Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (91 page)

 
          
“First
DF-3 site
twelve o’clock
,
twenty miles,” Patrick called out.

 
          
“I
need a turn! ” Wendy shouted.

 
          
“Do
it!”

 
          
“Right
forty degrees!” Wendy cried, and Elliott hauled the Megafortress into a tight
turn. “I’m jamming their ranging radars! I’ve got a lock! Pylon launch,
now\”
The AIM-9L Sidewinders mounted in
the weapons pods were not directly mated to the Megafortress’s attack
system—they had to be pointed at a target and allowed to find their own target.
But once Wendy had turned the Megafortress at the oncoming Chinese fighters,
the Sidewinders quickly detected the fighter’s hot-wing leading edges and sent
a missile lock signal. As soon as Wendy got the signal, she punched off one
Sidewinder. It homed perfectly on its target and exploded right in the path of
the J-8, sending it spiraling to the ground.

 
          
“Splash
two! ”
Cheshire
crowed when she saw the explosion and saw
the burning plane plummet to earth. Wendy immediately selected another
Sidewinder that had locked on to a fighter and let it fly. This one disappeared
from sight with no explosions—clean miss.

 
          
“Hold
this heading—we’re going nose to nose with them!” Wendy shouted.

 
          
“Shit
—
they're right on us!"
Elliott shouted. Both he and
Cheshire
saw numerous winks of light in the darkness
as the J-8 fighters opened fire on the Megafortress with their 23-millimeter
cannons, then peeled off.

           
The Megafortress’s crew heard what
seemed like hundreds of hammerlike blows all over the aircraft, then the rumble
and roar of the Chinese jets flying just a few hundred feet away from them.
“Check the instruments!” Elliott shouted to
Cheshire
. “Patrick!”

 
          
“Right
turn and center up!” Patrick responded.

 
          
Elliott
started a hard right turn—and immediately decreased the turn when they felt a
hard, sharp rumbling on the right wing. “We got something hanging on the
right,” he said. “Nance, you see anything?” “No,”
Cheshire
responded. “But I’ve got fluctuating number
four hydraulic pressure. It feels like we might have lost a spoiler.”

           
The DF-3 missile sites were situated
along the same access road, roughly in a line about five miles apart. “Radar
coming on ... radar stand by,” McLanahan said as he took the release fix. The synthetic
aperture radar image showed the Dong Feng-3 launch complex in stark detail: the
launch pad, gantry, and the two railroad lines leading from the launch pad to
the two missile-storage sheds, spaced about 200 yards apart. The Megafortress
rolled in on the first site. “Doors coming open . . . bombs away!” McLanahan
shouted. He sequenced the releases so that the bomblet scatter pattern of one
CBU-59 cluster-bomb unit was centered directly on the missile sheds.

 
          
The
tactic worked. Each DF-3 storage shed was blasted apart by hundreds of
one-pound bomblets, and the scatter pattern was large enough to encompass the
launch pad and a nearby electrical transformer farm, which shut down power to
the complex’s air defense artillery site located to the north. The second
missile was only damaged in the attack, but the first 59,000-pound
liquid-fueled DF-3 missile caught fire and created a massive explosion that
wiped out the second missile very effectively.

 
          
But
the sudden destruction of the DF-3 site alerted the air defense units
protecting the other two remaining sites, and seconds later the horizon was
illuminated with six antiaircraft artillery guns opening up. Wendy had used her
jammers to shut down the triple-A site’s tracking radars, so the Chinese
gunners were blindly sweeping the sky with their guns. The airspace over the
two remaining DF-3 sites was shimmering with thousands of rounds of artillery
shells.

 
          
“I
got no choice, guys,” Elliott said, and he broke off the bomb run by turning
hard right. “We can’t go through that mess.”

 
          
“Continue
your right turn fifty more degrees,” Wendy said. “Let’s get a few of these J-8s
off our tail while we wait for those gunners to run out of ammo.” As soon as
Elliott rolled out of his hard right turn, Wendy let one, then two Sidewinders
fly, and both shots were rewarded with bright flashes and flickering streaks of
light across the night sky.

 
          
“I’m
centering up,” Elliott shouted, and he yanked the Megafortress over into a hard
right turn back toward the DF-3 sites. The blobs of tracers were still slicing
through the sky, forming an impenetrable curtain of deadly bullets all across
the target area. “C’mon, you bastards,” Elliott cursed. “You don’t have that
much ammo . . . you’re going to run out any second—”

 
          
As
if on cue, one stream of tracers abruptly stopped. It was only one ZSU-37-2
site, but it was enough. Patrick centered his crosshairs on the second two DF-3
storage sheds, made sure the rotary launcher had positioned two more CBU-59
units in the bottom drop position, and made the release. The terrific explosion
that rocked the Megafortress told them the second attack had been a success.

 
          
The
two triple-A sites guarding the last DF-3 site swung west toward them and began
raking the sky around them, and for a moment it seemed as if every antiaircraft
artillery site in front of them got a direct bead on them—but then the shooting
stopped. The triple-A sites had either run out of ammo, or they had damaged
their gun barrels by several minutes of almost continuous shooting. Elliott
centered the computer steering bug on the last target... just twenty more
seconds, and they’d be heading home.

