Fatal Terrain

CHAPTER SEVEN

SKYBIRD, SKYBIRD, message follows: KILO, THREE, SEVEN, NINER, EIGHT, FOXTROT, ONE…” the U.S. Strategic Command senior controller said over the command net, reading off a long string of phonetic letters and numbers, then repeating the coded message with the phrase “I say again…” In the Eighth Air Force command center, two teams of two controllers were copying the message down, then beginning to decode the message separately, then comparing their results with each other; satisfied, they began running the associated checklist. The checklist would instruct them what message to transmit to the bomber forces under their command. Both sets of controllers composed the new message, then quickly verified it with each other.

Then, while the first set of controllers began reading the new coded message on the command posts UHF and VHF frequency, the second set of controllers copied the message and passed it along to the battle staff operations officer. He in turn decoded the message with another officer, checked their results with the first two sets of controllers — it checked once again. At least four sets of eyes always checked every message and every response to be sure they were accomplishing the proper action. If there was any error anywhere along the line — a nervous or cracking voice, a hesitation, anything — the other controller would slap a piece of paper over the codebook, and the controller reading the message would read, “Stand by,” then start all over again. The stakes were too enormous to leave any ambiguities.

“Latest EAM verified, sir,” the ops officer reported to the Eighth Air Force battle staff. “DEFCON Two emergency action message.” The entire staff opened up their checklists to the appropriate page, as the ops officer began writing updated date-time groups up on the command timing board. DEFCON, or Defense Condition, Two was a higher state of readiness for all U.S. military forces; for the bomber forces, it placed them at the very highest stages of ground alert, just short of taking off. “Message establishes an ‘A hour only, directing force timing for one hundred percent of the force on cockpit alert status, plus fifty percent of available forces as of A plus six hours to go to dispersal locations,” the ops officer went on. “Bases with missile flight times less than twelve minutes go to repositioned alert; bases with MFTs less than eight minutes go to engines-running repositioned alert. The message directs full Reserve and Guard mobilizations.”

Every member of the battle staff reached for telephones as soon as the minibriefing was over. Lieutenant-General Terrill Samson, commander of Eighth Air Force, was on the phone to his boss, the commander of Air Force Air Combat Command, General Steven Shaw. He was put on hold.

Samson sighed but did not let himself become angry. He knew he was already effectively out of the picture — in more ways than one. Steve Shaw didn’t need to talk to Terrill Samson for any important reason right now.

Barksdale’s sortie board was filled with tail numbers and parking areas, but all the sortie numbers and crew numbers were blank. That’s because they were all for B-52H bombers, and the B-52s had all been retired, deactivated. By October, all of them would be flown to Davis- Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, there to be cut up and put on display so that Russian, Chinese, and whoever else’s spy satellites could photograph the birds and be sure their wings had been clipped for good. Not that Barksdale’s ramps were vacant. Some of the B-lBs from the Seventh Bomb Wing out of Dyess Air Force Base, Abilene, Texas, who were going to become Air Force Reserve bombers in October, had dispersed to Barksdale — they would probably be assigned here full-time when Dyess turned into a B-1B training base.

But all of the heavy bombers that had once been under Terrill Samson’s command were now in the hands of U.S. Strategic Command and Admiral Henry Danforth — and since Samson had opened his mouth and dared to contradict Danforth’s blind preparation for a nuclear war that was not wanted and probably would never come except by some horrible accident, Samson was not even entrusted with commanding his bombers under CINCSTRATCOM. He was a three-star general without a command, without any responsibilities. He still monitored the status of each and every bomber that was formerly under his supervision, but he was not in the chain of command anymore — he was not even in the advice and consultation loop.

The bomber SIOP generation, the preparation for all the land-based B-1B Lancer and B-2A Spirit bombers for nuclear war, was still not going very well. About three-quarters of the force was on alert now — but under DEFCON Three, 100 percent of the bombers had to be on alert. In addition, 25 percent of the force had to be dispersed to alternate operating locations — Barksdale was one, along with Fairchild AFB in Spokane, Washington, Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota, and Castle AFB near Merced, California — but just a few bombers had arrived, and it would take days for them to get on alert with nuclear weapons aboard. All of the alternate fields were former bomber bases, but it had been months, even years, since any of them had any big bombers land there, let alone any bombers with nuclear weapons aboard.

Terrill Samson could offer words of encouragement, or dispense advice, or rant and rave and threaten to kick ass if they didn’t get moving faster. But it meant nothing. His words did not have any authority behind them anymore. Although his stand-down wasn’t officially set until October, it was as if Terrill Samson had already been relieved of command, and retired.

“Terrill, Steve here,” General Shaw said, as he came on the line a few moments later. “STRATCOM wants to put the B-2s on airborne alert. You got something on the shelf that we can give them in the next couple hours?”

“Yes, sir,” Samson responded woodenly, disguising his shock and disbelief. Airborne alert, nicknamed “Chrome Dome” and immortalized in films like Dr Strangelove, hadn’t been done in more than twenty-five years because it was so dangerous to have nuclear-loaded bombers flying around for hours or even days on end — the old Strategic Air Command had lost two bombers and four nuclear gravity bombs during Chrome Dome missions. Now Danforth and Balboa, two Navy pukes, somehow thought it would be a good idea to do it again.

“I expected a slightly stronger reaction from you, Earthmover,” Shaw remarked.

“Would it do any good, coming from me — or you?”

“Probably not, but I’d like to hear it anyway,” Shaw said. “First answer the question so I can give STRATCOM their answer, then talk to me.”

“We don’t have any Beak-specific airborne alert tracks laid out,” Samson responded, “but we can modify a few old B-52 racetracks and give them out to the B-2 crews. We can mate them to B-1B tracks, but we want to be sure we spread them out in case China decides to use nuclear warheads on air-to-air missiles.” Samson wondered why his deputy, General Michael Collier, who was the bomber chief for Strategic Command after Samson had been relieved, hadn’t called in the request directly from STRATCOM headquarters at Offutt. The only explanation was that Danforth, commander in chief of Strategic Command, was disregarding Collier’s recommendations, as he disregarded Samson’s.

“Sounds good. I knew I could count on you. Pass them along to Offutt soonest,” Shaw ordered. “Now, lay it on me. Give me your thoughts. Quickly, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Samson said. “I want to make another pitch to the Chief and the National Command Authority about the bomber force. We have got to take them off SIOP alert. I’ve got a series of plans we can present to the NCA—”

“I don’t have time to make the same pitch we tried yesterday, Terrill,” Shaw said. “I’m up to my eyeballs. STRATCOM wants to put nukes on the Strike Eagles now. ”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Shaw said. “We’re going to have all four F-15E Strike Eagle wings — the 3rd at Elmendorf, the 4th at Seymour-Johnson, the 366th at Mountain Home, and the 48th at Lakenheath — loaded for the SIOP and deployed to Elmendorf for operations against North Korea or China. CINCSTRATCOM is looking at North Korea starting a nuclear exchange within a few hours.”

“That’s nuts, sir,” Samson said. “That’ll suck a fourth of your tankers away. Losing Guam was bad enough for the tankers — putting nukes on F-15s for possible missions against North Korea, will drain even more tankers away.”

“You’re exactly correct, Earthmover, and that’s the argument I made — but the JCS and STRATCOM are on autopilot for Armaggedon. They think that if we put more nukes on more planes, the Chinese and North Koreans will back off,” Shaw said. “Anyway, I’m still waiting on a cocked-on-alert call from your Bones. Pass along a good word for me to the boys and girls at Whiteman for a good job in getting the B-2s loaded up so fast.”

They were loaded up and put on alert just so Danforth and Balboa could start dinking around with them, such as putting them on airborne alert, Samson thought bitterly. “I will, sir,” he responded; then, quickly, Samson went on: “Sir, I’d like a chance to meet with you and General Hayes on my plan to neutralize the Chinese strategic forces. We have missions on the shelf right now, ready to go, where we can take out every one of the Chinese long-range-missile silos without using nuclear weapons. I’d like to—”

“Sorry, Earthmover, but I can’t,” Shaw interrupted. “I went to STRATCOM with your suggestions without any luck, and I’ve got a second message in with the chief. They want to keep all the bombers on nuclear alert — they think it gives them the most leverage to have the bombers, especially the B-2s, loaded with nukes and threatening to destroy targets in China.”

“It’s obviously not working, sir, because China went ahead and destroyed Andersen and nearly wiped out the capital city of Guam,” Samson interjected, “and we still haven’t retaliated. Someone did, but it wasn’t us.

“Sorry, Earthmover,” Shaw repeated. “To a certain extent, I happen to agree with the JCS. We can’t risk losing the B-2s on a deep strike mission inside China.”

“The B-lBs can soften up China’s air defense well enough for the B-2s to go in.”

“But then they’re up against thousands of fighters and triple-A sites,” Shaw argued. “We can’t destroy all of them. Eventually, the B-2s would be fully exposed. If we lost even ten percent of the B-2 fleet on this attack, it would be a staggeringly demoralizing loss — and it would seem even worse if we didn’t do commensurate damage to the Chinese military. We might then be forced to use ICBMs or nuclear cruise missiles to destroy Chinese targets, and then we’d be on the very slippery slope we want to stay off. We’d be sending nuclear warheads over the pole, over Russia. That would make the Russkies very nervous, and we don’t want them involved in this fight, on either side.”

“Sir, we’ve got a plan that would practically ensure destruction of the Chinese long- and intermediate-range strategic offensive arsenal, without a devastating loss on our side — and without using nukes,” Samson said. “But I need the B-l and B-2 bombers. All of them. They’re not doing any good loaded with nukes. With you, me, and General Hayes talking to the SECDEF or maybe even the President, we might be able to convince him to let us try my plan before it’s too late.”

