Slowing its speed so the front section of the train would overtake it, the computer issued its next-to-final command. Instantly small rockets fired downward to propel a series of powerful explosive charges at the train’s midsection of heavily laden flatcars. The warhead cannisters fell with jarring thuds on the flat beds of the cars or directly on top of the canvas-covered equipment they carried.
Starting four seconds later, and working off time-delayed fuses, the warheads ignited one by one. The lightning-quick series of blinding yellow-orange flashes obliterated the second half of the mile-long train, blowing its sections off the track in more than a dozen places.
When the drone itself was free of all submunitions, it increased its speed while another electronic circuit armed the warhead in its own nose section. Switching from a radar mode to an infrared-homing target system, the remorseless little flying bomb sought out the most intense source of heat below it, quickly plunging itself into the second locomotive pulling the now-reduced line of freight cars. Within milliseconds, the diesel engine exploded in a flash of flame and black smoke. The rest of the train immediately derailed and slammed itself into a sickening pile of twisted flaming metal.
It was over in fifteen seconds. A load of Soviet SAM battery replacements would never reach the front.
The eastbound drone carried a different load of submunitions for its assigned target. Knifing above the parallel rails, the missile’s radar had detected motion below as a Warsaw Pact troop train passed beneath it, carrying a 15,000-man division of replacements to the fighting front in France.
Instantly, the drone’s control processors began a patterned, sequential firing sequence. One after the other, hefty rockets were ignited, propelling a lethal load of steel flechettes downward at an incredible speed of Mach 5. The flechettes were big 120-grain steel nails with sharp tail fins that screamed downward with an eerie whistling noise.
Almost 100,000 of the deadly darts were deposited along the length of the troop train, exploding through the thin railcar roofs like they were made of paper. In an instant, thousands of Red Army reservists were horribly dispatched as the speeding spikes pierced helmets, skulls and shoulder blades, tearing through their hapless victims until they exited the train’s floor, bone and blood skewered around their razor-like fins.
The superdrone, mother to the thousands of lethal baby bomblets, now activated its own targeting procedure, executing a burst of speed and a rapid U-turn to send it hurtling down the track toward the oncoming locomotive at a height of only ten feet. The train’s engineer had only time to open his mouth in a silent scream before the flying bomb obliterated the train’s front five cars with an ear-splitting explosion that smashed the ties, rails, roadbed, and all, sending the burning hulk of the foremost locomotive spinning into the air at least fifty feet from the rails.
Farther along the flight path of Davis’s B-52, another set of the munition-laden drones sought out a column of tanks bunched up in a bottleneck on the east bank of a narrow bridge. These drones carried a smaller version of the MW-1 munitions dispenser, packed with anti-armor shape charges that fit into horizontally projecting tubes in the dispenser’s side walls. Explosive propulsion charges nestled in the center of each pair of tubes were fired sequentially, expelling the shape charges in a wide distribution on either side of the drone’s flight path.
In a single pass over their target, the two drones deposited more than five thousand bomblets in little more than five seconds. The results were devastating to the clustered tanks. White-hot rods of molten metal burned through the armor, turning the tanks’ cramped interiors into fiery crucibles of death. More than five hundred armored vehicles were destroyed or damaged as thousands of the explosively formed penetrators found their marks in the thin top plating of the T-62’s turrets. Even the charges that failed to meet a tank’s top were still fatal to the enemy, since they embedded themselves in the frozen soil to become land mines, claiming still more victims as the dazed crews bolted from their stricken vehicles.
As if to seal the fate of the armored column, the two flying bombs dove into opposite ends of the narrow bridge, burrowing into the concrete before exploding and severing the span from its moorings. With tanks and troops sliding off the shattered roadway, the bridge collapsed into the river in a spectacular crash.
Relentlessly, the American smart-bomb attack continued …
Still more of Davis’s drones found strings of tank cars, full of gasoline and diesel fuel, parked in freight yards awaiting transport to the front. They erupted in towering geysers of yellow-white flame as they were ignited by hundreds of incendiary munitions dropped from the drones. The mini-firebombs created a thousand raging fires that joined into a single huge inferno, building to a firestorm that consumed the entire rail yard.
