Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (61 page)

 
          
The
senior controller aboard the 11-76 radar plane watched the attack on his radar
screen in sheer horror. Juidongshan Naval Base had just been attacked by rebel
Nationalist fighter-bombers, and they had just sat back and watched without
doing a thing! In a fit of rage, he whipped off his headphones and dashed over
to the operations officer’s console in the front curtained-off section of the
cabin. A young marine guard tried to block the officer’s path, but the
controller pushed him aside. “What in blazes do you think you are doing?” the
senior controller shouted angrily. “Juidongshan has been hit hard by the
Nationalists, and you sit here doing nothing!”

 
          
“I
am following orders, Captain,” the operations officer replied calmly. He paused,
then waved for the marine guard to step into the rear cabin, out of earshot.
“The Nationalists’ attack was expected.”

 
          
“Expected?
What do you mean?”

 
          
“Our
subs were evacuated hours ago,” the ops officer said. “Only a few decoy ships
remained, enough to whet the rebel bomber’s appetites and waste their bombs.
Base personnel were sent into air raid shelters. The only ones still
aboveground on that base are TV reporters.”

 
          
“TV
reporters? We allowed our base to be bombed simply for a propaganda ploy? What
is going on here?”

 
          
“That
is none of your concern, nor mine,” the operations officer responded. “It is
all part of some strange plan coming from
Beijing
. Return to your post and continue
monitoring for other attacks in our sector. This is supposedly part of a large
attack plan by the Nationalists, so we can expect more attacks tonight.”

 
          
The
next wave of Taiwanese fighter-bomber attacks occurred just minutes after the
senior controller returned to his console. “Attention, attention, enemy
fighters detected, crossing into restricted airspace seven- zero miles east of
Xiamen Air Base, heading west,” one of his controllers reported. “Two large
formations, estimating sixteen to thirty enemy aircraft.”

 
          
The
senior controller gasped inwardly as he called up the radar plot on his
display. If it was two cells of sixteen aircraft attacking
Xiamen
, this meant that the Nationalists had
committed their entire fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons to this attack. “Comm,
notify
Fuzhou
, scramble every plane they have,” the
senior controller ordered. Fie knew Fuzhou had almost one hundred fighters
based there, perhaps one-third of them armed, fueled, and on ready five alert,
with another ten or twenty capable of launching and escaping before the rebel
fighters arrived overhead; that force might be able to hold off the rebels
until the remaining force could be launched or moved and the base personnel
evacuated. Unlike Juidongshan, the senior controller knew that
Xiamen
had not been evacuated. “Get me a report on
how many fighters can launch. I want—”

 
          
“Nothing,”
said a voice behind him. It was the operations officer himself, standing over
his shoulder. “No fighters will launch from
Fuzhou
. Vector the three surviving fighters from
the Juidongshan engagement to
Shantou
, get them on the ground as soon as
possible.”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Do it,”
the ops officer snapped. “No
more arguments from you— lives depend on it.
Move ”

 
          
Land-based
radars at
Xiamen
confirmed what the 11-76 crew feared—it was
an all-out assault, with more than thirty F-16 fighter- bombers in eight
formations coming in at different altitudes and from different directions. No
fighters challenged them.

 
          
The
F-16 pilots knew that the Hong Qian-2 surface-to-air missiles based at
Xiamen
, just five miles west of the Taiwanese
island
of
Quemoy
, had a maximum range of 34 miles and an
optimum range of only 20 miles. The HQ-2s were old copies of ex-Russian SA-2
“flying telephone pole” missiles, huge lumbering two-stage missiles designed to
attack 1950s— and 1960s-era bombers, missiles with big warheads but with
unreliable, slow, and easily jammable radio remote-control command guidance—
hardly a match for the swift and nimble F-16s.

 
          
The
Taiwanese satellite intelligence was excellent, and the F-16’s APG-66 attack
radars locked onto the navigation and bombing aim- points with ease; once the
radars were locked on and a navigation update taken, the Falcon Eye imaging
infrared sensors were activated and slaved to the four possible targets at each
target waypoint. At forty miles, little could be seen on Falcon Eye or radar
except for larger buildings; most of the F-16s were going hunting for the more
vital buildings in the complex—headquarters, air- and coastal-defense weapon
sites, communications, barracks, weapon-storage facilities, aboveground fuel
storage, and . . .

 
          
Threat
receivers blared to life seconds after the F-16s sped inside max HQ-2 missile
range, as the search and height-finder radars switched to target-tracking and
missile-guidance modes and several surface-to-air missiles leapt into the sky
from
Xiamen
. The F-16 pilots activated their electronic
countermeasure pods and dropped chaff to decoy the enemy radars. At night, it
was easy to spot the HQ-2 missiles as they lifted off their launchers, trailing
a long bright yellow plume of fire. All of the HQ-2s went ballistic, powering
up to very high altitude, thousands of feet above the F-16s. Their second-stage
boosters ignited, powering them up even higher, some 30,000 feet above the
Taiwanese attackers, before starting their terminal dive toward the F-16s.

 
          
The
F-16s’ ECM pods effectively jammed the Chinese target-tracking radars, so the
Chinese missile technicians had to continually relock their radars onto another
target—but they had no way of knowing that they had locked onto a cloud of
radar-decoying chaff until several seconds after lock-on, when they would
notice that the target was hanging in the sky at zero airspeed. They had only
seconds to reacquire another legitimate target, because the HQ-2 missiles were
on their way down toward the rebel F-16s.