There was a slight pause on the other end, followed by an exasperated but resigned sigh; then: “Okay, Terrill, I’ll make the request once more. But it’s not going to work.”

“Thank you, sir,” Samson said. “I can fly out to Washington at any time to meet with the Chief or the NCA.”

“You just stay at Barksdale, and I’ll tell you when to show to give your dog-and-pony show,” Shaw said. “Keep quiet till then, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Samson replied — but Shaw had hung up before Samson gave his response. It was not a friendly suggestion to keep quiet — it was an order.

Sometime during the conversation with Shaw, Samson was handed a note. He asked a question of the briefer, then half-listened to the reply as he glanced at the messageform — and then his heart skipped a beat. He threw a “Continue on” order to his battle staff and dashed out of the battle staff room to the comm center. “What did you pick up?” he asked the command post senior controller.

“A message on that special SATCOM terminal you had installed here, sir,” the senior controller said. He handed Samson a printout. “Auto decryption on this end.” The message read: “HEADBANGER SENDS. URGENT REQUEST EMER AR RNDZVZ W/ SINGLE DRAGON 16 25N117E 10K ONLOAD. USE RED7 ARFREQ. ADVISE ASAP. OUT.” A later message read: “HEADBANGER FINDS FOUR H-7 MANY H-6 AT TDELTA SKIPPING TFOXTROT AND TGOLF. THX FOR EMERAR WITH DRAGON16. NAV27 ARCP OK. OUT”

“Wasn’t Headbanger the call sign of that modified B-52 that broke out of Andersen past the Navy and U.S. marshals and then disappeared, sir?” the senior controller asked..

“It sure as hell is,” Samson replied excitedly. “Shit. This means that not only is Elliott, McLanahan, and the rest of that motley crew alive, but they’re flying a damned mission — over fucking China). ”

“That attack on the PRC garrison at Xiamen?”

“A SEAD Wolverine cruise missile attack,” Samson surmised. “A couple of those cruise missiles could wipe out dozens of SAM and tripleA sites. Then they get someone to follow up with cluster-bomb attacks.”

“The ‘Dragon-16’? You don’t suppose they mean Taiwanese F-16s? That EB-52 is flying SEAD missions for Taiwanese F-16s?”

“Yep, and then continuing on deep inside China to do more bombing missions,” Samson said proudly. “I’ll bet the next intelligence message we get says that Wuhan has been attacked by unidentified bombers — maybe a couple other targets between Xiamen and Wuhan, or between Wuhan and the East China Sea.”

“But I thought all the Taiwanese F-16s were destroyed, along with their bases.”

“Obviously some survived — along with one Megafortress and Jon Masters’s tanker and a few of his gadgets,” Samson said. He searched a map of China: “The Chinese H-6 bomber base is at Wuhan, west of Shanghai,” he said. “It sounds like McLanahan found some H-7s — those are Tupolev-26 supersonic bombers — and decided to expend their remaining weapons there, instead of a couple other preplanned targets. But where are they flying out of? Who is running that operation?”

“We could find out,” the senior controller said. “If I can still receive their SATCOM transmissions, I suppose we can send them a message just as easy. ”

General Samson broke out into a broad grin, the first one in many, many hours. “Move over, son,” he said excitedly. “I’ve got to call me up some renegades so we can get to work cleaning up this war — before it gets completely out of hand.”

As Terrill Samson sat down to start typing out messages, he called for his executive officer. “Get the C-21 fueled up and ready to depart for Andrews. I want every preplanned strike package we’ve got to attack the Chinese ICBM complexes, bomber bases, and radar sites — and I want it all ready to go within the hour. Then contact Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Roma at Ellsworth and Colonel Anthony Jamieson at Whiteman, drag them off alert or wherever they are, and have them standing by with their conventional strike packages. Tell them I’m taking some of their bombers off nuclear alert — and then we’re going to work the way we were meant to go to work!”

The roar of jet engines could be heard far below, creating a constant rumbling and vibration throughout the medical facility. The Taiwanese staff appeared not to notice. They worked with silent efficiency, quickly and quietly loading up medical supplies for the evacuation.

David Luger had just been wheeled into an examination room from the X-ray lab. He was lying on a gurney, a thin sheet concealing all the other bandages on his left leg and arm. The left side of his body looked as if he had been spray-painted with a mixture of black, yellow, and brown paint — it looked like one continuous bruise from his head to ankle, and his left eye was swollen almost completely shut. “I tell ya, I’m okay,” Luger was protesting to the doctor accompanying him. Patrick and Wendy McLanahan, Brad Elliott, and Jon Masters were waiting for him; Patrick’s injuries, not nearly as serious as Luger’s, had already been treated.

“What’s the scoop, Doctor?” McLanahan asked the attending physician, who was carrying Luger’s X rays.

“Severe concussion, as we suspected,” the Taiwanese doctor replied, holding up each pertinent X ray as he spoke. “Slight cranial fracture. Partial hearing loss in the left ear, slight fracture in the left orbit. Cuts and bruises all along the left side of his body where he took the brunt of the explosion. Broken left knee, swollen left ankle and left foot. If I did not know he was hit by an exploding missile, I would say he had been hit by a bus.”

“I’m okay, I said,” Luger protested. “Damn, we kicked some ass, didn’t we?”

“We sure did,” Brad Elliott said, a broad smile on his face. “It was just like the first Old Dog flight. They threw everything but another Kavaznva laser at us, and we fought through it all and bombed the crap out of them! ”

“So let’s gas up and get ready to fly another sortie,” Luger said.

“Not you, Dave,” Patrick said. “You’re grounded. We’ll take the next run ourselves. I can handle both the OSO and DSO’s stuff.”

“This damned headache won’t keep me from at least helping mission- plan for you guys,” Luger said. “We still have to knock out the air defense sites around Shanghai.”

“What I’d like to do is bomb the crap out of the Chinese ICBM silos and launch sites,” Patrick McLanahan said, a definite tone of anger in his voice — very uncharacteristic for his buddy, Luger thought.

“We know where they are — we just need to get in there and nail ’em,” Ton Masters said, his voice as bitter as Patrick’s. “Our guys back at Blytheville launched two more satellite tracks over central China, and we think we’ve pinpointed all the DF-5 and DF-3 silos and launch sites. One more NIRTSat launch and I can have each and even⁷ one targeted, along with a good number of mobile missile launchers.”

“But we’re low on weapons,” Patrick went on. “We’re down to only two Strikers, two Wolverine missiles, and two Scorpion missiles. The ROC has plenty of fuel, air-to-air missiles, and cluster munitions left over, but our rotary launchers can’t earn⁷ the cluster bombs.”

“Shit, maybe we can send Hal, Chris Wohl, and Madcap Magician back to Andersen to steal us the rest of our Megafortresses,” Luger said with a grin — and then he noticed that the others did not share in his quip. In fact, everyone looked real funereal all of a sudden. “But why all the focus on the Chinese ICBM sites all of a sudden? I thought we were going after air defense sites.”

“Oh, that’s right — you were being checked out up here when we heard,” Wendy said. “Dave… the Chinese launched a nuclear ICBM attack against Guam.”

“What?”

“Andersen has been destroyed — it was attacked with a two-megaton warhead,” Wendy went on sadly. “Agana and most of the northern half of the island have been severely damaged.”

“Oh, my God,” Luger said in a low, completely horrified tone. “Was it a retaliation against our attack? Did we cause the Chinese to attack with nuclear missiles?”

“The Chinese were committed to using nuclear weapons to attack their enemies long before you came to our assistance, Major Luger,” Brigadier-General Hsiao Jason, commander of the Kai-Shan Military Complex, said as he entered the examination room. He extended a hand to David Luger. “I wanted to thank you for your sacrifice and good work, Major. I am very proud of all of you, and very grateful.”

“We’re not done yet, General,” Elliott said. “We’re going to load up each and every weapon we can and shove them right down China’s damned throat\ ”

“We will — when we get the right opportunity and the right targets, Brad,” McLanahan said. “Right now, we’ve got to finish repairs, then see if we can mount any of the ROC’s cluster munitions on our rotary launchers. Wendy, Brad, can you help General Hsiao’s techs finish the repairs on the DSO’s stuff?” Wendy nodded, gave Dave Luger a kiss to help speed his recovery, and hurried off back to the EB-52.

Patrick turned back to Luger. “Bedrest for you, chum.” He noticed Dave Luger wearing the archetypical “shit-eating grin” on his face, which looked even more funny with half of his face swollen and purple. “What are you grinning at?”

“You, Muck,” Luger said. “Look at you — tossing orders around, and everyone’s jumping, even Brad Elliott. Pretty cool. You’ve taken over this team, whether you know it or not.”

“So I’m like some modern Asian Robin Hood with his merry band of outlaws, huh?” Patrick remarked. “Sticking it to the Chinese and defending Taiwan.”

“I don’t mean just the mystical Zen bombardier, Patrick — you’re turning into the boss man around here,” Luger said seriously. “When we first started flying together, you didn’t want to have anything to do with commanders, not even aircraft commanders. You’d been offered dozens of command positions even before you made the major’s list, and you turned them all down. I don’t know how many more positions you were offered since the Old Dog mission — probably another couple dozen. Everybody knew you and respected your talents, but you weren’t a leader, and you never wanted any leadership positions. Now everybody’s waiting for you to give the word, even Brad.”

“If you’re done busting my chops, Dave, I’m gonna head downstairs and check on our plane.”

