by Dale Brown
nance pens, headquarters buildings, fuel storage, and
314 DALE BROWN
communications facilities. Coming in at low altitude-some
pilots shoved their prized F-16 Fighting Falcons right down to
two hundred feet, almost grazing the tops of antennas and
trees-the attacks were very effective. Some pilots even spot-
ted several ES313-class diesel-electric attack subs at the piers
and secured beside sub tenders and attacked them with great
success, using their 20-millimeter cannons in strafing mode.
With freedom to roam the sides and the base's air defenses all
but neutralized, any F-16 that missed a target could circle
around and come in again, so every assigned target was hit,
along with a few important targets of opportunity.
The third wave of F- 16 fighters never crossed the shoreline,
but their attacks were just as successful. These attackers car-
ried four Mk 55 bottom mines per plane, scattering them in
precise patterns near the submarine pens and in nearby Dong-
shan Harbor, covering most of the sea approaches to the naval
base. The Mk 55 mine moored itself to the bottom of the
harbor and waited. When it detected a large magnetic presence,
such as a ship or submarine, it would detach itself from the
bottom and start for the surface, then explode when it sensed
itself near its target.
As the Nationalist fighters started their withdrawal, twelve
J-6 fighters from Fuzhou Army Air Base to the north moved
into attack formation and tried to jump them. The fight was
over in a matter of seconds. Without even dropping their ex-
temal fuel tanks, the Taiwanese F- 16 fighter-bombers were
able to maneuver clear of the Chinese fighters' lethal cone of
fire, and in an instant the hunted would become the hunters.
The Chinese PL-2 air-to-air missiles could only lock onto a
target from the rear, where it had a clear look at the "hot dot"
of a fighter's jet exhaust, which'ineant every move a Chinese
pilot was going to make was already known by every Tai-
wariese pilot. It was a simple exercise to wait for a Chinese
pilot to commit to a rear attack, then jump him from above or
from the side, where the American-made Sidewinder missiles
were still effective. In less than two minutes, nine Chinese J-
6 fighters had been shot down; the other three merely launched
missiles at the slightest detection indication-they didn't even
know if it was friend or foe-then did a fast one-eighty and
bugged out.
The senior controller aboard the 11-76 radar plane watched
the attack on his radar screen in sheer horror. Juidongshan
FATAL T ER R AI N 315
Naval Base had just been attacked by rebel Nationalist fighter-
bombers, and they had just sat back and watched without doing
a thing! In a fit of rage, he whipped off his headphones and
dashed over to the operations officer's console in the front
curtained-off section of the cabin. A young marine guard tried
to block the officer's path, but the controller pushed him aside.
"What in blazes do you think you are doing?" the senior
controller shouted angrily. "Juidongshan has been hit hard by
the Nationalists, and you sit here doing nothing!"
"I am following orders, Captain," the operations officer
replied cahnly. He paused, then waved for the marine guard
to step into the rear cabin, out of earshot. "The Nationalists'
attack was expected."
"Expected? What do you mean?-
"Our subs were evacuated hours ago," the ops officer said.
"Only a few decoy ships remained, enough to whet the rebel
bomber's appetites and waste their bombs. Base personnel
were sent into air raid shelters. The I only ones still above-
ground on that base are TV reporters.'
"TV reporters? We allowed our base to be bombed simply
for a propaganda ploy? What is going on here?"
"That is none of your concern, nor mine," the operations
officer responded. "It is all part of some strange plan coming
from Beijing. Return to your post and continue monitoring for
other attacks in our sector. This is supposedly part of a large
attack plan by the Nationalists, so we can expect more attacks
tonight. "
The next wave of Taiwanese fighter-bomber attacks oc-
curred just minutes after the senior controller returned to his
console. "Attention, attention, enemy fighters detected,
crossing into restricted airspace seven-zero miles east of Xia-
men Air Base, heading west," one of his controllers reported.
,'Two large formations, estimating sixteen to thirty enemy air-
craft. "
The senior controller gasped inwardly as he called up the
radar plot on his display. If it was two cells of sixteen aircraft
attacking Xiamen, this meant that the Nationalists had com-
mitted their entire fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons to this attack.
"Comm, notify Fuzhou, scramble every plane they have," the
senior controller ordered. He knew Fuzhou had almost one
hundred fighters based there, perhaps one-third of them armed,
fueled, and on ready five alert, with another ten or twenty
316 DALE BROWN
capable of launching and escaping before the rebel fighters
arrived overhead; that force might be able to hold off the rebels
until the remaining force could be launched or moved and the
base personnel evacuated. Unlike Juidongshan, the senior con-
"Get me a
troller knew that Xiamen had not been evacuated.
report on how many fighters can launch. I want--
"Nothing," said a voice behind him. It was the operations
officer himself, standing over'his shoulder. "No fighters will
launch from Fuzhou. Vector the three surviving fighters from
the Juidongshan engagement to Shantou, get them on the
ground as soon as possible."
