Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (75 page)

OVER THE
FORMOSA
STRAIT
, NEAR
XIAMEN
,
FUJIAN
PROVINCE
,
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF
CHINA

THAT SAME TIME

 
          
The
attack began with a single AIM-120 Scorpion missile launch, but it was the
deadliest—because it downed the Chinese Ilyushin-76 airborne radar plane
stationed over the
Formosa
Strait
near
Quanzhou, which was monitoring all air traffic between
Fuzhou
and
Shantou
, the vital Chinese military bases opposite
Formosa
. The
EB-52
Megafortress was thirty miles away, flying just a hundred feet above the sea,
tracking the 11-76 with its 360-degree radar array on the dorsal fuselage
fairing; the Scorpion air-to-air missile hit the fuselage of the 11-76 squarely
at the right wing root, shearing off the wing and sending the Russian-built
plane and its twenty-two crew members spiraling into the Formosa Strait. Within
seconds, almost all of the Chinese military’s long-range surveillance
capability had been eliminated.

 
          
It
was David Luger’s first kill after returning to the Megafortress’s crew; and if
he hadn’t been so busy finding and lining up more targets, he would have stood
up and whooped for joy. But the mission, and the killing, had just begun.

 
          
Because
of the completely unknown performance capabilities taking off from the Republic
of China’s Kai-Shan underground airfield complex, the Megafortress was lightly
loaded for this mission. Each of the two rotary launchers in the bomb bay
contained four Wolverine cruise missiles and two Striker attack missiles, the
configuration mixed so the attacks could continue even if one launcher was
damaged or had malfunctioned. The Megafortress also carried one Striker attack
missile on each wing weapon pod, along with four AIM-120 Scorpion air-to-air
missiles in each pod—there were no Stinger airmine rockets in the tail cannon.
The weapon load was a full 12,000 pounds under normal mission capacity. To save
even more weight, no fuel was carried in the fuselage tanks, except the lowest
amount necessary to stay within the weight and balance center-of-gravity
envelope, which saved an additional 50,000 pounds.

 
          
“Crew,
stand by for bomb-bay missile launch,” Patrick McLanahan announced. “Quadruple
Wolverine missile launch. Radar coming on ... radar stand by.” McLanahan took a
thirty-second satellite update for the navigation computers, in order to
tighten down the accuracy of the system as much as possible prior to launch.
Then he checked the accuracy of the nav computers by taking a three-second
attack radar fix and then comparing where the aiming crosshairs lay on the
stored radar image. When McLanahan moved the crosshairs onto the exact
preprogrammed spot, the difference between the radar fix and the nav computers
was only fifty-seven feet. He decided to accept the satellite fix.

 
          
“Launch
point fix in, bomb doors coming open.” He clicked on the voice command switch:
“Commit Wolverine attack.”

 
          
WARNING,
MISSILE attack initiated, the computer replied, and automatically entered a
launch hold until the order could be verified.

 
          
“Commit
Wolverine attack,” McLanahan repeated to verify the order.

 
          
LAUNCH
COMMIT, warning, bomb doors open, the computer’s female voice responded. The
Megafortress’s bomb doors slid inside the fuselage, and the forward rotary
launcher in the bomb bay released the first AGM-177 Wolverine cruise missile.
In eight-second volleys, three more Wolverine missiles dropped clear of the
bomb bay, two total from each of the forward and aft rotary launchers. The
missiles glided in a shallow descent as their flight computers sampled the air
mass and did a microsecond flight-control check, exercising hundreds of tiny
microhydraulic actuators built into the skin, then ignited their turbojet
engines, throttled up to full power, and sped off toward their targets. As they
began their 500-mile-per-hour flight, they downloaded navigation data from the
GPS navigation satellite constellation and adjusted course, following the
flight plan transferred to their computers from the Megafortress.

 
          
All
four Wolverine missiles carried SEAD, or Suppression of Enemy Air Defense,
packages in its sensor bay and three internal munitions bays. The missiles’
sensor section contained combination infrared and radar-homing sensors, which
would lock onto an enemy radar, then slave an infrared sensor onto the vehicle
or building carrying the radar, and send targeting data to the missile’s
navigation computer. Two munitions compartments contained a total of eighteen
anti-vehicle “skeets,” and one weapon bay contained twelve Sky Masters ADM-151
decoy devices. The Wolverines had a preprogrammed flight plan based on Jon
Masters’s NIRTSat satellite data showing where some known garrisoned road-
mobile SA-5 surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, Honggi-2 SAM sites, and heavy
antiaircraft artillery sites were located.

 
          
When
the missiles flew within the estimated lethal range of the mobile SAM sites,
the Wolverine missiles ejected a decoy glider. The decoys were tiny gliders
with a specially designed shape, and contained tiny transmitters that made each
glider appear as big as a full-size fighter— to a Chinese SAM radar operator
scanning the skies for enemy aircraft, the decoys made it appear as if an enemy
attacker had suddenly appeared out of nowhere right on top of them. When the
SAM site operators activated their target-tracking radars to try to shoot down
the “attacker,” the seeker head in the Wolverine missile detected the signal
and locked onto the location of the emitter, then used that new position plus
its satellite navigation system fix to update its flight plan.

 
          
The
Wolverine cruised over the target location and seeded the area with
anti-vehicle skeets. Each skeet had a canister that contained infrared sensors
and several copper rods. The canister would spin as it was ejected from the
Wolverine missile. When the infrared sensors detected a vehicle-size target
below, it would detonate a small explosive charge that would instantly melt the
copper rod and shoot it at the target. The highspeed slug of molten copper was
powerful enough to penetrate the thin steel of heavy trucks or light tanks.
Each skeet could fire several slugs at once in all directions, sometimes
shooting several slugs into one vehicle.

