9th Bomb Squadron (7th Bomb Wing)
FL 300, 300 miles South East Fiery Cross Reef
Lt. Colonel Massey enjoyed flying the bone. Unlike the B-52, it was very fast and maneuverable. Plus, it just looked cool. That shouldn’t be a factor in a pilot’s mind, but it was. Just ask an A-10 driver.
“Hey Billy, did you know that the A-10 is the only USAF fighter to suffer a bird strike from BEHIND?”
“Oh man, we gonna have A-10 jokes all the way down to target?”
“Yep.”
Bill, the offensive systems officer (OSO) just groaned and rechecked the programming of the missiles.
The only thing cooler than flying a B-1 was being able to fly the B-1 very low at very high speeds. Just as Massey was about to do.
“Reaper one one to all Reapers. Down on the deck and buster. Emcon until we are RTB.”
With this command, all the B-1’s of the squadron dropped down to nearly wavetop height and pushed their engines to the max. They quickly passed the speed of sound as they dived and maintained that speed by using their afterburners. The planes didn’t have the fuel to keep this up for long, but they didn’t have to.
“Yee-haw! I love this shit!”
The second seater was grinning like an idiot. “You said it. Let’s get some salt stains on her.”
The massive bomber hurtled through the air, wings fully swept back, looking like an arrowhead but much faster than any arrow would ever travel. The dark surface of the sea was almost invisible from the cockpit except for the occasional whitecap. These passed under the plane absurdly fast, looking like white streaks. Neither man thought about this as they focused on their instruments.
The JASSM had sufficient range to be fired from much further away then they were currently planning to fire. Of course, the longer the subsonic missile was in flight, the higher the odds that the Chinese would detect the stealthy missiles. As the Navy had found out a few days before, the Chinese anti-missile capabilities were excellent.
By flying very low at supersonic speeds, the goal was to get in quickly and fire before the defenders realized they were under attack. Thus, giving the weapons a better chance of reaching their targets.
This was the theory anyway.
27th Fighter Squadron
FL 330, 150 miles South East Fiery Cross Reef
Major Richard “Tex” Ewing was not a happy man. As a pilot of the foremost air to air asset in the entire world, he expected to be on the offensive. Instead, his squadron had been split up into penny packets all over the pacific guarding tankers for an entire month. In his mind, that was not proper work for an F-22. His fighter was designed to get in close and take the enemy down before they knew what was coming.
In some ways, the ambush early in the conflict had been a curse. As soon as the news got out, every tanker pilot in the entire USAF was demanding an F-22 escort. It was plain to Ewing that F-15’s could do that job just fine, but the brass was afraid that the already stressed tanker fleet could not sustain the loss rate so the mission was given to F-22’s instead.
Now, finally, it was his turn.
With the power the Chinese AWACS bird was putting out, he could have detected it from twice or even triple the current range. This also meant that the probability of intercept was higher, but that was the job.
Unlike the previous attempt with F-15’s, the F-22’s would get right up close and maintain their guidance all the way in. This meant that the AIM-120D’s would have a much better chance of hitting the big radar bird and still be able to retreat. In theory. The F-15’s had lost a third of their attacking force and hadn’t taken out the AWACS plane. The mission should have been assigned to an F-22 from the beginning. Ewing ground his teeth in frustration.
He comforted himself with the fact that in World War II, it had taken the allies dozens of strikes to take out any one single target. Taking two passes at a target was only inefficient from modern standards. In World War II, that would be pretty darn good.
The weather for the attack was perfect. It was dark and overcast with no moon. Literally, nothing could be seen outside of his canopy and he didn’t even try to look. Instead, he was glued to his instruments and his threat receivers. At the moment, the target looked fat, dumb and happy which was just fine with Ewing.
In theory, the “detection threshold” of the F-22 was about twenty miles against the Chinese AWACS bird. For this reason, they would fire at fifty miles and guide the missiles into their target.
The first wave would track the AWACS bird with follow up waves being targeted on any supporting fighters.
As they approached, the threat warnings from his instruments became ever direr. Finally, it was time to fire.
