200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Copyright Qc 1991 by Dale Brown, Inc.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Published simultaneously in Canada Endpaper maps and maps on pages 267

and 370 by Lisa Amoroso.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Brown, Dale, date Sky masters / Dale Brown.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-399-13705-X

(Putnam) I. Title. PS3552.R68543S58 1991 90-56053 CIP 813'.54~c20

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

sky Masters is dedicated to General Curtis E. LeMay, the "Iron Eagle"

and the "Father of Strategic Air Power," a man who envisioned much of what Sky Masters is all about.

Sky Masters is also dedicated to the men and women who served as part of Operation DESERT SHIELD and DESERT STORM.

I wish to especially dedicate this story to my brother, Second Lieutenant James D. Brown, 3-35 ARMOR, First Armored Division, United States Army, and his wife, Leah, and all of our military forces serving ashore, afloat, and aloft for all the sacrifices they made in their personal and professional lives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my friend Lieutenant Colonel George Peck (who was instrumental in the research for Day of the Cheetah and who, like Loki's eternal fate in Norse mythology, seems destined to be forever bothered by my insistent questions and requests); TSgt Alan Dockery, Captain Harry G. Edwards, and the other helpful and professional persons in the Office of Public Affairs, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command (SAC), Offutt AFB, Nebraska, for their assistance in gathering information on SAC

conventional and maritime operations and the Strategic Warfare Center, and for their help in reviewing the manuscript; To all the men and women of the Strategic Air Command and Pacific Air Forces whom I met during GIANT WARRIOR '90, a multinational, multiservice combat strike and deployment exercise conducted by SAC's Fifteenth Air Force in August of 1990 at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. I wish to especially thank Lieutenant General Robert D. Beckel, Fifteenth Air Force commander, for allowing me the privilege of observing his super exercise; Brigadier General DavidJ. Pederson, Third Air Division commander, and Colonel Alan Cirino, Third Air Division deputy commander, and their staff for their hospitality and helpfulness in explaining the intricacies of Pacific theater combat operations; and to Colonel Arne Weinman, Ninety-second Bomb Wing commander and joint air forces commander of GIANT WARRIOR '90; Special thanks to Captain Cynthia Colin, Fifteenth Air Force Public Affairs, and the other professionals at Fifteenth Air Force Public Affairs, March AFB, California; MSgt Ron Pack, Ninety-second Bomb Wing public affairs; MSgt Al Dostal, Ninety-sixth Bomb Wing Public Affairs; Second Lieutenant Darian "Slick" Benson, Fifty-seventh Air Division Public Affairs; the feared terrorist-group-turned-media-pool known throughout the Pacific as the Dream Team; and everyone who helped make my visit to Guam and GIANT WARRIOR '90a pleasure and a success; To Brigadier General Larry Dilda, DCS I Communications and Computer Operations, HQ SAC, for conducting a very special tour of SAC

Headquarters, where I learned much about the "new" Strategic Air Command and its people and its new arsenal of weapons; and to Ron Silverstein, B-2 Project Senior Engineer and Chief Spokesman, and the others at Northrop Corporation, Air Force Plant 42, Palmdale, California, for an amazing tour of the B-2 bomber assembly facilities; To Colonel Thomas A.

Hornung, Chief of Public Affairs, Air Force Public Affairs-Western Region in Los Angeles, for his invaluable assistance throughout the making of Sky Masters and for arranging a spectacular tour of SAC

headquarters; and to Major Ron Fuchs, former Deputy and Chief of Media Relations in Los Angeles, for his time in reviewing the manuscript and offering some valuable comments; To CDR Bruce R. Linder, commanding officer of the guided missile frigate FFG-55 USS Elrod, who was extremely helpful in providing details pertaining to naval operations in the South China Sea, Palawan Passage, and the Philippines; To Richard Herman, famous author of Warbirds and Force of Eagles, for his technical knowledge on aerial combat in the F-4E and other facets of fighter combat; To Rockwell International for information on the B- 1 bomber; also to Orbital Sciences Corporation for information on the Pegasus air-launched space booster; To my executive assistant, Dennis Hall, for his hard work and support.

ACTUAL NEWS EXCERPTS Date: 5/21/90 PENTAGON DECLARES PHILIPPINES

"IMMINENT DANGER" AREA WASHINGTON (MAY 18) UPI-The Defense Department designated the Philippines Friday as an area of imminent danger for special pay purposes, which means US military and civilian employees will be getting slightly larger paychecks. The Pentagon said it took the action because of the "current unstable conditions" in the Philippines, where three American servicemen have been killed in politically motivated attacks this month alone. Imminent danger pay is an additional 15 percent of basic salary for American citizens who are department employees and $110 per month for all US military personnel. Date: 5/22/90 "Well, first in my mind, the communist dream in the Philippines will always be there. The communist dream of taking over and dominating the country will always be there because you can't kill an ideology."

General Renato S. de Villa, Chief of Staff, Armed Forces of the Philippines, from Asia-Pacific Defense Forum, U.S. Pacific Command, Winter 1989-1990 Date: 11/2/90 ... Turmoil in China... combined with speculation about U.S. forces departures from the Philippines, have merged to cause a new appreciation for U.S. regional security presence.

. . . I believe there is a growing realization in the Pacific that U.S. presence cannot be taken for granted. If the U.S. presence is substantially reduced, many Pacific nations perceive the danger of other nations moving into the vacuum created by our departure, with a potential result of conflict and instability." 22 ACTUAL NEWS EXCERPTS

Admiral Huntington Hardisty, U.S. Navy, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command, from Asia-Paczfic Defense Forum, U.S. Pacific Command, winter 1989-1990 Date: 11/6/90 MELEE MARS INAUGURATION OF AUTONOMY IN

SOUTHERN

PHILIPPINES COTABATO (Nov 6) REUTER-Police punched and clubbed 17 Moslem students before dragging them off by their hair on Tuesday after they disrupted President Corazon Aquino's inauguration of an autonomous government in the southern Philippines, witnesses said. The students, members of an organization supporting Moslem rebels demanding a separate state on Mindanao island, chanted slogans against the autonomous government about 20 meters from where Aquino was speaking. Manila has set up the autonomous government, dominated by Moslems, as a way to end separatist violence on Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines. The government, headed by former Moslem rebel commander Zacaria Candao, can pass its own laws, collect taxes and license fees, and set up a regional police force in the four predominantly Moslem provinces on Mindanao island it controls. Manila would retain control of defense and foreign policy. -from U.S. Naval Institute Military Database Defense News. Date: 14 January 1991 AIR FORCE TO CREATE TWO NEW

COMPOSITE AIR WINGS BY 1993 WASHINGTON-The U.S. Air Force will develop by 1993 two composite tactical air wings that combine different types of aircraft in the same unit. The new wings will serve as prototypes for the possible reorganization of the service's tactical force structure along more mission-oriented lines. . . . [The composite air wings]

would include aircraft that could perform attack, defensive, standoff jamming, and precision-strike missions. -from Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, p.26 AUTHOR NOTE Although the BIB bomber is now officially called "Lancer," the author will still use "Excalibur." Every effort has been made to present realistic situations, but all of the persons and situations presented here are products of my imagination and should not be considered reflections of actual persons, products, policy, or practice. Any similarity of any organization, device, weapons system, policy, person, or place to any real-world counterpart is strictly coincidental. The author makes no attempt to present the actual military or civil policies of any organization or government. The author hopes readers will note the chronological setting of this novel in regards to some of his previous books, most notably Day of the Cheetah. While certain characters and backdrops in that book appear here, the events described in this book come a full two years earlier than those in Day of the Cheetah. Moreover, this book, like that one, stands completely on its own-neither a prequel nor sequel. MONDAY, 6

JUNE 1994, 0812 HOURS LOCAL SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTHERN NEVADA < minus two

minutes and counting. . . mark." Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan glanced up at his mission data display just as the time-to-go clock clicked over to 00:01:59. Dead on time. He clicked open the command radio channel with the switch near his left foot. "Vapor TwoOne copies," he reported. "CROWBAR, Vapor Two-One requesting final range clearance."

"Stand by, Two-One." Stand by, he thought to himself-not likely.

McLanahan and his partner, Major Henry Cobb, were flying in an FB-111B

"Super Aardvark" bomber, skimming two hundred feet above the hot deserts of southern Nevada at the speed of soundevery five seconds they waited put them a mile closer to the target. The FBI 1 lB was the "stretched"

version of the venerable F-1 11 Supersonic swing-wing bomber, an experimental model that was the proposed interim supersonic bomber when the B-1 Excalibur bomber program was canceled back in the late 1970s.

Only a few remained, and the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC)-the Defense Department s secret test complex for weapons and aircraft, hidden in the restricted desert ranges north of Las Vegas-had them. Most F1-11 aircraft were Seeing their last few years of Service, and more and more were popping up in Reserve unitS or sitting in museums or base airparks-but HAWC always made use of their airframes until they fell apart or crashed. But the "Super Vark" Was not the subject of today's sortie. Although an FB-111B could carry a twenty-five-thousandpound payload, McLanahan and Cobb were carrying only one twenty-six-hundred-pound bomb that morning-but what a bomb it was.

Officially the bomb was called the BLU-96, but its nickname was HADES-and for its size it was the most powerful nonnuclear weapon in existence. HADES was filled with two hundred gallons of a thin, gasoline-like liquid that was dispersed over a target, then ignited by remote control. Because the weapon does not need to carry its own oxidizer but uses oxygen in the atmosphere to ignite the fuel, the resulting explosion had all the characteristics of a nuclear explosion-it created a mushroom cloud several hundred feet high, a fireball nearly a mile in diameter, and a shock wave that could knock down buildings and trees within two miles. Oddly enough, the BLU-96 had not been used since the Vietnam War, soHAWC was conducting experiments on the feasibility of using the awesome weapon again for some future conflict. HADES had been designed as a weapon to quickly clear very large minefields, but against troops it would be utterly devastating.

That fact, of course, would go into HAWC's report to the Department of Defense. "Vapor, this is CROWBAR, you are cleared to enter R-4808N and R-4806W routes and altitudes, remain this frequency. Acknowledge."

McLanahan checked his watch. "Vapor acknowledges, cleared to enter Romeo 4808 north and Romeo 4806 west routes and altitudes at zero-six, 1514 Zulu, remain with CROWBAR. Out." He turned to Cobb, checking engine instruments and the fuel totalizer as his eyes swept across the center instrument panel. "We're cleared in, Henry." Cobb clicked the mike twice in response. Cobb never said much during missions-his job was to fly the plane, which he always did in stony silence. Romeo 4808N-that was its official name, although its unclassified nickname was Dreamland"-was a piece of airspace in south-central Nevada designated by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense as a

"restricted" area, which meant all aircraft-civilian, commercial, other military flights, even diplomatic-were prohibited to fly over it at any altitude without permission from HAWC. Even FAA Air Traffic Control could not clear aircraft to enter that airspace unless in extreme emergency, and even then the violating aircraft could expect to get intercepted by Air Force fighters and the air-traffic controller responsible could expect a long and serious scrutiny of his actions.

R-4808N was surrounded by four other restricted areas that were meant to act as a buffer zone to give pilots ample warning time to change course if they were-accidentally or purposely-straying toward R-4808N. If one entered R-4808N without permission, military aircrew members would at best lose their wings, and commercial and civilian pilots would lose their licenses-and both would be in for an intense multiday "debriefing"

conducted by teams of military and CIA interrogators, who would discard most articles of the Bill of Rights to find out why someone was stupid enough to stray into Dreamland. At worst, one would come face-to-face with McLanahan and Cobb's FB-1 1 lB racing across the desert floor at the speed of heat-or nose-to-nose with a BLU-96 fuel-air explosive bomb or some other strange and certainly far deadlier weapon. Several thousand workers, military and civilian, were shuttled from Las Vegas, Nellis Air Force Base, Beatty, Mercury, Pahrump, and Tonopah every day to the various research centers there. Most civilian workers reported to the Department of Energy facilities near Yucca Flats, where nuclear weapon research was conducted; most military members traveled forty miles farther northeast to the uncharted aircraft and weapons facilities northeast of Yucca Flats called Groom Lake. A series of electronic and human observation posts was set up just south of Groom Lake in Emigrant Valley, where they could observe the BLU-96 HADES bomb's destructive power. At the northern tip of Pintwater Ridge, the navigation com puter commanded a full 60-degree turn toward the west. McLanahan clicked on the command channel: "CROWBAR, Vapor Two-One, 1P inbound, unlocking now at T minus sixty seconds. Out." It took only seconds to configure the switches for weapon release, and finding the target on radar was a snap-it was a six-story concrete tower, resembling a fire-department training tower, surrounded by trucks, a few surplus tanks and armored personnel carriers, and surrounded by about a hundred mannequins dressed in various combat outfits, from lightweight fatigues to bulky chemical suits. Obviously, HAWC was not concerned about evaluating the effects of a HADES bomb on minefields-they had "softer" targets in mind for the BLU-96. Surrounding ground zero were several thirty-foot-high wooden blast fences erected every one thousand feet, which would be used to gauge the effect of the HADES bomb's shock wave. McLanahan could shack this bomb with one eye-it was hardly a test of either his or Cobb's skill. This was going to be a "toss" release, where the bombing computer displayed a CCIP, or continuously computed impact point, steering cue on Cobb's heads-up display; the steering cue was a line that ran from the target at the bottom of the heads-up display to a release cue cross at the top, with the release pipper in the middle.

Cobb would offset the bomber to one side of the release cue line; then, at the right moment, would turn and climb so as to "walk" the pipper up the release cue line and eventually place the release cue cross directly in the center of the aiming pipper. When the cross split the pipper, the bomb would release-the hard turn would add "whip-crack" momentum to the bomb, allowing it to fly farther than a conventional level release.

It was all a very computer-controlled and rather basic bombing procedure-hardly a difficult task for a fifteen-year Air Force veteran bombardier. But sortie rates were down and flying hours were being cut, and McLanahan and his fellow flight test crew dogs were sniveling every flight they could. Except for a few high-value projects-Dreamstar, ANTARES, the Megafortress Plus, the A-I 2 bomber, the X-35 and X-37

superfighters, and a few other aircraft that were too weird for words and probably would never see daylight for another decade-research activity at Dreamland had almost ground to a halt. Peace was breaking out all over the world-despite the efforts of nut-cases like Saddam Hussein, Moammar Quaddafi, and a few renegade Russian generals to disrupt things-and the military would be the first to pay for the "peace dividend" that most Americans had been waiting for at least the past five years. "T minus thirty seconds, final release configuration check,"

McLanahan announced. He quickly ran through the final seven steps of the "Weapon Release-Conventional" checklist, then had Cobb read aloud his heads-up display's configuration readouts. Everything was normal.

McLanahan checked the crosshair placement on target, made a slight adjustment, then told Cobb, "Final aiming... ready. My dark visor's down." McLanahan told Cobb his dark visor was down because Cobb seemed never to check around the cockpit, although McLanahan knew he did. "Tone on." McLanahan activated the bomb scoring tone so the ground trackers would know exactly when the release pulse from the bombing computers was generated. "Copy," Cobb said. "Mine too. Autopilot off, TF's off.

Coming up on break... ready... ready... now." He said it as calmly, as serenely as if he were describing a china teacup being filled with afternoon tea-but his actions were certainly not dainty. Cobb slammed the FB- 111 in a tight 60-degree bank turn to the left and hauled back on the control stick. McLanahan felt a few roll flutters as Cobb made minute corrections to the break, but otherwise the break was clean and straight-the more constant the G-forces Cobb could keep on the BLU-96, the more accurate the toss delivery would be. Through the steady four Gs straining on every square inch of their bodies, Cobb grunted, "Coming up on release . . ready . . . ready . . . now. Release button .

. . ready . . now. McLanahan saw the flash of the release pulse on his weapon control panel, but he jabbed the manual release "pickle"

button just in case the bomb did not separate cleanly. "This is CROWBAR, good toss, good toss," McLanahan heard on the command channel. "All stations, stand by... Cobb had just completed a 180-degree turn and had managed to click on the autopilot again when both crew members could see an impossibly bright flash of light illuminate the cockpit, drowning out every shadow before them. Both men instinctively tightened their grips on handholds or flight controls just as a tremendous smack thundered against the FB111B's canopy. The bomber's tail was thrust violently to the left in a wide-sweeping skid, but Cobb was waiting for it and carefully brought the tail back in line without causing a roll couple.

"Henry-you okay?" McLanahan shouted. He could see a few stars in his eyes from the flash, but he felt no pain. He had to raise his dark visor to be able to see the instrument panels. Cobb raised his own visor as well. "Yeah, Patrick, I'm fine." After returning his left hand to his throttle quadrant, he made one quick scan of his controls and instruments, then resumed his usual position-eyes continually scanning, head caged straight ahead, hands on stick and throttles.

"CROWBAR, this is Vapor Two-One, condition green, McLanahan reported to the ground controllers. "Request clearance for a flyby of ground zero.

"Stand by, Vapor." The wait was not as long this time. "Vapor Two-One, request approved, remain at six thousand MSL over the target." Cobb executed another hard 90-degree left bank-turn and moved the FBI 1 lB's wings forward to the 54-degree setting to help slow the bomber down from superSonic speed. They could see the results as soon as they completed their turn back to the target. There was a ragged splotch of black around what was left of the concrete target tower, resembling a smoldering campfire thousands of feet in diameter. The tanks and armored personnel carriers had been blackened and tossed several hundred feet away from ground zero, and the regular trucks were burned and melted down to unrecognizable hunks. Wooden blast targets up to two miles away had been singed or knocked down, and of course all the mannequins, regardless of what they had been outfitted with, were gone.

"My God.. ." McLanahan muttered. He had never seen an atomic ground zero before except in old photos of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but guessed he was looking at a tiny bit of what such devastation would be like.

"Cool," was all Cobb said-and for him, that was akin to a long string of epithets and exclamations. McLanahan turned his attention away from the ugly burn mark and the holocaust below: "CROWBAR, this is Two-One, flyover complete, request approach clearance. "Vapor, this is CROWBAR, climb and maintain eight thousand, turn left heading three-zero-zero, clear to exit R-4806W and re-enter R-4808N to PALACE intersection for approach and landing. Thanks for your help."

"Eight thousand, three-zero-zero, PALACE intersection, Vapor copies all.

Good day. Out." McLanahan set up the navigation radios to help Cobb find the initial approach fix, but couldn't shake the pow~ul impression HADES

had left on him. It was a devastating weapon and would represent a serious threat and escalation to any conflict. No, it wasn't a nuclear device, but the fact that one aircraft could drop one bomb and kill all forms of life within a one-to-two-mile radius was pretty sobering. Just one B-52 bomber loaded with thirty to forty such weapons could destroy a small city. Thankfully, though, there wasn't a threat on the horizon that could possibly justify using HADES. Things were pretty quiet in the world. A lot of the countries that had regularly resorted to aggression before were now opting for peaceful, negotiated settlements.

Flare-ups and regional disputes were still present, but no nation wanted war with another, because the possibility for massive destruction with fewer military forces was a demonstrated reality. And for McLanahan that was just as well. Better to put weapons like HADES back in storage or destroy them than to use them. What Patrick McLanahan did not know, however, was that half a world away, a conflict was brewing that could once again force him and his fellow flyers to use such awesome weapons.

