Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06

by Fatal Terrain (v1. 1)

  “We will—when we get the right opportunity and the right targets, Brad,” McLanahan said. “Right now, we’ve got to finish repairs, then see if we can mount any of the ROC’s cluster munitions on our rotary launchers. Wendy, Brad, can you help General Hsiao’s techs finish the repairs on the DSO’s stuff?” Wendy nodded, gave Dave Luger a kiss to help speed his recovery, and hurried off back to the EB-52.

  Patrick turned back to Luger. “Bedrest for you, chum.” He noticed Dave Luger wearing the archetypical “shit-eating grin” on his face, which looked even more funny with half of his face swollen and purple. “What are you grinning at?”

  “You, Muck,” Luger said. “Look at you—tossing orders around, and everyone’s jumping, even Brad Elliott. Pretty cool. You’ve taken over this team, whether you know it or not.”

  “So I’m like some modern Asian Robin Hood with his merry band of outlaws, huh?” Patrick remarked. “Sticking it to the Chinese and defending Taiwan.”

  “I don’t mean just the mystical Zen bombardier, Patrick—you’re turning into the boss man around here,” Luger said seriously. “When we first started flying together, you didn’t want to have anything to do with commanders, not even aircraft commanders. You’d been offered dozens of command positions even before you made the major’s list, and you turned them all down. I don’t know how many more positions you were offered since the Old Dog mission—probably another couple dozen. Everybody knew you and respected your talents, but you weren’t a leader, and you never wanted any leadership positions. Now everybody’s waiting for you to give the word, even Brad.”

  “If you’re done busting my chops, Dave, I’m gonna head downstairs and check on our plane.”

  “I’m serious, Muck, I really am,” Luger said. “I’m not busting your chops. You’ve really changed. You’re not just a crewdog anymore— you’re a leader, a commander.” He smiled again. “Who woulda thunk it?” .

  “Not me,” Patrick said. He gave Luger a thumbs-up and left him in the company of a nurse and a security guard.

  Nancy Cheshire met McLanahan on the tarmac. The Taiwanese were busy launching frequent air patrols over Formosa, and the air inside the cavern was thick and heavy with jet exhaust that the ventilators were having trouble keeping clear. “How are we doing on mating the CBUs to the Megafortress, Nance?” Patrick asked.

  “We might be able to do something if we can mount a few racks onto the lower three beams of the rotary launcher,” Cheshire replied. “If we can, that’ll give us at least six CBUs per launcher. Unfortunately, there’s not enough room to mount racks and bombs on the entire launcher, only the bottom three stations. We’re pretty certain we can do a ‘straight six’ arrangement and put six CBUs on the lower and inboard stations of the wing weapon pods—that’s another twelve. With both launchers full, we can carry as many CBUs as six Taiwanese F-16s.”

  “Great news,” Patrick said.

  “This is even better news, I think,” Cheshire said. “We downloaded this off the satellite communications terminal—an incoming message, addressed to you”

  “Incoming?” Patrick remarked with surprise. “Is it from Sky Masters? They’re the only ones that we’ve been talking to.”

  “Nope, it’s not from Arkansas . . . it’s from Louisiana,” Cheshire said, wearing her broad, Cheshire cat smile. Patrick stopped short as he read . . . and he too began to put on a broad smile.

  “Nancy, I want power on the airplane, and—”

  “You got power and the SATCOM terminal’s fired up,” Cheshire said, but Patrick didn’t hear her—he was trotting, now running, toward the EB-52 Megafortress, to reply to the incredible message he’d just received.

  THE WHITE HOUSE OVAL OFFICE. WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, 24 JUNE 1997, 1812 HOURS LOCAL

  (WEDNESDAY, 25 JUNE, 0712 HOURS IN BEIJING, CHINA)

  “This madness must stop, Mr. President,” Foreign Minister Qian Quichen said via an interpreter on the hot-line phone from Beijing. The foreign ministers voice in the background betrayed his agitation and anger. “The people of China are clamoring for war, sir! They want revenge for the bloodthirsty sneak attack on our cities. President Jiang is going to make a personal appeal for calm on national television this morning, but he is under tremendous pressure from the military, the Congress, and the Politburo to retaliate against your naked aggression.”