 
          
The
Wolverine missile would fly its preprogrammed flight plan, cruising over the
area, dropping decoys, and then dropping skeets over any SAM sites detected.
Each Wolverine missile had the capability of destroying dozens of targets on
its flight, so with four Wolverine cruise missiles operating in a
thirty-by-thirty-mile target box, almost a thousand targets were instantly at
risk. The skeets worked their devastating magic with gruesome efficiency. Not
only were surface-to-air missile sites at risk, but any hot vehicles within a
hundred yards of the skeets were likely targets—troop carriers, transports,
supply trucks, even small buildings, anything with a warm core. Once a copper
slug burned through the outer layer of its target, it had cooled sufficiently
so that the second hard surface it hit caused the slug to break apart instead
of burning through. For most targets, this meant that the copper slug first
penetrated inside a passenger or crew compartment of a vehicle, ricocheted off
a second hard surface, then instantly turned into thousands of bits of
bulletlike projectiles that bounced around inside, shredding anything in its
path.

 
          
The
results of the Wolverine missile’s deadly flight was evident to the crew of the
Megafortress as they approached the Chinese coastline. Off in the darkened
distance, they could see numerous patches of bright red flashes as the skeets
went off, followed seconds later by bright yellow or white flashes as a truck,
tank, or other vehicle was hit and destroyed. Many times they saw spectacular
secondary explosions, as a skeet activated over a missile or antiaircraft
artillery site, causing missiles to explode or entire ammunition magazines to
cook off. After each Wolverine missile’s deadly cargo was expended, the missile
would do a kamikaze crash into the next SAM site it detected.

 
          
The
net result: by the time the Megafortress was “feet dry” over the Chinese coast,
more than fifty mobile antiaircraft weapon sites had been destroyed or put out
of commission in the area, another three hundred vehicles of all shapes and
sizes had been hit—plus over a thousand soldiers and sailors had been killed or
injured.

 
          
But
the Megafortress wasn’t the heavy hitter in this attack. Following the EB-52
and coming in from several directions at once was a twelve- plane attack
formation of Taiwanese F-16 Fighting Falcons. The Republic of China’s F-16s—all
but four of their surviving fleet of sixteen—had lagged several minutes behind
the EB-52, waiting until the long-range Ilyushin-76 radar plane and the
ground-based air defenses had been destroyed before making their move. Spread
out over forty miles in six flights of two, the F-16s dashed in at 300 feet
above the
Formosa
Strait
, the waves
acting as their only terrain-masking feature. But although the air defense
sites along the coast had detected the F-16s a full six minutes before they
attacked, they could do nothing about it—because the Wolverine missiles were
knocking out the missile-control and targettracking radars long before the
Chinese defenders could launch a counterattack.

           
The EB-52’s Wolverine cruise
missiles had destroyed the air defense units and many of the larger vehicles
arrayed around Quemoy Bay preparing to invade Taiwan’s Quemoy Island—the F-16
Fighting Falcons’ mission was to destroy or disrupt the estimated three hundred
thousand troops getting ready to cross the bay and retake Quemoy for mainland
China. Each F-16 carried six 800-pound CBU-59 APAM (AntiPersonnel,
Anti-Materiel) cluster bomb units, which scattered 670 one- pound bomblets over
a football field-size area. When the CBU-59 releases were computer-sequenced,
laying the dispersal footprints end- to-end, the swath of destruction for each
F-16 equaled over 350,000 square feet, the size of a suburban shopping mall.
Some of the bomblets were fuzed to detonate on impact; others used tiny trip
wires that would cause the bomblet to explode if disturbed or if a vehicle
passed nearby. All unexploded bomblets would self-detonate after a period of
time, anywhere from five minutes to twenty-four hours after being sown. One
baseball-size bomblet could destroy a small vehicle, damage a large wheeled
vehicle—or kill anyone standing within thirty feet.

 
          
Since
the majority of Chinese amphibious and infantry forces ready to invade
Quemoy
were either traveling in trucks or
bivouacked in tents along
Quemoy
Bay
, awaiting orders to begin the main assault,
they were caught mostly in the open and fully exposed to the cluster bomb
attack. Except for sporadic, unguided antiaircraft cannon and small-caliber
fire, the F-16s began their egress from the target area completely unopposed.
One Taiwanese F-16 Fighting Falcon was hit by cannon fire and was forced to
eject, but not until he flew his stricken fighter east of Quemoy Island,
practically into the arms of waiting Taiwanese patrols.

 
          
“Center
up on the steering bug, heading two-eight-three, five minutes thirty seconds to
the next turnpoint,” McLanahan reported to the Megafortress crew. They had
crossed the Chinese coastline forty miles south of Xiamen, over Futou Bay; the
new heading would take them south and west of the city of Zhangzhou and along
the southern edges of the Boping and Wuyi Mountains. “Minimum safe clearance
altitude, five thousand five hundred feet. High terrain
twelve o’clock
, twenty miles.” They were flying at treetop
level using the EB-52’s COLA (COmputer-generated Lowest Altitude), in which the
satellite-based navigation system compared its present and projected position,
along with airspeed and heading, with a huge database of terrain elevations to
compute the lowest possible altitude the Megafortress could fly without hitting
any terrain or known man-made obstructions, and without using any radar
emissions that might give their location away.

 
          
“Bandits,
twelve
o’clock
, no range,
no altitude yet,” Luger called out. “Just popped up ... got a range estimate
now, about forty-one miles and closing fast . . . speed five hundred knots. I
think we got a couple Chinese Sukhoi-27s in the area, guys—and the son of a
bitch might have gotten a look at us.”