by Dale Brown
“I know you are, Pavlo, and yes, for now, I have enough pilots,” Panchenko replied rather uneasily. Obviously unspoken was the fact that if they had to begin a major deployment or, God forbid, an offensive against the Russians, he would run out of fresh pilots in less than twenty-four hours. “Look, Captain, I admire your dedication. I’ll tell the General you were by—oh, hell, he’ll probably be over at the hospital visiting you tonight.”
“I’ll wait here for him,” Tychina said. “I’d like to ask his permission to get married.”
“Married … ? Jesus, Pavlo, you’re the most active war casualty I’ve ever seen,” Panchenko said. He smiled, then took Tychina’s hand and shook it. “Congratulations, son. Miss Korneichuk … Mikola, if I’m not mistaken?” Tychina nodded. “Good man. You were wise to seek the old man’s permission, too. He’s from the old school, when officers couldn’t get a hard-on without the commanding general’s permission. But if I know you fast-burning MiG-23 pilots, you already got the chaplain lined up, am I right?”
“He’ll do the ceremony in about two and a half hours, sir.”
“Ha, I knew it,” Panchenko said with a broad smile. “After what you’ve been through, I wouldn’t blame you for not waiting.” He picked up the outer office telephone and told Tychina, “I’ll get the old man to come back to the command center to tell him you’re here. You can ask him for his blessing, then I’ll have a car take you to the chapel. You’ll make it, don’t worry.” He made the phone call to his clerk, then added, “As far as permission to go back on duty, it’s denied—until after the honeymoon. Four days … no, make it a week. May I suggest you spend your honeymoon abroad, as far as your savings can take you—Greece, Italy, even Turkey.”
“You’re suggesting I leave the country, sir?” Tychina asked with total amazement. “I couldn’t do that!”
“Son, I’ll give you permission to cross the border,” Panchenko said, his face suddenly hard and serious, “and I strongly suggest you do it. First of all, you’re a damned hero, a true hero. You put your life on the line to defend your country against astounding odds, and you were victorious. The whole world knows about you, and they would think poorly of the Ukrainian Air Force if we put you back on duty so fast. You should be going to the United Nations or to NATO, testifying on the Russian aggression—in fact, I will request that the commanding general send you to Kiev to debrief the general staff, then send you to Geneva to argue our case.
“Second, you’re injured. You may think you’re ready to fly, but you’re not.” He held up a hand to silence Tychina’s protest, then added, “Third, you should take your bride out of the country, spend a few days making a future Ukrainian pilot, then leave her out of the country where it’s safe.”
“Sir, what in hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying that there’s going to be a war, son, and Ukrayina is going to be the battleground,” Panchenko said, using the less formal and more popular name, “Ukrayina,” for their country. “New Russia wants to lead an empire again—Moldova, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, maybe the Baltic states: the sons of bitches will try to take them all back. We’re going to stop them from taking Ukrayina, with God’s help and maybe some help from the West. But in the meantime, this will be no place for young Ukrainian wives and mothers.”
“Do you really expect a war with Russia, sir?” Tychina asked gravely.
“Unfortunately, I do,” Panchenko admitted. “So does the general staff. Ever wonder why you led a major patrol formation the other night with only a partial warload?”
Tychina’s eyes lit up from behind his mask: “Yes, dammit, I only had half the close-range missiles I needed.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Panchenko said, “and it’s not because of some black market thefts, as the rumor mill is saying these days. You should—”
A klaxon alert suddenly blared just outside the office. Tychina jumped at the sound, but to his surprise, Panchenko did not—in fact, he appeared to have expected it. The door to his office burst open, but Panchenko did not look at the communications officer who had entered—he looked directly at Tychina’s masked face with a sad, exasperated expression. “Sir!” the communications officer shouted. “ ‘Majestic’ fighter patrol reports large formations of bombers inbound. Supersonic bombers, Tupolev-160 and Tupolev-22M bombers, coming in at very low altitude. They got past the patrols.”