NEAR THE SPRATLY ISLANDS, SOUTH CHINA SEA WEDNESDAY, 8 JUNE 1994, 2247

HOURS LOCAL nst as fifty-seven-year-old Fleet Admiral Yin Po L'un, comander of the Spratly Island flotilla, South China Sea Fleet, People's Liberation Army Navy of China, reached for his mug of tea from the young steward, his ship heeled sharply to port and the tray with his tea went flying across the bridge of his flotilla's flagship. Well, evening tea would be delayed another fifteen minutes. Sometimes, he thought, his lot in life was as if the gods had sent a fire-breathing dragon to destroy a single lam-and the dragon finishes drowning in the sea along the way. The skipper of Yin's flagship, Captain Lubu Vin Li, chewed the young steward up one side and down the other for his clumsiness. Yin looked at the poor messboy, a thin, beady-eyed kid obviously with some Tibetan stock in him. "Captain, just let him bring the damned tea, please, " Yin said. Lubu bowed in acknowledgment and dismissed the steward with a slap on the chest and a stern growl. "I apologize for that accident, sir, " Lubu said as he returned to stand beside Yin's seat on the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin's flagship. "As you know, we have been in typhoon-warning-condition three for several days; I expect all the crew to be able to stand on their own two feet by now."

"Your time would be better spent speaking with Engineering and determining the reason for that last roll, Captain, " Yin said without looking at his young destroyer skipper. "The Hong Lung has the world's best stabilizer system, and we are not in a full gale yet-the stabilizers should have been able to dampen the ship's motion. See to it." Lubu's face went blank, then pained as he realized his mistake, then resolute as he bowed and turned to the ship's intercom to order the chief engineer to the bridge. The most sophisticated vessel in the People's Liberation Navy should not be wallowing around in only force-three winds, Yin thought-it only made the rest of his unit so unsightly. Admiral Yin turned to glance at the large, thick plastic panel on which the location and condition of the other vessels in his flotilla were plotted with a grease pencil. Radar and sonar data from his ships were constantly fed to the crewman in charge of the bridge plot, who kept it updated by alternately wiping and redrawing the symbols as fast as he could. His ships were roughly arranged in a wide protective diamond around the flagship. The formation was now headed southwest, pointing into the winds which were tossing around even his big flagship. Admiral Yin Po L'un's tiny Spratly Island flotilla currently consisted of fourteen small combatants, averaging around fifteen years of age, with young, inexperienced crews on them. Four to six of those ships were detached into a second task force, which cruised within the Chinese zone when the other ships were near the neutral zone.

On the outer perimeter of the flotilla, Admiral Yin Po L'un deployed three Huangfen-class fast-attack missile boats, capable against heavy surface targets, and four Hegu-class fastattack missile boats with antisubmarine and antiaircraft weapons. He had an old Lienyun-class minesweeper on the point, a precautionary tactic born of the conflict with the Vietnamese Navy only six years earlier. He also had two big Hainan-class fast patrol boats with antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine weapons operating as "roamers, " moving between the inner and outer perimeters. All were direct copies of old World War II Soviet designs, and these boats had no business being out in the open ocean, even as forgiving and generally tame as the South China Sea was. The ships in Yin's flotilla rotated out every few weeks with other ships in the six-hundred-ship South China Sea Fleet, based at Zhanjiang Naval Base on the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin. Yin's flagship, the Hong Lung, or Red Dragon, was a beauty, a true oceangoing craft for the world's largest navy. It was a Type EF5 guided-missile destroyer that had a Combination Diesel or Gas Turbine propulsion system that propelled the 132-meter, five-thousand-ton vessel to a top speed of over thirty-five nautical miles per hour. The Hong Lung had a helicopter hangar and launch platform, and it carried a modern, French-built Dauphin II patrol, rescue, antimine, and antisubmarine warfare helicopter. Yin's destroyer also carried six supersonic Fei Lung-7

antiship missiles, the superior Chinese version of the French Exocet antiship missile; two Fei Lung-9 long-range supersonic antiship missiles, experimental copies of the French-built ANS antiship missile; two Hong Qian-9 1 single antiair missile launchers, fore and aft, with thirty-missile manually loaded magazines each; a Creusoit-Loire dual-purpose 100-millimeter gun; and four single-barreled and two double-barreled 37-millimeter antiaircraft guns. It also had a single Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapon System gun. Developed in the United States of America, Phalanx was a radarguided Vulcan multibarrel 20-millimeter gun that could destroy incoming sea-skimming antiship missiles; from its mount on the forecastle perch behind and below the con, it could cover both sides and the stern out to a range of two kilometers. The Hong Lung also carried sonar (but no torpedoes or depth charges) and sophisticated targeting radars for her entire arsenal. The Hong Lung was specifically designed to patrol the offshore islands belonging to China, such as the Spratly and the Paracel Islands, and to engage the navies of the various countries that claimed these islands-so the Hong Lung carried no antisubmarine-warfare weaponry like the older Type EF4 Luda-class destroyers of the North Fleet. The Hong Lung could defeat any surface combatant in the South China Sea and could protect itself against almost any air threat. The Hong Lung's escort ships-the minesweepers and ASW vesselscould take on any threat that the destroyer wasn't specifically equipped to deal with. "Position, navigator, "

Admiral Yin called out. The navigator behind and to the Admiral's right called out in reply, "Sir!", bent to work at his plastic-covered chart table as a series of coordinates were read to him from the LORAN

navigation computers, then replied, "Sir, position is ten nautical miles northwest of West Reef, twenty-three miles north of Spratly Island air base."

"Depth under the keel?" "Showing twenty meters under the keel, sir, "

Captain Lubu Vin Li replied. "No danger of running aground if we stay on this course, sir." Yin grunted his acknowledgment. That was exactly what he was worried about. While his escorts could traverse the shallow waters of the Spratly Island chain easily, the Hong Lung was an oceangoing vessel with a four-meter draft. At low tide, the big destroyer could find itself run aground at any time while within the Spratly Islands. Although the Spratlys were in neutral territory, China controlled the valuable islands informally by sheer presence of force if not by agreement or treaty. Yin's normal patrol route took the flotilla through the southern edge of the "neutral zone" area of the island chain, scanning for Philippine vessels and generally staying on watch.

Although the Philippine Navy patrolled the Spratlys and had a lot of firepower there, Admiral Yin's smaller, faster escort ships could mount a credible force against them. And since the Philippine ships had no medium or long-range antiship missiles or antiair missiles in the area, the Hong Lung easily outgunned every warship within two thousand miles.

They were currently on an eastward heading, cruising well north of the ninth parallel-and as far as Yin was concerned, the "neutral zone" meant that he might consider issuing a warning to trespassers before opening fire on them. The shoal water was also south of their position, near Pearson Reef, and he wanted to stay clear of those dangerous waters.

"CIC to bridge, " the interphone crackled. "Wenshan re ports surface contact, bearing three-four-zero, range eighteen miles. Stationary target." Captain Lubu keyed his microphone and grunted a curt,

"Understood, " then checked the radar plot. The Wenshan was one of the Hainan-class patrol boats roaming north and east of the Hong Lung; it had a much better surface-search radar than the small Huangfen-classboat, the Xingyi, in the vicinity; although the Xingyi was equippe~Fei Lung-7 surface attack missiles, often other ships had to seek out targets for it. Lubu turned to Admiral Yin. "Sir, the surface contact is near Phu Qui Island, in the neutral zone about twenty miles north of Pearson Reef. No recent reports of any vessels or structures in the area. We have Wenshan and Xingyi in position to investigate the contact." Yin nodded that he understood. Phu Qui Island, he knew, was a former Chinese oil-drilling site in the Spratly Islands; the well had been capped and abandoned years ago. Although Phu Qui Island disappeared underwater at high tide, it was a very large rock and coral formation and could easily be expanded and fortified-it would be an even larger island than Spratly Island itself. If Yin was tasked to pick an island to occupy and fortify, he would pick Phu Qui. So might someone else. . "Send Wenshan and Xingyi to investigate the contact, " Yin ordered. "Rotate Manning north to take Wenshan '5 position." Manning was the other Hainan-class patrol boat acting as "rover" in Yin's patrol group. Captain Lubu acknowledged the order and relayed the instructions to his officer of the deck for transmission to the Wenshan. Yin, who had been in the People's Liberation Army Navy practically all of his life, was proud of the instincts he'd honed during his loyal career. He trusted them. And now, somewhere deep down in his gut, those instincts told him this was going to be trouble. Granted, Phu Qui Island, and even the Spratlys themselves, seemed the most unlikely place to expect trouble. The Spratlys-called Nansha Dao, the Lonely Islands, in Chinese-were a collection of reefs, atolls, and semisubmerged islands in the middle of the South China Sea, halfway between Vietnam and the Philippines and several hundred kilometers south of China. The fifty-five major surface formations of the Spratlys were dotted with shipwrecks, attesting to the high degree of danger involved when navigating in the area. Normally, such a deathtrap as the Spratlys would be given a wide berth. Centuries ago Chinese explorers had discovered that the Nansha Dao was a treasure trove of minerals-gold, iron, copper, plus traces or indications of dozens of other metals-as well as gems and other rarities. Since the islands were right on the sea lanes between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the "round-eyes"

eventually found them, and the English named them the Spratlys after the commander of a British warship who "discovered" them in the eighteenth century. It was the British who discovered oil in the Spratlys and began tapping it. Unfortunately, the British had not yet developed the technology to successfully and economically drill for oil in the weatherbeaten islands, so the islands were abandoned for safer and more lucrative drilling sites in Indonesia and Malaysia. As time progressed, several nations-Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines-all tried to develop the islands as a major stopover port for sea traffic. But it was following World War II that the Chinese considered the Spratlys as well as everything else in the South China Sea as their territory. As oil-drilling platforms, fishing grounds, and mining operations began to proliferate, the Chinese, aided by the North Vietnamese, who acted as a surrogate army for their Red friends, began vigorously patrolling the area. During the Vietnam War radar sites and radio listening posts on Spratly Island allowed the Vietcong and China to detect and monitor every vessel and aircraft heading from the Philippines to Saigon, including American B-52 bombers on strike missions into North Vietnam.

But the most powerful navy in the postwar world, the United States Navy, exerted the greatest tangible influence over the Spratly Islands.

Through its sponsorship, the government of the Philippines began patrolling the islands, eradicating the Vietnamese espionage units and using the islands as a base of operations for controlling access to the western half of the South China Sea. The Chinese had been effectively chased away from the Spratlys, ending five hundred years of dominance there. That became a very sore point for the Chinese. After the Vietnam War, the American presence weakened substantially, which allowed first the Vietnamese Navy, and then the Chinese Navy, to return to the Spratly Islands. But the Philippines still maintained their substantial American-funded military presence there, although they had ceded most of the southern islands to China and Vietnam. The lines had been drawn. The Philippines claimed the thirty atolls north of the nine degrees, thirty minutes north latitude, and the territory in between was a sort of neutral zone. Things were relatively quiet for about ten years following the Vietnam War. But in the late 1 980s conflict erupted again. During the war, Vietnam had accepted substantial assistance from the Soviet Union in exchange for Russian use of the massive Cam Rahn naval base and airbase, which caused a break in relations between China and Vietnam. Vietnam, now trained and heavily armed by the Soviet Union, was excluding Chinese vessels from the oil and mineral mining operations in the Spratlys. Several low-scale battles broke out. It was discovered that the Soviet Union was not interested in starting a war with China to help Vietnam hold the Spratlys, so China moved in and regained the control they had lost forty years earlier. Faced with utter destruction, the Vietnamese Navy withdrew, content to send an occasional reconnaissance flight over the region. That was when Admiral Yin Po L'un had been assigned his Spratly Island flotilla. To his way of thinking, these were not the Spratlys, or the Quan-Dao Mueng Bang as the Vietnamese called them-these were the Nansha Dao, property of the PeopIes Republic of China. China had built a hard-surfaced runway on Spratly Island and had reinforced some stronger reefs and atolls around it enough to create naval support facilities. Their claim was stronger than any other nation. Several other nations had protested the militarization of Spratly Island, but no one had done anything more than talk. To Admiral Yin, it was only a matter of time before all of the Nansha Dao returned to Chinese control. But the Filipino Navy, such as it was, still held very tight control over their unofficially designated territory. Yin's job was to patrol the region, map out all sea traffic, and report on any new construction or attempts to move oil-drilling platforms, fish-processing vessels, or mining operations in the neutral zone or in the Philippine sector. He was also to report on any movements of the Philippine Navy's major vessels in the area and to constantly position his forces to confront and defeat the Filipino pretenders should hostilities erupt. Not that the Filipino Navy was a substantial threat to the Chinese Navy-far from it. The strongest of the Filipino ships patrolling the Spratly Islands were forty-year-old frigates, corvettes, radar picket ships, and subchasers, held together by coats of paint and prayers. Still, a threat to Yin's territory-no matter whom it was from-was a threat, in his mind, to all of China.

Thirty minutes later, Yin's task force had closed to within nine miles of the contact while Wenshan and Xingyi had closed to within one mile; Yin positioned his ships so that he could maintain direct, scrambled communications with his two patrol boats but stay out of sight of the contact. "Dragon, this is Seven, " the skipper aboard Wenshan, Captain Han, radioed back to Admiral Yin. "I have visual contact. The target is an oil derrick. It appears to be mounted or anchored atop Phu Qui Island. It is surrounded by several supply barges with pipes on board, and two tugboats are nearby. There may be armed crewmen on deck. They are flying no national flags, but there does appear to be a company flag flying. We are moving closer to investigate. Request permission to raise the derrick on radio." So his instincts had been right An oil derrick in the neutral zone? How dare they place an oil derrick on Chinese property." Yin turned to Lubu. "I want the transmissions relayed to us. Permission granted to hail the derrick. Tell Captain Han to warn the crew that they will be attacked if they do not remove that derrick from the neutral zone immediately." A few moments later, Yin heard Han's warning: "Attention, attention the oil derrick on Phu Qui Island. This is the People's Republic of China frigate Wenshan on international hailing channel nine. Respond immediately. Over."

Captain Han on Wenshan was speaking in excellent English, the universal sailors language even in this part of the world, and Yin had to struggle to keep up with the conversation. He made a mental note to congratulate Han on his resourcefulness-the Wenshan was not a frigate, but if the crew of the oil derrick believed that it was, they might be less inclined to resist and more inclined to follow orders. "Frigate Wenshan, this is the National Oil Company Barge Nineteen on channel nine. We read you loud and clear. Over." Admiral Yin seethed. The National Oil Company. That was a Philippine company run by a relative of the new Philippine president, Arturo Mikaso, and headquartered in Manila. Worse, it was financed by and operated mostly by rich Texas oil drillers.

American capitalists who obviously thought they could, in their typically imperialistic way, just set up an oil derrick anywhere they pleased. The audacity. To even attempt to build a derrick in a neutral zone. And Yin knew it wasn't really neutral at all. It was Chinese territory. And the Americans and the Filipinos were trying to rape it.

"National Oil Barge Nineteen, " Han continued, "you are violating international agreements that prohibit any private or commercial mineral exploration or facilities in this area. You are ordered to remove all equipment immediately and vacate the area. You will receive no further warnings. Comply immediately. Over."

"Vessel Wenshan, we are involved in search and salvage operations at this time, " a new voice on the radio, young and at ease, replied.

"Salvage operations are permitted in international waters. We are not aware of any international agreements involving these waters. You may contact the Philippine or American governments for clarification."

"National Oil Barge Nineteen, commercial operations in these waters are a direct threat to the national security and business interests of the People's Republic of China, " Captain Han replied. He knew that Admiral Yin would not approve of his debating like this over the radio-he was a soldier, Yin would tell him, not a scum-sucking politician-but he wasn't going to move a meter closer to the Philippine oil derrick unless everyone on board understood why. "You are ordered to discontinue all operations immediately or I will take action." There was no further reply from the barge crew. "HF radio traffic from the barge, sir, "

Lubu said, relaying a report from his Radio section. "They may be contacting headquarters." Contacting headquarters? There was no reason for the people on the drilling platform to do anything other than dismantle. And to do it immediately. Yin shook his head in disbelief.

And anger. China had been forced to cede an island chain that was rightly theirs, forced to set up a neutral zone and allow free navigation in the area, only to have it thrown back in their faces. The arrogance! "This is unacceptable!" Yin spat. "Any idiot knows this is Chinese territory, whether this is called neutral territory or not. How dare they "We can relay a message to Headquarters and report the violation, sir. Yin bristled. "This is not a mere violation, Lubu. This is an act of aggression! They know full well that the neutral zone is off-limits to all commercial activity, and that includes salvage operations-if indeed that is what they are really doing. This task force will not sit idly by while these bastards ignore international law and challenge my authority." Lubu had not seen his Admiral this angry in a very long time. "Sir, if we are seriously considering an armed response, perhaps Headquarters... Admiral Yin cut him off. "These people aren't worth the aggravation of an explanation. Have you forgotten that I'm in charge of this area? It is my responsibility to protect our territory." Yin shook his head angrily. "The brazenness of this is what's so astounding to me. Don't they remember history? Hasn't there been enough of their blood shed over these islands? Have they gone senile? Well, let's remind them of the full power of this force."

Yin turned to Lubu. "Captain, relay to Captain Han on Wenshan: 'You are ordered to move within one thousand meters of the platform so as to provide sufficient lighting and covering fire from your deck guns, then dispatch a boarding crew to take the captain, officers, and other personnel on board the derrick into custody. After the crew is removed from the barge, you will destroy the entire facility with heavy gunfire.

'To Xingyi: have them move closer and be ready to assist. To the rest of this task group: 'go to general quarters." Relay the messages and execute."

"Number-one launch is manned and ready, sir, " the officer 0f( the deck reported. "The chief reports davits for launch number three are fouled; he recommends switching to launch four."

"So ordered. I want that launch freed up as soon as possible. Have other launches checked and report status to me immediately." Han wasn't going to say why-he was afraid they might need the damned launches for themselves. A few minutes later, with the ~nshan barely maintaining a close and comfortable position away from Phu Qui Island, the motor launches were lowered overboard. Each wooden launch, forty feet long and eight feet wide, carried a crew of three and eight sailors armed with AK-47 look-alike Type 56 rifles and sidearms. The launches were only a few dozen meters away from the Wenshan when the world seemed to explode for Admiral Yin, Captain Han, Captain Lubu, and the rest of the task force. The engines on the Wenshan had been racing back and forth in response to the helmsman's attempts to hold the ship's position steady.

Han had been watching the number-four motor launch moving away from the ship and did not hear his crewman's warning: "Shoal water! Depth three meters . . depth two meters... depth under the keel decreasing." From the barges on Phu Qui Island, bullets began pelting the starboard side of the Wenshan as the crewman aboard the oil-derrick barges fired on the approaching launches and at the Wenshan itself. Captain Han had not heard the shoal-water warning. He ran back into the bridge. "Radio to Hong Lung, we are under fire from the oil barges. "Captain, depth under the keel...!" Suddenly the Wenshan was pushed laterally toward the island and struck a coral outcropping surrounding Phu Qui Island. The patrol boat heeled sharply to starboard, the sudden, crunching stop flinging every crewman on the bridge off his feet. The gusting winds only served to push the Wenshan harder against the coral, and although the brittle calcium formations gave way immediately under the four-hundred-ton ship, the sound of straining steel combined with the howling winds and the cries of the surprised crewmen made it seem like the end of the world was at hand. The officer of the deck had raised his headset microphone to his lips and shouted, "Comm, bridge, relay to Hong Lung, we are under fire, we are under fire.. ." Then amid the tearing and crunching sounds: "We have hit the reef, we have hit the reef." But the message transmitted to the rest of the task force group by the startled and terrified radioman was, Wenshan to Hong Lung, we are under fire. . . we have been hit." ABOARD THE FLAGSHIP HONG LUNG When the warning from the Wenshan pierced the air in the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin spun on his heels to Captain Lubu and shouted, "Order Wenshan and Xingyi to open fire, full missile and gun salvo." Lubu wasn't going to question this order-he had been fearing just such an occurrence. He quickly relayed the command to his officer of the deck.

