ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (57 page)

“Er, probably maintaining an even keel, making no
headway at a depth of between sixty and one hundred feet, captain…he’s going to
launch his missiles, isn’t he sir?”

The captain did not answer because just then the red
lights on the board turned to green. “Flood
Three
and
Four, open outer doors, match bearings with the
Xia
and shoot.” 

The torpedoes were launched, and even as they left the
tubes every member of the crew heard the first solid
Ping
from
one of the
Chuntian
’s fast approaching weapons.

“Launch countermeasures, come left to one five zero at
thirty knots, make your depth two zero
zero
!”

“Control room, sonar…explosion at
bearing three one eight…very faint breaking up noises.”

On the plot the tracks of the
Chuntian
and
Hood
’s Spearfish had met head on. No one cheered.

The
Chuntian
’s crew may have lost the battle but the
Xia
could
still win the war for them.

Hood
’s
captain took hold of the back of the coxswain’s seat for support as the deck
canted to one side and tilted as the
Hood
headed up to the surface, turning out of the Chinese
torpedoes path as she went.

The
Xia
reached one hundred feet below the surface and came
to a dead stop. Her bow doors opened and she launched three torpedoes towards
the
Hood
, which could plainly be heard now.

In her current stationary state discharging
noisemakers would be a futile act, and as she carried no more of the Ghost Lamp
decoys it was a race against the Spearfish she could also hear in order to
launch her ICBMs.

On a count of three, he and the ships political
officer’s keys turned in their respective secure weapons panels and initiated a
fully automated launch routine. He knew exactly which target each missile was
allotted to and what their place was in the launch sequence. If only one
missile was launched before the torpedoes struck, the second attack in history
on Pearl Harbour would be a thousand times more devastating than the first.

The vibrations resounded through the big Chinese
submarine as the outer doors of the launch tubes opened two by two and seawater
began to fill the voids around the missile launch canisters sat within.

Aboard the USS
Tucson
they listened to the sound of the battle in full
knowledge of what it would mean should HMS
Hood
fail to kill the
Xia
before she launched. They had tracked every torpedo
from each vessel from the time they themselves had outrun the weapons
Chuntian
had sent after them. Every twist, turn and feint of the combatants had been
recorded and plotted. And never before had the crew of the US submarine felt
so
totally impotent as when the
Xia
came
to a dead stop and opened her launch tube doors.

They heard the distant, double ping of torpedoes own
sensors as they acquired and the sound of the weapons propellers become shrill
as they drove them at their targets at maximum acceleration. Finally the hammer
blows as warheads detonated, followed by the gut churning sound of bulkheads
buckling and the sea rushing in.

CHAPTER 8

Gansu Province: Same time.

Colonel Chandler could see sparkles of light ahead of
his own force, they seemed to be anything but randomly targeted as there were concentrations
at whichever level the aircraft of the Wild Weasel sweep under Dark Light
flight were. Each short-lived flash of light represented an exploding shell
dispensing expanding clouds of shrapnel.

It was shocking to behold and the colonel who had
flown across Baghdad on the first raid of the Gulf War could honestly say that
what he now beheld had to be four, maybe even five times heavier than what had
been thrown at them on that night.

Searchlights probed the heavens and he
could almost pinch himself in order to check he was really here and not
watching a WW2 newsreel.

Twenty-eight miles to the east he could see a similar
scene in the direction of the airbase and the space centre, but only at the
airfield was the attack being pressed without casualties. It was ironic that at
the one target where aircraft had passed so close to the gunners that they
could make out markings with the naked eye, they were unsuccessful in downing a
single one.

The airbase attack opened with B1-Bs dispensing runway
cratering weapons and mines along the tarmac, this was carried out at an
altitude of just sixty feet.

The Tower, tank farm, and hangars were attacked even
as the runway was still being cratered by the B1-Bs submunitions. Laser-guided
weapons struck every hanger and this destroyed all but two of the Flankers
based on the airfield. Owing to the inclement weather all had been brought in
from the dispersal shelters that were open on three sides to the elements and
kept in the hangars free of snow and ice. No CAP had been in place due to the
extreme remoteness of the location and its distance from the nearest known
enemy forces, but instead a pair was kept on permanent runway readiness.

The airbase attack ended with the SAM radars being
taken out as they hurriedly came up, and the pair of Flankers stranded at the
runways end disappeared in the single explosion caused by a Maverick landing
between them.

