“Why are we all black?” Aussie asked. His question wasn’t meant as any kind of joke, for normally SAS were allowed some leeway in the choice of uniform, but all black— antiterrorist — usually meant close-quarter combat.
“Freeman doesn’t want Manzhouli bombed, so if we’re to clear it it’ll be house to house,” Brentwood said tersely.
“Right,” Aussie said, quickly exchanging an M-16 for a stockless Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5K submachine gun. You aimed it by jabbing it toward the target and adjusting your aim according to the hits.
The last thing that every man checked was the black gloves, for quite apart from the rappelling down and climbing up that might be necessary, word had come down that it would be a “fast rope” descent from the helos. H hour was set for 0500 hours; the pilots aboard the Pave Lows would be flying on night vision and by hover coupler, which would orchestrate gyroscope, radar, altimeter, and inertial guidance system readouts to keep the helo steady and very low.
“Apart from anything else,” Salvini reminded one of the newcomers, “the SAS black antiterrorist uniform is meant to frighten the enemy.”
“You don’t need one then, Sal,” Aussie quipped. “You’re ugly enough already. We show them Salvini and it’s instant fuckin’ surrender!”
“Up yours!” Salvini told Aussie.
“Promise?”
“All right, you guys,” Brentwood said. “Let’s move out. Four of you attach yourselves to myself, Lewis, Williams, or Salvini.”
“Hey, Davey,” Aussie asked Brentwood as they went out onto the Chita strip. “What’s all this crap about Freeman not wanting to bomb the towns and villages?”
“Don’t know, Aussie. Part of the strategy.”
“He gone soft in the head or something?”
“Freeman? I doubt it.”
“So do I. So why the hell—” Brentwood couldn’t hear Aussie’s last word as a brisk wind was blowing east off of Lake Baikal, a bitter edge to it as the Pave Lows began warming up, their stuttering now a full roar, their warm wash felt through the all-black uniforms.
As those sectors of Freeman’s forces designated to simulate an all-out attack on the Manchurian front started to move out, Freeman received word that at long last the Labour opposition in Britain had conceded to the B-52 overflight over Britain. France still wouldn’t agree, however, and this would mean a diversion around Spain, but at least the mission of the big bombers was on. The problem was, would it come in time? Yet he could wait no longer with the north Chinese buildup of men and materiel about to burst upon him from the Manchurian fastness. Besides, Admiral Huang would tie up the southern forces.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
As he climbed into the rear barbette of the lead B-52, Sergeant Murphy, or “Pepto-Bismol,” as he was now known, was very unhappy and festooned with packets of the “new and improved” antacid tablets.
“Crabbing it,” their wheels angling into the crosswind, compensating for their natural tendency to drift to one side on takeoff, the nine B-52Gs forming the nine-plane wave of Stratofortresses from the Forty-second Wing of the U.S. Sixty-ninth Bombardment Squadron thundered along the runway and roared into the night sky over southeastern England. Each of the eight thirteen-thousand-pound-thrust Pratt-and-Whitney jet engines on the Big Ugly Fat Fellows was in high scream as the bombers, tops painted wavy khaki green, undersides white-gray, headed across the channel at the beginning of their 4,700-mile mission half a world away to attack the missile sites at Turpan.
Traveling at forty thousand feet plus, each of the nine bombers that made up the three cells — Ebony, Gold, and Purple — carried in its bomb bay and beneath its 185-foot wingspan the conventional bomb-load equivalent of fifteen World War II B-17s. Due to recent malfunctions in the normally remote-control console of the rear barbette with itsfour 12.7-millimeter cannon, the guns were manned, Murphy being the rear barbette gunner in Ebony’s lead plane. The heavy ordnance aboard the B-52s included thirty eleven-hundred-pound FAE, or fuel air explosive, bombs, each bomb of jellied gasoline over four times as powerful as the equivalent weight of high-explosive. In addition, each plane carried twelve five-hundred-pound free-fall high-explosive iron contact bombs with Pave conversion kits that turned them into smart bombs.
“Wish we were carrying cruise,” the radar navigator aboard Ebony One’s leader commented.
“You and me both,” added the ECM — electronic countermeasures or electronics warfare officer, a technician who when the war broke out had been selling the superfast Cray computers.
“It was a political decision,” answered Ebony’s captain, the air commander of the nine-plane wave. “Washington doesn’t want us carrying cruise missiles anywhere near the Mideast. Wouldn’t give us a ‘weapons free’ release even if we were packing them. Too risky. The Iranians are the worst. They pick up a cruise missile, think we’re popping off nuclear warheads, and bingo! The balloon goes up.”
To make especially sure that no such interpretation would be made by any one of the countries they’d be flying over, each one of the nine planes in Ebony, Gold, and Purple had been fitted with the special flared-wing fairings, which, if the B-52s were picked up by satellite, would identify them as being “cruise free.”
None of the six-man crew aboard Ebony One — the pilot and aircraft commander Colonel Thompson, copilot, navigator, radar navigator, EWO — electronics warfare officer— and gunner — was at all happy about the decision, but neither were they anxious about starting what was euphemistically referred to in air force manuals as a “nuclear exchange.” Even so, me EWO, in the cramped, windowless electronics recess of the tiny lower deck, had confided to the navigator and radar navigator forward of him on the lower deck that if he was to be downed, he’d just as soon go out in a “mushroom” as in some Iranian prison camp — the sight of the POWs in Vietnam and of the American hostages of the eighties and nineties was still a chilling memory for the American fliers. Several of the crew, teenagers then, could still recall the terrifying images of the Ayatollah seen on television and the humiliation of the Americans.
Above the EWO, the air commander and his pilot were carrying out visual checks, using the erratic wash of moonlight to make sure that all the contact bombs on the extender racks beneath the wings were well in place. The fine wires that would extract the safety pins of the primers could not be seen in the moonlight, but none of the bombs looked askew to the AC as he scanned the huge 185-foot wingspan that, supporting the four pods of the twin engines and the bombs, rose slowly as they gained altitude though the line of the wing was still below that of the fuselage, the tanks “loaded to me gills,” as Murphy, the rear gunner, was fond of putting it, with over thirty-five thousand gallons of kerosene.
As the English Channel, now a silver squiggle, receded far below them, the three cells disappeared in cloud, the navigator on Ebony One already going over his trace with the electronic warfare officer, who would have to coordinate his “jammer” pod against any ground-to-air missile batteries that protected the mobile sites around Turpan. Reading the coordinates from the computer, the navigator drew, as manual backup, the intersect lines with his protractor. The EWO circled in the last reported satellite digital photo relay showing the missile shelters around Turpan, but there were now seven additional “tents” showing up on the computer-enhanced photo.
“Are they more CS-2s, Ted?” the radar navigator asked. “Or SAMs?”
“Don’t know,” the EWO replied. “All I know is that we’re going to have to drop our load from as high as we can and I’ll be using every jammer we’ve got. Are we spot on the track, Charlie?” the EWO asked the navigator.