Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (60 page)

           
“Alert all task force vessels,
inbound stealth bombers, suspect at least two inbound toward
Davao
Gulf
. No weapons fired at outer gauntlet
vessels, but suspect an attack against inner defenses. Warn all patrol aircraft
to search the area north and northwest of Nenusa Archipelago for low- altitude
bombers.”

           
“Sir! Destroyer
Zhangyhum
reports engaging with HQ-91 missiles ... they may have
hit the U-2. Dispatching a frigate and patrol boat to investigate.”

           
“One down,” the destroyer commander
said with a quiet smile—“two more to go. . . .”

           
“Mayday, Mayday, Kelly is hit,
heading east, no—” The radio transmission from the U-2 went dead.

           
“Fuck,” was all Cobb could say.
“Patrick, let’s get out of here.”

           
“Few more seconds and we should get
all the ships near
Davao
Gulf
,” McLanahan replied. They had flown over a
hundred miles farther west than they had planned, within thirty miles of the
mouth of
Davao
Gulf
itself. The closer they got to Mindanao,
the more ships they saw—ranging in size from huge destroyers, frigates, and
amphibious assault craft, to small liaison and patrol craft—even a return that
the UPD-9 pod classified as a submarine periscope could be seen.

           
One more radar sweep, two minutes,
and they had all the data they needed. As Cobb began a turn south to head
toward the relative safety of the radar clutter around the Nenusa and
Talaud islands
, the Super Multi Function Display seemed to
light up like an old-style switchboard, with radar domes popping up everywhere.
It was as if every vessel with a transmitter had flipped it on. “Christ
almighty . . . Charlie-band search radar at our
twelve o’clock
... another one at our
two o’clock
... now I’ve got X-band fire-control radars
at our
ten o’clock
position. You’re going to have to take us right over
Talaud
Island
, Henry. We’re surrounded.”

           
“Fuck,” Cobb muttered. On this trip,
that seemed to be the veteran pilot’s favorite reply.

           
“Fifty miles to Talaud,” McLanahan
said. With the reconnaissance pods stowed, the radar dome belonging to the
vessel to the northeast no longer reached them, but they could still watch it
as it changed modes. It had changed from target acquisition mode, to air
search, and now back to rapid-scan air search, which was displayed as a yellow-
striped dome now. “Fast PRF scan on that Charlie-band radar,” McLanahan
reported. “They might be vectoring a fighter in.”

           
“Fuck . . .”

           
The miles seemed to crawl by. More
ships had their search radars on to the west, well inside Indonesian waters but
still broadcasting Chinese radar signals. A few vessels even activated
fire-control radars—Patrick guessed they might have been mistakenly fired on by
their own fighter! “Twenty miles. Nenusa Archipelago is on the left, Talaud is
right of—”

           
Suddenly a yellow radar dome
appeared right in front of the B-2 icon on the SMFD. The dome instantly turned
red, and the two crewmen could see gunfire popping on the horizon directly in
front of them. “Break right!” Patrick shouted as he hammered the “Chaff” button
for the left ejector racks; the electronic countermeasures jammers activated
automatically. “Descend!” Cobb threw the big bomber into a 45- degree bank
turn, letting the sudden loss of lift over the wings pull the nose down. He
rolled wings-level at one hundred feet above the sea—just one wingspan above
the dark waters below. Patrick could see tracers lashing out into the darkness,
firing at the chaff blob that he had just released. “Where the hell did
he
come from?”

           
“Fuck . . .”

           
The terrain-following computer began
to command a climb to clear the tall, spirelike mountains ahead, and the two
crewmen could start to see the island on the forwardlooking infrared scanner.
The largest island in the Talaud archipelago, Karakelong Island, was a lush
green island with gently rolling hills through the middle, but the central
hills were studded with two tall rock spires, one that towered seven hundred
feet above the forest and the other that rose an incredible twelve hundred feet
above the ridge.

           
The tracers swung farther to the
west as the chaff blob cleared and the Chinese patrol boat reacquired the B-2.
“Can’t go too much farther west,” Patrick said. “There’s another group of ships
just forty miles west of this island.”

           
“They were waiting for someone to
try to sneak in over these hills,” Cobb said. “They knew we’d try it, even
though these islands are in
Indonesia
. That means—”

           
“Shit. That means we don’t want to
fly over these islands ...!’·’

           
As if someone on
Karakelong
Island
heard him, just then on the infrared
scanner they could see a sharp flare of light, and a missile arced skyward,
then heeled over and headed straight for them. “I see it!” Cobb cried out.
“Stand by on flares right!” They had a little room to try a hard break, so Cobb
began pushing and pulling the control stick, beginning a fifty-to-one-hundred-foot
vertical oscillation. The closer the missile got, the more they could see it
mimicking that oscillation.

           
As soon as the motor on the missile
winked out, Cobb yelled,
“Now!”
then
threw the B-2 into a hard turn to the left. Simultaneously, Patrick pumped out
flares from the right ejector, keeping his finger on the button.

           
The missile passed directly over the
cockpit, missing the Black Knight by just a few scant yards. Luckily, there was
no explosion—either the missile failed to fuze or was still locked on the flare
decoys.

