“Nothing wrong with your procedures, Sergeant.”
Butler allowed a smile. “Have a good flight, and good hunting. We should be ready to go in twenty minutes, maybe less. Captain Powell is over there. I’m very sorry about the Megafortress, sir. Well, gotta go.” Butler handed Patrick his flight helmet, saluted and trotted back to the maintenance supervisor’s truck.
J. C. Powell met McLanahan halfway to Cheetah. He slapped his hands together. “We’re going hunting?”
“If I don’t get my ass court-martialed first, yes.”
“I heard Ken James stole the plane? I don’t believe it. I always suspected the guy was a little whacked out but not this ...”
“He’s more than a little whacked out. He’s jumped head-first into the shallow end, or something a lot worse.”
“Such as?”
“Something Briggs said a few days ago . . . that his security problems started when James arrived at Dreamland about a year and a half ago. Briggs even suspected Wendy, who happened to get here at the same time.”
“You mean, you think Ken James was some kind of damn spy?”
“It would answer a lot of questions, wouldn’t it?”
“The guy’s an Academy grad, passed every security screening check I have—probably more. I’m only a ninety-day wonder and I had to jump through some pretty small hoops—” “I didn’t say I had it all figured out. Maybe he was turned or recruited after he got here, or he’s being blackmailed. Maybe I’m all wrong. But one thing’s for sure—if the F-15S out of Davis-Monthan don’t get him, we will. I just hope I get a chance to ask him why the hell he did it”—Patrick glanced at the AIM-120 missiles being raised into position on Cheetah’s wings—“before we put one up his tailpipe.”
Over southwest Arizona
Twenty minutes later
There were eight other pilots who wanted to put one up Ken James’ tailpipe, but he wasn’t going to give them the opportunity.
Ken James—that name now discarded by DreamStar’s pilot, Andrei Maraklov—could see waves of radars all around him, but they were all search radars. He was deep within the Colorado River valley just south of Parker Dam, following the rugged mountain ridges as closely as he could to avoid detection. Two longer-range F-16L cranked-arrow fighters were behind him, their radars probing deep within the valley, but they never got a solid lock-on and they were staying up high to try to scan as much ground as possible. With their present tactics they were never going to get a shot at him.
But they were no longer the main threats—they were the pushers, the drivers, there only to keep DreamStar headed south toward the real danger. Maraklov had caught bits and pieces of scrambled radio conversations between the F-i6s and another aircraft. It was not hard to guess which: a Boeing 707 or 767 AWACS radar plane, stationed, Maraklov reasoned, between Gila Bend and Yuma over Sentinel Plain. From there the older 707 AWACS could scan over one hundred twenty thousand cubic miles of airspace, from San Diego to El Paso, and most of the way down the Gulf of California into Mexico. The radar aboard the improved 767 was even better. No doubt the AWACS would be accompanied by at least two F-15 fighters out of Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson for protective escort, plus at least two more F-15S to hunt down DreamStar.
The fuel situation was critical. Less than an hour’s worth of fuel, less than an hour from the hastily arranged landing site in Mexico. Staying at low altitude was badly sucking up fuel, but he had no choice—the AWACS could have picked him up as far north as Las Vegas if he was any higher.
Of course the maneuvering he did during the B-52 attack pushed him under the fuel curve. Especially that last maneuver, going from Mach one to one hundred knots one hundred feet off the ground, thereby putting DreamStar in a virtual hover. That took care of any reserve he’d had hopes of building up . . .
Well, the B-52 Megafortress was dead. They certainly nicknamed it right. It almost escaped, almost dodged away in time, almost managed to decoy the AIM-120 away. The Scorpion missile had to switch to home-on-jam guidance to finish the attack. Ironically the massive jamming power of the B-52 was probably what did it in—it must have been easy for the Scorpion missile to follow jamming power like that.
Who was on that plane? Ormack—good officer, better pilot, Elliott’s natural successor for the command of Dreamland. Kahn—a desk jockey. Had no business in the cockpit. Maraklov didn’t know Frost. He had dated Evanston once but that was no more than an experiment that neither wanted to continue. Besides, navs had no information of any value to anybody.
