by Dale Brown
Another series of short bursts punctured the tanks and set off thousands of gallons of fuel. Huge sheets of flame roared high into the air, bright enough to turn night into day.
Backlit now by the fires burning all along the flight line, Nadia Rozek’s Iron Wolf robot loped deeper into the Russian air base, hunting new prey.
Four hundred yards south, Patrick swiveled his CID’s torso. More targets appeared, a dispersed group of four Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile launch vehicles and their mobile command post. With one robotic hand, he slung the 40mm grenade launcher he’d been using to blow holes in the terminal buildings the Russians were using as barracks for their garrison, pilots, and ground crews. With the other hand, he uncoupled his electromagnetic rail gun and powered it up.
CCRRRAACK!
He fired five times, pausing only briefly to center the rail gun on a new target. Brief, blinding flashes of superheated plasma from the rail gun were eclipsed by larger and even brighter explosions as small dense projectiles moving at Mach 5 tore the Russian missile launchers and their command vehicle apart.
Movement alert, the CID’s computer warned. Two enemy aircraft taxiing for takeoff.
Patrick swung back to the left, accelerating to get clear of the thick columns of smoke boiling away from burning vehicles and buildings. Even his superb thermal sensors were being degraded by all the heat billowing off wreckage strewn across the airfield.
He bounded over an overturned BRDM and came down right in the middle of a group of stunned Russian soldiers. Mouths and eyes widened in horror as they took in the huge, lethal machine suddenly in their midst. One of them shook off his fear fast enough to bring his AK-74 up and start shooting. Bullets smacked into the CID’s torso and ricocheted away.
Growling, Patrick spun around—blurring into motion while seizing panicked, screaming enemy soldiers with his open robotic hand. One after another, he tossed them toward the nearest building. Their screams ended in dull, wet thuds as they slammed into metal and concrete walls and slid dead to the ground.
Su-27s on takeoff, the computer reported.
He swung back to the right, following the cues provided by his CID’s navigation system. Suddenly he came out of the smoke and haze and into clearer air.
A couple of hundred yards away, two twin-tailed gray-, white-, and black-camouflaged Russian fighters were rolling down the runway—picking up speed fast as their pilots went to afterburner to get into the air as quickly as possible. The two Su-27s must have been on ready alert, prepped to take off at the first sign of any attack. Those were brave airmen, Patrick thought with a brief touch of sadness, but foolish. Still, he couldn’t blame them for trying. It was the duty of any pilot to get his plane off the ground under enemy fire.
And it was his job to stop them.
He swung his rail gun toward the lead Su-27 as it lifted off the runway.
CCRRAACK!
The tungsten-steel alloy slug ripped through the Russian fighter’s fuselage and blew out the other end in a spray of burning metal and wiring. Knocked out of control, the Su-27 rolled off to the right, slammed back onto the runway, and blew up in a massive orange fireball. The second fighter, moving too fast to steer and too slow to take off, raced straight into the flaming, tangled remains of the first Su-27. Its undercarriage ripped away with an enormous screech and it slid on down the runway in a dazzling cloud of pinwheeling sparks and burning fuel. Suddenly it exploded. Twisted bits of debris pattered down across the airfield.
Two green dots pulsed at the edge of Patrick’s vision.
“CID One, this is Coyote One and Two. Good data links established,” he heard Brad radio. “We’re inbound at four hundred and fifty knots. Altitude one thousand. Range twelve miles. Ready for your targets.”
Patrick could hear a low background hum building in his ears. Warning. Big Bird radars reenergizing, the computer reported. He nodded. The Russian SAM crews must have finally managed to flush the malicious code he and Captain Rozek had loaded into their systems. He turned and ran toward the rows of earthen revetments holding the remaining Russian aircraft based at Konotop. At the same time, he keyed in and sent a series of GPS coordinates via data link to the incoming MQ-55 drones.
“Target sets received, CID One,” Brad told him. “And downloaded into our weapons.”
“Then take ’em out, Coyotes,” Patrick ordered.
