by Tom Clancy
The communications screen indicated they had a link, and Chuck appeared, his silver hair expertly razored into a crew cut, his face barely wrinkled for a man pushing sixty. Stanton had already broken that barrier, and he wanted to believe he looked as good as Chuck. Aw, hell, who was he kidding?
“Hey, Donny.”
“Hey, Chuck. Listen, I just got an e-mail from American Eagle telling me we’ve got total control of the Iridium cell phone system. He wants us to reach out to your boy up north. I was just reading his record.”
“Andreas is a pretty clever lad. Once he figures out the satellite is bent, he just might poke up his sail long enough to check for a text message. But how can I help?”
“My techies tell me they need the phone numbers for every Iridium 9505A onboard Florida, plus we need something — something personal — that will convince Andreas that our text message is legit. I know how serious you guys are about the silent in silent service.”
“I’ll get the squadron commander on the horn. Smitty keeps a roster of all the allocated 9505As, and next I’ll give Andreas’s wife a buzz. I’ll bet she can come up with something personal to authenticate with.”
“Sounds like a plan, Chuck. My best to Jamie. Fifteen minutes?”
“Back in fifteen, Admiral.”
“Captain, we’ve covered—”
“Hold on,” Commander Jonathan Andreas said, cutting off his communications officer. “Right now I want to hear Senior Chief Radioman Sheldon’s assessment of the situation.”
“Captain, I’ve been over every inch of that gear. I even got Chief Electronics Technician Burgess to look over my shoulder. I swear that the ELF and satellite receivers are good to go.” His tone grew ominous. “There’s just no signal.”
Andreas couldn’t estimate how much pride calling in another chief for help had cost his senior chief radioman.
Andreas nodded, “Sheldon, that’s good enough for me.”
Andreas returned to his quarters and sat on his bunk for almost ten minutes, allowing himself to work through the mystery, taking in each piece of evidence, examining it, probing it, trying to reach conclusions. Then he started down a new path, one in which they took action to get answers.
He came up with two plans.
Finally, he stood and purposefully stepped through the doorway into the head separating his stateroom from the XO’s. He knocked twice on the door in the opposite bulkhead, then stepped through to where the XO was reading something at his desk. He glanced up. “Sir?”
Without preamble, Andreas said, “XO, I’m about to break a cardinal rule, and I want you to hear it.”
“Skipper, are you sure?”
“Yes, I am.” The first plan sounded even more logical to him as he voiced it rapid-fire. “I’m going to go deep, sprint thirty miles northwest, stick up the antenna, and ping the transponder on the satellite. The problem could still be ours, but right now it’s the next-to-last action we can take. What do you think?”
“Skipper, with the shrouded propulsor, and at a depth of, say, eight hundred feet, we can do that.”
“I just can’t wait around any longer.”
“No doubt. We sprint at nearly thirty knots and find us a nice lonely spot out in the middle of the gulf.”
“So it’s worth a try?”
“It is, but I have to play devil’s advocate — what happens if we don’t trigger an answering ping from the transponder?”
“I said this was my next-to-last plan, XO. If this doesn’t work, you won’t believe what I’ll do next.”
THIRTEEN
“Ghost Hawk, this is Siren. Contact is now three minutes out, over.”
Major Stephanie Halverson, dressed like a praying mantis in her pressure suit and alien-like helmet with attached O2 line, took a deep breath and adjusted her grip on the stick.
The F-35B Joint Strike Fighter’s electro-optical targeting system (EOTS) continued to feed her up-to-the-nanosecond images and data on the approaching targets, and her helmet-mounted display system had some of the best head-tracking hardware and software she had ever fielded, along with all the usual requirements like a binocular-wide field of view, day/night capability with sensor fusion, and a digital image source for helmet-displayed symbology — all of which was engineer-speak for some wicked cool battlefield capability.
