“Signal to all ships: release all antiair batteries,” Yin ordered. “Protect yourselves at all cost.”
“Close it up, Two, close it up,” Tamalko shouted to Borillo on interplane frequency as he watched the second F-4E slowly drift in and out off his right wing. “Don’t get sloppy on me now.”
Tamalko was maneuvering back to the lead position. They had climbed back to a safe altitude of three thousand feet, executing circles over the area where the unidentified plane appeared to have gone down. Borillo was so erratic that Tamalko’s backseater frequently lost sight of him. It was some of the worst formation flying he had ever seen. The short air battle had really rattled the kid.
Tamalko was ready to send the kid home, or perhaps even put him in the lead and tell him where to go, but he needed the word from Headquarters first before anything else. In between yelling at Bonllo to stay in close to avoid going lost wingman, Tamalko was on the UHF radio to Puerto Princesa, trying to set up a relay from Palawan to the Philippine Air Force headquarters at Cavite, near Manila. It was not going well.
Meanwhile, aboard Bear Zero-Two, Lieutenant Borillo’s weapons system officer, Captain Fuentes, was dividing his time between coaching Borillo on night-formation flight and checking his radar, searching for other aircraft that might be in the vicinity. By depressing the antenna angle on his attack radar, the WSO could paint several ships ahead of them at twelve miles. His RHAWS indicator, the screen that showed the direction, intensity, and type of enemy radar threats in the vicinity, showed several search radars all across the horizon to the west. The threat-intensity diamond shifted between “S” designations on the scope as the system tried to decide which was the greatest threat. “Lead, looks like several ships at eleven o’clock, twelve miles,” Fuentes radioed to Tamalko. “Search radars only.”
“Copy… Two, close it back in, will you?” Tamalko said irritably. “If you go lost wingman it’ll take a damned hour to rejoin back up again.”
“Suggest a turn back to the east,” Fuentes said. “I don’t want to get any closer to those ships.”
“Stand by, Two,” Tamalko snapped. “I’m trying to talk with the command post.”
Fuentes looked up from his radarscope just in time to see his plane’s wingtip drift ever so slowly toward Tamalko’s right wing. “How you doing up there, Lieutenant?” he asked Borillo.
“Fine… fine,” Borillo answered hesitantly. “I’m moving in closer.” Judging by how the control stick and throttle quadrant in the backseat were wobbling around, Borillo wasn’t fine. But he was closing in nicely, so Fuentes took another look in the radar.
“Surface ships still at eleven o’clock, now ten miles, lead,” he radioed to Tamalko. “We can’t stay on this heading, sir.”
“Just stand by,” Tamalko radioed back angrily. “Just stay in route formation and—”
Just then several of the “S” symbols on the RHAWS scope changed to blinking “6” and “8” symbols, and a slow wavering tone could be heard on the interphone; red “Missile Warning” lights were flashing on the threat-indicator panel. “Acquisition radar, eleven and one o’clock positions,” Fuentes radioed to Borillo. “Naval SA-6 and -8 systems. We need to get out of this area…”
The tone suddenly shifted to a fast buzzer, and “Missile Launch” fights illuminated in both front and rear cockpits. “Missile launch!” Fuentes screamed. “Descend and accelerate! Now!” Fuentes searched the sky ahead of them, and he felt his face flush as he saw two bright yellow dots streaking toward them — antiair missiles. Thank God it was so easy to see them at night. “I see them! Right off the nose, just below the horizon! Aim right for them and get ready to break!”
But Borillo panicked. With a missile launch off the front quarter, the best defense was to point the fighter’s nose at the missiles, presenting the smallest possible radar cross-section, then jink away from them at the last possible moment. Young Borillo did exactly the wrong thing — he heard the word “Break” and started a hard right turn away from the oncoming missiles at 90 degrees of bank. With the full outline of the big F-4E presented belly-out toward the missile and its tracking radar, it was an easy target. Fuentes tried to wrestle the control stick back over to the left, but he was far too late — one of the Hong Lung's HQ-91 missiles, a copy of the Soviet Union’s advanced SA-11 antiaircraft missile, hit Borillo’s fighter and instantly turned it into a huge fireball.
Tamalko never got a verbal warning from his back-seater — young Pilas was too scared or had the volume turned down on his threat-warning receiver, Tamalko didn’t know — but when the “Missile Launch” warning sounded he promptly forgot about trying to contact Cavite and looked up to see the second HQ-91 missile streak past him, less than a hundred feet behind. He banked right, toward the threat indications, just in time to see the first missile destroy his wingman.
Pilas was screaming in the backseat as the shock wave from the explosion crashed over them. Tamalko tried to ignore the screaming as he pushed his fighter down in a six-thousand-foot-per-minute descent, yanking it level as he passed three hundred feet. “Shut up, Pilas — shut up!” Tamalko roared. The screaming finally ceased.
“Borillo got hit! Christ, they’re shooting at us!” Pilas shouted. “I thought this was an exercise!”
“Well, it’s not a fucking exercise. Those are Chinese ships out there, and they’re attacking.” And then Tamalko realized that Borillo really did shoot down an attacking Chinese patrol plane — it was he who probably saved hundreds of lives on Rajah Lakandula. And since Pilas never warned him of the threat until after missile launch, Borillo also saved Tamalko by banking away from the missiles. Even though he screwed up most of the flight, the young pilot was a damned hero.
“Give me a heading to that ship,” Tamalko told Pilas. “We’re attacking.”
“Attacking? With guns? All we have are guns, sir…”
“I know, I know,” Tamalko said. He readjusted his heads-up display for air-to-ground strafing, resetting the depression angle on the HUD to 37 mils. “Where are the damned ships?”
There was a slight pause, and Tamalko thought that Pilas was either not going to answer or was suffering a nervous breakdown. Then: “Radar contact, one o’clock, ten miles. Come right ten degrees. Target heading two-six-zero.” Tamalko made the turn and began pushing up the throttles in military power, saving afterburner thrust for the final few miles of his pass…
“High-speed aircraft approaching Wenshan, sir,” Captain Lubu reported. “Range sixteen kilometers. No contact on second aircraft. Wenshan maneuvering to put his aft 57-millimeter guns on the target.”
“He’d better stop turning and start shooting,” Admiral Yin said half-aloud. “If those planes are carrying Harpoon antiship missiles, he’s run out of time already.”
“Emergency message from Wenshan!” a radio operator called out. “They’ve run aground!”
“What?” Yin shouted. For the second time, the deep-draft patrol boat Wenshan had fallen victim to the shoal waters of the South China Sea — and the second time it had done so at a critical moment, while under attack from hostile Philippine forces. The image of the dragon drowning in the ocean rushed upon the Chinese Admiral once again — the battle, it seemed, always came to him.…