Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (72 page)

 
          
“One-One,
start a right turn, heading zero-two-zero, altitude one- fifty, touchdown point
in two miles, advise when you have the runway in sight.”

 
          
“Runway?”
Cheshire
exclaimed. “I don’t see no freakin’
runway!” Elliott started his tight right turn. The mountains were everywhere—
they were in a deep river valley, with sharply rising mountainous terrain in
every direction except behind them, toward the sea. Straight ahead, the
mountains were less than four miles away—it would take every bit of power, and
a lot of prayers, if they had to climb out of this defile right now. He
couldn’t afford to make careful, cautious turns now—every turn had to be at
forty degrees of bank, crisp and positive, so he could line up on the center of
the cave.

 
          
The
glow from the cave got brighter, and wider, and taller . . . and then,
suddenly, the entire outline of the hollow in the mountain was outlined in dull
yellow. It was enormous, more than 600 feet across and 200 feet high. Now, a
bit closer in, the outline of the edge of a
runway
could be seen,
inside the cave\
“Co,
you . . . you see what I see?”

 
          
“I
see it,”
Cheshire
breathed, “but I don’t freakin’ believe
it.” “One-One, Hualien final controller,” the radar controller radioed,
“proceed visually. If unable, execute missed approach instructions immediately.
You have ten seconds until your missed approach point.”

           
“No . . . no, we got the field . . .
uh, we got
it
in sight,” Elliott
responded. “Proceeding visually.”

 
          
“Roger,”
the controller said—the EB-52’s pilots could practically hear a huge sigh of relief
from the controller. “Remain this frequency for ground controller. Max runway
length one thousand eight hundred meters, approximately six thousand feet,
favor the right side of the runway. Welcome.”

 
          
The
controller’s voice sounded so relieved and casual, almost ecstatic, that Brad
Elliott felt as if he were in a dream—because he was still far from home free
right now. He felt as if the Megafortress’s pointed SST nose was the end of a
piece of thread, and the cave mouth was the eye of a needle, and the
Megafortress was barely small enough to squeeze inside! “Flaps full, airbrakes
six!” Elliott ordered. “My God, I don’t believe it!”

 
          
It
was way, way too late to go around at this point—even the power of the
Megafortress’s CF6 turbofans couldn’t fly it clear of the mountain now. Even a
ninety-degree bank turn with maximum back pressure and clinging to the edge of
the stall wouldn’t save them. They either landed now, or they would die in the
blink of an eye. The right wingtip dipped, pushed down by a gust of wind right
at the mouth of the cave, and for an instant Elliott thought he wouldn’t be
able to raise the wingtip fast enough before it crashed into the side of the
cave and spun them around inside. He forced the image of death out of his
mind’s eye.

 
          
The
Megafortress touched down several hundred feet from the edge of the
cliff—Elliott landed way long, a poor touchdown even on a normal runway in
perfect conditions. He didn’t wait until the front trucks were on the ground;
he pulled the throttles to idle, jammed the thrust reverser levers full down,
waited as long as he possibly could stand for the reversers to deploy, then
started to shove the throttles forward. There was a huge black aircraft barrier
net at the end of the concrete, and it was
right
there
, right in front of them! Elliott kept on shoving the throttles
forward, almost into military power. The Megafortress began to shake as if they
were in an earthquake.

 
          
“Ninety
knots! ”
Cheshire
shouted. Elliott tapped the brakes and felt
the pressure on his shoulder harness—good, they had brakes! He pressed the toe
brakes farther, and the Megafortress responded. Thrust reversers still on, he
pressed the brakes farther, right up to where he could feel the anti-skid
system begin to cycle the hydraulic power in the brakes on and off. He
depressed the toe brakes all the way, no more time to tap or save the brakes.

 
          
Full
brake power, full reverse thrust, and the barrier was still rushing up to meet
them. A little more than a hundred feet beyond the barrier was a steel jet
exhaust blast fence, and then the back of the cave wall itself—complete
darkness, cold deadly granite. It was very much like the end of the line in a
subway tunnel.

 
          
But
they did stop in time—the retracted nose of the EB-52 missed the barrier net by
less than half the length of the aircraft. Except for test flights, it was the
shortest landing any of them had ever made in an EB- 52 bomber—less than 6,000
feet. They used 50 percent less runway than they had ever used before. A
“follow-me” truck appeared off their right wingtip, and a ground crewman on the
back of the truck beckoned to them with a yellow-lensed flashlight and a hearty
wave. Elliott deactivated the thrust reversers, grabbed the steering knob, and
gently eased the throttles forward.

 
          
Taxiing
inside the cave was like driving through a low-ceiling indoor parking garage
with a high-profile vehicle. Everywhere they looked, they saw cheering
soldiers, some jumping up and down in happiness as they held their ears against
the bone-jarring noise and echo—Elliott and Cheshire mercifully shut down two
engines to cut down on the noise. They were directed to a parking spot just off
the edge of the runway, just a few hundred feet behind Jon Masters’s DC-10
tanker and satellite launch plane.

 
          
The
four bomber crewmen were instantly mobbed the moment they opened the lower
hatch and climbed out. The first to greet them were Wendy McLanahan, Jon
Masters, Paul White, and Hal Briggs. Wendy hugged her husband so tightly he
thought he heard some neck vertebrae snap, but he hugged her just as closely
and as tightly. “Patrick, oh God, you should have seen you fly into the cave! ”
Wendy exclaimed through tears of relief and joy. “I swear, it was like watching
a bat fly into a tiny hole in the wall! I saw the wingtip down, and I thought
you weren’t going to make it!”

