The operator flipped a few switches, and soon the room was filled with static. A few moments later a Russian accent boomed, “Lantern four-five Fox, acknowledge.”
“It’s Beringa,” Beech said to Markham.
“Lantern four-five Fox, this is Kommandorskiye Approach Control on GUARD frequency. Urgent. You are violating Soviet airspace. Lantern four-five Fox, turn thirty degrees left immediately and ident. Repeat. You are one-zero-zero kilometers off course and in violation of Soviet airspace.
Turn left thirty degrees immediately and ident.” The warning was then repeated in Russian and in clumsy Chinese.
“One hundred kilometers,” Beech said. “What the hell is that guy up to?”
“Whatever,” Markham said, “he’s in deep shit now.”
“Lantern four-five Fox, this is Kommandorskiye Approach on GUARD. I have lost your beacon. Repeat, I have lost your beacon. Check your IFF is in NORMAL and squawk ident immediately. You are in violation of Soviet airspace. Identify yourself immediately.”
“That’s it,” Markham said. “Cancel that last report. Prepare a priority One message for Pacific Fleet headquarters. Say that an unidentified aircraft, presumed American military, has violated Soviet airspace. Give our position and the last reported and estimated position of the aircraft. Soviet intentions are unknown but we expect them to search, intercept and destroy. We do not have any reason to believe that the unknown aircraft has an emergency, but tell them that he may be having navigational difficulties. More details to follow. I’ll have the Captain sign it immediately. And get a report ready for the Old Man,” Markham told Beech. “He’s gonna want one fast. I’m going to get permission to send up a radar balloon.”
“We may be able to move closer to his last reported position,” Beech suggested. “Get on the other side of the Kommandorskiyes. If this guy’s in trouble we can—”
“We haven’t even established if the son of a bitch is American,” Markham cut in. “He could be part of some elaborate Russian scheme to pull us away from monitoring Kavaznya. I’ll suggest it, Beech, but I won’t recommend it. Besides, he’d be too far inside Soviet territory for us to do anything.”
As his intelligence people hurried to execute his orders, Markham studied the plotting board. In front of him a technician made a series of computations and drew another line, plotting the unknown aircraft’s possible location.
“I don’t know who you are,” Markham said under his breath, “but, buddy, you just stirred up one hell of a hornet’s nest.”
“Call up the next point,” Elliott said. His arms were extended almost straight out from his body, straining to hold the control yoke forward, forcing the Old Dog down toward the dark waters of the north Pacific. The heading bug swung twenty degrees to the right. As the Old Dog started a right turn to the new computerized heading, Elliott spun the large trim wheel by his right knee forward to help him hold the bomber’s nose down—at the current rate of descent and high airspeed, the Megafortress wanted nothing except to zoom skyward.
As he reached for the trim wheel Elliott touched his right knee. The feeling—a tingling sensation, like it was asleep—had still been there a few hours ago, but it was gone now. A ring of pain encircled his thigh midway between his knee and hip like a clamp. A muscle twitched involuntarily on his right buttock. He looked over and saw Ormack carefully watching him.
“Bad?”
“Just watch your damn instruments, John.”
Ormack nodded, not reassured.
Nearly forty years earlier, Elliott recalled, he had hurt that knee falling out of a hayloft on his father’s farm. While sitting in the school library, sidelined from the football team, he had read all the books printed on the subject of knee injuries, vitamins to help mending ligaments, special exercises to strengthen muscles. After the cast came off he nursed the weakened knee back to health in only a few weeks, just in time for baseball season. The year his school won the state championship. He remembered the pride he felt at the time. Would he be as proud when this was over?
“Will that heading keep us clear of Beringa’s radar?”
“It should,” Luger said. “It’ll take us around on a one hundred and twenty-mile arc.” He checked the altimeter on his front instrument panel. It was spinning down faster than he’d ever seen, like a clock gone haywire. He was so light in his seat that he had to snatch his charts and pencil in midair to keep them from floating away in the negative Gs. “Passing twenty-five thousand for five thousand,” he called out. He remembered Major White’s egress trainers back at Ford, the way White made his huge mechanical beast dance on its ten-foot hydraulic legs. Well, this was for real—and it was much more than White could ever dream up ... “Passing twenty thousand.” Ford Air Force Base seemed very, very far away.
