by Dale Brown
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 in-
terphone. The Sukhoi-33s 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
7-
FATAL TERRA I N 163
left and right weapon pod launchers, and at less than six miles
the medium-range active-guidance missiles were almost un-
stoppable. "Splash two!" Vikram shouted.
"How about that, Emitter-you're a damned ace!" Chesh-
ire said.
"Don't start congratulating each other yet-I've got two
more carrier fighters airborne," McLanahan said. "Emitter, do
I you have contact on-T'
Ccrraacckk!
Suddenly it seemed as if every molecule of air in the cabin
were sizzling and popping like electrified popcorn. The inter-
phone began to crack and sputter with loud static. Several
aircraft systems popped off-line, although all four engines con-
tinued to run perfectly.
"Hey, I just got some kind of spike in the electrical sys-
i tem," 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. "Sta-
tion check. Cabin altitude is eight thousand ... fuel sys-
tem. . . " Just then, a terrific rumbling reverberated through the
Megafortress, followed by a tremendous buffeting. Unsecured
charts and checklist booklets flew through the cabin, and any-
one who didn't have their lap belts tightly snugged down felt
the tops of their helmets bounce off the ceiling. "Jesus!" El-
liott 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 Head-
banger, you read?"
Just then, there was another sudden snaps! of energy that
raced through the Megafortress-but this time, in a right turn
164 DALE BROWN
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 explo-
sion!
"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 si-
lence, 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 be-
fore Jon Masters's new modifications), on a mission over Be-
larus 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 Nor-
way. "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 alti-
FATAL TERRAIN 165
tude, 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.
Vikram experimentally moved the airmine cannon by mov-
ing his head-wherever he "looked," the cannon pointed in
that direction. Right now the display was blank, except for the
azimuth and elevation readouts, the missiles-remaining counter
at 50, and the status readouts, which all
read ON with flashing
red letters except for the cannon itself, which read OK in green
letters. "Looks like the cannon is okay," he reported. "But
the radars and datalink are still down. How can I track them
if I can't see them?"
"They're coming around!" Elliott shouted. "Three o'clock,
same altitude, about five miles."
"If that's all the information you got, Emitter, that's what
you use," McLanahan said. "You've got to visualize where
the fighters are, then lay the airmines out there and detonate
them manually where you think the fighters will be."
"But I don't understand how-"
"There's nothing to understand, Emitter-just do it!"
McLanahan shouted. "Now!"
Vikrarn focused his attention on the virtual gunnery display.
He tried to imagine the fighters rolling in hard toward their
target, arming missiles or guns, tightening the turn, decreasing
the range ... and then he pulled the trigger three times. A loud
bang bang bang! and a brief, sharp shudder rocked the EB-
166 DALE BROWN
52. In his virtual display, he saw three large circles moving
away from him; the size of the circle represented the range from
the bomber and decreased as the rocket got farther away ... ex-
cept the circle size did not decrease.'Vikram moved his head to
steer the first missile-nothing. He punched the DETONATE but-
ton with his right thumb-again, no indication that the missile
had detonated.
:,I think the radio link to the missile is down," Vikram said
' Then don't try to manually steer or detonate the missiles,'
McLanahan said. "Prearm all the missiles to detonate at two
miles-you'll just have to start pumping them out across the
whole rear quadrant."
" But I won't know if I hit anything," Vikram protested as
he punched in new anning instructions for all the remaining
rockets. "Sounds like a waste of airmines."
If you don't stop those fighters, Emitter, we'll waste a hell
of a lot more than a few airmines," McLanahan said. "Start
pumping them out." Quickly but methodically, Vikram started
laying down lines of airmine rockets, describing a figure-eight
pattern centered on the Megafortress's tail. The crew heard
several loud pops! and a sharp, hard rumble through the plane
as the cannon fired the rockets into the sky.
11 Bandit, nine o'clock!" Elliott shouted on interphone.
He's firing guns!" The fourth Su-33 fighter had broken off
his wingman's position when the leader had seen the exploding
airmines and circled around, both Chinese fighters staying well
away from the bomber's tail. Vikram swung the turret left, and
fired. Elliott tried to help by breaking hard right to put the
fighter back into the ain-nine cannon's lethal envelope, but not
in time. Several 23-millimeter cannon shells hit the Megafor-
tress's number four engine, causing it to disintegrate in the
blink of an eye. The engine-monitoring computers immedi-
ately sensed the turbine overspeed and shut the engine down
before it exploded. But the sudden loss of the right outboard
engine, coupled with the steep right turn and full thrust on the
left engines, threw the Megafortress into a steeper right
break ...
