in complete shock, and Captain Sun could not help but blink at his commanding officer in surprise. “But. . . sir, in only two landing-craft waves, we have less than three hundred troops ashore, and most of those are lightly armed engineers and Marines. They don’t have the equipment or strength to conduct a thorough search and destroy operation. In daylight hours they can hardly proceed faster than a half-mile inland-at night they may be on the beach for hours, easily until daylight. They have not even begun to probe the area for resistance. It would be madn- I beg your pardon, sir, in my opinion it would be unwise to send in the large landing ships until we can be sure the area is free of resistance.” Captain Sun sustained Yin’s furious glare with uneasy fear. He had come very close to total insubordination by calling Yin’s order “madness, ” and only Sun’s long-standing relation ship with Yin, as well as the fact that they were in the middle of a war, prevented hiln from being dismissed right then and there. “As you were, Captain, ” Yin growled. “Our plans and normal operating procedures are based on the level of resistance and the greatest threat facing our forces. The resistance so far is low, and the threat from American bombers is very high. Those ships are vulnerable. The more men we can get off those ships and safely on land, the better. Order the landing ships ashore immediately.” By using a Mode Two interrogator, which broadcast a short, coded signal to other American aircraft in the area commanding the other aircraft’s beacons to emit a short identification signal in reply, Patrick McLanahan could discover where other aircraft in the strike force were located and display it on the God’s-eye view on his Super Multi Function Display-in turn, this would be transmitted to the EB-52C escorts in the other strike packages so they could update their situational displays. The data would also be transmitted via NIRTSat communications satellites to the Joint Task Force commander on Guam and to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. The Mode Two told a horrifying story-they had already lost one B-52 and one B- 2, and they were still hundreds of miles from the Chinese amphibious assault force. McLanahan found his throat dry and his forehead hot and moist, and he found he could not control the slight trembling in his fingers-the trembling of real fear. He felt alone up here, and he felt as if every enemy vessel on that SMFD could see him and was waiting to kill him. After spending weeks with these men at the Strategic Warfare Center-swapping stories, techniques, and complaints; mission planning and debriefing until late at night at the 0-Club or at the Black Hills Saloon until being tossed out; and learning how to fight as a unit instead of as lone penetrators-it was as if a bit of his own soul had disappeared with each missing icon on that screen. They were dead, quickly and suddenly-and the toughest part of the mission was still ahead. The faces of the crew dogs that manned the missing bombers floated unbidden before his eyes, and burning drips of sweat that rolled into his eyes couldn’t blur those horrible images. Patrick had seen combat, had seen men close to him die, but this was harder than he ever imagined. All those faces, all those names-this morning they were all together, and now they were never coming back. Just like that… “What do you got, Patrick?” McLanahan shook himself out of reverie and focused his eyes past the ghostly faces he saw in the SMFD and concentrated again on the situation. The faces did not haunt himthey seemed to help him, seemed to encourage him to continue… “Patrick.. Patrick looked over at Cobb and nodded. “I’m all right, Henry…” Cobb had glanced at his partner briefly, waiting to see if he would get back into the fight, before resuming his usual stone-still stance. The faces had moved away from the SMFD-they felt as if they were looking over his shoulder now, marveling at the technology McLanahan commanded and waiting for him to continue the fight-and that made him feel much better. “We are twenty miles from the coastline near Kiaponga, ” Patrick said. “The B-52s behind us are joining up with Carter’s EB-52. There’s a destroyer battle group in the mouth of the Davao Gulf, and I think Carter and his B-52s from the south group are going after it. The number-two east strike group will follow-they’re all intact with all six B-52s.”
“Where are the Tomahawks?” Cobb asked. McLanahan touched an icon on his SMFD, and several blinking objects and a short data list appeared on the God’s-eye view. The Tomahawk cruise missiles could be interrogated just like a manned aircraft. “About ten miles ahead of the B-52s and not far behind us. We’ll go feet-dry, turn west, and let the Tomahawks go past us as they head inland; when they get ahead of us, we’ll head north and proceed to our targets.” McLanahan studied the display for a moment, then ceased his Mode-2 interrogations-even though the Mode-2 signals were encoded and transmitted in very short bursts, the enemy could still track an aircraft from them. “Looks like about half the Tomahawks are still with us.”
