by Dale Brown
"Brad, stay on the vectors," Patrick McLanahan shouted
on interphone. -Kuo told us it was going to be a hairy ap-
proach."
" 'HairyT We're headed right into the side of a fucking
mountain!"
"One-One, I show you well above glide path, fly heading
diree-five-zero, altitude two hundred feet. . ."
"General, this is nuts!" Cheshire shouted. "I see mountains
all around us!"
"Shut up, everyone, shut up!" Elliott shouted. "This
doesn't look good. I'm going missed. Radome in flight posi-
tion." He keyed the mike trigger as he pushed the throttles
forward: "Hualien, I'm executing missed ... wait, stand by!
Wait on the radome!
Just before Elliott began pushing in power to execute a go-
around, he saw what looked like a long, tall cleft in the moun-
tainside. It looked like a depression at first, but as they got
closer, it was obvious that it was far deeper than a depression,
more like a hollow, or even a huge cave ...
"One-One, start a right turn, heading zero-two-zero, altitude
,one-fifty, touchdown point in two miles, advise when you have
the runway in sight."
"Runway?" Cheshire exclaimed. "I don't see no freakin'
runway!"
Elliott started his tight right turn. The mountains were every-
where-they were in a deep river valley, with sharply rising
mountainous terrain in every direction except behind them,
toward the sea. Straight ahead, the mountains were less than
four miles away-it would take every bit of power, and a lot
of prayers, if they had to climb out of this defile right now.
368 DALE BROWN
He couldn't afford to make careful, cautious turns now--every
turn had to be at forty degrees of bank, crisp and positive, so
he could line up on the center of the cave.
The glow from the cave got brighter, and wider, and taller
... and then, suddenly, the entire outline Of the hollow in the
mountain was outlined in dull yellow. It was enormous, more
than 600 feet across and 200 feet high. Now, a bit closer in,
the outline of the edge of a runway could be seen, inside the
cave! "Co, you ... you see what I see?"
"I see it," Cheshire breathed, "but I don't freakin' believe
it."
"One-One, Hualien final controller," the radar controller
radioed, "proceed visually. If unable, execute missed approach
instructions immediately. You have ten seconds until your
missed approach point."
"No ... no, we got the field ... uh, we got it in sight,
Elliott responded. "Proceeding visually."
"Roger," the controller said-the EB-52's pilots could
practically hear a huge sigh of relief from the controller. "Re-
main this frequency for ground controller. Max runway length
one thousand eight hundred meters, approximately six thou-
sand feet, favor the right side of the runway. Welcome."
The controller's voice sounded so relieved and casual, al-
most ecstatic, that Brad Elliott felt as if he were in a drearn-
because he was still far from home free right now. He felt as
if the Megafortress's pointed SST nose was the end of a piece
of thread, and the cave mouth was the eye of a needle, and
the Megafortress was barely small enough to squeeze inside!
"Flaps full, airbrakes six!" Elliott ordered. "My God, I don't
believe it! "
It was way, way too late to go around at this point-even
the power of the Megafortress's CF6 turbofans couldn't fly it
clear of the mountain now. Even a ninety-degree bank turn
with maximum back pressure and clinging to the edge of the
stall wouldn't save them. They either landed now, or they
would die in the blink of an eye. The right wingtip dipped,
pushed down by a gust of wind right at the mouth of the cave,
and for an instant Elliott thought he wouldn't be able to raise
the wingtip fast enough before it crashed into side of the
cave and spun them around inside. He forced the image of
death out of his mind's eye.
The Megafortress touched down several hundred feet from
FATAL T ER RAI N 369
the edge of the cliff-Elliott landed way long, a poor touch-
down even on a normal runway in perfect conditions. He
didn't wait until the front trucks were on the ground; he pulled
the throttles to idle, jammed the thrust reverser levers full
down, waited as long as he possibly could, stand for the re-
versers to deploy, then started to shove the throttles forward.
There was a huge black aircraft barrier net at the end of the
concrete, and it was right there, right in front of them! Elliott
kept on shoving the throttles forward, almost into military
power. The Megafortress began to shake as if they were in an
earthquake.
"Ninety knots!" Cheshire shouted. Elliott tapped the brakes
and felt the pressure on his shoulder harness-good, they had
brakes! He pressed the toe brakes farther, and the Megafortress
responded. Thrust reversers still on, he pressed the brakes far-
ther, right up to where he could feel the anti-skid system begin
to cycle the hydraulic power in the brakes on and off. He
depressed the toe brakes all the way, no more time to tap or
save the brakes.