After an unusually long delay, her wingman, Captain Jake Boyd, finally replied with a curt “Roger that,” his own F-35B streaking over the frozen tundra just off Halverson’s right wing, its tail glowing faintly in the night.
“Ghost Hawk, do you have a problem, over?”
“Negative, Siren. Just shaking my head.”
They had nearly forty Russian Ka-29s on the AN/ APG-81 AESA radar, the helos on a bearing due south across the Northwest Territories, maintaining an altitude of just one thousand feet.
To say that Halverson and Boyd were surprised was an understatement.
Operating out of a small JSF training base located approximately two hundred miles north of Yellowknife, the capital of the NWT, she and Boyd were on their third scheduled night flight of the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) fighter used primarily by the United States Marine Corps and the Royal Navy.
As JSF pilots and members of the Air Force, they were being cross-trained in the fighter so that its features could be exploited in non-carrier based operations located far inland and in more rugged terrain. The JSF had struck a deal with the commissioner of the NWT to use the largely unpopulated areas for tests.
Halverson and Boyd had both hoped that after the fourteen-day training mission, they’d get a chance to take their state-of-the-art killing machines into Russia and show those vodka-soaked wolves what they could do.
That the Russians would help by dropping in themselves was as exciting as it was troubling.
Halverson maintained a video blog, Femme Fatale Fighter Pilot, and she couldn’t wait to share this with her readers, though she’d carefully dance around the classified details, and her face was always hidden behind her helmet.
“All right, Ghost Hawk, two minutes now,” she reported. “Let’s hit the gas and ascend before they spot us.”
“Roger that.”
“Igloo Base, this is Siren, we’re climbing to fourteen thousand to hover and observe contact, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. Igloo Base standing by.”
She and Boyd climbed to fourteen thousand, then, with the targets about to pass below in thirty seconds, they prepared to hover.
All right, baby, show me what you got.
Instead of utilizing lift engines or rotating nozzles on the engine fan and exhaust like the old Harriers, Halverson’s F-35B employed a shift-driven lift fan, patented by Lockheed Martin and developed by Rolls-Royce.
The contra-rotating fan was like a turboprop set into the fuselage, just behind the cockpit. Engine shaft power could be sent forward to it while bypass air from the cruise engine was sent to nozzles in the wings as the cruise nozzle at the tail vectored downward.
Thus, under her command, panels opened over the lift fan behind her, and a column of cool air providing 20,000 pounds of lifting power vented from the bottom of the aircraft, holding her steady, a fighter plane seemingly locked in the air by an invisible tractor beam.
Boyd was at Halverson’s wing, hovering as well.
“Siren, this is Igloo Base.”
“Go ahead, Igloo.”
“We’ve received no response from your contact. You have authorization to fly by those helos, attempt once more to make contact yourselves. Instruct them to turn around — but do not engage unless fired upon, over.”
“Roger that, Igloo Base. If they fail to comply, we’d like authorization to engage, over.”
“Understood, Siren. Just let ’em know we’re here first.”
“Roger that, Igloo Base, descending to intercept those helos. Ghost Hawk, you ready?”
“Oh, yeah, Siren.”
“Just follow me. This’ll be…
interesting.”
With that, she broke from her hover, jamming the stick forward and diving, the Pratt & Whitney engine thundering behind her with a force that crept into her gut, energized her, made her feel powerful beyond measure.
There was no darkness. Infrared peeled back the night to reveal the helicopters, flying in two clusters about three choppers abreast, spread far enough apart to be engaged individually.
Halverson took her bird straight down toward the lead three helos, diving directly in front of them, just fifty meters ahead.
She could only imagine the looks on those Russian pilots’ faces as their radars went wild, their canopies lit up, and they were suddenly buffeted by her jet wash—
Only to be hit again two seconds later by Boyd’s exhaust.
Screaming toward the mottled carpet of snow and trees below, Halverson pulled up and banked right, while instructing Boyd to bank left. They both came up, then suddenly went back to hover mode, floating there at one thousand feet, on either side of the column of Ka-29s as they advanced.
