“Nothing,” said a voice behind him. It was the operations officer himself, standing over his shoulder. “No fighters will launch from Fuzhou. Vector the three surviving fighters from the Juidongshan engagement to Shantou, get them on the ground as soon as possible.”
“What?”
“Do it,” the ops officer snapped. “No more arguments from you— lives depend on it. Move ”
Land-based radars at Xiamen confirmed what the 11–76 crew feared — it was an all-out assault, with more than thirty F-16 fighter- bombers in eight formations coming in at different altitudes and from different directions. No fighters challenged them.
The F-16 pilots knew that the Hong Qian-2 surface-to-air missiles based at Xiamen, just five miles west of the Taiwanese island of Quemoy, had a maximum range of 34 miles and an optimum range of only 20 miles. The HQ-2s were old copies of ex-Russian SA-2 “flying telephone pole” missiles, huge lumbering two-stage missiles designed to attack 1950s— and 1960s-era bombers, missiles with big warheads but with unreliable, slow, and easily jammable radio remote-control command guidance— hardly a match for the swift and nimble F-16s.
The Taiwanese satellite intelligence was excellent, and the F-16’s APG-66 attack radars locked onto the navigation and bombing aim- points with ease; once the radars were locked on and a navigation update taken, the Falcon Eye imaging infrared sensors were activated and slaved to the four possible targets at each target waypoint. At forty miles, little could be seen on Falcon Eye or radar except for larger buildings; most of the F-16s were going hunting for the more vital buildings in the complex — headquarters, air- and coastal-defense weapon sites, communications, barracks, weapon-storage facilities, aboveground fuel storage, and…
Threat receivers blared to life seconds after the F-16s sped inside max HQ-2 missile range, as the search and height-finder radars switched to target-tracking and missile-guidance modes and several surface-to-air missiles leapt into the sky from Xiamen. The F-16 pilots activated their electronic countermeasure pods and dropped chaff to decoy the enemy radars. At night, it was easy to spot the HQ-2 missiles as they lifted off their launchers, trailing a long bright yellow plume of fire. All of the HQ-2s went ballistic, powering up to very high altitude, thousands of feet above the F-16s. Their second-stage boosters ignited, powering them up even higher, some 30,000 feet above the Taiwanese attackers, before starting their terminal dive toward the F-16s.
The F-16s’ ECM pods effectively jammed the Chinese target-tracking radars, so the Chinese missile technicians had to continually relock their radars onto another target — but they had no way of knowing that they had locked onto a cloud of radar-decoying chaff until several seconds after lock-on, when they would notice that the target was hanging in the sky at zero airspeed. They had only seconds to reacquire another legitimate target, because the HQ-2 missiles were on their way down toward the rebel F-16s.
The F-16 pilots had detected only perhaps six or eight HQ-2 SAM launches, with one or two missiles targeted on each inbound attack formation. Even if all of them hit an F-16, which was extremely unlikely, the strike package would still be intact. The Chinese defenders might have one more shot at the F-16s if they were lucky, but more likely the F-16s would blow through a second wave and be over the base, and then the fun would start. Another turkey shoot, just like their successful brothers down over Juidongshan. Quemoy Tao, the Taiwanese-controlled islands east of Xiamen, would be safe from attack and finally avenged for the Chinese nuclear attack that had almost destroyed…
In the blink of an eye, all thirty-two Taiwanese F-16 fighter-bombers disappeared.
The special emergency underground command center in Beijing had been used only a few times in its forty-year history. The bunker had been used for long periods of time during conflicts between China and the Soviet Union in 1961 and 1979 that threatened to go nuclear; the other time was during the last major Chinese invasion of Taiwan, in 1955, when the United States had threatened to use nuclear weapons to stop the Communists from overrunning Taiwan. Built by engineers from the Soviet Union, the bunker was a perfect, albeit slightly smaller, replica of the Kremlin underground emergency bunker in Moscow, used when there was no time to evacuate the political and Party leadership from the city.
The 8,000-square-foot steel and concrete facility, set six stories under the Chinese Ministry of Defense on forty huge spring shock absorbers to cushion the shock of nearby nuclear explosions, was designed and provisioned to accommodate an operations, support, and security staff of thirty-eight — many of whom were women, the implications obvious— plus fifty high government officials. Now it contained the proper amount of staff and technicians, but perhaps three times the maximum number of government officials. President Jiang Zemin and his closest civilian and military advisors were seated around a simple rectangular table in the center of the bunker. Surrounding them were the other high officials and their aides, then a ring of communications, intelligence, and planning officers at their consoles and workstations that fed the president and his advisors a constant stream of information. Finally, the remainder of the government officials that had threatened, bribed, forced, or cajoled their way inside were jammed into every remaining nook and cranny of the bunker.
President Jiang scowled as he surveyed his surroundings. They had been in the bunker since midnight, when intelligence had reported that the rebel Nationalist air attack was under way. Eighty persons stuffed into the small enclosure was bad enough—180 was almost intolerable. But it was too late to open the blast doors. The worst part was that the one man he wanted to talk to was not present. This was an outrage! he thought. Sun Ji Guoming was going to suffer for this.
“Excuse me, Comrade President,” the defense minister, Chi Haot- ian, said. “Admiral Sun is on the line via satellite.”
“Where is he? I ordered him to be here before the attack began! ” “Sir… comrade, he is airborne, calling from a bomber aircraft over Jiangxi province! ”
“What? Give me that!” Jiang snatched the receiver from Chi. “Admiral Sun, this is the president. I want an explanation, and I want it now!”
“Yes, sir,” Sun Ji Guoming responded. “I am aboard an H-7 Gang- fang bomber. I am using it as my airborne command post to monitor the attack on the rebel Nationalists on Taiwan. We are ready to begin our attack on Makung, Taichung, Hsinchu, Tainan, and Tsoying. I request permission to begin our attacks. Over.”
Jiang was so angry that his words were coming out in confused sputters. “I ordered you to report here, to me, before these attacks began!” he shouted. “Why have you disobeyed me?”