by Dale Brown
She kept the power up and was starting to get into visual range in just under five minutes when suddenly her radar-warning receiver emitted a high-pitched, fast deedledeedledeedle warning tone. An enemy fire-control radar had locked on to her! The heads-up display categorized it as an “unknown,” position directly ahead of her. But there were no other aircraft except the guy in front of her….
A tail gun! That’s the only thing it could be! The damned bandit had locked on to her with a tail-mounted fire-control radar.
And sure as hell, moments later she saw winks of light coming from the still-dark silhouette of the bandit in front of her. The bastard was firing a tail gun at her! She immediately punched out radar-decoying chaff and flares and broke hard right to get away. She heard a couple hammer taps somewhere on the fuselage, but there were no warning messages.
Kelly was not scared—she was incensed! She’d been shot at by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles while doing patrols for Operation Southern Watch, and she’d taken on plenty of simulated surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, and every kind of air-to-air missile possible in training—but she’d never been shot at by a tail gunner. She didn’t even know that any planes had tail gunners anymore! Furious, she flipped her arming switch from the cannon to her Sidewinder missiles and tightened her turn, getting ready to line up on the bandit.
No question any longer—the guy was a hostile. She wished she could tell her wingman or the Nineteenth about the other bogeys heading in, fearing they all might have tail gunners, but the jamming was still too heavy. No matter—this guy was going down.
But as she lined up for her first shot, her night-vision goggles blanked out a tremendous burst of light coming from the bandit. It was a missile launch—but the missile was huge, hundreds of times larger than an air-to-air missile. The tail of fire had to be two hundred feet long! The missile shot straight ahead for a mile or two, then pulled up abruptly. A few moments later, she heard a sonic boom, followed by a large flash of light, and the missile accelerated and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Oh, Christ, Forman thought, he’s firing attack missiles toward Canada. They were too fast to be cruise missiles. They looked like…like…
Like air-launched ballistic missiles.
As soon as Kelly got a lock indication, she fired a Sidewinder. Seconds later another big missile launched from the bomber. “Oh, my God,” she muttered, and she fired her last Sidewinder. The first Sidewinder veered from the attack plane and went after the second missile, but it accelerated off too quickly. The Sidewinder couldn’t reacquire the plane and fell harmlessly away until it exploded. Just milliseconds before the second Sidewinder hit, the bandit launched a third big missile.
Her second Sidewinder hit the enemy aircraft directly in its right engine. The bandit veered right, stabilized, veered right again, started to turn left, then made a slower, steadier right turn, crossing directly in front of her. Forman closed in for the kill. At four miles, as the bandit made its turn, she recognized it as a Russian Tupolev-22M bomber, nicknamed “Backfire,” its variable-geometry wings slowly swiveling forward. It had two large external fuel tanks beside the fuselage on each side. Smoke and fire were trailing from the right engine, getting heavier each second. She switched to her cannon, zoomed down on him, and opened fire. Shells peppered the fuselage and left wing, and now through her night-vision goggles she could see puffs of fire coming from the lef tengine. The Backfire aimed right for the Canadian coast, still over a hundred miles away. She doubted if it would stay aloft for—
Her attention was drawn to a bright streak of fire above and to her left. She realized with horror it was another one of those huge air-to-surface missiles. In her desperation to shoot this guy down, she forgot she was single-ship, that there might be more bombers out there—and that she was responsible for them all until help arrived! That was probably why this Backfire turned right instead of left—to distract her enough so the wingmen could launch their missiles.
Forman turned sharply left and started a climb, selected her AMRAAM missiles, and quickly locked on to the second bandit just as it launched a second big air-to-ground missile—but then her radar-warning receiver screeched again, and this time the hammer blows and shudders she’d felt before came back twice as hard. In her drive to hose the first Backfire and then diverting her attention to the second bandit, she’d flown too close to the tail end of the first Backfire and gotten into its kill zone.
