Sky Masters полностью

The closest HADES canister went off three miles away, but to Yang and his Marines it felt as if they were in the middle of an erupting volcano. Yang found himself dazed but unhurt, flat on his stomach, his rifle thrown several meters away. He low-crawled to his rifle, picked it up, then rose cautiously to his knees. “Marines! Forward! APCs! Move out!” Thankfully, the first APC began to lumber off the air-cushion landing craft; the second showed no signs of moving. “Get those APCs off the landing craft! Move it! Move it!” Slowly, his men got to their feet, stumbling toward the APCs to take cover behind them as they got their senses back.

As Yang urged his men to get off the landing craft, he was able to scan out toward the straits toward his amphibious landing ship — and what he saw horrified him. The entire interior of the ship seemed to be on fire. Pieces of the pontoon bridges were hanging off the sides, all afire, and in the glare of the fires he could see men flinging themselves overboard into the buming-oil-covered gulf. A spectacular explosion sent a column of flames a hundred meters into the night sky as the fires finally found the twenty-five million decaliters of diesel fuel still in the LST’s storage tanks.

A few of his men stopped to look at the dying ship, and Yang grabbed them and shoved them forward. “Move it! Secure that treeline! Search that house! Move it…!”

The gunners aboard Dagu began firing into the sky again, and Yang could hear the sounds of fast and heavy jets getting closer. “Get off the landing craft!” he yelled. “Run toward the trees! Run!”

But it was too late.

Two minutes after the F-111s delivered their canisters of fire, the next strike package began its ingress from the northeast: four B-52s that had survived the battle with the destroyer Dalian continued their attacks with Harpoon missiles and CAPTOR mines; their escort EB-52C Megafortress had been shot down by a JS-7 fighter over Mindanao as it tried to turn away from the target area. The four B-52s claimed kills on two amphibious assault ships and seeded the straits with over a dozen CAPTOR mines that began to seek out and destroy the surviving vessels that tried to escape across the straits to Samal Island.

Then, sixty seconds after the last B-52 came off the target, the last and the heaviest-armed warplanes in the entire battle began their assault; six B-IB bombers swooped in from the north at treetop level. They were never detected until it was far, far too late.

Colonel Yang could see the bright globes of red and orange walk down the beach toward him, stitching a path of destruction fifty meters wide and hundreds of meters long. There was no place to run — the bomblets from the aerial- mine canisters covered the entire beach. He could only raise his rifle and fire at the hissing sound as the sleek American bomber, highlighted for a brief moment against the glare of the burning tank-landing ship, streaked overhead. Yang turned his back to the approaching chemical meat-grinder of bomblets and continued to fire at the bomber until he was cut down by the devastating explosions and clouds of shrapnel.

Never had Major Pete Fletcher, the B-lB’s OSO (Offensive Systems Officer), taken such an incredible array of weapons into battle before — in fact, never had he even heard of so many different kinds of weapons carried into battle. His B-1B Excalibur bomber, Blade Two-Five, had carried eight SLAM missiles on the external hardpoints — those had already been expended on the larger Chinese vessels in the Philippine Sea that survived the B-52s’ initial onslaught; eight Mk 65 QUICKSTRIKE mines in the aft bomb bay, which were shallow-water high-explosive antiship mines that were to be dropped in Dadaotan Straits and Bangoy Harbor itself; twenty-four GATOR mines in the middle bomb bay, which were to be released on the beach — each bomb would disperse hundreds of small softball-sized mines along a wide area that could destroy small vehicles or kill large numbers of troops who tried to move through the area after the raid; and finally they carried eight BLU-96 HADES FAE canisters in the forward bomb bay, which were designated against the landing craft and Marines ashore north of Samar International Airport.

All of the remaining weapons were to be dropped within a distance of only twenty miles, on three separate two-mile- long tracks — and while flying at treetop level at nearly six miles per minute, it left almost no time to think about procedures. He had taken a fix in between fighter attacks while going coast-in, and the navigation system was tight and ready to go. If he had time, Fletcher would try to take another radar fix going into the target area, but he doubted that would happen. The bombing computer would have to take care of everything.