“Cruise missile attack … and this time it won’t be a straight-and-level attack,” Panchenko said slowly, as if a great weariness had just come over him. “Lieutenant, launch Crown patrol and any other ready air patrols and aircraft. Sound the air raid sirens. Where’s the General and the Vice Commander?”
“The General is in quarters, sir. The Vice is at a city council meeting downtown.”
Panchenko knew it would take the commanding general at least ten to fifteen minutes to get back to headquarters, even if he raced back at high speed. He shook his head—he knew he had no choice. “Very well,” he said. “Under my authority, seal up the command center and disengage external antennas. Switch to the ground-wave communications network and report to me when full ground-wave connectivity is established.”
Pavlo Tychina’s masked head quickly went from the excited communications officer back to Panchenko. “What’s going on, sir? You’re sealing up the command center?”
“We were lucky the other night, thanks to you,” Panchenko said wearily. “You turned back what would have been the Russian’s warning shot at Ukrayina. If they meant peace, we would have been safe. If they meant war, I knew they would return, only this time with weapons of mass destruction. That attack has begun.”
“What? The attack? What are you … Mikki! God, no …!” Tychina’s masked eyes finally realized what the senior officer was saying. He shot to his feet, pushed the communications officer out of his way, and raced for the door. He managed to make it out of the battle staff area and main communications center, but by the time he reached the large blast door outside the command center, he found it closed and bolted. He went back and confronted the security guards outside the communications center, but all he found were men with tight lips and eyes filled with terror who would not comply with his order to open the blast door.
“Even the commanding general must stay out until the all-clear is sounded, Pavlo,” Colonel Panchenko said behind Tychina. “He knows that. Our ability to survive and fight would be destroyed if we opened that door. Even love must take a backseat when a nation and the lives of millions are at stake.”
The lights suddenly went out, and after several long moments of darkness the emergency lights went on. “We’re on generator power,” he said matter-of-factly. “We operate on hydroelectric generators that run on an underground river, did you know that? Unlimited water and power. We can even produce oxygen. We have diesel generators and batteries as a backup—we have enough batteries to cover a soccer field down here. I estimate there are a hundred people in the command center, and the supplies were stocked for twice that number. We can survive down here for three months, if need be.”
“What’s the point?” Tychina asked angrily. His sterile mask produced a hideous effect, ghostly and evil-looking, like some medieval executioner on a rampage. “Is there going to be anything up there to protect?”
“Cicero said, ‘While there is life there is hope,’ “ Panchenko said.
He turned, sniffed at the air. “The ventilators have kicked on. We draw fresh air from miles away from the base until radiation levels exceed a certain point, then shut down and go on carbon dioxide scrubbers and electrochemical air-restoration systems, like a big submarine. Come on, Pavlo, let’s get back and find out what’s going on outside.”
Tychina touched the big steel door. He thought he could hear voices and maybe fists pounding on the door from the other side, but the door was sixty centimeters thick, so that was unlikely. “She’s gone, isn’t she, sir?” he said from behind his mask.
“Pavlo, we don’t know,” Panchenko sa
id over the loud hum of the ventilators. “All we know is, we’ve got a job to do. Our country needs us. You may have become the senior pilot of this wing, Pavlo, maybe even of the entire Ukrayina Air Force. I need you to help organize whatever forces we have. Now you can destroy yourself with pity, and I’ll understand, because you’ve been through hell already. Or you can come with me and help me organize the battle against the Russians. Which is it going to be?”
Tychina nodded, took a deep breath, and followed Panchenko back to the battle staff briefing room. Perhaps he was being overly dramatic, he thought. Maybe it wasn’t a full-scale attack, or maybe the air patrols would turn the Russian bombers back—the patrols had been strengthened since his incident the other night. He could hear the usual cacophony of chatter coming from the communications room, the clatter of teletypes and fax machines, the hum of computers. Nothing was going to happen, he thought. Dammit, he had let Petr Panchenko, a man he truly admired and wanted to emulate, see his scared, apprehensive side. He had to really take charge now, Tychina thought. He had to—
—suddenly all the lights went dead, a sound louder than thirty years’ worth of thunderstorms rolled through the underground structure, and everything in Pavlo Tychina’s consciousness went black.