“How far were we from your start-descent point, McLanahan?” Ormack asked.
“Still about six minutes.”
“I’m surprised,” Luger said, “that they took that long to catch us. Hell, we were almost seventy miles off-course before they called us.”
“Coming up on fifteen thousand,” McLanahan sang out.
“Both radar altimeter channels are ready,” Ormack repeated. “Clearance plane is set to five thousand feet. Autopilot pitch command mode slaved to radar altimeter.”
“Good.” Elliott flipped switches on his left panel beside his ejection seat. “Okay, crew, listen up. You now have full authorization for all defensive measures. Angelina, you have Scorpion missile consent. Scorpion bay doors are at your command. Keep your radar transmissions to an absolute minimum. Wendy, you have full jamming authority. If any tracking or guidance signals come up that you think are strong enough to paint us, jam the piss out of them. Patrick, you’re now on interceptor watch. Leave navigation to Dave unless he needs help in the mountains. If Wendy sees any fighters that look like they’re trying to track us, you’ve got authority to transmit and lock onto them.”
“Passing ten thousand, General,” Luger said. “Five thousand to go.”
Elliott slowly began to pull back on the yoke and bring the throttles forward from idle to cruise thrust. The roller-coaster descent began to subside. As Luger counted the altitude down, Elliott decreased the descent rate until the Old Dog was leveled off*.
“Radar altimeter lock-on,” Ormack announced. He flipped a switch, double-checking the readouts. “Both radar altimeter channels are ready.”
“Autopilot coming on,” Elliott said. He flipped the autopilot switch on. The Old Dog remained rock-steady at five thousand feet. Now a pitch computer, slaved to signals from the radar altimeter, would work to keep the Old Dog at a mere five thousand feet above the water.
“Autopilot’s engaged,” Elliott confirmed. “Setting four thousand for a system check.” He turned the clearance-plane knob down one notch, and the Old Dog started a gentle dive, settling to precisely four thousand feet above the water.
“Resetting five thousand.” He turned the knob clockwise and the huge bomber started a slow climb back to five thousand feet.
“Anybody looking for us, Wendy?” Elliott asked.
“Very low-power radar signals. Much too low to see us. Nothing from Petropavlovsk radar. Lots of UHF and VHF radio transmissions, though.”
“But none of it on GUARD anymore, I’ll bet,” Ormack said. “They know we can monitor GUARD.”
“Which means they’re no longer interested in rescue,” Elliott said. “No more Mister Nice-Guy.” He thought for a moment. “Time to the coast, Dave?”
“Twelve minutes,” Luger said, checking the computer readouts.
“I feel exposed down here,” Elliott said. “I feel everyone can see us. I can’t wait to get back into the dirt.”
“I’d expect company long before that,” Ormack said. “I’d expect a fighter sweep of the area along our projected track line, then a second flight on the landward side.”
“What altitude you figure the fighters will come in?” Elliott asked.
“I
f they have the resources—and I’ll bet they do—it’ll be a high-cap, low-cap arrangement. The lowest might be five thousand feet. More likely, eight to ten thousand. High-cap will be up around thirty thousand.”
“How’s the fuel situation?”
“Worse than I thought,” Ormack told him. “I’ve just put the fuel management system back to automatic. The early descent had little effect on the curve, but the tip gear we’re dragging is just sucking our gas up. I have us at least five thousand below the revised fuel curve.”
“Every pound of gas is critical now,” Elliot said. “Patrick, can we cut off any points on your flight plan? Cut this corner a bit?”
“Risky,” McLanahan said, studying his chart. “We can head for the next point on the flight plan. It’ll save us about five minutes or so, but it’ll put us closer to a small town on the coastline. I wanted to avoid this town by at least ten miles. If we cut the corner, we almost overfly it.”
