“Splash two! ” Cheshire crowed when she saw the explosion and saw the burning plane plummet to earth. Wendy immediately selected another Sidewinder that had locked on to a fighter and let it fly. This one disappeared from sight with no explosions—clean miss.
“Hold this heading—we’re going nose to nose with them!” Wendy shouted.
“Shit—they're right on us!" Elliott shouted. Both he and Cheshire saw numerous winks of light in the darkness as the J-8 fighters opened fire on the Megafortress with their 23-millimeter cannons, then peeled off.
The Megafortress’s crew heard what seemed like hundreds of hammerlike blows all over the aircraft, then the rumble and roar of the Chinese jets flying just a few hundred feet away from them. “Check the instruments!” Elliott shouted to Cheshire. “Patrick!”
“Right turn and center up!” Patrick responded.
Elliott started a hard right turn—and immediately decreased the turn when they felt a hard, sharp rumbling on the right wing. “We got something hanging on the right,” he said. “Nance, you see anything?” “No,” Cheshire responded. “But I’ve got fluctuating number four hydraulic pressure. It feels like we might have lost a spoiler.”
The DF-3 missile sites were situated along the same access road, roughly in a line about five miles apart. “Radar coming on ... radar stand by,” McLanahan said as he took the release fix. The synthetic aperture radar image showed the Dong Feng-3 launch complex in stark detail: the launch pad, gantry, and the two railroad lines leading from the launch pad to the two missile-storage sheds, spaced about 200 yards apart. The Megafortress rolled in on the first site. “Doors coming open . . . bombs away!” McLanahan shouted. He sequenced the releases so that the bomblet scatter pattern of one CBU-59 cluster-bomb unit was centered directly on the missile sheds.
The tactic worked. Each DF-3 storage shed was blasted apart by hundreds of one-pound bomblets, and the scatter pattern was large enough to encompass the launch pad and a nearby electrical transformer farm, which shut down power to the complex’s air defense artillery site located to the north. The second missile was only damaged in the attack, but the first 59,000-pound liquid-fueled DF-3 missile caught fire and created a massive explosion that wiped out the second missile very effectively.
But the sudden destruction of the DF-3 site alerted the air defense units protecting the other two remaining sites, and seconds later the horizon was illuminated with six antiaircraft artillery guns opening up. Wendy had used her jammers to shut down the triple-A site’s tracking radars, so the Chinese gunners were blindly sweeping the sky with their guns. The airspace over the two remaining DF-3 sites was shimmering with thousands of rounds of artillery shells.
“I got no choice, guys,” Elliott said, and he broke off the bomb run by turning hard right. “We can’t go through that mess.”
“Continue your right turn fifty more degrees,” Wendy said. “Let’s get a few of these J-8s off our tail while we wait for those gunners to run out of ammo.” As soon as Elliott rolled out of his hard right turn, Wendy let one, then two Sidewinders fly, and both shots were rewarded with bright flashes and flickering streaks of light across the night sky.
“I’m centering up,” Elliott shouted, and he yanked the Megafortress over into a hard right turn back toward the DF-3 sites. The blobs of tracers were still slicing through the sky, forming an impenetrable curtain of deadly bullets all across the target area. “C’mon, you bastards,” Elliott cursed. “You don’t have that much ammo . . . you’re going to run out any second—”
As if on cue, one stream of tracers abruptly stopped. It was only one ZSU-37-2 site, but it was enough. Patrick centered his crosshairs on the second two DF-3 storage sheds, made sure the rotary launcher had positioned two more CBU-59 units in the bottom drop position, and made the release. The terrific explosion that rocked the Megafortress told them the second attack had been a success.
The two triple-A sites guarding the last DF-3 site swung west toward them and began raking the sky around them, and for a moment it seemed as if every antiaircraft artillery site in front of them got a direct bead on them—but then the shooting stopped. The triple-A sites had either run out of ammo, or they had damaged their gun barrels by several minutes of almost continuous shooting. Elliott centered the computer steering bug on the last target... just twenty more seconds, and they’d be heading home.
The last twenty seconds seemed like twenty hours—but soon the bomb doors rolled open, and McLanahan shouted, “Bombs away! Doors coming!”