All the targets on the revised list for the space centre
were in hardened shelters that required high altitude attacks with BLU-116s,
and these attacks cost them two of the precious B2s to massed 90mm AAA that
found the aircraft despite radar having never acquired a solid lock.

Chandler had heard rumours about the Chinese air
defence zones, both the fixed and mobile ones. He always figured they were just
story’s, kind of like the everlasting light bulb and the salt-water combustion
engine.

According to the stories that Chandler had heard the
Chinese never threw anything away, they had vast warehouses filled with weapons
that were maintained religiously, despite their age. From horse drawn Japanese
anti-aircraft guns to modern self-propelled, high altitude pieces and latest
generation SAMs, they were stored together
awaiting
a
time when they may be needed.

The thing that had convinced Chandler that the stories
were nothing more than popular legend had been the claims that the secondary
targeting systems were not laser or radar based, but audio. The altitude of the
approaching enemy aircraft would be calculated by the sound of their engines,
pre-cathode ray style. Pinpoint accuracy would be unnecessary or so the story
went, a thousand guns throwing a wall of fire up into the general direction of
an aeroplane would more than compensate for the lack of high technology.

Looking at the sky ahead he now knew the tales had not
been bar room banter.

The stealth forces trillion dollars’ worth of
state-of-the-art airframes no longer had the advantage; the playing field had
been levelled by weight of numbers and all were being targeted upon the
American aircraft using technology from the era of the crew’s grandparents.

Ahead of Chandler and the main force there was a flash
of light that was larger than all the rest and a moment later a trail of fire
was streaming back from a point in the night sky ahead. After a few seconds it
angled downwards, gaining in length and girth as the angle increased and the
fire spread. 

Chandler switched to the Black Light frequency but he
did not transmit, he just listened

“…Black Light Zero Four eject…Zero Four eject,
eject, eject…come on Jeanette, punch out, get the hell out of there!”

There was no response on the radio and Zero Four’s
plunge ended abruptly, a ball of flame rising up to mark the crash site.

“Black Lighters from Zero One, did any of you guys
see a chute?”

“Zero Two, Negative.”

“Zero Three, Negative.”

“Black Light Zero One from Spear Gun One, that’s a
negative from my Lancers too.”

There were other fires on the ground that Chandler
could see; no doubt some belonged to the other pair of F-117As and the two B1-B
Lancers from Spear Gun that had already fallen to AAA.

It was clear that without any further radar sites to
take
out,
his Wild Weasel force was providing nothing
more than target practice for the Chinese gunners.

“Ring Master, Ring Master, Black Light One…we’re
getting murdered here!”

“Black Light this is Ring Master, get your people out
of there and standby to hammer any radars that come back up.”

He waited for the acknowledging
“Roger”
before ordering the main force into a holding orbit while they were still clear
of the silos air defence zone.

Chandler wanted to see what the gunners would do once
they realised that there were no more aircraft overhead, he was hoping the fire
would slacken.

As Chandler’s B2 circled he could see the flames
leaping high from over in the east and guessed that the tank farm beside the
airbase was the main source. The flames eclipsed any sign of damage that may
otherwise have been visible from the space facility. He wished he knew why they
had been ordered to attack pointless targets there, the intelligence reports
clearly indicated the old vehicle assembly building had become an MT
maintenance facility six months before once work on the new and larger assembly
building had been completed. The ‘solid fuel booster store’ they had attacked
had been a dummy; they knew that and had seen the photographs of its empty
interior during the initial planning stage back on Mindanao. The real storage
facility was sited three miles away from the nearest building, where any
accident would not cause any damage to the rest of the facility. It said a
great deal for his crews that they had pressed home their attacks even though
all had known they wouldn’t halt the PRC putting satellites up, and wouldn’t
even delay them beyond the time it would take to clean up.

The AAA protecting the silos did not appear to have
slackened off in the slightest and the clock was running
,
he couldn’t afford to delay any further.

He would lay money that a pair of fighters had already
scrambled out of Lanzhou with more to follow, but he was far more concerned
with the time it would take to launch the ICBMs in the silos which were there
primary targets.

The highly corrosive and unstable liquid fuel could
only be pumped into the missiles tanks immediately before launch, and the best
available intelligence put the time needed for this operation to be anywhere
between twenty minutes and two hours.

If Colonel Chandler allowed a minimum of ten minutes
for the Chinese Premier to be informed the region was under air attack and to
make a decision to launch, then Chandler had only eleven minutes remaining
before the ICBMs were launched at their targets, if the lower fuelling figure
were to be proved correct.

