Thunder in the East

by Maloney, Mack;

  The first three of the stubby attack jets came in, dropped their bombs loads and escaped without a shot being fired at them. Their munitions were placed perfectly on two SAM sites and a radar station at the edge of the base. Three more A-7s screamed in, again using laser guided bombs to take out a pair of SAM sites, The follow-up trio of airplanes were carrying two 500-pound “Ironman” bombs apiece. These heavy-duty explosives were used for runway busting. They performed as advertised as two of the Strikefighters dashed through the increasing cloud of AA fire to blast moon-crater sized holes in the Circle’s main runway. The third A-7 had to divert from its bombing run due to heavy groundfire. It dropped its load on the likeliest target of opportunity and quickly departed the battle area.

  Within a minute of the A-7’s sneak attack, pandemonium had broken out at the enemy air base. The rogue A-7 had hit the airfield’s main communication station with its Ironmans, knocking the primary communication link between the Circle Combat Control center and the Circle interceptors. So, although few of them realized it at the time, the Circle aircraft rising to meet the United American bombers now had to rely on staticky secondary radio links, then they would return to their base to find its main runway was mortally cratered.

  “Two minutes to target …” Jones called out.

  No sooner had the words left his mouth when he heard his rear gunner yell: “Here they come! MiGs at five o’clock!”

  Suddenly the sky was filled with Texan F-4s diving through the bomber ranks to meet the climbing MiGs.

  “I count more than two dozen,” J.T. radioed ahead to Jones. “I suggest the escort engage also …”

  Jones had no time to mince words. “Do it, Tigershark leader,” he radioed. Immediately half the F-20s were rolling off toward the swarm of Fulcrums.

  The air battle was soon joined. The B-52s were now at 29,500 for their bombing runs and just 5000 feet below them a swirling knife-fight between the Circle and UA fighters had ensued. Glancing downward, Jones could see thick trails of brown jet exhaust criss-crossing with thinner white trails from air-to-air missiles. He saw a least three Circle MiGs get it in the span of ten seconds. Also one F-4 was smoking heavily and all this just in the small confined area he could see. His headphones were a racket of dogfight chatter: “Watch your ass!” “I got ’em!” “Missile lock!” “Smoke confirmed!” “Tango away!”

  In the middle of it all, Jones tried his best to concentrate on the bomb run, now just 90 seconds away. That’s when the SAMs started coming up …

  Both UA and Circle pilots alike saw the strange F-16XL roar into the swirl of battle below the B-52s. Under its wings it carried no less than 12 Sidewinders—only eight more than a normal F-16 might carry.

  But this airplane was far from normal …

  One Fulcrum pilot—an air pirate named Worm—was working on chasing an F-4 who in turn was blasting away at another Fulcrum with its nose cannon. Suddenly Worm was aware of the F-16 coming toward him at approximately the same altitude. He immediately laid off the F-4 and started to bank toward the exotic F-16. All of the Circle pilots had been warned that the legendary Hawk Hunter—The Wingman himself—might be flying with the United Americans. But Worm didn’t believe in legends. Besides he had it on good authority that Hunter had been killed months ago over in the Middle East somewhere.

  The pilot flying this F-16 therefore had to be an imposter.

  Worm leveled his MiG so it would sweep past the F-16 first, thus allowing him to roll into the UA jet and get on its tail. They were about a half mile apart when he started punching in arming instructions to his AA-10 air-to-air missiles, all the while keeping the approaching F-16 in sight via his cockpit Head’s Up Display.

  Suddenly, the F-16’s nose started to turn toward him. The strange jet didn’t alter its course—but, incredibly, it was turning on its axis …

  “What the fuck is this?” Worm cursed as he watched the airplane perform the bizarre gyration. “He can’t do that!”

  As they passed by each other at a combined speed of more than 1000 mph, the nose of the F-16 appeared as if it had suddenly burst into flames. Actually, all six of its snout cannons were firing at once. In an instant, the first four feet of the Fulcrum were gone—disintegrated in the combined fusillade of the six guns.

