Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (33 page)

 
          
“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 activated 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.