           
“Altitude!” Patrick shouted.
“Climb!” The bomber had entered initial buffet to a stall in the steep turn and
had lost precious altitude—the radar altimeter, which measured exact distance
below the bomber’s belly, was faulted because the distance was less than fifty
feet. Cobb rolled wings-level, let the airspeed build up, then gently pulled
back on the sidestick controller, careful not to throw the bomber into a full
stall by pulling back too fast.

           
“Screw this,” Cobb muttered. As soon
as he had his airspeed back, he pulled back on the controller, starting a steep
climb. “I’m getting out of here.”

           
The Super Multi Function Display was
alive with radar domes—one was right ahead of them, a Sea Eagle search radar
was highlighting them from the right, and far to the north another Sea Eagle
radar was about to envelop them. “Descend, Henry, we’ve got radars all around
us . .

           
“Let ’em try to get us,” Cobb said.

           
Tracers lit up the sky ahead of them
as they drove through the red-colored radar dome ahead of them. Cobb kept the
bomber climbing at full military power—the nose was higher than Patrick could
ever remember it as Cobb traded every knot of available airspeed for altitude.
He made a few hard turns, no more than 20 degrees at a time. Antiaircraft
artillery shells began exploding all around them, and several were close enough
to pummel the B-2. “Airspeed, Henry!” Patrick shouted. “Watch the stall. . . !”

           
But Cobb held the nose up, kept the
airspeed right on the edge of initial buffet to stall, and kept the climb
going. Moments later, Patrick noticed that the shells were exploding well below
them. As he looked down, he could see a blanket of fireworks below them as
tracers and exploding shells lit up the night sky. Cobb began to decrease his
climb rate at twenty thousand feet, but he kept the throttle in full military
power and kept climbing at five thousand feet per minute until they passed
forty thousand feet. The destroyer to the south of them tried one missile
launch on them, but the B-2’s jammers and laser countermeasures system reported
that the missile never approached within lethal range. As they climbed, the red
radar dome shrunk until it was a tiny inverted teacup well behind them.

           
Patrick looked over at his aircraft
commander. Cobb had returned to his typical flying position—oxygen mask on,
hands on stick and throttles, staring straight ahead, unmoving as a rock.
Patrick turned the cockpit lights up a bit so he could do a careful cockpit
check to investigate for damage— except for a few popped circuit breakers, he
found nothing.

           
As he swept his tiny red-lens
flashlight across his partner, he could see that the only evidence there was
that Henry Cobb had just saved their butts from crashing in a huge fireball in
the
Philippine Sea
was a tiny trickle of sweat dripping from
the edge of his oxygen mask. But save them he did.

           
“Cabin check complete,” Patrick
reported. Then: “Thanks, Henry.” The only acknowledgment he got was two clicks
on the interphone button.

Office of the National
Security Advisor, The White House

Friday, 7 October 1994, 1005
hours local

           
“We had better start talking about a
peaceful settlement to all this, Mr. Ambassador,” Secretary of State Dennis
Danahall said, “or things will surely go out of control.”

           
The Deputy Charge d’affaires of the
People’s Republic of
China
’s embassy, Tang Shou Dian, serenely folded
his hands on his lap as he regarded the three American government officials
before him: Secretary of State Danahall, National Security Advisor Kellogg, and
the President’s Chief of Staff, Paul Cesare, along with interpreters and
confidential secretaries. The ambassador had brought an assistant and
interpreter as well; because the ambassador’s “assistant” was a known Chinese
intelligence operative, Secret Service agents were posted outside the office
and in the anteroom to Kellogg’s office.

           
“I would be pleased to promptly
report any requests or proposals to my government, Mr. Danahall,” Tang said
without his interpreter. The interpreter would bend forward and speak in Tang’s
assistant’s ear as if she were translating for him, but everyone knew he spoke
and understood English very well.

           
“These are not proposals or
requests, Mr. Ambassador,” Frank Kellogg said. “These are statements of policy.
The
United States
will regard any further aggressive acts on
the
island
of
Mindanao
as hostile acts against the
United States
, and we will respond accordingly to counter
the threat, including the use of military force. That is the message we want to
convey to your government.”

           
“That message was made very clear by
your President’s television announcement yesterday,” Tang said. “As we
indicated in our response, the Teguina government has stated that Jose Samar
has no authority to conduct foreign policy or dictate military terms anywhere
in the
Philippines
, including
Mindanao
or the separate southern state. Therefore,
Samar
’s words have no meaning and your position
is illegal and completely without merit.”

           
“The Philippine constitution granted
Samar
’s state the right of self-defense,”
Danahall pointed out. “
Samar
is
completely within his powers to delegate that responsibility.” “That is a
matter for the United Nations to decide,” Tang said. “They should be allowed to
deliberate the matter.”

           
“We agree,” Danahall said. “But the
survival of the autonomous government of Jose Samar is in the best interest of
the
United States
, and the position and strength of Chinese
forces threaten their survival. Will the Chinese military agree to cease all
hostile actions and pull its forces back until the matter of
Mindanao
sovereignty is decided?”