Jiang nodded, understanding but not quite believing the awesome power that lay at his fingertips, waiting for his word to send them on their deadly way. “This is incredible,” Jiang said breathlessly, shaking his head. “The Party has promised we would never be the first to use nuclear weapons. We have already broken our pledge by using these horrid weapons against Taipei, but we reasoned that we were using these weapons against a rebel government within our own territory, not against a foreign power. But I ordered a nuclear attack against a Nationalist warship, then an American warship, and then a nuclear attack against an ally, simply to try to distract the Americans from attacking us. Now I must consider a full-scale nuclear attack against an American military base. I do not know if I can make this decision, Comrade General. It is too much.”
“You have almost the entire Politburo and Central Military Committee assembled here this morning, Comrade President,” Chin reminded him. “Call an emergency meeting with them right now. I will speak to them; together, without all the philosophical ramblings from Sun, we shall get their full support before issuing your orders.”
Jiang relented and gave a faint nod. In three minutes General Chin Po Zihong had called an emergency meeting to order on behalf of the president to present his plan to stop the Americans — and twenty minutes later, he had his orders.
“I’ve got an L-band Phazatron pulse-Doppler radar beating us up,” David Luger called out. “It’s a Sukhoi-27, all right. Clear me for maneuvers and all countermeasures.”
“Clear!” Brad Elliott shouted, tightening his grip on the side- mounted control stick. “You’re clear for all maneuvers as long as you nail that bastard! Just keep us out of the rocks! ”
Patrick McLanahan called up a God’s-eye view of the area surrounding their bomber. “Very high terrain northeast,” McLanahan said. “River valley west and northwest, almost sea level.”
“Then let’s start with northeast and take this son of a bitch into the rocks,” Luger said. He put his fingers on the manual decoy dispenser button. “Stand by for maneuvers, crew. Pilot, break right! ”
Elliott jammed the Megafortress hard to the right, feeling his butt press into the seat as the EB-52 started a hard climb to start cresting the rapidly rising terrain of the Boping Mountains. When he reached sixty degrees of bank, Elliott pulled on the control stick until he heard a stall warning tone, then released the back pressure but maintained the turn right at the edge of the stall. As Elliott started the hard turn, Luger punched out one small tactical decoy. The glider decoy, similar to the ones used in the Wolverine SEAD cruise missiles, had radar cross-sections dozens of times larger than the Megafortress itself. “Roll out, pilot,” Luger ordered, when they reached ninety degrees heading change, and Elliott quickly rolled the big bomber left.
The jink worked — but for only a few seconds. The Chinese Sukhoi- 27’s Phazatron N001 pulse-Doppler radar was a “look-down, shoot- down”-capable radar — it could stay at high altitude and look down to find enemy aircraft because the pulse-Doppler radar could reject radar clutter caused by terrain. One way to beat a pulse-Doppler radar system was to reduce the closure rate between aircraft, so in effect the aircraft looked like a piece of terrain on radar. By dropping a cloud of chaff and then turning ninety degrees to the Su-27’s flight path, the closure rate between the Megafortress and the Su-27 equaled the airspeed of the Su-27, which caused the system to reject the Megafortress as a possible target. And since the decoy glider proved to be a much more inviting target and still carried a good closure rate on the Su-27, the fighter’s attack radar programmed the decoy as the new target.
The Chinese Su-27 fighter pilot selected a Pen Lung-2 radar- and infrared-guided missile, received a lock-on tone, and got ready to press the launch button — until he realized his target was rapidly slowing down. The unpowered glider decoy made an inviting, easy-to-kill target, but it could not maintain the same airspeed as the Megafortress. The Chinese pilot canceled the attack when the target’s airspeed began to decrease below 300 knots — no military attack plane was going to fly that slow unless it was getting ready to land. He verified his decision by closing within five miles of the target, then attempted to lock onto the target with his Infrared Search and Track System. It would not appear on the IRSTS — the pilot knew it had to be a decoy, then. Any military attack plane would show clearly in the large supercooled eye of the IRSTS. He broke radar lock and commanded another wide-area search.
That delay gave Luger an opportunity: “Stand by for Scorpion launch, crew! ” he shouted. He hit the voice command button: “Launch one Scorpion missile at target number one.”
WARNING, LAUNCH command initiated, the computer responded in a soft, calm, female voice.
“Launch,” Luger ordered.
SCORPION MISSILE pylon launch, the computer announced, and a single AIM-120 AMRAAM collected target azimuth from the threat warning receiver, streaked out of the right wing weapon pod, climbed a few hundred feet, then arced left toward the Sukhoi-27. A few seconds after launch, the computer said, warning, attack radar to transmit, and the omnidirectional attack radar activated for four seconds, enough to lock onto the fighter and feed updated target range and bearing to the Scorpion missile, attack radar stand by, the computer said as it shut the radar down itself. With a fresh target update, the AIM-120 missile activated its own on-board radar seeker, instantly locked onto one of the Su-27 fighters, made a slight correction as its pilot detected the brief Megafortress radar lock-on and tried to make a last-ditch evasive break, then exploded just as it detected that it had closed to well within lethal range of its forty-four-pound high-explosive warhead.
The attack worked. The explosion occurred just a few feet behind the Su-27’s right wing near the fuselage, sending shrapnel through the fighter’s right engine and piercing right wing fuel tanks. The Chinese pilot was quick, and managed to save his prized jet by immediately shutting down the right engine before it seized or tore itself apart, but this jet was out of the fight — he had just enough fuel and control of his plane to keep himself upright and limp home. Even more important, his wingman, another Sukhoi-27, was ordered to lead his stricken comrade back to base— a Su-27 was too valuable and too expensive a weapon to be allowed to make an emergency single-engine landing at night in rugged terrain without assistance.
“Threat scope’s clear, gang,” Luger reported, with a sigh of relief. “Clear to center up.”
“Left turn heading three-three-two to the next turnpoint,” McLanahan said. “High terrain twelve miles, commanding on it. Minimum safe altitude in this sector, six thousand one hundred feet.”
“Good going, Major Luger,” Nancy Cheshire offered. “Sounds like you’ve been doing your homework.”
“I’ve never left this thing, Nancy,” Dave Luger said, wearing a broad smile under his oxygen mask. “Even after all these years, it’s as if I’ve never left. I’ve…” He hesitated, studying the new threat signals, then reported, “Looks like bandits at ten to eleven o’clock, well below detection threshold, closing in on us but not locked on. Now I got fighters at five o’clock, not locked on but heading this way. We got fighters all around us.”