Full brake power, full reverse thrust, and the barrier was
still rushing up to meet them. A little more than a hundred
feet beyond the barrier was a steel jet exhaust blast fence, and
then the back of the cave wall itself-complete darkness, cold
deadly granite. It was very much like the end of the line in a
subway tunnel.
But they did stop in time-the retracted nose of the EB-52
missed the barrier net by less than half the length of the air-
craft. Except for test flights, it was the shortest landing any of
them had ever made in an EB-52 bomber-less than 6,000
feet. They used 50 percent less runway than they had ever
used before. A "follow-me" truck appeared off their right
wingtip, and a ground crewman on the back of the truck beck-
oned to them with a yellow-lensed flashlight and a hearty
wave. Elliott deactivated the thrust reversers, grabbed the
steering knob, and gently eased the throttles forward.
Taxiing inside the cave was like driving through a low-
ceiling indoor parking garage with a high-profile vehicle.
Everywhere they looked, they saw cheering soldiers, some
jumping up and down in happiness as they held their ears
against the bone-jarring noise and echo-Elliott and Cheshire
mercifully shut down two engines to cut down on the noise.
They were directed to a parking spot just off the edge of the
370 DALE BROWN
runway, just a few hundred feet behind Jon Masters's DC-10
tanker and satellite launch plane.
The four bomber crewmen were instantly mobbed the mo-
ment they opened the lower hatch and climbed out. The first
to greet them were Wendy McLanahan, Jon Masters, Paul
White, and Hal Briggs. Wendy hugged her husband so tightly
he thought he heard some neck vertebrae snap, but he hugge
d
her just as closely and as tightly. "Patrick, oh God, you should
have seen you fly into the cave!" Wendy exclaimed through
tears of relief and joy. "I swear, it was like watching a bat fl
into a tiny hole in the wall! I saw the win tip down, and I
I 9
thought you weren't going to make it!"
After everyone climbed out of the Megafortress, they had a
moment to look at the incredible structure. It was an immense
underground airfield, with a single 200-foot-wide, 6,000-foot-
long runway in the middle of the gigantic structure! On the
other side of the runway were a line of about a dozen Tai-
wanese F-16 fighters-the Taiwanese had actually managed to
land F-16 Fighting Falcons in the cave!-along with a few S-
70 helicopters and S-2 Tracker turboprop maritime surveil-
lance planes. Patrick McLanahan and Brad Elliott had a grim
feeling that those planes represented what was left of the entire
Republic of China air force.
After shutdown, the stunned American crew members were
met by several officers and several more armed guards. The
senior officer stepped forward, shook their hands excitedly
with a broad smile, and said in very practiced English, "Wel-
come to Kai-Shan, my Flying Tiger friends, welcome. I am
Brigadier General Hsiao Jason, commander of this installation.
You must be General Elliott, and you are Colonel Mc-
Lanahan." Both of them were st ' ill too stunned to respond,
which pleased Hsiao immensely. "You and'your men are suf-
fering from Kai-Shan Psychosis, the inability to do anything
but stare up at the ceiling, the instant abandonment of all mil-
itary courtesies and even coherent speech," Hsiao said with a
smile. "The disease will affect you long after you leave this
place, I assure you. Please follow."
Indeed, it was hard to keep from staring at the detail of the
huge underground facility. The ceiling was geodetic reinforced
steel honeycomb, with segments three inches thick widening
to six inches toward the ceiling and ventilator openings inter-
spersed throughout-it was like a huge modem subway ter-
FATAL T ER RAI N 371
minal, only several times larger. Several steel support columns,
spaced every thousand feet on either side of the runway, soared
into the sky from floor to ceiling, set just a few feet from the
edge of the runway. The runway itself was concrete, with ar-
resting wires a few hundred feet from the approach end to stop
aircraft equipped with tail hooks-and, Briggs noted, all of the
Taiwanese F-16 fighters and S-2 Trackers had tail hooks.
Looking out the open mouth of the cave, all they could see
were mountains-a straight-in approach to Kai-Shan was not
possible.
"We've heard rumor about this place for years," Wendy
McLanahan remarked, but we never thought it truly ex-
isted!"
"Kai-Shan has been in operation for about six years,"
Hsiao said. "It was originally intended as the underground
command center for the Le Shan air defense network system,
but an alternate mountain location closer to Taipei was located
and used instead. This was ' then used as an emergency shelter
for troops and politicians until the new caverns deeper inside
the mountain were excavated. When we realized we had
enough space inside for an airfield, the decision was made to
convert it. Our first fixed-wing aircraft, an S-2 Tracker, landed
inside the mountain three years ago; the first F-16 landed here
just a few months ago."