The engine instruments were still okay, but she could feel a vibration in her control stick and rudder pedals—and then she noticed it, the right-wing fuel gauge dipping well below the level of the left. She immediately started transferring fuel from the right wing to the fuselage and left-wing tanks, but there was probably no room in the other tanks for the right-wing fuel—she was going to end up losing it. Fuel was life up here in the Arctic.
And as she fretted about her fuel state, the second bandit launched a third missile, then started to do a one-eighty. Now she assumed that each Backfire carried three of those big honking missiles, and she assumed that there were more up here, so instead of pursuing the second bandit, she searched farther west and south for more high-flying fast-movers. Sure enough, two more supersonic bogeys appeared.
She quickly verified that they were not transmitting any friendly IFF codes—they were not. She had to fly west a few minutes to get within range, which was not the direction she needed to be flying. Kelly didn’t have to check the nav computer to know that if she didn’t turn around now, she might not make it back to base. Even though Alaska had the best search-and-rescue units in the world, there was no way you wanted to eject over northern Alaska—and sure as heck not over the Beaufort Sea. She had to turn back….
But the Backfire she didn’t attack might be the one that launched a missile and destroyed Eielson, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Elmendorf, or Washington, D.C.—and there was no friggin’ way she was going to let that happen! She started a gradual climb and turned westward to get within position to attack with whatever ammunition she had left.
As quickly as she could, she maneuvered and locked up both Backfires, interrogated for friendly IFF codes once again, received a negative reply, then fired one AMRAAM missile at each. Both Backfires immediately started ejecting chaff and flare decoys, but she was close enough for the decoys to have no effect and the missiles to stay on target. The first Backfire was hit on the left side of the fuselage and started to spin almost straight down into the Beaufort Sea. The second was hit in the belly, and the hit must’ve detonated the missile in its belly, because the Backfire blew apart in a spectacular cloud of fire. The explosion then ignited the two external missiles, adding their destruction to the tremendous fury of that blast. Forman had to peel off to the north to stay away from that massive blast—she swore she could feel the heat right through her bubble canopy and winter-weight flight gear. Kelly repeated the attack with two more supersonic targets. One AMRAAM missed; she scored another hit on a Backfire but couldn’t see what happened to it because she had removed her night-vision goggles due to the longer ranges involved. Next…
“Warning, fuel low,” the computerized “copilot,” nicknamed “Bitching Betty,” intoned. One more glance at her fuel gauges: The right wing was almost empty, and the left wing and fuselage tanks were less than half full. Crap. She was right at emergency fuel level—sixty minutes of fuel, sixty minutes’ flying time to Eielson. But the tanker was on its way, and there was one emergency airfield at Fort Yukon that she might be able to use. She still had plenty of ammo in the cannon. Time to get busy.
Forman lowered her night-vision goggles and did strafing runs on two more Backfires, scoring hits on both but unsure if she’d done any damage. She then turned farther to the west to look for more targets—and there they were. As she saw it, there were several waves of attackers—multiple levels of slower-moving planes, most of them descending to low altitude, and another wave of high-speed attackers at higher altitude that appeared to be blowing past the slow-movers a
nd launching huge hypersonic missiles, perhaps to pave the way for the slow-movers.
“Warning, fuel emergency,” Bitching Betty chimed in. In her drive to get as many enemy planes as possible, Kelly had ignored her fuel state. She knew that her wingman was coming, but he was still at least twenty minutes away. She was almost out of ammunition—admittedly having been a little excitable and trigger-happy on her first gun pass, but being more frugal as her supply got lower and lower. She tried the radios again—still jammed. The datalink hadn’t activated yet, meaning that the AWACS plane from Elmendorf hadn’t arrived yet. There was no indication that her wingman was anywhere in the area, so she couldn’t even lead him to the bandits.
