tried to whack Ryan’s girlfriend. I was wondering whether we were going to draw straws or flip for the pleasure.”
Clark nodded. There would be no pleasure in executing the two Chinese special-forces men, but
Chavez said, “Sam, you’ll drive the truck at the rear of the hit. You’ll keep the prisoners with you, shoot them, and leave them in the vehicle.”
Sam just nodded. A couple years earlier he’d gotten in some trouble for shooting men in their sleep, even though it had been necessary. He did what he had to do then, and he’d do what he had to do now.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Fourteen Marine F/A-18C pilots took to the skies over Taiwan at midnight. They climbed into heavy cloud cover over the island and adopted flight paths to appear on PLA radars as if they were heading for regular CAP stations in the strait, just as they had done dozens of times before.
The ROC F-16s on station began leaving their sectors, as if the approaching flights would be relieving them, again to give the appearance to the Chinese that these radar signatures were just fighter planes on fighter missions, protecting the island from centerline incursions.
But not all the jets were flying as fighter planes tonight. Many of them, Trash’s and Cheese’s included, were equipped for a strike mission, and their destination was not a space of cold black sky over international waters.
No, their destination was the Huadu district of Guangzhou.
Fully laden with ordnance and extra fuel, Trash’s F/A-18C weighed more than fifty thousand pounds, and the controls felt sluggish. This Hornet felt like a different species from the nimble dogfighter he had flown when getting his two gun kills, and this plane even felt different from how it did the day before, when he shot down his third enemy fighter, an Su-27, with an AIM-9 missile.
There was no way in hell he could dogfight with all the bombs and fuel; if any J-10s or Su-27s came after his flight, he and the others with a strike loadout would have to dump all the air-to-ground weapons from their pylons and concentrate on their survival.
That might save their lives, but it would also ensure they would fail their mission, and they had been told they would get only one crack at this.
As the fourteen aircraft — flying in flights of two and four — approached the strait as if to go on station, no Chinese planes came up to meet them, as the weather was bad tonight and there would be plenty of opportunities for air-to-air engagements during the day tomorrow.
They met a pair of ROC refuelers over the strait, and this might have seemed to be an anomaly to PLA radar officers, but it would not raise concern. It looked as if this group of flights would just be loitering on their CAPs a bit longer than normal, which would not have triggered any alarms for the Chinese.
Once Trash and the others topped off their tanks, they turned to the south, still looking like most every fighter signature to fly west of Taiwan for the past month.
And then things got interesting.
Trash and the thirteen other planes dove out of thirty thousand feet, down toward the deck, on a heading that took them to the west. Their speed increased, and they tightened up as much as they could in the dark night, and they adopted a heading that took them out into the South China Sea.
Trash and Cheese were two of the six jets on this mission tasked with dropping ordnance on the China Telecom building in Guangzhou, a target that neither of the men understood really, although they had been too busy in the past eight hours since their initial briefing to worry about the larger context of their roles.
Four other Hornets each carried two two-thousand-pound JDAMs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. These were Mark 84 iron bombs with tailkits that increased the weapons’ accuracy and the distance from the target the pilot could release his payload. The weapons were incredibly accurate, but no one on the flight knew if they would even be employed, as the GPS satellites that flew overhead were flicking on and off like table lamps with shorts in their wiring. The decision was made to outfit the fighters with the JDAMs for the simple reason that the survivability potential of aircraft dropping JDAMs at altitude from distance was better than the other option.
Dumb bombs dropped from low altitude.
That role went to the B-team on this mission, Trash and Cheese. If the first four Hornets could not get a GPS signal to allow them to drop their weapons, then the B-team would dive in. Both F/A-18s carried the two- thousand-pound Mark 84 iron bombs, two on each plane. The Mark 84 bomb had not changed at all since it was dropped by F4 Phantoms over Vietnam nearly fifty years earlier.
Trash found it ironic that with ultramodern aircraft in the U.S. inventory, such as the F-22 Raptor and the F/A-18E Super Hornet, and with ultramodern air-to-ground munitions, such as laser-guided bombs and pinpoint- accurate GPS weapons, he and his flight lead were flying into battle in twenty-five-year-old airplanes that carried fifty-year-old bombs.
In addition to the six planes designated for ground attack, six more had a strictly air-to-air role this evening. They were fully loaded with AIM-9s and AIM-120s, and they would fly out to meet any aggressors that approached the squadron.
The last two planes in the mission were loaded with HARMs, high-speed anti-radiation missiles, to take out enemy SAM sites along the route.
All the pilots wore NVGs, night-vision goggles, which gave them the ability to see both their HUDs and the terrain outside, although they all knew the NVGs brought an additional hazard to their already dangerous operation: if any of the men had to eject, they needed to remember to pull off their NVGs before punching out, as the weight of the device on the front of the helmet would snap their necks during the ejection.
At one-thirty a.m. the Hornets flew fast and low, screaming over the waves as they headed southwest. By now they all knew the Chinese had scrambled fighters and alerted their coastal defenses, but for a few moments more, at least, the PLA had no idea what the group of planes’ intentions were.
After a heading change announced by the strike leader, the aircraft turned due north as one, directly toward Hong Kong.
Trash was the eleventh of the fourteen planes, and he kept his eyes on his HUD, making sure he didn’t slam into the water or another aircraft as he made his turn at three hundred feet above the surface. With a quick smile he wondered how to say “What the hell?” in Chinese, because he expected the phrase was being spoken in every radar room on every PLA base along the coast to the north.
Several flights of Chinese fighters took off from bases near the Taiwan Strait and headed out to meet the flight of Hornets racing over the South China Sea toward land. ROC Air Force planes flying combat patrols over Taiwan raced out to intercept them, launching AIM-120s from just south of the centerline, and then crossed it, heading into China’s side of the strait. This broke up the attack on the Marine jets, but it created a massive air-to- air battle that lasted more than an hour in the strait.
More PLAAF planes from bases in Shenzhen and Hainan flew out to meet the approaching aircraft, thinking them to be flown by ROC pilots, not by U.S. Marines. Four of the Marine jets with air-to-air munitions left the formation to engage the Chinese, launching medium-range missiles from distance and shooting down three J-5s before the Chinese even fired back.
An F/A-18 was blown out of the sky just twelve miles off the coast of Hong Kong, the victim of a J-5’s radar- guided missile, but two more J-5s were shot down by American missiles seconds later.
The remaining strike force flew on, low and fast, shooting over container ships at five hundred knots.
Four U.S. nuclear submarines had moved south of Hong Kong in the past forty-eight hours from their patrol areas in the Taiwan Strait. As the American aircraft approached Hong Kong, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from all four subs sprang from the black water, arced into the sky, and flew toward SAM batteries along the coast.