Walking across the runway to the south side of the facility
was like walking across Grand Central Station or the Toronto
Skydome. "We completed this facility late last year, after ten
years of construction and ten years of design and development
work," General Hsiao was saying. "The main airbase chamber
is almost eight hundred million cubic feet in volume, about
half of it natural granite and limestone reinforced with steel
and concrete. It is actually a combination of about one hundred
smaller caverns, hollowed out and reinforced to make several
large caverns. There are approximately two hundred thousand
square feet of additional support, housing, and storage space
on two levels above and below the airbase chamber. Above
your heads is approximately six thousand feet of solid rock.
"We are capable of accommodating up to twenty F-16-size
fighters on this level along the side of the runway, plus another
twenty or so belowground, accessible via those elevators there
and there," Hsiao went on. "The complex includes weapon,
fuel, and spare parts storage, enough to keep two medium at-
372 DALE BROWN
tack squadrons supplied during around-the-clock combat ol
erations for about one week. We can house as many as two
thousand air base personnel down here, plus a command and
control facility of one hundred, plus barrack two thousand ad-
ditional troops. We have a twenty-bed hospital, four dining
facilities, two laundries, even a movie theater."
"Sir, how in the world ... I mean, how was it possible to
keep this facility a secret?" Patrick McLanahan asked as they
reached the other side of the chamber, behind the huge steel
blast deflectors and into the rock wall itself, to where admin-
istrative and mission planning rooms had been set up. "The
number of construction crews must've been immense. The
money, the equipment, the manpower-all of it must have
created attention. How was it possible to avoid all scrutiny?"
"Same way we do it, Patrick-by keeping our mouths shut
and kicking anyone's ass who dares to open theirs," Brad
Elliott said.
"Precisely," General Hsiao replied. "The strictest security
measures possible were employed. But this side of the island
is very sparsely populated, and it attracts little attention. Once
the engineers and workers were safely inside, work could be
done in total secrecy."
"How did you make out during the Chinese attack on Hu-
alien?" Paul White asked.
"We were safe-Kai-Shan is shielded by the mountains,
and our cave shield was in place and is thick enough to with-
stand a bomb strike, so we received no damage from the nu-
clear blast," Hsiao replied. "Our facilities are full of the
injured and dying, though. We have cremated nearly a thou-
sand men, women, and children since the attack here at Kai-
Shan alone-we know of over eight thousand casualties in
Hualien alone, and there are undoubtedly many more that were
simply incinerated in the blast. Our revenge will be sweet, my
friends."
They heard the sound of a start cart outside on the airfield,
and General Hsiao ordered the door closed behind them, which
muffled the noise considerably. "One of our air patrols is pre-
paring to depart. Shall we watch?"
The sight was unbelievable. A Taiwanese F-16 fighter,
armed with four Sidewinder missiles and a centerline fuel tank,
taxied to the very bac
k of the runway. The barrier net had
been removed, and the blast fence was diverting the F-16's
FATAL TERRAIN 373
engine exhaust almost straight up into a cluster of ventilators.
"The engine exhaust is vented outside through several steel
plenums and sideways out across the mountains, where it is
less likely to be detected by infrared imaging satellites," Hsiao
explained.
The F- 16 ran its engine up to full power, then full after-
burner power, and released brakes. It looked very much like
an aircraft carrier takeoff-the fighter stayed on the deck until
reaching the mouth of the cave, then shot off into space. A
few minutes later, the barrier net was lowered and an F-16
came in for landing from a patrol. Again it resembled an air-
craft carrier landing-the F-16 suddenly appeared at the cave
mouth at slow speed, with its nose high in the air; it hit the
runway, caught one of the arresting wires, the nose came down
hard on the runway, and the fighter screeched to a halt at the
end of the arresting wire. Ground crewmen came running out
to disconnect the wire from the hook and marshal the fighter
to the elevator to take it down to the belowdecks aircraft han-
gar for servicing.
"My God," Nancy Cheshire exclaimed. "What if a plane
has to bolter? What if they miss a wire? What if a wire or
arresting hook breaks?"
"Then, if the barrier does not catch them, we will probably
all die," Hsiao Jason said matter-of-factly. He smiled broadly
and said, "Actually, my friends, your two planes have been
the first fixed-wing aircraft to land at Kai-Shan without using
an arresting wire. We were all in fire shelters for the landing
of the DC-10. But the landing of the bomber-well, I think
we were all up on deck to watch. It was most spectacular,
worth dying in a fireball to see." The American newcomers
were all too stunned to respond. "You must be very tired. We
have prepared meals and rooms for you and all your troops."
"With all due respect, sir, we'd like to get to work and
launch our first sortie at dusk," Patrick McLanahan said.
"Dusk? You mean, tonight?" General Hsiao exclaimed.
