“Forty seconds to first detonation, sir,” the quartermaster responded.
“Sound collision,” Yi ordered. “Signal the battle group to sound collision.” The alarm bells began ringing all across the ship; down below, men put the final clamps and cables on the helicopters up on deck and began clearing the flight decks.
ABOARD THE EB-52 MEGAFORTRESS
“Got ’em!” Vikram shouted. “Crotales no factor . . . Scorpions closing in on the M-11s!” He watched in fascination as the AIM-120 Scorpion missile’s icons quickly and smoothly merged with the Chinese M-ll ballistic missile icons. What incredible power! Vikram thought gleefully. We’re shooting down ballistic missiles, shutting down radars, turning away antiaircraft missiles, and getting ready to blow a carrier out—”
“Fighters!” Nancy Cheshire suddenly shouted out on interphone. “Two fighters at eleven o’clock high! They’ve got us in sight! ” Just then, the threat receiver came to life with a fast, high-pitched deedledee- dledeedle! and a female aural “Missile launch . . . missile launch . .. missile launch! ” warning. At the same time, streams of radar-decoying chaff and heat-seeking missile decoy flares began automatically ejecting from both internal tail ejectors. At the same time, Elliott grabbed the control stick and hauled it over hard left with his left hand, then jammed the throttles on the center throttle console to full military power.
Emil Vikram’s fingers were flying over his defensive weapon controls, immediately activating the ALQ-199 HAVE GLANCE active countermeasures system. On the Megafortress’s raised dorsal pod, tiny radar emitters popped up, slaved themselves to the enemy aircraft bearing from the threat receiver, and began tracking first the larger fighters and then the smaller, faster-moving Pen Lung-9 air-to-air missiles fired by the People’s Republic of China People’s Liberation Army Air Force Su-33 carrier- based fighters. As the missiles closed to within a mile, the ALQ-199 MAWS active countermeasures pods began firing laser beams at the missiles, blinding the sensitive radar sensors in the missile’s nosecap. Any PL- 9 missiles not decoyed by the chaff bundles or flares were hit by the lasers.
“Get on the horn, get some help up here!” Elliott shouted. “Clear on all weapons!”
Ignoring secure communications procedures, Cheshire activated the satellite transceiver and called, “Buster, this is Headbanger, we’re under attack, two Sukhoi-33s!”
“Copy, Headbanger,” Samson replied. “We’re trying to contact the ROC Air Force for assistance. Use everything you got to get out of there. Stand by.” The Megafortress crew got very quiet—they knew that help was very far away, and they were on their own.
“Stand by for AMRAAM launch!” Vikram shouted on interphone. The Sukhoi-33 s began a lazy right turn right in front of the Megafortress— they were obviously not expecting a counterattack by such a large, lumbering target. Vikram quickly locked up both Su-33s on the EB-52’s modified APG-73 attack radar from less than five miles away. “Roll wings level... birds leaving the rails, now. ” In two-second intervals, the last two AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAMs streaked off the left and right weapon pod launchers, and at less than six miles the medium-range active- guidance missiles were almost unstoppable. “Splash two!” Vikram shouted.
“How about that, Emitter—you’re a damned ace!” Cheshire said.
“Don’t start congratulating each other yet—I’ve got two more carrier fighters airborne,” McLanahan said. “Emitter, do you have contact on—?”
Ccrraacckkl
Suddenly it seemed as if every molecule of air in the cabin were sizzling and popping like electrified popcorn. The interphone began to crack and sputter with loud static. Several aircraft systems popped offline, although all four engines continued to run perfectly.
“Hey, I just got some kind of spike in the electrical system,” Nancy Cheshire reported. “Number two generator’s off-line, essential bus B breakers popped. Check your systems, guys, before I reset.”
“What was that?” Vikram asked nervously. “I never got any spike like that before.”
“Just check your systems, D-so,” Elliott responded. “Station check. Cabin altitude is eight thousand . . . fuel system ...” Just then, a terrific rumbling reverberated through the Megafortress, followed by a tremendous buffeting. Unsecured charts and checklist booklets flew through the cabin, and anyone who didn’t have their lap belts tightly snugged down felt the tops of their helmets bounce off the ceiling. “Jesus!” Elliott gasped as he tightened his grip on the control stick. “We running through a typhoon, or what? Anybody got anything?”
