Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “Ready.”

  Drummer looked for his wingman. He wasn’t there. No one was there but gray stratus, his radar showing him that what had been the ordered formation of Hornets and his fellow Tomcats was now dispersed to hell and gone, Fulcrums swarming in to attack. In the background babble, Drummer could hear Crowley’s voice ordering Reisman’s Hornets to go after the Flankers. Crowley, then Cuso, had realized that the Flankers were not stopping to jinx. Their intention was obviously to keep flying farther north, the real purpose of the Russian-made fighter-bombers not to help the Fulcrums intercept returning ROC Falcons and Mirages, but to bomb Penghu Island prior to invading it, the Fulcrums providing a fighter umbrella. Penghu, lying only thirty-five miles from Taiwan, would provide the ChiComs with several thousand Taiwanese hostages and an invaluable air base less than two and a half minutes away by air from Taiwan, closer than Cuba was to the United States.

  As Drummer used all the capabilities his avionics would provide, breaking fast to nine G’s and dropping chaff in the hope that the cloud of frequency-length cut aluminum strips would confuse the ChiComs’ radar-homing missile, he saw it closing. Eight seconds to impact. The sweet lady’s warning voice would kick in at five seconds.

  “Bogey’s mileage?” he shouted.

  “Thirty, twenty-five, twenty.” The RIO could see its contrail streaking toward them in the mirror. It was almost on them. His G-suit was sticking like Saran Wrap, perspiration pouring down his face, steaming up his visor. Then suddenly Drummer went straight up on afterburner, the cat on its tail, then into a loop, the missile passing below unable to turn as acutely, its envelope of air swallowed in the Tomcat’s turbulence.

  “Nice job, Drum. Nice job. Son of a bitch! You ran his clock out.”

  Drummer knew it was fifty percent damn good flying and fifty percent good luck that he’d managed to twist and turn enough for the missile to use up its thirty-one-mile range. “Son of a bitch has bought time for the Flankers, though,” he answered, sounding utterly drained, as was his RIO. “Let’s go help the Hornets.”

  It had been the same all over, in and out of the blue-gray sky, Tomcats and Hornets defending themselves from AA missile attack, the Fulcrums, though outnumbered, losing three. The ChiComs pilots were brave, and their MiG-29s were among the fastest birds in the world, but the overwhelming superiority of the American fighter pilots lay in their number of hours aloft, five to ten times the number of sorties flown by their opponents. And the ChiComs were still making the switch from dominant ground control to individual initiative.

  The Flankers, however, hotly pursued by the Hornets, had not yet been caught because of the necessity of Johnny Reisman’s aviators to first protect themselves from the Fulcrums that had dived wildly into their midst. Two Flankers had gone down, but ten were approaching Penghu Island. The Flanker fighter-bombers’ specific target was postulated by McCain’s SSES to be Makung City on the island’s west coast and Lintou Beach to the southeast. As a target, Makung, with only sixty thousand people and virtually no industry other than tourism and fishing, seemed to have been selected simply to terrorize the Penghu Islanders into not resisting the oncoming ChiCom invasion. Lintou Beach, however, as Reisman’s RIO was able to call up on his compact target location file, made more military sense. In Makung, the ROC had stationed two battalions, about two thousand soldiers in all. The regular army’s 1st Battalion and the 2nd Battalion’s reservists manned batteries of U.S.-made M-48 Chaparral SAM missiles.

  “Afterburners!” ordered Reisman, wanting to catch and keep the Flankers from bombing the island. He was aware that his Hornet’s fuel consumption would put them beyond the point of no return, unable to return to the McCain without refueling from the S-3B Viking, which would be a high-risk proposition, given the swarm of MiG-29s still battling Drummer’s Tomcats in the wild free-for-all. Switching off his afterburners, Reisman immediately felt the reduction in G forces, and was encouraged by his RIO advising him that a pair of Tomcats, having broken out of the supersonic killing zone, were hustling to assist the Hornets.

  At twenty-six miles from Penghu, Drummer was about to go in at Mach 2.1 to attack the Flankers when he saw one of them break formation, coming at him nose-to-nose.