“Russian helos, this is Joint Strike Force Fighter Siren, do you copy, over?
Halverson’s pulse raced.
“Here they come,” said Boyd.
Tactical data links transmitted every reading from the instruments onboard their fighters back to Igloo Base and to every JSF tactical and strategic command post on the planet via the satellite links. At any time, any operations XO could tap in to her cockpit to see what she was doing.
That Mr. Network-Centric Big Brother was always watching did unnerve Halverson, and there had been lots of talk among pilots of deliberately switching off certain systems at certain times. Since the war had broken out, the concept of network-centric operations (NCO) had proven a first step at dissipating some instances of the “fog of war,” in which communication breakdowns and poor information handling resulted in heavy losses. However, when misinformation did get into the system, it flowed like a virus and was hard to stop.
For now, though, the information coming at Halverson was pretty damned obvious and accurate. The Russians had no intentions of stopping.
“Russian helos, this is Joint Strike Force Fighter Siren. You have crossed into Canadian airspace and are instructed to turn back, over.”
Halverson waited a moment, then repeated the same instructions in Russian. Her language skills weren’t great, but her pronunciation was clear enough for them to understand — if they were willing to listen.
She also wondered about the Canadian response. They had adamantly maintained their neutrality in the war, though it wasn’t beyond imagination that they might court the Russians for some “diplomatic” purpose.
For all Halverson knew, these helos could be en route to a southern location at the invitation of the Canadian government; if that were the case, it would have been nice to inform the JSF of their little visit.
But what kind of drinking party were the Canadians throwing that required the Russians to come in forty helos? If crates of vodka and droves of loose women weren’t on the list, Halverson doubted they would attend.
“Igloo Base, this is Siren, over.”
“Go ahead, Siren.”
“We buzzed the helos and are hovering at one thousand as they approach. No response to our requests, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. Just maintain—”
“Siren!” cried Boyd. “Rockets incoming. Jesus—”
Out of the corner of her eye, Halverson caught the flash of a bright light, and just as she throttled up—
More unguided rockets fired from the lead choppers tore through her wake.
“Siren, this is Ghost Hawk! Jesus, damn it, I’m hit! I’m hit! Got a fire. Electrical failures. Damage to left wing. I saw the radar warning, and I just didn’t believe it! Losing control!”
“Eject! Eject!”
Halverson climbed over the swarm of choppers to look down upon the scene, spotting Boyd’s fighter beginning to drop like a rock, nose tipping down.
“Boyd, get out of there!”
He was at about one hundred and fifty knots when a tiny flash erupted, and the canopy tumbled away. Then the ejection seat fired, and out came Boyd, with approximately eight hundred feet between himself and the ground below.
Halverson wished she had time to see if he was okay, but the rage inside — awakened by the audacity of these Russians — launched her into action. She wheeled around, brought the jet into another hover, pivoted toward the helos.
Speed and maneuver. Speed and maneuver…
She had missile lock. There was no thinking it over or calling to base for authorization. And there were no second thoughts.
The two wingtip-mounted AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles exploded away from her jet, using a passive IR target acquisition system to home in on infrared emissions. They each raced toward a chopper in the lead group, leaving glowing white tendrils of smoke in their wake.
“Igloo Base, this is Siren. Ghost Hawk has ejected! Can’t see if he’s on the ground yet! I’ve engaged the helos, over!”
“Roger that, Siren.”
Twin booms shone in her display, the fireballs expanding then plummeting toward the icy deck.
Two Ka-29s down.
Thirty-five? Thirty-six to go?
She’d exhaust everything she had, she didn’t care.
But first she had to find Boyd, see if he made it, and if he did, be sure those bastards weren’t trying to finish the job.
His beacon shone in one of her displays, as the choppers below scattered like bees being swatted, spreading out, gaining altitude, while a few pilots descended even lower.
Two of the choppers banked hard, coming around to engage her as she hovered above them.