Angelina Pereira was almost old enough to be his mother, but she liked to use men and she liked men to use her. No age limits. She was never a target for any information or recruitment, although the KGB’s standard profiles fitted her. She probably would have laughed at him, just before shooting him in the balls. She was an unexpected job bonus, nothing else.
He would miss Wendy Tork most of all. Or rather miss never having had a chance to try to fulfill his fantasies about her . . . take her away from McLanahan ... Too bad he hadn’t tried to latch onto her sooner. If nothing else she had some highly useful information on electronic countermeasures research . . .
He made a slight altitude and course correction to avoid overflying a group of white-water rafters less than a hundred feet below. As he banked away to avoid them he could see several put hands over ears against the noise, but a few bikini- clad ladies waved. He had made that trip down the Colorado River several times, spending a weekend shooting the rapids, getting dumped into the swirling waters, laughing at a roaring campfire with a beer in one hand and a pretty young lieutenant from Nellis in the other.
Did they have rapids in Russia? Were the women pretty? Maraklov had forgotten more than remembered.
Things had, people said, changed over the years. Glasnost . . . the place was more open. But he doubted it would be to him.
Andrei Maraklov might truly be the deepest deep-cover agent ever produced by the KGB, but that didn’t mean he could go back to the USSR and enjoy the gratitude of his country. Would he ever be promoted to a leadership position in the KGB or the Mikoyan-Gureyvich Aircraft Design Bureau, the agency that designed and built the greatest fighter aircraft? No. He had been in the U.S. for nine years. Before that he had spent three years in a school that spoke more English and acted more American than parts of San Francisco and Chicago or L.A. They’d have to reteach him Russian, for God’s sake. If they ever trusted him after his return he’d probably be given some know-nothing job or a pension and watched for the rest of his life. He might be allowed to emigrate, but he’d be safer from the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency in Russia. Which didn’t say much. If they didn’t trust him they’d pick his mind clean of every scrap of information he had, then discard him. Either way, would his life be better in his homeland? What he really felt attached to, more than anything or anyone, was this plane that he had become part of, that was part of him . . .
Up ahead, it seemed like the entire sky had turned green. Search radar—a big one. There was definitely an AWACS radar plane up there. He was in the radar shadow right now, but in only a few miles the Colorado River valley would flatten out into the Sonora Desert basin, and then he’d be trapped. The last hundred fifty miles to the border was going to turn into a gauntlet—an unknown number of F-15 fighters in front of him, waiting for him to emerge from the valley. He was also going toward Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just ahead on the border, a base for two squadrons of F/A-18 fighter bombers, and F-16 fighters from Luke AFB in Phoenix could join in. So he could be facing six squadrons of fighters from four military bases on this last hundred-mile leg.
Then, he saw it: the AWACS radar plane. DreamStar’s threat receiver pinpointed the aircraft about a hundred fifty miles away, orbiting over the center of the Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson at twenty-five thousand feet. And if DreamStar could see the AWACS plane, he could see DreamStar. At a quick mental inquiry, Maraklov had the threat-warning computer analyze the radar transmissions from the plane a
nd learned it was the older E-3B Sentry AWACS, almost twenty-five years old but still a formidable radar platform; it was probably a drug-interdiction aircraft based out of Davis- Monthan AFB.
Suddenly, like some eerie Martian fog, green sky descended and engulfed him, and then the sky turned yellow. The AWACS had found him, started to track him. Maraklov tried to dodge closer to the river-valley edges to hide in any available radar shadow. No use. Once he was spotted and identified—an aircraft at two hundred feet above ground traveling at six hundred miles an hour could hardly be mistaken for a civilian plane—the AWACS would change position farther west to maintain a solid track on him in the valley . . .
“Unidentified aircraft ten miles north of Blythe, altitude twelve hundred feet MSL, airspeed five hundred forty knots. This is the United States Air Force air intercept controller on GUARD.” The radio message was being broadcast “in the blind” on GUARD, the international emergency frequency, to prove to him that he had indeed been spotted. “You are ordered to climb to ten thousand feet MSL, reduce speed and lower your landing gear immediately.” Military aircraft being intercepted were ordered to lower their landing gear because as a safety device the weapon systems on most fighters were automatically deactivated when the landing gear was down. “Contact me on two-three-three point zero immediately, repeat, contact me on frequency two-three-three point zero.”