“I’ve got my stuff in standby,” McLanahan reported. “I suggest a heading of dead east. Let’s get some distance from that Chinese battle group until we get our gear back on-line. Emitter, get your switches in standby so Nancy can get that generator back on. Brad, let’s ask the Kin Men if he’s got anything.”
“Rog,” Elliott said, switching radios: “Gabriel, this is Headbanger, how copy? Gabriel, this is Headbanger on Fleet Two.” Deciding that Captain Sung had dispensed with the code words by now, Elliott tried, “Captain Sung, this is Headbanger, you read?”
Just then, there was another sudden snapp! of energy that raced through the Megafortress—but this time, in a right turn toward the east, Elliott saw what caused it: “Holy shit, crew, I just saw a bright flash off to the northwest through the clouds! Jesus ... oh man, I think it was a nuclear explosion! ” He watched in horror as concentric rings of pure white clouds began to form far off on the horizon. The circular clouds raced across the sky, slowly dissipating as they got closer, until they disappeared—but moments later, another rumble and a hard shudder coursed through the big bomber. “I think that was the shock wave, crew. I think Quemoy got hit by a nuclear explosion! ”
“That shock was much less than the first one,” McLanahan said. “We’re a good forty miles from Quemoy—but we were only about ten miles from the Kin Men. I’ll be able to tell once my radar is back on-line, but the NIRTSat recon system isn’t showing the Kin Men on the board, and we can’t raise it by radio.”
“The Kin Men got hit by a nuclear anti-ship missile,” Cheshire stated flatly. The entire crew was stunned into silence, and no one argued with Nancy Cheshire on this point. A few years earlier, Nancy Cheshire had been flying in that very same seat in the very same EB-52 Megafortress (but before Jon Masters’s new modifications), on a mission over Belarus during the Lithuania-Belarus conflict. They had used an AIM-120 Scorpion missile to shoot down an SS-21 surface-to-surface nuclear missile that had been launched by pro-Soviet forces against the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius—and, it turned out, against the Belarussian capital of Minsk, in an attempt to kill any anti-Soviet supporters and heat up the Cold War once again. Cheshire had been on board the EB-52 when the SS-21 had missile created a partial nuclear yield just twenty miles away, temporarily blinding her. Her crew had barely managed to fly the crippled bomber to safety in Norway. “We don’t have anything to protect here anymore. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Let’s get a piece of that carrier and the destroyer first,” Elliott said angrily. “Son of a bitch, we should put that thing on the bottom of the ocean right now for what they’ve done! ”
“Brad, forget about the carrier and give me a hard right turn to the east,” McLanahan interjected. “We’ve got to get out of the area until we sort out our avionics problems and get some guidance on—”
“Fighters!” Cheshire shouted again. “Just above our altitude, nine o’clock, about five miles! You got ’em, Emitter?”
“I don’t have anything!” Vikram shouted in a high-pitched voice filled with fear. “No radar, no Scorpion missiles ...”
“Relax, Emitter,” McLanahan said. “Get your stuff back on and let’s see what we got. Check your tail cannon, see if you have control of the airmines.”
Vikram turned all of his equipment to OFF, waited a few seconds instead of a few minutes, then turned them directly back to ON instead of waiting to warm them up in STBY. He then activate
d his helmet-mounted “virtual” steering controls for the Stinger tail defense airmine rockets. The B-52’s old .50-caliber or 20-millimeter tail guns, which had been removed a few years earlier along with the gunner, had been replaced on the EB-52 Megafortress with an 80-millimeter launcher that fired radar- or radio-controlled rockets. The rockets, called “airmines,” were detonated either automatically or by manual command out to nearly four miles; they contained dozens of tungsten steel cubes that could shred aircraft skin or shell out an engine if sucked into an engine inlet.
Vikram experimentally moved the airmine cannon by moving his head—wherever he “looked,” the cannon pointed in that direction. Right now the display was blank, except for the azimuth and elevation readouts, the missiles-remaining counter at 50, and the status readouts, which all read ON with flashing red letters except for the cannon itself, which read ok in green letters. “Looks like the cannon is okay,” he reported. “But the radars and datalink are still down. How can I track them if I can’t see them?”