“At high altitude, ten minutes worth of fuel is a drop in the bucket,” Ormack said. “Down here ...”
“Is that town defended?” Elliott asked. “Any airfields there? Naval docks?”
“I don’t know,” McLanahan said. “There’s no detail like that on the charts I’m using.”
“We’ll have to risk it,” Elliott said. “The faster we get back over land, the better I’ll feel. Call up the next point, Patrick.”
McLanahan punched up the new destination number on his keyboard, verified the coordinates with his penciled notes on the margin of his makeshift chart and displayed the destination. The pilot’s heading bug shifted thirty degrees more to the right. The Old Dog banked right in response.
“Landfall in six minutes,” Luger said.
“Stay on watch, everyone,” Elliott said. “Stay on watch . . .”
“They’re launching the whole goddamned Russian Eastern Air Defense Command,” Beech said. He was sitting in direct command of the intelligence section; Markham and Captain Jacobs, captain of the Lawrence, were on the bridge.
“The son of a bitch couldn’t have picked a worse place this side of the Caspian Sea to disappear off Russian radar,” Markham told Jacobs. “Directly between Petropavlovsk and seven nuclear submarines in the pens to the south, and Kavaznya to the north.”
“But how did he go off their radar?” Jacobs asked, studying the slides Markham’s group had prepared of the situation. “I thought a mosquito couldn’t get through their radar coverage.”
“We’re not sure, Captain. More than likely, the guy crashed or ditched. Right from the beginning it sounded like the guy was having navigation problems.”
“Navigation problems don’t make planes ditch,” Jacobs said. “If he had a catastrophic emergency, enough to cause navigation or flight control problems, why the hell didn’t he declare an emergency? The Russians would’ve helped him—I’ve seen them do it before.”
“I don’t know, sir. He may have panicked.” Markham got up and pointed at the chart. “Radar coverage is sort of skimpy around here, too,” he said, as much to himself as to Jacobs. “Petropavlovsk radar coverage doesn’t quite extend this far north, but Beringa’s radar does cover this entire gap.”
Jacobs was about to say something but was interrupted by Beech on the intercom.
“Captain, message from PVO Strany, Far East Command headquarters, to all units. In the clear. Uncoded.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t read part of it in English,” Jacobs said. “What are they saying?”
“Air Defense Emergency declared for the area. General orders for deploying searching fighters in the area. Complete closing of Soviet airspace.”
“Send it,” Markham said. “Direct CINCPAC via JCS. Priority One.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jacobs studied the chart closer, finally picked up a pair of dividers lying on the console near his seat. “We use two hundred and fifty nautical miles for Center radars, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Markham said. “Standard line-of-sight-ranging. A bit more, depending on altitude.”
“But you don’t have a big circle around Beringa,” Jacobs noted, measuring the lines around the islands that composed the Russian members of the Aleutian chain.
“They don’t have a Center radar,” Markham said, his excitement rising. “They have shorter-range, low-altitude capable radar. Approach control radar.”
Jacobs measured a two hundred and fifty mile circle from Petropavlovsk. The circle barely intersected the radar circle from Beringa.
“They overlap . . .”
“But there’s a gap,” Markham said, pointing at the chart. “They overlap, but there’s still incomplete coverage. If you avoid this circle—”
“—he’s out of range.” Jacobs stabbed the chart excitedly and looked at Markham. “And Petropavlovsk won’t see him if—”
“If he’s low level. Below five or six thousand feet, he gets lost in the background radar clutter, even over water.”
“Wait a minute.” Jacobs held up a hand. “You said this guy was a tanker.’’
“He had a tanker call sign,” Markham said, checking his notes. “Lantern four-five Fox. Out of Elmendorf. But he had no flight plan, and Elmendorf reports no four-five Fox.”
“So he’s not a tanker. Then what?”
“A low-altitude penetrator?” Markham muttered. “A ... a bomber?”
“It seems he knew exactly where to go. Exactly. How else would he know about the gaps in radar coverage?”
Markham nodded. “But ... he surprised that recon jet.”
“Got his fingers caught in the cookie jar, maybe?”
