“Governor, I don’t think you understand. The rebels have the base completely surrounded. Yesterday they fired missiles at the helicopter you were in. If you try to leave, Governor, they will shoot you down.”
A breathless messenger from the command center brought a ray of hope. “Bombers are inbound, sir. They have radioed for instructions. What targets do you wish them to attack?”
“The rebels around the army base?” The pilot of the leading Sian H-6 bomber asked this question of his radio operator.
“Yes, sir. That is the order. Here is the chart.” The radio operator passed it forward to the copilot, who held it so the pilot could see.
The Sian H-6 was a twin-engine subsonic medium bomber, an unlicensed Chinese version of the Russian Tupolev Tu-16 Badger. First flown in 1952, the Badger was used only as a target drone or engine test bed in Russia these days. However, in China the H-6 was still a front-line aircraft in the air force of the PLA. This morning four of them were on their way to Hong Kong.
“The rebels are just outside the base perimeter,” the radio operator said.
As the implications of the target assignment sank in, the pilot and copilot looked at each other without enthusiasm. To ensure the bombs fell on the rebels and not inside the base, they would have to bomb from a very low altitude. Since the navigation-bombing radar was useless at low levels, the bombardier at his station in the glass nose would merely release the bombs as the plane flew over the enemy. As long as the rebels lacked antiaircraft missiles or radar-directed artillery, the bombers should be able to strike their target. If the weather was good enough.
“What did you tell the base commander?” the pilot asked the radio operator.
“That we would try for the assigned target, sir.”
“Tell the other airplanes to follow us in single file. We shall make a pass to locate the target, then bomb on the second pass.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We should be bombing on the first pass,” the copilot objected on the ICS.
“I want to see what’s there.”
“We have been ordered to bomb — a first pass without bombing will merely wake up the rebels.”
“When you are the pilot in command you can do it your way. Today we do it my way.”
After he squashed the copilot, the pilot reminded his gunners to keep a sharp lookout. Alas, the Sian H-6 lacked a radar-warning receiver. The plane contained a single forward-firing 23-millimeter cannon and three twin 23-millimeter mounts: a remote on the top of the fuselage, one on the belly, and a manned mount in the tail. Only the tail turret was aimed by a fire-control radar.
The bombers were three miles high when they flew across the city of Hong Kong and turned eastward, out to sea, still descending. No low clouds this morning, the pilot noted, visibility five or six miles. He and the bombardier stared down into the haze as the planes flew over the city.
“I see the base,” said the bombardier on the intercom.
“They should have sent fighters to escort us,” the copilot said nervously as he searched the wide, empty sky.
“They did!” the tail gunner sang out. “At four o’clock, high.” ‘
The pilot looked in the indicated direction with a sense of foreboding. The briefing officer had specifically said there would be no escorting fighters. Rumor had it that the fighter pilots were politically unreliable. A civil war, the pilot told himself, was mankind’s worst fear realized.
“Shengyang J-11s. Two of them.” The tail gunner again.
“Uh-oh,” said the copilot, who had also been told that the J-11 squadron at Hong Kong had joined the rebels. “What do we do now?”
“Those fighters may be hostile,” the pilot told the tail gunner. “If they shoot a missile or line us up for a gunshot, be ready.”
“Aye,” said the gunner, his voice rising in pitch. Like everyone in the bomber, he knew he had little chance of hitting an incoming missile with his gun. In fact, he had never been allowed to fire his gun with real ammunition.
Ensuring he was out of 23-millimeter range, Major Ma Chow turned to get behind the four bombers, which were strung out in trail. His wingman stayed in a loose cruise formation, several hundred feet behind Ma and slightly above the plane; of Ma’s turn.
Ma Chow was well aware of the fact that the bombers were defenseless against the two fighters, each of which was armed with four air-to-air missiles and one hundred and forty-nine 30-millimeter cannon shells. The fact that each plane was flown by a crew of his fellow countrymen also weighed heavily on him.
“What do we do?” his wingman asked over the radio.
“Let’s try the radio,” Ma Chow replied.
“Think they know we’re back here?”
“If they don’t, we’ll tell them.” The radios in Chinese warplanes could transmit and receive on only four frequencies, so it was a simple matter to try each of them.
Making a long, slow, descending turn in smooth air, the bombers dropped to a thousand feet above the water before they began their run westward toward the army base. Once in level flight the four bombers descended still farther, until they were only four hundred feet above the water.
Ma Chow locked up the trailing bomber with his radar and readied a missile.
“Bomber lead over Kowloon, this is fighter lead, over.” The pilot and copilot of the H-6 heard the call in their headphones.
“What do we do?” the copilot asked, panic evident in his voice. “If we talk to them the authorities will call it treason.”
“Bomber lead, this is fighter lead. If any of the bombers open your bomb bay doors, we will shoot you down. Please acknowledge.”
The bomber pilot didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He led the bombers around an island, then they straightened on course for the army base.
They crossed the waterline at about two hundred fifty knots, four hundred feet high.
There was no flak, of course, and no missiles. The planes flew in and out of splotchy sunshine over an immense, sprawling city. Ma Chow and the bomber pilots each wondered what the other would do as the tension ratcheted tighter and tighter.
“Target one mile,” the bombardier of the lead bomber sang out on the ICS. He readied the bombsight so that he could designate his aim point as he passed over it; the sight would track that location mechanically and give him steering back to it.
Crossing rooftops, racing along a few hundred feet up with the rising sun behind them and the buildings casting long shadows ahead, the string of planes thundered toward the army base. Automatically the pilot retarded the throttles slightly, causing the speed to bleed off still more.
Then they saw the people. A horde of people, an endless sea of humanity extending for miles completely surrounded the base.
“Those must be the rebels,” the bombardier said disgustedly as the lead plane swept overhead. “They aren’t even armed.”
“A few of them are,” the copilot offered.
The pilot, also looking, said nothing. He had never seen so many people in one place at one time in his life.
When they were past the base the pilot trimmed the nose a bit higher and pushed the power levers forward. With the two engines developing ninety-five percent r.p.m., he stabilized in a cruise climb. Passing three thousand feet, he said to the copilot, “I think it’s time we went home.”
“They will shoot us for disobeying orders,” the copilot objected.
“I saw no rebels, merely civilians.”
“Those were the rebels,” the copilot said obstinately. He was something of a fool, the pilot thought.
“You would bomb them, would you?”
“I have a wife and son at Quangzou,” the copilot replied, naming the town near the airbase they left before dawn.