by Tom Clancy
The F-14s on the lead were guided to aerial targets by the Hawkeyes. Again since there was commercial air traffic in the sky, the fighter pilots had to close to visual range for a positive ID of their targets. This could be dangerous, but there was no avoiding it.
What the Navy pilots didn’t know was that the Chinese knew the electronic signature of the APD-138 radar on the E-2Cs, and therefore they also knew that something was coming. Fully a hundred Chinese fighters scrambled into the air and set up their own combat air patrol over their East Coast. The Hawkeyes spotted that and radioed a warning to the advancing fighters, setting the stage for a massive air engagement in the predawn darkness.
There was no elegant way to go about it. Two squadrons of Tomcats, twenty-four in all, led the strike force. Each carried four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, plus four AIM-9X Sidewinders, The Phoenixes were old—nearly fifteen years old for some of them, and in some cases the solid-fuel motor bodies were developing cracks that would soon become apparent. They had a theoretical range of over a hundred miles, however, and that made them useful things to hang on one’s airframe.
The Hawkeye crews had orders to make careful determination of what was a duck and what was a goose, but it was agreed quickly that two or more aircraft flying in close formation were not Airbuses full of civilian passengers, and the Tomcats were authorized to shoot a full hundred miles off the Chinese mainland. The first salvo was composed of forty-eight. Of these, six self-destructed within five hundred yards of their launching aircraft, to the displeased surprise of the pilots involved. The remaining forty-two streaked upward in a ballistic path to a height of over a hundred thousand feet before tipping over at Mach-5 speed and switching on their millimeter-band Doppler homing radars. By the end of their flight, their motors were burned out, and they did not leave the smoke trail that pilots look for. Thus, though the Chinese pilots knew that they’d been illuminated, they couldn’t see the danger coming, and therefore could not see anything to evade. The forty-two Phoenixes started going off in their formations, and the only survivors were those who broke into radical turns when they saw the first warheads go off. All in all, the forty-eight launches resulted in thirty-two kills. The surviving Chinese pilots were shaken but also enraged. As one man, they turned east and lit up their search radars, looking for targets for their own air-to-air missiles. These they found, but beyond range of their weapons. The senior officer surviving the initial attack ordered them to go to afterburner and streak east, and at a range of sixty miles, they fired off their PL-10 radar-guided air-to-air missiles. These were a copy of the Italian Aspide, in turn a copy of the old American AIM-7E Sparrow. To track a target, they required that the launching aircraft keep itself and its radar pointed at the target. In this case, the Americans were heading in as well, with their own radars emitting, and what happened was a great game of chicken, with the fighter pilots on either side unwilling to turn and run—and besides, they all figured that to do so merely guaranteed one’s death. And so the race was between airplanes and missiles, but the PL-10 had a speed of Mach 4 against the Phoenix’s Mach 5.
Back on the Hawkeyes, the crewmen kept track of the engagement. Both the aircraft and the streaking missiles were visible on the scopes, and there was a collective holding of breath for this one.
The Phoenixes hit first, killing thirty-one more PLAAF fighters, and also turning off their radars rather abruptly. That made some of their missiles “go dumb,” but not all, and the six Chinese fighters that survived the second Phoenix barrage found themselves illuminating targets for a total of thirty-nine PL-10s, which angled for only four Tomcats.
The American pilots affected by this saw them coming, and the feeling wasn’t particularly pleasant. Each went to afterburner and dove for the deck, loosing every bit of chaff and flares he had in his protection pods, plus turning the jamming pods up to max power. One got clean away. Another lost most of them in the chaff, where the Chinese missiles exploded like fireworks in his wake, but one of the F-14s had nineteen missiles chasing him alone, and there was no avoiding them all. The third missile got close enough to trigger its warhead, and then nine more, and the Tomcat was reduced to chaff itself, along with its two-man crew. That left one Navy fighter whose radar-intercept officer ejected safely, though the pilot did not.