Seconds later the stormy night sky erupted with flashes of light and streaks of fire off in the distance. Using their sophisticated Round Ball fire-control radar, the fast attack craft Kingyi had maintained a continuous attack solution on the barges with their Fei Lung-7

surface-to-surface missiles. As soon as the warning cry had been issued by Captain Han on Wenshan, Captain Miliyan on Xingyi had ordered all missiles and guns made ready for action. When he received the message from Admiral Yin, the Fei Lung guided missiles were in the air. The Flying Dragon missiles received initial course guidance from the Round Ball targeting radar, and a small booster engine ignited that punched the twenty.two-hundred-pound missile out of its storage canister. After flying a hundred yards away from the ship, the big second-stage sustainer motor kicked on, accelerating the missile to Mach one. A radar altimeter kept the missile precisely at one hundred feet above the choppy waters until it hit the easternmost barge and exploded six seconds after launch. The pointed titanium armor-piercing warhead section thruster cap of the Fei Lung missile allowed the missile to drive through the thin steel hull of the outermost barge before detonating the warhead. The four-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead created a massive firestorm all across the Philippine oil platform, spraying red-hot chunks of metal and propellant for hundreds of yards in every direction. A wall of fire caused by a wave of burning petroleum washed across Phu Qui Island, swirling into an inverted tornado that defied the late summer rains and stabbed skyward. Captain Han watched the spectacular firestorm that was once a Philippine oil derrick for several moments until he realized that the Wenshan had returned to an even keel and that the forward 76-millimeter gun had opened fire on the platform, pounding the mountain of flames with twenty kilogram radar-guided shells. "Cease fire!" Han shouted at his officer of the deck, who was staring in rapt fascination out the forward windshield at the maelstrom. "Cease fire!" he repeated before the forward 76 was silent. "Helm! Move us out to two kilometers from the island. Signal the motor launches and the Hong Lung that we are maneuvering out of shoal water." As Wenshan eased away from the huge fires still raging on the Philippine oil barges, Xingyi launched two more missiles at the barge until Admiral Yin on the Hong Lung ordered him to stop. One Fei Lung missile was quite enough to suppress any hostile fire from the small oil facility, and two missiles would have completely destroyed it-four missiles, half the Xingyi 's load, could devastate an aircraft carrier. Admiral Yin's intent was clear-he wanted no one alive on that platform. "Seven, this is the Dragon, " the radio message began.

"Recover your boarding parties and rejoin the group. Over." Captain Han picked up the radio microphone himself. "I copy, Dragon, " Han replied.

"I recommend that one of my motor launches search for survivors. Over."

"Request denied, Seven, " came the reply. "Dragon Leader orders all Dragon units to withdraw." One hour later, all traces of the Philippine oil derrick and barges were swept away in the rising tide of the windswept South China Sea currents. Except for a few pieces of pipe and half-burned bodies, the oil platform had ceased to exist. MALACANANG

PALACE, MANILA, THE PHILIPPINES THURSDAY, 9 JUNE 1994, 0602 HOURS LOCAL

Since the Marcos years, the official residence of the Philippine President, Malacanang Palace, had undergone a major transformation.

Concerned for his security, Marcos had transformed the graceful eighteenth-century Spanish colonial mansion into an ugly fortress-he had blocked most of the windows and replaced stained glass and crystal with steel or reinforced bulletproof glass. Wishing to distance her government from the dictatorial excesses of the Marcos regime, Corazon Aquino had chosen to live in the less pretentious Guest House and had turned the palace into a museum of shame, where citizens and tourists could gape in wonder at Marcos' underground bunker-some called it his

"torture chambers"-and Imelda's cavernous bedroom, stratospheric canopy bed; her infamous shoe closets and her bulletproof brassiere. The new President of the Philippines, seventy-year-old Arturo Mikaso, changed the Malacanang Palace back into a historical landmark that his people could be proud of, as well as a livable residence for himself and a workable office complex 46ions of Malacanang Palace were now open for tours when they were not in use by the President. In time the palace again became a symbol for the city of Manila itself. But now, in the growing summer dawn, the palace was the scene of a hastily arranged meeting of the President's Cabinet. In Mikaso's residential office, where the President could see the Pasig River that wound through northern Manila, President Mikaso sipped a cup of tea. Mikaso was the elder statesman, a white-haired man who was taller and more powerful-looking than most Filipinos, a wealthy landowner and ex-senator who was immensely popular with most of his people. Mikaso had been elected as President of the nation when Corazon Aquino's second four-year term came to an end. He won the election only after forming an alliance with the National Democratic Front, the main political organ of the Communist Party of the Philippines; and the Moro National Liberation Front, a pro-Islamic political group that represented the thousands of citizens of the Islamic faith in the south Philippines.

"How many were killed, General?" Mikaso asked. "Thirty men, all civilians, " the Chief of Staff of the New Philippine Army, General Roberto La Loma Santos, replied somberly. "Their barge came under full attack by a Red Chinese patrol. No orders to surrender, no quarter given, no attempts to offer assistance or rescue the attack. The bastards attacked, then slinked away like cowardly dogs." A tall, dark-haired man, standing alone near the great stone fireplace, turned toward General Santos. "You have still not explained to us, General, "

Second Vice President J~~e Trujillo Samar said in a deep voice, "what that barge was doing in the neutral zone, anchored to Pagasa Island. .

"And what are you implying, Samar?" First Vice President Daniel Teguina, who was seated near the President's desk, challenged. Teguina was politically an ally of Samar but ideologically a complete opposite.

Part of the coalition formed during the 1994 elections was the appointment of forty-one year-old Daniel Teguina. Much younger than Mikaso, Teguina was not only a vice president, but also the leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, an ex-military officer, newspaper publisher, and leader of the National Democratic Front, a leftist political organization. With General J~~e Trujillo Samarwho besides being the second vice president was also governor of the newly formed Commonwealth of Mindanao, which had won the right to form its own autonomous commonwealth in 1990-these three men formed a fiery coalition that, although successful in continuing the important post-Marcos rebuilding process in the Philippines, was stormy and divisive. "Those were innocent Filipino workers on the barge.. ." said Teguina. Samar nodded and said, "Who were illegally drilling for oil in the neutral zone. Did they think the Chinese were going to just sit back and watch them work?"

"They were not drilling for oil, just taking soundings, " said Teguina.

"Well, they had no business there, " Samar insisted. "The Chinese Navy's actions were outrageous, but those workers were in clear violation of the law."

"You're a cold bastard, " Teguina cut in. "Blaming the dead for an act of aggression "Enough, enough, " the elderly Mikaso said wearily, gesturing for the men to stop. "I did not call you here to argue.

Teguina glared at both men. "Well, we can't just sit back and do nothing. The Chinese just launched a major act of aggression. We must do something. We must-"

"Enough, " Mikaso interrupted. "We must begin an investigation and find out exactly why that barge was operating in those waters, then. "Sir, I recommend that we also step up patrols in the Spratly Island area, "

General Santos said. "This may be a prelude to a full-scale invasion of the Spratlys by the Chinese."

"Risky, " Samar concluded. "A naval response would be seen as provocative, and we have no way of winning any conflict with the People's Liberation Navy. We would gain nothing... "Always the general, eh, Samar?" Teguina asked derisively. He turned away from him to the President. "I agree with General Santos. We have a navy, however small-I say to send them to protect our interests in the Spratlys. We have an obligation to our people to do nothing short of that." Arturo Mikaso looked at each of his advisers in turn and nodded in agreement.

Little did he realize the extraordinary chain of events he was about to set into motion with that slight nod of his head. OVER NEW MEXICO, 100

MILES SOUTH OF ALBUQUERQUE 9 JUNE 1994, 0745 HOURS LOCAL with his boyish face, long, gangly arms and legs, his baseball cap, and his thirty-two-ounce squeeze bottle of Pepsi-Cola-he drank five such bottles a day yet was still as skinny as a rail-Jonathan Colin Masters resembled a kid at a Saturday afternoon ball game. He had bright-green eyes and short brown hair-luckily, the baseball cap hid Masters' hair, or else his stubborn cowlicks would have made him appear even younger, almost adolescent, to the range officers and technicians standing nearby.

Masters, his assistants and technicians, and a handful of Air Force and Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA) officials were on board a converted DC-10 airliner, forty-five thousand feet over the White Sands Missile Test Range in south-central New Mexico. Unlike the military and Pentagon officials, who were poring over checklists, notes, and schematics, Masters had his feet up on a raised track in the cargo section of the massive airliner, sipping his cola and smiling like a kid who was at the circus for the first time. "The winds are kicking up again, Doctor Masters, " U.S. Air Force Colonel Ralph Foch said to Masters, his voice one of concern. Masters wordlessly tipped his soda bottle at the Air Force range safety officer and reached to his control console, punched in instructions to the computer, and studied the screen. "Carrier aircraft has compensated for the winds, and ALARM has acknowledged the change, " Masters reported. "We got it covered, Ralph." Colonel Ralph Foch wasn't mollified, and being called "Ralph" by a man-no, a kid-twenty years his junior didn't help. "The one-hundred-millibar wind patterns are approaching the second-stage 'Q'

limits, Doctor, " Foch said irritably. "That's the third increase over the forecast we've seen in the past two hours. We should consider aborting the flight." Masters glanced over his shoulder at Foch and smiled a dimpled, toothy smile. "ALARM compensated OK, Ralph, " Masters repeated. "No need to abort."

"But we're on the edge of the envelope as it is, " Colonel Foch reminded him. "The edge of your envelope, Ralph, " Masters said. He got to his feet, walked a few steps aft, and patted the nose of a huge, torpedo-shaped object sitting on its launch rail. "You established your flight parameters based on data I provided, and you naturally made your parameters more restrictive. ALARM here knows its limits and it still says go. So we go. "Doctor Masters, as the range safety officer I'm here to insure a safe launch for both the ground and the air crews. My parameters are established to-"

"Colonel Foch, if you want to abort the mission, say the word, " Masters said calmly, barely suppressing a casual burp. "The Navy doesn't get their relay hookup satellites on the air until tomorrow, you can spend the night at the Blytheville, Arkansas, Holiday Inn again, and I can bill DARPA another one hundred thousand dollars for gas. It's your decision."

"I'm merely expressing my concern about the winds at altitude, Doctor Masters . . "And I replied to your concerns, " Masters said with a smile. "My little baby here says it's a go. Unless we fly somewhere else to launch, away from the jet stream . . "DARPA is very specific about the launch area, Doctor. These satellites are important to the Navy. They want to moni tor the booster's progress throughout the flight. The launch must be over the White Sands range. "Fine. Then we continue to monitor the winds and let the computers do their jobs. If they can't properly compensate without going outside the range, we turn around on the racetrack and try again. If we go outside the launch window, we abort. Fair enough?" Foch could do nothing but nod in agreement. This launch was important to both the Navy and Air Force, and he wasn't prepared to issue a launch abort unilaterally. The object called ALARM that Masters so lovingly regarded was the Air Launched Alert Response Missile; there were two of the huge missiles on board the DC-10 that morning. ALARM was a four-stage space booster designed to place up to three-quarter-ton payloads in low-to-medium Earth orbit by launching the booster from the cargo hold of an aircraft-in effect, the DC-10 was the ALARM booster's first stage, with the other three stages provided by powerful solid-fuel rockets on the missile itself. The ALARM

missile had a long, slender, one-piece wing that swiveled out from its stowed position along the missile's fuselage after launch. The wing would supply lift and increase the effectiveness of the solid rocket motors while the booster was in the atmosphere, which greatly increased the power and payload capability of the booster. An ALARM booster could carry as much as fifteen hundred pounds in its ten-foot-long, forty-inch-diameter payload bay. On today's mission, each of Masters'

ALARM boosters carried four small two-hundred-pound communications satellites, which Jon Masters, in his own inimitable way, called NIRTSats-"Need It Right This Second" satellites. Unlike more conventional satellites, which weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds, were placed in high geosynchronous orbits almost twenty-three thousand miles above the Equator, and could carry dozens of communications channels, NIRTSats were small, lightweight satellites which carried only a few communications channels and were placed in low, one-hundred-to-one-thousand-mile orbits. Unlike geosynchronous satellites, which orbited the Earth once per day and therefore appeared to be stationary over the Equator, NIRTSats orbited the Earth once every ninety to three hundred minutes, which meant that usually more than one satellite had to be launched to cover a particular area. But a NIRTSat cost less than one-fiftieth the price of a fullsized satellite, and it cost less to insure and launch as well. Even with a constellation of four NIRTSats, a customer with a need for satellite communications could get it for less than one-third the price of buying "air time" on an existing satellite. A single ALARM booster launch, which cost only ten million dollars from start to finish, could give a customer instant global communications capability from anywhere in the world-and it took only a few days to get the system in place, instead of the months or even years it took for conventional launches. NIRTSats could be repositioned anywhere in orbit if requirements changed, and Masters had even devised a way to recover a NIRTSat intact and reuse it, which saved the customer even more money. Masters' customer this day was, as it usually was, the Department of Defense, which was why all the military observers were on hand. Masters was to place four NIRTSats in a four-hundred-mile-high polar orbit over the western Pacific to provide the Navy and Air Force with specialized, dedicated voice, data, air-traffic control, and video communications between ships, aircraft, and land-based controllers. With the NIRTSat constellation in place, the Navy's Seventh Fleet headquarters and the Air Force's Pacific Air Force headquarters could instantly talk with and find the precise locations of every ship and aircraft on the network. Coupled with the military's Global Positioning System satellite navigation system, NIRTSats would continually transmit flight or sailing data on each aircraft or vessel to their respective headquarters, although the vessels might be far outside radio range. The second ALARM booster carried another four NIRTSat satellites and was aboard as a backup if the first launch failed. Jon Masters' cocky attitude toward this important launch made Colonel Foch very uncomfortable. But, he thought, the little snot had every reason to feel cocky-in two years of testing and over two dozen launches, not one ALARM booster had ever failed to do its thing, and not one NIRTSat had ever failed to function. It was, Foch had to admit, quite a testament to the genius of Jonathan Colin Masters. Worse, the bastard was so young. Boy genius was an understatement. When Jon Masters was barely in grade school in Manchester, New Hampshire, his first-grade teachers showed Jon's parents a one-hundred-page treatise on the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster who had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the essay, Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent in launching a rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to Earth-and the Apollo space program had just gotten under way, with the first lunar landing still three years away. It didn't take Jon's parents a blink of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a private high school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master's degree in mathematics from Dartmouth, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after a tumultuous five years finally earned a doctorate in engineering at the age of twenty. The first love of Masters' life was and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency immediately after leaving MIT. The Shuttle Transportation System, or STS, program was just heating up by then, and Jon Masters was an integral part of the development of special applications that could take advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite and delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was at least partially designed by Jonathan Masters. But, even as the shuttle transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year and more ambitious projects, including the space statiOn, Jon Masters saw a weakness. It was an obvious problem that was creeping into the successful STS program-the spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles, with even more miles slated for them each year, and no more orbiters were being built. When the success of the shuttle program became obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new orbiter per year rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket boosters and avionics. But they had none. Jon Masters took an active interest in the numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned from NASA and accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences, Inc., a small Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that sometimes subcontracted work for the fledgling Strategic Defense Intiative Organization, the federal research and development team tasked with devising an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system. Soon afterward he became vice president in charge of research for the small company. Masters' presence on the board gave the company a shot of optimism-and a new line of credit-that allowed it to stay fiscally afloat. With the NASA shuttles grounded indefinitely following the Challenger disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in vogue. While NASA was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite booster duty and bringing back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988

Jon Masters, now the twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new president of Sky Sciences, soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced that he had developed a new low-cost space booster that was small and easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small Containerized Air Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a groundlaunched rocket that could be hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and launched from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB restored NASA and the military's ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit on short notice. His next project was a booster system similar to SCARAB

but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB could place a two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost anywhere on Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that carried the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support contingent, and at least fifteen hours' worth of work to erect the launch structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice tests, Masters needed no more than thirty hours from initial notification and delivery of the payload to T minus zero. But he wanted to do better. That was when ALARM was born. ALARM was merely a SCARAB

booster downsized to fit in a transport plane and fitted with wings. It used the launch aircraft as its first-stage booster, and it used lift from its scissor-action wings to help increase the efficiency of the smaller first- and second-stage boosters. Two ALARM boosters could be standing by on board the carrier aircraft; they would only need to bring the payloads on board and take off. With aerial refueling, the ALARM

carrier aircraft could stay aloft for days, traversing the country or even partly around the world, ready to launch the boosters. Masters had developed several different payloads for his small air-launched boosters. Along with the communications satellites, he had developed a small satellite that could take composite radar, infrared, and telescopic visual "photos" of the Earth, and the resulting image was dozens of times more detailed than standard visual photos. The images could be digitized and transmitted to terminals all over the world via his small communications satellites, giving commanders real-time reconnaissance and intelligence information. Combined with powerful computers, users from the Pentagon or White House to individual aircrew members on board strike aircraft could conduct their own sophisticated photo intelligence, plan and replan missions, and assess bomb damage almost instantaneously. With several different payloads on board, the flexibility of the ALARM system was unparalleled. A communications-satellite launch could immediately change to a satellite-retrieval mission or a reconnaissance-satellite mission, or even a strike mission. A single ALARM carrier aircraft could become as important a national asset as Cape Canaveral. "Fifteen minutes to launch window one, " Masters' launch control officer, Helen Kaddiri, announced.

Kaddiri was the chief of Masters' operations staff and the senior launch-control officer, in charge of monitoring all flight systems throughout each mission. In her early forties, exotically attractive, she'd been born and raised in Calcutta. She and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was twelve and she changed her name from Helenika to Helen. She was a completely career-minded scientist who sometimes found it very frustrating working for someone like Jon Masters. She regarded Masters warily with her dark, beautiful, almond-shaped eyes as he studied the command console. Masters was so relaxed and laid-back that all the uptight techno-types he worked with, especially those developing new space technologies, got really rankled-herself included. Maybe it was because Masters seemed to treat everyone and everything the same... like work was one big beach party.

The government officials they dealt with almost always shuddered when working with Masters. Even socializing with him was a strain. Kaddiri thought that every time they got a new government contract was a matter of luck. If it weren't for his genius... "Fourteen minutes to launch window one, " she said. "Thanks, Helen, " Jon replied. He pushed his baseball cap up higher on his forehead, which made him look even youngerlike "Beaver" Cleaver. "Let's get Roosevelt-One in position and ready." Kaddiri grimaced at another of Masters' quirks-he named his boosters, not just numbered them. He usually named them after American presidents or Hollywood actors or actresses. Helen thought that if Jon had a dog, he would probably number it instead. Jon swung his headset microphone to his lips: "Crew, Roosevelt- 1 is moving stage center.