  It happened so quickly that Worm had barely breathed. The F-16 shot by him in a nano-second and was soon out of sight. With his nose gone, Worm felt the MiG start to drop—and fast! He yanked the ejection lever once and nothing happened. He hit it again as the cockpit started to fill with fuel fumes. Still nothing. A third as the ejector blast went off—but the canopy fly-away mechanism had been destroyed by the F-16’s awesome barrage.

  Worm ejected right through the hard canopy glass, severing his aorta in the process. His chute opened properly enough, carrying the air pirate’s limp and bleeding body down through the raging air battle.

  The F-16 quickly engaged two more Fulcrums, staying level yet rising straight up to meet them head-on. Two buttons were pushed. Two Sidewinders leaped from the aircraft’s cranked arrow wings. Two more Fulcrums were soon plummeting to the ground.

  One F-4 pilot was in deep trouble. He had spotted four MiGs going after the chaff dispensing F-106s and had sped to the rescue. Now two of the MiGs had turned on him and were squeezing him from both sides. He twisted and turned in his aging Phantom, his radar control officer in the back seat yelling out “Missile lock!” until he was hoarse.

  Suddenly the F-16XL was beside him. The F-4 pilot looked up and saw the man inside the exotic fighter wave, then point up. The Phantom driver got the message. He suddenly yanked back on his stick and put the F-4 into a straining, gut-wrenching climb. No sooner had he moved when the F-16 did an near-impossible sideways maneuver, taking his place in the line of the Fulcrums’ fire.

  As the F-4 pilot watched, the F-16 suddenly dropped straight down, then, all in one motion, pointed its nose in the vertical and fired off two Sidewinders. The Fulcrum pilots had had no time to react whatsoever. Both of the ’Winders ran true, destroying the MiGs within two seconds of each other.

  The F-4 pilot couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

  “How the hell did he do that?” he yelled back to his radar officer.

  “I’m dizzy just watching him,” came the reply.

  For the next 45 seconds, the F-16XL twisted, turned, yawed, rolled, climbed, dove and generally “translated” through the enemy fighters. Fulcrums were falling out of the skies in two and threes. Finally they pulled back.

  Not one had reached the B-52s …

  But the heavies were already in enough trouble.

  The chaff airplanes were doing their best, but a stiff wind was scattering the tin foil strips, thereby cutting down on their effectiveness. Jones’s aircraft’s ECM was cranking so hard it was getting hot, but still it was all he could do to keep the Stratofortress level in the barrage of SAMs coming up toward them.

  “Thirty seconds to go!” he called out, remembering that prior to this mission, the heaviest action he’d seen was a strike against a Circle nuclear plant in the Badlands. But that had been a cakewalk compared to this …

  Suddenly he saw a speck of light climbing up to meet him in amongst the streams of SAM smoke.

  It was Hunter.

  “Hey, Hawk!” Jones called out to him, dodging a pair of SA-5s on his starboard side. “It’s getting very hairy up here.”

  “Just follow me,” Hunter radioed back.

  With that, Hunter put the F-16 a quarter mile out and 500 feet below Jones’s lead airplane. Then, to the astonishment of all, he started shooting. At SAMs …

  Turning the F-16XL in its yaw-axis mode, Hunter swayed back and forth, shooting at all the approaching SAMs with his Vulcan Six Pack. He looked like a farmer clearing a row of wheat through a field. The nine bombers simply tightened up their formation and followed him through.

  They were soon roaring directly over the downtown section of the city.

  “Ten seconds …” J
ones yelled out. “Five. Four. Three. Two … One … Bombs away!”

  On his call, each B-52 bombardier pushed his release button. Instantly, more than a half million pounds of bombs were falling toward the city.

  “Climb! Climb!” Jones shouted into his microphone, but the Strat pilots needed no further encouragement. As one, they put their huge jets into a steep climb. Then they banked away from the city, which was now just feeling the impact of the first of 270 tons of bombs …

  CHAPTER 54

  YAZ’S INFRARED SCOPE WAS flashing like crazy …

  “Jesus, there’s something hot down there,” he said to Ben Wa who was next to him, piloting the A-37 Dragonfly spy ship.