  “Master arm on!” confirmed his RIO, fear and adrenaline marrying in the rush of excitement. “Am centering the T. Bandits jinxed sixteen miles. Centering dot. Fox one. Fox one.” The Tomcat’s AIM-7 Sparrow missile’s detachment from the Tomcat, powered by its boost-sustained solid-fuel propellant, left its hard point in a sudden hiss, the sleek, twelve-foot-long Sparrow reaching Mach 4.2 only seconds after it shot out from its glove pylon. Drummer’s RIO made sure the missile was receiving constant illumination from the Tomcat’s fire-control triad of signal processor, radar, and updated responses computer.

  “Eight miles!” cut in another Tomcat. “Fox one, Fox one.” Then another, “Two for Lennox. Tally two! Tally two!” meaning Lennox had a visual of the red-eyed exhausts from a duo of Flankers. These two Sukhoi-30s with insufficient Fulcrum fighter cover had obviously decided they’d better take time to kill this Tomcat on their tail in order to have a successful bomb run on Makung and Lintou Beach.

  “Five miles,” said the Tomcat’s RIO. “Select Fox Two.” Then, “Four miles … Lock ’im up … lock ’im up…. Shoot Fox Two. Fox Two.”

  “Good kill! Good kill!” It was Lennox or some Tomcat pilot shouting his congratulations as they saw Drummer’s Sparrow missile hit its target, or more accurately, when the Sparrow’s big proximity-fused fragmentation warhead exploded several meters behind the Flanker, producing a massive shotgun effect, the Flanker’s kerosene fuel tank vaporizing in an enormous orange-white bloom of fire. Two seconds before Drummer’s kill shot, however, the Flanker’s pilot had fired one of his R73s, or Russian-made A-11 Archer close-combat heat seekers, its contrail lost in a wisp of stratus, getting out of harm’s way before Drummer’s Sparrow struck the Flanker. The Archer missile was now tracking Aviator Lennox’s Tomcat, which, at eleven thousand feet, had just fired its Sidewinder at the second of the two Flankers Lennox had spotted earlier.

  Lennox’s wingman, a short, wiry twenty-three-year-old from Waco, Texas, suddenly found himself the pursued. His Tomcat — glove vanes on the leading edges of the fixed wings extended to reduce the more than Mach 1 strain on the fighter’s tail planes — made a tight right turn inside the Flanker’s defensive right break. And so, in classic Red Baron style, Lennox was now immediately behind and in the Flanker’s cone of vulnerability. When he saw the lime-green arc formed by his gun’s computer impact line and gun sight’s green circle move to the middle of his HUD image of the Flanker, he fired. The long stream of his Tomcat’s six-barreled 20mm Vulcan, spewing out ninety rounds in less than a second, chopped up the Flanker’s turbofans and right tail plane. A collision warning sounded in the Texan’s cockpit, and he instinctively broke in the opposite direction, but didn’t climb fast enough to avoid the wake of “dirty air” from the disintegration of the ChiCom fighter-bomber. The supersonic swarm of debris that had been the Flanker’s nose radar and other white-hot debris thudded into the Tomcat’s nacelle housing and was sucked into the huge, canted intakes of the F-14’s left turbofan. The engine shut down immediately, and the Tomcat’s cockpit was so badly pitted by blades from the Flanker’s engines that Lennox’s wingman lost all frontal vision through the HUD, the fighter’s right intake struck by a piece of the Flanker’s heavy and unexploded ordnance.

  “Right engine’s gone!” shouted his RIO.

  “Eject,” ordered the Texan.

  “Roger!”

  Plummeting seaward, their bird tumbling out of control, the Texan and his RIO, ever faithful to the aviator’s code, still had full confidence in the efficacy of their plane’s design, specifically in the reputation of the Martin-Baker seats. They had been so meticulously made that with the aircraft parked upon a tarmac, the zero-zero system would still eject the pilots high enough to have their chutes open and bring them s
afely down. Now, fighting the punishing G forces exerted on the tumbling Tomcat, the two men nevertheless managed to reach and pull their snakes. In a split second the explosive bolts fired, releasing the seat.

  Both men’s necks snapped like twigs, the canopy’s fairing having been severely dented and thus locked by the impact of the Flanker’s supersonic debris.