Remote piloting was a damned odd experience, Brad thought. Most of him felt as though he were flying inside Coyote One—streaking at high speed toward the burning Russian air base. But at the same time, he also knew he was actually seated in a darkened control station more than six hundred miles to the west, watching screens that showed views and data gathered from the cameras and limited sensors mounted on the MQ-55 drone.
“Coyote One to Two,” he said. “Execute toss attack.”
“Two copies,” Mark Darrow replied from the station next door. “Attacking now.”
Brad double-checked the attack computer settings as he closed in to the target. Through his headset, he heard the bomb doors whine open as directed by the computer. He saw the flight-director bars suddenly skitter to the left and upward and he held his breath as the MQ-55 banked hard left and roared skyward at a steep angle, climbing fast through five thousand feet.
He saw three “GBU32” indications on his computer screen flash, then blink, then extinguish in rapid succession. One after another, three one-thousand-pound GBU-32 JDAMs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions, released, fell out of the bay, and flew onward, arcing up through the sky. The toss maneuver gave the bombs more range from low altitude than a conventional level bomb run, and the turn allowed the Coyote to escape while the bombs were still in the air. As the bombs hurtled through the air, receivers aboard each bomb were already picking up position data from the GPS satellite constellations high above in Earth orbit.
Inside each JDAM, a Honeywell HG1700 Ring Laser Gyro inertial unit constantly measured velocity, position, and acceleration, feeding this data through a microprocessor in its guidance and control unit. Together with the GPS signals it picked up, the GCU gave the bomb a continuous and highly accurate fix on its current position. Control surfaces in its tail flexed and swiveled, making the tiny adjustments necessary to “fine-tune” the bomb’s trajectory as it flew—screaming down from the top of its “toss” to strike within two meters of its programmed coordinates.
Brad’s Coyote rolled away, closed its bay doors, and dove back to low altitude. In the screens, he could see the light and dark patchwork of the fields and small towns surrounding the city of Konotop and its airfield rising up to meet him. He leveled off at just over five hundred feet, high enough to clear any buildings and low enough to be more difficult to detect on radar.
“JDAMs away,” he heard Darrow say. “Returning to base.”
Brad frowned. That was the plan. Once their bombs were gone, the Coyotes were useless and defenseless—dependent for survival entirely on their limited stealth capabilities. By any measure of common sense, he should follow Mark and slide out of the Konotop area while the getting was good. But he couldn’t shake the knowledge that Nadia was still in combat and in danger there below him. No matter what the plan said, it felt wrong to fly off to safety, leaving her behind.
Six huge explosions lit the sky, each set at a different point in a complete circle around the airfield. As the biggest flashes faded, he could see small bursts of orange and white fire—secondary detonations as missile propellant and warheads cooked off.
“Those Big Bird radars are down!” his father said. “Good hits on all JDAMs. Nice work, Coyotes. Many thanks.”
“Wolf Ferry One taking off,” the pilot of the XV-40 Sparrowhawk tilt-rotor transport reported from its hidden position in western Ukraine. “ETA to extraction point is roughly thirty minutes.”
“Ferry Two also in the air,” said another voice, this one belonging to the pilot flying the Iron Wolf Squadron’s MH-47 helicopter. Since the huge Chinook was much slower than the
XV-40, it had been concealed even closer to the Dnieper River.
Still undecided, Brad tweaked his joystick slightly to the right, starting a gentle turn that would keep him close to Konotop for just a few more minutes.
Piloting CID Two, Nadia Rozek ran straight up the sloping side of one of the aircraft revetments. Hard-packed dirt and netting tore away beneath the weight of her armored feet, but she was moving so fast that it didn’t matter. At the top of the revetment, she jumped again, bounding high over the Kevlar tent sheltering a Russian plane. She came down hard on the other side, right in the middle of a taxiway. She swung around, seeing the long, pointed nose of a Su-24M fighter-bomber poking out of the shelter.
She fired a short burst from her autocannon into the Su-24 at point-blank range. Pieces spiraled away as the shells hit home, gutting its avionics and controls. The autocannon whirred and fell silent. Ammunition expended, her computer reported.
Nadia snapped it back into place in her weapons pack and drew her rail gun. It whined shrilly, powering up.