“I’m serious, Muck, I really am,” Luger said. “I’m not busting your chops. You’ve really changed. You’re not just a crewdog anymore— you’re a leader, a commander.” He smiled again. “Who woulda thunk it?”.

“Not me,” Patrick said. He gave Luger a thumbs-up and left him in the company of a nurse and a security guard.

Nancy Cheshire met McLanahan on the tarmac. The Taiwanese were busy launching frequent air patrols over Formosa, and the air inside the cavern was thick and heavy with jet exhaust that the ventilators were having trouble keeping clear. “How are we doing on mating the CBUs to the Megafortress, Nance?” Patrick asked.

“We might be able to do something if we can mount a few racks onto the lower three beams of the rotary launcher,” Cheshire replied. “If we can, that’ll give us at least six CBUs per launcher. Unfortunately, there’s not enough room to mount racks and bombs on the entire launcher, only the bottom three stations. We’re pretty certain we can do a ‘straight six’ arrangement and put six CBUs on the lower and inboard stations of the wing weapon pods — that’s another twelve. With both launchers full, we can carry as many CBUs as six Taiwanese F-16s.”

“Great news,” Patrick said.

“This is even better news, I think,” Cheshire said. “We downloaded this off the satellite communications terminal — an incoming message, addressed to you”

“Incoming?” Patrick remarked with surprise. “Is it from Sky Masters? They’re the only ones that we’ve been talking to.”

“Nope, it’s not from Arkansas… it’s from Louisiana,” Cheshire said, wearing her broad, Cheshire cat smile. Patrick stopped short as he read… and he too began to put on a broad smile.

“Nancy, I want power on the airplane, and—”

“You got power and the SATCOM terminal’s fired up,” Cheshire said, but Patrick didn’t hear her — he was trotting, now running, toward the EB-52 Megafortress, to reply to the incredible message he’d just received.

“This madness must stop, Mr. President,” Foreign Minister Qian Quichen said via an interpreter on the hot-line phone from Beijing. The foreign ministers voice in the background betrayed his agitation and anger. “The people of China are clamoring for war, sir! They want revenge for the bloodthirsty sneak attack on our cities. President Jiang is going to make a personal appeal for calm on national television this morning, but he is under tremendous pressure from the military, the Congress, and the Politburo to retaliate against your naked aggression.”

“I’m sorry, Minister Qian, but I’ve told you twice already — the United States had nothing to do with any of those alleged attacks against your cities,” President Kevin Martindale said. With him in the Oval Office were his closest advisors: Ellen Whiting, Arthur Chastain, Jeffrey Hartman, Jerrod Hale, Philip Freeman, and Admiral George Balboa. An Army military intelligence officer fluent in Mandarin Chinese was interpreting and making notes for the President. “None of our bombers or attack planes were involved. Do you understand me, Minister Qian? No bombers of any kind under my command were involved in any attacks.”

“Then you… you are not being truthful,” the halting response came from Beijing.

“He said you are a liar,” the Army-Chinese language specialist interjected. “He said you are a ‘damnable liar.’ His exact words, sir.”

“That son of a bitch” the President swore half aloud, taking his fingers off the phones “dead-man switch” so Qian could not hear his curses. “Who the hell does he think he’s talking to?” He reactivated the handset once again, “Minister Qian, lets all compose ourselves and act like civilized men,” he said, forcing every bit of calm he could into his voice. “You can call me a liar, you can believe me or not believe me, I don't care. But here are the facts as we know them, sir: you launched ten intermediate-range ballistic missiles on an American military installation and destroyed it with a nuclear warhead. Do you dispute those facts, Minister Qian?”

“We do not dispute the fact that we launched rockets,” Qian said through his interpreter, “but the rockets were not attack rockets, and they contained no nuclear warheads, only meteorological data packages.”

“Minister Qian, our satellites and radar stations tracked those missiles from the moment they were launched to the instant they hit Guam,” the President said angrily. “The ten missiles that you launched from your launch sites in Ningsia and Inner Mongolia Provinces were the ones that were tracked heading for Guam. We detected the warhead separation and tracked each individual warhead as it reentered the atmosphere — we even tracked the one missile that destabilized and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, and with luck we’ll recover pieces of it and prove to the world that it was a Dong Feng-4 ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, as we believe it is. We have incontrovertible evidence of a Chinese nuclear attack on Guam, Minister Qian. The question now is, what is China going to do next?”

“Mr. President, the weather satellite rockets launched a few hours ago that you say you tracked were not responsible for the unconscionable devastation on your colonial island,” Qian said. “We have data to show the exact trajectory of our weather satellites that were inserted into low Earth orbit by those rockets, and we will be most happy to send that data to you. The satellites are still in orbit, a fact that any capable government can check on its own. As for the warheads that you say separated from our rockets, we cannot say. Your equipment or your analysis was obviously faulty. We had no reentry vehicles on our rockets, especially not nuclear warheads.”

Unfortunately, Qian was partly telling the truth, the President reminded himself. Three of the rockets launched among the ten inserted had later been identified by space surveillance cameras as visual- and infrared-spectrum photo weather satellites. As far as anyone could determine, these three satellites were harmless — and their presence afforded a weak but defensible explanation for the multiple Chinese rocket launch. It still could not erase all of the other evidence that China had attacked Guam with nuclear weapons, but now the possibility, however slim, that China had not shot rockets with nuclear weapons on board had to be carefully investigated. And that would take time.

“Minister Qian, I would like you to pass along a message to President Jiang and to the other members of your government,” President Martindale said firmly. “Tell him that I am going to speak to the leaders of both houses of Congress about going to the full Congress and the American people and asking for a declaration of war against China. ”

Even the interpreter, trained not to react emotionally to anything he heard or said, gasped at the announcement and had trouble providing a translation both of the President’s message and of Qian’s response: “You… you must not, sir!” Qian’s translator said in a quivering voice. “Mr. President, we are at odds only with the Nationalists on Taiwan, not with the United States of America. Please, sir, stop your support of this illegal and disruptive society, and assist the world community with reuniting all of China, and we promise that China will work tirelessly to strengthen the ties between our two nations.”

“Please pass along my message to President Jiang, Minister Qian,” the President said stonily. “I will be ready any time of the day and night to receive his reply. Good day to you, sir.” The President handed over the phone to Jerrod Hale with a grim expression on his face.

“You want a drink, Mr. President?” Hale asked. “I could sure go for one.”

“Not now, Jerrod,” the President said testily. He ran a tired hand over his eyes. “Christ, I feel like a cornered animal, with no other option but to lash out at anyone and everyone in front of me.”

Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain got off the phone near the coffee table in the informal conference area of the Oval Office. “Pentagon reporting a firefight across the DMZ, near Changdan. A North Korean special forces team blew up a tank maintenance facility. No reports yet on casualties or damage. Several artillery rounds were also fired towards Seoul, probably a probe. The USAF reports one F-16 anti-radar patrol fighter shot down five miles south of the DMZ by a surface-to-air missile; North Korea claims it was flying in the north. Pilot’s believed to be a casualty. ”

“I want to find a way to send some assistance to South Korea,” the President demanded. “What’s the best way? Arthur? Admiral? Let’s hear it.”

“Sir, we’ve got the George Washington in the Pacific, just a day or two from its operations area in the Philippine Sea,” Balboa said. “If we can get the Japanese to allow our supply ships to move out of their harbors, we can bring in the Washington to begin air ops against North Korea.”

“But that’s the problem, Admiral — Japan won’t allow us to move any ammunition supply ships out of their harbors,” Chastain said. “We’ve got food and fuel from Japan, but just a trickle of ammunition and spare parts. The Washington would be good for combat operations for about two weeks, and then it runs short. ” He turned to the President: “The best option would be to bring in more carriers, sir. With three carriers in the Philippine Sea and East China Sea area, we could-conduct reduced-level offensive air ops against North Korea, and perhaps have a limited holding force should China decide to attack. With four carriers, we could conduct full-scale air ops against North Korea or China, and do a holding force against anyone else trying to hit us from the side.”

“Four carriers,” the President muttered. “As many as we had in the Persian Gulf War, but without the nearby supply bases.”

“We run the risk of having too few carriers available in case things blow up in the Middle East,” Philip Freeman interjected.

“We’ve got plenty of assets, General Freeman,” Balboa argued.

“Lincoln would have to stay in the Arabian Sea to keep her eye on whatever the Iranians might do, now that they’ve captured one of our subs and might not give it back — and it might be better to bring another carrier out of the Med to reinforce her, or send more land-based planes from the States to Saudi,” Freeman explained. “So we cancel Lincolns planned rotation and send Carl Vinson in to work with Washington. That’s two. We’d then have to send Kitty Hawk out of the Indian Ocean to reinforce Vinson and Washington until we can get Nimitz under way from Alameda. A fourth carrier would have to come from the Atlantic Fleet.”

“I count two carriers that we can place on North Korea’s front doorstep in two days, three within a week, and four in a month — so far, I don’t see a big problem here,” Balboa said. “The carrier crews are ready to get into action — they want revenge for the attack on Lincoln earlier this year by Iran, the death of the Independence, and now for the attack on Guam. This is shaping up to be a carrier war, sir,” Balboa said with a touch of barely disguised glee in his voice and eyes. “Let the boys go out and kick some butt. ”

“It’s a lot of carriers within range of China’s missiles,” Freeman pointed out.

“We can take care of China and her missiles,” Balboa said confidently. At that moment, one of Balboa’s military aides entered the Oval Office, stepped over to the admiral, whispered in his ear, then departed again.

