Cauldron
Page 42
Although the Eagle was designed as an air-to-air fighter, it still had a respectable ground attack capability — at least in daylight and clear weather. Thankfully the weather was clear, because the Polish Air Force was throwing every aircraft it had, even trainers and squadron hacks, against the advancing EurCon columns. There were plenty of air-to-air targets, too, but killing airplanes wouldn’t stop the tanks closing on Wroclaw.
Tad remembered the intelligence officer’s briefing. Wroclaw’s capture would shatter Polish-Czech communications. And that would put an end to any hope that Czech troops could move north to reinforce Poland’s outnumbered army.
He scanned the mission profile, noting that his Eagle would be carrying an interesting mix of ordnance. The F-15 was loaded with twelve Russian-designed KMGU cluster bombs on two MERs, multiple ejection racks, along with American-built Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles for air-to-air combat.
The old Soviet Air Force had designed all its ordnance with NATO-standard bomb lugs, just like their planes’ fuel and electrical fittings. Intended to let them swiftly take over NATO airfields in time of war, it now allowed western- and eastern-bloc weapons to be used together. It was another of this war’s many ironies.
Broz finished talking and nodded him toward the door. It was time to fly.
Back in the open air, Wojcik hurried toward the fragment-scarred rows of squat, concrete aircraft shelters. He passed by other pilots and other enlisted men on the way. The ground crews looked even worse than he felt.
At least standing regulations required flight personnel to get a certain amount of sleep. Maintenance techs and the other ground staff basically worked until they fell over, and they were then allowed a little rest before being wakened again.
He grimaced. The base was damaged, they were losing aircraft, and everyone was on the edge of exhaustion. Poland’s ground forces were “regrouping” to meet the unexpected EurCon invasion. If they didn’t regroup soon, Tad thought, it would be too late.
He found his shelter, and was relieved to see a well-maintained, if worn, Eagle loaded and ready. The crew chief, a stocky, unshaven staff sergeant, still had enough energy to salute and report the aircraft ready.
Tad took his time going over the plane. Tired people make mistakes and mistakes kill pilots. So he looked carefully for unfastened access panels or improperly mounted bombs and missiles. He needed help from the staff sergeant as well, to check the arming wires on the unfamiliar Russian ordnance.
He climbed up into the F-15’s cockpit, checking the upper wing surfaces at the same time. With a twinge in his nether regions, he settled himself into the ejector seat and ran through his checklist while he hooked up. Satisfied, he hit the starter and waited while the engines spooled up, bringing life to the plane’s instrument panel.
With both engines roaring, Tad took his Eagle through the shelter’s open armored doors and out onto the runway. He already had clearance for a fast taxi and takeoff as soon as he was outside. Poland’s aircraft were more vulnerable on the ground than in the air.
Even fully loaded with bombs and missiles, the Eagle still seemed to leap skyward, and some of his fatigue seemed to stay behind on the ground.
Turning north, Tad cruised at low level until he picked up the Oder River valley, then turned northwest to follow it, dropping lower. By doglegging north along the valley, he planned to avoid the enemy troop concentrations deployed across the A4 Motorway. Frontline troops were never easy targets. Dug in, concealed, and ready for trouble, the odds were against him. His primary target for this mission was further back, one half hour’s flying time from Wroclaw — most of it spent on this detour down the Oder.
He hugged the water, now silvered as the sun rose, constantly moving his head as he scanned his instruments and the sky. EurCon aircraft did not have complete air superiority, but the numbers were usually on the wrong side for the Poles, and the last thing Tad wanted now was a dogfight. Not only would he have to jettison his air-to-ground ordnance and abort the mission, but he might lose, and Poland needed every plane it had. Standing orders repeated by Broz this morning, were that he was to “preserve” his aircraft, and coincidentally himself, so that they would both survive to fight tomorrow, and the day after that.
The river started to curve around to the west, as it approached Brzeg Dolny, a sleepy river town that was still in Polish hands. The waypoint cue on his HUD shifted, and Tad carefully nudged the throttles forward a little.
