Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (82 page)

           
The closest HADES canister went off
three miles away, but to Yang and his Marines it felt as if they were in the
middle of an erupting volcano. Yang found himself dazed but unhurt, flat on his
stomach, his rifle thrown several meters away. He low-crawled to his rifle,
picked it up, then rose cautiously to his knees. “Marines! Forward! APCs! Move
out!” Thankfully, the first APC began to lumber off the air-cushion landing
craft; the second showed no signs of moving. “Get those APCs off the landing
craft!
Move it! Move it!”
Slowly, his
men got to their feet, stumbling toward the APCs to take cover behind them as
they got their senses back.

           
As Yang urged his men to get off the
landing craft, he was able to scan out toward the straits toward his amphibious
landing ship—and what he saw horrified him. The entire interior of the ship
seemed to be on fire. Pieces of the pontoon bridges were hanging off the sides,
all afire, and in the glare of the fires he could see men flinging themselves
overboard into the buming-oil-covered gulf. A spectacular explosion sent a
column of flames a hundred meters into the night sky as the fires finally found
the twenty-five million decaliters of diesel fuel still in the LST’s storage
tanks.

           
A few of his men stopped to look at
the dying ship, and Yang grabbed them and shoved them forward. “Move it! Secure
that treeline! Search that house! Move it . . . !”

           
The gunners aboard
Dagu
began firing into the sky again,
and Yang could hear the sounds of fast and heavy jets getting closer. “Get off
the landing craft!” he yelled. “Run toward the trees!
Run!”

           
But it was too late.

           
Two minutes after the F-llls
delivered their canisters of fire, the next strike package began its ingress
from the northeast: four B-52s that had survived the battle with the destroyer
Dalian
continued their attacks with
Harpoon missiles and CAPTOR mines; their escort EB-52C Megafortress had been
shot down by a JS-7 fighter over Mindanao as it tried to turn away from the
target area. The four B-52s claimed kills on two amphibious assault ships and
seeded the straits with over a dozen CAPTOR mines that began to seek out and
destroy the surviving vessels that tried to escape across the straits to
Samal
Island
.

           
Then, sixty seconds after the last
B-52 came off the target, the last and the heaviest-armed warplanes in the
entire battle began their assault; six B-IB bombers swooped in from the north
at treetop level. They were never detected until it was far, far too late.

           
Colonel Yang could see the bright
globes of red and orange walk down the beach toward him, stitching a path of
destruction fifty meters wide and hundreds of meters long. There was no place
to run—the bomblets from the aerial- mine canisters covered the entire beach.
He could only raise his rifle and fire at the hissing sound as the sleek American
bomber, highlighted for a brief moment against the glare of the burning
tank-landing ship, streaked overhead. Yang turned his back to the approaching
chemical meat-grinder of bomblets and continued to fire at the bomber until he
was cut down by the devastating explosions and clouds of shrapnel.

           
Never had Major Pete Fletcher, the
B-lB’s OSO (Offensive Systems Officer), taken such an incredible array of
weapons into battle before—in fact, never had he even
heard
of so many different kinds of weapons carried into battle.
His B-1B Excalibur bomber, Blade Two-Five, had carried eight SLAM missiles on
the external hardpoints—those had already been expended on the larger Chinese
vessels in the Philippine Sea that survived the B-52s’ initial onslaught; eight
Mk 65 QUICKSTRIKE mines in the aft bomb bay, which were shallow-water
high-explosive antiship mines that were to be dropped in Dadaotan Straits and
Bangoy Harbor itself; twenty-four GATOR mines in the middle bomb bay, which
were to be released on the beach—each bomb would disperse hundreds of small
softball-sized mines along a wide area that could destroy small vehicles or
kill large numbers of troops who tried to move through the area after the raid;
and finally they carried eight BLU-96 HADES FAE canisters in the forward bomb
bay, which were designated against the landing craft and Marines ashore north
of Samar International Airport.

           
All of the remaining weapons were to
be dropped within a distance of only twenty miles, on three separate two-mile-
long tracks—and while flying at treetop level at nearly six miles per minute,
it left almost no time to think about procedures. He had taken a fix in between
fighter attacks while going coast-in, and the navigation system was tight and
ready to go. If he had time, Fletcher would try to take another radar fix going
into the target area, but he doubted that would happen. The bombing computer
would have to take care of everything.

           
“Coming up on initial point . . .
ready, ready, now,” Fletcher called out. “Heading is good. Thirty seconds to
release. Multiple GATOR release on heading one-eight-one, then right turn to
heading two-one-six for a multiple QUICKSTRIKE mine release, then right turn to
heading two-six-eight for a multiple HADES release. Stand by . . . fifteen seconds.”

           
The fires that were already burning
in
Dadaotan
Straits
and
Bangoy
Harbor
were spectacular—there had to be at least a
dozen large troopships burning, with spots of fires dotting the entire bay. “My
God, it looks like the end of the fucking world,” the copilot muttered on
interphone.

           
“Five seconds . . . stand by to turn
...”

           
But the huge fires that made it so
easy for the B-l crew to see the target area also made it easy for the Chinese
troops to see the incoming bomber. A row of tracers from a few of the surviving
amphibious assault ships arced into the sky, the undulating lines of shells
sweeping the sky in seemingly random patterns—and suddenly several of those
lines swept across the nose of the B-l bomber.

           
The impact of the 57-millimeter
shells from one of the tank-landing ships felt like hammer blows from Thor
himself. The cabin pressure immediately dumped, replaced a millisecond later
with a thunderous roar of the windblast hammering in through the cockpit
windows. Airspeed seemed to drop to zero, and the crew experienced a feeling of
weightlessness as the B-l started to drift and fall across the sky.