“Good, ” Cobb said. “I’d just as soon let those puppies beat the bushes for us. ABOARD THE DESTROYER HONG LUNG The grease-board plotting technician drew a line from a frigate icon near the mouth of Davao Gulf to near the tiny village of Kiaponga. Out of all the other dots, circles, icons, and lines on the board, that one line commanded Admiral Yin’s attention. “What is that?” he asked. “Sir, frigate Xiamen reports a weak UHF signal along this bearing, ” the situation officer replied. “Several microburst transmissions. Computer projection calling it a possible aircraft, airspeed eight hundred kilometers per hour, heading northwest.” Yin seemed to be transfixed by this line. “Any primary radar target? Altitude readout?”
“No, sir.” “Do they have an analysis of the signal itself?”
“Not yet, sir.” Captain Sun was completely perplexed-a destroyer and a frigate were coming under attack, but Yin was wondering about a microburst radio transmission. “Sir, Jinan is under attack by antiship missiles again-he cannot hold out much longer. We must assist him. I recommend ordering him to withdraw to the west so we can provide surface-to-air missile coverage for him. And we should head farther to the northeast to provide similar coverage for Xiamen-he is tracking numerous Tomahawk cruise missiles heading in his direction as well as the B-52 bombers… “I want to know what that signal was, Captain.”
“Very well, sir, ” Sun replied. “And as for Jinan and Xiamen… ?”
“Steer Hong Lung northeast to cover Davao Gulf as much as possible, but/inan will hold its position, ” Yin said with a hint of exasperation in his voice. “They have almost as much fire power as we do, and they have more escorts. I will not allow my ship commanders to start running all over the Celebes Sea at the first sign of trouble. I also want a report on our fighter coverage-I have not seen one fighter on that board since the first group of J-7s and Q-5s were engaged.” A few moments later a new manual plotting technician took over on the vertical-plot greaseboard, and he began filling in icons for a group of fighters just west of Mount Apo. “Sir, fighter groups fourteen, with six total Jianjiji-7 fighters, and composite fighter-attack group two, with three Qiangjiji-5 fighters and three A-5K fighter-bombers, are thirty-seven kilometers west of Mount Apo, ” Captain Sun reported. “They will be on station over Davao Gulf in three minutes.” Yin slammed a fist down on the table before him and hissed, “That is not good enough! We’re supposed to have a hundred fighters available to us on this operation, and there are only twelve? I had better see two more groups airborne immediately. I want all available J-7 and Q-5 fighters airborne immediately to attack the inbound bombers. “It will be done immediately, sir… but I must remind you that it leaves no Q-5 fighters available for close air support for our Marines, ” Sun said. “The Q-5 and the A-5 are the only planes we have that can aerial refuel. Also, few of these aircraft are equipped for night combat “We will have no Marines to provide close air support for if we do not stop these bombers!” Yin shouted. “Launch all available fighters now! And I want two fighters dispatched to search along the projected trackline of that microburst transmission. I want nothing to get past our defenses and strike our Marines… nothing!” The updated NIRTSat data feed came in just as Cobb and McLanahan’s B-2 crossed the coastline south of Kiaponga. Cobb had reactivated the terrain-comparison COLA computer, and they were snaking just two hundred feet above the lush coastal hills and valleys of the Sarangani Peninsula of southern Mindanao. On his Super Multi Function Display, McLanahan could see the updated positions of three Tomahawk cruise missiles that were to go in ahead of his B-2 Black Knight bomber; the computer used the missile’s last reported heading and speed, along with a knowledge of the missile’s pre-programmed flight plan, to estimate the missile’s position. “We’ll be ready for a turn in about sixty seconds, ” McLanahan told Cobb. The aircraft commander clicked his mike in response. The terrain sloped up steeply from the eastern cliffs facing the Celebes Sea in the Glan River Valley; the valley was at least six miles wide and did not rise as steeply on the west side. “Stay on the west slope of the coastal hills, on the ‘military crest, ’” McLanahan said. “It’s not the best place to be, but it’s better than getting trapped down in the valley. The hills should shield us from the warships off the coast as well.” Another double click in response as Cobb banked the B-2 gently right and began flying north- northeast along the western side of the coastal hills, not flying too high but not diving too deeply into the valley. McLanahan expanded his SMFD out to sixty miles’ range. At the top of the north-up display was their primary target, the radar site on Mount Apo. A yellow-colored dome surrounded the point, representing the range of the Chinese radar site operating there-that was their target. The edge of the yellow dome did not quite touch the B-2 icon-not because they were out of the radar’s range, but because the energy levels being recorded from the radar were less than those required to get a radar return off the stealth bomber. From that radar site the Chinese could vector in fighters against every American bomber in the strike package. McLanahan immediately designated the top of the mountain as the target for two SLAM missiles, programming in evasive turnpoints and data-link activation points and checking the Global Position System satellite signal for good navigational data feed to the missiles. He
