by Dale Brown
“These bastards are getting some help,” said Lieutenant Juno. “Can we get air support back here?”
TURK HEARD THE call from the forward operating base that they were under fire, but without target data for the mortars, there was little they could do at the moment. In the meantime he and Cowboy had their hands full dealing with the two UAVs, which had juiced their engines and were maneuvering to engage the American F-35Bs.
“Trying to climb above us, right?” said Cowboy.
“Yeah,” answered Turk. Deciphering what they would do next wasn’t that hard; it was figuring out three moves from now that was difficult.
Turk was struck by the fact that the planes were acting differently than they had the day before—rather than trying to remain undetected, they were going out of their way to make their presence known, changing their headings to make their profiles as wide as possible for the F-35 radars to pick up.
Why?
If these had been Sabres or even Flighthawks, it would be because they’d learned something from the earlier encounters. And they were trying to use that to some advantage.
So what had he learned from the earlier encounter? And what would they have expected him to learn, and then do?
Turk guessed they were trying to get the F-35s to use their radar missiles at long range. They must be confident of beating them.
“Let’s take a sixty-degree turn east. That’ll keep them on our nose as they climb.”
“Roger. I’m looking for a lock for the AMRAAMs,” added Cowboy.
“We want to hold on to the radar missiles as long as we can,” said Turk.
“Uh, that’s not what we briefed.”
“Yeah, I know. But hold on to them anyway. It’ll keep them from getting too close.”
“How’s that going to work, kemosabi?”
“I’m thinking. They flew purposely in a way that we could see them; they didn’t have to. So I’m figuring they want us to shoot sooner rather than later. It’s a guess,” he added, as if that were necessary.
A sharp cut by the UAVs as Cowboy got a lock told Turk he was right. At ninety miles away they were in range of the AMRAAM 120D radar missiles the planes were equipped with, but the planes would be able to easily beam the F-35s and temporarily disappear from the radar too far for the missiles’ own guidance systems to pick them up.
Turk called another break and brought them back on the scope.
“It’s a cat and mouse game,” he said. “We have to get closer.”
“What are they going to do then?”
“I’m thinking.”
The trick was to use their tactics and expectations against them, Turk realized.
“I’ll bait them,” he told Cowboy. “I’m going to fire the AMRAAMs, then try and get in their faces. They think they sucked me in. You keep your distance until they come after me. When they’re both on my tail and you have a lock, fire. The closer you are the better; we don’t want them to outrun the missiles.”
“How close do you want them to get to you?”
“As close as it takes. I’ll tell you when to fire.”
THE RADAR ABOARD the Global Hawk was used by the Cube to synthesize a three-dimensional view of the jungle, painting the trees and terrain in gray-greens. There were two clumps of rebels in the shadow of the ridge; Danny gave both locations to the Marines as possible mortar locations. Meanwhile, the Marine’s Shadow UAV found a large clump of men north of the camp, less than a mile away.
“They’re going to attack once the mortaring stops,” Lieutenant Juno predicted, pointing at the screen.
“Can you target them with your mortars?” asked Danny.
“We will if we can. I just lost coms with the mortar team. I’m going to send someone—Mofitt!”
The corporal came over and listened as the spotter gave him the coordinates. Then he took off out of the bunker.
Danny turned his attention back to the displays. Though they were a mile away, the rebels were running toward the perimeter. It was the weakest of the four sides to begin with, and the mortaring had softened it up.
“They’ll be at the defenses in five minutes,” said Danny. “There are fifty of them at least. You’ll have to shift your mortar attack or we’ll be overrun.”
“My coms with the mortars are still out,” yelled Juno as the bunker shook with another strike. “I’ve lost two of my mortar men, and a third’s injured.”
“What about Mofitt?”
“Can’t raise him on the radio. I’m going to send someone else.”
“I’ll go,” said Danny. He yelled to Ward, the Whiplash techie monitoring the UAVs, to keep an eye on the targets and feed him their coordinates every thirty seconds.
“Colonel, don’t go,” warned the lieutenant.
Two rounds landed, one practically on top of the bunker.
“All right,” said Juno, giving in. “Get the mortars redirected. I’ll organize a counterattack.”
TURK CLOSED TO within fifty miles of the two UAVs before getting solid locks for the AMRAAMs. He dished them off in quick succession, then buttoned up the fighter, though his stores on the wings still presented a juicy radar picture.
Just as he had thought, the UAVs made sharp turns and switched on their ECMs. Still, the AMRAAMs continued in their direction, and for a moment Turk thought he might have two kills. But the small planes could cut unbelievably tight turns in the air, and now managed to duck under the radar missiles. They were already coming for Turk when the AMRAAMs realized they were hopelessly lost and self-exploded in disgust.
Turk tucked his wing down, pushing his plane lower—and closer to the enemy’s flight path. He got a warning that the targeting radar in the closest small aircraft was trying to lock on. He went steeper into the dive, striving for a balance between being an enticing target and a dead one. A warning blared—the small aircraft had locked on him from ten miles away.