“Seems like you have visitors, Mr. President,” Balboa said. “Air Force chief of staff Hayes, Shaw from Air Combat Command, and Samson from Eighth Air Force. They probably want to pitch another hackneyed bomber idea to you. I heard rumblings from General Hayes that Samson was kicked off the Combined Task Force in Strategic Command because he was resisting putting ‘his’ bombers on nuclear alert.”

“Fm not thrilled about keeping them on alert either,” the President said bitterly. “But I don’t want to talk with them. Those three screwed up big-time with how they handled the Megafortress project. Elliott, McLanahan, Masters, all their weapons, and one of the Megafortresses are missing after they apparently steal the planes, ignoring my orders, and now Finegold and her committees are on my ass because they think I was hiding them.” The anger was evident on the President’s face — but Philip Freeman detected something else. A twinge of sadness, perhaps? “Now we’ve lost all the Megafortresses with the rest of Andersen Air Force Base. You handle them the way you see fit, George. That’s your chain of command.”

“Yes, sir,” Balboa said happily. He shot a smug, satisfied glance to Philip Freeman, who had engineered the whole bomber thing behind his back all these past months, but he had stepped out of the Oval Office. Freeman had been shot down just as surely as Samson and his precious bombers had been.

“Get the carriers moving towards the Philippine Sea, and we’ll see what Jiang has to say to me,” the President ordered. “Jeffrey, stay in contact with Qian, keep the pressure on.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Hartman replied.

“Jerrod, call the Leadership, set up a meeting for us later tonight so we can discuss what to do about China,” the President said. “I might have to compromise with Finegold on Taiwan, but Taiwan can take a backseat for now — I want a united front beside me when I go on TV and tell the American people about what the hell happened to Guam.”

At that moment, Philip Freeman walked into the Oval Office, strode right up to the President, and handed him a note. President Martindale gulped, swallowing hard, then dropped the note on his desk in surprise. “Get them in here, now” the President said to Freeman.

"What?” Balboa retorted. “You mean Hayes, Shaw, and Samson? You’re going to talk to those three? Why? I thought you were going to leave them to me, sir?”

“McLanahan, Elliott, his crew, his plane — they’re alive,” the President said. “They were the ones who staged the attacks against China, against the coastal air defense bases and the bomber base. They led the last remaining Taiwanese fighter-bombers in to attack China’s invasion force.”

“That’s impossible! ” Balboa shouted. “Where-are they? How could they possibly still be operating?”

“They’re flying out of an underground base on Taiwan,” the President said. “An underground air base!”

“That’s bullshit… er, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I’ve never heard of any such thing,” Balboa said.

“Admiral, McLanahan and Elliott flew their Megafortress bomber right up into central China,” Philip Freeman said. “If what General Samson says is true — and we’ll confirm it with satellite imagery — they may have knocked out a third of China’s long-range-bomber fleet in one night. We shouldn’t be questioning this development — we should be discussing how to turn this unexpected windfall to our best advantage.”

“I told you about Elliott, Mr. President,” Balboa said angrily. “I told you he was a loose cannon. It was this unauthorized attack that prompted China to launch their ICBM attack on Guam. Elliott’s responsible for this disaster!”

“What Elliott and McLanahan are responsible for is getting our asses moving and making things happen, rather than sitting around and waiting for things to happen,” the President said. The President was now ignoring his Joint Chiefs chairman. “Get them in here,” he told Freeman with a broad, hopeful smile on his face. “They survived, dammit — they survive d!”

The 221st People’s Maritime Patrol of the People’s Republic of China, based on Yuhuan Island thirty miles east of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, had been formed in 1955, flying rag-wing biplanes off the coast every hour of every day for forty-two years except in the most extreme weather conditions. The group’s mission was to patrol the coastline, operating roughly from Shanghai to the north all the way to Hong Kong to the south, although the group’s aircraft mostly patrolled the Formosa Strait.

The 221st was like an exclusive club. There were only one hundred members in the unit, and there would only ever be one hundred members — no more, no less. Prospective members had to be recommended by three other members, screened by a selection committee, and approved by the commander. Members served for life, and the only vacancies were the ones caused by death or court-martial, never by resignation. The group had several members over the age of ninety who still strapped into the back of their patrol planes and stared out the observation windows looking for enemy ships or ships in distress — the same as they had done for the past forty-plus years.

In 1985, the 221st was given a new class of aircraft, its first metalwing plane: three Hanzhong Y-8 maritime patrol aircraft, a copy of the old Soviet An-12 “Cub” transport. The plane was over twenty years old then, but it represented a significant upgrading of the group’s patrol capabilities. Along with numerous observation windows, the Y-8 carried electronic radio direction finders, which could scan for radio transmissions and provide a bearing to the transmitter. With two or more bearings, the operator could fix the location of the transmitter with surprising accuracy. The Y-8 was a four-turboprop smoke-belching monster that could barely fly above 10,000 feet, but it could stay aloft for as long as twelve hours and fly in almost any kind of weather. The members of the 221st, old and young alike, loved it.

One of the 221st’s planes was on patrol one evening over the East China Sea, north of Taipei, when the radio DF operator caught the first bearing to an unidentified aircraft. A second bearing fix established the target’s course and speed — out away from the Chinese coast, heading to the north of the island of Formosa. The operators were also able to identify the VHF radio frequency of the target and eavesdrop on their uncoded conversations — they were speaking not Mandarin Chinese, not even Taiwanese or Hakka, but English! The Y-8 crew decided to pursue the targets out as far as they could to the east to find out where they were headed.

Several DF bearings on several frequencies told the Y-8 crew members that there was more than one target in the area — they counted six so far, all heading east-northeast — but not toward Taipei, as the crew would’ve guessed. The targets all flew well north of the northern tip of Formosa. Because there were no fighter patrols up over the Nationalist capital — the airfields had been very effectively bombed out by Chinese missile and bomber attacks — the Y-8 crew decided to fly low, only 1,000 feet above the East China Sea, and cut east, close to Taipei. That way, they could track the targets no matter which way they headed.

Their strategy worked. The targets gradually turned south, down into the Philippine Sea, and the Chinese Y-8 crew was" able to follow them. The VHF radio transmissions became more frequent. They also started receiving VHF bearings from Formosa — near the military base at Hualien. Was that possible? Hualien had been hit and destroyed by Chinese nuclear-tipped M-9 missiles days ago — that had been confirmed. Could it be possible that the Nationalists had rebuilt the base so quickly?

There was only one way to find out — go take a look. The Y-8 crew started to fly south along the eastern Formosa coastline. Slowly, careful to avoid any ships or clusters of lights on shore, throttled back with minimum propeller pitch to cut down on noise, they inched their way along the coast toward Hualien. Soon, the target bearings were turning… turning westbound, right in front of the Y-8! Westbound? Hualien s runways were oriented generally north-south — the coastal mountains in this area to the west rose steeply out of the sea…

… and suddenly, the Y-8’s observers on the starboard side spotted the military base at Hualien. It was as flat as a pancake. Not much detail could be seen, but the crumbled foundations, the large pieces of debris scattered everywhere, and the fires still burning in many places told them that the base was completely unusable.

So where in blazes were the Taiwanese targets going?

The Y-8 crew continued southbound until the radio DF bearings started to shift toward the north. According to their charts, the high terrain in this vicinity was over 12,000 feet, just fifteen miles to the northwest, but the alluvial plain southwest of Hualien was almost ten miles wide and would allow them to stay low while turning around. They started a starboard turn over the coast, looping around back to the northeast. If they kept the town of Hualien just off the starboard wingtip, they would be clear of the transmission lines along the highway to the west and well clear of the—

The Y-8 crew heard a sudden rushing sound, which quickly grew into an ear-shattering roar. A jet fighter had just missed them! It had flown underneath them, about 200 feet lower than the big Y-8, heading northwest! That was insane, impossible! There was nothing to the northwest except 10,000- and 11,000-foot mountains…

But then they saw the glow of light from a wide chasm cut into the rocks, and the Y-8 pilot instinctively banked to port to head toward it— as long as he could see light, there were no mountains in the way. The light grew, expanded… and then, to the crew’s amazement, they saw sequenced flashing landing lights\ There was an airfield down there! It was unbelievable! Impossible! The Y-8 banked hard to port and descended— and then they could clearly see inside the huge cave, and sure enough, there was an entire airstrip inside that monstrous cave! It was a secret rebel Nationalist airfield, actually built inside the mountain!

This was too important a discovery — they had to break radio silence. The Y-8’s communications officer immediately sent out an emergency position report on the shortwave — the UHF radio would certainly not get out this deep in the mountains. He did not listen for a reply — he just continued to transmit the position as best he could estimate, adding that they had discovered a secret rebel airfield.

Suddenly, a flash of light and a streak of fire erupted from the north part of the cave. In the blink of an eye, the streak of fire reached out across the sky and struck the number four engine. The engine exploded in a burst of fire, shearing off seven feet of the starboard wingtip along with it. The rebels had obviously detected the Y-8 crew’s HF transmissions and had instantly homed in on them, and the base was obviously very well defended. They added that bit of information to their continuous radio reports — and now it was time to get out of there as fast as they could!

Full power on the other three good engines, full pitch, and the Y-8 started a slow climb. The pilots were flying on a prayer now — thank the stars the Y-8 was a tough bird. Only the quick work of the copilot to shut down the engine and cut off fuel from the right wing kept them from crashing in a ball of flame. As best they could estimate, they were heading for the Mei River valley, which cut westward up through the Chung Yang Mountains. They were at 3,000 feet and climbing at 1,500 feet per minute. On either side of the valley, the mountains rose very steeply— within five miles north and south of the river, the peaks were as high as 11,000 feet! It was completely pitch-black outside. He would have to trust his compass and his navigator to keep them in the valley long enough to climb to a safe altitude. The Chung Yang range was not very wide — in twenty miles, less than six or seven minutes, they would be at the summit. Once on the western side, they could hug the mountains until they were sure they could not be tracked, then pick their way west until they could get back over the Formosa Strait, then—

The two Sidewinder missiles fired from the pursuing Taiwanese F-16 fighter each hit and destroyed an engine, tearing them off the wings in a huge ball of fire. The Y-8 burst into flames and veered sharply right, and it hit the granite wall of the mountains seconds later.

