Chapter 82
One, three. Our bogeys are now twenty miles west. No transponders and they’re down at five thousand feet.”
“Looks like our Chinese friends are serious,” the flight lead responded on their discreet frequency. “Go ahead, light ’em up.”
But improvising was what fighter pilots did best.
But the Chinese pilots didn’t know that.
The major leading the high two-ship grinned.
He was a graduate of the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School—in essence, a fighter pilot’s PhD program covering weapons employment and tactics—and he could only imagine the chaos their move must be causing on the three distant flight decks.
On shock value alone, it would be a massive distraction.
The Chinese wouldn’t have been expecting enemy fighters in the area, let alone missile launch warnings.
The major watched his radar display closely.
He anticipated one of two possible outcomes.
If the transport pilots became sufficiently spooked by the radar warning, they would turn away.
And that, at the very least, would delay the impending airdrop.
If they kept coming, however, it would suggest they recognized the warning for the ruse that it was.
Or, the major mused, there’s some kind of political officer on the flight deck with a gun pointed at the pilots’ heads.
A minute later, the answer was clear. Gun to their heads or not, the Chinese hadn’t altered course.
“One, three,” the major said. “I show no change in the course of our targets.”
“One copies,” the flight lead replied. “Hopefully it won’t matter. One’s rolling in hot.”
The lead F-35 pilot rolled into a 20-degree dive and lined up the flight path vector with the programmed target symbol. His weapons were armed and his eyes glued to his heads-up display. Five seconds later he hit his “pickle” button and recovered from the dive.
Six GBU-32 JDAMs dropped in a precise sequence, separated by an interval measured in milliseconds.
Each weighed half a ton, and their guidance packages steered them toward the triple-checked coordinates.
They flew with the precision of military-grade GPS.
The only hint that they were inbound was the engine noise of the receding F-35, and that soon abated.
As if mocking their potential destructive force, the bombs glided toward the polar ice cap in absolute silence.