  Wa noted the heading and banked toward it. They were some 100 miles east of Syracuse, patrolling the highways for evidence of Circle troop movements, more mystery trucks or any other enemy activity. After his first taste of behind-the-lines combat, Yaz had to admit he felt more comfortable riding along at 10,000 feet.

  “Signal getting stronger,” he said, fine-tuning the infrared scope. “This one is burning. Sun’s been down for three hours and it’s glowing. Pushing out a lot of internal heat …”

  “Let’s go down and take a closer look,” Wa said, putting the A-37 into a dive.

  They were over what used to be known as the New York State Thruway. Now the highway—which at one time stretched up and across the entire state—was little more than a collection of long strips of concrete separated by fallen bridges. Air pirates had been known to set up shop where the roadway was straight and flat and boasting tree cover on each side. These the long spans of highway proved ideal for landings and take-offs. Hunter and his cohorts had once fought a brief war in this area against a notorious air pirate gang known as The Cherry Busters. But now it appeared that most of the road was abandoned and little used by either surface vehicles or aircraft.

  Except for those right below them.

  “I read ten vehicles in all,” Yaz said, as the A-37 passed directly overhead. “The hot one is right in the middle. They are not semis. Much smaller readings. And they’re not barreling along like the semis did. They’re only going about 35 mph, tops.”

  “Something’s slowing them up,” Ben replied. “They already know we’re here, might as well go down for a real close look …”

  With that, he put the A-37 into a tight 180 and brought it down to just 250 feet. Yaz automatically turned on the small jet’s ECM pod, and he armed its ten small, air-to-surface missiles—just in case. He also switched on the AGM-65 radar’s threat warning indicator.

  “No threat indications,” he reported, meaning that no one on the roadway below was warming up a weapon—such as shoulder-launched SAM—to launch at them.

  Ben headed straight for the convoy, the A-37’s bright nose light switched to on. The glare illuminated the ten vehicles enough for the airplane’s belly cameras to get a good photo of them.

  “Smile guys,” Wa said as the A-37 streaked over the convoy, which had now stopped.

  Yaz felt several pings! hit the underwings of the Dragonfly; someone below had taken a few shots at them with a rifle or an automatic weapon.

  “No damage done,” he reported ten seconds after they made their photo sweep.

  “Did you see anything really unusual?” Wa asked him. The pilot had been so busy during the low pass just controlling the jet that he had barely caught a glimpse of the vehicles in the convoy.

  Yaz had had a better, albeit brief view. “Armored jeeps I think,” he said. “It looks like they’re escorting a tank of some kind …”

  “Only one way to find out for sure,” Ben said, turning the Dragonfly westward. “Let’s get the hell back and look at what the camera saw …”

  Three hours later, Hunter, Jones, Ben and Yaz were gathered around a small video monitor, waiting to see the footage the A-37 had shot for the first time.

  “Here we go,” Ben said as he started the VCR.

  The screen flickered to life. At first it was simply dark. Then gradually, outlines of the roadway, the center island and the trees on either side came into view. Suddenly a bright flash sent a wave of static across the screen, the result of Ben turning on the A-37’s nose beacon.

  “Here’s where we get illumination,” Yaz said.

  Now the footage clearly showed the ten vehicles lined up on the side of the roadway, stopped at the first sound of the airplane. A few figures were seen scurrying about as the camera drew nearer.

  “The vehicle in the middle of them was the one giving off all the heat,” Yaz said as the camera passed right over the front end of the convoy. “Here it comes … right now!”

  The airplane was moving so fast, it was hard to discern just what kind of vehicle it was. But that was what slow motion and freeze-frame were for.

  “Let’s back it up,” Jones said,

  Yaz did so and within a few seconds they were watching the fast sweep in slo-mo and reverse.

  “Freeze it right there …” Hunter said.

  Yaz complied and when the static cleared, all four of them were looking at a relatively clean image of the vehicle that had been glowing on the infrared scope.

  It was the gold APC …

  Viceroy Dick gobbled up the handful of painkillers and washed them down with a swig of champagne.

  “Is your head better, baby?” the young girl beside him cooed, softly stroking the bandage over his left eye.

  “It’s getting there,” he said, taking another gulp of bubbles.