Stand by." The interior of Masters' converted DC-10 was arranged much like the firing mechanism of a rifle. Like a cartridge magazine, the two boosters were stored side by side in the forward section of the one-hundred-twenty-feet-long, thirtyfoot-wide cargo bay, which afforded plenty of room to move around the fifty-feet-long, four-foot-diameter rockets and their stabilizers. Forward of the storage area was the control center, with all of the booster monitoring and control systems, and forward of the control room was a pressure hatch which led to the flight deck-for safety's sake, the flight deck was sealed from the cargo section so any pressurization malfunctions in the cargo end would not prevent the flight crew from safely recovering the plane. The back fifty feet of the cargo hold was occupied by a large cylindrical chamber resembling the breech end of a shotgun, composed of heavy steel and aluminum with numerous thick Plexiglas viewports all around it. The boosters would roll down a track in the center of the cargo hold into the chamber, and the chamber would be sealed from the rest of the aircraft. Just prior to launch, the chamber would be depressurized before opening the "bomb-bay" doors. With this system, the entire cargo section of the aircraft did not have to be depressurized before launch.

Floodlights and high-speed video cameras inside the launch chamber and outside the DC-10 launch plane were ready to photograph the entire launch sequence. With two of Kaddiri's assistants with flashlights watching on either side, the first forty-three-thousand-pound space booster began rolling on its tracks toward the center of the cabin. The crew, especially the cockpit crew of two pilots and engineer, had to be notified whenever one of these behemoth rockets was being moved.

Whenever they moved a rocket, the flight engineer had to begin transferring luel to the side where the booster was moved to keep the launch aircraft stable. The booster moved about ten feet per minute, which was the same speed that a similar weight in jet fuel could be transferred from body tanks to the corresponding wing tanks. In two minutes the booster was in position in the center of the launch cabin, and it began its slow journey aft into the launch chamber. This time, to ensure longitudinal stability as the twenty-one-ton rocket moved aft, a large steel drum filled with eight thousand gallons of jet fuel in the belowdeck cargo section would slowly move forward as the booster moved aft, which would help to keep the aircraft stable; after the booster was launched, the drum would quickly move aft to balance the plane. It took much longer for the booster to make its way aft, but it was finally wheeled into position in the chamber and the heavy steel hatch closed.

Once in place, retractable clamps held the booster in place over the bomb-bay doors. "Roosevelt One in position, " Kaddiri called out as she peered through the observation ports in the chamber. "Flight deck, confirm lateral and longitudinal trim."

"Aircraft trim nominal, " the flight engineer reported a few seconds later. "Standing by."

"Roger. Confirm hatch closed and locked." Masters checked the console readouts. "Launch-chamber hatch closed, locked, green lights on."

"Engineer cross-check good, green lights on, " the flight engineer reported after checking his readouts from the flight deck. Kaddiri reached into a green canvas bag slung over her shoulder into a portable oxygen pack and withdrew an oxygen mask, checked the hose and regulator, and then clicked the mask's built-in wireless microphone on. Her assistants in the aft end of the DC-10 did the same; Masters and Foch had already donned their masks. "Oxygen On and Normal, " she said. She got thumbs-up from her assistants after they checked their masks, then said, "Ready to depressurize launch chamber." Masters got a thumbs-up from Foch, then replied, "Oxygen On and Normal at the control console."

He called up the cargosection pressurization readout and displayed it in big numerals on a monitor screen so both he and Foch could read them easily-two sets of eyes were always better than one. "Launch chamber depressurizing-now." For all that cross-checking and preparation, it was quite unspectacular. In two minutes the launch chamber was depressurized and the cargo-bay pressure was stable. After monitoring it for another minute to check for slow leaks, Masters removed his mask and radioed, "Cargo-section pressure checks good, launch chamber fully depressurized, no leaks." The computer would continue to monitor the cabin pressure and warn the crew of any changes. Masters and everyone else kept their masks dangling from their necks . . . just in case.

"Data-link check." Masters checked to be sure that the booster was still exchanging information with the launch computers. The check was all automatic, but it still took several long moments. Finally: "Data connection nominal. Two min utes to launch window." Masters turned to Colonel Foch. "We need final range clearance, Colonel." Foch was staring intently at one of the screens on the console, which was displaying atmospheric data relayed from the White Sands Missile Range headquarters through their extensive sensor network. "I show the winds at the maximum Q limits, Doctor Masters, " he said. "We should abort."

"Roosevelt says he's a go, " Masters replied, ignoring the warning and checking the readouts again. "Let's proceed."Jon looked at Kaddiri as he hit the intercom button. "Helen?" She removed her oxygen mask as she walked back to the command console. "It's pretty risky, Jon."

"Helen, 'pretty risky' is not a 'no." Unless I hear a definite no, I'd say we proceed." Foch cleared his throat. "Doctor, it seems to me you're taking a big chance here." He glanced at Kaddiri, expecting a bit more support from someone who obviously wasn't sure of what Masters was doing, but he got nothing but a blank, noncommittal expression.

"You're wasting one of your boosters just to prove something. This isn't a wartime scenario. "Colonel, this might not be a war we're fighting, but to me it's nothing less than an all-out battle, " Masters said. "I have to prove to my customers, my stockholders, my board of directors, and to the rest of the country that the ALARM system can deliver its payload on time, on target." He turned to Foch, and Kaddiri could see a very uncharacteristic hardness in Masters' young face. "I programmed these boosters with reliability in mindreliability to deliver as promised, and reliability to do the mission in conditions such as this." Foch leaned forward and spoke directly at Masters in a low voice.

"You don't have to tell me all this, Doctor. I know what you want. You get paid if this thing gets launched. My flight parameters insure both safety for ground personnel and reliability of the launch itself. Yours only covers the launch. My question is, do you really care what happens after that? I think you care more about your business than the results of this mission." Masters glared at him. He whipped off his baseball cap and stabbed at Foch, punctuating each sentence: "Listen, Ralph, that's my name on that booster, my name on those satellites, my name all over this project. If it doesn't launch, I take the heat. If it doesn't fly, I take the heat. If it doesn't deliver four healthy satellites in their proper orbits, I take the heat. "Now you might think you know my contracts, Ralph. You're right-I do get paid if Roosevelt-One is launched. I get paid if we bring it back without launching it, too. I've already gotten deposits for the next six launches, and I've already received progress payments for the next ten boosters. But you don't know shit about my business, buddy. I've got a dozen ways to fail, and each one can put me out of business faster than you can take a pee. I do care about that. And still I say, we launch.

Now if you have any objections, say it and we'll abort. Otherwise issue range clearance, sit back, and watch the fireworks." Helen Kaddiri was surprised. She'd never seen Jon so wound up. He was right about the pressure on him and the company-there were more than a dozen ways to fail. Friendly and unfriendly suitors were waiting to snap up the company. The aerospace sector had fared very poorly in the recent U.S.

economic mini-recession, and it was worsened by the declining outlook on all defense-industry stocks with the advent of glasnost, perestroika, the opening of Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany. Sky Masters, Inc., had to indeed prove itself on each flight. But Jon Masters had always let the pressure roll off his back. He paid lip service to the concerns of his board of directors and partners, and treated military experts like Foch and scientists like Kaddiri as part of his road show.

He listened only to those who agreed with him. Sometimes he seemed too busy having a good time to see the danger in what he was doing. Colonel Ralph Foch clearly was not having a good time. He turned away from Masters and checked the data readouts being transmitted to Masters'

launch aircraft from the White Sands Missile Test Range; the data was a collection of sensor readings, meteorological-balloon measurements, and satellite observations about conditions both in the atmosphere and in the region of space that the four NIRTSats would travel. Foch checked several screens of data with a checklist and binders of computer models devised for this launch, then compared the information with corrective actions being reported by Masters' launch aircraft as well as the data from the ALARM booster itself. Since the launch was, in effect, the ALARM booster's first stage, the rocket was already "flying" the mission-issuing corrections to the jet's flight crew, updating its position, and continually plotting its new route of flight-while still within the cargo bay of the converted DC-10. "You're right on the borderline, Doctor Masters, " Foch finally said. "But you're still within the safety margin. Pending final clearance from White Sands, you're cleared to launch." Foch swung his headset microphone in place and made the radio call to the missile-range headquarters, recommending clearance to launch. With airborne clearance received, the ground range safety headquarters made a last-minute sweep of the range, alerted Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center to assist in keeping aircraft out of the area, then issued final range clearance. Masters grinned at Helen. "You've got the con, Helen." He liked to use nautical terms like "con" although Masters had never been near a naval vessel. "Initiate launch sequence. "Crew stand by for launch sequence,

" Kaddiri sighed over interphone as Masters made his way aft with the two launch technicians. Kaddiri began to read off the fifty-one-item checklist steps, most of which were simply verifying that the computer was reporting the proper readings and was progressing smoothly, with no fault reports. The automatic countdown stopped on step 45, "Final Launch Clearance, Crew Notified, " at T minus sixty seconds, where the computer initiated an automatic countdown hold and transferred control back to Kaddiri. "T minus sixty second hold, " she announced. "Flight controls visually inspected and checked in manual mode." Jon Masters liked to accomplish this last check himself instead of sitting up on the launch-control console-it was his last look at each missile before sending it out into the world, like a parent dressing the child before sending him off for the first time to kindergarten. Both launch officers and Masters checked the long, slender scissor wings and vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the tailplane. When they reported OK, Kaddiri activated the flight-control self-test system. The scissor wings swiveled out two feet until several inches of the wingtips were visible, and the rudder and stabilators on the tailplane jumped back and forth in a pre-programmed test sequence. "Self-test in progress, " Masters called out. "X-wing to fifteen-degree position, left wingtip right. . .

rudder right. rudder center . . . rudder left . . . left stab up .

. . center . . . down . . . center . . . right stab up . . .

center . down . . . center." The test lasted only ten seconds.

Kaddiri canceled the selftest, then manually set the booster to launch configuration. The wings swiveled back to lie along the top of the booster's fuselage. "Verifying flight-control settings for launch, "

Masters called out. "X-wing centered. Rudder centered. Stabilators set to trailing-edge down position." With the horizontal stabilizers in the trailing-edge down position, the nose of the ALARM booster would dive down and away from the DC-10 after launch, minimizing the risk of collision. "T minus sixty countdown hold checklist complete, " Kaddiri reported. She checked the navigational readouts. "On course as directed by Roosevelt-One, time remaining in launch window one, six minutes fourteen seconds." By then Jon Masters had walked up beside her and had taken his seat again, taking a big swig from a squeeze bottle.

"Resume the countdown, " Masters said, watching the TV monitors on the console. As he spoke, the pressure-secure bay doors on the lower fuselage snapped open, revealing a lightgray cloud deck a few thousand feet below. Other cameras mounted on the DC-10's belly, tail, and wingtips showed the gaping forty-foot hatch wide open, with the ALARM

booster suspended in the center of the dark rectangle. "Doors open.

Thirty seconds to go. . Those thirty seconds seemed to take hours to pass. Masters was about to call to Helen to ask if there was a problem when she started counting: "Stand by for launch . . . five . . four

. . . three . . . two . . . one . . . release!" It was a strange sensation, a strange sight. The ALARM booster just seemed to shrink in size as it fell out of the launch chamberlt continued to fly directly underneath the open doors as if it were frozen in place. The doors stayed open long enough so that Jon could see the X-wing begin to move slightly to provide a bit of stability as it cruised along. The DC-10's tail heeled upward as the twenty-one-ton rocket dropped awayit would take a minute for the movable counterweight tank to rebalance the plane. The crew members in the cargo section held on firmly to handholds in the ceiling or bulkheads as their bodies were pressed to the floor. "Rocket away, rocket away, " Helen called out. Immediately, the DC- 10 began a 30-degree bank turn to the left, and Roosevelt-I was lost from the bomb-bay camera. Helen switched to a wingtip camera to monitor the motor firing. "We're clear from booster's flight path, "

Kaddiri called out. "Coming up on first-stage ignition... ready, ready... now. Like a giant stick of chalk drawing a fat white-yellow line across the sky, the first-stage motor of the ALARM booster ignited, and the rocket leaped ahead of the DC- 10 in a blur of motion. When the rocket was about a mile away, the X-wing scissored out until the wing was almost perpendicular to the rocket's fuselage, and the ALARM booster reared its nose upward and began to climb. Nineteen seconds after launch, the booster was traveling almost twice the speed of sound and had recrossed its launch altitude as the wing generated lift. Seconds later, the rocket was lost from view, traveling too fast for the high-speed cameras to follow. "T plus thirty seconds, Roosevelt-One on course, all systems normal, passing one-twenty-K altitude, velocity passing Mach three, " Kaddiri reported. "Launch-chamber doors closed, chamber repressurized, " one of the techs reported. "Ready to reload."

They were in no hurry to load Roosevelt-Two into position on this mission, but Masters liked to practice rapid-fire procedures to demonstrate that a multiple ALARM launch within a single launch window was possible. "T plus sixty seconds, fifteen seconds to first-stage burnout, " Kaddiri reported. "Altitude one-eighty K, passing Mach six, pitch angle thirty degrees. All systems nominal." Using the scissor wings to augment the motor's thrust with lift, the booster climbed quickly through the atmosphere. As the air started to thin and less lift was being generated by the wings, they scissored back closer and closer to the booster's fuselage until, just before first-stage motor burnout, the wings were fully retracted back along the body of the rocket. Seventy-six seconds after ignition, the first-stage motor burned out and the rear half of the fifty-feet-long booster, carrying the rear tailplane and the scissor wings, separated from the rest of the booster. The rocket was at the very edge of space, nearly 250, 000 feet above Earth. Nine seconds later, the second-stage motor ignited, sending the booster streaking into space. The first-stage section began its controlled tumble to Earth, and four recovery parachutes opened at sixty thousand feet above ground. A specially equipped Air Force C-130

cargo plane would snag the parachute in midair and reel the firststage booster in somewhere over the northern section of the White Sands Missile Test Range. This recovery procedure would allow them to use the ALARM booster system anywhere in the world without hazard to people on the ground, even near heavily populated areas. The second- and third-stage motor sections would re-enter the atmosphere from space and burn up. "Good second-stage ignition, " Kaddiri reported. "Altitude passing three hundred forty K, velocity passing Mach eleven, on course."

She turned to Foch with a look of concern, then at Masters.

"Second-stage nozzle reports a gimbal-limit fault, Jon. It might have over corrected for winds at altitude and sustained some damage." Masters had a stopwatch counting down to the second-stage burnout. "Forty seconds to second-stage burnout, " he muttered. "Is it still hitting a stop? Is it correcting its course?"

"Continuous faults on the nozzle, " Kaddiri replied. "It's maintaining course, but it might slip out of stage-three tolerance limits." The third-stage section of the booster was much smaller than the first two stages, designed only to increase the booster's velocity to Mach 25 for orbital insertion; it could not perform large course corrections. If the second-stage motor could not hold the booster within a gradually narrowing trajectory corridor, the booster could slip into a useless and possibly dangerous orbit. Numerous "safe" orbits were computed where the NIRTSat satellites would not interfere with other spacecraft and where they could be "stored" until it was possible to retrieve them, but it was usually very difficult to place a malfunctioning booster into a precomputed "safe" orbit. If it could not be placed in a position where it was not a hazard to other satellites, it could damage or destroy dozens of other payloads and re-enter the atmosphere over a populated area. Before that could be allowed tohappen, they would destroy it.

That was exactly what Foch had in mind as he opened the plastic-guarded safety cover on the command destruct panel. Foch, Kaddiri, Masters, and the ground safety officers at the White Sands range could command the ALARM booster to self-destruct at any time; now that the booster was flying, Masters had very little authority over its disposition-he could not override a "Destruct" command. "I told you this might happen, Doctor Masters, " Foch said. "The booster was obviously shaken off course by the strong, high-altitude winds, and it sustained some damage and can't correct its course enough." But Masters sat back and, to everyone's surprise, put his feet up on the control console. "Ten seconds to second-stage burnout, " he said, sipping his soda. "Sit back, relax. It'll stay in the groove long enough."

"The decision doesn't rest with you this time, Masters, " Foch fumed.

"The command'll come from White Sands or the Air Force Space Tracking Center. White Sands will initiate the destruct sequence. If their command doesn't work, I initiate mine."

"Well, well.. ." Masters laughed, pointing to the computer monitor.

Foch turned to look. "Second-stage burnout, and Roosevelt-One is still on course." They studied the readouts for a few more moments. The booster, headed into a polar orbit over Canada, was picked up by Alaskan radar sites as it continued its climb to its orbit altitude. Soon its orbital insertion would be picked up by space-tracking radars at San Miguel Air Force Station in the Philippines, and the NIRTSats would begin their work. After a while, Masters turned to Foch with a smug expression. "Minor course corrections being made, but it's right on course. Expect third-stage ignition in four minutes." He took another big Sip of soda, then punctuated his victory with a loud burp. "I'd get your finger away from that destruct button if I were you, Colonel. The Navy wouldn't appreciate you blowing up a perfectly good booster." CLARK

AIR BASE, ANGELES, PAMPANGA PROVINCE REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

PHILIPPINES INDEPENDENCE DAY SUNDAY, 12 JUNE 1994, 1147 HOURS LOCAL

One

of the first major uses of Masters' new NIRTSat constellation of real-time position and communications reporting capability for Air Force aircraft was a few days later-and it was the most inauspicious. It was the day the last of the United States Air Force's aircraft departed the Philippines as the Americans turned over their military bases to full Filipino control. The satellites would control the last of the American fighters and tankers as they withdrew from the Philippines to bases in Japan and Guam. Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force's Thirteenth Air Force at Clark Air Base, sixty-five miles north of Manila, was in a magnificent white six-story stucco building, at the end of a long grassy mall between the NCO and officers' family-housing areas. Both sides of the mall along the Weston and Wirt Davis avenues had once been lined with flags of the numerous military units of several nations that had liberated the Philippines from Japan during World War II, standing as a monument to those who had died defending this island nation against the Axis. Now the sixty poles were vacant except for the three flagpoles at the head of the mall opposite the headquarters building-the flags of the Philippines, the United States, and the U.S. Air Force. From his vantage point on the review stand in front of the headquarters building, Major General Richard Stone noticed that someone had lowered the American flag down several feet from the top of its staff-it almost appeared to be at half staff. Perhaps it should be so. Stone's aide, Colonel Michael Krieg, stepped over to his boss and handed him a Teletype report.

"Latest on that skirmish near the Spratlys, sir, " Krieg said. "The Chinese are still claiming they were attacked by heavy antiship weapons.

Twentyseven Filipinos dead, six Americans, and five missing."

"Christ, " Stone sighed. He had watched the repercussions build over the last week since the skirmish. "Do the Chinese expect anyone to believe that? Why the hell would an oil company have any antiship missiles on an oil-exploration platform?"

"They did have machine guns, sir. Twenty-millimeter. World War Two vintage American Mk 4. Pretty good operating condition, too-before the Chinese melted it with a Fei Lung-7."

"Idiots, " Stone muttered. "Opening up on a warship like that. So what are the Chinese doing now?"

"Laying low, " Krieg replied. "Only occasional incursions in the Spratly Island neutral zone. President Mikaso's government is being very understanding about it so far. Vice President Samar issued a statement calling for reparations from the Chinese."