Something big thudded down to her left, only meters away. Startled, she swung toward it—raising her weapon. And lowered it, just as fast. It was CID One, piloted by the nameless stranger who commanded this mission. Of all the peculiar experiences she’d had since joining the Iron Wolf Squadron, realizing that one of their only two war robots was manned by someone no one ever saw was surely one of the oddest.
“Easy there, Captain,” the other pilot said, somehow sounding amused even through an encrypted and compressed radio transmission. “You take the aircraft shelters on the right. I’ll go left. Make your shots count. We’re both running low on ammo and power.”
“Understood, One,” Nadia said stiffly, aware that her face was reddening with embarrassment. She turned right and loped down the row of parked Russian aircraft, destroying them with single shots from her rail gun. Behind her, she could hear the other CID doing the same thing. Caught on the ground inside their shelters, Su-24 fighter-bombers, Su-25 ground-attack planes, and MiG-29 and Su-27 fighters all went up in flames or were torn apart by high-velocity impacts.
OVER KURSK, IN WESTERN RUSSIA
THAT SAME TIME
The two Russian Su-35 single-seat fighters were flying east at ten thousand meters, heading for the barn at Voronezh Malshevo airfield after finishing another routine patrol over eastern Ukraine. The lead pilot, Major Vladimir Cherkashin, yawned under his oxygen mask and then fought down the urge to go on yawning. These night flights were deadly dull. Pilots assigned to provide air cover over the armies advancing on Poland during the day at least got to see the seemingly endless columns of tanks, self-propelled guns, and infantry fighting vehicles on the move. At night, there was nothing to see but the occasional pattern of lights from some drab little Ukrainian farm village and the vast sea of stars blinking overhead. And in the absence of any opposition from the Poles or the Ukrainians, there was nothing to do.
“Drobovik Lead, this is Voronezh Control. Stand by for new orders,” a tense voice crackled through his headphones.
“Control, this is Shotgun Lead. Standing by,” Cherkashin said, jolted to full awareness. “Did you hear that, Oleg?” he asked his wingman, flying about two kilometers off his right wing.
“Da, Major,” the other pilot, Captain Oleg Bessonov, replied. “It’s nice to know that we’re not the only ones awake this late.”
“Shotgun Lead, Voronezh Control,” a new voice said urgently. To his surprise, Cherkashin recognized it as the voice of Major General Kornilov, commander of the 7000th Air Base at Malshevo. His eyebrows rose. Whatever new orders were coming were not routine. “Proceed immediately to Konotop. Repeat, immediately. Exercise caution! We’ve just lost all radio and telephone communication with the airfield there, including the S-300 battalion. Orbit over the airfield at five thousand meters and await target vectors. Say state and estimated time en route.”
Shit, Cherkashin thought, that didn’t sound good. Five thousand meters put them high enough to protect them from shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. Was this another terrorist attack? Or something much bigger? “Understood, Control, stand by,” he said, quickly bringing up a digital map on his left multifunction display. His two Su-35s were about two hundred kilometers due east of Konotop. Another key press switched the MFD back to a view of his fighter’s systems and fuel state. They still had plenty of gas. “ETE less than eight minutes.”
“Acknowledged,” Kornilov said. “The airspace is clear of all friendly aircraft. If you detect hostiles, you are cleared to engage without further orders. Repeat: weapons hot. Acknowledge.”
“Yes, sir, understood, weapons hot,” Cherkashin acknowledged. His jaw tightened. Letting them off the command and control leash like this meant the brass was definitely spooked. He keyed his mike, signaling Bessonov. “Shotgun Two, this is Lead. Follow me!”
Cherkashin tugged his stick hard left, yanking the Su-35 into a tight, high-G turn back to the west. At the same time, he shoved his throttle forward, feeding more power to the fighter’s big Saturn 117S turbofans. As he rolled out of the turn on a course toward Konotop, the aircraft accelerated smoothly. A quick finger press on his stick powered up his Irbis-E multimode electronically scanned array radar. Whatever the hell was going on up ahead, he and Bessonov were not going to be flying in blind.