The remaining Tomcats continued to bore in. They were out of Phoenix missiles now, and closed to continue the engagement with Sidewinders. Losing comrades did nothing more than anger them for the moment, and this time it was the Chinese who turned back and headed for their coast, chased by a cloud of heat-seeking missiles.
This bar fight had the effect of clearing the way for the strike force. The PLAN base had twelve piers with ships alongside, and the United States Navy went after its Chinese counterpart—as usually happened, on the principle that in war people invariably kill those most like themselves before going after the different ones.
The first to draw the wrath of the Hornets were the submarines. They were mainly old Romeo-class diesel boats, long past whatever prime they’d once had. They were mainly rafted in pairs, and the Hornet drivers struck at them with Skippers and SLAMs. The former was a thousand-pound bomb with a rudimentary guidance package attached, plus a rocket motor taken off obsolete missiles, and they proved adequate to the task. The pilots tried to guide them between the rafted submarines, so as to kill two with a single weapon, and that worked in three out of five attempts. SLAM was a land-attack version of the Harpoon anti-ship missile, and these were directed at the port and maintenance facilities without which a naval base is just a cluttered beach. The damage done looked impressive on the videotapes. Other aircraft tasked to a mission called IRON HAND sought out Chinese missile and flak batteries, and engaged those at safe distance with HARM anti-radiation missiles which sought out and destroyed acquisition and illumination radars with high reliability.
All in all, the first U.S. Navy attack on the mainland of East Asia since Vietnam went off well, eliminating twelve PRC warships and laying waste to one of its principal naval bases.
Other bases were attacked with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched mainly from surface ships. Every PLAN base over a swath of five hundred miles of coast took one form of fire or another, and the ship count was jacked up to sixteen, all in a period of a little over an hour. The American tactical aircraft returned to their carriers, having spilled the blood of their enemies, though also having lost some of their own.
CHAPTER 58
Political Fallout
It was a difficult night for Marshal Luo Cong, the Defense Minister for the People’s Republic of China. He’d gone to bed about eleven the previous night, concerned with the ongoing operations of his military forces, but pleased that they seemed to be going well. And then, just after he’d closed his eyes, the phone rang.
His official car came at once to convey him to his office, but he didn’t enter it. Instead he went to the Defense Ministry’s communications center, where he found a number of senior- and mid-level officers going over fragmentary information and trying to make sense of it. Minister Luo’s presence didn’t help them, but just added stress to the existing chaos.
Nothing seemed clear, except that they could identify holes in their information. The 65th Army had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Its commanding general had been visiting one of his divisions, along with his staff, and hadn’t been heard from since 0200 or so. Nor had the division’s commanding general. In fact, nothing at all was known about what was happening up there. To fix that, Marshal Luo ordered a helicopter to fly up from the depot at Sunwu. Then came reports from Harbin and Bei’an of air raids that had damaged the railroads. A colonel of engineers was dispatched to look into that.
But just when he thought he’d gotten a handle on the difficulties in Siberia, then came reports of an air attack on the fleet base at Guangszhou, and then the lesser naval bases at Haikuo, Shantou, and Xiachuandao. In each case, the headquarters facilities seemed hard-hit, since there was no respo
nse from the local commanders. Most disturbing of all was the report of huge losses to the fighter regiments in the area—reports of American naval aircraft making the attacks. Then finally, worst of all, a pair of automatic signals, the distress buoys from his country’s only nuclear-powered missile submarine and the hunter submarine detailed to protect her, the Hai Long, were both radiating their automated messages. It struck the marshal as unlikely to the point of impossibility that so many things could have happened at once. And yet there was more. Border radar emplacements were off the air and could not be raised on radio or telephone. Then came another phone call from Siberia. One of the divisions on the left shoulder of the breakthrough—the one the commanding general of 65th Type B Group Army had been visiting a few hours before—reported ... that is, a junior communications officer said, a subunit of the division reported, that unknown armored forces had lanced through its western defenses, going east, and ... disappeared?