Brad Elliott saw a flash of white light off to his left, and then his vision exploded into a blaze of stars and his body felt as if he had hit a brick wall.
“Brad's hit!” Nancy Cheshire screamed. The entire left side of the cockpit appeared as if it had been shredded apart by a giant tiger’s claw. Cheshire grabbed the control stick, then experimentally juggled the throttles. But the flight-control computer had already determined that the number one engine had been destroyed, and the computer immediately had shut off fuel to the engine, activated the fire-extinguishing system, and isolated electrical and hydraulic power. “I lost number one—it’s shut down! ” she called out. “I still got the airplane! Sing out back there! ”
“Offense is okay!” Patrick responded. He looked over through the thin haze of smoke and saw Wendy leaning over in her seat. Her console looked as if a grenade had exploded inside it, and the windblast from the shattered left cockpit windows was blowing a vortex of smoke and debris back over Wendy McLanahan. “Jesus! Wendy!”
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” they heard over interphone. “I... I just got a face full of smoke. ”
“Hang on, Wendy!”
“No! Patrick, stay strapped in! ” Wendy cried out. “I’m going to stay down here to stay out of the smoke. ”
“What do you got back there, guys?” Cheshire asked, the panic rising in her voice.
“It looks like we got squat,” Patrick responded. “The DSO’s station is toast, and my stuff is in reset.” He concentrated on the red flashing indications on his right-side instrument panel: “The last Striker missile is showing an overtemp condition, but I can’t shut it down and I can’t jettison it until my equipment comes back up. I’ll try to restart it.”
“We got a major problem up here, kids,” Nancy Cheshire said, quickly scanning the instruments. Most of the electronic instruments were blank; she concentrated on the auxiliary and backup gauges. “We lost number one, we’re on emergency hydraulic power, and we got one generator left. All I got right now is the damned whiskey compass. Brad . . . Brad looks real bad. I think he’s ...”
“Go ahead and say it... you thought I was dead,” Brad Elliott said. Slowly, painfully, with help from Nancy Cheshire, he hauled himself upright in his seat, and Cheshire locked his inertial reel in place.
“Brad!” Patrick shouted. “Are you all right?”
“Hell no,” Elliott said, coughing to clear his throat of a mass of blood. “But they can’t kill me that easy.” His voice was barely a whisper over the thunderous roar of the jet blast coming through the shredded fuselage.
“We’re gonna make it, Brad,” Cheshire said on interphone. “Hang on.”
Elliott scanned the nearly blank instrument panel and chuckled, the laughter quickly changing into a full-body convulsion. “I highly doubt it,” he gasped, after the convulsions stopped.
“Nance, give me a right turn back to the east,” Patrick said. “We’ll try to get as close to the Yellow Sea or the Bo Hai as we can get. Hal and Chris are standing by on Okinawa with Madcap Magician and the Taiwanese air force—they might be able to pick us up.”
“Mack, we’re six hundred goddamn miles from the Yellow Sea, we’re surrounded by fighters, and we’re all shot to hell,” Brad Elliott said. “I got a better idea—we jump out.”
“No way,” Cheshire said.
“You’re a sweetie, and I’ve always had the hots for you, co,” Elliott said, “but you all know this is the onl
y option. When those fighters come back, they’ll blow us to pieces. I’d rather not be on board when that happens, thank you very much.”
“We made it before, Brad,” Patrick said. “We can make it again.”
“We’re in the middle of Inner Mongolia, hundreds of miles from help, and we’re down to emergency everything,” Elliott said. “We got no choi—”
Suddenly, the Megafortress buckled under them and slew nearly sideways. Cheshire straightened the plane out only by using both hands on the control stick. “We got hit, number four’s on fire!” she shouted. This time, the computer did not shut down the engine automatically. Cheshire jammed the number four throttle to idle, then to cutoff, then pulled the yellow fire T handle to cut off fuel to the engine and activate its fire extinguisher. “Still got a fire on number four! ” Cheshire shouted. “It won’t go out! It won’t go out! ” There was a bright flash of light and another violent explosion jerked the bomber nearly upside down. “Fire! Fire!” Cheshire shouted.