Other drones found similar fuel dumps, aircraft parking areas, long-range radar stations, temporary troop billets, bridges, tunnels, power stations, dams—literally dozens of enemy targets were bit. The bombardment was multiplied several hundred times as the rest of the B-52 force seeded the clouds above Eastern Europe with their smart weapons, raining tons of electronically guided munitions of their wide-ranging targets of opportunity.
And even as the B-52 force was raining death on the trains, tanks, and trucks in East Europe, the F-111’s based at Upper Heyford and Lakenheath had hit the Soviets’ airfields and the Baltic ports. Many Soviet pilots returning from the running dogfight over France arrived to find their landing fields in smoking ruins. Some were able to divert the auxiliary fields in the Soviet Union itself, but many were forced to crash-land in fields and deserted roads. Ships docked in the Baltic ports were strafed and sunk as they lay at anchor, unable to escape the low-flying Aardvarks.
By morning, the military might of the Red Army lay scattered like crushed and smoking steel toys along the length of its supply routes. Not a single rail line or major bridge between the Ukraine and the Rhine River was left intact. Only a handful of air fields, ammunition dumps and troop billets had escaped the devastation. Nearly a half million Warsaw Pact reservists were now Warsaw Pact casualties, killed or wounded long before they could reach the front lines.
Returning to his base just as the sun was coming up, Colonel Davis, his crew, and every one of his commanding officers stretching back to the Pentagon itself, knew that Rolling Thunder—the one chance roll of the dice—had been a success.
But the strategic victory hadn’t been cheap.
Twenty-five of Davis’s bombers had been lost some to SAMs and interceptors, but mostly to the hazards of the low-level flight they’d been forced to make.
Two hundred and fifty of his men were gone. But they had done the soldier’s job; they had obeyed orders; and they had carried out an impossible mission. That wouldn’t be enough for the families of those crews who didn’t make it back. Words were never enough. But still, somehow, Davis felt the ghosts of the men who had fallen out of the skies in the war fifty years before could now return to their resting places, their souls at peace once again.
Chapter 33
BACK AT ROTA, A weary collection of men gathered on the blackened runway, searching the northern horizon.
Their eyes and hands darted at the slightest sound or flicker of light, then slumped as it faded or disappeared. Eleven F-16s had landed already, exhausted pilots coaxing the last few drops of fuel into the battered engines, struggling to bring the fighters back home from the huge dogfight. More than one pilot had pulled his emergency fuel lever to make it.
“And then there was one,” General Seth Jones muttered under his breath, cursing himself again for not keeping the stray pilot in closer tow after the gigantic aerial battle had finally broken up just after sunrise that morning. Later intelligence reports would confirm that the Soviet High Command, absolutely shocked at the devastation wrought by the one-time high-tech superdrone sneak attack and fearing further assaults, had issued a recall from the swirling dogfight, ordering all its fighters back to the rear areas, some bac
k to the Soviet Union itself.
And, at that moment, thousands of NATO paratroopers were raining down on a string of key cities that stretched back into East Germany itself. Like chopping the serpent into many little pieces, the democratic forces were, in a matter of hours, regaining all of the territory lost in the past few hellish days.
But there was yet to be a celebration at Rota.
At the end of the gigantic dogfight, Jones had last seen the lone all-white F-16 chasing a single MiG off into the horizon, and his own fuel level was so critical he couldn’t dare follow.
But if any pilot could make it back, Jones knew this one could.
Clustered on the tarmac with him were other pilots—JT Toomey, just returned to the base via a French Medivac chopper, Ben Wa, and the rest—including Blue, the base’s chief engineer, and the base flight surgeon. All the other planes were accounted for—they were waiting for the last one.
Another thirty minutes passed.