Banking left and climbing out of the valley, he turned southwest, skimming over alternating patches of forest and farms with freshly planted crops. The land was all thickly settled, and he could see the invasion’s impact on the roads. Orderly groups of military vehicles, presumably Polish, since they weren’t shooting at him, moved to the west. Refugees, dark, ragged shapes on foot or packed into heavily loaded cars, fled to the east.
He thought of his grandparents, and wondered if they had looked like that in those first terrible days of World War II, trying to flee a merciless enemy. His hand tightened on the F-15’s stick. Now his mother and father faced the same dangerous, heart-wrenching trek.
His parents lived, or had lived anyway, in Wroclaw. His last communication with them had been a hurried phone call three days before. Life in the city was difficult, his father had said, but not as hard as what you are doing. Tad knew that wasn’t true. Doing one’s duty was easy. Especially when it meant fighting Germans.
Then they asked him if they should stay or go, a sensitive question to ask one of the city’s defenders. With his mind full of bleak situation briefings, Tad had told them to go — erring on the side of caution. Now they were somewhere on the road, heading to the east and uncertain safety in Warsaw.
Anger built up, but he tried to channel it, turning it into concentration on the job at hand. Maybe he could buy his mother and father a little more time to reach a safe haven, if any place in Poland could truly be said to be safe. He only wished his parents had kept their American citizenship so he could have wangled them a place on one of the evacuation flights back to the States.
The halfway point on his southwest leg was the road from Sroda Slaska and Wroclaw. According to this morning’s intelligence summary, the city was still in Polish hands, so he’d planned to pass west of the town.
The summary was out of date.
As his Eagle sped past the outskirts of town, the right side of his cockpit came alive. The radar track, and launch warning lights all lit up at virtually the same moment. The enemy radar signal showed dead ahead.
Tad looked up from the panel and saw two dark shapes arrowing toward him, rising on billowing white columns. Radar-guided SAMs!
Reflexively he turned hard left — almost too hard. The F-15’s nose dipped toward the ground, and he hurriedly corrected, adding more throttle. At the same time, one thumb punched both the chaff and flare buttons. He wanted chaff in the air to confuse the enemy launcher’s radar, and he wanted flares spewing out behind him in case the SAMs had a backup IR tracker.
The F-15’s nose spun to port, and Tad put the missiles on his right rear, about five o’clock. He couldn’t outrun them, but the Eagle had a smaller radar signature from that angle, and if he could just get beyond the horizon of the ground-based radar guiding them, the missiles should lose him.
He pushed the throttles forward to full military power, and even lowered the jet’s nose a little — diving lower still. Flying so low was hazardous in this built-up maze of power lines and buildings, but it beat getting his tail blown off. He fought the urge to crane his head back and see where the missiles were. At this altitude, taking his eyes off his flight path for that long would be suicide.
The Eagle built up speed quickly, although the drag and weight of the bombs prevented him from going supersonic. Hopefully it was enough. Wojcik counted the seconds, trying to figure ranges and speeds. And the threat display went dark, just as quickly as it had lit up. Pulling up a little and throttling back, he risked a glance behind him.
Tad let out his breath and turned back toward his target, following the steering cues on the HUD in front of him. He made a mental note to warn intelligence that EurCon’s forward units were now past Sroda Slaska.
A small village loomed ahead — surrounded by fields and small orchards.
It was time. He changed his weapons settings, selecting the cluster bombs instead of the Sidewinder he always had prepped in transit. As he double-checked his settings, the cockpit threat receiver lit up again, this time warning him about a search radar probing somewhere up ahead. He knew the signal’s source, the SAMs guarding the Cicha Woda River crossing.
Retreating Polish troops had dropped the highway bridge as EurCon forces approached, but enemy engineers had quickly rigged a replacement across the narrow river. But that wasn’t his target. Pontoon spans were easily replaced.
