Colonel Ginkim Hok, a slim, middle-aged man of moderate height, stepped into the flight control tower with a cup of black coffee in one hand. Ginkim Hok was a “new star,” one of the Army personnel who had risen through the ranks over the last ten years as successive organizational reforms and funding increases had expanded the Soodean military. And like so many other “new stars,” he was eager to prove his worth to the nation which had promoted him, even though his own youngest days were over. When the higher-ups first assigned him to command the Frontline Multirole Fighter Regiment at Chonlin Forward Airbase, he had imagined this to be a great triumph. But now, three years later, it felt as though nothing had changed. Chonlin was a fairly small airstrip, one of many dispersed around the border to scatter the Army’s reserve of Feidou-12 fighters, and as one of the closest ones to the border it would be a promising target in any war with Maverica. More importantly for the Colonel, however, it was a drab and lifeless place, the gray of concrete and steel easily blending into the overcast sky. At times, he found himself wondering whether his promotion to this post had been a backhanded move, whether he had been shoved away into a dead-end position so that more promising officers would have less competition as they moved on to higher ranks. This was a distressing possibility indeed for a man who, like his rising and competitive peers, prided himself on his reputation and promise. With the years dragging on, he would probably be passed over for promotion again and again, before finally ending his career in this backwater outpost. When the Southwestern Army Group marched into Firmador two autumns ago, a part of him deep down had almost wished that the war would escalate to Maverica. Perhaps then he would have an opportunity to prove himself as a commander, to rise in the ranks, even to establish a place for his name in history.
Pushing the old thoughts aside, the Colonel took another sip of his coffee. Most Soodean officers preferred tea, and under most circumstances this particular officer would bow to national pressure, but he had become hooked on this bitter drink during a training tour in Erusuia. And today, he reasoned, he really needed it. Outside the windows of the control tower, the ground was carpeted in a thick layer of cold fog, which was only now beginning to disperse under the rays of the morning sun. Colonel Hok had little time to observe the weather, however; one of the flight control personnel had just summoned him from the officers’ lounge below, and as the commanding officer for Chonlin Forward Airbase, he was obligated to deal with it himself.
“Sir, I’m glad to see you here. We have four potentially hostile radar contacts inbound from the west. Radar signature seems to be consistent with the Maverican Air Force’s F-29, we can only pick them up clearly on the VHF radar sets. They’re approaching our border at cruising speed.”
“Well, you all know the standard procedure,” Hok replied, pausing to take a sip from his coffee mug. “Radio our nearest patrolling flight and have them form up alongside the intruders. We’ll meet them the moment they intrude into our airspace and ‘escort’ them back to the border.”
The flight control officer tried to hide his expression, but a shadow of a grimace showed anyway. “Sir, I’m afraid there’s something of a complication. Flight 13 is on Bingo Fuel and returning to base, they can’t turn back to intercept. Flight 14 is heading out now to replace them, but their takeoff was delayed by the fog, and they won’t be in position to head off the Maverican fighters for another ten minutes.”
Now it was Colonel Hok’s turn to grimace, but he concealed the reaction by taking another sip of the bitter coffee. Whatever his illusions may have been when the operation began, life at Chonlin had never been the same since the invasion of Firmador two autumns ago. Many of his best squadrons had been transferred out to provide air support on the front lines, and they were still out there now providing air patrols along a much larger hostile border zone. Command had assigned him some new planes a few months back, but it was still short of his total two years ago, and many of the pilots were young recruits who had been pushed through training to quickly close the gap. The regular border patrols he had to keep up in his sector were already spread thin, and this morning’s cold fog had only made things worse.
“New update, sir,” the flight control officer repeated. “The enemy fighters have just crossed into our airspace and are maintaining speed and course. They’re coming right at us.”
“How close is Flight 14?”
“Still seven minutes out, sir. At this rate the enemy will be over a hundred kilometers into our airspace by the time they meet.”