“How the hell does an enemy attack successfully and disappear?” the marshal had demanded, in a voice to make the young captain wilt. “Who reported this?”
“He identified himself as a major in the Third Battalion, 745th Guards Infantry Regiment, Comrade Marshal,” was the trembling reply. “The radio connection was scratchy, or so it was reported to us.”
“And who made the report?”
“A Colonel Zhao, senior communications officer in the intelligence staff of 71st Type C Group Army north of Bei’an. They are detailed to border security in the breakthrough sector,” the captain explained.
“I know that!” Luo bellowed, taking out his rage on the nearest target of opportunity.
“Comrade Marshal,” said a new voice. It was Major General Wei Dao-Ming, one of Luo’s senior aides, just called in from his home after one more of a long string of long days, and showing the strain, but trying to smooth the troubled waters even so. “You should let me and my staff assemble this information in such a way that we can present it to you in an orderly manner.”
“Yes, Wei, I suppose so.” Luo knew that this was good advice, and Wei was a career intelligence officer, accustomed to organizing information for his superiors. “Quick as you can.”
“Of course, Comrade Minister,” Wei said, to remind Luo that he was a political figure now rather than the military officer he’d grown up as.
Luo went to the VIP sitting room, where green tea was waiting. He reached into the pocket of his uniform tunic and pulled out some cigarettes, strong unfiltered ones to help him wake up. They made him cough, but that was all right. By the third cup of tea, Wei returned with a pad of paper scribbled with notes.
“So, what is happening?”
“The picture is confused, but I will tell you what I know, and what I think,” Wei began.
“We know that General Qi of Sixty-fifth Army is missing, along with his staff. They were visiting 191st Infantry Division, just north and west of our initial breakthrough. The 191st is completely off the air as well. So is the 615th Independent Tank Brigade, part of Sixty-fifth Army. Confused reports talk of an air attack on the tank brigade, but nothing precise is known. The 735th Guards Infantry Regiment of the 191st division is also off the air, cause unknown. You ordered a helicopter out of Sunwu to take a look and report back. The helicopter will get off at dawn. Well and good.
“Next, there are additional reports from that sector, none of which make sense or help form any picture of what is happening. So, I have ordered the intelligence staff of the Seventy-first Army to send a reconnaissance team across the river and ascertain what’s happening there and report back. That will take about three hours.
“The good news is that General Peng Xi-Wang remains in command of 34th Shock Army, and will be at the gold mine before midday. Our armored spearhead is deep within enemy territory. I expect the men are waking up right now and will be moving within the hour to continue their attack.
“Now, this news from the navy people is confusing, but it’s not really a matter of consequence. I’ve directed the commander of South Sea Fleet to take personal charge of the situation and report back. So say about three hours for that.
“So, Comrade Minister, we will have decent information shortly, and then we can start addressing the situation. Until then, General Peng will soon resume his offensive, and by evening, our country will be much richer,” Wei concluded. He knew how to keep his minister happy. His reward for this was a grunt and a nod. “Now,” General Wei went on, “why don’t you get a few hours of sleep while we maintain the watch?”
“Good idea, Wei.” Luo took two steps to the couch and lay down across it. Wei opened the door, turned off the lights, then he closed the door behind himself. The communications center was only a few more steps.
“Now,” he said, stealing a smoke from a major, “what the hell is happening out there?”
“If you want an opinion,” a colonel of intelligence said, “I think the Americans just flexed their muscles, and the Russians will do so in a few hours.”
“What? Why do you say that? And why the Russians?”
“Where has their air force been? Where have their attack helicopters been? We don’t know, do we? Why don’t we know? Because the Americans have swatted our airplanes out of the sky like flies, that’s why.”