Instead, Wojcik was going to hit the traffic waiting to cross that pontoon bridge. No temporary bridge could be as efficient as the original span, so the area’s already-crowded roads were backed up with every type of enemy vehicle. The military term for the traffic jam was “chokepoint.” The drivers stuck in it probably had their own, considerably more profane terms.
Tad pushed the nose down once again, taking his plane from a hundred meters high to twenty. The radar warning signal went away. Whether they’d shut down or simply lost him, he didn’t know. He was now masked by the surrounding terrain, which was the only reason any sane pilot would want to fly this low. He stayed low, holding his breath but glad to have it.
Skimming over plowed fields, he shot through a gap in the treeline praying that there weren’t any power lines strung in front of him. Still, he’d risk running into wires rather than exposing his plane to SAMs or flak. Now Tad ignored the landscape in front of the Eagle. Even throttled back, all he could see was a streaked blur. Instead, he gauged his height by looking out to the side, where his eyes could fix on objects in the near and middle distance.
Trees, houses, and fields flashed past and vanished astern. Flying this low was somehow exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Not even the wildest roller-coaster ride could compare. Although he tried to look at the steering cues on his HUD occasionally, he dared not risk a look at the map display. Instead, he relied on memorized landmarks and mental calculations to plan ahead. Things were going to start happening very quickly.
Suddenly a cluster of buildings at a crossroads passed underneath and he was at the IP — the initial point for his bomb run. Gladly shedding the hair-raising safety of nap-of-the-earth flight, he throttled to full military and climbed, turning slightly to line up with the road ahead. He set the chaff and flare dispenser to automatic.
His F-15’s nose had barely come up when the warning receiver lit up again, every light and warning buzzer sounding one right after the other. The EurCon air defenses were ready and waiting for him. He ignored the sounds, instead concentrating on the motion of the aircraft and his carefully planned attack maneuver.
As the fighter’s nose popped up, it blocked his view of the target area. Tad gently pressed the stick to the right and rolled his airplane inverted, so that the terrain was laid out in front of and over him.
He easily spotted the Cicha Woda River and the A4 Motorway running east to west, crossing it. The wreckage of a concrete span lay to one side, and he could see the gray-green pontoon bridge next to it, with raw cuts in the earth embankment on either end where heavy engineering vehicles had bulldozed and scraped ramps down to the river.
The bridge and the road west were lined with trucks, personnel carriers, tanks, and every kind of military transportation. Tad could see soldiers jumping from truck cabs and scattering in all directions, but tracers were still rising from all along the road. Every vehicle with a machine gun was firing at him.
More tracers floated toward him from a flak battery deployed on the south side of the highway. Oddly enough, the enemy ground fire didn’t seem to be bothering him too much, either. Combat had taught him to spend more time worrying about the dangers he could control, evade, or defeat. Flak was too random. If one of those glowing balls arcing skyward had his number on it, so be it. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
His HUD said he was high enough, and pulling the stick hard to the left, Tad quickly rolled wings level and a little nose-down. The F-15 straightened out at two hundred meters high — just above minimum safe height for his cluster bombs. He felt his speed building up.
His concentration was completely fixed on lining up on the mass of enemy matériel in front of him. He noted the ground fire, gray puffs and tracers more intense than before. Now it was starting to worry him, and fractions of a second passed like years as symbols crawled across his HUD and the ground rippled past beneath him. He had to hold a steady course. If he jinked, he’d miss.
The bomb line shortened to a dot in the center of his windscreen and Wojcik pressed the weapons release. Cluster bombs dropped from the ejector racks at quarter-second intervals, fell a hundred meters, then split apart, showering the enemy with five-pound antitank bomblets. Over five hundred of the deadly spheres rained down onto a box fifty meters wide and three-quarters of a kilometer long.
The area below him erupted in small explosions. Dust kicked up by each blast quickly obscured his view. Small red flashes lit the inside of the dust cloud. While the bomblets were relatively small, each one could destroy a tank or any other vehicle it landed on. Each explosion also sent deadly fragments slicing in all directions.