Markham shook his head. “Spotted by a recon plane, he ... he turns around before they figure out he’s headed inland—”
“Toward Kavaznya, ” Jacobs said.
“And he’s disappeared again, going in the back way.”
“Goddamn,” Jacobs muttered. “Why me? Why now?”
“None of our communications on this entire boat are completely secure, sir,” Markham reminded the captain, second-guessing him. “If we blow the whistle—”
“Why the hell doesn’t anybody tell us what’s going on? Well, it’s too late now anyway. The whole Far East Command is after him. He won’t get far.”
“So what do we do?”
Jacobs shook his head. “We do nothing. Nothing we can do. That guy, whoever he is, is all on his own.”
“Four minutes to coast-in,” Dave Luger announced.
Elliott jerked himself out of his reverie. He hadn’t been sleeping—he couldn’t really remember the last time he had—but he had been in some sort of daydream ever since descending to low level. Now his eyes were locked onto the dim glow of the small Russian town they were approaching.
The tiny town, too small to have a name on Luger’s general-purpose navigation chart, appeared as a scattering of lights off* in the distance. Just one small blob of lights, with a small string of lights trailing away— probably a lighted path down to the docks for the fishermen, or the main road in and out of town.
It wasn’t the first Russian town he’d seen, but this one seemed different. Innocent. Peaceful. Moscow, the last time he was there as an Embassy adviser back in the seventies, was menacing. Even during the newlywed years of detente, he felt its choking, suffocating presence. Here, over the cold rough pioneer-like badlands of eastern Siberia, it seemed different...
Elliott unconsciously gripped the yoke tighter. The sight of the long SST nose of the Old Dog reminded him where he was, what they were doing. He readjusted his microphone.
“Wendy?”
“Nothing, General,” Wendy replied, nervously anticipating his query. “Random, low-power VHF.” Her voice was a clipped monotone.
“Distance to the coastal mountains, Dave?”
“General, I don’t know for sure. My enroute chart doesn’t show any detail of the Kamchatka peninsula. I’ll need a few radar sweeps to range them out.”
Elliott considered that. He couldn’t wait
to get within the safety of the mountains, but still . . . “All right—authorized. But no more than a few seconds.”
“Better let me take a look,” McLanahan said, readjusting his attack radar controls. “I can look out eighty miles in full-scan, Dave’s limited to thirty in a small cone.”
“Do it,” Elliott told him. “Dave, can you draw a picture of the terrain? Give yourself a little topographic map?”
Luger blocked out a section of his high-altitude chart and measured out a rough eighty-mile-range radar-scope diagram, then loosened his parachute and ejection seat straps and leaned over as far as possible to look at McLanahan’s ten-inch display.
“Ready.”
“Here we go.” McLanahan finished reconfiguring and pretuning his scope, then pressed the RADIATE button. The radar image of the eastern shore of the Kamchatka peninsula appeared—the first radar picture, McLanahan thought, from an American bomber about to make an attack on an installation of the Soviet Union. Don’t dwell on it, he told himself . . . “Gently rising terrain in the next forty miles.”
Luger was furiously shadow-graphing the scope presentation on his chart. “Navigation looks good—we’re about thirty miles from the coast on radar, our heading looks good to avoid overflying that town. It should pass about two miles to our left. High terrain starts in about thirty-seven miles, but so far nothing is above us. Some high stuff* at sixty miles but still no big shadows.”
“Which means,” Ormack said, “that five thousand feet might be a safe altitude for us.”
“Got all you need, Dave?” McLanahan asked.
Luger shook his head as he added some detail of some long-range peaks to his bastardized terrain chart. “Few more seconds . . .’’he muttered.
McLanahan nodded and continued studying the scope. “That town looks pretty big,” he said over interphone as he studied the display, adjusting the video and receiver gain controls to eliminate the terrain returns, then turned to his partner. “Done with the long range, Dave?” Luger nodded. “I’m checking that town in thirty-mile range. It looks funny.” He moved the range selector to thirty-mile range. The small town was now magnified in good detail at the top of his scope.
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