... too tight: the turn steepened, the airspeed decreased, the
angle of attack increased, and the tight turn quickly wrapped
into a 5G accelerated stall. The crew felt the rumble of the
stall along the huge wings, felt the rumble deepen as the de-
parted slipstream banged first on the spoilers, then the fuse-
FATAL TER RAI N 167
lage, then felt the neck-jarring jolts as the slipstream grabbed
the V-tail assembly and rocked the bomber in both pitch and
yaw simultaneously. No matter how much the pilots moved
the control stick, the bomber would not respond-all of the
control surfaces had been immobilized by a 300-knot blast of
disrupted air, acting like a huge whirlpool slamming the
bomber in every direction at once.
"Wings level! Wings level!" Cheshire shouted. The Mega-
fortress was still in a one-hundred-degree right bank, and it
felt as if it was tipping farther right, threatening to roll upside
down.
"Controls won't respond!" Elliott shouted on interphone.
"No response!"
"We got it, we got it!" Cheshire shouted cross-cockpit. She
still did not have time to put on her oxygen mask. The FiRE
#4 warning lights came on, but in the Megafortress that was
only an advisory-the aircraft had already responded to the
fire, shutting down the engine, activating the firefighting sys-
tem, and rerouting fuel, hydraulic, bleed air, pneumatic, and
electrical systems away from the stricken engine. "Damn, we
lost number four!" Cheshire shouted. "Number four's already
shut down! General, try airbrakes. Bring the power back to
idle. Emitter, nail that fighter, for Christ's sake!"
"My gear's in reset, Nance!" Atkins shouted back on in-
terphone. "I'm blind for the next ninety seconds!"
"Stand by," Elliott responded. "Airbrakes six, power com-
ing back. . . " All of the crew members were thrown forward
into their shoulder straps as the airspeed rapidly bled off. El-
liott held the control stick full forward, easing it slightly left
every few seconds to test if the controls were responding. At
first it felt as if the nose was rising, threatening to send them
into a tail-first spin right into the sea, but a few long, tense
4seconds later, the nose tucked under and the artificial horizon
attitude indicator stopped its tumble. Elliott applied slight left
rudder and left bank, and the left wing came down slightly. In
very, very gradual increments, he fed in left bank, being extra
careful not to bleed off any of the slowly increasing airspeed.
He felt a slight rumble in the wings and fuselage and lowered
the airbrakes. The rumble remained-they were still right at
the initial buffet, right at the edge of the stall.
"Passing five thousand!" Cheshire shouted.
As the bank decreased below forty degrees, Elliott smoothly
168 DALE BROWN
began reapplying power, and the airspeed increased faster.
Now, with the wings almost level, the nose down below the
horizon, and airspeed increasing, he slowly began feeding in
back pressure to decrease the rate of descent. At first there was
no response-their airspeed had decreased below flying speed,
way below-so he held the stick forward and fed in a bit more
power.
"Four thousand feet!"
Another try-this time, Elliott felt pressure on the stick as
he pulled, and he kept the back pressure in until he felt it mush
again, then released. The nose was ten degrees below the ho-
rizon now, and the stall buffeting was all but gone. A bit more
back pressure ... no, too much, forward again, nose moving
down, airspeed increasing, good ... a bit more back, wings
level, good, no mushing, a bit more back pressure, pitch up to
eight degrees, six degr
ees ...
"Three thousand feet!"
Elliott slowly began moving the throttles forward. Power
spooling up to one hundred percent, another try for more al-
titude ... good, nose coming up to four degrees, almost level,
airspeed still rising, descent rate decreasing . . . "Two thou-
sand ... one thousand ... Jesus, Brad, you got it?"
There! Nose on the horizon, airspeed right at takeoff speed,
wings level-they were flying again! Elliott looked up from
his airspeed indicator and saw how close they got to the ocean
... shit, the waves looked close enough to be spraying salt
water on them! The radar altimeter read 200 feet, just barely
out of the cushion of air known as ground effect. They were
flying! "I got it, crew, I got it," Elliott said triumphantly.
Airspeed was above 200 knots, so he lifted the nose above the
horizon, and the radar altimeter started up ... 250, 300, well
out of ground effect now and we're still flying and airspeed's
still incr-
The 23-millimeter shells from the Chinese Sukhoi-33's gun
attack stitched a single line of inch-wide holes along the upper
fuselage of the Megafortress beginning just aft of the trailing
edge of the right wing, straight up and across the crew com-
partment. The steel shells punctured the avionics "canoe" on
the fuselage just before tearing into the aft and center body
fuel tanks, causing a terrific explosion. The shells continued
through the crew compartment, piercing Emil Vikrarn's ejec-
tion seat and shredding his head, body, instrument panel, and
FATAL TER RAI N 169
left-side fuselage area, missing McLanahan and Elliott by only
inches. A scream erupted from McLanahan's lips as he
watched his partner get blown to pieces right before his eyes.
Vikram's chest looked as ragged and raw as an old scare-
crow-thankfully, the pieces of his helmet hid his decimated
head. Blood spattered against the forward crew compartment
and left-side cockpit windows just before the left windows
disintegrated. The crew cabin explosively decompressed, cre-
ating a sudden solid fog in the cockpit, then a virtual hurricane
