' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (50 page)

On this day however things were going wrong despite their best efforts but the fleet could not remain undetected for long. A planned dawn airdrop from the east, when the sun would be in the defender eyes, was not going to happen. The storm had taken too long to vacate the area so they would not loop south of Bohol to make that easterly approach. This of course meant that the sun would be in their eyes, the attackers, but it would have risen too high above the horizon to be too much of an impediment to marksmanship as the sun would rise as they were still crossing the South China Sea.

The first aircraft to take off though did not do so from Vietnam but at 0100hrs from RAAF Tindall, a bare bones aerodrome 175 miles SE of Darwin.  RAAF Darwin had been the original choice, but it had come under both surface to surface missile attack and naval gunfire on several occasions. The main runway had been severely damaged in the last attack and was no longer viable. With a far lighter fuel load the Globemasters could have used the second, shorter runway, and tanked immediately after taking off but it was simpler to use RAAF Tindall’s single 2,500 metres runway instead.

The C-17s of 99 Squadron RAF could also have made that long haul without refuelling had they been carrying just
paratroopers, but their payloads demanded that they have a long drink from the tankers of 33 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, in order to return the same way.

Flights of C-130s arrived from several RAF squadrons, No’s 24, 30, 47 and 70 Squadron to carry 3 Para, 23 Engineer Regiment, the 105mm light guns of 7 Parachute Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery along with food and ammunition. The lead aircraft of No. 47 Squadron was captained by Squadron Leader Braithwaite on her first sortie after being promoted. Wing Commander Stewart Dunn was also flying the formations lead aircraft on his first sortie after promotion.

The Anglo/French formation flew low and in complete communications silence. It crossed the coast of Palawan without incident and without sighting any of the warring factions around the Spratlys. A fortunate happenstance as the USS
Constellation’s
air wing which was to meet and escort the transport stream did not arrive on time. The carrier was over forty years of age, an old lady, and her steam catapult’s failed. USS
John C Stennis’s
air wing was CAP for the fleet and about to launch Wild Weasel flak suppression sorties on the target. It was impractical for the two carriers to switch roles. The USS
Constellation
repaired the catapults but she launched her wing very late.  

With full knowledge that the Chinese fleet was to the north of the Spratly Islands the airborne transport stream followed a slightly more southerly course, keeping below the islands, although due to the 2
nd
Brigade taking off from Phanrang to the east, they were being carried on a slightly more northerly line, slowly converging with the Vũng Tàu stream.

Reports had reached the Chinese flagship
Mao
that the Royal Brunei Navy had sailed, bound for the southern Spratly Islands and the commander decided to deal with the smaller of the opposition’s ships earlier rather than later.
Mao
launched an anti-shipping strike even though the range was extreme.
Mao’s
strike aircraft carried mainly anti-ship and anti-radiation missiles with only a pair of Aphids for self-defence along with 150 rounds for the Su-30s 30mm cannons. They narrowly missed the Transall and Hercules carrying the Anglo/French airborne brigade and did not find any trace at all of the Royal Brunei Navy, but on turning back for their carrier they caught the big C-17s carrying the US 2
nd
Brigade without a CAP and the slaughter commenced. 

   Colonel Neil Hughes Brown, 97
th
Airlift Squadron out of Lewis/McChord AFB near the Rockies, put the nose of his aircraft, ‘Pride of Seattle’, down towards the South China Sea and made it there by luck as much as skill and judgement. The early morning sea fog and drab grey colour scheme was not a perfect patch by any means, but there were plenty of other targets that were easier to see. Eventually near the coast of Palawan the aircraft emerged from the fog bank. There were no other targets to distract the Chinese aviators and he had two Su-30s closing on his tail. He could not outrun or outmanoeuvre them, the Chinese carrier aircraft were shy of air-to-air missiles now but not cannon ammunition. He had two choices really, stay low and ditch in the sea near the shore or turn over the island and gain enough height for the mass of troops in the aircrafts belly to exit the aircraft by parachute. The first option gave him a better chance of surviving than the second, but men would drown, trapped inside the aircraft. He gave his orders and let the two Sukhois closed to gun range just off the shore before dropping the gear and flaps. The drastic loss of speed caught both the Sukhoi pilots by surprise and they overshot. Colonel Brown raised the gear and shoved the throttles through the gate, juggling the controls and avoiding a stall, just barely, as he strove for speed and height. The red light came on in the hold and the jump masters got the troops on their feet and hooked up. They had been lucky the first time and the same trick would not work again, or would it? As the first tracer round flashed by from behind Colonel Hughes banked hard right instead of going into a diving turn, as they enemy pilots expected, suddenly the target was looming large before them, the 169 foot wingspan and broad fuselage like an aerial wall and again they broke to avoid a collision, but not before Neil felt cannon round strikes reverberate through the airframe. The master fire warning sounded as debris, smoke and flame streamed from the port outer engine. There were twenty dead and wounded in the hold and the flight engineer shut down the port outer engine, activating the fire extinguisher.

The nose came down below the horizon and as the wings came level again the line of flight was bisecting the length of the island of Palawan. The jump doors opened, and the green light came on.

The large cargo ramp was of no use in any way, the static lines were hooked up for exits through the side jump doors in the fuselage.

The jumpmasters now had the task of cutting the static lines of the dead, and those they judged too badly wounded to jump unaided and they shouted and gestured for the sticks to exit.

When the aircraft attacked next it was not from the stern it was from head-on.

