“By God, Dick!” Freeman told Norton exuberantly. “We’ve done it. Wolf dung. Norton, how about that for high tech? By God, we’ve done it!”
And so they had — until, as the position became clearer to the northernmost Chinese commanders, a very low tech carrier pigeon arrived at Shenyang HQ informing the PLA’s Northern Command that the ferocity of the American attacks that had been assumed to be a major offensive now appeared to be no more than well-coordinated probing actions. Cheng was about to order the northern bound troops westward, but this would take time, especially with rail links like that of Manzhouli now broken. Instead he ordered the reserves to reverse direction and head south back down out of Manchuria as fast as possible and then westward into Inner Mongolia and the Gobi. So, Cheng thought, the great American general believed he had outwitted the PLA!
Suddenly the EWO in Ebony One saw an amber blip on his screen. “AC,” he said, notifying the air commander. “Unidentified aircraft. Two o’clock high. Fifty miles.”
The captain acknowledged. “Stay with them, Murphy — must be one of our Harrier escorts.”
“Got him in the cone, skipper.”
“Countermeasures ready?” the captain asked as a precaution.
“Ready, sir,” the EWO confirmed. Four seconds had elapsed since the first radar contact.
“Range?” the captain asked.
“Forty-nine miles. Speed, Mach one point eight,” which meant that whatever it was was traveling in excess of nine hundred miles per hour. Most probably a fighter, all right, but not a Harrier.
The captain banked left, beginning evasive action, hoping that Purple’s and Gold’s EWOs would have seen either the contact on their screens or his “radio silence” evasive maneuver. Hopefully they had seen both. Beneath them the great peaks of the Hindu Kush rose majestically in a sea of moonlit white peaks. “Range?”
“Forty-eight miles. Closing. Mach one point three. Three others joining him.”
The first four-thousand-mile East Wind 4, which western experts thought had been discarded in favor of the longer eight-thousand-mile-range CSX-4, landed on the right flank of Freeman’s armored column racing south of Manzhouli. It did no more damage than blow up enormous blocks of ice from the twenty-mile-wide Lake Hulun, which still, mostly frozen, was providing Freeman’s armored columns with a shortcut south. The second and third missiles, however, hit the ice in the middle of the column, and an M-60 tank and Bradley fighting vehicle rolled at speed and disappeared.
Immediately Freeman in the lead tank saw other columns slow. “Full bore!” he yelled into the radio. “Keep moving, damn it! And everyone stay buttoned up.” The clang of cupolas and hatches shutting could be heard echoing along the ice as the tracked vehicles continued to throw up a curtain of fine white ice particles that glinted beautifully in the early dawn.
“Where the hell are those B-52s?” Freeman mused, while looking through his commander’s periscope for sign of any enemy activity in the Manchurian foothills far off to his left, his tank’s remarkably quiet gas turbine blowing the snow aft of him like castor sugar.
Over the Hindu Kush it was not yet dawn as the nine B-52s adjusted their course northeastward for Turpan. The mountains’ snowy peaks, like the B-52s themselves, were still moonlit, with some clouds bunching up, shifting in from the west as the four ChiCom fighters, Shenyang J-6Cs, wings swept back, nose intake reminiscent of older MiGs, were swooping down at Mach 1.3 from thirty-six thousand feet toward the B-52s, two of the fighters armed with four air-to-air missiles, the other two with eight 8.35-inch rockets, together with their deadly NR-30mm cannon.
The electronics warfare officer in Ebony One and those in the other eight bombers that made up Ebony, Gold, and Purple were watching their own radars, each plane’s quad 12.7-millimeter machine guns in the rear barbettes shifting with the bogeys’ approach, but the ChiCom fighters were still too far away, beyond the effective one-kilometer range of the guns.
The three B-52s of Purple were now in thick stratus, their exhaust heat signal weakened by the clouds’ moisture, the Shenyangs shifting their attack to the six planes of Ebony and Gold. It told Ebony’s captain that he could expect heat-seekers, so that when he saw the pinpricks of light from the Shenyangs he yelled, “Release flares,” knowing the B-52s could not turn in time. Even if the six B-52s did manage to swing toward the ChiCom fighters, denying the B-52s’ engine heat to the rear-entry infrared-seeking missiles, the bombers’ guns, their only external antiaircraft weapons, would be facing away from the Shenyangs.
The sky was suddenly aglow with phosphorus flares, like shooting stars, the ChiComs’ four 120-pound, Soviet-type Aphid missiles streaking toward Ebony and Gold at over 2,800 meters per second, to reach the B-52s in 6.5 seconds.
Murphy, controlling the rear barbette of Ebony One, his heart thumping so loudly it was the only thing he could hear, cheered as he saw the ChiCom missiles curving off into the thickets of burning flares aft of Ebony and disintegrating. But now another four rockets were streaking toward the B-52s.
“Active! Active!” Ebony’s EWO yelled, indicating these weren’t Aphids — heat-seekers — but were emitting radar beams, using the reflections of these from the B-52s to home in on.
“Chaff!” Ebony One’s captain yelled, his order, as he was also air commander of the wing, immediately obeyed by Gold and Purple so that now the sky twinkled in the dying light of the flares, the millions of strips of aluminum, cut to various wavelengths to cover the band, “fuzzing” the ChiComs’ radar-homing missiles.
“Ha! You bastards!” Murphy called, elated by the Chinese’s failure to sucker the B-52s into thinking the second set of missiles was heat-seekers instead of radar-homing air-to-air Apexes — which, though heavier at seven hundred pounds, were one and a half times faster.
These four missiles began curving away, but unlike the heat-seekers before them, each missile’s flight path wasn’t so much a single curve but rather a series of jerky movements, crisscrossing one another’s smoky trails like hounds confused by the fox’s scent, tearing into the chaff clouds at over one thousand meters per second. “Foiled by foil, you fools!” Murphy shouted.
Then he heard a rapid thudding noise, one of the Shenyang’s NR-30mm cannon raking Ebony One’s port side. But the big plane had seen worse than this, its upgraded wet — that is, fuel-carrying — wing having a remarkable ability to soak up self-sealing punctures created by the ChiComs’ machine gun fire. The Shenyang swept past, going into a tight turn. The B-52s were in cloud, out of it, then in again. Then as quickly as they appeared, the bogeys were gone, obviously on bingo fuel or because there were SAM sites ahead that might not distinguish between friend or foe. Murphy was ecstatic, but not so Air Commander Thompson. They had yet to reach the target and get back again. And where in hell were the Harriers?
Freeman’s lead division of five hundred and forty tanks was advancing in column, broken up into three brigades of 144 M1A1 and M-60 tanks each, and the brigades in turn were broken down into three battalions of sixty tanks, companies of fifteen tanks each, and finally platoons of five tanks. The lead tank had two aerials instead of one, one for intertank communication, the other for air strikes if necessary, and was followed in column by the second tank covering an arc of fire on the right side of the column, the third tank covering the left side, and so on down the column.