NINETEEN
Over the Adriatic Sea, 900 Miles West of L’vov Air Base That Same Time
They had left Lossiemouth Royal Air Force Base in Scotland, heading southeast, under the cover of a drenching rain and low overcast skies. The first sonic boom was sixty seconds after takeoff, where only a few fishermen and whales in the North Sea heard it. They stayed at high altitude and at Mach-two, flying in the same jet airways as the Concorde and other military flights, until over the Atlantic far off the coast of Spain, where the flight rendezvoused with a special U.S. Air Force KC-10 Extender aerial tanker. After fifteen minutes, fully fueled, the aircraft turned eastbound again, and let the throttles loose. Passing Mach-two, the normal turboramjet engines were shut down, and the ramjet engines were engaged. Now, twenty minutes and fifteen hundred miles later, they were screaming over the Adriatic at an altitude of one hundred thousand feet.
Every mission in the United States Air Force’s newest reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-91A Aurora, was not only an aviation record-setter—it was a totally new experience for mankind. The Aurora was a large, triangular-shaped aircraft made entirely of heat-resistant composite materials—the fuselage was both a lifting body, like a giant one-piece wing, and was also a critical component of the aircraft’s combined-cycle ramjet engines. Most of the 135-foot-long, 75-foot wide, three-hundred-thousand-pound gross weight aircraft was fuel—but not JP-4 jet fuel or even JP-7 high-flashpoint fuel as used in the Aurora’s predecessor, the SR-71 Blackbird, but supercooled liquid methane. It was the fastest air-breathing machine ever built.
For takeoff from Lossiemouth, the SR-91A burned gaseous methane mixed with liquid oxygen through the four large engine ducts on the bottom of the aircraft, much like the liquid-fueled engines on the Space Shuttle. At Mach-2.5, or two and a half times the speed of sound, the liquid oxygen would gradually be shut off, the rocket nozzles retracted, and the engines would switch to pure ramjet operation. A ramjet was a virtual hollow tube with a bulged interior that would compress incoming air like a giant jet turbine compressor; then methane fuel would be added and the mixture burned. The resulting thrust was four times more powerful than any other existing aircraft—Aurora was more like a spacecraft at that point. One more refueling over the Arabian Sea, and on to the destination in Okinawa, Japan. Upon approach to landing, the ramjet engines would be shut down, the turboramjet engines restarted, and a “normal” approach and landing—if a five-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-mile-per-hour straight-in approach to landing could be considered normal—and the mission would be over.
In that mission, the three-person crew would have encircled one-third of the Earth in about three hours, and photographed over seven million square miles of the Earth’s surface, transmitting the imagery via satellite to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Virginia. The pictures—synthetic aperture radar, long-range oblique optical, digital charged-coupled device optical, and infrared linescan—along with data from dozens of electronic sensors, would be developed and analyzed long before the Aurora was parked in a special hangar at Okinawa, allowed to cool off—its skin temperature would easily exceed a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and it would take about twenty minutes before anyone could even approach the plane—and the space-suited crew finally taken off the plane. The next day, another series of recon missions, more records set, and a final landing at their home base at Beale AFB, California.
It was often said by proponents of the SR-91A Aurora that crewmen were an unnecessary redundancy—everything done on Aurora, from takeoff to landing to all reconnaissance and navigation work, was fully computerized. So when the electromagnetic and particle sensors aboard Aurora went crazy as it passed over the Adriatic Sea, the reconnaissance computer merely recorded the data, reset itself, did a complete self-test of its millions of computer chips and circuits, and began recording more information, automatically repeating the process six times a second. There was no report to the human occupants, no warning, no flight plan alterations.