"Lots of luck." "Vice President Teguina called for an investigation-not of the Chinese, but of Mikaso's government, " Krieg added. "Of Mikaso $

government? Not the Chinese? 'Coursethat's typical, " Stone said.

"Whatever it takes to distance himself from Mikaso.. . just as he's always done. Anything for a headline."

"The little bastard's got balls, that's for sure. Major General Stone grunted. "You can say that againTeguina loves to stir things up. Now, what do we have out there keeping an eye on things?" Krieg looked at his boss with a look of pure concern. "In two hours-nothing."

"What?" "Message from CINCPAC." CINCPAC was the acronym for Commander in Chief Pacific Command, the U.S. military organization responsible for all military activities from the West Coast of the United States to Africa. "He wants no combat aircraft or vessels near the area until they can get a reading from the Chinese. Strictly hands off."

"Well, what did we have out there?" Stone grumbled, irritated at CINCPAC's order. "A couple F-16s from here checking it out, maybe a P-3

subchaser diverted to Zamboanga Airport or Bangoy Airport near Davao-er, sorry, they call it Samar International Airport now-to take some pictures. Apparently the Chinese feel our presence is threatening.

CINCPAC agreed. No more flights within fifty miles."

"A fitting end to a perfectly lousy day, " Stone said, straightening his uniform and heading toward the reviewing stand for the ceremony. Major General Richard "Rat" Stone was the commander of the now disbanded Thirteenth Air Force-the principal American air defense, air support, and logistics support organization in the Republic of the Philippines.

General Stone-whose nickname was short for "Rat Killer" after a strafing run in his F-4 along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam had killed dozens of rats with 20-millimeter cannon fire-commanded the twenty different organizations from five major operating commands at Clark Air Base.

Principal of all the organizations on his base was the Third Tactical Fighter Wing, composed ofF- 16 fighter-bombers and F-4G "Advanced Wild Weasel" electronic warfare and defense suppression fighters; and the 6200th Tactical Fighter Training Group, who operated the various tactical training ranges and fighter weapons schools in the Philippines and who ran the seven annual "Cope Thunder" combat exercises to train American and allied pilots from all over the Pacific. The Third Tactical Fighter Wing, whose planes had the distinctive "PN" letters on the tail plus either the black "Peugeots" of the Third Tactical Fighter Squadron or the "Pair-O-Dice" of the Ninetieth Tactical Fighter Squadron, flew air-to-air and air-to-ground strike missions in support of American interests from Australia to Japan and from India to Hawaii.

Clark Air Base had also been home to a very large Military Airlift Command contingent of C-130 Hercules transports, C-9 Nightingale flying hospitals, C- 12 Huron light transport shut tIes, and HH-53 Super Jolly and HH-3 Jolly Green Giant rescue and special-operations helicopters.

The 374th Tactical Airlift Wing shuttled supplies and personnel all across the South Pacific and would, in wartime, deliver troops and supplies behind enemy lines. The Ninth Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, the Twentieth Aeromedical Airlift Squadron, and the Thirty-first Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron all provided medical airlift support and would fly rescue missions over land or water to recover downed aircrews-these were the organizations that first welcomed the American prisoners of war from Vietnam in 1972. Clark also housed the 353rd Special Operations Wing, whose MC-130E Combat Talon aircrews trained to fly psychological warfare, covert resupply, and other "black"

missions all across the Pacific. The base also supported the other American and Filipino military installations, including Subic Bay Naval Station, Sangley Point Naval Station, Point San Miguel Air Force Station, Camp O'Donnell, Camp John Hay, Wallace Air Station, Mount Cabuyo, Mactan Airfield, and dozens of Philippine Coast Guard and National Guard bases. In essence, Clark Air Base had been a vital link to the Pacific and a major forward base for the United States and its allies since it opened in 1903. Now it was all being handed back to the Philippineshanded back to them during some of the most volatile and dangerous times in the country's history. Stone's gaze moved from his country's flag to the throngs of noisy protesters outside the perimeter fence less than a kilometer away. At least ten thousand protesters pressed against the barbed wire-topped fences, shouting anti-American slogans and tossing garbage over the brick wall; Stone had arranged armored personnel carriers every one hundred yards along the wall surrounding the base to counter just such a demonstration. The Americans inside those carriers were armed only with sidearms and tear-gas-grenade launchers, and the Filipino troops and riot police outside the gates had nothing more lethal than fat rubber bullets. They were being pelted by rocks and bottles so badly that the carrier's crews dared not poke their heads out or even open one of the thin eye-portals.

The throngs could easily overrun them all if they were stirred up.

Occasionally a shot could be heard ringing out over the din of the crowd. Stone realized that, after weeks of these protests, he no longer jumped when he heard the gunfire. The Thirteenth Air Force commander had aged far beyond his fifty years in just the last few months. Of no more than medium height, with close-cropped silver hair, piercing blue eyes, broad shoulders narrowing quickly to a trim waist, and thin racehorse ankles, Stone was a soft-spoken yet energetic fighter pilot who had risen through the ranks from a "ninetyday-wonder" Officer Training School pilot candidate during the Vietnam War to a two-star general and commander of a major military installation defending a principal democratic ally and guarding America's western flank. In the past year, however, he had found himself supervising a degrading, ignoble withdrawal from the base and the country he had learned to love so well.

It was deeply depressing. From a contingent of nearly eleven thousand men and women only twelve months earlier, Stone had assembled the last remaining two hundred American military personnel on the mall in front of the reviewing stand, to march one last time in parade. Although there were supposed to be ten persons from each of the twenty resident and tenant organizations on the base, Stone knew that most of the two hundred men and women who marched before him were security policemen, who had been hand-picked to ensure the safety of General Stone and the other Americans from Clark AB as they departed that day. Part of the reason for the huge demonstration outside the perimeter fence was the presence of the two Filipino men on the reviewing stand with Stone: Philippine President Arturo Mikaso, and First Vice President Daniel Teguina. Teguina had carried the cry for the Philippines to cut all ties with the West and to not renew the leases on American military bases. Unlike the refined and elderly Mikaso, Daniel Teguina liked to be in the public eye, and he carefully polished his image to reflect the young radical students and peasants that he believed he represented. He dressed in more colorful, contemporary clothes, dyed his hair to hide the gray, and liked to appear in nightclubs and at soccer matches. The National Democratic Front, despite reputed ties to the New People's Army, the organization that controlled the Communist-led Huk insurgents in the outlying provinces, flourished under the Mikaso-Teguina coalition government. Under Mikaso's strong popular leadership, the military threat to the government from the extremist Communist forces subsided, but the new, more radical voices in the government were harder to ignore. It didn't take long for a national referendum to be called after the 1994 elections, which forbade the President to extend the leases for American bases any further. The referendum passed by a narrow margin, and the United States was ordered to withdraw all permanent military forces from the Philippines and turn control of the installations to the Philippine government within six months. Second Vice President General Jose Trujillo Samar, who was not present at the ceremonies, shared the majority of Filipinos' distaste for American hegemony, and he fought hard for removal of the bases. Leaving, Rat Stone was out of a job. Over the slowly rising screaming and yelling from the protesters, the American airmen marched in front of the reviewing stand, formed into four groups of fifty, and were ordered to parade rest by Colonel Krieg, acting as the parade adjutant general.

Surrounding the grassy mall were two sets of bleachers, where guests of the government and a few American family members and embassy personnel watched with long faces the lowering of the colors for the last time over Clark Air Base. Banks of photographers, television cameras, and reporters were clustered all around the reviewing stand to capture the ceremonies. While several network news companies were on hand, no live broadcast of the ceremony was permitted. General Stone had felt, and the Air Force concurred, that a live broadcast might cause widespread demonstrations all across the country. That was also the reason no high-level American politicians were on hand. The official transfer had been made in the safety of Washington, D.C., weeks ago. President Mikaso stepped forward to the podium as a taped trumpet call was played. The crowd began to cheer, and an appreciative ripple of applause issued from the bleachers. When the music stopped, Mikaso spoke in flawless English: "My friends and fellow Filipinos, we are here to mark a historic end, and a historic beginning, in the relations between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America. On this day of freedom and independence, we also mark a significant milestone in the future of the Philippines. "For over ninety years, we have relied on the courage, the generosity, and the strength of the people of the United States for our security. Such an arrangement has greatly benefited our country and all its people. For this, we will be eternally grateful. "But we have learned much over these long years. We have studied the sacred values of democracy and justice, and we have strived to become not just a dependency of our good friends in the United States, but a strong, trusted ally. We are here today to celebrate an important final stage of that education, as the people of the Philippines take the reins of authority of our national security responsibilities. We are thankful for the help from our American friends, and we gratefully recognize the sacrifices you have made to our security and prosperity. With your guidance and with God's help, we take the first great step toward being a genuine world power. . Mikaso spoke eloquently for several more minutes, and when he was done, appreciative applause made its way from the bleachers all the way out beyond the wall, over the crowds. The people clearly loved their President. But Teguina listened to the speech and Mikaso's praise for the United States with growing impatience and disgust. He loathed the Americans and had always resented their presence. As for Mikaso, he owed him nothing.

He'd agreed to this hybrid coalition only after he'd realized he didn't have enough votes to win the presidency himself. As taped music was played over the PA system, Mikaso, Stone, and, reluctantly, Teguina, positioned themselves in front of a special set of three flagpoles behind the reviewing stands. An honor guard stepped onto the stand and positioned themselves around the flagpoles. As Mikaso placed a hand over his heart in tribute, the Philippine flag was lowered a few feet in respect. Then, as "Retreat" was played, the American flag was raised to the top of the staff, then slowly lowered. "Why is our flag lowered?"

Teguina whispered, as if to himself. When no one paid him any attention, he raised his voice: "I ask, why is the Philippine flag lowered first? I do not understand "Silence, Mr. Teguina, " Mikaso whispered. "Raise the Philippine flag back to the top of the staff, , " he said, his voice now carrying clearly over the music. "It is disrespectful for any national flag to be lowered in such a way. "We are paying honor to the Americans-"

"Bah!" Teguina spat. "They are foreigners returning home, nothing more." But he fell silent as the American flag was lowered and the honor guard began folding it into the distinctive triangle. When the flag was folded, the honor guard passed it to General Stone, who stepped to Arturo Mikaso, saluted, and presented it to him. "With thanks from a grateful nation, Mr. President, " Stone said. Mikaso smiled. "It will be kept in a place of honor in the capital, General Stone, as a symbol of our friendship and fidelity."

"Thank you, sir." At that, the two men looked skyward as a gentle roar of jet engines began to be heard. Flying over the base and directly down the mall over the reviewing stand were four flights of four F-4 Phantom fighters, followed by a flight of three B-52 bombers, all no more than two thousand feet above ground-and everyone could clearly see the twelve Harpoon antiship missiles hanging off the wings of each B-52. The audience in the bleachers applauded and cheered; the crowd outside the gate was restlessly cheering and shouting at the impressive display. But Daniel Teguina decided he had had enough. This... this American love feast was too much for a native Filipino. He pushed past Stone and Mikaso and quickly low ered the Philippine flag from its pole, unclipped it, and reattached it to the empty center pole where the American flag had just been removed. "What in God's name are you doing, Teguina?"

Mikaso shouted over the roar of the planes. Teguina ordered one of his bodyguards to raise the Philippine flag. He turned, glaring at Stone, and said, "We are not going to defer to Americans any longer. This is our land, our skies, our countryand our flag!" As the flag traveled up the pole, Stone heard one of the most chilling sounds he'd ever experienced-the screams of fury, anger and, ultimately, jubilation coming from the thousands outside the gates. As the Philippine flag reached the top of the pole, the screams reached a deafening, roaring crescendo. Teguina and Stone stared long and hard at each other, while President Mikaso began babbling apologies for his First Vice President's behavior. Thus ended the American presence in the Philippines. After the ceremonies quickly ended, Rat Stone made his way to the air terminal to supervise the final departure-he still preferred not to call it an evacuation-of American military personnel from Clark Air Base. He couldn't shake the feeling deep in his gut that this cessation of mutual defense arrangements had happened too quickly, too abruptly. The skirmish just last week in the Spratly Islands was still fresh in his mind. And so was the look in Daniel Teguina's eyes... it chilled him to the bone. No, Rat Stone decided, this would not be the last time he would see the Philippines. ... The question was when. HIGH TECHNOLOGY

AEROSPACE WEAPONS CENTER (HAWC), NEVADA MONDAY, 13 JUNE 1994, 0715

HOURS

LOCAL "Tell me this is a joke, sir, " Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan said to Brigadier General John Ormack, "andwith all due respect, of course-I'll beat your face in." John Ormack, the deputy commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center-nicknamed HAWC, the Air Force's secret flight-test research center that was a part of the Dreamland complex-didn't have to look at the wide grin on McLanahan's face to know that he wasn't seriously threatening bodily harm to anyone. He could tell by McLanahan's voice, wavering with pure excitement, that the thirty-nine-year-old radar navigator and flight-test project officer was genuinely thrilled. They were standing in front of the newest, most high-tech aircraft in the world, the B-2

stealth bomber. And best of all, for the next several months, this B-2-nicknamed the "Black Knight"belonged to him. "No joke, Patrick, "

Ormack said, putting an arm around McLanahan's broad shoulders. "Don't ask me how he did it, but General Elliott got one of the first B-2A test articles assigned to Dreamland. That's one nice thing about being director of HAWC-Elliott gets to pull strings. This one has been stripped down quite a bit, but it's a fully operational modelthis was the bomber that launched the first SRAM-II attack missile a few months back."

"But they just made the B-2 operational, " McLanahan pointed out. "They don't have that many B-2s out there-just one squadron, the 393rd, right?" Ormack nodded. "What are we doing with one?" McLanahan asked.

"Knowing Elliott, he put the squeeze on Systems Command to begin more advanced weapons tests on the B-2, in case they begin full-scale deployment. Air Force stopped deployment, as you know, because of budget cutbacks-but, as we both know, General Elliott's projects aren't under public scrutiny." Ormack went on. "He was pushing the shift from nuclear to conventional warfighting strategy to Congress, just as Air Force did. It was hard for the Air Force to sell the B-2 as a conventional weapons platform-that is, until Elliott spoke up. He wants to turn this B-2 into another Megafortress-a flying battleship. The man managed to convince the powers-that-be to let him use one for advanced testing. "Of course we need a senior project officer with bomber experience, experience on EB-series strategic-escort concepts, and someone with a warped imagination and a real bulldogtype attitude.

Naturally, we thought of you." McLanahan was speechless, which made Ormack smile even more. Ormack was an Air Force Academy graduate, medium height, rapidly graying brown hair, lean and wiry, and although he was a command pilot with several thousand hours' flying time in dozens of different aircraft, he was more at home in a laboratory, flight simulator, or in front of a computer console. All of the young men he worked with were either quiet, studious engineers-everyone called them

"geeks" or "computer weenies"-or they were flashy, cocky, swaggering test pilots full of attitude because they had been chosen above 99.99

percent of the rest of the free world's aviators to work at HAWC.

McLanahan was neither. He wasn't an Academy grad, not an engineer, not a test pilot. What McLanahan was was a six-foot blond with an air of understated strength and power; a hardworking, intelligent, well-organized, efficient aviator. The eldest son of Irish immigrants, McLanahan had been born in New York but raised in Sacramento where he attended Air Force ROTC at Cal State and received his commission in 1973. After navigator training at Mather AFB in Sacramento he was assigned to the B-52s of the 320th Bomb Wing there. After uprating to radar navigator, he was again assigned to Mather Air Force Base. Along the way, McLanahan became the best radar bombardier in the United States, a fact demonstrated by long lines of trophies he'd received in annual navigation and bombing exercises in his six years as a B-52 crew member. His prowess with the forty-year-old bomber, lovingly nicknamed the BUFF (for Big Ugly Fat Fucker) or StratoPig, had attracted the attention of HAWC's commanding officer, Air Force Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, who had brought him to the desert test ranges of Nevada to develop a "Megafortress, " a highly modified B-52 used to flight-test high-tech weapons and stealth hardware. Through an unlikely but terrifying chain of events, McLanahan had taken the Megafortress, idiomatically nicknamed the Old Dog, and its ragtag engineer crew into the Soviet Union to destroy a renegade ground-based antisatellite laser site. Rather than risk discovery of the highly classified and politically explosive mission, McLanahan had been strongly encouraged to remain at HAWC and, in effect, accept an American high-tech version of the Gulag Archipelago. The upside was that it was a chance to work with the newest aircraft and weapons in the world. McLanahan had happily accepted the position even though it was obvious to all that he had little choice. The Old Dog mission, one of the more deadly events that ultimately drove the Soviet Union to glasnost, had to be buried forever-one way or another. Many successful, career-minded men might have resented the isolation, lack of recognition, and de facto imprisonment. Not Patrick McLanahan. Because he was not an engineer and had very little technical training, his job description for his first years at HAWC consisted mainly of answering phones, acting as aide and secretary for General Elliott and General Ormack, and rewriting tech orders and checklists. But he educated himself in the hard sciences, visited the labs and test centers to talk with engineers, begged and pleaded for every minute of flying time he could, and, more important, performed each given assignment as if it were the free world's most vital research project. Whether it was programming checklists into a cockpit computer terminal or managing the unit's coffee fund and snack bar, Patrick McLanahan did his work efficiently and professionally.

Things began to change very quickly. The Air Force promoted him to Major two years below the zone. He was given an executive officer, then a clerk, than an assistant, a staff, and finally his own office complex, complete with flight-test crews and dedicated maintenance shops. The projects began to change. Instead of being in charge of documentation and records, he was heading more concept teams, then more contractor-MAJCOM liaison jobs, then more subsystem projects, and finally full-weapon systems. Before the ink was dry on his promotion papers to Major, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. His "exile" was occasionally broken, and the young "fastburner" was frequently "loaned"

with assignments with other research, development, and government agencies, including Border Security Force, Special Operations, and the Aerospace Defense Command. Very soon, McLanahan had become a fixture in any new project dealing with aviation or aerospace. He was now one of the most highly respected program managers in the Department of Defense.

The mission of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center had changed as well. With budget cutbacks and greater downsizing in all strategic bombardment units, some place had to be designated to keep all these inactive aircraft until they might be needed again. Although most were sent to the "boneyard, " the Air Force Aerospace Maintenance and Restoration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, to be stored for spare parts or for scrap, a few were secretly sent to Dreamland, in the desert of central Nevada, for research and special missions. The place was the Strategic Air Reserve Group, commanded by General Elliott. SARG took the work of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center one step furtherlt created an operational unit out of exotic research experiments. Whereas the Old Dog became an operational mission completely by accident, now other "Old Dogs" were being created and held in reserve until needed. The new Old Dogs collected over the years now included six B-52 bombers; two B-1 bombers-both original A-models; six F-111G fighter-bombers, which were formerly SAC FB-1 11A strategic bombers; and the newest arrival, McLanahan's B-2 Black Knight bomber. "The other task you've got is ASIS, " Ormack continued. "Air Force is finally considering putting a pilot-trained navigatorbombardier on board the B-2 instead of the current navigatortrained 'mission commander' layout. The cockpit is designed for two pilots; you have to redesign it for a weapons system officer and defensive systems operator, but retain the dual pilot control capability. You've got a few months, no more than four, to get ASIS ready for full-scale production and retrofit, including engineering blueprints and work plan." He smiled mischievously and added, "The B-2 pilot 'union' is not too happy about this, as you might expect. They think ASIS is a bunch of crap, that the B-2 is automated enough to not need a navigator, and the B-2 should keep its two pilots. I think our experience with the Old Dog proved otherwise." McLanahan laughed. "That's an understatement. Now, what's ASIS stand for?"

