Tiger's Claw

TWELVE

FIRST EXPEDITIONARY BOMB WING, ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, GUAM

A FEW HOURS LATER

Patrick McLanahan climbed down the boarding ladder of his XB-1 Excalibur bomber into the warm, tropical air, instantly feeling sweat pop out underneath his international orange flight suit. His copilot, Colonel Warner “Cutlass” Cuthbert, was waiting for him on the ramp. “What a flight, Patrick!” he exclaimed when Patrick joined him a few moments later. He handed Patrick a bottle of cold water. “And we got to see JN-15s and JN-20s up close! Amazing!”

“It was excellent, Cutlass,” Patrick said, gladly accepting the bottle of water and almost downing it all in one swig. “The machines did great.”

Tom Hoffman joined them a few moments later, his XB-1 parked in the shelter right next to Patrick’s. “Now I see where you get this reputation of yours, General,” he said. “Where did that high-speed pass come from? We didn’t brief that.”

“With a freakin’ JN-20 on your tail, I had to do something,” Patrick said. “I improvised.”

“Well, it impressed the hell out of me, General,” Hoffman said. “I’d hate for you to be shot down by a JN-20, but thank you for stepping in.”

“You’re welcome. And I see you’ve been brushing up on your Chinese swear words.”

“I wasn’t going to do that on an open frequency, General, but when they started moving in like that, it pissed me off,” Hoffman said. “It reminded me of the EP-3 incident again.” In 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic intelligence aircraft had been patrolling near Hainan Island, China, when it was intercepted by two People’s Liberation Army Air Force J-8 fighters. One fighter collided with the EP-3 during a high-speed pass, causing the fighter to break into pieces and causing damage to the EP-3’s radome and one propeller. The EP-3 managed to safely land on Hainan Island. The crew was detained for ten days then released. The EP-3 was dismantled, examined by Chinese intelligence experts, and then the pieces shipped back to the United States.

Patrick, Cutlass, Hoffman, and his copilot, the veteran Air Force pilot Ed Gleason, performed a postflight inspection of their XB-1 Excalibur bombers. On the First Expeditionary Bomb Wing’s parking ramp, underneath large Kevlar fabric tent shelters, were eight XB-1 Excaliburs. Two were being readied for patrols over the South China Sea; and two were being readied for patrols over the Strait of Malacca, a thin vital waterway in Malaysia between the South China Sea and the Andaman Sea where most sea traffic between the Pacific and Indian Oceans traversed. Two shelters were empty because those XB-1s had already taken off for South China Sea patrols. Farther down the line were the active-duty bombers of the Continuous Bomber Presence, nestled in revetments instead of tents, and the KC-10 Extender, KC-46A Provider, and KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling tanker aircraft, and on the other side of the ramp were four F-15C Eagle and two F-22 Raptor fighters, who like the bombers rotated to Guam from stateside units.

After their walkaround postflights, the flight crews met with their maintenance teams and crew chiefs in a debriefing tent and went over every system in the aircraft, discussing malfunctions and any unusual indications or activity. It took over an hour, but it was a vital part of every mission, just as important as the flying itself. After making sure the data dumps and systems and cockpit recordings were safely retrieved, the crews headed to the DFAC, or dining facility, to sit and talk about the mission.

“I’ll tell you, General, I’m very impressed with your XB-1s,” Cuthbert said over yet another bottle of ice-cold water. “I was a little skeptical, even after the test flights. But the old gals look like they’re doing well. I’ll be interested to see if the data dumps discover any problems, because I thought I saw some twitchiness in the exhaust gas temperatures on our number three engine, and the left main landing gear seemed to take a long time to report down-and-locked, but otherwise those bad girls look good.”

“Thanks, Cutlass,” Patrick said. He checked his handwritten notes on his kneeboard tablet computer. “I think I wrote something about the number three EGT and the landing gear too. The left main seemed pretty noisy during retraction too, a lot of grinding noises—too many for my taste.” He checked messages on his tablet. “There is a list of things being reported by my guys back at Battle Mountain they want us to check—the maintenance crews should have this list already. I’ll make sure after we get done. The number thirteen plane should be ready to deploy in a couple days.”

“I’ve got their tents set up already,” Cutlass said.

“Pretty darn nice shelters and quarters, Cutlass,” Gleason remarked. “When I heard we’d be staying in tents, I wasn’t so excited to come out here, but those definitely ain’t my daddy’s tents.”

“Bulletproof Kevlar, air-conditioned, solar-powered, and high-speed Internet access in every one,” Cutlass said. “Some of the crews out here prefer them to our standard brick-and-mortar dorms.”