DreamStar’s weapon system did not deactivate unless Maraklov deactivated it, gear up or down, but it was a moot point—DreamStar had only one AIM-120 missile left and very little fuel, not enough for any sort of engagement. The F-15 fighters would not have much chance of catching him on their own, but with the AWACS up and locked-on they could be vectored in with high precision and even process a missile launch, all without one watt of energy being transmitted from their own radars. So DreamStar would have to use its attack radar to find the F-15S, and that would give away DreamStar’s position to them.
Maraklov set one of his radios to the discrete frequency but did not reply—that would be suicidal. But he did hear: “DreamStar, this is Colonel Harrell, Eagle Squadron commander. We’re following vectors toward you. We’ll be all over you in a few seconds. Climb out of there, slow down and drop your gear or we’ll consider you a hostile and blow your shit away. Answer up. Over.”
A one-second burst of energy on the attack radar told Maraklov the story—six fighters, three pairs, all at different altitudes, arranged along the Colorado River and spaced about twenty miles apart. The closest was about thirty miles ahead, only two hundred feet above ground. The AWACS had moved northward a few miles to get a better look down the valley and to get away from the radar shadows from the Kofa Mountains.
“We’ve got lock-on, James,” Harrell said. “I got you at my twelve o’clock, twenty-eight miles. My wingmen know where you are. The Marines have set up a little surprise for you. Hiding down here in the mud ain’t going to help. Give it up before you get yourself smoked.”
That bit about Yuma Marine Corps Air Station was not exactly true, but it came close. The Marines could easily set up a surface-to-air missile blockade of the Colorado River mouth from Yuma Marine Corps Air Station. Harrell wouldn’t reveal that, though. But the odds were starting to pile up here, and they were all against him.
There was no way to even the odds, but Maraklov decided he wasn’t going to just surrender. Giving up DreamStar was unthinkable. It would make everything he’d done pointless. But if the F-15S didn’t get him, his lack of fuel reserves would. Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy for the F-15S to bring him down. It was time to put his DreamStar through its paces.
Maraklov pushed DreamStar to full power, trimmed for max speed and put her right down on the deck—fifty feet above the river bed.
“That was stupid, James,” Harrell called over the radio. “Very damn stupid. We’ve got you all the way. You can’t get away ...”
* * *
Maybe, maybe not. But he wasn’t about to drive right into their laps so they could take easy shots at him. If they wanted him they’d have to work for a shot. He had been cruising at about two to three hundred feet above ground, popping up occasionally to pass over bridges and power lines strung across the Colorado River. Now, two hundred feet would seem like two thousand compared to his present altitude. Using his computer-enhanced responses and DreamStar’s powerful radar in terrain-avoidance mode, Maraklov kept DreamStar less than fifty feet above ground. He did not try to pop up over tall transmission lines—he went under them. He could clearly see rafters and campers lined up on the banks, plugging their ears against the sonic boom that rolled over them as he roared past at Mach one—if he could have seen behind him, he would have seen a huge plume of white exploding off the Colorado River as DreamStar’s sonic wake crashed against the water. Birds pinged and slammed into the canopy and fuselage, but Maraklov kept going, too close now to be brought down by a damned duck.
Near the town of Picacho the steep mountain ranges on either side of the Colorado disappeared. He was only forty miles to the border. He broke away from the river and headed directly south for Yuma.
Suddenly ANTARES screamed “missile tracking” in his brain. The threat receivers had detected that an AIM-120 Scorpion missile had activated its radar and was tracking him— more likely, the F-15 had fired two missiles, since he probably was carrying two more and had at least three other wingmen with missiles. They had a lot of firepower on their side; they could afford to be generous.