           
Fletcher reacted instantly. While
struggling to keep himself upright in his seat as much as possible, he selected
all remaining stores stations, opened the bomb doors, and hit the “Emergency
Armed Release” button once again. “All weapons away! Weapons away!” he shouted.
“Right turn to escape, Doug!” He called to the pilot, Captain Doug Wendt.
“Right turn! Head west!”

           
All of the mines and BLU-96 canisters
made a normal release—except one. One of the racks in the forward bomb bay was
hit by gunfire, the rack jammed, then released, and the canister was flung
against the aft bomb-bay bulkhead and detonated. Fire and debris from the bomb
and the damaged bomb bay flew into the right engine intakes, shelling the
starboard engines and causing another terrific explosion.

           
There was a sound like a raging
waterfall filling the entire crew compartment, and smoke began to fill the
cabin. The B-l seemed to be hanging upside down, twisting left and right and
fishtailing around the sky. “Doug? Answer up!” No reply. “George?” Again no
reply. Without thinking of what he was doing, Fletcher pulled the parachute
release mechanism on his ejection seat, which unclipped him from his seat but
kept his parachute on his back. He dropped to the deck and began crawling on
his hands and feet toward the clipboard.

           
“Pete!” Lieutenant Colonel Terry
Rowenki, the DSO (Defensive Systems Operator), yelled behind him. “What the
hell are you doing? Get back here!”

           
Fletcher ignored him. Flat on his
stomach, he made his way through the howling windblast to the cockpit. Through
the glare of flares outside, he could see that all of the windshields were
blown in, and both Wendt and Lleck were slumped over in their seats,
unconscious. The autopilot was not on, but the B-l was light and trimmed enough
to maintain wings-level even without hands on the control stick.

           
“Terry! Get out! Eject!” Fletcher
screamed, but he could not be heard over the windblast. Crawling forward
another few feet, he pulled himself up onto the center console, keeping as far
below the murderous wind coming through the shattered windows as he could,
reached across, and lifted the right-side ejection handle on Doug Wendt’s seat.
The large red “Eject” light snapped on in every section of the cabin—it came on
automatically whenever the pilot’s ejection handles were raised. Fighting the
force of the wind hammering on his entire body, he reached up and hit the
ejection trigger with his left hand.

           
The inertial reel thankfully yanked
Doug Wendt’s body upright in his seat a fraction of a second before the
overhead escape hatch blew off and the seat roared off into space. But the
ejection seat’s rocket motor flared right in Fletcher’s face, and he screamed
again as his vision was replaced by angry stars of pure pain. He was on the
verge of unconsciousness, and only another explosion from somewhere inside the
bomber brought him back to his senses. Struggling through the pain to regain his
vision, he finally gave up trying to open his eyes, groped around for Lleck’s
ejection handle, found it, and pulled. This time the white-hot fire from the
motor seared his chest and stomach, and he slumped to the deck.

           
“Pete! Pete, dammit, wake up!”

           
Someone was calling his name . . .
someone . . . Fletcher raised his head.

           
“Pete! This way! Crawl this way!
Hurry!”

           
It was Terry Rowenki—the idiot
hadn’t ejected yet. Fletcher’s head hit the deck with a dull thud. That was his
problem, he thought blissfully as he drifted off toward unconsciousness—the man
had a perfectly good ejection seat, now was the time to use it.

           
But sleep wouldn’t come. He soon
felt someone pulling his legs. “Pete, dammit, crawl this way . . . you
motherfucker, wake up, dammit, wake up . . .”

           
To humor him, Fletcher pushed
against the center cockpit console toward the systems compartment. The odd
pitch angles of the deck seemed to help him—the Excalibur’s nose was high in
the air, as if they were in a steep climb—and Rowenki’s grasp was
extraordinarily strong. He heard another loud sound, more windblast sounds the
farther back he moved—until he realized that it was the big entry hatch.
Rowenki had jettisoned the hatch and the entry ladder and was trying to pull
Fletcher out!

           
Somehow Rowenki managed to get
Fletcher pulled to the hatch and over onto his stomach, head toward the open
hatch. “What the fuck did you think you were doing up there?” Rowenki yelled as
he continued to wrestle with Fletcher’s ragdoll-like body. “Being a damned hero?
You get me killed up here, Fletcher, and I’ll fucking haunt you for a hundred
years.”

           
Attaching the emergency rescue rope
to the D-ring on Fletcher’s parachute harness, Rowenki used his feet and shoved
Fletcher headfirst out the entry hatch. The escape rope yanked taut, spinning
Fletcher’s body around but pulling the ripcord D-ring and opening the
parachute. One of Fletcher’s legs got tangled in the parachute risers, but it
whipped free and the chute safely opened. Rowenki was right behind him, leaping
out of the hatch as if he were going to do a cannonball from a high-diving
board. He broke his left foot when it hit the aft edge of the hatch, but the
pain only served to remind him to pull the D-ring as he sailed toward the lush
tropical forests below.

           
The stricken B-l continued to sail
in a nose-high climbing right turn for several minutes, almost executing a full
180- degree turn, until it finally ran out of airspeed, stalled, and crashed to
earth near the town of
Cadeco
. The last aircraft of the first raid of the Air Battle Force had
completed its journey.

           
“Sir, report from a J-7 fighter over
Samar
International
Airport
,” the radioman announced.

           
Admiral Yin was on his feet.
“Speak!” he shouted, loud enough to startle just about everyone in the room.
“Is the airport taken?”