 
          
The
F-16 pilots had detected only perhaps six or eight HQ-2 SAM launches, with one
or two missiles targeted on each inbound attack formation. Even if all of them
hit an F-16, which was extremely unlikely, the strike package would still be
intact. The Chinese defenders might have one more shot at the F-16s if they
were lucky, but more likely the F-16s would blow through a second wave and be
over the base, and then the fun would start. Another turkey shoot, just like their
successful brothers down over Juidongshan. Quemoy Tao, the Taiwanese-controlled
islands east of
Xiamen
, would be safe from attack and finally avenged for the Chinese nuclear
attack that had almost destroyed . . .

 
          
In
the blink of an eye, all thirty-two Taiwanese F-16 fighter-bombers disappeared.

 
          
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE UNDERGROUND COMMAND
CENTER,
BEIJING
,
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF
CHINA

SUNDAY, 22 JUNE 1997
,
0331 HOURS LOCAL (SATURDAY, 21 JUNE
_t
1431 HOURS ET)

           
The special emergency underground
command center in
Beijing
had been used only a few times in its forty-year history. The bunker
had been used for long periods of time during conflicts between
China
and the
Soviet Union
in 1961 and 1979 that threatened to go
nuclear; the other time was during the last major Chinese invasion of
Taiwan
, in 1955, when the
United States
had threatened to use nuclear weapons to
stop the Communists from overrunning
Taiwan
. Built by engineers from the
Soviet Union
, the bunker was a perfect, albeit slightly
smaller, replica of the Kremlin underground emergency bunker in
Moscow
, used when there was no time to evacuate
the political and Party leadership from the city.

 
          
The
8,000-square-foot steel and concrete facility, set six stories under the
Chinese Ministry of Defense on forty huge spring shock absorbers to cushion the
shock of nearby nuclear explosions, was designed and provisioned to accommodate
an operations, support, and security staff of thirty-eight—many of whom were
women, the implications obvious— plus fifty high government officials. Now it
contained the proper amount of staff and technicians, but perhaps three times
the maximum number of government officials. President Jiang Zemin and his
closest civilian and military advisors were seated around a simple rectangular
table in the center of the bunker. Surrounding them were the other high
officials and their aides, then a ring of communications, intelligence, and
planning officers at their consoles and workstations that fed the president and
his advisors a constant stream of information. Finally, the remainder of the
government officials that had threatened, bribed, forced, or cajoled their way
inside were jammed into every remaining nook and cranny of the bunker.

 
          
President
Jiang scowled as he surveyed his surroundings. They had been in the bunker
since
midnight
,
when intelligence had reported that the rebel Nationalist air attack was under
way. Eighty persons stuffed into the small enclosure was bad enough—180 was
almost intolerable. But it was too late to open the blast doors. The worst part
was that the one man he wanted to talk to was not present. This was an outrage!
he thought. Sun Ji Guoming was going to suffer for this.

           
“Excuse me, Comrade President,” the
defense minister, Chi Haot- ian, said. “Admiral Sun is on the line via
satellite.”

 
          
“Where
is he? I ordered him to be here before the attack began! ” “Sir . . . comrade,
he is
airborne,
calling from a bomber
aircraft over
Jiangxi
province! ”

           
“What? Give me that!” Jiang snatched
the receiver from Chi. “Admiral Sun, this is the president. I want an
explanation, and I want it
now!”

           
“Yes, sir,” Sun Ji
Guoming responded. “I am aboard an H-7 Gang- fang bomber. I am using it as my
airborne command post to monitor the attack on the rebel Nationalists on
Taiwan
. We are ready to begin our attack on
Makung,
Taichung
, Hsinchu,
Tainan
, and Tsoying. I request permission to begin
our attacks. Over.”

 
          
Jiang
was so angry that his words were coming out in confused sputters. “I ordered
you to report here, to me, before these attacks began!” he shouted. “Why have
you disobeyed me?”

 
          
“Because
I do not think I could have squeezed into your command center there, sir,” Sun
responded. Jiang couldn’t help but look around himself again and cursed the
cowardice and failure of discipline that filled this bunker up like this.
“Besides, sir, not every flag officer of the People’s Liberation Army can be in
an underground shelter—someone must lead our troops to victory. I therefore
decided to lead the bombing raid on the rebels myself.”

 
          
“This
is insubordination at the highest level!” military chief of staff General Chin
Po Zihong thundered. “He has insulted every man in this room! Admiral Sun must
be stripped of his rank and imprisoned immediately for this! ”

 
          
President
Jiang looked around the impossibly overcrowded bunker and was embarrassed and
shamed. He could not censure a commander who was out flying with his troops,
ready to take on the high-tech, well- trained Nationalist air force. “I think
it would be difficult for any of us to arrest Comrade Sun, since he is free and
is struggling on behalf of the People’s Republic of
China
, while we are in this concrete sardine can!
” Jiang said in a loud voice. “We are safe, and we dare accuse Comrade Admiral
Sun of insubordination while he risks his life to be seen by his fellow
soldiers?” Chin fell silent. Jiang returned to the receiver: “Comrade Sun, can
you report on the status of the operation?”