 
          
The
last twenty seconds seemed like twenty hours—but soon the bomb doors rolled
open, and McLanahan shouted, “Bombs away! Doors coming!”

 
          
Brad
Elliott saw a flash of white light off to his left, and then his vision
exploded into a blaze of stars and his body felt as if he had hit a brick wall.

 
          
“Brad's hit!”
Nancy Cheshire screamed.
The entire left side of the cockpit appeared as if it had been shredded apart
by a giant tiger’s claw.
Cheshire
grabbed the control stick, then experimentally juggled the throttles.
But the flight-control computer had already determined that the number one
engine had been destroyed, and the computer immediately had shut off fuel to
the engine, activated the fire-extinguishing system, and isolated electrical
and hydraulic power. “I lost number one—it’s shut down! ” she called out. “I
still got the airplane! Sing out back there! ”

           
“Offense is okay!” Patrick
responded. He looked over through the thin haze of smoke and saw Wendy leaning
over in her seat. Her console looked as if a grenade had exploded inside it,
and the windblast from the shattered left cockpit windows was blowing a vortex
of smoke and debris back over Wendy McLanahan.
“Jesus! Wendy!”

 
          
“I’m
all right, I’m all right,” they heard over interphone. “I... I just got a face
full of smoke. ”

 
          
“Hang
on, Wendy!”

 
          
“No!
Patrick, stay strapped in! ” Wendy cried out. “I’m going to stay down here to
stay out of the smoke. ”

 
          
“What
do you got back there, guys?”
Cheshire
asked, the panic rising in her voice.

 
          
“It
looks like we got squat,” Patrick responded. “The DSO’s station is toast, and
my stuff is in reset.” He concentrated on the red flashing indications on his
right-side instrument panel: “The last Striker missile is showing an overtemp
condition, but I can’t shut it down and I can’t jettison it until my equipment
comes back up. I’ll try to restart it.”

 
          
“We
got a major problem up here, kids,” Nancy Cheshire said, quickly scanning the
instruments. Most of the electronic instruments were blank; she concentrated on
the auxiliary and backup gauges. “We lost number one, we’re on emergency
hydraulic power, and we got one generator left. All I got right now is the
damned whiskey compass. Brad . . . Brad looks real bad. I think he’s ...”

 
          
“Go
ahead and say it... you thought I was dead,” Brad Elliott said. Slowly,
painfully, with help from Nancy Cheshire, he hauled himself upright in his
seat, and
Cheshire
locked his inertial reel in place.

 
          
“Brad!”
Patrick shouted. “Are you all
right?”

 
          
“Hell
no,” Elliott said, coughing to clear his throat of a mass of blood. “But they
can’t kill me that easy.” His voice was barely a whisper over the thunderous
roar of the jet blast coming through the shredded fuselage.

 
          
“We’re
gonna make it, Brad,”
Cheshire
said on interphone. “Hang on.”

           
Elliott scanned the nearly blank
instrument panel and chuckled, the laughter quickly changing into a full-body
convulsion. “I highly doubt it,” he gasped, after the convulsions stopped.

 
          
“Nance,
give me a right turn back to the east,” Patrick said. “We’ll try to get as
close to the
Yellow
Sea
or the
Bo Hai
as we can get. Hal and Chris are standing
by on
Okinawa
with Madcap Magician and the Taiwanese air
force—they might be able to pick us up.”

 
          
“Mack,
we’re six hundred goddamn miles from the
Yellow Sea
, we’re surrounded by fighters, and we’re
all shot to hell,” Brad Elliott said. “I got a better idea—we jump out.”

 
          
“No
way,”
Cheshire
said.

 
          
“You’re
a sweetie, and I’ve always had the hots for you, co,” Elliott said, “but you
all know this is the only option. When those fighters come back, they’ll blow
us to pieces. I’d rather not be on board when that happens, thank you very much.”

 
          
“We
made it before, Brad,” Patrick said. “We can make it again.”

 
          
“We’re
in the middle of
Inner
Mongolia
, hundreds
of miles from help, and we’re down to emergency everything,” Elliott said. “We
got no choi—”

 
          
Suddenly,
the Megafortress buckled under them and slew nearly sideways.
Cheshire
straightened the plane out only by using
both hands on the control stick. “We got hit, number four’s on fire!” she
shouted. This time, the computer did not shut down the engine automatically.
Cheshire
jammed the number four throttle to idle,
then to cutoff, then pulled the yellow fire
T
handle to cut off fuel to the engine and activate its fire
extinguisher. “Still got a fire on number four! ”
Cheshire
shouted. “It won’t go out! It won’t go out!
” There was a bright flash of light and another violent explosion jerked the
bomber nearly upside down. “Fire! Fire!”
Cheshire
shouted.

 
          
“Eject!
Eject! Eject!” Brad Elliott shouted.

 
          
Patrick
looked over at Wendy. She returned his glance—but that was all the hesitation
she allowed herself. She jammed her fanny back into the seat, straightened her
back, pushed the back of her helmet into the sculpted headrest, tucked her chin
down, crossed her hands, and pulled the ejection ring between her legs. Her
shoulder harness automatically tightened, snapping her shoulders and spine back
into the proper position; the overhead hatch blew off, and she was gone in a
blinding cloud of white smoke. Patrick pulled his handle as soon as he saw she
was gone.