“Coming within two miles,” Pilas said. “Two miles… now.” Just then, the heads-up display circular firing cue began its clockwise sweep, like a racing timer — when the sweep circle passed the three o’clock position on the HUD, he could open fire. Tamalko checked his switches visually instead of by feel, double-checked his gun status — still not jammed after 340 rounds fired off, which was above-average for the M61A1 cannon — and by the time he faced forward to fine up on target, he was within a mile and a half. Pipper in the center of the radar diamond, a good ARM 260 indication — and Tamalko let loose, maintaining short trigger pulls, feeling the reassuring buzz of the gun when it fired, keeping the pipper lined up on the radar target diamond. There was no return fire from the big Chinese ship.
The cannon jammed with thirty rounds remaining, but every one of the others had been placed neatly into the ship’s midsection. Tamalko clicked the gun to “Safe” and banked up on his left wing, keeping a low, thin profile to the ship as he passed overhead. He caught glimpses of flickering fights on deck as he screamed over the ship at Mach one, but whether they were secondary explosions or reflections of fight, he couldn’t tell.
Tamalko banked left, heading south, keeping his engines out of afterburner to avoid attracting any heat-seeking missiles or optically guided guns. The threat radars from the big destroyer were gone. Maybe he
And then it happened.
For a millisecond Tamalko’s eyes registered the brightest flash of light he’d ever seen. It was just on the horizon, almost directly off the nose. And just as quickly the light enveloped and blinded him. His eyes became two red-hot spheres of excruciating pain, burned, it seemed, by molten lava.
Behind him, Pilas was screaming and Tamalko realized he, too, was screaming…
The roar of the F-4E’s big engines was gone, which meant they had been hit by something big enough to cause a double flameout — a big missile must have exploded right in front of them, blinding them and shelling out the engines. The control stick was beginning to tighten up as hydraulic power bled away — soon it would freeze up completely.
He hauled back on the stick to try to start a zoom maneuver and trade some of their Mach one speed for altitude — if they ejected at Mach one, the windblast would tear them apart. He couldn’t tell if they were gaining altitude… there wasn’t time to think. “Eject! Eject!” Tamalko screamed, then crossed his wrists in front of him, grasped the ejection ring between his legs, and pulled.
The canopy ripped off in the slipstream before the crewmen’s heads crashed through it, and both he and Pilas were rocketed free and clear of the stricken plane.
Tamalko’s body was flying forward at almost seven hundred feet per second.
The wall of compressed, superheated air rushing toward him from the explosion of the single RK-55 nuclear warhead of the Fei Lung-9 missile was traveling at two thousand feet per second. When the two met, Tamalko, Pilas, and the crippled F-4E Phantom II fighter were mercilessly crushed into powder, then vaporized by the five-thousand-degree heat of the fringes of the fireball that had already destroyed the Philippine corvette
A young Air Force staff sergeant, Amy Hector, was on the FOREST GREEN console at the U.S. Air Force Space Command’s Command and Control Operations Center, deep within the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, when her detection board went crazy.
“Red Collar, Red Collar,” Staff Sergeant Hector called on the center-wide intercom, pressing the “Call” button on her console so that her warning message would override all the other transmissions in the Operations Center. The words “Red Collar” would also ensure immediate attention by all — the effect those simple code-words had was akin to her screaming at the top of her lungs:
“FOREST GREEN with an event-detection warning, all stations stand by…” Hector waited a few more heartbeats, then quickly began reading her detection figures aloud, knowing that the senior controller and the various section chiefs were scrambling to their seats and checking their own readouts. “FOREST GREEN shows three units with amplitude pulse threshold readings. System reports confirmation of readouts, repeat, system reports readout confirmation, event confidence is high.” Technicians at Cheyenne Mountain seldom used words like “nuclear detonation” or “explosion” — these were collectively called “events” and “readouts.” There was an odd emotional detachment prevalent inside the Mountain, as if they could somehow block the horrors they saw by naming them something harmless.
