Traveling at forty thousand feet plus, each of the nine bombers that made up the three cells — Ebony, Gold, and Purple — carried in its bomb bay and beneath its 185-foot wingspan the conventional bomb-load equivalent of fifteen World War II B-17s. Due to recent malfunctions in the normally remote-control console of the rear barbette with itsfour 12.7-millimeter cannon, the guns were manned, Murphy being the rear barbette gunner in Ebony’s lead plane. The heavy ordnance aboard the B-52s included thirty eleven-hundred-pound FAE, or fuel air explosive, bombs, each bomb of jellied gasoline over four times as powerful as the equivalent weight of high-explosive. In addition, each plane carried twelve five-hundred-pound free-fall high-explosive iron contact bombs with Pave conversion kits that turned them into smart bombs.
“Wish we were carrying cruise,” the radar navigator aboard Ebony One’s leader commented.
“You and me both,” added the ECM — electronic countermeasures or electronics warfare officer, a technician who when the war broke out had been selling the superfast Cray computers.
“It was a political decision,” answered Ebony’s captain, the air commander of the nine-plane wave. “Washington doesn’t want us carrying cruise missiles anywhere near the Mideast. Wouldn’t give us a ‘weapons free’ release even if we were packing them. Too risky. The Iranians are the worst. They pick up a cruise missile, think we’re popping off nuclear warheads, and bingo! The balloon goes up.”
To make especially sure that no such interpretation would be made by any one of the countries they’d be flying over, each one of the nine planes in Ebony, Gold, and Purple had been fitted with the special flared-wing fairings, which, if the B-52s were picked up by satellite, would identify them as being “cruise free.”
None of the six-man crew aboard Ebony One — the pilot and aircraft commander Colonel Thompson, copilot, navigator, radar navigator, EWO — electronics warfare officer— and gunner — was at all happy about the decision, but neither were they anxious about starting what was euphemistically referred to in air force manuals as a “nuclear exchange.” Even so, me EWO, in the cramped, windowless electronics recess of the tiny lower deck, had confided to the navigator and radar navigator forward of him on the lower deck that if he was to be downed, he’d just as soon go out in a “mushroom” as in some Iranian prison camp — the sight of the POWs in Vietnam and of the American hostages of the eighties and nineties was still a chilling memory for the American fliers. Several of the crew, teenagers then, could still recall the terrifying images of the Ayatollah seen on television and the humiliation of the Americans.
Above the EWO, the air commander and his pilot were carrying out visual checks, using the erratic wash of moonlight to make sure that all the contact bombs on the extender racks beneath the wings were well in place. The fine wires that would extract the safety pins of the primers could not be seen in the moonlight, but none of the bombs looked askew to the AC as he scanned the huge 185-foot wingspan that, supporting the four pods of the twin engines and the bombs, rose slowly as they gained altitude though the line of the wing was still below that of the fuselage, the tanks “loaded to me gills,” as Murphy, the rear gunner, was fond of putting it, with over thirty-five thousand gallons of kerosene.
As the English Channel, now a silver squiggle, receded far below them, the three cells disappeared in cloud, the navigator on Ebony One already going over his trace with the electronic warfare officer, who would have to coordinate his “jammer” pod against any ground-to-air missile batteries that protected the mobile sites around Turpan. Reading the coordinates from the computer, the navigator drew, as manual backup, the intersect lines with his protractor. The EWO circled in the last reported satellite digital photo relay showing the missile shelters around Turpan, but there were now seven additional “tents” showing up on the computer-enhanced photo.
“Are they more CS-2s, Ted?” the radar navigator asked. “Or SAMs?”
“Don’t know,” the EWO replied. “All I know is that we’re going to have to drop our load from as high as we can and I’ll be using every jammer we’ve got. Are we spot on the track, Charlie?” the EWO asked the navigator.