"What?"
d. "No more arguments
'Do it," the ops officer snappe
from you-lives depend on it. Move.--
Land-based radars at Xiamen confirmed what the 19-76 crew
feared-it was an all-out assault, with more than thirty F-16
fighter-bombers in eight formations coming in at different al-
titudes and from different directions. No fighters challenged
them.
The F-16 pilots knew that the Hong Qian-2 surface-to-air
missiles based at Xiamen, just five miles west of the Taiwanese
island of Quemoy, had a maximum range of 34 miles and an
optimum range of only 20 miles. The HQ-2s were old copies
of ex-Russian SA-2 "flying telephone pole" missiles, huge
lumbering two-stage missiles designed to attack 1950s-and
1960s-era bombers, missiles with big warheads but with un-
reliable, slow, and easily jaminable radio remote-control
command guidance-hardly a match for the swift and nimble
F- 16s.
The Taiwanese satellite intelligence was excellent, and the
F-16's APG-66 attack radars locked onto the navigation and
bombing aimpoints with ease; once the radars were locked on
and a navigation update taken, the Falcon Eye imaging infra-
red sensors were activated and slaved to the four possible tar-
gets at each target waypoint. At forty miles, little could be
seen on Falcon Eye or radar except for larger buildings; most
vital buildings
of the F-16s were going hunting for the more
in the complex-headquarters, air- and coastal-defense
weapon sites, communications, barracks, weapon-storage fa-
veground fuel storage, and
cifities, abo
Threat receivers blared to life seconds after the F-16s sped
inside max HQ-2 missile range, as the search and height-finder
FATAL TERRAIN 317
radars switched to target-tracking and missile-guidance modes,
and several surface-to-air missiles leapt into the sky from Xia-
men. The F- 16 pilots activated their electronic countermeasure
pods and dropped chaff to decoy the enemy radars. At night,
it was easy to spot the HQ-2 missiles as they lifted off their
launchers, trailing a long bright yellow plume of fire. All of
the HQ-2s went ballistic, powering up to very high altitude,
thousands of feet above the F-16s. Their second-stage boosters
ignited, powering them up even higher, some 30,0W feet
above the Taiwanese attackers, before starting their terminal
dive toward the F-16s.
The F- l6s' ECM pods effectively jammed the Chinese tar-
get-tracking radars, so the Chinese missile technicians had to
continually relock their radars onto another target-but they
had no way of knowing that they had locked onto a cloud of
radar-decoying chaff until several seconds after lock-on, when
they would notice that the target was hanging in the sky at
zero airspeed. They had only seconds to reacquire another le-
gitimate target, because the HQ-2 missiles were on their way
down toward the rebel F-16s.
The F- 16 pilots had detected only perhaps six or eight HQ-2
SAM launches, with one or two missiles targeted on each in ' -
bound attack formation. Even if all of them hit an F- 16, which
was extremely unlikely, the strike package would still be in-
tact. The Chinese defenders might have one more shot at the
F-16s if they were lucky, but more likely the F-16s would
blow through a second wave and be over the base, and then
the fun would start. Another turkey shoot, just like their suc-
cessful brothers down over Juidongshan. Quemoy Tao, the
Taiwanese-controlled islands east of Xiamen, would be safe
from attack and finally avenged for the Chinese nuclear attack
that had almost destroyed ...
In the blink of an eye, all thirty-two Taiwanese F- 16 fighter-
bombers disappeared.
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE UNDERGROUND COMMAND
CENTER, BEIJING, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
SUNDAY, 22 JUNE 1997, 0331 HOURS LOCAL
(SATURDAY, 21 JUNE, 1431 HOURS ET)
The special emergency underground command center in Bei-
jing had been used only afew times in its forty-year history.
318 DALE BROWN
The bunker had been used for long periods of time during
conflicts between China and the Soviet Union in 1961 and
1979 that threatened to go nuclear; the other time was during
the last major Chinese invasion of Taiwan, in 1955, when the
United States had threatened to use nuclear weapons to stop
the Communists from overrunning Taiwan. Built by engineers
from the Soviet Union, the bunker was a perfect, albeit slightly
smaller, replica of the Kremlin underground emergency bunker
in Moscow, used when there was no time to evacuate the po-
litical and Party leadership from the city.
