CHAPTER 8
Colonel Chandler could see sparkles of light ahead of his own force, they seemed to be anything but randomly targeted as there were concentrations at whichever level the aircraft of the Wild Weasel sweep under Dark Light flight were. Each short-lived flash of light represented an exploding shell dispensing expanding clouds of shrapnel.
It was shocking to behold and the colonel who had flown across Baghdad on the first raid of the Gulf War could honestly say that what he now beheld had to be four, maybe even five times heavier than what had been thrown at them on that night.
Searchlights probed the heavens and he could almost pinch himself in order to check he was really here and not watching a WW2 newsreel.
Twenty-eight miles to the east he could see a similar scene in the direction of the airbase and the space centre, but only at the airfield was the attack being pressed without casualties. It was ironic that at the one target where aircraft had passed so close to the gunners that they could make out markings with the naked eye, they were unsuccessful in downing a single one.
The airbase attack opened with B1-Bs dispensing runway cratering weapons and mines along the tarmac, this was carried out at an altitude of just sixty feet.
The Tower, tank farm, and hangars were attacked even as the runway was still being cratered by the B1-Bs submunitions. Laser-guided weapons struck every hanger and this destroyed all but two of the Flankers based on the airfield. Owing to the inclement weather all had been brought in from the dispersal shelters that were open on three sides to the elements and kept in the hangars free of snow and ice. No CAP had been in place due to the extreme remoteness of the location and its distance from the nearest known enemy forces, but instead a pair was kept on permanent runway readiness.
The airbase attack ended with the SAM radars being taken out as they hurriedly came up, and the pair of Flankers stranded at the runways end disappeared in the single explosion caused by a Maverick landing between them.
All the targets on the revised list for the space centre were in hardened shelters that required high altitude attacks with BLU-116s, and these attacks cost them two of the precious B2s to massed 90mm AAA that found the aircraft despite radar having never acquired a solid lock.
Chandler had heard rumours about the Chinese air defence zones, both the fixed and mobile ones. He always figured they were just story’s, kind of like the everlasting light bulb and the salt-water combustion engine.
According to the stories that Chandler had heard the Chinese never threw anything away, they had vast warehouses filled with weapons that were maintained religiously, despite their age. From horse drawn Japanese anti-aircraft guns to modern self-propelled, high altitude pieces and latest generation SAMs, they were stored together awaiting a time when they may be needed.
The thing that had convinced Chandler that the stories were nothing more than popular legend had been the claims that the secondary targeting systems were not laser or radar based, but audio. The altitude of the approaching enemy aircraft would be calculated by the sound of their engines, pre-cathode ray style. Pinpoint accuracy would be unnecessary or so the story went, a thousand guns throwing a wall of fire up into the general direction of an aeroplane would more than compensate for the lack of high technology.
Looking at the sky ahead he now knew the tales had not been bar room banter.
The stealth forces trillion dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art airframes no longer had the advantage; the playing field had been levelled by weight of numbers and all were being targeted upon the American aircraft using technology from the era of the crew’s grandparents.
Ahead of Chandler and the main force there was a flash of light that was larger than all the rest and a moment later a trail of fire was streaming back from a point in the night sky ahead. After a few seconds it angled downwards, gaining in length and girth as the angle increased and the fire spread.
Chandler switched to the Black Light frequency but he did not transmit, he just listened
“…Black Light Zero Four eject…Zero Four eject, eject, eject…come on Jeanette, punch out, get the hell out of there!”
There was no response on the radio and Zero Four’s plunge ended abruptly, a ball of flame rising up to mark the crash site.
“Black Lighters from Zero One, did any of you guys see a chute?”
“Zero Two, Negative.”
“Zero Three, Negative.”
“Black Light Zero One from Spear Gun One, that’s a negative from my Lancers too.”
There were other fires on the ground that Chandler could see; no doubt some belonged to the other pair of F-117As and the two B1-B Lancers from Spear Gun that had already fallen to AAA.
It was clear that without any further radar sites to take out, his Wild Weasel force was providing nothing more than target practice for the Chinese gunners.
“Ring Master, Ring Master, Black Light One…we’re getting murdered here!”
“Black Light this is Ring Master, get your people out of there and standby to hammer any radars that come back up.”
He waited for the acknowledging “Roger” before ordering the main force into a holding orbit while they were still clear of the silos air defence zone.
Chandler wanted to see what the gunners would do once they realised that there were no more aircraft overhead, he was hoping the fire would slacken.
As Chandler’s B2 circled he could see the flames leaping high from over in the east and guessed that the tank farm beside the airbase was the main source. The flames eclipsed any sign of damage that may otherwise have been visible from the space facility. He wished he knew why they had been ordered to attack pointless targets there, the intelligence reports clearly indicated the old vehicle assembly building had become an MT maintenance facility six months before once work on the new and larger assembly building had been completed. The ‘solid fuel booster store’ they had attacked had been a dummy; they knew that and had seen the photographs of its empty interior during the initial planning stage back on Mindanao. The real storage facility was sited three miles away from the nearest building, where any accident would not cause any damage to the rest of the facility. It said a great deal for his crews that they had pressed home their attacks even though all had known they wouldn’t halt the PRC putting satellites up, and wouldn’t even delay them beyond the time it would take to clean up.
The AAA protecting the silos did not appear to have slackened off in the slightest and the clock was running, he couldn’t afford to delay any further.
He would lay money that a pair of fighters had already scrambled out of Lanzhou with more to follow, but he was far more concerned with the time it would take to launch the ICBMs in the silos which were there primary targets.
The highly corrosive and unstable liquid fuel could only be pumped into the missiles tanks immediately before launch, and the best available intelligence put the time needed for this operation to be anywhere between twenty minutes and two hours.
If Colonel Chandler allowed a minimum of ten minutes for the Chinese Premier to be informed the region was under air attack and to make a decision to launch, then Chandler had only eleven minutes remaining before the ICBMs were launched at their targets, if the lower fuelling figure were to be proved correct.
“Spectre One, Two and Three I want you to gain angels forty, send your activation signals to the RERs and standby…… Spectre Four and Five form on me and follow me up to thirty thousand…….Javelin One, take your aircraft north and standby to make a dummy pass on my word……Fire Arrow Zero Two hook east at twenty thousand and standby also…. ” In a very short time he had a plan in place to divide up the massed guns protecting the silos, he had no doubt that it would work because the defenders could not afford not to react to approaching aircraft, but would it work enough? He could not afford to unduly risk his own aircraft or Spectre Four and Five because they were the back-up’s for the attack, they would break once they had succeeded in drawing fire but the remainder would continue on into the cauldron.