But the Y-8’s radio operator had made over a dozen position and contact reports in that short period of time, and almost every one of his transmissions had been received by military listening posts in mainland China.

The secret Taiwanese underground airfield at Kai-Shan was a secret no longer.

“We have them, Comrade Admiral!” Jiang Zemin said joyously as Admiral Sun Ji Guoming was ushered into the president’s office. “General Chin has just briefed me. A secret air base! Do you believe it? A secret underground air base in eastern Formosa, just a few miles west of Hualien, cut into the mountain itself. We have its exact location.” Admiral Sun did not react to the news. “Now is your chance, Comrade Admiral. You can attack and destroy the rebel Nationalists’ remaining air forces with ease.”

Sun bowed to President Jiang and the chief of staff, General Chin, but remained silent for several long, uncomfortable moments. Finally: “Comrade President, I request permission to be relieved of duty.”

General Chin rolled his eyes in complete exasperation. Jiang laughed and said, “Relieved of duty? You are a national treasure, comrade! And victory is within your grasp, the victory you told me we could achieve before Reunification Day! One of our maritime patrols tracked a group of rebel F-16s back to their secret lair, an underground air base near Hualien. We sent in commandos, who verified their location. We must draw up a strike plan and destroy that facility immediately!”

“Comrade General Chin’s forces are more than capable of destroying that facility, sir,” Sun said. “You do not need me any longer. I am of no use to you now. ”

“Why do you say such things, comrade?” Jiang asked. “Are you ill? Did you suffer some family misfortune?”

“I am unable to continue my duties because I feel we have lost our tao, ” Sun replied solemnly.

“What in blazes are you talking about, Sun?” Chin exploded.

“We have lost our way, our reason for going to war in the first place,” Sun said, keeping his eyes averted. “We may achieve a victory over the rebels, but we cannot win this conflict now. The tao we follow will not lead to a true and honorable victory. ”

“That is nonsense, comrade,” Jiang said. “You have done well. It is your right, your destiny, to deliver the final blow to the Nationalists. This is a great honor we bestow on you. You deserve it.”

“But this cannot be my victory because it is not my tao—it is the tao of Comrade General Chin,” Sun said. “The nuclear attack on Guam was his way, his road to victory. It is not mine. I cannot lead the People’s Liberation Army forces along this path.”

“The Paramount Leader has conferred a great honor upon you, Sun,” Chin said impatiently. “Take it. Plan a strike mission using any air, rocket, or naval assets you desire. We expect this underground airfield complex to be destroyed or occupied by the People’s Liberation Army within forty-eight hours.”

“I humbly request to be relieved of duty,” Sun intoned.

“Request denied, Admiral,” Chin responded. “Carry out your orders. Present a strike plan to the Paramount Leader and myself within eight hours, and prepare to execute the plan within forty-eight hours.”

“Sir, I humbly request you to accept my resignation from your service,” Sun Ji Guoming said, bowing deeply in total obeisance. “A man cannot follow other than his own tao. Mine is lost. I am of no usefulness to you any longer.”

“That is not true, Comrade Admiral,” Jiang said. “What are you trying to tell us?”

“I am saying that to return to the tao that will ensure victory, we must now strive to make peace just as ferociously as we strove to destroy,” Sun said. “We must gather our forces to our center and protect it, and in doing so show the world that we are no longer a threat. We should configure all our air and naval forces for defensive operations only. We should destroy all our remaining offensive ballistic missiles, and openly pledge never again to employ thermonuclear weapons—”

“Are you insane, Sun?” Chin Po Zihong exploded. “Stop now? Obviously the rebels are far stronger than we anticipated. We need to destroy them quickly and utterly. And we need our nuclear-deterrent forces now more than ever to ensure that the United States will not attempt a massive attack against us.”

“Sir, Sun-tzu teaches us that if faced with superior forces, do not fight. We may feel we have gained the upper hand, but Sun-tzu’s words are a warning to us. Our forces are not superior to the United States. The American forces are massing over the horizon. I can sense it. I can feel it. They have not been destroyed. I urge the Paramount Leader to immediately contact the American president and pray — no, I urge him to beg for peace. ”

"What?” Chin retorted angrily. “Beg? We should beg the Americans?”

“Yes, sir,” Sun said. “Now. Immediately. Before it is too late.”

“Admiral Sun, you are dishonoring yourself by this flagrant display of pompous indignation and insubordination,” Chin said angrily. “Your request is denied. You are ordered to prepare a strike plan against the rebel Nationalist underground airfield complex and present it, in person, to me and the president’s staff within eight hours. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Sun replied.

Chin looked at the president, who was looking at Sun Ji Guoming as if he had grown a second head on his shoulders. With no additional comments, Chin snapped, “Then get out of here.” Sun bowed again, turned, and departed. Once Sun had left, Chin said, “All that Sun-tzu crap has addled his brain, I think.”

“Unfortunate,” Jiang Zemin said. “He appeared to be such a promising young officer. Perhaps we should reconsider this attack plan, Comrade General?”

“Because Sun thinks it is not his ‘way’ to do this attack?” Chin retorted. “He is upset because his plan of waiting for the Nationalists to capitulate did not work. He is upset because in the end we had to use brute strength to shove the Americans out of Asia. He thought he could do it with unorthodox methods and trickery, and his lack of vision allowed the Nationalist air force and the Americans to counterattack. We cannot allow that to happen again. We are on the threshold of a great victory over the rebels on Formosa, comrade, and this attack will break the backs of the Nationalists once and for all. Every missile, every attack plane, every bomb we have available should be used against this mountain hideout. We shall pound the Nationalists’ mountain fortress into sand!”

“But what if the Americans do stage a counteroffensive?” Jiang asked. “Perhaps we should be watchful, gather our forces, and prepare to repel an American attack. We can deter the Americans by sheer force of numbers. Surely they will not try a nuclear attack if we ask to begin peace negotiations now. ”

“And then where will the rebels be? Rebuilding their forces, getting more assistance from the Americans, and conducting more hit-and-run air attacks on our forces,” Chin said. “No. We should attack the rebel mountain complex immediately. If Sun will not do it, I have many more competent generals who will.”

The attack began with a heavy missile bombardment with conventionally armed Dong Feng-9 and -11 missiles from the mainland. Their accuracy was not great, but it didn’t need to be — because more than three hundred missiles launched from sixteen different locations, with warheads ranging from 500 pounds to more than 1,700 pounds of high explosive, peppered the area around Kai-Shan for over an hour. Every square inch of a twenty-five-square-mile area around Kai-Shan was blasted away. Along with the effect of the nearby nuclear explosions at Hualien, the area resembled the surface of the moon in very short order.

The second phase of the attack was by a completely new weapon system: China’s Type-031 attack submarine. In the day preceding the attack, the Type-031 sub, named the Yudao, had left its port at Shanghai and had cruised without incident right up to the mouth of the Mei River, less than five miles from the cave entrance to the Kai-Shan airfield complex, and waited. At the preplanned time, the Yudao surfaced, took a final targeting fix using its Golf-band targeting radar — aiming at a tiny radar reflector placed near the cave entrance by the Chinese commandos — and began firing Yinji-6 “Hawk Attack” guided missiles at the cave. The first four Yinji-6 missiles blasted open the movable armored doors to the cave entrance, finally exposing the interior of the complex to attack. Two of the remaining four Yinji-6 missiles flew inside the cave itself, creating spectacular gushes of fire and exploding rock from within.

The third phase of the attack was the most impressive, and was certainly the largest Asian aerial attack force since Japan’s naval air forces in World War II. Led by thirty H-6 bombers, watched by an Ilyushin-76 radar plane, and guarded by ten Sukhoi-27 and thirty Xian J-8 air- superiority interceptors, an attack force of two hundred Nanchang Q-5 fighter-bombers, each carrying two 1,000-pound bombs plus a long- range fuel tank, swept over the island of Formosa to begin the attack on Kai-Shan.

The H-6 bombers went first. From ten miles out, they launched huge Hai-Ying-4 missiles at the complex. These missiles merely flew straight to a set of coordinates, and were meant to knock down or destroy any rock outcroppings that might still be obstructing the cave entrance. Although the HY-4 missiles were not designed for land attack and some did not perform well in this hastily planned role, the destruction they caused left the attack path wide open for the waves of Q-5 bombers to follow.

As if they were doing a standard traffic pattern entry to land on Kai- Shan’s underground runway, the Q-5 fighter-bombers flew eastbound over the Chung Yang Mountains at 1,000 feet above ground until they were about ten miles offshore, then turned southbound for three miles, then north westbound, descending to 500 feet and lining up on the cave entrance. The planned procedure was a “toss” delivery, where the pilots would pull up sharply about two miles in front of the cave, then pickle off the bombs, which would fly on a ballistic path right into the cave. There could be no delay on the pull-up — the Chung Yang Mountains rose from 500 feet to nearly 10,000 feet within five miles, so there was only a six-second margin of error. The best bombardiers from all over China were picked for this important mission.