The 8,000-square-foot steel and concrete facility, set six sto-
ries under the Chinese Ministry of Defense on forty huge
spring shock absorbers to cushion the shock of nearby nuclear
explosions, was designed and provisioned to accommodate an
operations, support, and security staff of thirty-eight-many of
whom were women, the implications obvious-plus fifty high
government officials. Now it contained the proper amount of
staff and technicians, but perhaps three times the maximum-
number of government officials. President Jiang Zemin and his
closest civilian and military advisors were seated around a sim-
ple rectangular table in the center of the bunker. Surrounding
them were the other high officials and their aides, then a ring
of communications, intelligence, and planning officers at their
consoles and workstations that fed the president and his ad-
visors a constant stream of information. Finally, the remainder
of the government officials that had threatened, bribed, forced,
or cajoled their way inside were jammed into every remaining
nook and cranny of the bunker.
President Jiang scowled as he surveyed his surroundings.
They had been in the bunker since midnight, when intelligence
had reported that the rebel Nationalist air attack was under
way. Eighty persons stuffed into the small enclosure was bad
enough-180 was almost intolerable. But it was too late to
open the blast doors. 'Me worst part was that the one man he
wanted to talk to was not present. This was an outrage! he
thought. Sun Ji Guorning was going to suffer for this.
"Excuse me, Comrade President," the defense minister, Chi
Haotian, said. "Admiral Sun is on the line via satellite."
"Where is he? I ordered him to be here before the attack
began! "
"Sir ... comrade, he is airborne, calling from a bomber air-
craft over Jiangxi province!"
ATAL T ER RAI N 319
"What? Give me that!" Jiang snatched the receiver from
Chi. "Admiral Sun, this is the president. I want an explanation,
and I want it now!"
"Yes, sir," Sun Ji Guoming responded. "I am aboard an
H-7 Gangfang bomber. I am using it as my airborne command
post to monitor the attack on the rebel Nationalists on Taiwan.
We are ready to begin our attack on Makung, Taichung, Hsin-
chu, Tainan, and Tsoying. I request permission to begin our
attacks. Over. "
Jiang was so angry that his words were coming out in con-
fused sputters. "I ordered you to report here, to me, before
these attacks began!" he shouted. "Why have you disobeyed
me?"
"Because I do not think I could have squeezed into your
command center there, sir," Sun responded. Jiang couldn't
help but look around himself again and cursed the cowardice
and failure of discipline that filled this bunker up like this.
"Besides, sir, not every flag officer of the People's Liberation
Army can be in an underground shelter-someone must lead
our troops to victory. I therefore decided to lead the bombing
raid on the rebels myself."
"This is insubordination at the highest level!" military chief
of staff General Chin Po Zihong thundered. "He has insulted
every man in this room! Admiral Sun must be stripped of his
rank and imprisoned immediately for this!"
President Jiang looked around the impossibly overcrowded
bunker and was embarrassed and shamed. He could not cen-
sure a
commander who was out flying with his troops, ready
to take on the high-tech, well-trained Nationalist air force. "I
think it would be difficult for any of us to arrest Comrade Sun,
since he is free and is struggling on behalf of the People's
Republic of China, while we are in this concrete sardine can!"
Jiang said in a loud voice. "We are safe, and we dare accuse
Comrade Admiral Sun of insubordination while he risks his
life to be seen by his fellow soldiers?" Chin fell silent. Jiang
returned to the receiver: "Comrade Sun, can you report on the
status of the operation?"
"Yes, sir," Sun responded. "As expected, the Nationalists
attacked Juidongshan with conventional bombs and air-
dropped mines. The base was moderately damaged, but we
suffered no casualties. Four of our J-6 air defense fighters were
shot down, with four presumed casualties. The Nationalist at-
320 DALE BROWN
tack on Xiamen was stopped completely, with an estimated
thirty-two Nationalist F-16 fighters obliterated. No estimates
on Nationalist casualties on Quemoy Dao, but observed above-
ground damage was extensive. No damage, no casualties at
Xiamen. All of our invasion forces are intact and awaiting your
orders for the second phase of our attack."
President Jiang hesitated. This was easily the most monu-
mental decision of his life. Up until now, he had almost com-
pletely escaped criticism for the People's Liberation Army's
activities in the Formosa Strait or South China Sea region since
these conflicts had begun about a month ago. He had been
roundly criticized for bringing the former Russian, former Ira-
nian aircraft carrier into the western Pacific; he had been crit-
icized for amassing an attack fleet against Quemoy; he had
been criticized for his policies against allowing more home
rule of Hong Kong. But ever since Admiral Sun had begun
his unconventional-warfare campaign against Taiwan, very lit-
tle criticism had been directed against him-it had all been
directed against the United States and against the rebels on
Formosa, even though Admiral Sun and the People's Libera-
tion Army under his command had precipitated everything that