by Dale Brown
untary early retirement last year. His appetite for decisive, raw,
raging combat, to do whatever it took to achieve victory, the
urge to drive your enemies before you and take command, was
gone. He was a technoid now, almost reaching full "suit"
status. Elliott couldn't imagine it, but Patrick might actually
prefer flying a desk now instead of flying a bomber. The old
'Muck" McLanahan, bombardier extraordinaire, would never
allow a squid to get between him and control of the skies, the
earth, or the seas anywhere in the-
Brad Elliott was just starting to ease his artificial leg under
the stiff, clean white sheets when the phone on the table near
the window rang. Swearing aloud, he got up to answer it.
"VAat?"
It was an Asian voice on the other end: "Do I have the
pleasure of speaking with Lieutenant General Bradley James
Elliott?"
"Who the hell is this?"
"My name is Kuo Han-min, General. I am the ambassador
to the United States of America from the Republic of China,
calling from New York. I am very pleased to speak to you."
"You were in the White House, meeting with the Presi-
dent.
"Yes, General. I am pleased that the President has pledged
his support for my country, and I hope he successfully con-
vinces your parliament and the American people that my coun-
try should remain independent from the Communists."
"How did you find my number?"
FATAL TERRA I N 115
"I am well familiar with Dr. Jon Masters and his com-
pany," Kuo explained. "Once I saw you and Colonel Patrick
McLanahan with Dr. Masters, I logically assumed you were
working with him. After that, it was easy to trace your office
number."
1, in not listed," Elliott said, in an angry tone. "Not here,
not anywhere."
"I must give credit to my eager staff," Kuo said, in -a light
tone, "and admit I do not know how I came to get your num-
ber, only that I have it-as well as your Oregon address and
your travel itinerary for today."
"Whatdo you want?"
"General, sir, I have called to ask a great boon," Kuo said.
"I deduce by your conversation with President Martindale and
your hasty return to Dr. Masters's facility in your charming
southern American state of Arkansas that you are preparing to
launch a great mission to support my people and my country
against the threat we now face by the Chinese Communists."
"You deduce wrong," Elliott said. "Good-bye."
"Let us coordinate our attacks, General," Kuo went on
quickly. "Together, we can destroy the Communist fleet once
and for all. The power of your incredible bomber fleet,
matched with my country's naval power, will mean certain
death for any who threaten my country or any democratic so-
ciety in Asia."
"I Oon't know what you're talking about," Elliott said.
"What we're doing is none of your business. What you're
doing is none of ours."
"The Cominunist carrier battle group is carrying nuclear
weapons," Ambassador Kuo said. "The carrier is carrying
three nuclear-tipped M-11 land attack missiles, and the two
destroyers each carry four nuclear-tipped SS-N-12 anti-ship
InIssiles."
Elliott's jaw dropped open in surprise. "You're shifting
me ... you know this for a fact? Are you sure?"
"We are positive of our information, General," Ku said.
"We believe their target is Quemoy Tao. My country is send-
ing our newest frigate, the Kin Men, out to intercept and de-
stroy these vessels before they can get within range and launch
their missiles. I am begging you to help us. Use the power of
your Megafortress bombers to help defend our warship until
116 DALE B ROW N
it can successfully destroy the three nuclear-armed Communist
warships."
"How in hell do you know ... ?"
"General Elliott, I assure you, many friends as well as many
enemies know or can logically assume much about your spe-
cial bomber fleet," Kuo said. "Believe me, sir, the Republic
of China is a friend. You are our best hope for survival until
President Martindale can defeat his opponents in your Con-
gress and commit the full force of American military strength
against the Chinese Communists. You are the new Flying Ti-
gers, the new American Volunteer Group, the band of brave
Americans who seek to save your friends the Chinese Nation-
alists from being destroyed by powerful imperialist invaders.
Please help us. Let us fight together."
Brad Elliott knew he should put th
this man. He knew he should report this foreign contact to the
e phone down and ignore
Air Force Office of Special Investigations and to Sky Masters,
Inc.'s, security department right away. The Megafortress mis-
sion to Asia was in jeopardy, and it hadn't even begun. This
man, whoever he was, knew far too much about the Megafor-
tress project.
But instead, Brad Elliott said, "Don't tell me where you
are-I'll track you down."
"Thank you, General Elliott," the Asian voice said, and
hung up.
Elliott retrieved his electronic address book and found the
name of a friend in the Military Liaison Office of the U.
State Department. He would tell him how to contact the new
Taiwan embassy in Washington, who would tell him how to
contact the ROC ambassador. If they gave him a number and
it connected him to Kuo, he would hang up, call the ROC
embassy again, and ask to be patched in to Kuo. If that
worked, he would then redo the embassy patch, this time
through the Pentagon's National Military Command Center
communications room, which could detect and defeat any
blind phone drops, shorts, or secret outside switches.