Smoke and flame belched from the shutdown engine but it was not of danger to the paratroopers boiling out of the side doors as rapidly as possible. Excluding the dead and wounded, only ten, plus the jumpmasters, still remained inside the aircraft when the cockpit exploded under the impacts of 30mm cannon rounds.

The ‘Pride of Seattle’ rolled inverted and dived into a mountain called Cleopatra’s Needle, exploding on impact.

Both Sukhoi’s turned for home but their wing members were shouting on the radio that they were being engaged by carrier aircraft, F-14 Tomcats.

Low on fuel and short on ammunition, the Chinese aviators got a taste of the helplessness the C-17 crews and their sticks of paratroopers may have felt.

The Tomcats were themselves a little on the light side where ordnance was concerned when they eventually took station protecting the transports, but
Mao
was now short a bunch of aircraft too.

China had a problem; their aircraft had been engaged by carrier aircraft far from any carrier they knew of.

It took an hour, an hour of technical debate at the various scientific levels and shouted accusations and denouncements at political ones.

Someone took the decision and pulled the plug on the photo reconnaissance and RORSAT satellites, and the People’s Republic of China was suddenly back at her 1950s stage of satellite intelligence.

Arbuckle Mountains, Oklahoma.

“Oh my good God.” The President said, stricken. “All those men?”

“
Church
is dead, long live
Church
.” Joseph Levi stated with a tinge of sadness as he entered the briefing room.

The president went tight lipped and glared furiously at his chief scientific adviser, but Joseph had only just entered having been told that the grand ruse was over. He did not know the details of what had just transpired over the South China Sea.

The various advisers seemed to feel the need to voice their opinions unbidden, which is not how it was meant to work.

“Can we cancel the operation?”

“No, we have to see it through, Mr President.”

“Mr President, it’s over a third of the airborne force, simply gone before they could even arrived at the target.”

“The mission called for ten thousand men, not five, we have to abort sir!”

“Three thousand men, artillery and ammunition…..”

“If we try again in two days…”

His hand slapped down hard on the top of his desk, causing his water to dance in its glass.

“Be quiet, all of you!” the President ‘did a Henry’ silencing the room so he could take a deep breath, a step back and switched off his emotions for a moment as he looked dispassionately at the problem.

“If the Malay’s hadn’t tried for the Spratly’s the Chinese fleet
could
have bumped into ours. If they hadn’t then we
could
have two corps to fight in Australia instead of one…if that typhoon hadn’t shown up…if, if, if… ’IF’ is for losers.” He glared at them. “We are fully committed now and with a little luck the enemy will assume that the aircraft and paratroopers were all part of the situation in the Spratly Islands.” he glared at those who had so quickly been ready to fold.

“We play the hand we’ve got.”

Mactan

The resistance movement on Cebu had infiltrated the work crews to get access to the island of Mactan which was to become fortified if the Chinese got their way. The plans for bunkers, those completed, those underway and those still on the drawing board had all found their way to the tropical forested hills that were the guerrilla’s stamping ground.

The number and type of mobile anti-aircraft systems was known, including the position of camouflaged hides and firing positions
on both Mactan and in and around Cebu City and neighbouring Mandaue City where the northern end of the bridges sat. The positions GPS coordinates, as well as a general description.

The airborne tanker fleet that w
as so vital to air operations between mainland China and Australia were to have massive hardened shelters but currently they were making do in camouflaged ‘soft’ dispersals, and the positions of all of these irreplaceable assets were marked for destruction by the planners.

Because of the absolute secrecy involved Garfield Brooks was unaware of the intended landings until a few hours before. He was further south at Barili, up in the hills west of Carcar dealing with the training of local fighters.  It was an area the Chinese 6
th
Army’s 86
th
Mechanised Brigade feared to tread so although it was not completely safe it did have more security than the hills to the north where Colonel Villiarin preferred to be.  The Chinese stuck to the coastal roads and the main highways that crossed the mountain spine. The 86
th
were not bad troops but they were out of their comfort zone. They were well trained and equipped to fight a highly mobile mechanised armour war, one fought on the wide open reaches of the Siberian Plateau, against similarly equipped troops from Russia.  The Chinese High Command had stripped two of the infantry brigades of their IFVs in order to get them out patrolling on foot.

Garfield quickly summoned his men and gathered those Filipinos he had already trained, before setting off north to set vehicle ambushes on those roads the garrison was so attached to.

Day 1: Operation
Vespers
(Airborne element)

0600hrs.

Once the dawn arrived, so too did the US air strikes, coming from low to the east had first removed the KJ-2000 AWAC and the CAP with AIM-54 Phoenix missile shots. Filipinos awoke to the sound of warfare on their doorsteps, peering curiously across the channel at the source of the explosions and machine gun fire.

  A ‘Wild Weasel’ preceded the airborne stream by twenty minutes, picking off the radars or forcing them to shut down, tempting air defence sites to engage and malleting them if they did. The F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18E Super Hornets moved on to defensive strongpoints and bunkers. Two aircraft, with very brave crew, attempted to save their aircraft from destruction on the ground and to combat the attackers. They tore along the new 1,400m runway on afterburner but neither made it, one pass with two bursts from a Vulcan cannon put paid to the attempt. One pilot managed a ground ejected but his wingman did not.

AV-8Bs from USS Boxer and USS Essex would provide further CAS, close air support, but only for a limited period as they would also support the US Marines amphibious landing at Toledo and needed to refuel and rearm before that time.

Sukhoi-30s, a second KJ-2000, Antonov transports and assorted helicopters burned in their dispersals.