by Dale Brown
“If we lose that StealthHawk, it’ll be the military and diplomatic embarrassment of the decade,” Patrick said. “A few more minutes, that’s all, Rebecca.”
Furness looked at Patrick with an expression of fear and anger—but she made the turn and pushed on the control stick. “Damn it, General, this better work—and fast.”
It did. As soon as they cruised back within the ten-mile arc of the StealthHawk, they were able to get it turned back toward them. They were fifteen miles inside the Turkmen border, but at least they were headed away from the long-range SA-4 missile site. The warning of the SA-4’s “Long Track” surveillance radar still blared in their ears—they were still being detected, possibly tracked. Patrick entered commands into the UCAV’s control computer, and the StealthHawk performed a rejoin on the EB-1C Vampire bomber.
Suddenly they heard a fast, high-pitched deedledeedledeedle! warning, followed by a computerized female voice that calmly said, “Warning, SA-4 missile launch, four o’clock, twenty-eight miles. Time to impact, fifty seconds. . . . Warning, second SA-4 missile launch, four o’clock, twenty-eight miles, time to impact, fifty-eight seconds.” The voice was so calm and pleasant that one almost expected it to sign off with “Have a nice day.”
“Damn you, General . . . !”
“We’ve got time,” Patrick said. “Once we get the StealthHawk turned around, we’ll be okay.”
“Puppeteer, what is going on up there?” David Luger radioed. “You just got fired on by an SA-4!”
“Thirty seconds and we’re out of here.”
“You don’t have thirty seconds!”
“We’ve got the ‘Hawk, Dave. Twenty-five seconds and we’ll be cleaned up.”
“You’re crazy, man,” Luger said seriously. “You won’t have enough time to accelerate out of there in time.”
“Countermeasures ready . . . trackbreakers active . . . towed array deployed,” Patrick said.
“Forty seconds to impact.”
“We’re going to get nailed if we don’t get out of here, General!”
“We’ll make it. Fifteen seconds.”
“Thirty seconds to impact.”
Suddenly Patrick said into the computer, “Let’s get out of here, Rebecca! I’m setting COLA. Go to zone five, now!”
“General . . . ?”
“The SA-4s are speeding up—they’re diving on us,” Patrick said. “We ran out of time. Zone-five afterburners, now! Flight-control system to terrain-following, set clearance-plane COLA, ninety left!” Rebecca responded instantly—she shoved all the throttles forward to the stops as the EB-1C nosed over into a steep twenty-degree nose-low dive for the flat, moonlike desert floor below. Patrick’s order set their altitude for COLA—and with very little high terrain below them, they were heading to less than a wingspan’s distance above the earth. Patrick ordered the StealthHawk to activate all its radar sensors and open all its weapons bays—anything he could think of to increase the UCAV’s radar cross-section and make it look larger than the Vampire’s to the SA-4 missile-guidance radar tracking them. . . .
Seconds later Patrick reported, “Lost contact with the StealthHawk! The SA-4 got it. Ninety left again, up and down jinks! Hurry!” Rebecca hauled the bomber into a steep bank, turning the EB-1C so they were directly nose-on to the SA-4’s radar, presenting the smallest possible radar cross-section, then furiously started yanking the control stick forward and back in sharp, fast cycles. They hoped the SA-4 would try to match their fast altitude changes and eventually crank itself off a smooth intercept track. “Trackbreakers on . . . chaff . . . chaff . . . Oh, shit, hang on!”
The SA-4 missile missed—but when it was only a few hundred feet away from the left side of the Vampire bomber’s nose, the missile’s three-hundred-pound warhead detonated. The cockpit was filled with a blinding yellow-red burst of light from the fireball. Patrick closed his eyes in time, but Rebecca was looking directly at it when the warhead went off. She screamed just as a giant invisible fist slammed into the bomber’s nose. It felt as if they were tumbling upside down out of control. . . .
But when Patrick was able to get his bearings again, he discovered with surprise that they were still upright. One multifunction display on the pilot’s side was out, and two generators on the left side were offline, but everything else seemed all right.
All except Rebecca. “Shit!” she cried. “I can’t fucking see! You got the aircraft, MC!”
