silkworm.” We could expect a high subsonic closing speed and an incredible amount of damage if it hit us.
The RAM launcher swiveled on its mount and fired. Seconds passed and there was a puff of flame several miles away. The radar showed no more enemy missile.
Just then, the guns began firing. At about the same time, a second missile was launched. RAM fired again and got another kill.
Ponyville hammered away with its own artillery. I saw a couple of flashes and rising smoke trails as Tomahawks were ripple-fired.
Seconds ticked by, feeling like ages. I was poised for another North Korean missile, but all of a sudden all the radars had gone dark and we were out of targets.
I hit the intercom button. “Shep, Jeff, get to the fore gun and begin reloading.” I turned to Nika, who was standing with me on the bridge. “You have the conn.”
She nodded. “I have the conn.” I went below decks to help reload. The missile sites had come out of nowhere, and taking them out had required a dozen or so shells from each gun. We couldn’t afford to get caught with empty magazines.
The shells were stored in an armored room below the gun. We had to manually load them into the magazine so the gun could use them. In a few minutes, we were finished with the fore gun and made our way aft to deal with the other one.
When I came back to the bridge, I saw Observation Island beginning to move. “Mission complete,” came the voice of the combat controller who had choreographed the operation from his position aboard. “Stand by to receive casualties,” he added dryly.
Nika was technically still in charge since I hadn’t relived her when I came back. She swung the wheel to maneuver Heinlein into a position better suited to the task.
Thirty two fighters had gone in. Twenty nine came back. Really not too bad considering that North Korean airspace had some of the densest air defenses on the planet. Without a complete analysis of the operation, it was hard to know what went wrong and what could have gone better, but it seemed safe to say that Cobra Judy had earned the rest of the night off.
One of the fighters had been damaged and wouldn’t make it home. I heard the pilot talking to the combat controller and planning his ditch. They selected a spot and the pilot ejected. A couple of pegasi from the embarked air unit aboard Ponyville picked him up and brought him over to us. His leg was wrenched in the ejection, but he was conscious. The pilot seemed surprised at pony rescuers, but certainly wasn’t complaining.
We got him back to the ship. When the medical team from Observation Island was ready they transferred over in a small boat.
We had a medical room aboard, and in the current situation, it seemed better not to move the pilot to the other ship. His name was Major Brinell. Jones was no doctor, but she had gone to medical school for a couple of years before joining the CIA, so she was most qualified.
I had gone down to the medical bay to meet the man. I asked him if he wanted something for the pain.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Pills or liquor?”
He seemed surprised that he had an option. Before he could answer, the Navy doctors from Observation Island started to come in. I slipped away.
There was a news team with our visitors, a camera man and a female reporter. It took me a moment to recognize them as who I’d seen on the deck of Observation Island earlier.
I stepped out into the passage before they spotted me. Andy was there.
“What’s with the camera crew?” I asked.
“They came over with the medics. I meant to stop them from going below decks, but that woman is pushy.” He shrugged. “I don’t think they’ve seen anything secret yet.”
“Well, pushy or no, they’re leaving ASAP. The last thing we need is to be on TV.”
Before the sun came up and made it easier to tie Ponyville to what had happened that night, they had to leave. The cruiser navigated close to us. Standing on the bridge wing, Penny and I raised our hooves, a gesture the equine sailors returned in a long distance hoof-bump. The ship peeled off and dissapeared into the dawn.
I went back downstairs and narrowly avoided the news crew. While they were aboard, I figured that I would have to keep a low profile. Whether or not they knew who Sail Canvas was, a pegasus with a sailboat for a cutie mark was kind of distinctive. Luckily, I had a disguise.
Through coordination with Princess Celestia of Equestria, questionable use of magic, and a promise to keep the spells secret, I had received a rather unassuming necklace that could change the wearer’s species. It was possibly a crime against nature, but it had made my relationship with Nika a lot more interesting. Better, nobody knew who “Sean Carter” was. That was the name I gave when delivering Major Brinell’s painkillers later.
“Your voice sounds familiar,” he said.
I shrugged, subtly adjusting the clothes that I was unused to wearing. I saw the news crew coming in to talk to him since the doctors had cleared out and quickly departed. We would have to get them off the ship as soon as possible.