If the third call was successful-then they'd talk about stop-
ping the damned Chinese.
... EVALUATING THE ENEMY,
CAUSING THE ENEMY'S CHI TO BE
LOST AND HIS FORCES TO SCATTER
SO THAT EVEN IF HIS DISPOSITION
IS COMPLETE HE WILL NOT BE
ABLE TO EMPLOY IT, THIS Is
VICTORY THROUGH THE TAO.11
-Weibao-Tzu
Chinese military theoretician
and advisor, fourth century B.
IN THE FORMOSA STRAIT, NEAR QUEMOY ISLAND,
JUST OFF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
OF CHINA COAST
WEDNESDAY, 4 JUNE 1997, 0631 HOURS LOCAL
(TUESDAY, 3 JUNE, 1831 HOURS ET)
"Who in blazes is it?" Admiral Yi Kyu-pin asked of no one
in particular, peering nervously through his high-power bin-
oculars. The ship he was watching was moving slowly toward
them on an intercept bearing. It had not been spotted on radar
until it was only twenty kilometers away from the lead escort
ship, practically within visual range; now it was no more than
ten kilometers from the lead escort. The challenge was obvi-
ous. The sixty-seven-year-old admiral had already launched a
Zhi-9 light shipboard helicopter to investigate
and was waiting
for the pilot's report.
Yi was not too concerned about the vessel, though, because
he dwarfed it and easily outgunned it. Yi was in command of
117
118 DALE BROWN
the Mao Zedong, a 64,000-ton aircraft carrier of the People's
Republic of China's Liberation Army Navy. Although the car-
rier did not have its entire fixed-wing air group of more than
twenty Russian-made Sukhoi-33 fighters on board-an agree-
ment between China and Taiwan -prohibited the Mao Zedong
from carrying attack planes until after passing Matsu Island
during its transit of the Formosa Strait-it did carry four Su-
33 fighters, configured only for air defense, plus three times
its normal complement of attack and anti-submarine helicop-
ters. Accompanying the Mao were two 4,000-ton Luda-class
destroyers, Kang and Changsha, the 14,600-ton replenishment
oiler Fuqing, and the repair and support vessel Hudong, which
acted as a floating repair shop. Flanking the Mao battle group
was an armada of more than forty smaller vessels, everything
from Huangfeng-class coastal patrol boats to Fushun-class
minesweepers to Huchuan semi-hydrofoil missile boats-any-
thing that could keep up with the nuclear-powered carrier and
its escorts.
While he waited, Admiral Yi took a few moments to think
about-no, to savor-the immense power at his command as
the skipper of this vessel. Even though this warship, the first
aircraft carrier owned by an Asian nation since World War II,
had had a very checkered existence, it was now at the absolute
pinnacle of its fighting capability.
Its keel had been laid down in June of 1985 at the Nikolayev
shipyards near the Black Sea in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic, and it had been launchdd in April of 1988 as the
second true Soviet fixed-wing aircraft carrier, much larger and
more capable than its Kiev- or Moskva-class anti-submarine
helicopter carrier cousins. It had first been dedicated as the
:'defensive aviation cruiser" Riga; it had been called a
I cruiser" because the Republic of Turkey, which guards the
approaches in and out of the Black Sea, forbids any aircraft
carriers to sail through the Bosporus and so would never have
allowed it to leave the Black Sea. Because of severe budget
cuts and technological difficulties, it had never fully completed
its fitting-out and never joined its sister ship Tbilisi in the
Northern Fleet of the Soviet Navy. It had been renamed Var-
yag when the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, whose capital
the ship had been ' named for and where the ship was to be
based once it entered Soviet fleet service, had become the in-
dependent Republic of Latvia in 1991.
FATAL TER RAI N 119
The Varyag, which means "Viking" or "dread lord," had
been sold to the People's Republic of China in 1991 for the
paltry sum of thirty million U. dollars in cash, completely
stripped of all electronic and weapon systems; the world mil-
itary press believed that it had been sold as scrap for cash to
line the pockets of ex-Soviet admirals and bureaucrats, forced
out of service without pensions when the Soviet Union col-
lapsed. Because of an international embargo on any military
sales to China, and because most of Asia feared what China
might do with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier-the Tian-
anmen Square massacre had been only two years earlier-the
carrier had been sent to Chah Bahar Naval Base in the Islamic
Republic of Iran, where it had been used as a floating prison
and barracks. But in 1994, it had undergone a $2 billion crash
rearming and refit program, and Iran and China had jointly
made it operational in 1996-the first aircraft carrier and the
greatest warship ever owned by a Middle East or Islamic na-
tion.