“We’ve deluded ourselves that the Russians don’t want to fight, haven’t we? A man named Hitler once thought the same thing. He died a few years later, the history books say. We similarly deluded ourselves into thinking the Americans would not strike us hard for political reasons. Wei, some of our political leaders have been off chasing the dragon!” The aphorism referred to opium-smoking, a popular if illegal pastime in the southern part of China a few centuries before. “There were no political considerations. They were merely building up their forces, which takes time. And the Russians didn’t fight us because they wanted us to get to the end of the logistical string, and then the fucking Americans cut that string off at Harbin and Bei’an! General Peng’s tanks are nearly three hundred kilometers inside Russia now, with only two hundred kilometers of fuel in their tanks, and there’ll be no more fuel coming up to them. We’ve taken over two thousand tanks and turned their crews into badly trained light infantry! That is what’s happening, Comrade Wei,” the colonel concluded.
“You can say that sort of thing to me, Colonel. Say it before Minister Luo, and your wife will pay the state for the bullet day after tomorrow,” Wei warned.
“Well, I know it,” Colonel Geng He-ping replied. “What will happen to you later today, Comrade General Wei, when you organize the information and find out that I am correct?”
“The remainder of today will have to take care of itself” was the fatalistic reply. “One thing at a time, Geng.” Then he assembled a team of officers and gave them each a task to perform, found himself a chair to sit in, and wondered if Geng might have a good feel for the situation—
“Colonel Geng?”
“Yes, Comrade General?”
“What do you know of the Americans?”
“I was in our embassy in Washington until eighteen months ago. While there, I studied their military quite closely.”
“And—are they capable of what you just said?”
“Comrade General, for the answer to that question, I suggest you consult the Iranians and the Iraqis. I’m wondering what they might try next, but thinking exactly like an American is a skill I have never mastered.”
They’re moving,”, Major Tucker reported with a stretch and a yawn. ”Their reconnaissance element just started rolling. Your people have pulled way back. How come?”
“I ordered them to collect Comrade Gogol before the Chinese kill him,” Colonel Tolkunov told the American. “You look tired.”
“Hell, what’s thirty-six hours in the same chair?” A helluva sore back, that’s what it is, Tucker didn’t say. Despite the hours, he was having the time of his life. For an Air Force officer who’d flunked out of pilot training, making him forever an “unrated weenie” in A
ir Force parlance, a fourth-class citizen in the Air Force pecking order—below even helicopter pilots—he was earning his keep more and better than he’d ever done. He’d probably been more valuable to his side in this war than even that Colonel Winters, with all his air-to-air snuffs. But if anyone ever said such a thing to him, he’d have to aw-shucks it and look humbly down at his shoes. Humble, my ass, Tucker thought. He was proving the value of a new and untested asset, and doing so like the Red Baron in his red Fokker Trimotor. The Air Force was not a service whose members cultivated humility, but his lack of pilot’s wings had compelled him to do just that for all ten of his years of uniformed service. The next generation of UAVs would have weapons attached, and maybe even be able to go air-to-air, and then, maybe, he’d show those strutting fighter jock-itches who had the real balls in this man’s Air Force. Until then, he’d just have to be content gathering information that helped the Russians kill Joe Chink and all his brothers, and if this was Nintendo War, then little Danny Tucker was the by-God cock of the by-God walk in this virtual world.
“You have been most valuable to us, Major Tucker.”
“Thank you, sir. Glad to help,” Tucker replied with his best little-boy smile. Maybe I’ll grow me a good mustache. He set the thought aside with a smile, and sipped some instant coffee from an MRE pack—the extra caffeine was about the only thing keeping him up at the moment. But the computer was doing most of the work, and it showed the Chinese reconnaissance tracks moving north.
Son of a bitch,” Captain Aleksandrov breathed. He’d heard about Gogol’s wolf pelts on state radio, but he hadn’t seen the TV coverage, and the sight took his breath away. Touching one, he halfway expected it to be cold and stiff like wire, but, no, it was like the perfect hair of a perfect blonde ...