The American Air Battle Force, however, was obviously ignoring all warnings.
“CIC, bridge, position of our fighter coverage.”
“Sir, Liang-Two flight of eight J-7 fighters are over Nenusa Archipelago, one hundred eleven kilometers northwest of the B-52. They are less than ten minutes from bingo fuel and have already received permission to return to Zamboanga for refueling. Sichuan-One-Zero flight of four Q-5 fighters are three hundred kilometers northwest of the B-52, headed southeast to take over for Liang-Two flight.”
Damned sparse fighter coverage, Kaifeng’s commander thought to himself. Because that bomber was a “ferret,” running away at the first sign of trouble, they were not giving it as much fighter attention as they should. Well, that was going to stop right here and now.
“CIC, bridge, chase that damned plane out of here,” Kaifeng’s commander ordered. At this point chasing “Old Gas” out of antiship-missile range was more important than revealing radar frequencies. “Hit them with the fire-control radar.” That was usually plenty to make the B-52 turn and run.
“Yes, sir,” the combat information officer responded. “Shall I recall Liang-Two flight to provide air cover?”
“Get a fuel state from them. If they have not reached bingo fuel yet, have them engage. If they have reached bingo, engage with the HQ-91 system. Then vector in Sichuan-Ten flight and have them chase that B-52 out past two hundred kilometers.”
The warning tone over the interphone system for a missile acquisition radar was different from a search radar — in general, the more serious a threat, the faster and more insistent the tone. The appearance of a “Search” radar gave a rather leisurely “Deeedle… Deeedle… Deeedle.” When the Chinese Golf-band air-search radar changed to an India-band missile acquisition radar, the tone was a fast, loud “Deeedledeeedledeeedledeeedle!” At the same time, “Missile Warning” lights illuminated at every station of the EB-52C Megafortress bomber orbiting at thirty thousand feet over the Philippine Sea.
“Missile warning, twelve o’clock,” the electronic warfare officer, First Lieutenant Robert Atkins, announced. “India-band radar… ‘Fog Lamp’ SAM director for an HQ-91 missile. This’ll change to missile launch at any second.” Atkins’ voice became squeakier with every passing moment — he was an engineer, not a crew dog, and he never thought he’d be taking these behemoth modified B-52s into battle.
“Don’t sweat it,” Major Kelvin Carter, the Megafortress’s pilot, said, trying to project the most confident voice he could. “They’re just trying to scare us out. Easy on the jammers until the shit starts rollin’.”
Carter’s words did little to calm young Atkins down, so he turned back to the peace and security he usually got from the one thing that he knew he could trust in this screwed-up world — his equipment. Designed at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center several years ago by a near-mythical engineer named Wendy Tork, Atkins had improved on Tork’s groundbreaking designs and produced what was probably the best electronic warfare suite ever to leave the ground.
Atkins was sitting before a complex of multi-function displays on the Megafortress Plus’s upper deck, scanning the skies for enemy radars and programming the bomber’s array of jammers against each one. His ECM system automatically processed the electronic signals, analyzed them, identified them, pointed out their range and bearing from the Megafortress, and selected the appropriate jamming packages to use against them. It could do the same with a hundred other signals from very long ranges. The system would also automatically dispense decoys against radar or heat-seeking missiles to protect them from missile attacks.
A B-52G or -H Stratofortress bomber had performed all the other “ferret” flights from Guam in the past few days, but tonight it was an EB-52 Megafortress pulling the unenviable task of drawing the attention of the Chinese Navy and assessing the threats present around eastern Mindanao — a regular B-52 was hardly qualified to take such a risk.
All in all, the system relegated Atkins to a “verbal squawk box” role — what the others called “crew coordination” was still a foreign concept to him, since everything on the Megafortress was so automated — as it should be, of course. Why risk an extra human life on board, when a computer could do the job faster, better, and cheaper anyway?
His directed defensive weapons were designed to operate automatically as well. The Megafortress had eight AGM-136A TACIT RAINBOW antiradar cruise missiles in clip-in racks in the forward part of the bomb bay, plus a rotary launcher with eight AGM-88B HARM High-Speed AntiRadar Missiles in the aft bomb bay. The electronic countermeasures system would automatically program both the HARM and TACIT RAINBOW missiles for a particular enemy radar system they encountered. In case that particular radar was shut down during a TACIT RAINBOW attack, the missile would stay aloft for several minutes, search for just that radar, home in on it, and destroy it after reactivation. If another ship tried to shoot down the subsonic TACIT RAINBOW cruise missile with radar-controlled guns, Atkins could launch supersonic HARM missiles at the radar and destroy it.
The bottom line: he had designed all this to be totally automatic, and it was obvious that he didn’t fit in with this crew. Why in hell then was he here?
Seated beside Atkins was the Megafortress’s “gunner,” Master Sergeant Kory Karbayjal. Karbayjal and the other noncommissioned officers flying that position still liked the name “gunner” or “bulldog,” although the term was an anachronism — the old .50-caliber machine guns or 20-millimeter Gatling gun of other, more conventional BUFFs were gone, replaced by the EB-52’s array of defensive missiles. The Megafortress carried twelve AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles on wing pylons, and it carried fifty small Stinger rear-firing heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles in the tail launcher.
That was another job that could be done by computers, too, although Karbayjal obviously enjoyed his work. Karbayjal, a twenty-six-year veteran of the B-52, had flown the old D-model BUFFs, the ones where the gunner sat in the tail in a tiny compartment with his machine guns and used only his eyes to spot enemy fighters. He took it upon himself to look after young Atkins just as much as he looked for enemy fighters, something that Atkins resented as well.
The navigators, Captains Paul Scott and Alicia Kellerman, were downstairs keeping track of their position and preparing for fighter combat — the four Megafortress strategic escort bombers on this mission carried no ground-attack weapons because they were all designed to blast through enemy defenses and give the other strike aircraft a better chance of reaching their targets. Scott could use his attack radar to designate and track targets for their AIM-120 air-to-air missiles, while Alicia Kellerman controlled the dorsal ISAR radar and kept track of all other aircraft and enemy ships in the area. The pilots, Major Kelvin Carter and Lieutenant Nancy Cheshire, were very quiet — they were obviously steeling themselves for the battle that was about to begin.
Using the large dorsal side-looking radar in ISAR (inverse-synthetic aperture radar) mode, Kellerman had already identified the largest ship ahead as a Luda-class destroyer even before its weapons radars came up, so Atkins had already anticipated what kind of radars and weapons the vessel had and how to deal with each one. The Megafortress’s ISAR system had also mapped out the locations and movements of the other vessels in the south and west groups of Chinese ships and had passed that information to other aircraft.