  “I’m sorry, Minister Qian, but I’ve told you twice already—the United States had nothing to do with any of those alleged attacks against your cities,” President Kevin Martindale said. With him in the Oval Office were his closest advisors: Ellen Whiting, Arthur Chastain, Jeffrey Hartman, Jerrod Hale, Philip Freeman, and Admiral George Balboa. An Army military intelligence officer fluent in Mandarin Chinese was interpreting and making notes for the President. “None of our bombers or attack planes were involved. Do you understand me, Minister Qian? No bombers of any kind under my command were involved in any attacks.”

  “Then you ... you are not being truthful,” the halting response came from Beijing.

  “He said you are a liar,” the Army-Chinese language specialist interjected. “He said you are a ‘damnable liar.’ His exact words, sir.”

  “That son of a bitch” the President swore half aloud, taking his fingers off the phones “dead-man switch” so Qian could not hear his curses. “Who the hell does he think he’s talking to?” He reactivated the handset once again, “Minister Qian, lets all compose ourselves and act like civilized men,” he said, forcing every bit of calm he could into his voice. “You can call me a liar, you can believe me or not believe me, I don't care. But here are the facts as we know them, sir: you launched ten intermediate-range ballistic missiles on an American military installation and destroyed it with a nuclear warhead. Do you dispute those facts, Minister Qian?”

  “We do not dispute the fact that we launched rockets,” Qian said through his interpreter, “but the rockets were not attack rockets, and they contained no nuclear warheads, only meteorological data packages.”

  “Minister Qian, our satellites and radar stations tracked those missiles from the moment they were launched to the instant they hit Guam,” the President said angrily. “The ten missiles that you launched from your launch sites in Ningsia and Inner Mongolia Provinces were the ones that were tracked heading for Guam. We detected the warhead separation and tracked each individual warhead as it reentered the atmosphere—we even tracked the one missile that destabilized and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, and with luck we’ll recover pieces of it and prove to the world that it was a Dong Feng-4 ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, as we believe it is. We have incontrovertible evidence of a Chinese nuclear attack on Guam, Minister Qian. The question now is, what is China going to do next?”

  “Mr. President, the weather satellite rockets launched a few hours ago that you say you tracked were not responsible for the unconscionable devastation on your colonial island,” Qian said. “We have data to show the exact trajectory of our weather satellites that were inserted into low Earth orbit by those rockets, and we will be most happy to send that data to you. The satellites are still in orbit, a fact that any capable government can check on its own. As for the warheads that you say separated from our rockets, we cannot say. Your equipment or your analysis was obviously faulty. We had no reentry vehicles on our rockets, especially not nuclear warheads.”

  Unfortunately, Qian was partly telling the truth, the President reminded himself. Three of the rockets launched among the ten inserted had later been identified by space surveillance cameras as visual- and infrared-spectrum photo weather satellites. As far as anyone could determine, these three satellites were harmless—and their presence afforded a weak but defensible explanation for the multiple Chinese rocket launch. It still could not erase all of the other evidence that China had attacked Guam with nuclear weapons, but now the possibility, however slim, that China had not shot rockets with nuclear weapons on board had to be carefully investigated. And that would ta
ke time.

  “Minister Qian, I would like you to pass along a message to President Jiang and to the other members of your government,” President Martindale said firmly. “Tell him that I am going to speak to the leaders of both houses of Congress about going to the full Congress and the American people and asking for a declaration of war against China. ”

  Even the interpreter, trained not to react emotionally to anything he heard or said, gasped at the announcement and had trouble providing a translation both of the President’s message and of Qian’s response: “You . . . you must not, sir!” Qian’s translator said in a quivering voice. “Mr. President, we are at odds only with the Nationalists on Taiwan, not with the United States of America. Please, sir, stop your support of this illegal and disruptive society, and assist the world community with reuniting all of China, and we promise that China will work tirelessly to strengthen the ties between our two nations.”