“I’ve got the aircraft,” Patrick responded. He issued voice commands to the autopilot and got the plane leveled off at five hundred feet above the ground, turned away from the SA-4 site, and heading for the Afghan border—in three minutes they were across. Between the city of Andkhvoy and the Turkmen border, Patrick started a climb, and in ten minutes they were at a safe cruising altitude, heading south across Afghanistan for a perilous Pakistani frontier crossing.
“Patrick, I’ve got the generators back online,” David Luger reported as he and several technicians studied the real-time reports datalinked from the stricken Vampire bomber. “Engines, hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical are all in the green. We’ve got the aircraft. How’s Rebecca?”
“I’ll be all right,” she muttered. Patrick examined her eyes carefully and found no apparent damage. “I’m just flash-blinded, that’s all. It’s coming back. Give me a couple aspirins out of the medical kit and see if there’s any eyewash or salve in there.” She stared out her windscreen. “Hey, there’s something wrong here. I can’t see out my windscreen. Is it me or something else?”
Patrick looked, too. “The windscreen is all blackened and crazed—the blast from the SA-4 might have instantly delaminated it.” He shone his flashlight outside toward the nose. “I think we might have some problems out there. Do a check of the refueling system, Dave.”
“Stand by.” It took only a few seconds. “Yep, looks like we got a problem—self-test of the refueling system failed. Looks like your slipway doors are damaged.”
Patrick got out the high-power floodlight and looked. “I see all kinds of sheet metal loose out there,” he reported. “Looks like the slipway doors might have been blown loose and are jammed or hanging halfway inside the slipway.”
“We’re in deep shit if we can’t refuel, guys,” Rebecca said.
With the help of the technicians back at Battle Mountain, Patrick began reading the flight-manual checklist for the refueling system. The checklist eventually directed him to pull the circuit breaker that actuated the slipway doors. “Last item—manual slipway door-retract handle, pull,” he read.
“Give it a try, Muck,” Luger said. “You got nothing else you can do.”
Patrick firmly and positively pulled the small T-handle on the upper instrument console, then shone the big spotlight outside again. “Well?” Rebecca asked.
“Still looks the same. Looks like the slipway door ripped off its supports and is jammed inside the slipway. Dave . . .”
“We’re running the best range numbers now,” Luger responded.
Patrick switched seats with Rebecca—she couldn’t see quite clearly yet, so it was better for her not to be in the pilot’s seat—then immediately set the Vampire’s flight-control system to max-range profile. The Vampire used mission-adaptive technology, tiny actuators in the fuselage that subtly changed almost the entire surface of the bomber’s fuselage and wings to optimize the aerodynamics. The system could be set to increase airspeed, improve slow-flight characteristics, help land in crosswinds, or reduce the effects of turbulence.
Patrick told the flight-control system to conserve as much fuel as possible. When he did so, the airspeed dropped off considerably, and they started a very slow climb. The mission-adaptive technology flattened out the flight controls as much as possible, reducing drag—they could barely maneuver, but they would be saving as much fuel as possible. As they climbed, their airspeed increased in the thinner air, so they traveled farther on the same amount of fuel. But their four-hour return flight became five, then soon s
ettled into a five-and-a-half-hour endurance run.
And they still had the gauntlet of the Pakistani air defenses, now on full alert, to run.
“We’ve worked the numbers as best we could, Muck,” David Luger said, “and the best we can figure is, it’ll be close. The winds aren’t helping you—you have a twenty-minute deficit. But if you can make it up to at least thirty-nine thousand feet and then do a very shallow idle-power descent, we think you’ll make up the deficit. How’s that slipway looking? Anything fly off yet?”
“Still looks like someone left a wad of scrap metal in there. Seems like we might lose part of the left side of the radome, too.”
“Roger. If the slipway still looks blocked, we’ll have to send the tanker home. He doesn’t have enough fuel to wait for you.”
“Send him home,” Patrick said. “Have him gas up and then launch after us. Maybe we’ll move into precontact in the descent and have the boom operator take a close look.”
The Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier was a jumble of search radars and frantic radio messages in several different languages. “We may have lucked out,” Patrick said. “Sounds to me like everyone’s running out of fuel and heading home. The Iranian SA-10s are still active, but they’re intermittent. They might be afraid of shooting down their own aircraft or firing on a Pakistani jet over the border.”