The stores panel showed the last bomb gone, and the Eagle accelerated again, freed of their drag and three-ton weight. The road ahead of him was still full of German and French equipment, though. Deviating from the attack plan, Tad lowered the F-15’s nose and pressed the gun trigger, hammering the stalled column with 20mm fire. He had to slow the enemy down, to kill as many of them as humanly possible. He held the run as long as he could, but finally had to break off as his altitude dropped dangerously low.
He banked hard right and kept his nose on the horizon. Although it was a dangerous companion, the cluttered landscape was turning into a familiar friend. Automatically he reset the gunsight and computer from air-to-ground to air-to-air mode, selecting Sidewinder. He was now ready to defend himself, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to.
He ran north at high speed, then angled to the northeast, over flat farmland and small villages. Occasionally he saw a burned patch on the ground or a cluster of vehicles where none should be.
The HUD cues changed, and he throttled back to cruise, turning carefully to the southeast. A minute’s run at afterburner had put him twenty-five kilometers away from the scene of his attack, and hopefully his victims had reported him fleeing to the north. Now his turn toward base should evade any pursuers. He eased up to the relatively safe altitude of one hundred meters. At economical cruise, he was only a few minutes from Wroclaw.
The symbols on the HUD were just stabilizing when the right side of the instrument panel lit up again. Sparing a glance down from the blurred landscape ahead, Tad saw two bearings on his radar warning receiver, with the legend “RDX/Rafale” next to each one. Almost as soon as they appeared, they changed, with the track warning light illuminated. Two of EurCon’s most advanced fighters were in the air and they knew right where he was.
His chest tightened, and almost without thinking he accelerated to full afterburner, pointing the F-15’s nose straight at the fighters. He energized his own radar, not really expecting to see anything, and was rewarded with little more than a few flickering echoes across the scope. The Rafale was not a “full stealth” design, but it had a reduced radar cross section. Even if anyone was lucky enough to get a lock on one, its powerful radar jammer could easily break the tenuous hold.
But Ta
d had expected that. Ever since that first embarrassing mock dogfight with a Rafale, he’d put a lot of mental energy into developing the tactics he’d need to take them on and win. Lining his aircraft’s nose up on the enemy fighters, he also angled it down, back toward the ground. With the speed of long practice, he set up his weapons panel.
He watched the HUD cues carefully, smoothly trading altitude for airspeed. Tad knew his maximum speed in this load configuration, and he also knew the range of the French Mica missile, about fifty kilometers. He counted the seconds, hoping that the French radars would have trouble sorting him out of the ground clutter. The French pilots, not feeling threatened, might take a few extra moments to set up their attack. After all, they might reason that a plane on the deck, running fast, was probably trying to evade — its pilot too busy and too frightened to strike back effectively.
Tad was forced to divide his time between the HUD, the threat warning display, and the earth racing by below him. The track warning was still illuminated, the missile light still dark. Wojcik pressed the chaff release twice, although he was pretty sure it wouldn’t help. It didn’t. The French radars stayed locked on.
Now! Tad pulled back on the stick, hard. He was braced for the g-forces, but the crushing sensation grew and grew until the edges of his vision grayed out and his breathing was no more than a shallow pant. His HUD danced with squiggling lines and symbols. The g-meter showed seven point something.
A glowing box suddenly appeared on the glass in front of him. He eased off on the stick and guided the plane’s nose up until the box was inside a large circle — the vulnerability cone, a visual cue showing the area where his missiles were most effective. He was now going almost straight up, using the raw power of the Eagle’s big turbofans to maneuver vertically as well as horizontally. The Rafale’s largest radar cross section was from above or below, and his radar had finally found enough return at that angle to get a lock.
The instant the cueing box passed into the circle, Tad pressed the trigger, and was rewarded with a roar and a plume of smoke in front of him as a Sparrow missile raced skyward, almost straight up.