Emil Vikram’s fingers were flying over his defensive weapon controls, immediately activating the ALQ-199 HAVE GLANCE active countermeasures system. On the Megafortress’s raised dorsal pod, tiny radar emitters popped up, slaved themselves to the enemy aircraft bearing from the threat receiver, and began tracking first the larger fighters and then the smaller, faster-moving Pen Lung-9 air-to-air missiles fired by the People’s Republic of China People’s Liberation Army Air Force Su-33 carrier- based fighters. As the missiles closed to within a mile, the ALQ-199 MAWS active countermeasures pods began firing laser beams at the missiles, blinding the sensitive radar sensors in the missile’s nosecap. Any PL- 9 missiles not decoyed by the chaff bundles or flares were hit by the lasers.
“Get on the horn, get some help up here!” Elliott shouted. “Clear on all weapons!”
Ignoring secure communications procedures, Cheshire activated the satellite transceiver and called, “Buster, this is Headbanger, we’re under attack, two Sukhoi-33s!”
“Copy, Headbanger,” Samson replied. “We’re trying to contact the ROC Air Force for assistance. Use everything you got to get out of there. Stand by.” The Megafortress crew got very quiet — they knew that help was very far away, and they were on their own.
“Stand by for AMRAAM launch!” Vikram shouted on interphone. The Sukhoi-33 s began a lazy right turn right in front of the Megafortress— they were obviously not expecting a counterattack by such a large, lumbering target. Vikram quickly locked up both Su-33s on the EB-52’s modified APG-73 attack radar from less than five miles away. “Roll wings level… birds leaving the rails, now. ” In two-second intervals, the last two AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAMs streaked off the left and right weapon pod launchers, and at less than six miles the medium-range active- guidance missiles were almost unstoppable. “Splash two!” Vikram shouted.
“How about that, Emitter — you’re a damned ace!” Cheshire said.
“Don’t start congratulating each other yet — I’ve got two more carrier fighters airborne,” McLanahan said. “Emitter, do you have contact on—?”
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Suddenly it seemed as if every molecule of air in the cabin were sizzling and popping like electrified popcorn. The interphone began to crack and sputter with loud static. Several aircraft systems popped offline, although all four engines continued to run perfectly.
“Hey, I just got some kind of spike in the electrical system,” Nancy Cheshire reported. “Number two generator’s off-line, essential bus B breakers popped. Check your systems, guys, before I reset.”
“What was that?” Vikram asked nervously. “I never got any spike like that before.”
“Just check your systems, D-so,” Elliott responded. “Station check. Cabin altitude is eight thousand… fuel system…” Just then, a terrific rumbling reverberated through the Megafortress, followed by a tremendous buffeting. Unsecured charts and checklist booklets flew through the cabin, and anyone who didn’t have their lap belts tightly snugged down felt the tops of their helmets bounce off the ceiling. “Jesus!” Elliott gasped as he tightened his grip on the control stick. “We running through a typhoon, or what? Anybody got anything?”
“I’ve got my stuff in standby,” McLanahan reported. “I suggest a heading of dead east. Let’s get some distance from that Chinese battle group until we get our gear back on-line. Emitter, get your switches in standby so Nancy can get that generator back on. Brad, let’s ask the Kin Men if he’s got anything.”
“Rog,” Elliott said, switching radios: “Gabriel, this is Headbanger, how copy? Gabriel, this is Headbanger on Fleet Two.” Deciding that Captain Sung had dispensed with the code words by now, Elliott tried, “Captain Sung, this is Headbanger, you read?”
Just then, there was another sudden snapp! of energy that raced through the Megafortress — but this time, in a right turn toward the east, Elliott saw what caused it: “Holy shit, crew, I just saw a bright flash off to the northwest through the clouds! Jesus… oh man, I think it was a nuclear explosion! ” He watched in horror as concentric rings of pure white clouds began to form far off on the horizon. The circular clouds raced across the sky, slowly dissipating as they got closer, until they disappeared — but moments later, another rumble and a hard shudder coursed through the big bomber. “I think that was the shock wave, crew. I think Quemoy got hit by a nuclear explosion! ”
“That shock was much less than the first one,” McLanahan said. “We’re a good forty miles from Quemoy — but we were only about ten miles from the Kin Men. I’ll be able to tell once my radar is back on-line, but the NIRTSat recon system isn’t showing the Kin Men on the board, and we can’t raise it by radio.”
“The Kin Men got hit by a nuclear anti-ship missile,” Cheshire stated flatly. The entire crew was stunned into silence, and no one argued with Nancy Cheshire on this point. A few years earlier, Nancy Cheshire had been flying in that very same seat in the very same EB-52 Megafortress (but before Jon Masters’s new modifications), on a mission over Belarus during the Lithuania-Belarus conflict. They had used an AIM-120 Scorpion missile to shoot down an SS-21 surface-to-surface nuclear missile that had been launched by pro-Soviet forces against the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius — and, it turned out, against the Belarussian capital of Minsk, in an attempt to kill any anti-Soviet supporters and heat up the Cold War once again. Cheshire had been on board the EB-52 when the SS-21 had missile created a partial nuclear yield just twenty miles away, temporarily blinding her. Her crew had barely managed to fly the crippled bomber to safety in Norway. “We don’t have anything to protect here anymore. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Let’s get a piece of that carrier and the destroyer first,” Elliott said angrily. “Son of a bitch, we should put that thing on the bottom of the ocean right now for what they’ve done! ”
“Brad, forget about the carrier and give me a hard right turn to the east,” McLanahan interjected. “We’ve got to get out of the area until we sort out our avionics problems and get some guidance on—”
“Fighters!” Cheshire shouted again. “Just above our altitude, nine o’clock, about five miles! You got ’em, Emitter?”
“I don’t have anything!” Vikram shouted in a high-pitched voice filled with fear. “No radar, no Scorpion missiles…”
“Relax, Emitter,” McLanahan said. “Get your stuff back on and let’s see what we got. Check your tail cannon, see if you have control of the airmines.”
Vikram turned all of his equipment to OFF, waited a few seconds instead of a few minutes, then turned them directly back to ON instead of waiting to warm them up in STBY. He then activated his helmet-mounted “virtual” steering controls for the Stinger tail defense airmine rockets. The B-52’s old .50-caliber or 20-millimeter tail guns, which had been removed a few years earlier along with the gunner, had been replaced on the EB-52 Megafortress with an 80-millimeter launcher that fired radar- or radio-controlled rockets. The rockets, called “airmines,” were detonated either automatically or by manual command out to nearly four miles; they contained dozens of tungsten steel cubes that could shred aircraft skin or shell out an engine if sucked into an engine inlet.