  He had been knocked out cold during the A-7 air strike—while he was watching the scope showing the heavy bombers approaching Syracuse, the attack planes had caught those at the Aerodrome completely by surprise. When they pulled him out of the rubble of the base’s communications center, he was covered with bumps and scrapes, the most serious needing twenty stitches over his left eye.

  But Dick made the best of the situation. His wound relieved him from the hideous duty of pulling the 150 corpses from the demolished communications center. The Circle doctors had patched him up, gave him a bottle of codeine pills and sent him on his way. He had gone straight to one of the Aerodrome’s still-functioning bars, and although it was about three in the morning, was able to pick up the young hooker and bring her back to his quarters to start his recuperation.

  Like some many of the girls who had chosen to stay at the Aerodrome, she was dressed in this latest “Queenie” fashion—woman’s tux, silk low-cut blouse, dark nylons and short boots. Her hair was cut in the perfect blond shag style that completed the look.

  Dick had her remove the blouse and as he fondled her pert breasts, he evaluated his situation.

  The United American air strikes—both the raid on the Aerodrome and the carpet bombing of downtown Syracuse—had been devastatingly accurate. Not only had the A-7s creamed the base’s communications center, they had so cratered its main runway, that the surviving Fulcrums had had a bitch of a time returning to base and landing on the shorter secondary runways. Two of the valuable airplanes had wound up in ditches because of the abbreviated landing space.

  “Sixteen airplanes shot down,” he murmured. “Two in the goddamn ditch, two take off for parts unknown. And we didn’t get a single shot on those bombers …”

  “What are you talking about, baby,” the girl asked as she rubbed him softly between his legs. “Those guys who bombed us yesterday?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Dick said, at first not even realizing he was talking aloud. The codeine was starting to take effect. “What would you know about it?”

  She shrugged and pushed her hair back, preparing to perform oral sex on him. “I just know that guy they call the Wingman was involved,” she said. “Everyone was talking about it right afterward …”

  That’s all he needed to hear. Even the lowliest-bargirl knew that the great Hawk Hunter—he being the person whose bones were supposedly rotting over in the Arabian desert—was very much alive and working with the United American air forces. Dick had bel
ieved all along that Hunter was alive. Even Viktor couldn’t take out the famous flag-waving pilot.

  “Yeah, what do you know about this guy?” he asked her.

  She reached for the champagne bottle and gargled down a mouthful.

  “We hear all kinds of things,” she said. “He’s the best in the air. He’s the best in bed. He has ESP. You know, they say the Queen is his girlfriend and …”

  “Enough!” Dick scolded her. “I’m sick of hearing about this guy. Just get on what you’ve been paid for …”

  She took another gargle of champagne and then went down on him.

  He lay back and tried to figure his next move. Damn these United Americans! he thought. It’s time they got a taste of their own medicine …

  CHAPTER 55

  THE SUN WAS JUST coming up when Hunter spotted the ten-vehicle convoy. They were 60 miles east of the position where Ben and Yaz had first spotted them and were now close to the old state capital of Albany.

  He had loaded up his F-16XL with an even dozen air-to-surface missiles and had set his radar on the search and destroy mode. He was intent on taking out the convoy, quickly, thus allowing him to get back to the more pressing duties of the battle for Syracuse.

  Once they were certain the gold APC was part of the convoy Wa and Yaz had found, he and Jones engaged in yet another round of speculation as to what the armored vehicle was carrying. They had estimated more than 100 troops—probably Spetsnaz—were accompanying the vehicle, a heavy guard which indicated whatever was inside the APC was more important in the enemy’s eyes than the cargo being hauled in the Mystery Trucks.

  It was also something small, so Jones’s guesses included the so-called “key” mechanisms used to launch ICBMs. With proper adjustment, the keys could fire the remaining mid-west-cum-Badlands ICBMs—assuming there were some left—to just about any spot in the world. Hunter leaned more toward something having to do with the SDI systems in space. Perhaps the Russians were stealing the essential elements to the old SDS system in an attempt to reprogram their own bargain-basement orbiting stations. Rumors to that effect had been floating around the continent since the New Order was installed. And Hunter knew that it was more in the Soviet way of doing things to steal the technology than bother to develop it on their own.