Rockets flashed from their underwing pods. She rolled to her left, even as she engaged her four-barreled GAU-22/A gun mounted in a teardrop pod along the jet’s aft center pylon, the four barrels bound in one spinning cylinder.
Armor-piercing discarding sabot with tracer rounds leapt out ahead of her fighter at a rate of forty-two hundred per minute, chewing into the first chopper’s canopy amid a flurry of sparks and the laser-like streaks drawn by the tracers.
She shifted fire to the next helo, more rounds drumming along its side as the pilot attempted to evade.
The first chopper began to fall away, out of control, smoke pouring from the shattered cockpit. And suddenly, the second one joined the first, rolling away, trailing more smoke.
She carried only two hundred and twenty rounds of ammo for the gun despite its cyclic rate of fire, and she had already blown through half. Damn it. The cost of being trigger-happy.
There were two more Sidewinders in her internal bays, along with two AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons for hitting hardened surface targets. She also had a pair of five-hundred-pound JDAM bombs under the wings, but they wouldn’t help unless those helos put down. Finally, she had a pair of laser-guided training rounds they were supposed to use in a couple of days.
Boyd’s fighter had crashed just ahead, the flames still soaring skyward; he had drifted downwind about a half kilometer farther south.
“Ghost Hawk, this is Siren, you copy, over?”
No response.
“Igloo Base, this is Siren. No contact from Ghost Hawk on the ground. Four choppers engaged and destroyed, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. You’re ordered to return to base, over.”
“Negative, Igloo Base. I’m not leaving until I can confirm if Ghost Hawk made it or not, over.”
“Stand by, Siren…”
Well, she’d stand by, all right, but not without unleashing her last two Sidewinders.
The helos, now much more spread apart, maintained their southerly course, a speckled field of potential targets glowing on her display.
“Here you go,” she whispered. “Eat this.”
Dinner was, in fact, served, a late-night course of explosives delivered with blinding efficiency.
The bay doors swung open, and the rockets spat f
rom the warplane’s belly, arrowing through the night.
She throttled up once more, dove, and came in for a final run with guns—
Even as the two Sidewinders slammed into their targets, sending debris and flaming bodies hurtling outward in all directions.
Not liking her current angle, she drove the stick left, banking hard, the fighter riding the cold air as though racing on rails. She came back around, diving once more, and squeezed the trigger, targeting another chopper from behind until its engine flared and died.
Then she ceased fire, lined up on the next bird and squeezed the trigger, more rounds streaking away.
But in a few seconds, the gun went dead, out of ammo, and the chopper was still flying.
“JSF fighter plane, this is American Eagle, over.”
Halverson gasped. She knew that call sign but could hardly believe it. The President of the United States was on the radio.
“American Eagle, this is Siren, go ahead, over.”
“Major, what am I looking at here?”
“Sir, those blips on the screen are approximately thirty to thirty-five Russian Ka-29 troop transport helos on a southerly heading. I’ve taken out seven of them, damaged an eighth, but I’ve exhausted my ammo. They fired upon us first, sir. I lost my wingman, who ejected, and I want to fly over the crash site and see if he made it.”
“Can you do that without losing your bird?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you’ve got my permission. Major, you’re looking at them. What do you think they’re up to?”
“Sir, I honestly have no idea. But I’d recommend calling the Canadians to get some people up here ASAP.”
“Roger that, Major. Good work. I hope your wingman made it.”
“Thank you, sir, Siren out.”
She shuddered as she realized she had just had a conversation with the president! Damn, whatever was happening had to be huge.
With a hard blink, she brought herself back to the moment. The enemy helos passed over the crash site and continued on as she descended behind them, homing in on Boyd’s beacon.
She slowed as she got on top of the signal, spotted one chute, tangled and whipping in the breeze, still attached to the ejection seat. She wheeled around once more and slowed to a complete hover, keeping a wary eye on the radar while searching for Boyd and his chute.