The attack lasted just minutes; as fast as it had begun, it was over. The radios were clear, and attack radars were as effective as they ever were. But in that few minutes, the damage was horrifying: the 11–76 radar plane, eleven H-6 bombers, four Su-27s, eighteen J-8 fighters, and forty- one Q-5 fighter-bombers had been shot down, with no losses to American aircraft. Each and every Navy and Air Force plane made it back to its carrier or base, then began rearming and setting up for local-area air defense in case the Chinese tried a counterattack.
The Chinese fighters and bombers lucky enough to escape the American hit-and-run attack from the darkness soon found other problems. Twelve B-1B Lancer bombers from Ellsworth and Dyess Air Force Bases had been sent over eastern China, loaded with eight AGM-86C cruise missiles with non-nuclear high-explosive warheads, and eight AGM-177 Wolverine antiair defense cruise missiles, to attack air bases and air defense sites throughout southeast China. The military landing strips at Fuzhou, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Jingdezhen, Nanchang, and even Shanghai were cratered by cruise missiles, and the Chinese approach and ground- control radars and some air defense missile and artillery emplacements had been destroyed by the Wolverine missiles. All of the fighters scheduled to land at these bases had to be diverted…
… except there were no military fields within range to send them. The number of planes destroyed or damaged simply by running out of fuel or attempting to make a forced landing at a civil airstrip or highway quickly exceeded the number of planes shot down by American fighters.
But the B-lBs’ mission was not to deny landing strips to Chinese fighters low on fuel, but to open a gaping hole in China’s multilayered air defense and surveillance radar network to allow yet another attacker to slip in unnoticed — six B-2A Spirit stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base. The B-2 bombers went feet-dry over several points along the Chinese coastline from Shanghai to Qingdao, taking separate low- level attack routes inbound to their targets — the intercontinental ballistic missile bases in north-central China.
The twelve Dong Feng-5 missile silos and twenty Dong Feng-3 launch sites, with two DF-3 missiles assigned per site, were spread out over 10,000 square miles in two Chinese provinces, and heavily defended by HQ-2 surface-to-air missile sites and antiaircraft artillery sites — but the B-2s swarmed over the missile fields near Yinchuan in Inner Mongolia province and, one by one, attacked.
Each B-2A carried sixteen AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) guided weapons on two internal rotary launchers. Each SLAM was a Harpoon turbojet-powered anti-ship cruise missile fitted with an imaging infrared television sensor in the nose and a GPS satellite navigation guidance system. The coordinates of the targets were all loaded into the missile’s memory by the B-2’s attack computer; each B-2 bomber merely had to fly to a predetermined launch point and release the missiles. Once released from low altitude—300 and 500 feet above ground— and as far as fifty miles from the target, the missiles would get a final navigation update by its GPS receiver and guide itself to the target, skimming less than a hundred feet above the ground at 250 miles an hour. The missile was even programmed with turnpoints so they would not reveal the location of the B-2 launch aircraft. Once the missiles were launched, the B-2 bombers turned eastbound and began the treacherous 1,500-mile trek back across hostile airspace to their first post-strike refueling anchor.
Sixty seconds prior to impact, the AGM-84E SLAMs began to transmit images of their assigned target area — but they did not transmit the pictures back to the B-2s that launched them. Instead, the images were picked up by a lone aircraft flying over the Chinese ICBM missile fields at 20,000 feet.
The EB-52 Megafortress had launched from Kai-Shan with the remaining nine flyable Taiwanese F-16s and Jon Masters’s DC-10 just after sunset. The Megafortress was armed with every drop of fuel and every remaining weapon it could possibly carry: two Wolverine cruise missiles and two Striker rocket bombs on the forward bomb-bay rotary launcher; six CBU-59 cluster bomb units on the aft bomb bay; and one AIM-120 Scorpion air-to-air missile and four AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles on each wing weapon pod. After an aerial refueling, the EB-52 flew north over the East China Sea and waited for the B-l and B-2 bombers to arrive from the United States. Once the B-l bombers laid down the cruise missile barrage along the Chinese coastline, the B-2 and the Megafortress cruised in toward the Chinese ICBM fields. With the attention of the entire Chinese air defense system focused on the Formosa Strait, it was a simple exercise for the six B-2s and the lone EB-52 to penetrate disrupted Chinese airspace and head for their assigned targets.
The EB-52 arrived in the Chinese ICBM field several minutes before the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers got to their launch points. Flying in the defensive systems officer s seat, Wendy McLanahan started the attack by launching the Wolverine missiles over the ICBM missile fields. The two Wolverines used their decoys and radar seekers to hunt down any antiaircraft radars, then attacked them with antiarmor skeets.
“The Wolverines are working,” Brad Elliott said. “I can see the place starting to light up.” Several antiaircraft artillery sites opened fire, some very close by but locked onto the decoy gliders, not the Megafortress. Streams of heavy antiaircraft artillery tracers arced into the sky — followed a few moments later by a bright flash on the ground and secondary explosions rippling across the expanse of darkness.
“Very cool,” Nancy Cheshire remarked, as more missile and tripleA sites were hit. “The Wolverines are working great.”
“You spoke too soon,” Wendy said. “Eve lost contact with both Wolverines. Both of them got shot down.”
“I’ve got missile video starting to come in,” Patrick McLanahan announced. As each SLAM got within range, a window would open up on his supercockpit display, and he could watch as the missile approached the target. A wide white rectangle in the center of the video indicated the missiles preprogrammed target area. As the SLAM got closer, Patrick could make out more and more detail of the exact target spot, and he resized the target rectangle until it enclosed only the spot he wanted to hit. A small white dot represented the missiles impact point, and Patrick resized the rectangle so the dot could stay inside the rectangle without too many gross flight-control corrections.
“Pve got fighter radar activity at three o’clock, range unknown,” Wendy announced. “We’re running out of time.”
Patrick could hear the tension in her voice. He had been against having her on this mission at all — her wounds from the last time she had flown on an EB-52 Megafortress had only recently healed, not to mention the danger to the child she carried. But Wendy had been the first to demand that she go along, and hers was the loudest voice arguing against her husband. No one else knew the Megafortress’s defensive suite and weapons better than Wendy Tork McLanahan. Patrick might be able to operate the systems by himself if the bomber was not under attack, but if it ever became an item of interest and came under active attack, it would take one crew member’s full attention to defend the Megafortress. If there was going to be any chance of success on this raid, Wendy had to go along.
“Got a range now, three o’clock, forty miles and closing,” Wendy reported. “I’ve got multiple bandits — four, maybe six. One of them looks like a Su-27. Signal threshold is low, but they’ve got several sweeps on us. They could get a lock on us in three to four minutes.”
Two SLAM missiles would be targeted against the DF-5 silos — the first SLAM would crack open the silo, and the second would dive inside and destroy the missile. The first 1,400-pound Standoff Land Attack Missile would execute a pop-up maneuver a few seconds before impact, then dive directly down onto the silo cover to crack open the silo; the second SLAM would follow a few seconds later, execute the same pop-up and dive maneuver, and destroy the missile inside. The DF-3 missiles were stored on erector trailers inside storage sheds near each launch site, and it was a simple task to target each storage shed and destroy the missile inside.