 
          
After
everyone climbed out of the Megafortress, they had a moment to look at the
incredible structure. It was an immense underground airfield, with a single
200-foot-wide, 6,000-foot-long runway in the middle of the gigantic structure!
On the other side of the runway were a line of about a dozen Taiwanese F-16
fighters—the Taiwanese had actually managed to land F-16 Fighting Falcons in
the cave!—along with a few S-70 helicopters and S-2 Tracker turboprop maritime
surveillance planes. Patrick McLanahan and Brad Elliott had a grim feeling that
those planes represented what was left of the entire Republic of China air
force.

 
          
After
shutdown, the stunned American crew members were met by several officers and
several more armed guards. The senior officer stepped forward, shook their
hands excitedly with a broad smile, and said in very practiced English,
“Welcome to Kai-Shan, my Flying Tiger friends, welcome. I am Brigadier General
Hsiao Jason, commander of this installation. You must be General Elliott, and
you are Colonel McLanahan.” Both of them were still too stunned to respond,
which pleased Hsiao immensely. “You and your men are suffering from Kai-Shan
Psychosis, the inability to do anything but stare up at the ceiling, the
instant abandonment of all military courtesies and even coherent speech,” Hsiao
said with a smile. “The disease will affect you long after you leave this
place, I assure you. Please follow.”

 
          
Indeed,
it was hard to keep from staring at the detail of the huge underground
facility. The ceiling was geodetic reinforced steel honeycomb, with segments
three inches thick widening to six inches toward the ceiling and ventilator
openings interspersed throughout—it was like a huge modern subway terminal,
only several times larger. Several steel support columns, spaced every thousand
feet on either side of the runway, soared into the sky from floor to ceiling,
set just a few feet from the edge of the runway. The runway itself was concrete,
with arresting wires a few hundred feet from the approach end to stop aircraft
equipped with tail hooks—and, Briggs noted, all of the Taiwanese F-16 fighters
and S-2 Trackers had tail hooks. Looking out the open mouth of the cave, all
they could see were mountains—a straight-in approach to Kai-Shan was not
possible.

 
          
“We’ve
heard rumors about this place for years,” Wendy McLanahan remarked, “but we
never thought it truly existed! ”

 
          
“Kai-Shan
has been in operation for about six years,” Hsiao said. “It was originally
intended as the underground command center for the Le Shan air defense network
system, but an alternate mountain location closer to
Taipei
was located and used instead. This was then
used as an emergency shelter for troops and politicians until the new caverns
deeper inside the mountain were excavated. When we realized we had enough space
inside for an airfield, the decision was made to convert it. Our first
fixed-wing aircraft, an S-2 Tracker, landed inside the mountain three years ago;
the first F-16 landed here just a few months ago.”

 
          
Walking
across the runway to the south side of the facility was like walking across
Grand Central Station or the Toronto Skydome. “We completed this facility late
last year, after ten years of construction and ten years of design and
development work,” General Hsiao was saying. “The main airbase chamber is
almost eight hundred
million
cubic
feet in volume, about half of it natural granite and limestone reinforced with
steel and concrete. It is actually a combination of about one hundred smaller
caverns, hollowed out and reinforced to make several large caverns. There are
approximately two hundred thousand square feet of additional support, housing,
and storage space on two levels above and below the airbase chamber. Above your
heads is approximately six thousand feet of solid rock.

 
          
“We
are capable of accommodating up to twenty F-16-size fighters on this level
along the side of the runway, plus another twenty or so belowground, accessible
via those elevators there and there,” Hsiao went on. “The complex includes
weapon, fuel, and spare parts storage, enough to keep two medium attack
squadrons supplied during around-the-clock combat operations for about one
week. We can house as many as two thousand air base personnel down here, plus a
command and control facility of one hundred, plus barrack two thousand
additional troops. We have a twenty-bed hospital, four dining facilities, two
laundries, even a movie theater. ”

 
          
“Sir,
how in the world ... I mean, how was it possible to keep this facility a
secret?” Patrick McLanahan asked as they reached the other side of the chamber,
behind the huge steel blast deflectors and into the rock wall itself, to where
administrative and mission planning rooms had been set up. “The number of
construction crews must’ve been immense. The money, the equipment, the
manpower—all of it must have created attention. How was it possible to avoid
all scrutiny?”

 
          
“Same
way we do it, Patrick—by keeping our mouths shut and kicking anyone’s ass who
dares to open theirs,” Brad Elliott said.

 
          
“Precisely,”
General Hsiao replied. “The strictest security measures possible were employed.
But this side of the island is very sparsely populated, and it attracts little
attention. Once the engineers and workers were safely inside, work could be
done in total secrecy.”

           
“How did you make out during the
Chinese attack on Hualien?” Paul White asked.

 
          
“We
were safe—Kai-Shan is shielded by the mountains, and our cave shield was in
place and is thick enough to withstand a bomb strike, so we received no damage
from the nuclear blast,” Hsiao replied. “Our facilities are full of the injured
and dying, though. We have cremated nearly a thousand men, women, and children
since the attack here at Kai- Shan alone—we know of over eight thousand
casualties in Hualien alone, and there are undoubtedly many more that were
simply incinerated in the blast. Our revenge will be sweet, my friends.”

 
          
They
heard the sound of a start cart outside on the airfield, and General Hsiao
ordered the door closed behind them, which muffled the noise considerably. “One
of our air patrols is preparing to depart. Shall we watch?”