order to have a successful bomb run on Makung and Lintou Beach.
“Five miles,” said the Tomcat’s RIO. “Select Fox
“Good kill! Good kill!” It was Lennox or some Tomcat pilot shouting his congratulations as they saw Drummer’s Sparrow missile hit its target, or more accurately, when the Sparrow’s big proximity-fused fragmentation warhead exploded several meters behind the Flanker, producing a massive shotgun effect, the Flanker’s kerosene fuel tank vaporizing in an enormous orange-white bloom of fire. Two seconds before Drummer’s kill shot, however, the Flanker’s pilot had fired one of his R73s, or Russian-made A-11 Archer close-combat heat seekers, its contrail lost in a wisp of stratus, getting out of harm’s way before Drummer’s Sparrow struck the Flanker. The Archer missile was now tracking Aviator Lennox’s Tomcat, which, at eleven thousand feet, had just fired its Sidewinder at the second of the two Flankers Lennox had spotted earlier.
Lennox’s wingman, a short, wiry twenty-three-year-old from Waco, Texas, suddenly found himself the pursued. His Tomcat — glove vanes on the leading edges of the fixed wings extended to reduce the more than Mach 1 strain on the fighter’s tail planes — made a tight right turn inside the Flanker’s defensive right break. And so, in classic Red Baron style, Lennox was now immediately behind and in the Flanker’s cone of vulnerability. When he saw the lime-green arc formed by his gun’s computer impact line and gun sight’s green circle move to the middle of his HUD image of the Flanker, he fired. The long stream of his Tomcat’s six-barreled 20mm Vulcan, spewing out ninety rounds in less than a second, chopped up the Flanker’s turbofans and right tail plane. A collision warning sounded in the Texan’s cockpit, and he instinctively broke in the opposite direction, but didn’t climb fast enough to avoid the wake of “dirty air” from the disintegration of the ChiCom fighter-bomber. The supersonic swarm of debris that had been the Flanker’s nose radar and other white-hot debris thudded into the Tomcat’s nacelle housing and was sucked into the huge, canted intakes of the F-14’s left turbofan. The engine shut down immediately, and the Tomcat’s cockpit was so badly pitted by blades from the Flanker’s engines that Lennox’s wingman lost all frontal vision through the HUD, the fighter’s right intake struck by a piece of the Flanker’s heavy and unexploded ordnance.
“Right engine’s gone!” shouted his RIO.
“Eject,” ordered the Texan.
“Roger!”
Plummeting seaward, their bird tumbling out of control, the Texan and his RIO, ever faithful to the aviator’s code, still had full confidence in the efficacy of their plane’s design, specifically in the reputation of the Martin-Baker seats. They had been so meticulously made that with the aircraft parked upon a tarmac, the zero-zero system would still eject the pilots high enough to have their chutes open and bring them safely down. Now, fighting the punishing G forces exerted on the tumbling Tomcat, the two men nevertheless managed to reach and pull their snakes. In a split second the explosive bolts fired, releasing the seat.
Both men’s necks snapped like twigs, the canopy’s fairing having been severely dented and thus locked by the impact of the Flanker’s supersonic debris.
Lennox glimpsed the tumbling dot of the Tomcat on his green monitor, saw it swell into sudden luminescence as it smashed into the sea. But his attention was quickly hijacked by the tadpole shape streaking in on his radar, a missile fired from eight miles behind. Normally it would have taken the missile.8 seconds to reach him, but thanks to Typhoon Jane’s headwinds, it took 1.2 seconds, time enough for Lennox’s RIO to drop chaff and pop flares, hoping to confuse both the Archer’s radar and infrared. The American ruse failed, however, the agility and maneuverability of the Russian-made missile so acute that despite Lennox’s and his RIO’s countermeasures, the ten-foot Archer was able to lock on via the ChiCom pilot’s helmet-mounted sight, a full forty-two degrees off bore sight.
Lennox, his RIO, and their beloved machine disappeared from the FITCOMPRON’s Prowler’s radar.
This second explosion shocked the already stunned Combat Information Center in the
“Hope to hell our screen’s working,” opined a veteran chief petty officer, referring not to the CIC’s blue board, but to the carrier’s protective screen of Aegis cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and two attack subs whose sole reason for being there was to prevent a ChiCom “box” or missiles getting through to the heart of the CVBG.
In
From this high ground they fired a rain of air-to-surface TV-guided missiles at Penghu installations, and dropped seven 1,100-pound bombs, knocking out six of the quad Chaparral launchers in a series of head-thudding explosions whose gases created a dust storm that swept across the island before being blown leeward by gusts heralding Typhoon Jane’s approach. The hurricane of shrapnel from the bombs, however, was not so readily dispersed, scything through the reservists, who, unlike the regular ROC troops in the 1st Battalion, had failed to dig enough slit trenches along Lintou Beach. Instead, the reservists had clumped together in the tactically futile but psychologically understandable belief that protection lay in numbers.
In Makung, panic reigned in the fish markets and town itself, clustered about the picturesque harbor, and families who would normally have fled down to fishing boats to make good their escape from any man-made assault on their small island were afraid to do battle with the huge seas stirred up by Jane. Taipei radio had now upgraded Jane to supertyphoon, the winds off Taiwan’s east coast reportedly reaching 140 miles per hour with gusts to 180. It meant that even if the families of Makung, their town ablaze from the ChiCom bombing and strafing, managed to escape the wind-fanned inferno and reach their boats, their Taiwanese navy could not help them, the wind-whipped seas drowning all hope of rescue. Meanwhile, the Americans could not help much, their Rules of Engagement requiring them to hold their fire for fear of overshooting the enemy planes and killing Taiwanese civilians. Penghu’s sacred banyan tree was also destroyed, having been used by the ChiCom bombers as their initial aiming point.
“Damn!” said Johnny Reisman. “Can’t do a damn thing!”
Crowley and Cuso heard and shared their FITCOMPRON leader’s frustration, his voice remarkably clear through the crackle and labored breathing of an aviator who had just overseen the worst aerial defeat of American arms in the last quarter century.
Within minutes of the ROC 1st Battalion on Penghu sounding the air raid warning, 350 presumed tourists trapped on the island had quickly sought refuge from the Flanker blitz by taking cover in and around the popular Fengkuei cave on the rocky southwestern isthmus of the island. When the air raid finally ended, these “tourists” emerged from their ad hoc shelter, heading toward the fiercely crackling ruins of Makung, armed with Kalashnikov 47s, bandoliers of 7.6mm ammunition, grenades, and light but deadly 60mm mortars. The arms had been planted months earlier by PLA navy commandos during clandestine landings by diesel-electric subs that had come in close to Penghu during stormy weather, the rough seas having subsumed the already quiet running of the subs’ battery- power propulsion, making the ChiCom presence in the strait undetectable by even the best Taiwanese sonar.
The island was now hostage to the PLA.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“So,” pronounced Choir Williams, as the SpecFor group watched CNN’s Marte Price reporting the Chinese-U.S. conflict in the Taiwan Straits. “Looks like we don’t need to wait for
Salvini nodded in agreement.
“Choir!” Aussie announced triumphantly. “I think you just lost a bet, boyo.” His tone, however, was devoid of the usual follow-up jabs that characterized the relationship between Freeman’s Special Forces team. The bloody
