John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

The first targets on the list that morning were the satellite launch centers at Taiyuan and Jiuquan, and the Guangde rocket launch site west of Shanghai, respectively known as Base 25 and Base 603. These targets were within 500 kilometers of the coast and could be struck by B-2s over the South or East China Seas. Three B-2s would be assigned to each target and Banks watched them take off, glad a little payback was heading east while the base still intact.

Someone took a pot shot at us, he thought, but THAAD was good enough to knock whatever they sent our way down. Now we return the favor. Those bad boys will be up in ten minutes, and this is probably the last any human eyes will see of them until they return. The Spirits of Missouri, California, South Carolina, Washington and Texas were already up, Spirit of Kansas, his home state, was the last in the line, the one new plane that had joined the B-2 wing to replace the bomber by that very same name that had been lost on this airfield in a takeoff crash in 2008.

It was a $1.4 billion dollar mishap that day, not including the “classified material” the Spirit of Kansas had been carrying that also went up in smoke when the big plane came down. The official “findings” on that crash attributed it to three improperly calibrated pressure transducers that resulted in faulty data sent to the flight control computer. The plane went into a stall on takeoff, its wing dipped and hooked the ground, and that was that.

Don’t crash again, baby, he whispered as the Kansas-II began to put on power. He stood and watched the running lights wink as the plane taxied. Three minutes later the roar of the engines told the tale. The “Bats” were all airborne now, their bellies full of high tech death and destruction. After achieving altitude, the formation would cruise north over Rota and Tinian in the Marianas where they would then turn northeast and head for Kadena AFB on Okinawa to meet some very special friends.

The US was taking no chances with its precious B-2s. They would soon be joined by the 94th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron flying F-22 Raptors in escort for the sortie into the East China Sea. Six fighters would be up that morning to join the party, and Flight Lieutenant William Hitchcock was in one of them. With a vintage name like that his mates had naturally taken to calling him “Wild Bill” and he lived up to the handle well enough as a daring and highly skilled pilot.

Hitchcock was still trying to shake that nagging cough that was just part of the job insofar as the F-22 was concerned. The pilot’s oxygen system has been buggy throughout the life cycle of the aircraft, but no matter what they did to try and correct the problem, the well known “Raptor cough” persisted, resulting from breathing high concentrations of oxygen enriched air while accelerating through multi-G force maneuvers. When you could fly higher and faster than most anything in the sky, there were a few tradeoffs that you just lived within the service. Wild Bill had no regrets.

An hour later he was up at altitude and waiting for his charge. Perhaps the most capable fighter in the world, the unique radar scattering shape of the plane combined with the radar absorbing materials used in its construction made it extremely stealthy. Finding it in the sky on radar would be much like trying to track a pea flying at several thousand miles per hour. The APG-77 radar system was also very stingy with the energy it used, activating to find potential threats without also revealing the position of the Raptor . At the same time its ALR-94 radar warning sensors could silently detect other radar-using targets at very long range. It was the same basic calculus of air combat—see the enemy first and kill the enemy before he sees you.

Radio silence was also a part of the job like this, but Wild Bill didn’t mind. He enjoyed the quiet solitude of soaring at 40,000 feet through the early hours of dawn. The bombers were below them, lumbering along under the careful watch of the Raptors . An E-3 Sentry was also up that morning for long range radar coverage in case the Chinese had any surprises in store for the package. Hitchcock didn’t expect any trouble, particularly this far out from the Chinese mainland, but as chance would have it, trouble was on its way. His data link from the E-3 soon indicated a number of airborne contacts inbound and they were ordered to engage.

The Raptors began to accelerate rapidly, streaking away from the subsonic B-2s as they went into supercruise mode, their radars searching the skies ahead. It looked like quite a reception committee, and the only thing that Hitchcock could think of at that moment was how in hell the enemy had managed to locate them.

The truth of the matter was that the Chinese had not located them. They were simply flying a mission of their own, targeted at Taiwan again with two squadrons of J-12 fighters led by a squadron of their premier stealth strike fighters, the formidable J-20. There were eighteen planes in all, and they were intending to strike an airfield near Taipei as a follow on to the highly successful ballistic missile strikes of the previous days. To the Raptor pilots it looked like someone had given away the game and they assumed the B-2s had been targeted for interception. But the Chinese hadn’t seen a thing that morning. It was all happenstance that was about to become an lightning fast air duel between the best fighters each side possessed.

The odds appeared very steep to Wild Bill at first blush. He was tracking eighteen enemy fighters, and the Raptors of the 94th were outnumbered three to one. No strangers to combat, the 94th was one of the oldest active squadrons in the US Air Force. Their legacy dated back to 1917 when they first flew SPADs in the First World War. Over the years they had flown P-38s in WWII over North Africa and Italy, and eventually moved on through the evolving chain of fighter designs to the F-15A Eagles before being upgraded to the deadly Raptors . Now they were about to prove their worth and throw their hat in the ring, as true to their squadron insignia.

With high value strike assets close at hand, the Raptors needed to get at the enemy quickly, and the talons they would use were the latest air-to-air missile the US had deployed to date, the AIM-120D. Each plane carried four of these longer range missiles in the central internal weapons bay, along with two shorter range AIM-9M/X Sidewinders in smaller internal bays to either side. They would fire immediately, while the action still remained well beyond visual range, and see if they could thin the enemy ranks.

The fighters surged ahead, their central bays opening for only one brief second to fire, and then they peeled off on a new vector, ready to fire again. The Chinese never saw them coming, and it was not until the first three J-20s detected the AAMRAMs coming in for them that the jig was finally up. All three died before they could do anything about it, but the word was out and the other planes were breaking formation, jettisoning external fuel tanks to go stealthy, and sweeping away in all directions. They scattered into the azure blue sky climbing as their afterburning turbofans burned with yellow, hot fire.

The Chinese tactic when surprised was to get high, using their incredible service ceiling of over 65,000 feet to gain advantage. Two J-20s were climbing, but the Raptors were already up there watching like supersonic birds of prey, and their second salvo was in the air before the first of the J-20s even got a fleeting ghost of a radar lock on them. The pilot knew he had been targeted, but he still managed to get off two PL-12 missiles in reprisal. Then he died a flaming death along with three more comrades in the older J-12s.