“Eject! Eject! Eject!” Brad Elliott shouted.
Patrick looked over at Wendy. She returned his glance—but that was all the hesitation she allowed herself. She jammed her fanny back into the seat, straightened her back, pushed the back of her helmet into the sculpted headrest, tucked her chin down, crossed her hands, and pulled the ejection ring between her legs. Her shoulder harness automatically tightened, snapping her shoulders and spine back into the proper position; the overhead hatch blew off, and she was gone in a blinding cloud of white smoke. Patrick pulled his handle as soon as he saw she was gone.
Cheshire looked over at Brad Elliott—and hesitated. “Go!” she shouted at him. She grabbed the control stick. “I got the plane! Go! Eject!”
To Nancy Cheshire’s complete astonishment, Brad Elliott reached down beside his ejection seat—and pulled the red manual man-seat separator knob, then reached up and twisted the center of his five-point harness clasp on his chest. His parachute shoulder straps and lap belt fell away with a clatter. He had detached his parachute from his ejection seat and then opened up the clasp to his parachute harness! He would never survive an ejection now! “Brad, what in hell. . .”
Brad Elliott reached over and grasped his control stick and the throttles. “I got the plane now, Nancy,” he said. “Get out of here.”
“Brad, goddammit, don’t do this!”
“I said, ejectl ” Elliott shouted.
Nancy Cheshire’s eyes were wide with fear, locked onto his with a questioning stare... but somewhere in Brad Elliott’s reassuring eyes, she found the answer. She touched his right hand in thanks, nodded, then assumed the proper ejection position in her seat and fired her ejection- seat catapult.
“Finally, I get some peace and quiet around here,” Brad Elliott said half aloud.
He didn’t need an attack computer or even a compass to do what he needed to do now. Off in the distance, he could see flashes of light from another heavy barrage of antiaircraft fire—it was coming from the last Dong Feng-5 intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile site, the one that hadn’t yet been destroyed. He steered his beautiful creation, his EB-52 Megafortress, right at the tracers.
The fire was still burning brightly on the right wing; he had no instruments, no weapons, no jammers or countermeasures. But the Megafortress was still flying. In Brad Elliott’s mind, it would always be still flying.
Ten minutes and two fighter attacks later, it was still flying. It was still flying, as fast and as deadly as the day, more than ten years ago, he’d rolled onto his first bomb run over Dreamland in the Nevada desert, when he nosed the giant bird over and down, aiming it directly for the door of the last Chinese DF-5 ICBM missile silo. The Megafortress did not protest, did not try to fly out of the crash dive, did not give any ground proximity warning. It was as if it knew that this is what it was supposed to do, what was finally expected of it.
“Patrick! Wendy!”
“Here! ” Patrick shouted. Nancy Cheshire limped over to the voice, and soon found Patrick and Wendy McLanahan. Thankfully, both appeared unhurt. “You okay, Nance?” Patrick asked.
“I think I broke my damned ankle,” Cheshire replied. “Wendy? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. Patrick had her lying flat on her back, using their parachutes as a sleeping bag to keep her comfortable. They both had plastic hip flasks of water out and were sipping from them. “My back’s sore, but I’m okay.” She touched her belly. “I think we’re all fine.”
“Did you find Brad?” Patrick asked Cheshire. No reply. “Nance? Did Brad make it out?”
As if in reply, they all looked to the west as a bright flash of light and a huge column of fire rose into the night sky. It was not a nuclear mushroom cloud, but the geyser of fire and the billowing cloud of smoke reflecting the flames of the exploding DF-5 ICBM sure resembled one. “My God!” Wendy exclaimed. “That’s where the DF-5 is, isn’t it? Is Terrill Samson still flying bombers out here? How did . . . ?”
“Brad,” Patrick breathed. He looked from the exploding DF-5 to Nancy Cheshire. “He didn’t make it out, did he?”
“He made it,” Cheshire replied with a smile. “He made it... exactly where he wanted to go.”
“In general, in battle one endures through strength and gains victory through spirit . . . When the heart’s foundation is solid, a new surge of ch’i will bring victory.”