With the sky full of enemy planes all around her, she came to the horrifying realization that she was done for the day—she had no fuel and no weapons. The enemy aircraft were heading farther to the southeast, within visual range of the Canadian coastline by now. They were heading away from Eielson, so she couldn’t pursue. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she had no choice except to break off and head for home.
And then she saw them: more missiles flying overhead. The Backfires that she couldn’t down were launching their missiles! And she was powerless to stop them.
Forman pointed her F-16’s nose toward Eielson, entered the emergency beacon code into her transponder, and throttled back to max-range power. On radar she could see even the slow-movers down low passing her easily. Her radar tracked twelve bandits cruising on their way toward North America, and it detected even more missile launches. She kept trying her radios, but it would be no use until every one of the bandits had disappeared from radar.
As she slowed to her best-range power setting, the vibration in her stick and rudder pedals got worse. She couldn’t go below three hundred knots without the fighter’s shaking so violently that she thought she could lose control at any second. That was not good. It meant that air refueling was probably out of the question.
“Hunter Four, this is Hunter Eight on company, how do you read?”
Thank God the jamming had subsided enough to hear human voices, she told herself. “Two by, Eight,” she responded. “How me?”
“Weak and barely readable,” her wingman said. “We tried to raise you earlier, but no response. I have you tied on, three-zero at one-two bull’s-eye, base plus eleven. What’s your state?”
“Eight, I engaged seven, repeat, seven bandits,” Forman said breathlessly. “Do you copy?”
“You engaged seven bandits? Did you make visual contact?”
“Affirmative. Russian Backfire bombers. Two of them launched what appeared to be very large air-to-surface missiles. I got six of the bandits. There were several groups of bandits, the Backfires up high and slower-movers that descended to low altitude. They were headed southeast. I have been unable to contact Knifepoint. Can you try? Over.” Hunter Eight was farther south, away from the Russian planes that were jamming them—she hoped he’d have better luck.
Now Forman’s wingman sounded as breathless as she did. “Stand by,” he said. On the primary radio, she heard, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight.” It took several tries to reach the NORAD controller. “Hunter Four has engaged large hostile attacking bomber force.” He gave the approximate position and direction of flight.
“We copy all, Hunter flight,” the controller responded. “We encountered heavy MIJIing on all frequencies. We have lost contact with all SEEK IGLOO and SEEK FROST sites. Unable to provide service at this time.” The controller paused, then said, “We saw the gaggle go by, but we couldn’t talk to anyone—and then we lost our radars. There wasn’t a damn thing we could do.”
North American Aerospace Defense Headquarters,
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Colorado
That same time
Triple-C, this is ADOC, we have a situation,” the intercom announcement began. “Alaska NORAD Region has just submitted a radar outage report. They report losing contact with four long-range radars and seven short-range radars of the North Warning System. They’ve also submitted a Fighter Status Report and indicate they have lost contact with one of their fighters scrambled out of Eielson. This is not a drill. Both Alaska NORAD and Eielson report communications outages as well.”
“ADOC, Command copies,” responded U.S. Army Colonel Joanna Kearsage, the command director of the Combined Control Center. “All OCs, stand by. Systems, warm up the hot lines. This is not a drill.” Kearsage was a former Patriot air-defense-brigade commander from Fort Hood, Texas, and a twenty-two-year Army veteran. She once thought that nothing compared to deploying her brigade out to the field on short notice and putting her beloved Patriot missile system through its paces—and then she got the assignment to the Mountain. She’d been wrong. For eight hours every day and a half, information from all over the world flowed right to her fingertips, and she made decisions that affected the lives of two great democracies and the peace and freedom of the entire world. There was nothing else like it.