The Colonel sat down at his chair, slamming the cup onto his desk with a thud. Immediately after waking up that morning, he had suspected that today would be a bad day, but this was worse than anything he had expected. If the intruders had arrived ten minutes early or ten minutes late, he would have turned them back without a problem. But the stars had not aligned in his favor today, and now a sizeable formation of hostile fighters was openly violating Soodean airspace right under his nose and there was next to nothing he could do about it. The higher-ups would be livid, that he knew for a fact; demotion would be the best outcome for a situation like this, a dismissal from service the worst. But it wasn’t just his career future that bothered him now. More than that, he dreaded what blows his reputation would suffer. On an ordinary day his deeds and performance were shielded from public knowledge, for better or for worse, by the military’s national secrecy wing. But a slip-up like this was too great to ignore, and the same bureaus that once masked his day by day routine would no doubt leak this story to the propaganda press. His name would be tarnished nationwide, paraded around the nation in print as an instructive allegory in laziness or neglect of duty. His wife, his children, perhaps even their children would live on with that guilt and shame – assuming that they kept their surnames. Changing a surname to evade dishonor was a procedure with many precedents in Menghe culture. And the thought that his legacy would die out turned Hok’s stomach sour.
“They are continuing into our airspace, sir, and still not turning back,” the flight control officer reported, beads of sweat now visible on his forehead. He was probably contemplating whether the same fate would extend to his name as well.
“Call up the EW units stationed around our perimeter and tell them to jam all communication frequencies dispatched from those aircraft, including satellite channels. If they’re taking any reconnaissance information – signals, photos, anything – I don’t want them sending it back to their base.”
“Understood. I request permission to radio them from the ground and order them to turn back.”
A warning from flight control was indeed the proper backup procedure for a situation like this, albeit a much less effective one than putting fighters alongside the intruder. Seeing blue-and-gold roundels on the FD-12 pulling alongside you was one thing, and hearing a garbled message from air traffic control was another. The Maverican pilots would return home reporting that the defenses in his sector were weak and spread thin. If this was a deliberate probing attack, perhaps they were preparing to report it already. But the Colonel wasn’t ready to accept a dishonored fate quite yet.
“Request denied,” he muttered, rising from his chair and stepping toward the windows. A nebulous idea was forming in his head. It was a gamble, and a severe one, but if he pulled it off right he could return home a proud man. “Has Flight 14 contacted the enemy yet?”
“Not yet, sir. They’re still on approach and have yet to open a radio channel.”
“Update their orders now,” Colonel Hok commanded, his voice clear but with a hint of a waver deep below. “Instead of escorting the intruders back over the border, they will form up behind them and order them to maintain heading and land at our airfield.”
The flight control officer jolted back in his chair, then whipped around to face his commander. “Sir, that’s…”
“It’s in violation of standard procedure, but necessary for an extreme case like this,” Hok replied, the idea already spinning in his head like a whirlwind. “Inform them that they are under special military arrest for entering Soodean territory without permission, trespassing as an agent of a potentially hostile foreign state, and being in possession of a forbidden deadly weapon. For these offenses, they will be taken into custody, interrogated, and subjected to the proper punishments for these offenses.”
The flight control officer hesitated, only gradually turning back to his desk. The small beads of moisture on his forehead had turned into a glimmering sheen of sweat, even though a chilling draft could be felt in the room. “Understood, sir,” he replied in a shaky tone. “I will relay your instructions to the leader of Flight 14 immediately.”
Colonel Hok nodded his approval, but his mind was a thousand miles away. He felt a surge of adrenaline, not unlike the feeling he had known on air combat exercises straight out of flight school. Presented with a seemingly impossible situation, he had moved outside the box to solve it, and now he stood triumphantly on top. The same propaganda newspapers that would have otherwise denounced him as a failure would now celebrate him as the man who boldly captured a pack of Maverican spies. And the same superior officers that would have dismissed him from his post would now praise him for handing over a fine sample of the enemy’s advanced F-29s in full working condition for inspection and reverse-engineering. Perhaps future generations would remember him now for his quick thinking and cunning trap. To be immortalized as a hero was the dream of every Soodean soldier, after all, and now Ginkim Hok would have a rare chance to do so without sacrificing his life in the process. Instead, he would sit back for now and rely on the four small FD-12s, which were now racing through the sky with an urgent message for the foreign visitors.
At no point did the Colonel consider that this plan, hastily cobbled together to save his own skin, was about place the entire nation in severe and urgent danger.