“They’re coming around!” Elliott shouted. “Three o’clock, same altitude, about five miles.”
“If that’s all the information you got, Emitter, that’s what you use,” McLanahan said. “You’ve got to visualize where the fighters are, then lay the airmines out there and detonate them manually where you think the fighters will be.”
“But I don’t understand how—”
“There’s nothing to understand, Emitter—just do it!” McLanahan shouted. “Now!”
Vikram focused his attention on the virtual gunnery display. He tried to imagine the fighters rolling in hard toward their target, arming missiles or guns, tightening the turn, decreasing the range . . . and then he pulled the trigger three times. A loud bang bang bang! and a brief, sharp shudder rocked the EB-52. In his virtual display, he saw three large circles moving away from him; the size of the circle represented the range from the bomber and decreased as the rocket got farther away . . . except the circle size did not decrease. Vikram moved his head to steer the first missile—nothing. He punched the detonate button with his right thumb—again, no indication that the missile had detonated.
“I think the radio link to the missile is down,” Vikram said.
“Then don’t try to manually steer or detonate the missiles,” McLanahan said. “Prearm all the missiles to detonate at two miles—you’ll just have to start pumping them out across the whole rear quadrant.”
“But I won’t know if I hit anything,” Vikram protested as he punched in new arming instructions for all the remaining rockets. “Sounds like a waste of airmines.”
“If you don’t stop those fighters, Emitter, we’ll waste a hell of a lot more than a few airmines,” McLanahan said. “Start pumping them out.” Quickly but methodically, Vikram started laying down lines of airmine rockets, describing a figure-eight pattern centered on the Megafortress’s tail. The crew heard several loud pops! and a sharp, hard rumble through the plane as the cannon fired the rockets into the sky.
“Bandit, nine o'clock!” Elliott shouted on interphone. “He’s firing guns!” The fourth Su-33 fighter had broken off his wingman’s position when the leader had seen the exploding airmines and circled around, both Chinese fighters staying well away from the bomber’s tail. Vikram swung the turret left, and fired. Elliott tried to help by breaking hard right to put the fighter back into the airmine cannon’s lethal envelope, but not in time. Several 23-millimeter cannon shells hit the Megafortress’s number four engine, causing it to disintegrate in the blink of an eye. The engine-monitoring computers immediately sensed the turbine overspeed and shut the engine down before it exploded. But the sudden loss of the right outboard engine, coupled with the steep right turn and full thrust on the left engines, threw the Megafortress into a steeper right break ...
. . . too tight: the turn steepened, the airspeed decreased, the angle of attack increased, and the tight turn quickly wrapped into a 5G accelerated stall. The crew felt the rumble of the stall along the huge wings, felt the rumble deepen as the departed slipstream banged first on the spoilers, then the fuselage, then felt the neck-jarring jolts as the slipstream grabbed the V-tail assembly and rocked the bomber in both pitch and yaw simultaneously. No matter how much the pilots moved the control stick, the bomber would not respond—all of the control surfaces had been immobilized by a 300-knot blast of disrupted air, acting like a huge whirlpool slamming the bomber in every direction at once.
“Wings level! Wings level!” Cheshire shouted. The Megafortress was still in a one-hundred-degree right bank, and it felt as if it was tipping farther right, threatening to roll upside down.
“Controls won’t respond!” Elliott shouted on interphone. “No response!”
