Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (82 page)

 
          
“Thanks,
Nance,” McLanahan said. “I’ll keep it in mind. But as long as we’re sucking
dirt here, I’ll stay in this seat.”

 
          
“Okay.”
Cheshire
found the first-aid kit and slapped as many
large bandages and compresses on the biggest gashes as she could. “You GIBs
will live,” she said to the “Guys In Back.” McLanahan’s wounds looked the
worst, but the blow to Luger’s head worried her the most—he would have to be
checked carefully for signs of a concussion or other head trauma. “Just please
advise us before you pass out, okay, Dave?”

 
          
“Anything
for you, Nancy,” Luger replied.
Cheshire
gave Luger a wink and went quickly back to
her seat and strapped in tightly.

 
          
“Where
are those fighters?” Elliott asked.

 
          
“I’m
going to do a radar sweep,” Luger said, fighting off a wave of dizziness and
nausea every time he moved his head. “Radar coming on.” He activated the
omnidirectional radar for a few seconds, then turned it back to standby.
“Fighters are turning right to pursue, at
five o’clock
high, eight miles.”

 
          
“We’re
coming to the river floodplain area,” McLanahan said. “Set for COLA altitude
again. We’ve got four minutes until we get into any high terrain again.”

 
          
“The
search radar is down,” Luger announced, “so they’ll have a tougher time finding
us. We’ll—” Just then, the threat warning receiver bleeped again: “Fighters at
six o’clock
, coming inside six miles, I think they got
a lock on us! Give me a hard turn to the right.”

 
          
“Can’t
turn yet!”
Cheshire
shouted. “We’re still not above three
hundred knots!”

 
          
“I
need a right turn fast! ”

 
          
“Where
are they?”

 
          
“Radar
coming on . . .” Luger activated the attack radar, and immediately the warning
tones sounded again: “Bandits, six o’clock, five miles! ” he shouted. He
instinctively activated the Stinger tail airmine cannon . . . before realizing
with shock, “Shit! No tail cannon rounds! Activating Scorpion missiles!” But
before he could command a AIM-120 launch, the crew heard, “MISSILE LAUNCH,
MISSILE LAUNCH!”

 
          
“Break
right!” Luger shouted.

 
          
“We
can’t!”
Cheshire
shouted back. “We got no airspeed! No
airspeed!”

 
          
Luger
ejected flares and decoy gliders again—but it was too late. The missiles were
in the air, headed right for them . . .

 
          
.
. . no,
not
for them! Seconds before
they launched from four miles behind the EB-52 Megafortress, the two Chinese
J-8 fighters were hit by Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, fired by two Taiwanese
F-16 fighters. The F-16s had broken off from the returning bombing pack to
escort the EB- 52 Megafortress on its separate strike route. The F-16s could
receive datalink information from the EB-52’s radar, so it knew where to look
for the Chinese fighters; then, using their Falcon Eye infrared sensors,
similar to the Sukhoi-27’s Infrared Search and Track sensor, the F-16s were
able to sneak up on the Chinese fighters without being detected themselves.

 
          
The
Chinese Sukhoi-27 was still alive, however, and now he was fighting mad. He
broke off the attack on the Megafortress, wheeled, immediately pounced on the
two F-16s, and fired two PL-2 missiles into one of the F-16s. The second F-16
was alone, trapped right in the crosshairs of the faster and equally nimble
Su-27 . . .

 
          
No,
not quite alone. “Attack radar on . . . commit Scorpion launch on air target X
ray,” Luger ordered, and he fired two over-the-shoulder AIM-120 missiles at the
Su-27. Moments before the Su-27 closed in for the kill, he was blasted apart by
a double hit of Scorpion radar-guided missiles. “Splash one -27,” he announced.

 
          
“Thank
you, Headbanger,” the Megafortress crew heard over the emergency UHF channel in
heavily accented English. “Good luck, good hunting. ”

 
          
“The
F-16 is heading home,” Luger said, as he studied his threat display. “But he’s
three hundred miles off his flight plan. I don’t know if he’ll have the fuel to
make it all the way back to Kai-Shan.”

 
          
“Yes,
he will,” McLanahan said. He quickly composed a satellite transceiver message
on his terminal. “I’ll send in Jon Masters’s tanker aircraft. They can do a
low-level pickup emergency refueling over the coast.”

           
“Jon’s tanker ever do an emergency
refueling before?” Elliott asked.

           
“Hell no,” McLanahan said. “I don’t
think Jon’s tanker has ever refueled any other plane except a Megafortress and
a couple others, and I know for sure that none of the Taiwanese pilots have
refueled from Jon’s DC-10. But now’s a damned good time to learn. We don’t need
the fuel right now—the Taiwanese F-16 does.”

           
In less than four minutes, the
Megafortress sped across the wide, flat
Chang Jiang
River
valley and across to the protective sanctuary
of the
Ta-
Pieh
Mountain
range, just as another wave of fighters
arrived from the neighboring
Changsha
fighter base to search for the mysterious
attacker. The Megafortress continued northwest bound through the mountains for
a few minutes, then cut northeast until they were at the extreme northeast end
of the
Ta-Pieh
Mountains
. From there, they launched their next
attack: two Wolverine antiair defense cruise missiles against the surface-
to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery units defending the bomber base at
Wuhan
, followed by two Striker missiles.