—from The Methods of the Ssu-Ma, Fourth century B.c. Chinese military text
EPILOGUE
BRUNEI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, THE SULTANATE OF BRUNEI
TUESDAY, 1 JULY 19 97, 1200 HOURS LOCAL (MONDAY, 30 JUNE, 2300 HOURS ET)
Oddly enough, the jets that pulled off to an isolated part of Brunei International Airport and maneuvered beside each other nose-to-tail were both Gulfstream IV long-range business jets—but one was in the red and white livery of the Chinese Civil Aeronautical Administration, and the other was in the plain white with blue trim of the United States Air Force. Guards of the Sultan of Brunei’s Gurkha Reserve Unit, the elite paramilitary palace guard, ringed the parking ramp, while armored personnel carriers and heavily armed Humvees roamed the area beyond.
The inner guards seemed oblivious to the noise of the Chinese Gulf- stream as it pulled into its assigned parking spot. It did not shut down its engines. A set of stairs had been rolled out and placed near the exit door on the port side of the Chinese Gulfstream; the USAF Gulfstream had used an integral airstair that extended from the plane itself, and the exit door was already open and ready. Two lines of GRU commandos quickly formed between both sets of stairs, and one guard carrying an infantry rifle was stationed at the top of the stairs of each plane.
The door of the Chinese Gulfstream opened, and a lone man wearing a plain gray tunic appeared and stepped down the stairs. At the same time, a lone individual in a plain dark business suit walked down the USAF Gulfstream’s airstair. They walked across the ramp between the two lines of armed GRU commandos and met in the center of the tarmac. They regarded each other for a moment; then the American made a slight, polite bow. The Chinese man smiled, made an even slighter nod, then extended a hand. The American shook it hesitantly. No words were exchanged. Both men turned, walked a few paces away, turned sideways in front of the GRU commandos, then looked toward their respective aircraft.
At that, several individuals began emerging from both the USAF and CAA jets and stepped down the airstairs. Ten men wearing blue and white polyester jogging suits and white running shoes emerged from the USAF jet; two women and one man, wearing white baggy peasant’s outfits and sandals, stepped off the Chinese jet. In single file, the two columns of individuals walked across the tarmac between the GRU commandos. The men who came off the USAF jet walked more and more quickly until they were virtually running up the airstairs into the Chinese jet, but the American man and two women prisoners strode deliberately, proudly, toward the USAF plane.
All except the last man of each side. As if by some unspoken sign
al, the two men slowed, then paused as they passed each other. The Chinese man straightened his shoulders, then bowed to the other prisoner and said in English, “Good fortune to you, Colonel Patrick Shane McLanahan. Happy Reunification Day.”
“Same to you, Admiral Sun Ji Guoming,” Patrick McLanahan said. They bowed to each other again. McLanahan glared at Chinese Minister of Defense Chi Haotian, gave him a smile, then said in a loud voice, “Happy Reunification Day, Minister Chi.” Chi Haotian’s face was an expressionless, stony mask as he turned and headed quickly back to his waiting aircraft.
“Welcome home, Colonel McLanahan,” the American in the dark business suit, Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain, said. He clasped McLanahan on the shoulder and steered him toward the waiting Gulfstream.
“Whatever,” McLanahan said tonelessly as he boarded the Air Force C-20H Gulfstream for the long ride home. Gunnery Sergeant Chris Wohl, on guard at the top of the airstairs with an M-16 rifle with a M-206 grenade launcher attached, gave Patrick a “way to go” smile and nod as they passed one another. McLanahan did not return the sentiment.
Only when the wheels were up and they were heading east on their way back to the United States did Patrick McLanahan finally shed the tears of joy, and tears of sorrow, that had been welling up in him for the past ten years.
“Admiral Sun Ji Guoming flew a Sukhoi-27 fighter right onto Kadena Air Base and surrendered to the U.S. Air Force,” Secretary of Defense Chastain told him. “Fie then asked to make a public statement on the international news. He said who he was and said that he would reveal the government of China’s entire plan for the destruction and recapture of Taiwan unless China agreed to a cease-fire and a prisoner exchange was arranged. Jiang Zemin agreed immediately.”
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