But Yi had a bad feeling about this: this was no photo opportunity or publicity ploy. The rebel warship was serious — it meant to board and search a foreign warship nearly twenty times its size! “Sound general quarters, all ships, all hands at battle stations, not an exercise,” Yi shouted. “Get the fighters up on deck and ready to launch, full air defense weapon load. Comrade Chong, report to the Combat Information Center, prepare to take charge of the engagement if they get a lucky shot off and hit the bridge. I will take the battle helm from here.”
“They cannot be serious!” the first officer, Chong, shouted as the quartermaster sounded the general quarters bell. “They mean to engage us?”
“If they try, it will be the shortest naval engagement in history,” Yi said angrily. “Officer of the deck, signal the task force to shift to combat formation. Bring the formation to thirty knots, give me twenty degrees to port to put our guns on the starboard side. Get Helicopter Group One on deck armed for anti-submarine warfare, and Helicopter Groups Two and Three ready for rescue duties. ” Yi knew that Taiwan had a small force of F-16 and F-5 fighter-bombers and, although they were very far away, they could do some damage if they got through the Kangs Crotale Mod- ulaire surface-to-air missile screen — they could easily overwhelm Yi s small fleet of Sukhoi-33 fighters and close-in weapon systems.
“All stations report manned and ready,” the officer of the deck reported a few minutes later. “The group also reports all stations manned and ready for combat. Estimate five minutes before the group is in combat formation. Interceptor flight one is up on deck, ready to launch in about ten minutes.”
“Very well,” Yi responded. “Combat, range to the rebel frigate?”
“Range fifteen thousand meters.”
Well within range of the frigate’s Harpoon missiles, Yi thought, but if the rebels were going to use them, they would’ve done it long ago. “Cowards,” Yi said to the captain of the Taiwanese frigate acidly. “You should have taken the shot when you had the chance — now you have no chance.” To his officer of the deck, Yi ordered, “I want a lookout to watch that frigate — if it tries to launch its helicopter or traverse that gun, I want to know about it immediately. Send a Flash priority signal to fleet headquarters; notify them that we are being threatened by an armed Taiwanese frigate that is ordering us to stop and be boarded. Advise them that we are proceeding at best speed and ask for instructions — and I want permission to engage and destroy that patrol boat if necessary.”
“That PLAN battle groups got everything lit up, crew,” defensive systems officer (DSO) Air Force First Lieutenant Emil “Emitter” Vikram reported, referring to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy vessels. “Rice Screen Golf-band air search, Crotale antiair, Square Tie Type 331 anti-ship targeting, India-band Sun Visor fire control, Great Leader satellite communications, jammers across the entire spectrum — he’s broadcasting everything but AM and FM golden oldies. He’s leaking so much power out his side lobes that I can feel it in my fillings.”
“We get the message, DSO,” retired Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, the pilot, replied. Vikram had been the youngest and one of the brightest engineers at the now-closed High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, but he had the least amount of flight experience, so he still hadn’t learned to completely control his excitement when using the interphone. “Just give us the important news and record the rest. Co, you should be double-checking the ‘combat’ checklist. If you’re just sitting there with nothing to do, with a Chinese battle group ready to attack just twenty miles away, you’re probably missing something.”
“Hey, I was born ready, General,” the copilot retorted, causing an exasperated scowl from the pilot. “My checklist’s complete — I’m just waiting for the fur to start flying.” Sitting across from Elliott, monitoring the four large color multifunction displays on the forward instrument panel, was his copilot, Air Force Major Nancy Cheshire. A longtime test pilot and engineer, Cheshire had spent several years at HAWC as one of Elliott’s most talented pilots and flight test engineers; she had already flown two secret strike missions in the EB-52 as part of Brad Elliott’s classified stealth raiders. When HAWC had closed, she had been assigned as one of the first female B-2 Spirit stealth bomber pilots in the U.S. Air Force — but she had readily given up that choice assignment when McLanahan and Elliott had asked to “borrow” her to fly one of Jon Masters’s Megafortress strategic escort “flying battleships.”
This Megafortress was loaded for bear with both offensive and defensive weapons. Instead of a standard weapon pylon, each wing held a large teardrop-shaped stealthy fibersteel fairing that contained the external weapons on ejector racks. Each wing weapons fairing held six AGM-177 Wolverine stealth turbojet cruise missiles, which were tar- getable rocket-powered cruise missiles with a range of up to fifty miles, fitted with three small internal bomb bays that could carry a variety of weapons or other payloads. The Wolverine missiles on this mission carried a mix of payloads — half were configured as area jammer/decoys that could simulate a massive bomber or fighter attack and completely shut down radar screens and disrupt enemy air defense systems for miles in all directions; the other half carried cluster bomb packages so each missile could attack three targets, then dive into a fourth. Each pylon also carried four radar-guided AIM-120C AMRAAMs for bomber defense — in total, the same number of missiles as on a F-15 Eagle fighter — that could be fired at enemy targets up to thirty miles away, even behind the bomber.
Internally, the EB-52 Megafortress was armed with twelve AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow anti-radar cruise missiles in the forward part of the bomb bay, which were small turbojet-powered missiles that would loiter over an area and automatically attack an enemy radar that activated nearby which transmitted specific threat frequencies — the missiles could orbit for up to an hour over a twenty-five-square-mile area. The aft section of the fifty-foot long bomb bay contained the bomber’s maximum offensive punch that would hopefully not be needed on this mission — a rotary launcher with eight AGM-142B Striker missiles. The Strikers were rocket-powered, supersonic bombs with a 1,000-pound high-explosive warhead that carried a satellite navigation system and TV and imaging infrared terminal guidance packages that gave them precision-kill capability; wings that unfolded after release from the bomb bay gave the Striker missile a ballistic cruising range of nearly fifty miles.
“I show us in COMBAT mode and ready to fight,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan, the offensive systems officer, said. McLanahan could sense the tension in the voices of everyone on board, even Brad Elliott. It had been over two years since Elliott had flown in combat, and almost a year since losing command of HAWC, and his nervousness and hyper alertness were obvious. McLanahan checked the mission status readout on his weapons display. The mission status readout was a direct satellite link with U.S. Pacific Command headquarters at Pearl Harbor, which indicated their orders continuously. Although McLanahan could override PACCOM’s orders, the active datalink was the same as a direct verbal order from U.S. Pacific Command. “Datalink mission status is CHECK FIRE, and my nose is cold. Everyone stand by.”
McLanahan’s offensive systems suite was dominated by the SMFD, or Super Multi Function Display, a two-by-three foot screen on the forward instrument panel, from which McLanahan controlled all of his systems and weapons. Using a Macintosh-like interface, McLanahan could display any combination of flight, navigation, weapons, systems, or sensor information on that screen, and resize, stack, or move any of the windows around with ease. McLanahan controlled the SMFD in three ways: he could touch the screen with a finger to manipulate windows; he could use a trackball and pointer like a mouse; or he could issue commands to the computer by hitting a switch near his right foot and speaking to the computer. Using all three methods together allowed McLanahan to operate his systems with incredible speed and accuracy.