“No sweat,” the navigator answered, giving their position over the Bay of Biscay as they were heading over Spain for Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, their flight taking them over the bay because as with the American raid on Qaddafi’s Libya, they were not allowed to fly over French soil. Also, AC Thompson wanted to keep as far away as possible from the trigger-happy new Soviet republics. Hence the southern crescent-shaped detour. Also time had to be allowed for Phantom-4G Wild Weasels to go in just ahead of the bombers to jam as much ChiCom ground-to-air communications and radar as possible.
In Freeman’s AirLand battle opening up all along the Amur front, first the medium-range bombers and fighters went in, shooting up everything in sight, including superbly camouflaged oil-lamp-heated dugouts, which their infrared targeted as tanks in defilade position. Even so, the Chinese were struck by the ferocity of the American offensive.
Colonel Soong, north of Manzhouli, had his troops well dug in atop A-7 but was paid a return visit by a C-130 Spectre gunship whose crew’s infrared night-vision capacity enabled it to pour down a deadly rain of fire. But whereas during an attack on A-7 earlier in the war a C-130 had finally fallen prey to a surface-to-air missile, this time the SAM sites had been raked by F-15 Eagles.
Each Eagle dropped sixteen thousand pounds of smart ordnance from its underfuselage and underwing hard points, so that the C-130 was left unthreatened save for small-arms fire. As it continued in its devastating counterclockwise spiral, spewing out its deadly fire, if any of the Chinese troops lifted a rifle or RPG, or any other weapon in a desperate attempt to down it, they were immediately sighted on the infrared screens and targeted.
From Fuyuan in the east near Khabarovsk to Manzhouli in the west, the night was rent by fire. In Fuyuan the Americans received unexpected help from the Jewish underground in the nearby Jewish Autonomous Oblast and actually succeeded in pushing the Chinese four miles back across a frozen section of the river.
The advance, General C. Clay reported, was getting out of hand. One of the most aggressive groups was a Jewish contingent led by Alexsandra Malof, the woman who had been tortured by Siberian and Chinese alike and who was determined to help the Americans. It was she who, with other Jewish women, had been forced to fraternize, who had been the
Up around Never and Skovorodino, sites of one of Freeman’s fiercest-fought battles earlier in the war, the Chinese gave as good as they got. The ChiCom regulars wouldn’t yield even to the marines’ M-60s, whose 105mm guns, atop the tortoiselike appearance of the tanks caused by blocks of reactive armor all over them, blasted PLA infantry positions across the river. Salvos of expensive, at least for the Chinese, RPGs were fired at the M-60s, but the reactive armor blowing up as it was struck neutralized the Chinese attack in the main and the M-60s kept up a deafening fire that resounded like thunder through the still-snow-dusted hills and along the flats of the river at the foot of cleft-hewn mountains.
Cheng could tolerate the situation so far, but what he was asking his aides for was any reports coming in from around Manzhouli to the west on his left flank, where Chinese positions stretched along the wall of Genghis Khan, and beyond to the south, where the country became flatter — and would be much more suitable for the American Abrams forty-five-mile-per-hour main battle tank.
“Nothing, General.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cheng asked, though his voice was subdued and surprisingly calm.
“Only static, General! The American Wild Weasels’ electronic interceptors are jamming all radio communications.”
“We don’t know what’s going on anywhere,” another said. “They’re attacking on so many points we don’t know where their main concentration lies.”
“Freeman’s no fool,” Cheng said. “He knows better than to spread his forces that thinly from Manzhouli to Khabarovsk — over a 1,200-mile front. No army in the world can attack equally along such a lengthy front. If our radios are jammed we’ll have to rely on our motorcycle couriers.”
“But General, it would take them hours — in some cases, days — before they could reach—”
“Not to us here in Beijing, you fool. I mean between regimental commands. We have good men up there. They will use their initiative.”
Indeed they were, one motorbike signal company already moving couriers out along the narrow roads through