“Great,” Rebecca said, putting more saline drops in her stinging eyes. “Maybe we’ll avoid getting caught in the crossfire long enough to splash down in the Indian Ocean.”
“Wait, they’re not going home—they’re chasing another target!” Patrick exclaimed, studying the datalinked composite tactical display. He switched to his own laser-radar display and took a two-second snapshot. “There’s a big target at our one o’clock position, eighty-three miles, low. It’s huge—it looks as big as a 747, and it’s radiating on several VHF, UHF, and some navigation search frequencies.” He switched radio frequencies. “Tin Man, this is Puppeteer.”
“Hi, boss,” Hal Briggs responded. Air Force Colonel Hal Briggs was an Army- and Air Force–trained commando and security expert, a longtime partner of Patrick’s, and a close friend. He was now assigned as the commander of a secret unit at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base called the Battle Force, comprising highly trained and heavily armed commandos that supported special-operations missions all over the world.
“What do you guys think you’re doing?” Patrick asked.
“Just trying to clear a path for you,” Hal replied. He had launched in the MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet aircraft off the deck of their covert-operations freighter as soon as he saw Patrick’s turn inland to pursue the errant StealthHawk. Loaded with extra fuel as well as electronic warfare jammers, Hal and his crew sped inland and established an orbit right along the Pakistan-Iran frontier, then activated their jammers and decoy transmitters. The decoy transmitters made the MV-32 appear a hundred times larger than its actual size on the Iranian and Pakistani radarscopes—too inviting a target to be ignored.
“We appreciate it, Tin Man,” Patrick said, “but we see at least a half dozen Iranian and Pakistani fighters within thirty miles of your location and one less than twenty miles that might have detected you. Get as low as you can and bug out to the southeast.”
“We’re outta here, Puppeteer, but not to the southeast,” Hal responded. “You head southeast. We’ll draw the bad guys away until you’re clear. Save your fuel.”
“Are you armed?”
“Negative,” Hal replied. Normally the MV-32 carried two retractable pods that held laser-guided Hellfire missiles, Maverick TV-guided attack missiles, Stinger heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, Sidearm antiradar missiles, or twenty-millimeter gun pods—but they also held three-hundred-gallon fuel tanks, and that’s what this mission required. The MV-32 had a chin-mounted twenty-millimeter Gatling gun—that was its only defensive armament, almost completely ineffective against high-speed aircraft. “I need you to give us a heads-up on where the bad guys are, Puppeteer—and remember the third dimension.”
“I hear you, Tin Man,” Patrick replied. He switched his display to one that accentuated terrain even more—the laser-radar view was so detailed and precise that it looked like a daylight photograph. “Head south and stay as low as you can. Nearest bandit is at your four o’clock, moving in to fifteen miles, high. He’s painting you with his radar. You have your jammers on?”
“Roger that.”
“There’s a pretty deep crevasse at your one o’clock, eight miles. See it yet?”
“Negative.”
“He’s counterjamming you—looks like he’s got a solid lock on you,” Patrick said. “Turn right twenty degrees, hard.” Patrick knew that the MV-32 was fitted with infrared suppressors on the exhaust end of its fanjet engines, but they would still create very hot dots against the night sky that made easy targets for heat-seeking missiles. The first important task was to turn those hot exhausts away from the Iranian fighter’s infrared sensors. “He’s descending and slowing. He’s trying to line up a shot.”
“Terrific.”
“He’s too far away for us to reach you in time, Tin Man,” Patrick said. “Turn ten more right. He’s closing to max IR missile range. Get ready to—”
“He fired!” Briggs shouted. “He fired again! Two incoming!” The MV-32 carried a tail-warning receiver that tracked the heat of enemy aircraft behind it—when the system detected a flash of heat from the same target, it assumed that the target fired a missile and issued a missile launch warning. “We’re maneuvering . . . popping flares.” Patrick could hear the tension in Hal’s voice, hear him grunt as the MV-32’s pilot maneuvered hard into the missile. Once the Pave Dasher turned toward the missiles, the decoy flares would be the hottest dots in the sky, and the enemy missiles would go after them instead—he hoped.