"Depends on who you ask, " Ormack said dryly. "Officially Attack Systems Integration Station. The flight test pilots and B-2 cadre call it something else-in honor of all navigators, of course. "What's that?"

'Additional shit inside." McLanahan laughed again. "Figures." Slamming navigators was common fare in this fighter pilot's Mecca in southern Nevada. Still awestruck, he walked toward the huge batwinged bomber sitting inside the brilliantly lit hangar. The Black Knight was designed specifically to attack multiple, heavily defended, and mobile targets around the world with high probability of damage and high probability of survival. To fly nearly five thousand miles unrefueled, the B-2 had to be huge-it had the same wingspan as a B-52 and almost the same fuel capacity, able to carry more than its own weight in jet fuel. In the past, building a bomber of that size meant it was a sitting duck for enemy defenses-a quarter-to-half-million pounds of steel flying around made a very easy target for enemy acquisition and weapons-guidance radars. The B-52, first designed in the 1 940s when it was designed to fly at extremely high altitudes, eventually had to rely on flying at treetop level, electronic jammers and decoys, and plain old circumnavigation of enemy threats to evade attack. The B-58 Hustler bomber relied on flat-out supersonic speed. The FB111 and B- 1

strategic bombers utilized speed, a cleaner "stealthier" design, advanced electronic countermeasures, and terrain-following radar to help themselves penetrate stiff defenses. But, with rapid advances in fighter technology, surface-to-air missiles, and early warning and tracking radars, even the sleek, deadly B-1 would soon be vulnerable to attack. The black monster before Patrick McLanahan was the latest answer. The B-2 was still a quarter-million-pound bomber, but most of its larger structural surfaces were made of nonmetallic composites that reduced or reflected enemy radar energy; reflected energy is dispersed in specific narrow beam paths, or lobes, which greatly decreases the strength of the reflected energy. It had no vertical flight-control surfaces that could act as a radar reflector-viewed on edge, it appeared to be nothing more than a dark sliver, like a slender tadpole. Each wing was made of two huge pieces of composite material, joined like a plastic model-that meant there were no structural ribs to break, no rivets attaching the skin to a skeleton, producing an aircraft that was as strong at the wingtips as it was at the fuselage. Its four turbofan engines were buried within V-shaped wings, which eliminated telltale heat emissions, and engine components were cooled with jet fuel itself to further reduce heat emissions. Its state-of-the-art navigation systems, attack radars, and sensors were so advanced that the B-2 could strike targets several miles before the bomber could be detected by enemy acquisition radars. The cost of the Black Knight bomber program was staggering-a half billion dollars per plane and nearly eighty billion dollars for an entire fleet, including research, development, and basing. A planned total purchase of one hundred and thirty-two B-2s in five years quickly went away, replaced with an extended procurement deal that would bring only seventy-five bombers on-line over ten years.

Even that reduced production rate had been compromised-by April of 1992

there were only twelve fully operational B-2 in the inventory, including the initial three airframes used for testing and evaluation and nine more that had been purchased in 1991. The 1992 and 1993 budgets had carried only "life-support" funding for the B-2-just enough money to keep the program alive while retaining the ability to quickly gear up production if the need arose. Because there would only be seventy-five B-2s active by the turn of the century, the B-52-slated for replacement by the Black Knight-would still be in the active strategic nuclear penetrator arsenal well into the twenty-first century. But the B-2, despite charges of being a "billion-dollar boon SK operational, was now a reality and had proven itself ready to go to war in extensive flight testing. The first Black Knight bomber squadronthe 393rd Bomb Squadron

"Tigers"the same unit that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War Il-had been activated at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri a few months earlier, and when that happened, it had rendered billions of dollars' worth of the enemy's military airdefense hardware instantly obsolete. "Got time for a walkaround, sir?" McLanahan asked.

"You bet, " the young Air Force General replied. Ormack let Patrick drink in the sight of the magnificent black bomber before him as Patrick stepped toward it for a walkaround "getacquainted" inspection. The B-2

had no fuselage as on more conventional airplanes; it was as if someone had sawed off the wings of a B-52, stuck them together, and put wheels on it. For someone like McLanahan, who was accustomed to seeing the huge, drooping wings of the mighty B-52, it was amazing to notice that the B-2s, which were just as long and easily twice as wide, did not droop one inch-the composite structures were pound-forpound stronger than steel. The skin was perfectly smooth, with none of the stress wrinkles of the B-52, and it had no antennae attached to the hull that might act as a radar reflector. The plane's "flying wing" design had no vertical flight control surfaces that would create a radar reflector; instead, it achieved stability by a series of split flaps / ailerons on the wing's trailing edges, called "flaperons, " which would deflect in pairs or singularly in response to a triple-redundant laser optic flight computer's commands. The unique flaperon flight-control system, plus a thrust ejector system that directed engine exhaust across the flaperons to increase responsiveness, gave the huge bomber the roll response of a small fighter. To prevent any radar image "blooming" when the flaperons were deflected in flight-even the small flaperon deflection caused by aS-degree turn would increase the radar image size several times-the trailing edge of the B-2's wings were staggered in a zigzag pattern, which prevented any reflected energy from returning directly back to the enemy's radar receiver. Patrick ducked under the pointed nose on his way back to the double side-by-side bomb bays, the natural part of such an aircraft that would attract any SAC bombardier. The lower part of the nose section on either side of the nose gear had large rectangular windows protected by thick pads. "Are these the laser and IR windows?"

Patrick asked Ormack. "You got it, Patrick, " Ormack replied. "Miniature laser spotters / target designators and infrared detectors, slaved to the navigation system. The emitter windows and the cockpit windows are coated with an ultrathin material that allows radar energy to pass through the windows but not reflect back outwards, much like a one-way mirror. This reduces the radar reflectivity caused by energy bouncing off the crew members or equipment inside the plane itself. If allowed to reflect back, the radar return from the pilots' helmets alone can effectively double the B-2's radar signature."

"Where's the navigation radar? Is there one on the B-2?"

"You bet. The Black Knight has an AN/APQ-181 multimode radar mounted along the wing leading edges, with ground-mapping, terrain-following, targeting, surveillance, and rendezvous modes-we can even add air-to-air capability to the system. "Air-to-air on a B-2 bomber?" McLanahan whistled. "You're kidding, right?"

"Not after what we did on the B-52 Old Dog, " Ormack replied. "After our work in Dreamland putting antiair missiles on a B-52, I don't think there'll ever be another combat aircraft that can't do a dozen different jobs, and that includes heavy bombers carrying air-to-air weapons. It makes sense-if you can take sixteen to twenty weapons of any kind into battle with you, you have the advantage. Besides, the B-2 is no slouch of a hot jet any way you look at it-the B-2 bomber has one-one hundredth the radar cross-section of an F-15 Eagle Fighter, one-twentieth the RCS

of an F-23 Wildcat fighter-which means it could engage targets before the other guy even knows the B-2 is out there-and at high altitude it has the same roll rate and can pull as many Gs as an F-4 Phantom." The underside of the B-2 was like a huge dark thunder cloud-it seemed to stretch out forever, sucking up every particle of light. Patrick was surprised by what he found-two cavernous weapon bays. "It's a hell a lot bigger than I thought, General, " he said. "Each bomb bay carries one Common Strategic Rotary Launcher filled with eight SRAM short-range attack missiles, " Ormack replied. "Sixteen SRAM missiles-it packs quite a wallop. Putting B61 or B83 gravity nuclear bombs on board is still possible as well, although using standoff-type weapons instead of gravity bombs makes the B-2 a much greater threat. The Black Knight can only carry four cruise missiles, so there are no plans to include AGM-129A cruise missiles although we modified the weapon-delivery software to do so. "It'll make a great battleship escort, " McLanahan said. "I think the boss is right-it's a waste to have these babies sitting on the sidelines with nukes on board while we're getting hammered in some non-nuclear dogfight. Air Force talks about 'global reach, global power, ' but they don't talk much about how long-range bombers can defend themselves in a hostile environment without an initial nuclear laydown. They talk about sending B-52s from Guam, Diego Garcia, or Loring to anywhere else in the world in twelve hours, but they don't explain how the bomber is supposed to survive its attack.

With the Black Knight configured as a counterradar escort, it can do it.

It has the range to fly just as deep as the strike bombers, and it carries as much firepower as a B-52. We'll put that new PACER SKY

satellite data stuff on it, maybe an ISAR radar, smart bombs..." "We've tested every possible weapon on a B-2, " Ormack acknowledged, "from AGM-130 Striker glide-bombs-your personal favorite, I know-Harpoon antiship missiles, sea mines, MK 82 iron bombs, AMRAAM missiles, Sidewinder missiles, the TACIT RAINBOW antiradar cruise missiles, Durandal runaway-cratering bombs, AGM-84 SLAM TV-guided missiles, hell, even photoreconnaissance pods. At half a billion dollars a pop, Congress didn't want to buy a nuclear-only plane, so we're going to demonstrate that the B-2 could be flexible enough for any mission."

Ormack shrugged, then added, "I'm not convinced myself that the B-2 can make a good defensive escort plane. If a fighter or ground missile site gets a visual on this thing, you're dead."

"I don't know about that, " Patrick said. "I think it'd be tough to kill in a tactical battle." "Yeah? Most of the Air Force would disagree, " Ormack replied. "Look at these wingsthis thing is huge, even when seen from several thousand feet up. It's subsonic, which makes it a more inviting target and less elusive. No, I think the Air Force would forgo risking B-2 on a conventional raid." He looked at McLanahan for feedback and was surprised when the young navigator gave him an unsure shrug in reply. "You still disagree?"

"I haven't flown fighters as long as you, sir, " McLanahan said, "but I have a tough time finding an airport from five thousand feet in the air, much less a single plane. At five thousand feet, a pilot is looking at almost four hundred square miles of ground. If he's flying, say, eight miles per minute on a low combat-air patrol, forty square miles zip under his wings every ten seconds-twenty on each side of his cockpit. If he can't use a radar to at least get himself in the vicinity, his detection problem is pretty complicated."

"If a combat air patrol always had that wide an area to search, I might agree with you, " Ormack said. "But the field of battle narrows down rapidly. One lucky sighting, one squeak of a radar detector or one blip on a radar screen, and suddenly the whole pack's on top of you."

"But I might have my missiles in the air by then, " Patrick said. "If not, I sure as heck will not stay high over a target area. I've got an infrared camera that can see the ground, and the pilots have windows-those boys better be flying in the dirt with fighters on my tail. Even the F-23 advanced tactical fighter can't fight close to the ground-they have to rely on taking 'look-down' shots from higher altitudes. That's where a stealthy plane has the advantage." Ormack didn't have a reply right away-he was thinking hard about McLanahan's arguments. "You bring up a few good points, Patrick, " Ormack admitted.

"You know what this calls for, don't you?"

"RED FLAG, " McLanahan replied. "No-better yet, the Strategic Warfare Center. General Jarrel's little playland up in South Dakota."

"You got it, " Ormack said. "We'll have to put an EB-2 up against a few fighters on Jarrel's range and see what happens. Maybe even have them fly along with other aircraft on the range to see if our escorts can be effective with other strike aircraft." He smiled at McLanahan and added, "I think that can be arranged. We can send you out to the Strategic Warfare Center for some operational test flights when the 393rd Bomb Squadron goes to the SWC in a few months. I'll bring it up to General Elliott, but I think he'll go for it. You might have just found yourself a new job, Patrick-developing penetration and attack techniques for Black Knight stealth escort crews."

"Throw me in the briar patch, " McLanahan said as they moved forward to the entry hatch. McLanahan's new bird was AF SAC 90-007, the seventh B-2

bomber built. He found the plane's nickname, "License to Kill, "

stenciled on the entry hatch as he and Ormack walked to it and opened it up to climb inside-it was a perfect nickname. Patrick checked that the

"Alert Start" switch was off and safed-the B-2 had a button in the entry hatch that would start the bomber's internal power unit and turn on power and air before the pilots reached the cockpit. With this system, the B-2 could have engine started, the inertial navigation system aligned, and the plane taxiing for takeoff in less than three minutes, without any external power carts or crew chiefs standing by. Ormack did activate the "Int Power" switch in the entryway, which activated internal power on the plane. Unlike the B- 1 bomber, whose offensive and defensive stations seemed to have been put in reluctantly, almost haphaz ardly, the B-2's cockpit was massive. There was almost enough room for McLanahan to stand up straight as he slid into the right seat and began to strap in. Ormack looked at the young navigator with amusement as he set his seat and even put on a pair of flying gloves. "Going somewhere?"

"You want a redesigned cockpit, sir, then you gotta do it with the crew dog strapped into position, " McLanahan re plied. "The reach is much different. If I had a helmet, I'd put it on." Ormack nodded his agreement and smiled-as usual, McLanahan was getting right down to business. The bomber's left instrument panel was like a television director's console. Four color MFDs, or multi-function displays, dominated the instrument panel; each MFD was encircled with buttons that would change the screen's function, allowing hundreds of different displays on each screen. The bomber used small sidestick controllers, like a fighter plane, with throttle quadrants to the left of each seat and the buttonfestooned control stick to the right. Each seat also had a wide, oval-shaped heads-up display, or HUD, that would project flight and attack information on the windscreen. "Where're all the instruments?" McLanahan exclaimed with obvious surprise. "There's hardly anything installed in here. Did they give us a stripped-down test article or what?"

"This is a fully functional production model, Patrick, " Ormack replied.

"Everything is done on the MFDs or using switches on the throttles and control stick. The screens show menu choices for selecting options for each piece of equipment, and you just push a button to select it or use the set button on the stick."

"But I don't see any flight-control system switches, " McLanahan persisted. "What about a flap lever? Gear handle? How do you raise the landing gear-haul it up with a rope?"

"This is almost the twenty-first century, my friend, " Ormack replied.

"We don't move levers-we tell the plane what to do and it takes care of it." He pointed to the right-hand MFD at each station, which showed a simple five-line menu: BATT POWER, APU POWER, ALERT START, NORMAL START, and EMER START. Each item was located next to a corresponding button on the screen. "To start engines, you simply press the button and advance the throttles to idle, " Ormack explained. "The computer takes care of everything else. Start engines, and up comes a different menu of items.

Select TAKEOFF. The computer configures the plane for takeoff and continues to configure the plane during the climbout and all the way to level off-it'll raise the gear and flaps, monitor the power settings, everything. Once at cruise altitude, you select CRUISE and it'll fly the plane, manage the fuel, and report any errors. It has several different modes, including LANDING, LOW LEVEL, GUST for bad weather conditions, GO AROUND, and ATTACK modes."

"Computerized flying, huh?" McLanahan muttered. "Pretty slick. You almost think they could do away with the pilot and nav. "It's advance hardware, but not totally foolproof, " Ormack said. "The pilot in the loop is still important."

"And the nav in the loop as well, " McLanahan said with a smile, examining the right-hand seat. "Or should I say, 'mission commander'? I like the sound of that." The right-hand instrument panel had boles and slots for the same size and number of color MFDs as the pilot's side, but technicians had already removed the monitors themselves. "This looks like a duplicate of the pilot's side, " McLanahan observed. "I think it is, " Ormack said. "The original idea was to have two pilots, remember. They decided it-" As Ormack watched, Patrick suddenly reached down to an awkwardly mounted keyboard on the right bulkhead and pulled it out of its slot. "Hey-!"

"Sir, having these nice color MFDs on the right side for the nav would be fine, " McLanahan said, "but it would also be a huge waste. Small MFDs are nice, but they're old technology... "Old technology? These MFDs are the latest thing-highresolution, high-speed, one twenty-eight K

RAM per pixel, the whole nine yards... "Compare it with pilot's side, "

McLanahan said. "Look here. The pilot can sit back, set up a scan, and fly his plane with complete ease and confidence. What does the nav have? The nav has got to focus on one screen at a time to do his job.

His eyes lock on one screen-they have to, because you got one screen that displays only one set of information. What happens then? He loses track of what's going on around him. He loses situational awareness.

Something important might be happening on one of the other screens, but he doesn't know that because he's got to stare at this screen for several seconds. The setup forces him to divert his attention in several different directions at once, and by doing so you make him less effective, not more. "These are the best MFDs available, " Ormack said wryly. "You can swap displays around on each screen, split the screens and have two displays on one screen, even have the computer shift displays for you-sort of an autoscan. What's wrong with all that?"

"They're great, but they're outdated, " McLanahan repeated. "We can get something better." He shook the keyboard at Ormack, then tossed it over his shoulder. "And no important keyboards on the side instrument panels. If the nav has to take his eyes off the scope on the bomb run, it's no good and it shouldn't be in the plane. That's what gets crews killed."

"We can rig up a swivel arm for the keyboard.. ." Ormack began, but McLanahan was clearly unimpressed. "I don't know exactly what you have in mind, Patrick, but I don't think you can just decide to replace the entire avionics suite . "You want my recommendations, you'll get them, "

McLanahan said. "You didn't mention any restrictions or specifications, so I'll build you the best cockpit I can think of." He paused for a moment, then said, "And we'll start with the Armstrong Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat."

"Armstrong? What... ?" And then he realized what Patrick was getting at: "The Super Cockpit program? You want to put one of those big six-square-foot screens in the B-2?"

"Sir, it's tailor-made for the Black Knight, " McLanahan said excitedly.

"The screen would fit perfectly in this big cockpit, and they can rewrite the software in a matter of months. We can bring it in within a few weeks and have a demo flight within four months, I guarantee it." He paused for a moment, then added, "And once we get Super Cockpit installed, we can install that Sky Masters PACER SKY system General Elliott is working on-real-time satellite target reconnaissance. That'd be awesome. A satellite sending you real-time pictures of a target area, a computer drawing your route of flight, and having it displayed on a huge mother Super Multi-Function Display? Oh, man, this is gonna be great!" John Ormack thought about the idea for several long mo ments.

He knew McLanahan was nothing if not a walking idea machine, but he never expected him to devise two such radical ideas in so short a time.

It was an interesting combination: Super Cockpit was a 1 980s technology demonstration program that had never been implemented in any tactical aircraft, and PACER SKY was a brand-new idea that was just now being operationally tested. Ormack knew Sky Masters' NIRTSats could make combined synthetic radar, infrared, and visual photographs of a geographic area in one pass, uplink it to a satellite, then download it.

But uplinking it to a TDRS satellite (Tactical Information Distribution System used by the Army and Air Force) then downloading it to a targeting computer on a strike aircraft was brilliant. The computer would be able to classify each return with known or suspected targets, measure the precise target coordinates, and load them into the crew's bombing computers. The crews could then call up each target, evaluate the information and direct a strike against the targets in virtually real-time. It would be the first time crews would have access to virtual real-time imagery during a conflict. Leave it to McLanahan, Ormack thought proudly. "Jesus, Patrick, " Ormack said, "you've already come up with six months' worth of work and you haven't been in the seat five minutes-and you've probably busted the bank as well."

"Well, we can eliminate a lot of this stuff, then, " McLanahan said, gesturing to a small shelf under the glare shield. "We can ditch this attempt at a work desk-with the Super Cockpit installed, we won't need charts and books out cluttering the cockpit-but we'll need coffee-cup holders, of course "Coffee-cup holders!" Ormack cried. McLanahan's extraordinary capacity for coffee was well known throughout Dreamland.