It was as if it were perfectly normal, an everyday routine occurrence, for a half-dozen solar flares to erupt simultaneously—on the surface of the Earth, over Eastern Europe.
“Whoa, baby!” Air Force Major Marty Pugh, the engineer and RSO (Reconnaissance Systems Operator), called out over interphone. Although the plane’s cockpit was fully pressurized, all of Aurora’s crewmembers wore pressure suits, like the astronauts they were, and they were strapped so securely in place that movement was all but impossible. Very little talking was ever done during the high-altitude, high-speed portion of the flight, so when something happened, an excited voice got instant attention from everyone. “Hey, I got some particle energy readings that just jumped off the scale.”
“Copy,” Colonel Randall Shaw, the mission commander, replied. “I’m running a flight control check, Snap. Stand by.” He got two clicks on the microphone from the aircraft commander, Graham “Snap” Mondy, who merely positioned his hands a bit closer to the side-mounted control stick and throttles. In a conventional aircraft, a flight control check would entail moving the stick, jockeying the throttles, perhaps turning off the autopilot and making a few gentle turns. Not in Aurora—a gentle turn might take them off course by two hundred miles, and flying without an autopilot at Mach-six could turn them into a blazing meteor in seconds. The flight control check was a simple voice command and a two-second self-check in which the flight control computer checked all of its circuits. “Check complete,” Shaw reported. “In the green.” Two more clicks meant that Mondy confirmed the report.
“Some shit is really going down there off to the north,” Pugh said. In the fifteen seconds between his first and second sentence, Aurora had traveled twenty miles, and the sensors had turned their attention to Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and was getting ready to take pictures of Greece, Turkey, and the eastern Mediterranean. “You guys see anything out there at your ten o’clock?”
Looking out the window in Aurora was usually an exercise in frustration. The hull glowed so brightly from the heat that it washed out much of the view, and ground features zipped by so fast that even prominent landmarks like a city at night or the Himalayas went by before you had a chance to say, “Look at the Himalayas.” But Colonel Mondy swiveled his head around in the Teflon helmet bearings and looked to his left …
… just in time to see a tremendously bright burst of light, like a laser beam had just flashed directly in his eyes. He blinked his eyes and turned away, but the spot was still there, etched right into the center of his field of view. “Dammit,” Mondy said, “I just got flashed by something—an explosion, or a laser beam, something. Damn, I got a spot in my eyes.”
“Massive electrical discharge,” Pugh reported, “like a … a nuclear explosion or something
… no thermal energy, but particle energy discharges nearly off the scale. Portside CCD optical cameras are out—whatever hit you, Colonel, got our digital cameras too. I’ve picked up five or six of them.”
“Not now, Marty,” Mondy interrupted irritably. He lifted his visor and tried to rub his eyes with his right index finger, but the bulky inflated gloves of the pressure suit didn’t do much good. “Dammit, Randy, I really got hurt here.”
“What is it, Colonel?”
“That flash … I got a dark brown spot in front of my eyes, and it’s not going away,” Mondy said. “I think I got a retinal burn or something. You have the aircraft.”
“I have the aircraft,” Shaw acknowledged. “You need help? Want to come out of hypersonic range so we can radio headquarters?”
“No … dammit, maybe. Let me think,” Mondy said. Because Aurora developed a very powerful thermal and static electric field around it during its hypersonic flight, it was usually necessary to slow down to Mach-three, the lowest speed possible with the ramjet, to talk to anyone on the radios. Standard procedure was to remain radio-silent during all ramjet operations. In an emergency you stayed hypersonic until you computed an alternate landing site at least five hundred miles away, because it would take that long to slow down, restart the turboramjet engines, and make an approach—and there were only ten approved landing sites in the entire civilized world for Aurora.
“No, stay with the flight plan—but you’ll have to take the plane for the landing, Randy,” Mondy said. “Man, I’m really hurt. That dark spot is getting bigger and darker, and I’m getting a really bad headache. Check all systems again, crew—I’m concerned about that blast affecting our systems.”