Then, they all heard the same noise at the same time—an uneven drone that could only come from the throat of a jet engine. A jet engine throttled back too far, as the pilot tried to feed fuel to his greedy turbine a drop at a time. A jet engine that had seen more hours of operation in the past two days than it was supposed to see in two months. A jet engine that responded to the lightest touch on the throttle, easing until the fuel was almost choked off, then coughing again as it was fed more life-giving JP-8.
Only one pilot would even attempt to land a supersonic fighter with almost no fuel, with no margin for error. Only one pilot could have made it this far.
There was never much question that he would.
The F-16 had come straight in, not bothering to circle or even ask for clearance.
Like a faltering paper airplane, the dirty white Falcon descended toward the base. It swooped down gently in short, almost flat little scalloping dives as its engine was hauled back to the stall point; then it surged forward with the merest tap to the throttle, starting another gentle dive. Ever so slowly and deliberately, the plane was coming down to meet the dark runway.
A half mile out … Now a quarter … Now closer still.
And ever so slowly, the plane was descending toward the ground. Now only fifty feet of air separated the lowered landing gear from the murky tarmac of the runway as the plane crossed the fenced edge of the field. The engine was hiccupping, starved for fuel as it tried to push the little jet along.
Now forty feet … another cough from the engine … another surge to drive forward and down. Thirty feet now … the runway beneath was blasted by the sporadic downwash. Twenty feet … another gasp from the throttled-back turbine, and then a puff of black smoke was emitted from the plane’s tail. A shudder seemed to shake the jet as it hung for a long second above the pitted runway, its engine rumbling.
A final thrust from the dying turbofan propelled the F-16 along the last stretch of landing strip, until finally the main gear touch the ground heavily, kicking up twin puffs of rubber smoke and bringing the tapered nose of the fighter swiftly down to compress the sturdy nosewheel strut to its maximum retraction. At the instant the nosewheel made contact with the pavement, the mighty turbo fan engine sputtered once and was silent.
The Wingman had come home.
With its engine trailing the thinnest wisp of gray smoke, the lone F-16 rolled quietly down the runway until it came to a stop directly in front of the refueling station. It took several minutes before the crowd of pilots, with the mechanic and flight surgeon in tow, reached the wingtip of the small fighter.
Jones was the first one up to the cockpit, surprising many of the younger pilots with an athletic bound onto the flat wing surface, then over to the emergency foothold. To his dismay, he found the canopy had been popped already. The pilot had already dismounted and was walking toward the fueling hoses, still wearing his heavy flight helmet.
Because the pilot still wore the oxygen mask loose around his neck, Jones and the others couldn’t hear the mumbling voice as he walked briskly over to the JP-8 supply and began dragging a supply hose back toward his airplane’s starboard side wing tank. Only when he got closer did Jones realize what the young man was saying.
“Got to fuel up. I’ll get more ammo, too …”
The words barely stumbled out of Hunter’s mouth before they fell off in confused slurs around his dangling black mask. Yet his stride was even and regular, carrying the heavy hose without even noticing the stunned crowd of on-lookers.
“Captain Hunter,” Jones called out to the young pilot, instinctively knowing that he should keep a distance. “Captain, listen to me … It’s all over …”
Hunter didn’t pause or even break stride. “After fuel, more ammo,” he mumbled. “Be back up there in thirty …”
Jones finally walked up to the younger man and forcibly grabbed his arm. He was visibly shocked by how ghostly Hunter’s face had become since he’d given him his father’s wings not many hours ago.
“Captain, you don’t understand,” Jones said patiently, standing directly in front of him, physically blocking his path to the all-white airplane. “It’s all over—Moscow has asked for a cease-fire. We don’t have to fly the mission any more.”
Hunter stopped abruptly. His bleary, vacant eyes tried to struggle into focus on Jones. His jaw worked back and forth beneath the beard stubble as if he were trying to understand words spoken in some foreign tongue. His hands fumbled with the heavy fueling hose as if he were unsure about what to do with it. Finally he looked up at Jones again.
“Cease-fire?” he asked haltingly.