"On a B-2? Get outta here!"

"You think I'm kidding, sir?" McLanahan replied. "I'll bet you lunch for a week that there's not only coffee-cup holders for the pilot over there, but a pencil-holder and maybe even an approach-plate holder. How about it?"

"You're on, buddy, " Ormack said. "Coffee-cup holders on multimillion-dollar warplanes went out with khaki uniforms and nose art.

Besides, everything on this plane is computerized-why would the pilots need pencils and approach plates when everything's on the multi-function displays in living color?" Ormack searched the aircraft commander's station for a moment as McLanahan confidently sat back in his seat and waited. A few moments later he heard a muttered, "Well, I'll be damned..."

"Find something, General?"

"I don't believe it!" Ormack shouted. "Chart holders, pencil holders, coffee-cup holders-no ashtray, hotshot... unbelievable."

"Let me guess, " McLanahan teased, "there's a space up there for an inflight lunch box?"

"Box lunches and even a stopwatch holder. I just don't believe it.

There are twenty systems on this plane that'll give you a countdown. The plane practically flies itself, for God's sake! If you want, a female electronic voice'll even give you a countdown over interphone. But they went ahead and put in a black rubber stopwatch holder anyway. "The Air Force probably paid a thousand dollars for it, too, " McLanahan added dryly. "The more things change, the more they stay the same. We'll have developed a hypersonic bomber that can circumnavigate the globe in one hour, and someone'll still put a stopwatch holder in the cockpit."

Ormack tried to ignore McLanahan's smug smile. "Well, you've got your work cut out for you over here, that's for sure, but you've made a terrific start. When can you get to work?"

"Right away, General, " McLanahan replied. "The F-15F Cheetah project is off the flight line for a few months, so this'll work out perfectly.

I've got a staff meeting with J. C. Powell and McDonnell-Douglas in about an hour, and I'll clear the desk and schedule an afternoon staff meeting on this project. We'll be back out here taking measurements"-he paused, then gave Ormack a sly smile-"right after we get back from lunch. Your treat, I believe?" THE GOLD ROOM OFFICE OF THE CHAIRMAN OF

THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D.C. MONDAY, 15

AUGUST 1994, 0800 HOURS LOCAL CC6ood morning, sir, " Navy Captain Rebecca Rodgers, senior staff officer, Pacific, of J-2, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate, began. "Captain Rodgers with this morning's intelligence report. The briefing is classified top secret, sensitive sources and methods involved, not releasable to foreign nationals; the room is secure." She paused to doublecheck that the thick mahogany double doors to the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff Conference Center, referred to as the "Tank" or the "Gold Room, " were closed and locked and that the red "Top Secret" lights were on. Rebecca

"Becky" Rodgers could feel the tension of the men and women in the Tank that morning, and her news was not going to help to cheer them up one bit. Captain Rodgers was at the briefer's podium at the base of the Tank's large, triangle-shaped conference table where everyone could see her and the screen clearly. It was a most imposing and decidedly uncomfortable spot-seven of the most senior, most powerful military men on the planet watching her, waiting for her, no doubt evaluating her performance every moment. The first few sessions in this room had been devastating for her. But that was a half-dozen crises ago, and it seemed like old hat now. She didn't need the old trick of trying to imagine the Joint Chiefs naked to get through her nervousness-the fact that she knew something that these powerful men and women did not know was comfort enough. Present for the briefing was JCS Chairman General Wilbur Curtis; the Vice Chairman, Marine Corps General Mario Lanuza; the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Randolph Cunningham; Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Peterson; Air Force Chief of Staff General William Falmouth; and Army Chief of Staff General John Bonneville, plus their aides and representatives from the other J-staff directorates.

Curtis insisted on attendance by all Joint Staff members and directorates for these daily briefings-it was probably the only opportunity for the staff to get together as a team during their busy week. The Chairman sat at the blunted apex of the triangle, with seats available beside him at the head of the table for the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States if they chose to attend, although in his two years of office, the President had never set foot in this place. The four-star Joint Staff members and their aides and staffers sat on the Chairman's left, the J-staff directorate representatives on the right, and guests and briefers at the base of the triangle near the back. Each seat had a small communications console and computer I TV monitor embedded in the table, which was fed from the giant Global Military Communications, Command, Control, and Intelligence Network operations center on another level of the Pentagon. The back wall of the Tank was a large rear-projection screen. Arranged above it was a series of red LED digital clocks with various times, and several members of the staff, by force of habit after long years aloft or at sea, gave themselves a time hack from those ultra-precise clocks every morning. "The number-one topic I have for you today is the Philippines and South China Sea incidents, " Rodgers said after concluding her routine force status briefings. "In response to the attack on an oil-exploration barge a few months ago in the neutral zone in the Spratly Island chain, both the Philippines and China have stepped up naval activity in the area. "Specifically, the Chinese have not added any new forces except for a few smaller shallow patrol boats. They have a very strong contingent there, including the destroyer Hong Lung, which carries the Hong Qian-9 1 surface-to-air missile system, the Fei Lung-7

and Fei Lung-9 antiship missile systems, and a good complement of dual-purpose guns. Additionally, they have two frigates, four patrol boats, some minesweepers, and other support vessels. They usually detach into three smaller patrol groups, with a missile craft leading two groups and Hong Lung and its escorts comprising the third. Vessels from the South Sea fleet, headquartered at Jhanjiang, rotate with the ships about once per month; however, Hong Lung rotates very seldom.

Their base on Spratly Island is very small, but they can land medium-size cargo aircraft there to resupply their vessels. "The Filipinos have substantially increased their presence in the Spratly Islands following the attack on the oil barge. They have sent two of their three frigates into the disputed area and are now patrolling their section vigorously with both sea and air assets. "But despite the naval buildup, the Philippine naval fleet is practically nonexistent, "

Rodgers concluded. "All of their major combatants are old, slow, and unreliable. The crews are generally not well trained and rarely operate more than a day's cruise away from their home ports."

"So without the United States forces to back them up, they're sitting ducks for the Chinese, " Admiral Cunningham said. "Sir, the Chinese fleet is not that much more advanced than the Philippine fleet, at least the vessels that operate near the Spratly Islands, " Rodgers said. "Most are small, lightly armed patrol boats. The exception, of course, is the flagship, Hong Lung. It is without question the most capable warship in the entire South China Sea, comparable in performance to U.S. Kidd-class destroyers but faster and lighter. The frigates are heavily armed as well; most have HQ-6 1 SAM missiles, which would be very effective against the Filipino helicopters and may even be capable against the Sea Ray antiship missile. All are comparable in performance to U.S. Oliver Hazard Perryclass frigates, except without helicopter decks or the sophisticated electronics. "The main Chinese offensive thrust would obviously be their overwhelming ground forces-they could land several hundred thousand troops in the Philippines in very short order, "

Rodgers concluded. "Although we generally classify the Chinese Navy as smaller and less capable than ours, their naval forces are very capable of supporting and protecting their ground troops. An amphibious assault on the Philippines by the Chinese would be concluded very quickly, and it would push the necessary threshold of an American counter strike to very high levels-very much along the lines of our DESERT SHIELD

deployment, although without the advantage of forward basing."

"So if the Chinese want to take the Spratly Islands, there's not much we could do about it, " General Falmouth summarized. "Sir, at the current force levels in the area, if the Chinese wanted to take the Philippines, there would be little we could do about it..." There was a very animated murmur of voices at that comment. Curtis was the first to raise his voice above the others: "Wait one, Captain. Is this a J-2 assessment or an opinion?"

"It is not a directorate finding, sir, but it is nevertheless a statement of fact, " Rodgers replied. "If they so decided, it would take the People's Liberation Army Navy less than a week..."

"Ridiculous..." "They wouldn't dare..." "Absurd..." "According to the directorate's preliminary report, sir, " Rodgers explained, getting their attention, "if the Chinese captured five strategic military bases-the naval facilities at Subic Bay and Zamboanga, the Air Force bases at Cavite and Cebu, and the Army base at Cagayan de Oro-and if they defeated Second Vice President Samar's militia at Davao, they could secure the entire country." She paused, then looked directly at them.

"Gentlemen, the New Philippine Army is nothing more than a well-equipped police force, not a defense force. They have relied on the United States for its national defense-and obviously would have to again, if the need arose. General Samar's Commonwealth Defense Force is a welltrained and well-organized guerrilla-fighting force, but they cannot stand up against a massive invasion. The Chinese have a thirty-to-one advantage in all areas. General Wilbur Curtis surveyed his Chiefs of Staff with a look of concern-the information Captain Rodgers had just conveyed had silenced them all. He had heard a lot of bad news during the past six years that he'd chaired the Joint Chiefs. He had learned to quickly decipher between isolated incidents and incidents that had a broader, far more serious impact if left untended. He knew the implications of what Rodgers was saying could be far more serious than any of them had previously thought. "I think we all wanted to believe this was just another skirmish. But with the United States out of the Philippines, there is a large power vacuum in the area. We knew there'd be that danger. Still, I don't think anyone believed the Chinese would consider moving so soon-if they really are." Curtis turned to Captain Rodgers again and asked, "Are the Chinese likely to attempt an invasion?"

"Sir, if the Joint Chiefs would like a detailed briefing, I should get Central Intelligence involved, " Rodgers said. "I had been concentrating on the military aspects and hadn't prepared a full briefing on the political situation. But J-2 does feel that the Philippines are ripe for the picking." Curtis waited for additional thoughts from the Joint Chiefs; when there appeared to be no concrete suggestions, he said, "I'd like to review the current OPLANS for dealing with a possible Chinese action in the Philippines, then. I need to know what plans we have built already, and if they need to be updated. Captain Rodgers, I'd like Central Intelligence to get involved, and I'd like Current Operations to draft a response plan that I can present to the Secretary of Defense for his review. Include a Philippines update in the daily briefings, including satellite passes and a rundown on naval activity in the Spratlys and in the Chinese South China Sea fleet. Let's get on top of this thing and have a plan of action before it threatens to blow up in our faces." HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE WEAPONS CENTER (HAWC) DREAMLAND,

NEVADA WEDNESDAY, 17 AUGUST 1994, 0905 HOURS LOCAL The phone line crackled. "Brad! How the hell are you?" Lieutenant General Brad Elliott leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly as he recognized the caller. "I was expecting you to send young Andy Wyatt out here to harass me again, sir, but I'm glad to hear from you. "Can the 'sir'

stuff with me, you old warhorse, " Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Wilbur Curtis said over the snaps and crackles in the scrambled phone line. "You know better. Besides, it's been a long time since we've spoken. When are we going to get together?"

"I have a feeling it'll be soon, my friend. I've been getting calls from half the J-staff, a bunch of calls from Space Command-you had to be the next caller. Let me guess-you want some air time on some satellites of mine. "Now how the hell did you know that?"

"Every time I build a new toy, you want it, that's how I know it."

"That's why you're out there, you stupid bastard. You're supposed to be developing toys for us to play with, not polishing your three stars.

Stop whining."

"I'm not, believe me." Elliott chuckled. "I assume you want to use the new Masters NIRTSats, the ones that can downlink radar, infrared, and visual imagery all in one pass in real-time both to the ground stations and aircraft. Right?" "You're not telepathic are you?" Curtis joked.

"They tell me you can receive satellite images on your B-2 bomber as well as your B-52 Megafortress?"

"We flight-test PACER SKY at the Strategic Warfare Center in a couple weeks, " Elliott said, "but ground tests have gone really well. Let me guess some more: you want pictures of a certain area, but don't want to use DSP or LACROSSE satellites because you don't want certain Superpower countries to know you're interested. Am I close?" "Frightfully close, "

Curtis said. "We're watching a Chinese naval buildup in the South China Sea. We think they might be getting ready to plug away at either the Spratlys or the Philippines. If we send a DSP or KH-series bird over the area, we risk discovery."

"The Philippines? You mean the Chinese might try an invasion?"

"Well, let's hope not, " Curtis said. "The President is a big fan of President Mikaso's. We've been expecting something like this for years, ever since we realized there was a good possibility we were going to get kicked out of the Philippines-now it might actually happen. We've got our pants pretty much down around the ankles as far as Southeast Asia goes right now. What with the buildup in the Persian Gulf and the closing of a bunch of bases overseas, we've got zilch out there...

"Well, if you need the pictures, you got 'em, " Elliott said, running his hand across the top of his hair. "We can transmit the digitized data to J-2, or Jon Masters can set up one of his terminals right on your desk there-providing you don't keep stretching your secretary out over it all the time."

"My secretary is a fifty-year-old Marine Corps gunnery sergeant that could grind us both down into little nubs, you old lech." Curtis laughed. "No, transmit it to J-2 and J-3 out here at the Pentagon soonest. They'll give you a call and tell you exactly what they want. "I know what you want, sir, " Elliott said. "Hey, don't be so sure, big shot, " Curtis said. "Man, some guys-they get on the fast track, tool around the White House for a few months, and it goes right to their heads. And stop calling me sir. You'd have four stars, too, if you'd climb up out of that black hole you've built for yourself out there and join the real world again."

"What? Leave Dreamland and miss the opportunity for some first-class, four-star abuse? No way." Elliott gave his old friend a loud laugh and hung up. U.S. AIR FORCE STRATEGIC WARFARE CENTER ELLSWORTH AFB, SOUTH

DAKOTA "Room, ten-HUT!" Two hundred men and women in olive drab flight suits moved smartly to their feet as Air Force Brigadier General Calvin Jarrel and his staff entered the auditorium briefing room. The scene could have been right out of Patton except for the ten-foot-square electronic liquid-crystal screen onstage with the Strategic Air Command emblem in full color, showing an armored fist clutching an olive branch and three lightning bolts. Otherwise it looked like the setting for countless other combat-mission briefings from years past-except these men and women, all SAC warriors, weren't going to war... at least not yet. It was easy to mistake General Cal Jarrel for just another one of the four hundred or so crew dogs at the Air Force Strategic Warfare Center, and that was just fine with him. Jarrel was an unimposing five foot eleven, one-hundred-sixty-pound man, with boyish brown hair and brown eyes hidden behind standard-issue aluminum-framed aviator's spectacles. Many of those close to the General thought that he was uncomfortable with the trappings of a general officer, and everyone on the base agreed that at the very least he was the most visible one-star anyone had ever known. On the flight line or on the indoor track in the base gym, he could be seen jogging early each morning with a crowd of several dozen staffers and visitors, which was how he kept his slight frame lean and trim despite an ever-increasing amount of time flying a desk instead of a B-52 Stratofortress, B-1B Excalibur, or F-1 11 G Super

'Vark bomber. He was married to an environmental-law attorney from Georgia and was the harried father of two teenage boys. Like many of the men and women in the Strategic Air Command of the mid-1990s, Jarrel appeared studious, introspective, unobtrusive, and soft-spoken-unlike their hotshot fighter-pilot colleagues, it was as if they understood that the awesome responsibility of carrying two-thirds of the nation's nuclear deterrent force was something that was not to be advertised or bragged about. Certainly, the critics thought, SAC's twenty thousand aircrew members had little to boast about and nothing to look forward to for the next century-the fifty B-2s and one hundred rail-garrisoned Peacekeeper ICBMs planned to be operational by then might very well be the only nuclear-armed weapons in SAC's inventory. Virtually all of the B-52s, B-1B bombers, cruise missiles, and reconnaissance aircraft were rumored to be headed for conventionally armed tactical-support roles, in the inactive reserves-or, worse, in the boneyard. It was a winding-down period for SAC, which created questions about readiness, training, and motivation. That's where Jarrel's Strategic Warfare Center School, and the Air Battle Force, came in. "Seats, " General Cal Jarrel said in a loud voice as he made his way to the stage. The aircrew members in the room took their seats and restlessly murmured comments among themselves as Jarrel stepped up to the podium. He was there to give the welcoming speech to a new crop of aircrew members that were to begin an intensive three-week course on strategic air combat-SAC's "graduate school" on how to fly and fight. As was the case for the past year since becoming director of the Strategic Warfare Center, he had to convince each and every one of these men and women of the importance of what they were about to learn-and, in a very real sense, to convince the rest of the country and perhaps himself as well. Lieutenant Colonel McLanahan listened to General Jarrel's comments, sitting on the edge of his auditorium seat. All around him were stealth bomber crews, who, like him, were there to attend the Strategic Warfare Center school. When General Jarrel acknowledged the B-2 crews in his opening remarks, a ripple of applause-and a few Bronx cheers-passed over the crowd for the B-2 crews. This is where I belong, McLanahan thought: in a flight suit, getting briefed with these other crew dogs. He had, he realized, been isolated at Dreamland far too long. Sure, he was one of the most dedicated and successful aircrew members and weapon-systems project managers in the entire military. But where had that gotten him? Flying a battle-scarred B-52 fully renovated with modern hardware deep into Soviet airspace to knock out Russia's state-of-the-art armaments? It should have been the most rewarding mission in his career. Instead it had landed him at HAWC, where he'd been ever since. But flying was in his blood. McLanahan knew the score-because of the highly classified nature of his work he'd probably never get beyond 0-6 (Colonel), or if he was lucky, 0-7 (Brigadier-General). But at least they were letting him fly a dream plane. The only problem was he couldn't tell anyone about it. His cover story was that he was "observing" the school for the Pentagon. Still . . . he was here. And the real excitement was coming. . General Jarrel was well into his talk. "SAC is being tasked with much more than delivering nuclear weapons-we are being tasked with providing many different elements of support for a wide variety of conflict scenarios, " Jarrel went on, speaking without a script and from his heart as well as from the numerous times he'd given this speech.

"The way we do it is through the Air Battle Force, " Jarrel continued.

"From this moment on, you are not members of any bomb squadron, or fighter squadron, or airlift group-you are members of the First Air Battle Wing. You will learn to fly and fight as a team. Each of you will have knowledge of not only his or her own capabilities, but those of your colleagues. The Air Battle Force marks the beginning of the first truly integrated strike force-several different weapon systems, several different tactical missions, training, deploying, and fighting together as one. "Because the Air Battle Force concept is new and not yet fully operational, we have to disband each task force class and return you to your home units. When you leave this Center, you will still belong to the Air Battle Force, and you are expected to continue your studies and perfect your combat skills from within your own units.