  “Please pass along my message to President Jiang, Minister Qian,” the President said stonily. “I will be ready any time of the day and night to receive his reply. Good day to you, sir.” The President handed over the phone to Jerrod Hale with a grim expression on his face.

  “You want a drink, Mr. President?” Hale asked. “I could sure go for one.”

  “Not now, Jerrod,” the President said testily. He ran a tired hand over his eyes. “Christ, I feel like a cornered animal, with no other option but to lash out at anyone and everyone in front of me.”

  Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain got off the phone near the coffee table in the informal conference area of the Oval Office. “Pentagon reporting a firefight across the DMZ, near Changdan. A North Korean special forces team blew up a tank maintenance facility. No reports yet on casualties or damage. Several artillery rounds were also fired towards Seoul, probably a probe. The USAF reports one F-16 anti-radar patrol fighter shot down five miles south of the DMZ by a surface-to-air missile; North Korea claims it was flying in the north. Pilot’s believed to be a casualty. ”

  “I want to find a way to send some assistance to South Korea,” the President demanded. “What’s the best way? Arthur? Admiral? Let’s hear it.”

  “Sir, we’ve got the George Washington in the Pacific, just a day or two from its operations area in the Philippine Sea,” Balboa said. “If we can get the Japanese to allow our supply ships to move out of their harbors, we can bring in the Washington to begin air ops against North Korea.”

  “But that’s the problem, Admiral—Japan won’t allow us to move any ammunition supply ships out of their harbors,” Chastain said. “We’ve got food and fuel from Japan, but just a trickle of ammunition and spare parts. The Washington would be good for combat operations for about two weeks, and then it runs short. ” He turned to the President: “The best option would be to bring in more carriers, sir. With three carriers in the Philippine Sea and East China Sea area, we could-conduct reduced-level offensive air ops against North Korea, and perhaps have a limited holding force should China decide to attack. With four carriers, we could conduct full-scale air ops against North Korea or China, and do a holding force against anyone else trying to hit us from the side.”

  “Four carriers,” the President muttered. “As many as we had in the Persian Gulf War, but without the nearby supply bases.”

  “We run the risk of having too few carriers available in case things blow up in the Middle East,” Philip Freeman interjected.

  “We’ve got plenty of assets, General Freeman,” Balboa argued.

  “Lincoln would have to stay in the Arabian Sea to keep her eye on whatever the Iranians might do, now that they’ve captured one of our subs and might not give it back—and it might be better to bring another carrier out of the Med to reinforce her, or send more land-based planes from the States to Saudi,” Freeman explained. “So we cancel Lincolns planned rotation and send Carl Vinson in to work with Washington. That’s two. We’d then have to send Kitty Hawk out of the Indian Ocean to reinforce Vinson and Washington until we can get Nimitz under way from Alameda. A fourth carrier would have to come from the Atlantic Fleet.”

  “I count two carriers that we can place on North Korea’s front doorstep in two days, three within a week, and four in a month—so far, I don’t see a big problem here,” Balboa said. “The carrier crews are ready to get into action—they want revenge for the attack on Lincoln earlier this year by Iran, the death of the Independence, and now for the attack on Guam. This is shaping up to be a carrier war, sir,” Balboa said with a touch of barely disguised glee in his voice and eyes. “Let the boys go out and kick some butt. ”

  “It’s a lot of carriers within range of China’s missiles,” Freeman pointed out.

  “We can take care of China and her missiles,” Balboa said confidently. At that moment, one of Balboa’s military aides entered the Oval Office, stepped over to the admiral, whispered in his ear, then departed again.

  “Seems like you have visitors, Mr. President,” Balboa said. “Air Force chief of staff Hayes, Shaw from Air Combat Command, and Samson from Eighth Air Force. They probably want to pitch another hackneyed bomber idea to you. I heard rumblings from General Hayes that Samson was kicked off the Combined Task Force in Strategic Command because he was resisting putting ‘his’ bombers on nuclear alert.”