“Translate positive Z!” Patrick shouted. “Now!”
The Pave Dasher had one feature the Iranian fighters lacked—the ability to fly vertically. As Patrick watched the pursuit unfold on his multifunction display, the MV-32 Pave Dasher suddenly stopped in midair, turned directly toward the incoming missiles, then flew straight up at five hundred feet per minute. Now there were two objects in the sky even brighter than the decoy flares—two fat, red-hot, yet invisible columns of jet-engine exhaust. It was too irresistible a target. Both missiles headed right for the tubes of heat and exploded harmlessly more than a hundred feet underneath the MV-32.
Patrick didn’t see that. What he saw was the Iranian fighter still barreling directly at the MV-32. Either the Iranian was “target fixated”—so intent on watching his quarry die that he ignored his primary job of flying the airplane—or he was closing in for another missile attack or a gun kill. “Bandit’s at your twelve o’clock, five miles, slightly high, closing fast!” Patrick radioed. “Lock him up and nail him!”
The MV-32’s pilot immediately activated his own infrared targeting sensor and aimed it where Patrick told him. At less than six miles, the fighter was a huge green dot on the pilot’s targeting scope. He immediately locked up the fighter into the targeting computer, slaved the twenty-millimeter Gatling gun to the target, and at three miles opened fire.
The Iranian pilot decided to fire his own thirty-millimeter cannon at two miles—that was the last mistake he’d ever make. The MV-32’s shells sliced into the fighter’s canopy and engines a fraction of a second before the Iranian pilot squeezed his trigger. The jet exploded into a fireball and traced a flaming streak across the night sky until it plowed into the mountains below, less than a mile in front of the Pave Dasher.
“Good shooting, guys,” Patrick said when the fighter disappeared from his tactical display. “Now start heading southwest. Your tail’s clear. Nearest bandit is at your five o’clock, thirty-seven miles, not locked on.”
“Thanks for the help, boss,” Hal Briggs radioed. “See you back at home plate.”
“Don’t hold breakfast. We’re going to be up here awhile,” Patrick said. Rebecca Furne
ss groaned but said nothing.
Five hours later, with the bomber still over three hundred miles from home, the Sky Masters support aircraft—a privately owned DC-10 airliner converted as a launch and support aircraft by the StealthHawk’s designer, Jon Masters of Sky Masters Inc.—maneuvered slightly above and ahead of the Vampire. The DC-10’s pilot, flight engineer, and boom operator, sitting in the boom operator’s pod in the rear looking out through the large “picture window” underneath the boom, all came to the same conclusion: “Sorry, Puppeteer,” the boom operator reported. “The whole left side of the slipway is pushed in, and the slipway door is crumpled up inside there.”
“Any way you can use the boom to pry the door away from the slipway?” Patrick asked.
“It’s worth a try,” the boomer said. Slowly, carefully, he used the refueling boom as a pick, trying to push and pull pieces of metal away from the receptacle at the bottom of the slipway. Twenty minutes later a large piece of metal bounced off the windscreen—thankfully, not cracking it. “Let’s give it a try, Puppeteer.”
Patrick had to do the flying—Rebecca’s eyesight was still too marginal for her to perform this delicate task. Patrick switched the flight-control computers to air-refueling mode and maneuvered the Vampire bomber up into contact position. The boom operator extended the probe. They saw the probe bounce and skid around the broken slipway, then finally ram against the receptacle. “No contact light,” the boomer said. “Toggles aren’t engaging. But I’m right in there.”
“Start the transfer,” Patrick said.
The boomer started the transfer pumps—and immediately the windscreen iced completely over as hundreds of gallons of jet fuel gushed out of the receptacle, streamed back across the windscreen, and froze. “I lost contact with you,” Patrick said, activating the windshield de-ice system. “But I think we took some gas. I’ll keep it as steady as I can—you just keep plugging me.”
It was the weirdest, scariest, and most violent aerial refueling Patrick had ever done. Time after time the refueling nozzle slammed into the damaged slipway; every time the probe reached the receptacle, the boom operator forced the nozzle tight against it, then turned the pumps on low. More fuel streamed out—but some was going into the Vampire’s tanks.