Hunter’s voice was thick with exhaustion, but his computer-like brain was racing on adrenaline, forcing the thoughts to process through the fog of his weariness.
“It’s being confirmed now, Captain,” Jones reassured the dazed pilot. “We received the initial burst message. Came from the Vice-President himself—the President was still airborne in the White House command plane. It was garbled somewhat, but still understandable. The Sovs want to talk. They’ve had it. They’re licked.”
“What?” Hunter asked, not quite believing what he was hearing.
Jones smiled for the first time in days.
“It’s true,” he said. “While we were zapping their fighters, SAC bombed their supply lines back into the Stone Age. Our troops are securing a dozen cities all the way back to Russia itself. The commie bastards don’t even want to know how it comes out. They’re retreating in droves. Their top brass has called it quits. In other words, we did it, Captain.”
Hunter, still clutching the big hose, kept staring back at his stained, dirty, oil-covered white F-16. Its air intake, slung as it was under the pointed nose, looked like a gaping mouth, silently panting as if to catch its breath. Hunter made a half-step toward the plane as if he were still undecided about whether to continue.
Jones had anticipated his extraordinary pilot’s potential burnout, and he discreetly motioned behind Hunter to the flight surgeon, who deftly palmed a small silver syringe out of his satchel. Maneuvering through the crowd of gathered pilots, the doctor approached Hunter as if to give him a firm handclasp, then quickly plunged the needle right through Hunter’s flight suit into his arm.
The sharp twinge of pain from the stabbing syringe made Hunter wince and recoil, but it was as if he was in slow motion. The powerful sedative quickly found its way through his overtaxed system, and though he instinctively tried to fight it, he finally buckled. Jones, the doctor, and several others reached around to grab him under the arms to prevent him from falling to the pavement.
Just before Hunter’s bloodshot eyes closed, he looked up at Jones.
“It’s over, Hawk,” the general said calmly. “And we won.”
“We won?” Hunter repeated groggily, catching one last glimpse of his battle-scarred white fighter and then beyond it, to the piles of burned hulks and salvage wrecks that lined the base.
“We won what?” he asked.
Chapter 34
&nbs
p; The Aftermath
HUNTER SPENT THE NEXT forty-eight hours sleeping.
Yet, in a strange way, he was never more awake. He found himself immersed in strange dreams—actual living visions in which he teetered between a coma-like unconsciousness and an eerie trance that was more half-sleep and half-hallucination.
At times he rolled fitfully in the hospital bed, his arms flailing as he fought off dark demons that the powerful sedative drug had released from his subconscious. Now they roved through his nightmare, gruesome and malevolent, conjuring the lurid images that played out in his fragmented non-stop incubus.
Throughout his drug-induced fog, one cruel vision kept assaulting his tormented brain. He was high above the surface of the earth, as if he was cruising his F-16 into the stratosphere. But there was no sensation of being confined to a cockpit, or even an aircraft. He was just floating—floating along in the thin air, powerless to control his flight, like a runaway helium balloon accidentally released from a child’s hand. And all he could do was watch helplessly as the planet below appeared sporadically through the dense cloud formations.
At times he was miles above the North American continent, suspended over the whirling clouds as they were driven along by the swift river of the jet stream. Below him, by some trick of the cloud’s parting, he could see the entire United States stretching serenely from Atlantic to Pacific coast, and from Canadian to Mexican border. The towering peaks of the Continental Divide tumbled down to become the flat plains of the central West, then the fertile fields of the Midwest, and then the rolling knobs of the green Appalachian chain rose up until they faded into the eastern coastal plain. It was, at first, a beautiful, nirvana-like vision.
But something was terribly wrong.
Even as Hunter was watching, an evil-looking red-and-black stain appeared in North Dakota and began spreading south and west. Terrific explosions rocked the ground below him, seeming to engulf whole states in their deadly volatile embrace. The shock waves buffeted Hunter as he hung there, unable to react except to cry out in anguish for the wounded land below.
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