KONOTOP AIRFIELD
THAT SAME TIME
Patrick reached the end of the row of parked aircraft and bounded back over the revetment. Between them, he and Nadia Rozek had just wrecked more than twenty Russian fighter and attack planes. Everywhere he looked, there were ruined, burning buildings, trucks, and armored cars . . . and dead soldiers. Lots of dead Russian soldiers and airmen. He winced. There were probably a few terrified survivors hiding in the debris, but he was willing to bet that none of them had ever gotten a real look at the two robots who had just smashed Konotop Airfield. They’d killed any Russian who’d come close enough to see them clearly.
Still moving, he checked his ammunition and power status. He was out of ammunition for his autocannon and down to just a few shots with the 40mm grenade launcher. Even his electromagnetic rail gun was on its last clip, with just two shots remaining. His CID was down to about 40 percent power, more than enough to make it back to the Iron Wolf recharge and rearmament team, but not enough for another prolonged engagement. Query CID Two status, he thought.
The information relayed from the other robot’s automated systems appeared almost instantly in his consciousness, as if he was reading the information in his mind’s eye. He frowned. The Polish Special Forces captain’s machine was in much the same state, although her rail gun was completely empty. She did have a couple of mini-Stinger antiaircraft missiles left in one weapons pack, but not much else that would be of real use in ground combat.
He nodded. They’d done what they came to do. Now it was time to break off, before the Russians were able to react. “CID Two, this is One,” he signaled. “Rally and recover as planned. Repeat, rally and recover.”
“Acknowledged,” Nadia replied.
The two Iron Wolf CIDs turned and sprinted away through the thickening clouds of oily, black smoke rolling across the ravaged Russian air base. They jumped over the still-active perimeter minefields and bounded northeast, moving toward the distant extraction point at a steady forty miles an hour.
Warning, Patrick’s computer suddenly pulsed in his consciousness. Two Su-35s east of your position. Range sixty miles. Closing at seven hundred knots. Altitude fifteen thousand feet. One X-band radar active.
“Well, that’s torn it,” he muttered. Those Russian fighters would have a difficult time locking on to the CIDs, but the other Iron Wolf units—especially the XV-40 tilt-rotor and Chinook helicopter coming in to pick them up—would be sitting ducks. And once their robots ran out of battery and fuel-cell power, he and Captain Rozek would be just as dead.
“CID One, this is Two,” Nadia said crisply, seeing the same alert. “Suggest we move east and de
ploy for antiair ambush. Here.” She highlighted a group of several drab, six-story-tall, Stalinist-era apartment buildings on the northern outskirts of Konotop.
Patrick nodded, seeing her suggested ambush site mirrored on his own display. Despite the pressure on her, Captain Rozek was thinking clearly, calmly, and showing superb tactical sense. The buildings there would give them good cover from radars and IRSTs, infrared search and tracking systems, on those incoming Su-35s. “Agreed, CID Two. Let’s go!”
Brad listened to their quick, terse transmissions with mounting despair. His MQ-55 Coyote was still orbiting at low altitude just five miles west of the city. Stealth design or not, the powerful Irbis-E phased-array radars on those fast-approaching Russian fighters were sure to pick his defenseless drone up in the next couple of minutes. Should he bolt to the west right now, hoping to draw the Su-35s away from Nadia and his father? No, he thought bitterly, that would accomplish nothing. Once those Su-35 pilots locked him up, they could easily knock him out of the sky with a single long-range missile shot. He wouldn’t buy the CIDs and the other Iron Wolf ground teams more than a minute or two. At most. Worse yet, breaking west would only lead the Russians that much closer to the even more visible and vulnerable friendly aircraft heading for the planned extraction point.
He bit his lip. There had to be something else he could try. Somewhere else he could fly. He pushed the joystick forward a bit, sliding down to within a couple of hundred feet of the ground. Flying really low and really slow might buy him a few extra seconds to think.
Quickly, Brad brought up a digitized satellite map of Konotop on his secondary display. The two CIDs were going to try hiding among the “clutter” of the city’s buildings. Could he try the same thing?