In early 1997, Iran's military leaders had immediately put
the carrier, now called the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to
use against its enemies in the Persian Gulf region, attacking
several pro-American states with the carrier as the spearhead.
They had been turned away by the American air force, using
stealth bombers and high-tech cruise missiles to attack the car-
rier. The stealth bomber attack had caused one of the Kho-
meini's Sukhoi-33 fighter-bombers to crash on deck, causing
a huge fire that had cooked off a P-500 Granit anti-ship mis-
sile-the ship had been one more explosion away from head-
ing to the bottom of the sea. Iran, beaten and humiliated by
the unseen American attackers, had been forced to sue for
peace before its prized possession was completely lost.
The United States had been ready, willing, and happy to
make the carrier into an instant artificial reef in the Arabian
Sea by putting a few torpedoes or cruise missiles into it, but
Iran had quickly surrendered the carrier to its real owners, the
People's Republic of China, and the United States had not
wanted to anger that superpower by sinking its property. The
carrier, now renamed the Mao Zedong after the People's Re-
public of China's Communist leader, had been taken in tow
by the Chinese destroyer Zhanjiang and sent back to China,
carefully watched during its transit by every country with long-
range maritime surveillance capability. Most Asian nations
120 DALE BROWN
were still fearful of China sailing a carrier through the politi-
cally turbulent east Asian seas, but the carrier was little more
than floating scrap now-wasn't it?
The twice-orphaned carrier was not yet ready to be cut up
into razor blades. In a few short weeks, repairs had been com-
pleted, and now the little ski-jump carrier Mao was once again
operational. Only a few of its complete wing of twenty-four
ex-Russian Sukhoi-33 supersonic fighter-bombers were on
board, but it carried a full complement of anti-submarine hel-
icopters, as well as antiaircraft and land attack weapons. Six
of the P-500 Granit anti-ship missiles in the forward launch
tubes had been replaced with a navalized version of the M- II
ballistic land attack missile, each with a range of over sixty
kilometers. Despite its armament, however, the carrier was
considered little more than an expensive Chinese plaything-
perhaps something to impress the neighbors-and not a grave
military threat.
That idea, Admiral Yi thought gleefully, was going to be
known as one of the biggest effors of judgment made in recent
history.
After what seemed like hours, the first officer approached
his captain with a copy of an intelligence report, complete with
radar, optronic, and visual profiles, several weeks old but
hopefully still useful. "Received the patrol's report, sir. It is
flying a Taiwanese flag," the first officer reported. "The vessel
is a French-designed, indigenously built Kwang Hwa III-class
frigate. One of the Nationalists' new toys, launched just last
year. "
:'Armament?"
/>
'Has a thirty-six-round vertical launch system with twelve
Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles, ten ASROC rocket-boosted
torpedoes, and fourteen Standard antiair missiles ' -the Stan-
dard missiles can be used for 'Surface attack as well. Four
side-firing torpedo tubes. Sea Sparrow close-in antiaircraft and
anti-missile system, 40-millimeter bow-mounted dual-purpose
gun, Phalanx close-in air defense cannons fore and aft, and
several 12.7-millimeter machine gun mounts."
"Very impressive," Yi mused. "Strange our patrols have
not detected it before. Where is it based?"
Unknown, sir," the first officer replied. "Perhaps in the
Nationalists' secret underground naval base?"
Yi did not share in the joke. The first officer referenced the
FATAL T ER RAI N 121
current intelligence estimate-if the term "intelligence" could
even be loosely applied-that the Nationalists were spending
trillions of yuan on constructing huge underground military
facilities so they could withstand an expected nuclear attack
by the People's Republic of China's Liberation Army. Sup-
posedly they had built an underground base large enough to
barrack an entire division and store hundreds of tanks and
armored vehicles-and had even constructed an underground
airfield in the eastern mountains on Formosa big enough to
launch and recover two squadrons of F- 16 Fighting Falcon jet
fighters. Of course, years of espionage work had uncovered no
evidence of any secret underground bases. "What about its
aviation fit?"
"Large helicopter hangar, can carry two small helicopters,"
the first officer continued. "Typically carries one S-70 heli-
copter, armed with AS-30L laser-guided attack missiles, tor-
pedoes, or Harpoon dnti-ship missiles. The superstructure is
built of composite materials and aluminum covered in radar-
absorbent materials. The slanted foredeck, angled superstruc-
ture, and folding antenna arrays are supposed to be stealth
devices to reduce radar signature."
"I would say it worked-we did not spot him until he was
less than twenty kilometers out," Yi said. He was not familiar
