He clicked open the microphone and said in a loud voice, so everyone in CIC could hear him: “Captain Lubu, open a satellite channel to Dongdao Airfield immediately.” Dong- dao was the new Chinese Air Force airfield in the Paracel Islands; it was almost seven hundred kilometers north of their present location, but it was the closest Chinese airfield with any sort of strike capability. Although there was an Air Force general on the island in charge of the base, most of the air-strike assets at Dongdao belonged to the Chinese Army Navy, and to Yin. “I want a Shuihong-5 patrol craft fully armed for surface combat to rendezvous on this flagship immediately, and another standing by to relieve the first. The patrol had better be airborne in thirty minutes or else…” That got the CIC operator’s attention — they all concentrated hard on their consoles, praying their Admiral would not turn on them.
Yin considered radioing the South China Sea Fleet Headquarters at Zhanjiang directly, but so far Admiral Yin had not really done anything noteworthy except get one-sixth of his flotilla destroyed or damaged; he needed to show some initiative, some decisive action, before informing his headquarters of the disaster and awaiting instructions. The Shui- hong-5 was a large turboprop flying boat used primarily for antisubmarine warfare and maritime patrol, but the ten aircraft assigned full-time to his Nansha Island flotilla were fitted for antiship duties, with French-made Heracles II sea surveillance and targeting radar, two C-101 supersonic antiship missiles hung under the wings, and six French-made Murene NTL-90 dual-purpose lightweight torpedoes, also on wing pylons. The Shuihong-5 was a significant threat to any ship that did not possess antiaircraft missiles, and to Yin’s knowledge no Filipino warship carried antiaircraft missiles except perhaps short-range Stinger shoulder-fired weapons.
It was enough to bomb the hell out of whatever Philippine forces were out there. Then, when his commander, the notoriously mercurial High General Chin Po Zihong, called him on the carpet for the destroyed
It was an absolutely spectacular day for flying. The skies were clear, with only a few stray wisps of clouds to break up the blue all around. The winds were relatively calm and turbulence-free, which was rather unusual at forty thousand feet.
Things were not quite as calm, however, inside the special, heavily modified Sky Masters, Inc., DC-10 aircraft orbiting off the California coast.
There was only one booster in the cargo section of the special DC-10 that morning, which presumably would have made Jon Masters half as anxious as when he was carrying two. Instead, Masters was agitated and irritable, much to the chagrin of the rest of the crew. The source of his irritation was Sky Masters’ newest air-launched space booster, Jackson-1, a dark, sleek, bullet-nosed object whose very looks promised powerful results. But the booster, named for the seventh President of the United States, wasn’t going anywhere. And that was the problem.
“What’s going on?” Masters demanded over interphone, drumming his fingers on the launch-control console.
Helen Kaddiri sighed. “We’re still tracking down the problem, Jon. We’re having trouble on the Ku-band downlink from Homer-Seven.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” Masters reminded her. “If we can’t talk to that satellite, we’ll have to abort.”
Kaddiri sighed again. As if she didn’t know. An assistant handed her yet another self-test readout. She rolled her eyes and crumbled the paper up in her hands. She took a deep breath and keyed the interphone mike: “There’s still a fault in the bird, Jon, and it’s not at our ground station. We’re going to have to abort. There’s no choice. Air Force is saying the same as well.”
That was not what Masters wanted to hear. “Homer- Seven was working fine just seventy minutes ago.” Homer- Seven was one of the constellation of eight TDRS, or Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s to provide uninterrupted tracking, data, and communications coverage for the space shuttle and other military satellites, including spy satellites. They replaced several slow, outmoded ground communications stations once located in remote areas of the world such as the Australian outback and the African Congo.
“Now the Air Force wants to abort? After they’ve been screaming at me to get these fuckers in orbit so they can eyeball the Philippines? That’s typical. Tell ’em to keep their nose out of my business and find out where the problem is in