The first flight of ten Q-5 bombers started their runs, and the plan was working better than anticipated. The lead bombers announced that pilots could fly a hundred feet higher to get a flatter toss into the cave, because parts of the ceiling of the cave had collapsed and they couldn’t arc the bombs in quite as high anymore. As the first flight of Q-5 bombers cleared the target area, the second flight started their turn inbound on the attack course…

… just in time to hear the warning screams over the command frequency: “Warning, warning, all aircraft…” and then the loud, incessant hiss of static. Pilots all over the sky over Taiwan were switching to alternate frequencies, but all they found there, after a few seconds of trying to speak, was more static. The 11–76 Candid radar plane orbiting over Formosa might as well have been back on the ground, because no one could hear or talk with its all-important radar controllers.

It was up to the Sukhoi-27s and radar-equipped Shenyang J-8 fighters now — but it was soon apparent that they were mostly out of the fight as well — the jamming was intruding on their attack radars. The J-8 s older radars were easily jammed; the Su-27’s modern pulse-Doppler radars and advanced counter jamming functions worked better. “Enemy planes, heading westbound! ” the Su-27 pilots shouted on the attack frequency — but that did no good, because all of the VHF and UHF frequencies were jammed. No warnings and no formation orders could be sent or received. Two electronic-warfare EA-6B Prowlers from the USS George Washington, and two more EA-6Bs from the USS Carl Vinson had set up an effective electromagnetic net around the island of Formosa, denying the Chinese air force the use of any radio or radar frequencies except those in use by the U.S. Navy attack planes bearing down on the Chinese air armada.

The first target was the Ilyushin-76 radar plane — and that task was left to the nine surviving fly able Taiwanese F-16s, which had launched out of Kai-Shan just after sunset, along with Jon Masters’s DC-10 tanker- transport. Four Su-27s guarded the 11–76, but in the confusion caused by the EA-6B Prowlers jamming their radios and disrupting their radars, they were no match for the wave of F-16s. All four Su-27s were shot down by the F-16s, against the loss of one F-16—and then each F-16 took a shot at the 11–76 radar plane. At least a dozen AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles plowed into the Chinese radar plane, sending huge burning pieces spinning into the Formosa Strait. The eight Taiwanese F-16s then withdrew from the area and linked up with Jon Masters’s DC-10 tanker-transport orbiting over the Pacific, where they all refueled and headed to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.

The confusion between the Chinese planes allowed the Navy fighters to get into missile range. A total of twenty-four F-14 Tomcats and twenty F/A-18 Hornets from the two carriers in the Philippine Sea began launching missiles. The Tomcats could open fire from over seventy miles away with their huge AIM-54C Phoenix long-range antiair missiles, while the Hornets attacked from as far as twenty miles away with medium-range AIM-7 Sparrow and AIM-120 radar-guided missiles. Nearly half of the Su-27s and J-8 fighters covering the attack force were destroyed before the Navy fighters closed in within range of their short-range AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking antiair missiles, and another eight Su-27s and J-8s fell to AIM-9 missile attacks. The surviving Chinese fighters fled before the American fighters got a chance to close within cannon range. The Chinese fighter-bombers that had not dropped their weapons simply punched off the bombs and fuel tanks wherever they were and turned westward to get away from the unseen predators closing in on them.

But the Chinese bombers retreating from the area were just being herded into another trap — ten four-ship formations of U.S. Air Force F- 15 C Eagle fighters from the Eighteenth Wing at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa and the Third Wing from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, all loaded with six AIM-120 AMRAAMs and two AIM-9 Sidewinders apiece. The F-15s spread out over the Formosa Strait and simply waited for the Chinese aircraft to fly right into their laps before opening fire. Twenty-three F-15 pilots claimed kills that night, and three more claimed multiple kills. Any Chinese HQ-2 surface-to-air missile sites that tried to lock onto the F-15s over the Strait were destroyed by U.S. Navy A-6E Intruders launching AGM-88 High speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.

The attack lasted just minutes; as fast as it had begun, it was over. The radios were clear, and attack radars were as effective as they ever were. But in that few minutes, the damage was horrifying: the 11–76 radar plane, eleven H-6 bombers, four Su-27s, eighteen J-8 fighters, and forty- one Q-5 fighter-bombers had been shot down, with no losses to American aircraft. Each and every Navy and Air Force plane made it back to its carrier or base, then began rearming and setting up for local-area air defense in case the Chinese tried a counterattack.

The Chinese fighters and bombers lucky enough to escape the American hit-and-run attack from the darkness soon found other problems. Twelve B-1B Lancer bombers from Ellsworth and Dyess Air Force Bases had been sent over eastern China, loaded with eight AGM-86C cruise missiles with non-nuclear high-explosive warheads, and eight AGM-177 Wolverine antiair defense cruise missiles, to attack air bases and air defense sites throughout southeast China. The military landing strips at Fuzhou, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Jingdezhen, Nanchang, and even Shanghai were cratered by cruise missiles, and the Chinese approach and ground- control radars and some air defense missile and artillery emplacements had been destroyed by the Wolverine missiles. All of the fighters scheduled to land at these bases had to be diverted…

… except there were no military fields within range to send them. The number of planes destroyed or damaged simply by running out of fuel or attempting to make a forced landing at a civil airstrip or highway quickly exceeded the number of planes shot down by American fighters.

But the B-lBs’ mission was not to deny landing strips to Chinese fighters low on fuel, but to open a gaping hole in China’s multilayered air defense and surveillance radar network to allow yet another attacker to slip in unnoticed — six B-2A Spirit stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base. The B-2 bombers went feet-dry over several points along the Chinese coastline from Shanghai to Qingdao, taking separate low- level attack routes inbound to their targets — the intercontinental ballistic missile bases in north-central China.

The twelve Dong Feng-5 missile silos and twenty Dong Feng-3 launch sites, with two DF-3 missiles assigned per site, were spread out over 10,000 square miles in two Chinese provinces, and heavily defended by HQ-2 surface-to-air missile sites and antiaircraft artillery sites — but the B-2s swarmed over the missile fields near Yinchuan in Inner Mongolia province and, one by one, attacked.

Each B-2A carried sixteen AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) guided weapons on two internal rotary launchers. Each SLAM was a Harpoon turbojet-powered anti-ship cruise missile fitted with an imaging infrared television sensor in the nose and a GPS satellite navigation guidance system. The coordinates of the targets were all loaded into the missile’s memory by the B-2’s attack computer; each B-2 bomber merely had to fly to a predetermined launch point and release the missiles. Once released from low altitude—300 and 500 feet above ground— and as far as fifty miles from the target, the missiles would get a final navigation update by its GPS receiver and guide itself to the target, skimming less than a hundred feet above the ground at 250 miles an hour. The missile was even programmed with turnpoints so they would not reveal the location of the B-2 launch aircraft. Once the missiles were launched, the B-2 bombers turned eastbound and began the treacherous 1,500-mile trek back across hostile airspace to their first post-strike refueling anchor.

Sixty seconds prior to impact, the AGM-84E SLAMs began to transmit images of their assigned target area — but they did not transmit the pictures back to the B-2s that launched them. Instead, the images were picked up by a lone aircraft flying over the Chinese ICBM missile fields at 20,000 feet.

The EB-52 Megafortress had launched from Kai-Shan with the remaining nine flyable Taiwanese F-16s and Jon Masters’s DC-10 just after sunset. The Megafortress was armed with every drop of fuel and every remaining weapon it could possibly carry: two Wolverine cruise missiles and two Striker rocket bombs on the forward bomb-bay rotary launcher; six CBU-59 cluster bomb units on the aft bomb bay; and one AIM-120 Scorpion air-to-air missile and four AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles on each wing weapon pod. After an aerial refueling, the EB-52 flew north over the East China Sea and waited for the B-l and B-2 bombers to arrive from the United States. Once the B-l bombers laid down the cruise missile barrage along the Chinese coastline, the B-2 and the Megafortress cruised in toward the Chinese ICBM fields. With the attention of the entire Chinese air defense system focused on the Formosa Strait, it was a simple exercise for the six B-2s and the lone EB-52 to penetrate disrupted Chinese airspace and head for their assigned targets.

The EB-52 arrived in the Chinese ICBM field several minutes before the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers got to their launch points. Flying in the defensive systems officer s seat, Wendy McLanahan started the attack by launching the Wolverine missiles over the ICBM missile fields. The two Wolverines used their decoys and radar seekers to hunt down any antiaircraft radars, then attacked them with antiarmor skeets.

“The Wolverines are working,” Brad Elliott said. “I can see the place starting to light up.” Several antiaircraft artillery sites opened fire, some very close by but locked onto the decoy gliders, not the Megafortress. Streams of heavy antiaircraft artillery tracers arced into the sky — followed a few moments later by a bright flash on the ground and secondary explosions rippling across the expanse of darkness.

“Very cool,” Nancy Cheshire remarked, as more missile and tripleA sites were hit. “The Wolverines are working great.”

“You spoke too soon,” Wendy said. “Eve lost contact with both Wolverines. Both of them got shot down.”

“I’ve got missile video starting to come in,” Patrick McLanahan announced. As each SLAM got within range, a window would open up on his supercockpit display, and he could watch as the missile approached the target. A wide white rectangle in the center of the video indicated the missiles preprogrammed target area. As the SLAM got closer, Patrick could make out more and more detail of the exact target spot, and he resized the target rectangle until it enclosed only the spot he wanted to hit. A small white dot represented the missiles impact point, and Patrick resized the rectangle so the dot could stay inside the rectangle without too many gross flight-control corrections.

“Pve got fighter radar activity at three o’clock, range unknown,” Wendy announced. “We’re running out of time.”