At first the idea of living in a huge underground bunker was not very appealing. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was a series of massive excavations covering four and a half acres deep inside the Mountain. Inside the granite excavations was a rabbit’s warren of fifteen steel buildings, most of which were three stories tall, all mounted on springs to absorb the shock of a nuclear blast or earthquake. There was no contact between the buildings and the rock; flexible corridors connected the buildings. The complex had its own emergency power generators and water reservoirs, along with its own dining halls, medical centers, and barracks, and even such creature comforts as two exercise centers, a barbershop, a chapel, and a sauna. The whole complex was enclosed behind massive steel doors, each weighing over twenty-five tons but so precisely balanced on their hinges that only two men could push them open or closed if necessary.
The command director of the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was the person in charge of the round-the-clock global monitoring network of three major military commands: the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Strategic Command, and the U.S. Northern Command, all responsible for the defense of the United States and Canada. Kearsage’s forty-person Charlie crew manned the extensive communications and computer-network terminals that collected information from everywhere in the world and from space and merged it into the displays and readouts presented to the command director and her operations staff. Her battle staff was broken up into operations centers within Cheyenne Mountain: Missile Warning, Air Warning, Space Control, Intelligence, Systems Control, and Weather. Each center’s combined data was displayed in the command center on several computer monitors of various types and sizes.
Kearsage was seated in the command center along with her deputy commander, Canadian Forces Colonel Ward Howell, and the noncommissioned officer in charge of command communications. Dominating the command center were four wall-size monitors with graphical compilations of the global threat and continental defense picture. The left-center screen showed the current threats for North America, and the right-center screen showed threats around the world. Flanking the two large center screens were two other screens showing the status of air-defense and strategic-attack forces. Two rows of computer monitors in front of Kearsage and her deputies showed up-to-date information and reports from the individual operations centers themselves.
Her attention was riveted on the North America display, which showed the circles representing the optimal range of the long-range radars, or LRRs, and short-range radars, or SRRs, of the North Warning System in northern Alaska and northern Canada. The circles were blinking red, indicating a malfunction or degradation. The North Warning System was the first line of defense against air-breathing threats to the North American continent—and for some reason a good chunk of it was suddenly shut down.
In addition, there was a blinking red inverted V, indicating the last known position of the F-16 scrambled out of Eielson Air Force Base on cryptic orders fro
m the Pentagon. She could still see the two other groups of symbols, representing other airborne assets: one F-16C and a KC-135R tanker from Eielson, which were supposed to rendezvous with the lone F-16; and two F-15Cs and an E-3C AWACS radar plane flying northeast from Elmendorf Air Force Base in southern Alaska to temporarily set up a long-range radar and fighter picket northwest of Alaska over the Arctic Ocean. But the other two groups of symbols were steady green—on course, on time, and in contact. What happened to the first F-16?
“ADOC, talk to me,” Kearsage said, using the acronym for the Air Defense Operations Center inside the Mountain, her group responsible for tracking and identifying all air targets over North America. “What do we have? And where is that fighter?”
“Village is trying to ascertain the status of those radars and to make contact with the fighter,” the Air Warning Center’s senior controller responded. “Remote transmissions appear to be experiencing heavy interference.” “Village” was the call sign for the Alaska NORAD regional headquarters at Elmendorf Air Force Base.
“SOLAR, would sunspot activity be responsible for the comm interference?” “SOLAR” was the nickname for the Weather Support Center at nearby Peterson Air Force Base, which provided weather support to Cheyenne Mountain.
“Unknown at this time, ma’am, but we’re not experiencing any abnormal solar activity.”
“Triple-C, this is MWC,” the controller at the Missile Warning Center at NORAD reported. The Missile Warning Center was responsible for detecting, identifying, and monitoring any possible missile launches anywhere on the planet, using heat-seeking satellites, and predicting if the missiles posed a threat to North America. “We’re looking at some events near the long-range and short-range radar sites in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Not very high threshold readings—definitely not ballistic-missile launches. Stand by.” “Events” were how they referred to whatever hot spots the heat-sensing Defense Support Program satellites could pick up—anything from oil-well fires and forest fires to ballistic-missile launches.