If a crisis should develop, you can be brought back here to be placed back within the Air Battle Force system, ready to form the Second or Third Air Battle Wings. Eventually, Air Battle Wings will be formed on a fulltime basis for extended tours." Jarrel talked for several more minutes, giving the history of the Strategic Warfare Center's mission, which since 1989 had conducted strategic combat training exercises through sorties that were spread over three thousand miles of low- and highaltitude military training routes over nine Midwestern states. When he had finished, he said, "All right, ladies and gentlemen, get out there and show us how a strategic battle can be fought by America's best and brightest!" The auditorium erupted in cheers, and somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Patrick McLanahan was cheering the loudest. Late one night a couple of days after General Jarrel's Strategic Warfare Training Program was under way, Brigadier General John Ormack, who had come with Cobb, McLanahan, the EB-52 and B-2 bombers, and the rest of the support crew from HAWC, found Patrick McLanahan sitting in the cockpit of his Black Knight. External power and air had been hooked up, and McLanahan was reclining in the mission commander's seat with a computer-generated chart of the Strategic Training Range Complex on the three-by-two-foot Super Multi Function Display before him. Patrick had a headset on and was issuing commands to the B-2's sophisticated voice-recognition computer; he was so engrossed in his work-or so deep in daydream, Ormack couldn't quite tell which-that the HAWC vice commander was able to spend a few moments watching his junior chief officer from just behind the pilot's seat. The guy had always been like this, Ormack remembered-a little spacy, quiet, introverted, always preferring to work alone even though it was a genuine pleasure being around him and he seemed to enjoy working with others. He had the ability to tune out all sound and activity around him and to focus all his attention and brainpower on the matter at hand, whether that was a mission-planning chart, a bomb run at Mach one and a hundred feet off the ground, or a Voltron cartoon on television. But ever since arriving here at Ellsworth, McLanahan had become even more hardworking, even more focused, even more tuned out-to everything else but the task at hand, which was completing the curriculum at the Strategic Warfare Center and the Air Battle Force with the highest possible grade. Even though McLanahan himself was not being "graded" because the HAWC crews were not official participants, he was slamming away at the session as if he were a young captain getting ready to meet a promotion board. It was hard to tell if Patrick was working this hard because he enjoyed it or because he was trying to prove to himself and others that he could still do the job. . But that was Patrick McLanahan. Ormack stepped over the center console and into the leftside pilot's seat. McLanahan noticed him, straightened himself up in his seat, and slid the headsets off. "Hey, sir, " McLanahan greeted him. "What brings you here this evening?"

"Looking for you, " Ormack said. He motioned to the SMFD. "Route study?"

"A little mission planning with the PACER SKY processor, " McLanahan said. "I fed the STRC attack route through the system to see what it might come up with, and it turns out if we attack this target here from the west instead of from the northeast, the MUTES in Powder River MOA site won't see us for an extra twenty-one seconds. We've got to gain sixty seconds after the Baker bomb site to get the extra time to get around to the west, so we'll lose a few points on timing, but if this works we'll gain even more points on bomber defense." He shook his head as he flipped through the computer-generated graphics on the big screen.

"The rest of the crews in the Air Battle Force would kill me if they knew I had something like PACER SKY doing my mission planning." "That reminds me, " Ormack said. "General Elliott got a tasking for NIRTSat time for a Joint Chiefs surveillance operation. Something to do with what's going on in the Philippines. You might get tapped to show your stuff for the J-staff."

"Fine. I'll water their eyes. "The guard said you've been up here for three hours working on this, " Ormack said. "You spent three hours just to save twenty seconds on one bomb run?" "Twenty seconds-and maybe I take down a target without getting 'shot' at." He motioned to the SMFD

and issued a command, which caused the scene to go into motion. A B-2

symbol on the bottom of the screen began reading along an undulating ribbon over low hills and dry valleys. Dead ahead was a small pyramid symbol of a target complex-small "signposts' on the ribbon marked off seconds and miles to go to weapon release. Off to the right of the screen, a yellow dome suddenly appeared. "There's the threat site at one o'clock, but this hillock blocks me out from the west-whoever surveyed the site for positioning this MUTES site obviously didn't think crews would deviate this far west." The computerized mission "preview"

continued as the yellow dome began to grow, eventually engulfing the B-2

bomber icon and turning red. McLanahan pointed to a countdown readout.

"Bingo-I release weapons ten seconds after I come under lethal range of the MUTES site. If I carry antiradar missiles, I can pick him off right now, or I just turn westbound around the hillock to escape. Ormack nodded in fascination at the presentation, but he was more interested in studying McLanahan than watching the computer. "There's quite a party at the 0-Club, Patrick, " he said. "This is your last night of partying before the weekend, and a lot of your old cronies from Ford Air Force Base asked about you. Why don't you knock off and join us?" McLanahan shrugged and began reconfiguring the SMFD for another replay. "Crew rest starts in about an hour . "One beer won't hurt. I'll buy."

McLanahan hesitated, then glanced at Ormack and shook his head. "I don't think so, sir... "Something wrong, Patrick? Something you're not telling me?"

"No . . . nothing's wrong." Patrick hesitated, then issued voice commands to the computer to shut down the system. "I just. . . I don't really feel part of them, you know?" "No, I don't."

"These guys are the real crew dogs, the real aviators, " Patrick said.

"They're young, they're talented, they're so cocky they think they can take on the whole world."

"Just like you were when I first met you, " Ormack said with a laugh.

"We used to think you had an attitude, but that was before we knew how good you really were." He looked at McLanahan with a hint of concern.

"You were pretty excited about coming to the Strategic Warfare Center, about getting back to the 'real world' . "But I'm not back, " Patrick said. "I'm farther from them than I ever thought I'd be. I feel like I've abandoned them. I feel like I should be out there pulling a crew or running a bomb-nav shop, but instead I'm.. ." He shrugged again, then concluded, "Like I'm playing around with gadgets that probably won't have anything to do with the 'real world'. "That's not what you're down about, " Ormack said. "I know you better than that. You're down because you somehow don't think you deserve what you've got. I see you around your buddies out there: they're old captains or majors, and you're a lieutenant colonel; they're still on line crews, flying dawn patrols and red eyes and pulling alert, doing the same thing they did ten years ago, while you're flying starships that most of those guys will never see in their careers, let alone flythey're talking about their last bomb-competition mission or their last Operational Readiness Inspection, while your job is so classified that you can't talk about it at all. You're down because you can't share what you have with them, so you hole yourself up in here thinking that maybe you don't really have what it takes to be a good crew dog. "Patrick, you're where you are because you're the best. You did more than be chosen for a job: you excelled, you never gave up, you survived, and you saved others. Then when we stuck you in Dreamland to keep you quiet, you didn't just vegetate until completing your twenty years-you excelled again and made yourself invaluable to the organization. "You deserve what you have. You earned it. You should go out and enjoy it. And you should also buy your boss a beer before he drags your ass out of this cockpit. Now move it, Colonel." NEAR PHU QUI ISLAND, IN THE SPRATLY ISLAND CHAIN SOUTH

CHINA SEA THURSDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 1994, 2344 HOURS LOCAL The number-two task force of Admiral Yin Po L'un's Spratly Island flotilla was again cruising within radar range of Phu Qui Island, the large rock and coral formation in the disputed neutral zone between the Philippine-occupied islands to the north and the Chinese-held islands to the south. Unlike the more powerful ten-ship task force that surrounded Admiral Yin's flagship, this one had only four ships-two Hainan-class patrol boats, a Lienyun-class minesweeper, and a Huangfen-class fast attack missile craft, the Chagda, which acted as the command vessel for this faster, shallow-draft patrol group. Commander Chow Ti U, skipper of the Chagda, felt uneasy with his latest series of orders. It had been over three months since the attack on the Philippine oil-drilling barge, and the tension in the region had been escalating on a weekly basis. Now it was so thick one could cut it with a knife-and much of the heightened tensions could be directly attributed to the way Admiral Yin had handled the entire affair. Despite what was originally and officially reported, Yin had departed the area after attacking the oil barges; his contention that the seas were too rough to begin rescue operations did not sit well with anyone. When the weather cleared, it was found that Yin had steamed back to the Chinese side of the neutral zone, well away from Phu Qui Island-again, his contention that he was concerned about retaliatory attacks from Philippine warships did not explain why he did not offer to assist in rescue operations. Chow would never say so to anyone, but Yin's actions could be characterized as unprofessional, exhibiting a total disregard for the rules of naval warfare, international law, and common decency between sailors. Chow felt that the Admiral had every right to confront the illegally placed oil-drilling rig, and he was well within his responsibilities when he returned fire-even such devastating return fire as he used. But to sim ply slink away from the area without offering any help or without radioing for help was very suspicious.

Since then, while there'd been no skirmishes, there had been a few close calls. Everyone was on edge, looking, waiting, wondering. ... Chow and his fellow Chinese crewmen privately felt it was only a matter of time before something else happened, and after witnessing the way Admiral Yin had handled the first skirmish, everyone was skittish about how he would proceed in an escalated conflict. "Range to Phu Qui Island, navigator, "

Chow called out. His crewmen were obviously keeping very close track themselves, for the answer was almost instantaneous: "Sir... we are presently twenty-five kilometers southwest of Phu Qui Island. We will be in radar range within minutes."

"Very well, " Chow grunted. Twenty-five kilometers-they were right on the edge of the neutral zone-perhaps inside it by no more than a kilometer. Unlike Admiral Yin, Chow had no intention of tempting fate by openly cruising the neutral zone. Pearson Reef was indisputably the property of the People's Republic of China, so he would stay close to it. His radar could survey enough of the neutral zone to check for any other intruders. Still... he was uneasy. Perhaps because Admiral Yin chose not to continue operating his larger, more powerful task force along the border as before-but had instead chosen to operate farther south, well in undisputed Chinese waters. The first explanation was, of course, that Yin had been ordered to keep away from the neutral zone, but as weeks went by, the rumor was that Yin simply did not want to risk the wrath of the Philippine Navy and put his precious flagship Hong Lung in harm's way. Instead, he had ordered Chow's smaller, less powerful, less capable task force to patrol the area. Admiral Yin's task force was seventy-two kilometers to the southwest, fairly close to Nansha Dao Island itself, which meant Yin was in very real danger of running aground in the shallow waters. Commander Chow's force was better suited for those interreef patrols-but if that was where the Admiral preferred to stay... "Surface contact, sir, " an officer in the Combat section of the bridge crew blurted out. "Bearing, zero-five-zero degrees, range twenty kilometers. Speed zero." Chow turned to the plotting board as another crewman penciled in the contact on the clear Plexiglas board.

Phu Qui Island. "Confirm that contact, " Chow ordered. "Make sure you're not painting the island itself." But he knew it was not possible for his radar to paint the shallow, half-submerged outline of a coral

"island" at this extreme range. Someone was on or near the disputed island. The Filipino salvage crews, along with the inevitable warships, had long since departed-there had been no large vessels near the island now for several weeks. Since Yin's attack, ships transiting the neutral zone, including Chow's small task force, had been careful to report their movements to the governments of each country that had claims on the islands-Chow had a list of every ship that planned on plying these waters in the next several days. There had been no reports of any vessels that sought to anchor on Phu Qui Island. "Radar confirms contact as a vessel, " the Combat officer replied a few moments later. "Definite cultural return. Unable to get an ISAR reading on the contact, but it is not terrain or sea shadows." ISAR, or Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar, was a new feature of the "Square Tie" surface-search radar that could combine vertical and horizontal radar scans with Doppler-frequency shift information to get a two-dimensional "picture" of a surface return; ISAR

could usually identify a vessel at ten to fifteen miles, well beyond visual range. Commander Chow hesitated-he couldn't believe the Filipinos would actually attempt to set up their oil-drilling rigs on the island again. It was tantamount to a declaration of war. He was also reluctant to cruise farther into the neutral zone without specific orders from Admiral Yin. Let him take the responsibility for another attack. "Send a FLASH emergency message to Dragon, " he finally ordered his officer of the deck. He could feel the first prickles of tension-heated sweat forming on the back of his neck, and it wasn't from the humidity.

"Inform him of our radar contact. We will stand by for instructions."

He paused momentarily, then added, "Send the minesweeper Guangzou from present position northwest and secure the north and northeast axis. If we have to move toward Phu Qui, I want the lane clear. I give specific orders for Guangzou to enter the neutral zone on my authority; record the order in the log." The minesweeper, although based on a Shanghai-class patrol boat, had no offensive armament except small-caliber machine guns and could not be considered a warship; therefore sending a minesweeper alone into the neutral zone could not be considered a hostile act. The officer of the deck issued the orders; then: "Sir, I suggest we request the helicopter on Ho ng Lung be sent to investigate the contact ahead of the task force. It would be much less threatening to whoever is on Phu Qui Island."

"We will be ordered to move closer to Phu Qui Island whether we see what is out there or not, Chow predicted. "But it's a good suggestion. Get it in the air." They did not have to wait long for the order: "Message from Dragon, sir, " the officer of the deck reported." 'Task force two is hereby ordered to cross into the neutral zone immediately.

Investigate contact on Phu Qui Island with all possible speed, identify all intruders, detain all persons. Peacetime rules of engagement in effect-do not fire unless fired upon, but repel assaults with all available resources. Helicopter will be dispatched immediately to assist. Dragon task force en route to your location. ETA two-point-three hours." Message ends."

"Very well, " Chow replied, nodding confidently and pumping his voice up with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. "Sound silent general quarters, repeat, silent general quarters. Relay to all vessels, go to silent general quarters." It was a fairly calm night, and the noise of alarm bells and sirens going off might very well be heard twenty kilometers away. This was the first time that Commander Chow had ever faced a real confrontation between two powerful, hostile navies, and so far his thin, forty-six-kilogram body was not taking the excitement too well. His stomach was making fluid, nervous rumblings. "Have Guangzou complete a zigzag pattern along the zerofive-degree bearing from us, then begin a search pattern direct to Phu Qui Island. Transition Yaan and Buojj into trail and forward-scan each flank for signs of intruders." He was glad when his officer of the deck and the rest of the bridge crew went about their duties-he was feeling worse by the minute. He had never experienced seasickness in his sixteen years in the People's Revolutionary Army Navy, but this time, at the worst possible moment, he just might. ... He tried to ignore his stomach and ordered his ships in the best formation in which to approach a hostile island. The minesweeper would execute a zigzag pattern in front of Chagda perhaps a kilometer wide, clearing the path of any hidden mines while maintaining good forward speed toward the target. With his two Hainan-class patrol boats in trail position, one behind the other and spaced about a kilometer apart, whoever was on that island might not detect the two trailing vessels until the shooting started. The two patrol boats, each one configured for both antiaircraft and antisubmarine warfare, would be scanning the skies and seas ahead and to each side of the formation, searching for hostile aircraft, ships or submarines. "All ships are at general quarters, " the officer of the deck reported with a bow. Chow was just donning his life jacket and baseball cap, in lieu of a combat helmet. "All ship's weapons manned and report ready."

"Very well. I want range to Phu Qui Island every kilometer, " Chow ordered. "Have the vessels maintain ten knots until-"

"Sir! Acquisition radar detected, bearing zero-five-zero, " Combat reported. "Well, what in blazes is it? Analysis! Quickly!" There was another interminable delay; then: "C-band acquisition, sir. . .

probably Sea Giraffe 50, OPS-37, SPS-10 or -21 surface-search system...

slow scan rate... Calling it an SPS-10 now, sir. . . Chow scowled at the reports from his Combat section; they were rattling off Swedish and Japanese radar systems when they knew that the only C-band radar in the Spratlys had to be Filipino. "Nineteen kilometers to Phu Qui Island and closing, " came the range report from the navigation officer. "Speed ten knots."

"Negros Oriental class, " the officer of the deck announced. "Latest intelligence reports had the Nueoa Viscaya putting out to sea. It may have arrived here in the Spratlys." Chow nodded his agreement. The Nueoa Viscaya was one of two active ex-U.S. anti-submarine-warfare vessels operated by the Philippine Navy as coastal patrol boats, another fifty-year-old rust bucket rescued from the scrap heaps. It was small, slow, and lightly armed. They used old American C-band SPS- 10 or French Triton II surface search and acquisition radars as well as older-model ULQ-6 jammers. Fortunately, its heaviest weapon was a 76-millimeter cannon, as well as 40- and 20millimeter antiaircraft and antimissile guns that might be a danger to the Hong Lung's helicopter as far as six kilometers away. "Relay to Hong Lung that we suspect the Philippine vessel PS80 to be in the vicinity of Phu Qui Island, " Chow ordered. "Inform them we have detected acquisition C-band radar emissions and that-"

"Message from Baoji, sir!" the radio technician yelled. "Radar contact aircraft, bearing one-niner-zero, fifteen kilometers!"

"Air-defense alert to all vessels, " Chow shouted. "Order five-kilometers free-fire to all vessels. Broadcast on emergency frequencies for all aircraft to stay out of visual range of Chinese warships." He dashed over to the radar display on the center bridge pedestal. The composite radar images showed nothing but Pearson Reef and Cornwallis West Reef, two very large coral formations on the southeastern edge of the Spratly Islands-and it was then obvious what had happened. The single blast of radar energy from whatever vessels were near Phu Qui was enough to divert all attention to the northeast, while aircraft managed to sneak around behind Chow's task force, hide in the radar clutter created by the coral reefs, and slip in close. "Radar now showing three aircraft, altitude less than ten meters, speed sixty knots, " Combat reported. "Suspect rotarywing aircraft. Range now thirteen-point-five kilometers and closing..." The radar display suddenly showed several bright white spikes radiating out from center.

The spikes seemed to spin around the scope, dim, disappear, and reappear seconds later with even greater intensity. "Jamming on all systems."

"All ships, defensive maneuvering, " Commander Chow ordered. "Active ECM

and decoys. Signal Dragon in the clear, report possible air attack from the southeast-"

"Missile in the air!" someone screamed. Directly ahead, right on the dark horizon, a bright flash of light could be seen, followed by an arc of light that flared quickly, then disappeared. Another flash of light followed, the trail of the missile straight this time-headed right for Chagda. "Hard starboard!" Chow shouted. "Flank speed! Chaff rockets!

Release batteries on all guns! All guns, antimissile barrage!" The portside 3O-millimeter antiaircraft guns, twin-barrel automatic guns housed in two-meter domes, began pounding into the sky, guided by the Round Ball fire-control radar. The furious hammering, so close to the bridge, turned Chow's guts inside out. At the same time, small rockets fired off the fantail into the night sky-this was the ERC-1 decoy system, which consisted of racks of small cylindrical mortars that fired parachute-equipped shells several hundred meters away and about a hundred meters high. Some of the rockets streamed pieces of tinsel that would act as bright radar-reflectors, while others would spew globes of burning phosphorus that would decoy an infrared-guided missile. His ship also carried floating radar reflectors, buoy polelike devices, like tall punching bags, that were weighted to pop upright when tossed overboard; they were laughably inadequate devices, but someone always found the time to heave a few over the side in the slim hope that a missile might find it more appealing than a two-hundred-ton patrol boat.

Every member of the bridge crew was staring out toward Phu Qui Island when suddenly a terrific burst of light split the air, and for several seconds the low profile of the minesweeper Guangzou was highlighted in a huge ball of fire. Several secondary eruptions quickly followed-the shock wave and sound of the explosion that hit the Chagda several seconds later was like a three-second hurricane and thunderstorm rolled into one. Commander Chow had never seen such a horrifying sight.

"Guangzou . . . the minesweeper's been hit... "Look!" someone shouted. Chow turned in time to see a streak of light pass not more than a hundred meters astern of Chagda, a blur of a missile-looking object, just before another huge explosion rocked the patrol boat. The second missile fired from near Phu Qui had miraculously missed the patrol boat and horned in on the chaff cloud and formerly comical-looking radar reflectors, detonating after hitting the floating decoy. The blast was so tremendous that Chow thought his eardrums had ruptured. Except for a loud ringing in his ears and a few crewmen knocked off their feet by the concussion, the small patrol boat was unharmed. The attack continued. Even though Yaan and Baoji were larger and better equipped than Chagda, neither of them carried any decoy rockets, and their electronic countermeasures emitters were small; they relied on their antiaircraft guns, two twin 57-millimeter and two twin 25-millimeter rapid-firing cannons, to defend themselves. Both ships'

guns were lighting up the sky as the helicopters closed in from the southeast. "Sir! Baoji reports the helicopters are launching missiles!"