  Lennox glimpsed the tumbling dot of the Tomcat on his green monitor, saw it swell into sudden luminescence as it smashed into the sea. But his attention was quickly hijacked by the tadpole shape streaking in on his radar, a missile fired from eight miles behind. Normally it would have taken the missile.8 seconds to reach him, but thanks to Typhoon Jane’s headwinds, it took 1.2 seconds, time enough for Lennox’s RIO to drop chaff and pop flares, hoping to confuse both the Archer’s radar and infrared. The American ruse failed, however, the agility and maneuverability of the Russian-made missile so acute that despite Lennox’s and his RIO’s countermeasures, the ten-foot Archer was able to lock on via the ChiCom pilot’s helmet-mounted sight, a full forty-two degrees off bore sight.

  Lennox, his RIO, and their beloved machine disappeared from the FITCOMPRON’s Prowler’s radar.

  This second explosion shocked the already stunned Combat Information Center in the McCain, the room so quiet that only the hum from the air conditioners’ vents and the whir of the 24/7 digital disc recorder could be heard. Four men and a hundred million dollars lost in less than six seconds.

  “Hope to hell our screen’s working,” opined a veteran chief petty officer, referring not to the CIC’s blue board, but to the carrier’s protective screen of Aegis cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and two attack subs whose sole reason for being there was to prevent a ChiCom “box” or missiles getting through to the heart of the CVBG.

  In McCain’s SSES, the chief boffin called Admiral Crowley with more bad news. Seven, possibly eight, of the ChiCom Flankers had reached Penghu Island, penetrating its defensive ring of Chaparral SAM sites. In fact, five-man Chaparral crews — each made up of commander, driver, gunner, and two loaders — belonging to the reservists’ battalion on Penghu, were still frantically launching Chaparrals. The fiery backblasts from quads of the eleven-ton U.S. missiles were clearly visible to the ChiComs’ seven remaining Sukhoi fighter-bomber pilots. Quickly going to their Lyulka afterburners, they rapidly climbed to eleven thousand feet, placing themselves a thousand feet beyond the Chaparrals’ maximum altitude.

  From this high ground they fired a rain of air-to-surface TV-guided missiles at Penghu installations, and dropped seven 1,100-pound bombs, knocking out six of the quad Chaparral launchers in a series of head-thudding explosions whose gases created a dust storm that swept across the island before being blown leeward by gusts heralding Typhoon Jane’s approach. The hurricane of shrapnel from the bombs, however, was not so readily dispersed, scything through the reservists, who, unlike the regular ROC troops in the 1st Battalion, had failed to dig enough slit trenches along Lintou Beach. Instead, the reservists had clumped together in the tactically futile but psychologically understandable belief that protection lay in numbers.

  In Makung, panic reigned in the fish markets and town itself, clustered about the picturesque harbor, and families who would normally have fled down to fishing boats to make good their escape from any man-made assault on their small island were afraid to do battle with the huge seas stirred up by Jane. Taipei radio had now upgraded Jane to supertyphoon, the winds off Taiwan’s east coast reportedly reaching 140 miles per hour with gusts to 180. It meant that even if the families of Makung, their town ablaze from the ChiCom bombing and strafing, managed to escape the wind-fanned inferno and reach their boats, their Taiwanese navy could not help them, the wind-whipped seas drowning all hope of rescue. Meanwhile, the Americans could not help much, their Rules of Engagement requiring them to hold their fire for fear of overshooting the enemy planes and killing Taiwanese civilians. Penghu’s sacred banyan tree was also destroyed, having been used by the ChiCom bombers as their initial aiming point.

  “Damn!” said Johnny Reisman. “Can’t do a damn thing!”

  Crowley and Cuso heard and shared their FITCOMPRON leader’s frustration, his voice remarkably clear through the crackle and labored breathing of an aviator who had just overseen the worst aerial defeat of American arms in the last quarter century.

  Within minutes of the ROC 1st Battalion on Penghu sounding the air raid warning, 350 presumed tourists trapped on the island had quickly sought refuge from the Flanker blitz by taking cover in and around the popular Fengkuei cave on the rocky southwestern isthmus of the island. When the air raid finally ended, these “tourists” emerged from their ad hoc shelter, heading toward the fiercely crackling ruins of Makung, armed with Kalashnikov 47s, bandoliers of 7.6mm ammunition, grenades, and light but deadly 60mm mortars. The arms had been planted months earlier by PLA navy commandos during clandestine landings by diesel-electric subs that had come in close to Penghu during stormy weather, the rough seas having subsumed the already quiet running of the subs’ battery-power propulsion, making the ChiCom presence in the strait undetectable by even the best Taiwanese sonar.