“We got it, we got it! ” Cheshire shouted cross-cockpit. She still did not have time to put on her oxygen mask. The fire #4 warning lights came on, but in the Megafortress that was only an advisory—the aircraft had already responded to the fire, shutting down the engine, activating the firefighting system, and rerouting fuel, hydraulic, bleed air, pneumatic, and electrical systems away from the stricken engine. “Damn, we lost number four!” Cheshire shouted. “Number four’s already shut down! General, try airbrakes. Bring the power back to idle. Emitter, nail that fighter, for Christ’s sake! ”
“My gear’s in reset, Nance!” Atkins shouted back on interphone. “I’m blind for the next ninety seconds! ”
“Stand by,” Elliott responded. “Airbrakes six, power coming back...” All of the crew members were thrown forward into their shoulder straps as the airspeed rapidly bled off. Elliott held the control stick full forward, easing it slightly left every few seconds to test if the controls were responding. At first it felt as if the nose was rising, threatening to send them into a tail-first spin right into the sea, but a few long, tense seconds later, the nose tucked under and the artificial horizon attitude indicator stopped its tumble. Elliott applied slight left rudder and left bank, and the left wing came down slightly. In very, very gradual increments, he fed in left bank, being extra careful not to bleed off any of the slowly increasing airspeed. He felt a slight rumble in the wings and fuselage and lowered the airbrakes. The rumble remained—they were still right at the initial buffet, right at the edge of the stall.
“Passing five thousand!” Cheshire shouted.
As the bank decreased below forty degrees, Elliott smoothly began reapplying power, and the airspeed increased faster. Now, with the wings almost level, the nose down below the horizon, and airspeed increasing, he slowly began feeding in back pressure to decrease the rate of descent. At first there was no response—their airspeed had decreased below flying speed, way below—so he held the stick forward and fed in a bit more power.
“Four thousand feet! ”
Another try—this time, Elliott felt pressure on the stick as he pulled, and he kept the back pressure in until he felt it mush again, then released. The nose was ten degrees below the horizon now, and the stall buffeting was all but gone. A bit more back pressure . . . no, too much, forward again, nose moving down, airspeed increasing, good ... a bit more back, wings level, good, no mushing, a bit more back pressure, pitch up to eight degrees, six degrees . . .
“Three thousand feet!”
Elliott slowly began moving the throttles forward. Power spooling up to one hundred percent, another try for more altitude... good, nose coming up to four degrees, almost level, airspeed still rising, descent rate decreasing ... “Two thousand... one thousand .. .Jesus, Brad, you got it?”
There! Nose on the horizon, airspeed right at takeoff speed, wings level—they were flying again! Elliott looked up from his airspeed indicator and saw how close they got to the ocean . .. shit, the waves looked close enough to be spraying salt water on them! The radar altimeter read 200 feet, just barely out of the cushion of air known as ground effect. They were flying! “I got it, crew, I got it,” Elliott said triumphantly. Airspeed was above 200 knots, so he lifted the nose above the horizon, and the
radar altimeter started up ... 250, 300, well out of ground effect now and we’re still flying and airspeed’s still incr—
The 23-millimeter shells from the Chinese Sukhoi-33’s gun attack stitched a single line of inch-wide holes along the upper fuselage of the Megafortress beginning just aft of the trailing edge of the right wing, straight up and across the crew compartment. The steel shells punctured the avionics “canoe” on the fuselage just before tearing into the aft and center body fuel tanks, causing a terrific explosion. The shells continued through the crew compartment, piercing Emil Vikram’s ejection seat and shredding his head, body, instrument panel, and left-side fuselage area, missing McLanahan and Elliott by only inches. A scream erupted from McLanahan’s lips as he watched his partner get blown to pieces right before his eyes. Vikram’s chest looked as ragged and raw as an old scarecrow—thankfully, the pieces of his helmet hid his decimated head. Blood spattered against the forward crew compartment and left-side cockpit windows just before the left windows disintegrated. The crew cabin explosively decompressed, creating a sudden solid fog in the cockpit, then a virtual hurricane of thundering wind and violent sound. Brad Elliott was thrown to the right as his head and upper torso took the entire brunt of the hurricane-force winds ripping through the blasted left cockpit windows.
Through her screams of terror and shock, copilot Major Nancy Cheshire’s training took over. She was battered by the hurricane-force slipstream and shocked by the explosions ripping through her plane, but she managed to focus on her one and only priority: flying the airplane. Everything else had to wait. Still two hundred feet above the South China Sea, the EB-52 Megafortress was still flying and still accelerating, so she held on to those two facts with every ounce of her skill, experience, and strength. The wings were still attached, three of the plane’s four engines were still running and still producing smash, and they hadn’t hit the rock-solid ocean yet—and it was her job to keep it that way.
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