Ewing flashed his small maglight out the window to get his wingman’s attention. Two flashes. In a few seconds, he could see two flashes in return. They were ready. Under emcon, he had no way of actually communicating, but there was no need. Everyone knew the mission plan. At exactly fifty miles, he launched two AIM-120D’s.
On the bottom of the aircraft, two small doors opened and the plane rapidly ejected two missiles which quickly fell away and ignited their rocket motors. The brief interval when the doors opened represented the most danger to the stealthy plane so the system was designed to launch the missile quickly.
The missiles remained “dark” as they sped to their targets. At some point, the AWACS bird would see the small targets, but they were very hard to spot. Finally, they spotted the threat. The radar went dark and the plane began to rapidly descend. However, this time the F-22’s were maintaining guidance. Mid-course guidance made the AIM-120D the fearsome weapon it was.
The F-22’s automatically passed guidance information to the missiles as they corrected and then went active. Three of the missiles missed their target despite the support but three of them hit. Ewing could see a distant flash as the missiles exploded.
Then, suddenly the sky lit up. The AWACS plane had exploded as one of the missiles breached a fuel tank.
Simultaneously, the threat receivers in the plane went completely berserk, multiple ground-based radars woke up, searching for the attackers. Ewing and the squadron continued straight and level, passing directly over the target island.
“Raptor one one, sentry seven.”
There was a pause but Ewing didn’t answer. The USAF AWACS crew knew he was under emcon and wouldn’t answer.
“Raptor, we have bandits rotating at Fiery Cross and Michief Reef. Course one six zero. Speed point nine mach and increasing. Go get ’em Tex.”
Ewing didn’t know exactly how the controller knew he was leading the flight, but he had every intention of doing just that. With another quick signal to his wingman, he dived his jet straight down and continued to push the flight stick down until he had completed a 180-degree turn, vertically. A quick roll and he was now heading back to the island at less than one thousand feet, faster than the speed of sound.
While it was likely that the Chinese on the island would hear the jets, it was very unlikely they would be able to target Ewing or his squadron. Because the F-22 was able to “supercruise” above the speed of sound without afterburners, their thermal signature was very much reduced compared to a “conventional” jet. The jet’s exhaust nozzles were also designed to reduce thermal signatures as much as possible. That plus the cloud cover would make infrared detection difficult. They already knew that the Chinese could not get a good radar lock on the F-22, so they should be able to withdraw safely. In theory.
After passing the island, it was safe to light up the LPI radar. He quickly identified two Chinese fighters, vainly trying to find him approaching the island. They didn’t expect the Americans to be behind them.
Pulling up, he was able to get a good lock at only ten miles. “Fox Three!” He was only talking to himself, but it had become a habit to call his shots after so much time spent training. The two AIM-120C missiles flew straight and true. The first Chinese jet fell and then his wingman fired and took the second one down.
Dropping down to wavetop height, he quickly ramped down his emissions and focused on exfiltrating from the area and getting back to his assigned tanker location. Overall, a good day in the office.
9th Bomb Squadron (7th Bomb Wing)
100 Feet AGL, 100 Miles South East Fiery Cross Reef
Maintaining strict emcon, the B-1’s of the squadron approached their release point in complete radio silence. No signals were exchanged. The mission had been pre-planned down to the second.
The OSO in each plane double and then triple checked the programming of each of the AGM-158 JASSM missiles.
“Ready to drop Billy?”
“Ready Mas, triple checked.”
“Right. On my mark. Drop. Drop. Drop.”
One after another, the weapons dropped out of the rotary rack in the B-1 bomb bay. As each missile dropped into the slipstream, it opened it diminutive wings and a small jet engine lit up.
“That’s it. All missiles away.”
“OK. Breakaway.”
Massey pulled the big bomber up to two hundred feet and slowly turned the plane around and descended again. They maintained wavetop height for ten more minutes then slowly gained altitude.
“He Mas, notice something?”
“What Billy?”
“I’m not getting threat warning on that AWACs.”
“Let’s hope the Raptors did their job.”
Fifteen minutes later, the cruise missiles began to strike their targets. Close in weapons systems began to fire, but it was too little too late. All the fixed radars on all seven islands and most of the SAM sites were off the air.