Turk waited anxiously for a warning that the small aircraft had fired a radar missile, but none came. The Flighthawk 3s could carry small radar-guided missiles that were effective at twenty miles, but as the UAV closed the distance without firing, Turk knew these aircraft weren’t carrying them.
It wasn’t much of a possibility, but it was one less thing to have to worry about, he told himself.
Somehow, that hardly cheered him.
“Basher One, do you have a lock?”
“Working on it, Two.”
“Keep closing.”
“If you stop flitting around, I might have a chance.”
Turk rolled into an invert and then let the nose of the plane dive downward, in effect making a large loop in the sky. The maneuver changed the plane’s direction 180 degrees; he was now facing toward the two UAVs. He was hoping they would now start turns and come around for a rear quarter attack; instead, the radar receiver warned that they had just locked on to his plane.
Too far for a shot, thought Turk. They were four miles away. He knew he had a few seconds.
A flash of light danced off the front fuselage. The infrared detector buzzed—the aircraft were firing a laser at him.
Turk pushed straight down into a dive, twisting away from the enemy UAVs. They were on his back, swooping almost parallel to each other so that he couldn’t escape by simply going to one side or the other.
“OK,” he said over the radio. “This is as close as I want them.”
Actually, closer, he thought.
“Fire, Fox One,” called Cowboy. “Fire, Fox One.”
Turk pushed the F-35B into a tight turn. Gravity punched him in the face and chest, then tried wrestling his hand from the stick. He got a temperature warning in the engine. The gauges began lighting with cautions, and now the aircraft’s Bitchin’ Betty system chimed in, saying he was going too low.
“Pull up!” said the automated voice, bizarrely calm yet very incessant. “Pull up!”
Turk yanked back on the stick, but he’d miscalculated his momentum; the plane continued to sink.
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br /> “Throttle, throttle, throttle,” he said, as if he were talking to the plane. He jammed the control to full military power and struggled to keep his nose positioned correctly. He was still losing altitude, unable to overcome the basic laws of physics. His stomach shot into his throat, then fell like a stone to his feet: he was climbing.
He hit his flares and the stores of chaff, desperate to confuse the UAVs any way possible. He could see one of them flying about a mile away, just ahead, banking to come back after overshooting him.
The aircraft was roughly the size of Flighthawk 3s, but with a profile closer to an X-48. Stubby wings extended from a wing-in-body design just like the Gen 4 Flighthawk. But there were a pair of small turbojets at the rear, rather than the single engine of the Gen 4. A twin-boom tail sandwiched the engines, which, judging from the aircrafts’ maneuvers, had directional thrust. Adjusting thrust from both engines also probably helped.
Suddenly the aircraft disappeared in a burst of smoke. Cowboy’s AMRAAM had caught it.
But where was number two?
DANNY GRABBED THE lieutenant’s M-16 and ran out to find Mofitt. He’d gotten about halfway across the compound to the mortar station when he saw a body lying flat on the ground.
Mofitt, he thought. Damn.
He ran to the body and slid down next to him. The man’s head raised as he did.
It was Mofitt. He turned his face toward Danny’s, his white cheeks covered with dirt.
“Where are you hit?” Danny asked.
“I . . . I don’t know.”
A mortar round whizzed overhead.
“Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
“I’m—uh—”
Danny scooped him into a fireman’s carry and carried him back to the bunker. About twenty yards from the entrance, Mofitt seemed to lift off his shoulders. Danny became weightless, spinning around on the ground like a top that had just been pulled off the string. A hailstorm descended around him and he slammed into the ground, face-first.
A black and gray kaleidoscope danced around his head as he caught his breath. He knew what had happened—a mortar shell had hit nearby—but somehow he couldn’t put that knowledge into any context, much less plan what to do next. His confusion seemed to last an eternity, and when it started to fade it was replaced by a heavy rolling sound, the kind a heavy steamroller would make if it were pushing his skull into the ground.
Danny got to his feet. Mofitt was nearby, on his knees, shaking his head. Danny tried to ask him if he was OK, then realized the blow had left him deaf.
It was a good thing they hadn’t reached the bunker. The shell that had knocked him to the ground was a direct hit on a spot weakened by the earlier blasts. It had torn a massive gash in the roof near the entrance, splitting through the metal below the layer of sandbags and dirt.
Danny saw beams of light inside—flashlights. Two men ran up behind him, then began clawing at the dirt and debris that had fallen into the entrance.
Moving in what seemed like slow motion, Danny began to help. The six people who’d been in the bunker were all still alive, but in various degrees of shock. Lieutenant Juno was bleeding from an enormous gash at the top of his head, but his was the lightest injury; his radio man had a compound leg fracture and two broken ribs. Trevor Walsh, the Whiplash technician, was sitting at his bench, dazed and holding his limp right arm against a small but sucking wound at the side of his chest.
“They have lasers,” he told Danny. “Turk just called it in.”
Danny heard the words from a distance; his hearing was coming back.
“You’re wounded,” he told Walsh. He repeated it twice, unsure if he was garbling his words.
A corpsman ran in shouting orders, directing that the injured be taken to a second bunker being used as a med station. Danny pointed to him; Walsh got up slowly, trying to help.