“Spectre One, Two and Three I want you to gain angels
forty, send your activation signals to the RERs and standby…… Spectre Four and
Five form on me and follow me up to thirty thousand…….Javelin One, take your
aircraft north and standby to make a dummy pass on my word……Fire Arrow Zero Two
hook east at twenty thousand and standby also…. ” In a very short time he had a
plan in place to divide up the massed guns protecting the silos, he had no
doubt that it would work because the defenders could not afford
not
to
react to approaching aircraft, but would it work enough? He could not afford to
unduly risk his own aircraft or Spectre Four and Five because they were the
back-up’s for the attack, they would break once they had succeeded in drawing
fire but the remainder would continue on into the cauldron.

Chandler’s aircraft was levelling out when Spectre One
reported the successful activation of all six RERs and green lights on all six
weapons.

“Roger Spectre One, this will be a simultaneous drop on
all six targets just as planned, but I want twice the spacing between aircraft
plus a thousand feet of vertical clearance. The rest of us will turn in toward
the target to draw some guns our way in thirty seconds time, so you wait twenty
seconds longer and begin your runs.”

He received three acknowledgements and had time left
for a deep breath before banking hard right, bringing the nose around to point
toward the silos and opening the throttles all the way.

The sky ahead was receiving a fairly equal share of
attention but pretty soon he noticed that change. The bursting shells seemed to
home in on his flight level and he pushed the nose down in response, losing
five thousand feet before levelling out.

Fire Arrow Zero Two was caught almost immediately by a
searchlight, a second later two more locked on, trapping it in a cone of light
for all to see and all to shoot at. The F-117As pilot twisted and turned the
aircraft in a vain attempt to throw off the searchlights, before rolling and
diving for the valley floor. Chandler watched the manoeuvres with trepidation,
the Nighthawk isn’t built for high-speed aerobatics, and it is not terribly
keen on the medium speed variety either. It relies upon stealth rather than the
classic fighter aircraft qualities to achieve its mission goals. Pilots who
have unwisely tried to throw the aircraft around the sky like some stunt
machine have found the F-117A flying away without them, in several different
directions at once. The
colonel was
unable to follow the Nighthawk with his eyes so he did not then know how its
pilot fared, but to the west he saw fire in the sky as yet another of his B1-B
Lancers fell.

A near miss shook the B2 he was flying and he decided
that his flight of three had done all it safely could for now so he ordered
them to break off and reform to the south once more.

A SAM
radar came up, sweeping
the skies with radar energy until a Dark Lighters HARM obliterated the
transmitter vehicle. A searchlight passed across Chandler’s B2, the glare
robbing him of his night vision but then the man-made turbulence ended and they
were back in the clear.

Chandler couldn’t see Spectre aircraft carrying out
the attack but he banked around and peered out into the night sky at where he
thought they would be.

“Come on guys and gals” he muttered to himself. “One
good run and we can all go
ho
…..”

A 90mm shell pierced the composite belly of Spectre
Three and detonated as the rotating dispenser was in the process of cycling the
second BLU-116 out of the weapons bay. The B2 disintegrated a bright flare of
light in the night sky and then it was gone.

In the central command bunker a quarter of a mile from
the line of silos they could neither
hear
nor feel
anything that was going on around them, such was the depth below ground and
thickness of the walls, and yet the screech of audible alarms shook the staff
there more than the actual sight of five of the silos being destroyed would
have done.     

The five weapons successfully released had flown true,
homing on the splashes of light of a wavelength no human could see unassisted,
to penetrate the silo caps and explode inside where the volatile fuel was being
pumped into the ICBMs added to the destruction.

The subterranean fuel tanks ruptured and the contents
flash ignited causing an over-pressure that wrecked the integrity of the
underground structures. The ground buckled, bulged and burst open with a roar,
the valley was momentarily lit up like day as the fireballs expended
themselves. Slabs of reinforced concrete flew hundreds of yards to smash into
the frozen earth whilst the tremors caused by the explosions ventured even
further from the sources, radiating outwards like the ripples on the surface of
a pond to shake the very walls of the valley.

High above the valley floor on the ridge top the
accumulation of snow about Site Six shifted. Its grip with the rock and ice
loosened, the mass began to move slowly at first but it was unstoppable now, it
gained momentum and swept down towards the edge. The laser designator in its
niche was swamped before the weight of snow tore the securing ice screws free
and the designator joined just one of many avalanches and rock falls triggered
around the valley.

“Was that all six, was that all the silos?”