Seated beside Atkins was the Megafortress’s “gunner,” Master Sergeant Kory Karbayjal. Karbayjal and the other noncommissioned officers flying that position still liked the name “gunner” or “bulldog,” although the term was an anachronism — the old .50-caliber machine guns or 20-millimeter Gatling gun of other, more conventional BUFFs were gone, replaced by the EB-52’s array of defensive missiles. The Megafortress carried twelve AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles on wing pylons, and it carried fifty small Stinger rear-firing heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles in the tail launcher.
That was another job that could be done by computers, too, although Karbayjal obviously enjoyed his work. Karbayjal, a twenty-six-year veteran of the B-52, had flown the old D-model BUFFs, the ones where the gunner sat in the tail in a tiny compartment with his machine guns and used only his eyes to spot enemy fighters. He took it upon himself to look after young Atkins just as much as he looked for enemy fighters, something that Atkins resented as well.
The navigators, Captains Paul Scott and Alicia Keller- man, were downstairs keeping track of their position and preparing for fighter combat — the four Megafortress strategic escort bombers on this mission carried no ground-attack weapons because they were all designed to blast through enemy defenses and give the other strike aircraft a better chance of reaching their targets. Scott could use his attack radar to designate and track targets for their AIM-120 air- to-air missiles, while Alicia Kellerman controlled the dorsal ISAR radar and kept track of all other aircraft and enemy ships in the area. The pilots, Major Kelvin Carter and Lieutenant Nancy Cheshire, were very quiet — they were obviously steeling themselves for the battle that was about to begin.
Using the large dorsal side-looking radar in ISAR (inverse-synthetic aperture radar) mode, Kellerman had already identified the largest ship ahead as a Luda-class destroyer even before its weapons radars came up, so Atkins had already anticipated what kind of radars and weapons the vessel had and how to deal with each one. The Megafortress’s ISAR system had also mapped out the locations and movements of the other vessels in the south and west groups of Chinese ships and had passed that information to other aircraft.
The “Missile Warning” light was still on, and they were driving closer and closer to the Chinese destroyer. Atkins still had no jammers on the missile acquisition radar — jamming the signal too early would surely elicit a very angry response from the Chinese. “We gotta shit or get off the pot here, kids… a few more miles and we’ll be under attack…”
“Sixty seconds,” the crew navigator, Captain Alicia Kellerman, announced. Like most of the crews from the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Kellerman was an ex-crew member — formerly on KC-135 tankers — who put their engineering degrees to good use at the Dreamland research facility. Although flying was part of their job descriptions, flying into combat was completely unexpected — but Kellerman loved it. “Start countermeasures in forty seconds, release configuration checks completed… thirty seconds.”
Suddenly Atkins got an inverted “V” bat-wing signal on his radar threat-warning scope. The computer monitor hesitated momentarily, then issued a stream of identification data. “I’ve got a fighter, twelve o’clock, range… range is undetermined yet, but he’s outside forty miles. Stand by, Paul.” Paul Scott was ready to use the EB-52’s attack radar to lock onto the fighter and provide fire control instructions for their AIM-120 air-to-air missiles, but it might not yet be necessary. “I’ve got a range-only radar. Skyranger type 226, probably a J-7 fighter, Chinese copy of a MiG-2 IF. Max range of the radar is only twenty miles, and he’s well outside that… fighter radar’s down.” The Skyranger radar was useless for searching for targets because it supplied only range information to the fighter’s computers — this J-7 fighter needed ground-controlled intercept radar to attack targets. It was still deadly, but it was not very sophisticated — Atkins’ tiny AIM-120C missiles had a better radar than the J-7 fighter. “There could be more than one out there.”.
Great, Carter thought. Here’s where the shit hits the fan. “Paul, get a range and a firing solution on them,” Carter said. “We can’t stay radar-silent forever.”
“Copy,” Scott said. He slaved his attack radar antenna to Atkins’ threat-warning receiver bearing and switched it to “Radiate.” “Got ’em,” Scott called out, switching off the radar immediately. “I counted at least four fighters, forty- five nautical miles, slightly above us. Could be four groups of two.”