  “Fm not thrilled about keeping them on alert either,” the President said bitterly. “But I don’t want to talk with them. Those three screwed up big-time with how they handled the Megafortress project. Elliott, McLanahan, Masters, all their weapons, and one of the Megafortresses are missing after they apparently steal the planes, ignoring my orders, and now Finegold and her committees are on my ass because they think I was hiding them.” The anger was evident on the President’s face—but Philip Freeman detected something else. A twinge of sadness, perhaps? “Now we’ve lost all the Megafortresses with the rest of Andersen Air Force Base. You handle them the way you see fit, George. That’s your chain of command.”

  “Yes, sir,” Balboa said happily. He shot a smug, satisfied glance to Philip Freeman, who had engineered the whole bomber thing behind his back all these past months, but he had stepped out of the Oval Office. Freeman had been shot down just as surely as Samson and his precious bombers had been.

  “Get the carriers moving towards the Philippine Sea, and we’ll see what Jiang has to say to me,” the President ordered. “Jeffrey, stay in contact with Qian, keep the pressure on.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Hartman replied.

  “Jerrod, call the Leadership, set up a meeting for us later tonight so we can discuss what to do about China,” the President said. “I might have to compromise with Finegold on Taiwan, but Taiwan can take a backseat for now—I want a united front beside me when I go on TV and tell the American people about what the hell happened to Guam.”

  At that moment, Philip Freeman walked into the Oval Office, strode right up to the President, and handed him a note. President Martindale gulped, swallowing hard, then dropped the note on his desk in surprise. “Get them in here, now” the President said to Freeman.

  "What?” Balboa retorted. “You mean Hayes, Shaw, and Samson? You’re going to talk to those three? Why? I thought you were going to leave them to me, sir?”

  “McLanahan, Elliott, his crew, his plane—they’re alive,” the President said. “They were the ones who staged the attacks against China, against the coastal air defense bases and the bomber base. They led the last remaining Taiwanese fighter-bombers in to attack China’s invasion force.”

  “That’s impossible! ” Balboa shouted. “Where-are they? How could they possibly still be operating?”

  “They’re flying out of an underground base on Taiwan,” the President said. “An underground air base!”

  “That’s bullshit.. . er, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I’ve never heard of any such thing,” Balboa said.

  “Admiral, McLanahan and Elliott flew their Megafortress bomber right up into central China,” Philip Freeman s
aid. “If what General Samson says is true—and we’ll confirm it with satellite imagery—they may have knocked out a third of China’s long-range-bomber fleet in one night. We shouldn’t be questioning this development—we should be discussing how to turn this unexpected windfall to our best advantage.”

  “I told you about Elliott, Mr. President,” Balboa said angrily. “I told you he was a loose cannon. It was this unauthorized attack that prompted China to launch their ICBM attack on Guam. Elliott’s responsible for this disaster!”

  “What Elliott and McLanahan are responsible for is getting our asses moving and making things happen, rather than sitting around and waiting for things to happen,” the President said. The President was now ignoring his Joint Chiefs chairman. “Get them in here,” he told Freeman with a broad, hopeful smile on his face. “They survived, dammit—they survive d!”

  OVER THE EAST CHINA SEA, NORTH OF TAIWAN FRIDAY, 27 JUNE 1997, 2012 HOURS LOCAL (THURSDAY, 26 JUNE, 0912 HOURS ET)

  The 221st People’s Maritime Patrol of the People’s Republic of China, based on Yuhuan Island thirty miles east of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, had been formed in 1955, flying rag-wing biplanes off the coast every hour of every day for forty-two years except in the most extreme weather conditions. The group’s mission was to patrol the coastline, operating roughly from Shanghai to the north all the way to Hong Kong to the south, although the group’s aircraft mostly patrolled the Formosa Strait.

  The 221st was like an exclusive club. There were only one hundred members in the unit, and there would only ever be one hundred members—no more, no less. Prospective members had to be recommended by three other members, screened by a selection committee, and approved by the commander. Members served for life, and the only vacancies were the ones caused by death or court-martial, never by resignation. The group had several members over the age of ninety who still strapped into the back of their patrol planes and stared out the observation windows looking for enemy ships or ships in distress—the same as they had done for the past forty-plus years.