Patrick finished checking messages on his tablet. “I thought I’d be able to take a nap,” he said, “but there’s a video teleconference scheduled in twenty minutes with PACAF. Tom, Ed, can you make sure the maintainers got that list of things to check from Battle Mountain before you hit the rack?”

“Sure, General,” Hoffman said, “but I don’t need no stinkin’ nap. Heck, I’d love to take another patrol.”

“Same here,” Gleason said.

“Let’s give the other guys some stick time, okay?” Patrick said with a smile. “We can’t hog all the flights.” He checked the sortie schedule to make sure he’d be available to sit in on the preflight briefing for the next XB-1 patrol launch, then he and Cutlass headed toward the First EBW command center to take the video teleconference.

“Well, that certainly didn’t take long, gents,” General George Hood, commander of Pacific Air Forces, said on the video teleconference a few minutes later. “I’ve already heard from Admiral Luce at Pacific Command, and he’s already heard it from CJCS and CNO. The Chinese are hopping mad. General McLanahan, did you or someone in your patrol do an intentional high-speed near miss with a Chinese JN-20 fighter this morning—and, may I remind you, the first call came in to the White House at zero-five-hundred hours?”

“That was me, General Hood,” Patrick said. “Colonel Hoffman’s plane had been intercepted by two JN-15s and a JN-20 from the carrier Zheng He, and I thought they were crowding him a little too closely, trying to force a confrontation. I decided I needed to break up that formation.”

“You flew over the JN-20 going supersonic?”

“Yes, sir. It was clear in a million and I had all the players in sight.”

“That was a harebrained thing to do, General, with all due respect,” Hood said. Patrick McLanahan had been retired from the Air Force for many years, but he still had an enduring reputation that garnered respect from even the most senior active-duty Air Force officers. George Hood was definitely one of them: even though he had a higher rank than Patrick when he was on active duty, Patrick McLanahan’s actions all over the world on behalf of the United States of America, his unstoppable drive—and, frankly, his sheer audacity—led Hood to address Patrick as equals. “The Chinese say we were trying to force a confrontation.”

“Of course they did, General Hood,” Patrick said. “They were definitely crowding Colonel Hoffman, and in my judgment they wanted to either chase him out of there or force him to do something belligerent so they could attack.”

“All right, all right,” Hood said. “I assume you have helmet-cam video and radar data downloads of all this?”

“Yes, General,” Patrick said. All their flight helmets were fitted with a high-definition video camera that shot everything the crewmembers saw, and also recorded all intercom, radar, and radio transmissions; the offensive and defensive systems suites’ datalink provided detailed position and performance data to ground stations as well.

“Transmit it to me as soon as you can,” Hood said. “Okay, here’s what PACOM ordered: first, obviously, no more high-speed passes. Second: single-ship patrols from now on.” Patrick’s eyes narrowed with concern; Cutlass’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Hood saw all this on his video teleconference monitor and held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say, boys. I set up two-ship patrols for a reason, and I’ll keep on lobbying PACOM, but for now let’s do what they say until we get some more sorties under our belt.”

“Yes, sir,” Cutlass said, but he obviously did not like that order.

“Third: no more jamming unless you get illuminated with an uplink or missile-guidance signal.”

“All this puts us at a decided disadvantage, General Hood,” Patrick said.

“That’s the way it’s got to be for now,” Hood said. “Just to clarify, General—what are the airborne patrols armed with?”

“The forward bomb bay is loaded with a rotary launcher with four AIM-120C AMRAAM and four AIM-9X air-to-air missiles, and the aft bomb bay has a three-thousand-gallon fuel tank. The planes also carry chaff, flares, a Sniper targeting pod, and the Little Buddy.” Chaff was used to decoy radar-guided missiles; flares could decoy heat-seekers.

“Good. No other stores are authorized for the airborne patrols,” Hood said.

“The JH-37 we intercepted was carrying antiship missiles as well as air-to-air missiles, sir,” Patrick said, “and they were practicing attack runs on that Navy oiler.”

“Frankly, General McLanahan, I wouldn’t be surprised if your bombers there were recalled,” Hood said. “Your stunt back there could have pushed China to the breaking point. You might have to be sacrificed to keep China happy.”

Hood paused for a moment, then added, “I’ll be honest with you, gents: I think Pacific Command thinks of you guys as not much more than window dressing. Now the White House is afraid that intercept might shove the Chinese over the edge. Sending you home might be the only thing that keeps your stunt from morphing into an international incident, General McLanahan.”