Maraklov commanded a hard seven-G climb, almost straight up. He gained altitude to about a thousand feet, then flipped over and pulled hard in a nine-G descent straight down. Fifty feet above ground he yanked his fighter upright and pulled hard to the left behind a hill. The missiles followed his turns but overshot on the climbout, and when they turned to follow he had disappeared. The missile’s computer brain allowed the radar seeker to attempt to reacquire a target for three seconds, then tried to lock-on to any jamming signals in the area. None was present. The missile then began following steering signals from the E-3 AWACS radar plane and turned back toward DreamStar, but by then it was too late. The Scorpion missiles, designed for medium-range engagements at higher altitudes, ran out of fuel and self-destructed seconds later.
Maraklov rolled hard right and found himself back in the Colorado River valley near Laguna Airfield. He commanded DreamStar back down on the deck just in time to fly under a transmission line. At that moment, the scanner on the aft fuselage detected a growing heat source and issued a MISSILE attack warning. An F-15 dived down from its patrol altitude right on top of DreamStar and had quickly closed in to IR missile range.
In the literal blink of an eye Maraklov commanded DreamStar from max speed mode to max alpha—the slowest speed DreamStar could sustain. Within seconds DreamStar’s wings went from nearly flat to steeply curled; the two-dimensional louvers shuttled forward to redirect thrust down instead of aft; and DreamStar’s canards snapped upward, holding the nose high while the plane decelerated. In ten seconds DreamStar went from Mach one to two hundred knots—only DreamStar’s composite structure, lighter than steel but a hundred times stronger, could withstand the strain.
The two F-15 fighters had closed to three miles behind DreamStar when suddenly their quarry seemed to freeze in mid-air. At only a hundred feet off the ground there was no room to maneuver, especially with two fighters together in close formation. The lead F-15 broke hard right to avoid DreamStar, then managed to pull up hard enough to escape crashing into the low hills north of Yuma. His wingman was not so lucky—not able to keep up with the five-G pull, the second F-15 fighter pancaked into the desert floor and exploded before the pilot could eject.
Twenty miles to go. Gradually, Maraklov applied power and began to transition back to max-speed, being careful not to use gas-guzzling afterburner. He was over Yuma now, skimming just above tall buildings and radio antennae. The F-15S were still behind him but they weren’t attacking until DreamStar passed clear of the city. He screamed over
Yuma Marine Corps Air Station with his airspeed nearly back at Mach one and saw F/A-18 fighters at the end of the runway, probably being held because of the F-15 fighters in pursuit. There was something else at the southeast end of the main runway but he didn’t have time to make it out before—AAA LOCK-ON, blared in Maraklov’s mind. ANTARES reacted first, banking hard right and pulling away as warning messages flashed in his mind and streaks of black raced past his canopy. It was an M173 Bulldog anti-aircraft artillery vehicle, a small tank with two 40-millimeter radar-guided guns that fired prefragmented tungsten-alloy shells out to a range of over four miles. There were only a few Bulldog regiments in the United States; Maraklov was unlucky enough to run into one. Without jammers, the only defense against the Bulldog was to fly as far and as fast away from it as possible—its twin cannons could pump out two hundred rounds per minute per barrel. Maraklov now had no choice but to kick in full afterburner.
ANTARES reported damage to several mini-actuators in the wings. One Bulldog was not an affective weapon against highspeed ground-hugging fighters, but even so it had been a narrow escape. The Bulldog was quickly deactivated as the F-15S came into range. Maraklov pulled his throttle out of afterburner as fast as he could, but the damage had already been done. DreamStar had no fuel reserves left. Every mile in any direction other than toward the landing point meant one more mile Maraklov would end up short of it.
Maraklov rolled DreamStar left and headed directly for Laguna de Santiaguillo, staying at one hundred feet above ground, flying directly over a small town. He activated the attack radar and completed a three-second sweep of the sky . . . the F-15 fighters had turned around, and at another mental inquiry he found out why—DreamStar was in Mexico, two miles south of the border, over the town of San Luis. He had made it.
Aboard the lead F-15 over southwest Arizona
“What the hell do you mean, turn back?” Colonel Jack Harrell, the Eagle Squadron commander from Davis-Monthan AFB, said over the scrambled radio channel. He lowered his oxygen visor with an exasperated snap. His four remaining squadron members were arranged in extended fingertip formation around him, two on his left and two others about a half-mile farther off to his left. “Tinsel, verify that last transmission. Over.”
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