Patrick could hear the tension in her voice. He had been against having her on this mission at all — her wounds from the last time she had flown on an EB-52 Megafortress had only recently healed, not to mention the danger to the child she carried. But Wendy had been the first to demand that she go along, and hers was the loudest voice arguing against her husband. No one else knew the Megafortress’s defensive suite and weapons better than Wendy Tork McLanahan. Patrick might be able to operate the systems by himself if the bomber was not under attack, but if it ever became an item of interest and came under active attack, it would take one crew member’s full attention to defend the Megafortress. If there was going to be any chance of success on this raid, Wendy had to go along.

“Got a range now, three o’clock, forty miles and closing,” Wendy reported. “I’ve got multiple bandits — four, maybe six. One of them looks like a Su-27. Signal threshold is low, but they’ve got several sweeps on us. They could get a lock on us in three to four minutes.”

Two SLAM missiles would be targeted against the DF-5 silos — the first SLAM would crack open the silo, and the second would dive inside and destroy the missile. The first 1,400-pound Standoff Land Attack Missile would execute a pop-up maneuver a few seconds before impact, then dive directly down onto the silo cover to crack open the silo; the second SLAM would follow a few seconds later, execute the same pop-up and dive maneuver, and destroy the missile inside. The DF-3 missiles were stored on erector trailers inside storage sheds near each launch site, and it was a simple task to target each storage shed and destroy the missile inside.

The SLAM launches had been coordinated so that the Megafortress could fly eastbound out of the target area and he would be within effective datalink range of each SLAM, working west to east. As soon as one SLAM would hit, another window popped open, and Patrick would start steering another SLAM in to its target. Some SLAMs did not transmit their TV images, so it was unknown if they ever hit their targets, but each SLAM was guided by a precise inertial navigation system updated by GPS satellite navigation signals, accurate to at least ten feet in altitude and position, so even without a TV datalink they were very accurate weapons. Out of seventy-two SLAMs successfully launched from the B-2s, fifty-one reached their assigned targets and transmitted a good enough TV picture so Patrick could assess the damage and call the target destroyed or knocked out of commission.

“But we got three DF-3 and two DF-5 sites where we don’t know if they got hit,” Patrick announced to his crew.

“Perfect — we got two Strikers and six CBUs left,” Brad Elliott said. “Let’s go back there and finish the job.”

“Two o’clock, thirty-two miles and closing,” Wendy announced. She then looked over at her husband and saw him intently watching her. “I agree,” she said. “Let’s go get ’em.”

“The odds are that the SLAMs got the last missile sites,” Patrick said. “They’ve been running great, all of them.”

“But we can’t be sure, can we?” Nancy Cheshire asked.

“We can wait and get a satellite downlink from Jon’s NIRTSats,” Elliott said. “Those can tell us if they got hit. How long until we get a picture?”

“We won’t — we didn’t get a new constellation up in time,” Patrick said. “The best info we’ll get is from our synthetic aperture radar or from a Striker video link.”

“Then let’s do it,” Wendy said. Patrick turned toward her, and she saw something that she’d rarely seen before — the fear in his eyes. “Patrick, we’ve got to go back,” Wendy said on interphone. “We don’t have a choice. We didn’t come all this way to leave any targets left.” Patrick knew she was right. They had risked everything to fly deep into the heart of the People’s Republic of China and attack these important targets — as long as they had weapons left, they had to use them.

Patrick touched his supercockpit display and called up the five surviving targets. The closest one was only ten miles away; the farthest, a DF-5 long-range ICBM site, was nearly forty miles farther west.

“Gimme a left turn heading two-five-seven, center the bug, stand by for bomb-bay Striker launch,” Patrick ordered.

“No.” The words came from none other than Brad Elliott. “We’re not turning back. We’re going to use the gas and the weapons we have left to fight our way out of here.”

“Brad…”

“I’m overruling you this time, Muck,” Elliott said determinedly. “You may be the mission commander, but I’m the aircraft commander, and I’m responsible for the lives on board this plane. We’re six hundred miles inside China, alone, with only ten defensive missiles and three hours’ worth of gas left. We did our job. Two DF-5s and six DF-3s are not going to threaten anyone.”

“Brad, we can do it,” Wendy said. “We can take out those last sites.” “Forget about it, Wendy,” Elliott said. “Let someone else worry about them. You and Patrick and Nancy have a life that’s more important than blowing up a couple missile sites in the middle of nowhere. Patrick, call up the exit point and pick the best way to get us out of here.” Patrick looked as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders— he even smiled. “Okay, Brad,” Patrick said. “We’ve got one DF-5 site that’ll be within range just a couple minutes to the north, and all of the DF-3 sites are east and southeast. We’ll leave the last DF-5 site for some other time.” He entered commands on the supercockpit display, then said, ’’Give me a left turn to zero-three-seven and center up. Bomb-bay Striker launch coming up… in one hundred seconds.” Elliott responded by turning the Megafortress to the northeast.

“Bandits are at five o’clock, twenty-five miles and closing,” Wendy reported. “I’m targeting the lead Su-27 for one Scorpion launch. Looks like we might have two Su-27s leading a total of eight J-7s or J-8s. The second formation of fighters is moving to eight o’clock, thirty-three miles.”

“They’re going back to defend the western surviving DF-5 site,” Cheshire guessed. “It must still be active.”

“Bomb doors coming open… missile away!” Patrick said as he processed a Striker missile launch. Elliott immediately rolled right and centered up on the first DF-3 launch site.

“Bandits got a good look at that missile launch! ” Wendy cried. “Bandits at six o’clock, eighteen miles and closing… stand by for pylon missile launch… radar lock, they got a radar lock… no, radar’s down, they’re closing in to heater range… missile away, missile away! ” An AIM- 120 Scorpion missile streaked out of the left weapon pod, arced up and over the Megafortress, and plummeted down on its quarry. “Splash one! ” Wendy shouted. “Splash.…no, the Su-27’s still up! I hit one of the other fighters! The Su-27’s still coming!”

“Good terminal video,” Patrick called out. Sure enough, the Dong Feng-5 missile silo they had just launched on had not been touched by any of the SLAMs. Patrick centered the targeting crosshairs directly on the movable concrete silo cover, and hit it directly in the center. “Got it! ” he shouted.

“Stand by for second pylon launch!” Wendy shouted. “Missile away! ” The last Scorpion missile flew out of the right weapon pod, and this time it did not miss. “Splash two!” she shouted. “Got the -27! The other fighters are breaking formation… I’ve got two formations of J-8s now, closest at three o’clock, seven miles and closing. The second formation’s at six o’clock, twelve miles.”

“First DF-3 site twelve o’clock, twenty miles,” Patrick called out.

“I need a turn! ” Wendy shouted.

“Do it!”

“Right forty degrees!” Wendy cried, and Elliott hauled the Megafortress into a tight turn. “I’m jamming their ranging radars! I’ve got a lock! Pylon launch, now\” The AIM-9L Sidewinders mounted in the weapons pods were not directly mated to the Megafortress’s attack system — they had to be pointed at a target and allowed to find their own target. But once Wendy had turned the Megafortress at the oncoming Chinese fighters, the Sidewinders quickly detected the fighter’s hot-wing leading edges and sent a missile lock signal. As soon as Wendy got the signal, she punched off one Sidewinder. It homed perfectly on its target and exploded right in the path of the J-8, sending it spiraling to the ground.

“Splash two! ” Cheshire crowed when she saw the explosion and saw the burning plane plummet to earth. Wendy immediately selected another Sidewinder that had locked on to a fighter and let it fly. This one disappeared from sight with no explosions — clean miss.

“Hold this heading — we’re going nose to nose with them!” Wendy shouted.

“Shit — they're right on us!" Elliott shouted. Both he and Cheshire saw numerous winks of light in the darkness as the J-8 fighters opened fire on the Megafortress with their 23-millimeter cannons, then peeled off.

The Megafortress’s crew heard what seemed like hundreds of hammerlike blows all over the aircraft, then the rumble and roar of the Chinese jets flying just a few hundred feet away from them. “Check the instruments!” Elliott shouted to Cheshire. “Patrick!”

“Right turn and center up!” Patrick responded.

Elliott started a hard right turn — and immediately decreased the turn when they felt a hard, sharp rumbling on the right wing. “We got something hanging on the right,” he said. “Nance, you see anything?” “No,” Cheshire responded. “But I’ve got fluctuating number four hydraulic pressure. It feels like we might have lost a spoiler.”

The DF-3 missile sites were situated along the same access road, roughly in a line about five miles apart. “Radar coming on… radar stand by,” McLanahan said as he took the release fix. The synthetic aperture radar image showed the Dong Feng-3 launch complex in stark detail: the launch pad, gantry, and the two railroad lines leading from the launch pad to the two missile-storage sheds, spaced about 200 yards apart. The Megafortress rolled in on the first site. “Doors coming open… bombs away!” McLanahan shouted. He sequenced the releases so that the bomblet scatter pattern of one CBU-59 cluster-bomb unit was centered directly on the missile sheds.

The tactic worked. Each DF-3 storage shed was blasted apart by hundreds of one-pound bomblets, and the scatter pattern was large enough to encompass the launch pad and a nearby electrical transformer farm, which shut down power to the complex’s air defense artillery site located to the north. The second missile was only damaged in the attack, but the first 59,000-pound liquid-fueled DF-3 missile caught fire and created a massive explosion that wiped out the second missile very effectively.

But the sudden destruction of the DF-3 site alerted the air defense units protecting the other two remaining sites, and seconds later the horizon was illuminated with six antiaircraft artillery guns opening up. Wendy had used her jammers to shut down the triple-A site’s tracking radars, so the Chinese gunners were blindly sweeping the sky with their guns. The airspace over the two remaining DF-3 sites was shimmering with thousands of rounds of artillery shells.

