The Megafortress’s crew heard what seemed like hundreds of hammerlike blows all over the aircraft, then the rumble and roar of the Chinese jets flying just a few hundred feet away from them. “Check the instruments!” Elliott shouted to Cheshire. “Patrick!”
“Right turn and center up!” Patrick responded.
Elliott started a hard right turn — and immediately decreased the turn when they felt a hard, sharp rumbling on the right wing. “We got something hanging on the right,” he said. “Nance, you see anything?” “No,” Cheshire responded. “But I’ve got fluctuating number four hydraulic pressure. It feels like we might have lost a spoiler.”
The DF-3 missile sites were situated along the same access road, roughly in a line about five miles apart. “Radar coming on… radar stand by,” McLanahan said as he took the release fix. The synthetic aperture radar image showed the Dong Feng-3 launch complex in stark detaiclass="underline" the launch pad, gantry, and the two railroad lines leading from the launch pad to the two missile-storage sheds, spaced about 200 yards apart. The Megafortress rolled in on the first site. “Doors coming open… bombs away!” McLanahan shouted. He sequenced the releases so that the bomblet scatter pattern of one CBU-59 cluster-bomb unit was centered directly on the missile sheds.
The tactic worked. Each DF-3 storage shed was blasted apart by hundreds of one-pound bomblets, and the scatter pattern was large enough to encompass the launch pad and a nearby electrical transformer farm, which shut down power to the complex’s air defense artillery site located to the north. The second missile was only damaged in the attack, but the first 59,000-pound liquid-fueled DF-3 missile caught fire and created a massive explosion that wiped out the second missile very effectively.
But the sudden destruction of the DF-3 site alerted the air defense units protecting the other two remaining sites, and seconds later the horizon was illuminated with six antiaircraft artillery guns opening up. Wendy had used her jammers to shut down the triple-A site’s tracking radars, so the Chinese gunners were blindly sweeping the sky with their guns. The airspace over the two remaining DF-3 sites was shimmering with thousands of rounds of artillery shells.
“I got no choice, guys,” Elliott said, and he broke off the bomb run by turning hard right. “We can’t go through that mess.”
“Continue your right turn fifty more degrees,” Wendy said. “Let’s get a few of these J-8s off our tail while we wait for those gunners to run out of ammo.” As soon as Elliott rolled out of his hard right turn, Wendy let one, then two Sidewinders fly, and both shots were rewarded with bright flashes and flickering streaks of light across the night sky.
“I’m centering up,” Elliott shouted, and he yanked the Megafortress over into a hard right turn back toward the DF-3 sites. The blobs of tracers were still slicing through the sky, forming an impenetrable curtain of deadly bullets all across the target area. “C’mon, you bastards,” Elliott cursed. “You don’t have that much ammo… you’re going to run out any second—”
As if on cue, one stream of tracers abruptly stopped. It was only one ZSU-37-2 site, but it was enough. Patrick centered his crosshairs on the second two DF-3 storage sheds, made sure the rotary launcher had positioned two more CBU-59 units in the bottom drop position, and made the release. The terrific explosion that rocked the Megafortress told them the second attack had been a success.
The two triple-A sites guarding the last DF-3 site swung west toward them and began raking the sky around them, and for a moment it seemed as if every antiaircraft artillery site in front of them got a direct bead on them — but then the shooting stopped. The triple-A sites had either run out of ammo, or they had damaged their gun barrels by several minutes of almost continuous shooting. Elliott centered the computer steering bug on the last target… just twenty more seconds, and they’d be heading home.
The last twenty seconds seemed like twenty hours — but soon the bomb doors rolled open, and McLanahan shouted, “Bombs away! Doors coming!”
Brad Elliott saw a flash of white light off to his left, and then his vision exploded into a blaze of stars and his body felt as if he had hit a brick wall.
“Brad's hit!” Nancy Cheshire screamed. The entire left side of the cockpit appeared as if it had been shredded apart by a giant tiger’s claw. Cheshire grabbed the control stick, then experimentally juggled the throttles. But the flight-control computer had already determined that the number one engine had been destroyed, and the computer immediately had shut off fuel to the engine, activated the fire-extinguishing system, and isolated electrical and hydraulic power. “I lost number one — it’s shut down! ” she called out. “I still got the airplane! Sing out back there! ”
“Offense is okay!” Patrick responded. He looked over through the thin haze of smoke and saw Wendy leaning over in her seat. Her console looked as if a grenade had exploded inside it, and the windblast from the shattered left cockpit windows was blowing a vortex of smoke and debris back over Wendy McLanahan. “Jesus! Wendy!”
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” they heard over interphone. “I… I just got a face full of smoke. ”
“Hang on, Wendy!”
“No! Patrick, stay strapped in! ” Wendy cried out. “I’m going to stay down here to stay out of the smoke. ”
“What do you got back there, guys?” Cheshire asked, the panic rising in her voice.
“It looks like we got squat,” Patrick responded. “The DSO’s station is toast, and my stuff is in reset.” He concentrated on the red flashing indications on his right-side instrument paneclass="underline" “The last Striker missile is showing an overtemp condition, but I can’t shut it down and I can’t jettison it until my equipment comes back up. I’ll try to restart it.”
“We got a major problem up here, kids,” Nancy Cheshire said, quickly scanning the instruments. Most of the electronic instruments were blank; she concentrated on the auxiliary and backup gauges. “We lost number one, we’re on emergency hydraulic power, and we got one generator left. All I got right now is the damned whiskey compass. Brad… Brad looks real bad. I think he’s…”
“Go ahead and say it… you thought I was dead,” Brad Elliott said. Slowly, painfully, with help from Nancy Cheshire, he hauled himself upright in his seat, and Cheshire locked his inertial reel in place.
“Brad!” Patrick shouted. “Are you all right?”
“Hell no,” Elliott said, coughing to clear his throat of a mass of blood. “But they can’t kill me that easy.” His voice was barely a whisper over the thunderous roar of the jet blast coming through the shredded fuselage.
“We’re gonna make it, Brad,” Cheshire said on interphone. “Hang on.”
Elliott scanned the nearly blank instrument panel and chuckled, the laughter quickly changing into a full-body convulsion. “I highly doubt it,” he gasped, after the convulsions stopped.
“Nance, give me a right turn back to the east,” Patrick said. “We’ll try to get as close to the Yellow Sea or the Bo Hai as we can get. Hal and Chris are standing by on Okinawa with Madcap Magician and the Taiwanese air force — they might be able to pick us up.”
“Mack, we’re six hundred goddamn miles from the Yellow Sea, we’re surrounded by fighters, and we’re all shot to hell,” Brad Elliott said. “I got a better idea — we jump out.”
“No way,” Cheshire said.
“You’re a sweetie, and I’ve always had the hots for you, co,” Elliott said, “but you all know this is the only option. When those fighters come back, they’ll blow us to pieces. I’d rather not be on board when that happens, thank you very much.”
“We made it before, Brad,” Patrick said. “We can make it again.”