The corpsman looked at him and told him to join the rest of the wounded, but Walsh refused, claiming he wasn’t so hurt that he couldn’t continue to do his job. He went back to his post, adjusted Danny’s tablet, then promptly collapsed. The Marine com specialist, his face dotted with gashes and oozing blood, helped lift him onto a stretcher that had just been brought in, then took his spot.
“Colonel, I have Captain Thomas,” the Marine told Danny. “He wants to know the situation.”
Danny heard the words like faint echoes in the distance. That was a vast improvement from just a few minutes before.
“The radio?” Danny asked.
The Marine handed it to him.
“We’re getting a lot of incoming,” Danny said into the mike. “We just took a big blow to the command center. The lieutenant is out of action.”
“The Ospreys are heading for us,” said Captain Thomas. “I’m going to leave a platoon to mop up. The rest of us are coming back.”
“We’ll hold the fort until then,” said Danny. “Wait—”
He leaned over and looked at Walsh’s large sitrep screen, which was showing the radar feed from the Global Hawk.
“There’s a road about a quarter mile north of the force that’s aiming at our northern perimeter,” he told the captain. “Big enough for the Ospreys to land. Get them in there, roll them up.”
“Affirmative. Can you give me coordinates?”
“I’m going to give you back to your guy who’s looking at everything from the UAVs and aircraft. He’ll punch this stuff straight to you. Right?”
“Got it, Colonel.”
As he put down the radio handset, Danny realized his hearing had returned just in time: he could hear gunfire on the perimeter.
“You stay here,” he told the com specialist. “Anyone else who can stand, grab your rifle and come with me.”
2
Washington, D.C.
ZEN WOULD HAVE had to have been the stupidest person in Washington not to realize that Todd’s overture to him meant she wasn’t going to run for President. He would also have to be extremely naive to interpret anything she said as a guarantee that she definitely would support him if he decided to run.
However . . .
At the moment, at least, she was clearly disposed to helping him. And her support would be useful within the party.
Mostly, anyway. And outside the party it was surely a liability. The administration was under virulent attack for what critics and much of the media called its hawkish worldview.
The funny thing was, Zen thought it wasn’t hawkish enough.
Be that as it may, his main questions now were: why was Todd not going to run for reelection, and why was she backing him?
He could guess the answer to the latter: she loathed the vice president, who, as he’d told her, would be the most likely candidate, and on foreign policy matters Zen’s views were probably the closest to hers in Congress.
So why wasn’t she going to run? Did she fear impeachment, which the opposition party was always talking about? Several House members even submitted bills to do just that, but they had never made it out of committee, let alone to the floor of the House. Her allies held a small but firm majority in the House that usually kept the opposition in its place, but there was always the danger that she would do something to anger just enough of them to tip things against her.
So did he want to be President?
It was what every little boy wanted, wasn’t it?
It had been. Eons ago. These days, only madmen and maniacs wanted to be President.
Zen smiled at himself. He was a little of both. Every fighter pilot was.
There were other things he wanted. Walking again topped the list.
After all these years in a wheelchair, after everything he’d achieved, in the back of his mind that remained a deep desire. Deprived of so much . . .
Had he been, though? One could argue that he’d gotten everything out of life that a man could possibly want: adventure, a great career, a wonderful wife, the most beautiful and brightest daughter in the world—
“Dad?”
&n
bsp; He broke from his reverie and saw his daughter Teri standing in front of him. From the looks of things, she’d been there for quite a while.
“Thinking about senating again,” said the eight-year-old in a voice that dripped of satire. She was never cuter than when she was being impertinent.
“As a matter of fact, I was,” said Zen.
“Well, I’m hungry. When are we eating?”
He glanced at his watch—it was closer to bedtime than to dinnertime.
Ouch! That wonderful wife was going to kill him.
“We’re eating right now,” he told her. “Get your coat.”
“My coat?”
“You don’t want McDonald’s?”
“Yeah!” said his daughter, running from the room as if she’d just won the lottery.
If only every political decision were so easy.
3
Malaysia
BY THE TIME Turk realized where the other aircraft was, it was nearly too late. He threw his wing down hard and hit his flares and chaff, desperate to get his butt out of the pip of the attacking UAV. Fortunately, the laser’s relatively small size and its need to pause and recycle between bursts meant that it had only a few milliseconds on target before he was able to dance away. Even so, the high-energy beam put a nasty black streak on the side of the fuselage, momentarily raising the temperature in the engine into the red. Turk jerked the stick and worked his pedals, trying to jink as unpredictably as possible and confuse the always logical computer guiding the UAV. Then, falling way too low to build enough speed to run away, and worried about the engine blowing up, he pulled the fighter into as tight a turn as it could manage and held on, hoping the UAV might make a mistake and turn inside him.
That didn’t happen. But when he checked the radar, he realized the enemy aircraft was gone. Somewhere in the middle of his crazy dance he’d shaken free.
“Basher Two, how’s your plane?” asked Cowboy.
“I’m OK.” Turk glanced at his panel and realized that the alert on the engine was off; whatever harm the laser had done wasn’t permanent, or at least wasn’t affecting him at the moment.