  The island was now hostage to the PLA.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “So,” pronounced Choir Williams, as the SpecFor group watched CNN’s Marte Price reporting the Chinese-U.S. conflict in the Taiwan Straits. “Looks like we don’t need to wait for Petrel’s water sample results after all, me boyos. It’s the Chinese!”

  Salvini nodded in agreement.

  “Choir!” Aussie announced triumphantly. “I think you just lost a bet, boyo.” His tone, however, was devoid of the usual follow-up jabs that characterized the relationship between Freeman’s Special Forces team. The bloody animal and human carnage they had seen in the waters of their strait disallowed the usual spirited repartee — at least for now.

  “What d’you think, General?” Aussie asked.

  Freeman’s attention had shifted from Marte Price to the TV screen’s sidebar weather map of Typhoon Jane. “Doesn’t make sense,” he concluded. “Starting a war on two fronts. Fundamental. Even for a superpower. Beijing attacking Taiwan and us at the same time? Anyway, if they were going to do that, why one offensive in the open, the other not?”

  “Maybe,” suggested Aussie, “their planned invasion of Taiwan — which we know they’ve always had on the shelf — was triggered prematurely by the Taiwanese firing the first shot. ChiComs had to react?”

  “I think so,” agreed Freeman, “and I’ll tell you why. It’s that damned typhoon. No planned offensive by Beijing would willingly battle that bitch and the Taiwanese armed forces at the same time.”

  “So you think Taipei did fire first?” asked Salvini.

  “Don’t know, Sal,” answered Freeman. “Sometimes we never know who fired the first shot.” He paused. “ ’Bout ourselves, war, or anything else. I don’t know if the ChiComs started it, but something — don’t ask me what — tells me they’re not the ones sinking our ships here in Juan de Fuca.” He glanced across at Choir. “I wouldn’t claim that wager with Aussie just yet.”

  “Then who is it, General?” pressed Choir.

  Before Freeman could answer, the phone rang with the Coast Guard’s IMU test. The Darkstar-detected anomaly was positive. Definitely isotope-tagged. There was a problem, however, in that the isotope match-up was for the oil used by a Caribbean Panama-registered cruise ship, Bermuda Star. Obviously, it had illegally jettisoned or leaked it en route to either Vancouver or Seattle, the two major Northwest cruise ship ports.

  “Shit a brick!” said Aussie, crushing the plastic water bottle from which he’d been drinking and throwing it violently into the wastebasket, the mood of the other three no different. For a few seconds no one spoke. But if Choir, Salvini, and Aussie’s silence was a measure of their bitter disappointment in having failed to narrow the search for the killer sub whose sheer audacity Freeman couldn’t help but grudgingly admire for the utter chaos and humiliation such
a small gutsy force had brought about — as his own team had in the past — the silence afforded the general a moment to think, uninterrupted by the others’ theories.

  He switched off the TV and tossed the remote on his bed, which he’d remade after the maid service had been in — the blankets now so tightly tucked that a tossed quarter bounced off it — testimony to the fact that as much as he was an original maverick thinker in the armed forces, he also valued the small but valuable drills that reinforced respect for tradition. He knew that some of the old ideas “in the box” could still serve well in times of personal and national crisis. Going back to the box of boring procedures for a moment, he asked Salvini to go online and into Google, to do a search on the Net for cruise ships’ arrivals and departures. In a minute Salvini saw that the Bermuda Star had been scheduled to arrive in Seattle a week before, that is, before the sinkings. But the entry was flagged with a red asterisk.

  “Queer,” observed the general, explaining his comment by pointing out that Seattle Port Authority showed Bermuda Star as “delayed.” Having departed Lahaina, Maui, for Seattle two weeks ago, the cruise ship had been compelled to return to Hawaii due to an outbreak of a virulent SARS-like bronchial virus, over a dozen passengers removed to the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Honolulu. And the ship had been quarantined.

  “So it didn’t get to Seattle,” said Freeman, his earlier fatigue replaced by a surge of energy.

  “I don’t get it,” confessed Sal.

  “The sub got hold of however many barrels it needed,” said Freeman, “from Bermuda Star. So if the sub sprang a leak, from its hydraulics, whatever—”