“I got no choice, guys,” Elliott said, and he broke off the bomb run by turning hard right. “We can’t go through that mess.”

“Continue your right turn fifty more degrees,” Wendy said. “Let’s get a few of these J-8s off our tail while we wait for those gunners to run out of ammo.” As soon as Elliott rolled out of his hard right turn, Wendy let one, then two Sidewinders fly, and both shots were rewarded with bright flashes and flickering streaks of light across the night sky.

“I’m centering up,” Elliott shouted, and he yanked the Megafortress over into a hard right turn back toward the DF-3 sites. The blobs of tracers were still slicing through the sky, forming an impenetrable curtain of deadly bullets all across the target area. “C’mon, you bastards,” Elliott cursed. “You don’t have that much ammo… you’re going to run out any second—”

As if on cue, one stream of tracers abruptly stopped. It was only one ZSU-37-2 site, but it was enough. Patrick centered his crosshairs on the second two DF-3 storage sheds, made sure the rotary launcher had positioned two more CBU-59 units in the bottom drop position, and made the release. The terrific explosion that rocked the Megafortress told them the second attack had been a success.

The two triple-A sites guarding the last DF-3 site swung west toward them and began raking the sky around them, and for a moment it seemed as if every antiaircraft artillery site in front of them got a direct bead on them — but then the shooting stopped. The triple-A sites had either run out of ammo, or they had damaged their gun barrels by several minutes of almost continuous shooting. Elliott centered the computer steering bug on the last target… just twenty more seconds, and they’d be heading home.

The last twenty seconds seemed like twenty hours — but soon the bomb doors rolled open, and McLanahan shouted, “Bombs away! Doors coming!”

Brad Elliott saw a flash of white light off to his left, and then his vision exploded into a blaze of stars and his body felt as if he had hit a brick wall.

“Brad's hit!” Nancy Cheshire screamed. The entire left side of the cockpit appeared as if it had been shredded apart by a giant tiger’s claw. Cheshire grabbed the control stick, then experimentally juggled the throttles. But the flight-control computer had already determined that the number one engine had been destroyed, and the computer immediately had shut off fuel to the engine, activated the fire-extinguishing system, and isolated electrical and hydraulic power. “I lost number one — it’s shut down! ” she called out. “I still got the airplane! Sing out back there! ”

“Offense is okay!” Patrick responded. He looked over through the thin haze of smoke and saw Wendy leaning over in her seat. Her console looked as if a grenade had exploded inside it, and the windblast from the shattered left cockpit windows was blowing a vortex of smoke and debris back over Wendy McLanahan. “Jesus! Wendy!”

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” they heard over interphone. “I… I just got a face full of smoke. ”

“Hang on, Wendy!”

“No! Patrick, stay strapped in! ” Wendy cried out. “I’m going to stay down here to stay out of the smoke. ”

“What do you got back there, guys?” Cheshire asked, the panic rising in her voice.

“It looks like we got squat,” Patrick responded. “The DSO’s station is toast, and my stuff is in reset.” He concentrated on the red flashing indications on his right-side instrument panel: “The last Striker missile is showing an overtemp condition, but I can’t shut it down and I can’t jettison it until my equipment comes back up. I’ll try to restart it.”

“We got a major problem up here, kids,” Nancy Cheshire said, quickly scanning the instruments. Most of the electronic instruments were blank; she concentrated on the auxiliary and backup gauges. “We lost number one, we’re on emergency hydraulic power, and we got one generator left. All I got right now is the damned whiskey compass. Brad… Brad looks real bad. I think he’s…”

“Go ahead and say it… you thought I was dead,” Brad Elliott said. Slowly, painfully, with help from Nancy Cheshire, he hauled himself upright in his seat, and Cheshire locked his inertial reel in place.

“Brad!” Patrick shouted. “Are you all right?”

“Hell no,” Elliott said, coughing to clear his throat of a mass of blood. “But they can’t kill me that easy.” His voice was barely a whisper over the thunderous roar of the jet blast coming through the shredded fuselage.

“We’re gonna make it, Brad,” Cheshire said on interphone. “Hang on.”

Elliott scanned the nearly blank instrument panel and chuckled, the laughter quickly changing into a full-body convulsion. “I highly doubt it,” he gasped, after the convulsions stopped.

“Nance, give me a right turn back to the east,” Patrick said. “We’ll try to get as close to the Yellow Sea or the Bo Hai as we can get. Hal and Chris are standing by on Okinawa with Madcap Magician and the Taiwanese air force — they might be able to pick us up.”

“Mack, we’re six hundred goddamn miles from the Yellow Sea, we’re surrounded by fighters, and we’re all shot to hell,” Brad Elliott said. “I got a better idea — we jump out.”

“No way,” Cheshire said.

“You’re a sweetie, and I’ve always had the hots for you, co,” Elliott said, “but you all know this is the only option. When those fighters come back, they’ll blow us to pieces. I’d rather not be on board when that happens, thank you very much.”

“We made it before, Brad,” Patrick said. “We can make it again.”

“We’re in the middle of Inner Mongolia, hundreds of miles from help, and we’re down to emergency everything,” Elliott said. “We got no choi—”

Suddenly, the Megafortress buckled under them and slew nearly sideways. Cheshire straightened the plane out only by using both hands on the control stick. “We got hit, number four’s on fire!” she shouted. This time, the computer did not shut down the engine automatically. Cheshire jammed the number four throttle to idle, then to cutoff, then pulled the yellow fire T handle to cut off fuel to the engine and activate its fire extinguisher. “Still got a fire on number four! ” Cheshire shouted. “It won’t go out! It won’t go out! ” There was a bright flash of light and another violent explosion jerked the bomber nearly upside down. “Fire! Fire!” Cheshire shouted.

“Eject! Eject! Eject!” Brad Elliott shouted.

Patrick looked over at Wendy. She returned his glance — but that was all the hesitation she allowed herself. She jammed her fanny back into the seat, straightened her back, pushed the back of her helmet into the sculpted headrest, tucked her chin down, crossed her hands, and pulled the ejection ring between her legs. Her shoulder harness automatically tightened, snapping her shoulders and spine back into the proper position; the overhead hatch blew off, and she was gone in a blinding cloud of white smoke. Patrick pulled his handle as soon as he saw she was gone.

Cheshire looked over at Brad Elliott — and hesitated. “Go!” she shouted at him. She grabbed the control stick. “I got the plane! Go! Eject!”

To Nancy Cheshire’s complete astonishment, Brad Elliott reached down beside his ejection seat — and pulled the red manual man-seat separator knob, then reached up and twisted the center of his five-point harness clasp on his chest. His parachute shoulder straps and lap belt fell away with a clatter. He had detached his parachute from his ejection seat and then opened up the clasp to his parachute harness! He would never survive an ejection now! “Brad, what in hell…”

Brad Elliott reached over and grasped his control stick and the throttles. “I got the plane now, Nancy,” he said. “Get out of here.”

“Brad, goddammit, don’t do this!”

“I said, ejectl ” Elliott shouted.

Nancy Cheshire’s eyes were wide with fear, locked onto his with a questioning stare… but somewhere in Brad Elliott’s reassuring eyes, she found the answer. She touched his right hand in thanks, nodded, then assumed the proper ejection position in her seat and fired her ejection- seat catapult.

“Finally, I get some peace and quiet around here,” Brad Elliott said half aloud.

He didn’t need an attack computer or even a compass to do what he needed to do now. Off in the distance, he could see flashes of light from another heavy barrage of antiaircraft fire — it was coming from the last Dong Feng-5 intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile site, the one that hadn’t yet been destroyed. He steered his beautiful creation, his EB-52 Megafortress, right at the tracers.

The fire was still burning brightly on the right wing; he had no instruments, no weapons, no jammers or countermeasures. But the Megafortress was still flying. In Brad Elliott’s mind, it would always be still flying.

Ten minutes and two fighter attacks later, it was still flying. It was still flying, as fast and as deadly as the day, more than ten years ago, he’d rolled onto his first bomb run over Dreamland in the Nevada desert, when he nosed the giant bird over and down, aiming it directly for the door of the last Chinese DF-5 ICBM missile silo. The Megafortress did not protest, did not try to fly out of the crash dive, did not give any ground proximity warning. It was as if it knew that this is what it was supposed to do, what was finally expected of it.

“Patrick! Wendy!”

“Here! ” Patrick shouted. Nancy Cheshire limped over to the voice, and soon found Patrick and Wendy McLanahan. Thankfully, both appeared unhurt. “You okay, Nance?” Patrick asked.

“I think I broke my damned ankle,” Cheshire replied. “Wendy? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she replied. Patrick had her lying flat on her back, using their parachutes as a sleeping bag to keep her comfortable. They both had plastic hip flasks of water out and were sipping from them. “My back’s sore, but I’m okay.” She touched her belly. “I think we’re all fine.”

“Did you find Brad?” Patrick asked Cheshire. No reply. “Nance? Did Brad make it out?”

As if in reply, they all looked to the west as a bright flash of light and a huge column of fire rose into the night sky. It was not a nuclear mushroom cloud, but the geyser of fire and the billowing cloud of smoke reflecting the flames of the exploding DF-5 ICBM sure resembled one. “My God!” Wendy exclaimed. “That’s where the DF-5 is, isn’t it? Is Terrill Samson still flying bombers out here? How did…?”

“Brad,” Patrick breathed. He looked from the exploding DF-5 to Nancy Cheshire. “He didn’t make it out, did he?”

“He made it,” Cheshire replied with a smile. “He made it… exactly where he wanted to go.”