 
          
As
the Striker missiles sped inbound, McLanahan suddenly whooped for joy: “Hey,
crew, I think we hit the jackpot! ” He could clearly see two separate parking
areas at the huge bomber base at
Wuhan
—both filled with heavy bombers. One area
was reserved for at least forty H-6 bombers, lined up almost wingtip to
wingtip; the other parking area had four H-7 bombers, former Russian Tupolev-26
supersonic heavy bombers. “I’m going to program the last two Striker missiles
for the base, too—might as well nail the targets as we get ’em. The navy base
at
Shanghai
will have to wait for our next attack
opportunity.” McLanahan steered the two Striker missiles already in flight at
the H-7 supersonic bombers, planting one Striker in between two bombers so the
tremendous blast knocked out both bombers at once, then launched the two
remaining Strikers at the H-6 parking ramp. All four H-7 bombers went up in
huge clouds of fire, and the Strikers destroyed eight more H-6 bombers and
damaged several more.

 
          
As
a parting gesture, McLanahan quickly programmed the last two Wolverine missiles
to orbit over Wuhan bomber base and attack any targets of opportunity with the
anti-vehicle skeets—any H-6 bomber that tried to start engines and taxi clear
of the devastated parking ramp for the next forty minutes would be treated to a
personalized demonstration of the power of an anti-vehicle skeet shooting
molten copper slugs into it from out of the darkness. Another thirteen H-6 bombers,
plus a number of fuel, security, and maintenance vehicles, were damaged or
destroyed by the skeets launched from the Wolverine cruise missiles.

 
          
As
the Chinese air defense fighters from Nanjing and Wuhu air bases converged
first on Anqing, then Wuhan, to try to find and destroy the unidentified
attacker, the crew of the Megafortress turned southeast through sparsely
settled Zhejiang province, going feet-wet directly between the two Chinese
naval bases at Wenzhou and Dinghai. Chinese air defense sites were in an uproar
over the invasion on the garrisons at
Xiamen
, which meant that all available naval air
fighter units had been sent on patrol to the south to try to stop any more
Taiwanese invaders. Like a ghost riding the rising coastal fog, the Megafortress
quietly slipped out of Chinese airspace and disappeared over the
East China Sea
.

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, NEAR
COLORADO
SPRINGS
,
COLORADO

TUESDAY, 24 JUNE, 1327
HOURS LOCAL (1527 HOURS ET)

           
The first detection was from the
U.S. Space Commands Pacific Satellite Early Warning System, or SEWS, a large
heat-sensing satellite that detected the bright flash of fire from the first
65,000-pound Dong Feng-4 ballistic missile lifting off from its fixed launching
pad in east-central
China
. Since the launch detection was immediately
correlated with a known DF-4 launch site, an automatic ICBM launch warning was
issued by Space Command to all American, Canadian, and NATO military units throughout
the world through the North American Aerospace Defense Command at
Cheyenne
Mountain
. The entire Space Command complex, known as
Team 21—the Space Operations missile detection wings, the worldwide
communications network, and the crisis management team of the Cheyenne Mountain
Strategic Defense Combat Operations Center— were on full alert when the next
seven DF-4 missiles were detected moments later.

 
          
The
commander of U.S. Space Command was called out of a lunch meeting with some of
his visiting wing commanders, and he was quickly escorted to the Air Force
Missile Warning and
Space
Operations
Command
Center
. General Joseph G. Wyle was the new
commander of “the Mountain.” A father of three daughters, a former F-4 Phantom
fighter WSO (weapons systems officer) turned computer engineer, Wyle was one of
the U.S. military’s few “triple hats,” a commander of three major military
commands: U.S. Air Force Space Command, in charge of all of the Air Force’s
satellites, boosters, land-based missiles, and launch facilities; U.S. Space
Command, in charge of all of America’s strategic defense systems, such as
surveillance satellites and radars; and the North American Aerospace Defense
(NORAD) Command, the joint U.S. and Canadian military team dedicated to
detecting, tracking, and identifying all incoming threats against the North American
continent. The four-star general had been the deputy “triple hat” commander
under General Mike Talbot during the last major international crisis in
Asia
, when
China
had first started flexing its blue-water
muscles against its neighbors.

 
          
“Still
waiting for SEWS confirmation of a Chinese IRBM launch,” the senior controller
reported on the commander’s net in the command center.

 
          
“Let’s
hear what you
do
know,” Wyle ordered.

 
          
“SEWS
Pacific detected a total of ten missile launches in east-central
China
,” the senior controller reported.
“Subsequent sensor hits showing large rocket plumes rising through the
atmosphere, heading east. We have course and speed and approximate missile
weight and performance data correlated through SEWS.”

 
          
“So
we’re positive that we’re looking at Chinese ballistic missiles?”

 
          
“The
latest intelligence data says the Chinese still had DF-4 missiles at all of the
ten known launch sites in the area of the current launches— not the
longer-range DF-5, not any of the experimental long-range ICBMs, nor any civil
or commercial Long March boosters,” one of the intelligence officers reported.
“So we can rule out with very good probability that the Chinese are not
launching satellites, and that the attack is not against any targets in
North America
.”