Fortunes of War

by Stephen Coonts

  Each pilot knew exactly where the others were because his computer, the brain of the airplane, presented the tactical situation in a three-dimensional holographic display on the MFD, or multifunction display, in the center of the instrument panel. On his left, another MFD presented information about the engines, fuel state, and weapons. On his right, a third MFD depicted God’s view, the planes as they would look from directly overhead while flying over a map of the earth.

  The pilot selected the presentations and functions he wanted by manipulating a cursor control on the right or inboard throttle with his left hand. The aircraft’s control stick, on the side of the cockpit under his right hand, was also festooned with buttons, so without moving his hands from stick and throttles, the pilot could choose among a wide variety of options that in earlier generations of fighters would have required lifting an arm and mechanically throwing a switch or pushing a button.

  The current state of the art in fighter planes, the F-22 Raptor was a computer that flew, capable of a top speed of about Mach 2.5 and maneuvering at over 9 Go’s. The semi-stealthy design was intended to enable the pilot to detect the enemy before he was himself detected. Alas, the Athena capability of the Zero gave it the edge. In modern war any pretense of airborne chivalry had been completely jettisoned:

  the pilot who shot first and escaped before the victim’s friends could do anything about it would be the victor.

  Level at thirty thousand feet, the Raptors accelerated in basic engine to supercruise at Mach 1.3. The pilots flipped a switch to turn on the chameleon skin of their planes. The planes faded from view as their skin color changed electronically to blend them into the summer sky.

  As briefed, Scheer turned left five degrees and held the heading until the gap between him and the leader had widened to five miles, then he turned back to parallel Cassidy’s course. The second section moved right and spread out in a similar manner. With his four planes spread over twenty miles of sky, Cassidy hoped to optimize his chances of getting one plane into Sidewinder range on any Zero they chanced to meet. If one plane was detected, the others could circle in behind the attacking Zero while it was engaged with its intended victim. That was the plan, anyway, carefully explained and diagramed.

  As the cloud deck under them feathered out, the land below became visible under scattered cumulus clouds that were growing as the sun warmed the atmosphere.

  The planes flew east. Cassidy began hearing the deep bass beep of a search radar probing the sky on a regular scan. The beep made Cassidy fidgety. Of course, the stealthy shape of the F-22 prevented the operator from getting enough of a return to see the American fighters — he knew that for a fact — but still … The visibility today was excellent. On the left, a huge range of mountains wearing crowns of snow stretched away to the horizon. On the right, another range ran off haphazardly into the great emptiness toward Manchuria. The land was so big, so empty. A pilot who ejected into this trackless wilderness was doomed to die of exposure or starvation. At Cassidy’s insistence, the following day the U.s. Air Force would fly in a Cessna 185 on tundra tires, with long-range tanks, to use as a search and rescue plane if the need arose.

  To fly the plane and operate the computers — there were actually five of them: three flight-control computers, an air-datastnavigation computer, and a tactical computer — the Raptor pilot had to concentrate intently on the torrent of information being presented graphically on his HUD and the three MFDS. There was no time for sight-seeing, for trying to spot the enemy with the human eye. The pilot was merely the F-22’s central processing unit.

  This thought went through Bob Cassidy’s mind as he forced himself to concentrate on the displays in front of him.

  The miles rolled by swiftly at Mach 1.3. Not much longer … Clad in a full-body G suit and a helmet that covered his entire head, Cassidy couldn’t even scratch his nose. Sweat trickled down his face. Since he couldn’t do anything about it, he ignored it. Cassidy was nervous. He shook his head once to clear the sweat from his eyes, toyed with the idea of raising the Plexiglas face shield on his helmet so he could get his fingers to his face and wipe the sweat away. That would take maybe fifteen seconds, while the plane would traverse almost three and a half miles of sky. Not yet. Cassidy took a few seconds to stare at the spot in space where the computer said Scheer had to be. Nothing. The chameleon skin had blended the fighter into the sky so completely it was invisible to the naked eye. Today, of course, the F-22’s had their radars secured, the tac display no longer blank. The Sky Eye had located the enemy and the satellite was beaming down the information. Two Zeros were in the air over Zeya. These must be the two that were on the ground with their engines running an hour ago. As the range decreased and Cassidy shrank the scale of the display, he realized that the Zeros were on some kind of training mission. They were not in formation. They flew aimlessly back and forth over the base, did some turns, just wandered about. Perhaps the pilots were flying post-maintenance check flights. At fifty miles, Cassidy and Scheer began their letdown. The transports bringing bombs to Zeya would not arrive until tomorrow, so today all the F-22’s could do was strafe. Gvelich and Foy stayed high and together. They would go for the airborne Zeros. Cassidy could hear the baritone beep of a search radar sweeping past his plane. The beeps were quite regular, which made him believe that the operator did not see him. Too little energy was being reflected from the stealthy shape of the F-22 to create a blip on the operator’s screen. Finally, as the range closed, the returning energy would be sufficient to create a blip, and the operator would see him. Cassidy wondered how close that would be. He acquired the airfield at fifteen miles. The afternoon sun was behind him and slightly to his right, so he and Scheer would be essentially invisible as they came over.

  Throttling back more, Cassidy let his speed drop to Mach 1. He wanted every second he could to shoot, but he wanted to arrive with minimum warning. Down to three thousand feet, ten miles, lined up on the ramp, Cassidy pulled the throttles back even farther. Scheer was already separated out to the left, looking for his own targets. The other plane had faded from view. Cassidy had to check the tac display to make sure where Scheer was. The routine beeps of the enemy radar changed drastically. Now the operator was sweeping the beam back and forth over the two F-22’s repeatedly. Nine miles. They had made it in to nine miles before being picked up. Bob Cassidy was down to five hundred knots when he saw the enemy fighters. There were five of them, parked in a row on the ramp. At least he hoped they were Zeros. They might have been Russian iron, but he didn’t have time to make sure. Cassidy turned hard to get lined up, checked to make sure he had the ball in the center, and glanced at the altimeter. The row of fighters was coming at him fast. And Paul Scheer appeared out of nowhere in his left-frontal quadrant, no more than fifty feet away. Paul was going to strafe these guys, too. Cassidy throttled back still more. He was down to three hundred knots now. Scheer opened fire, walked a stream of shells across the parked planes, and broke left. Smoke poured from one of the planes. Cassidy walked his shells across the planes, too, and broke right. “Make a pass at the hangars, Paul, and we’re out of here. I’ll join on you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cassidy circled to the south as Scheer shot up the hangars. The pilot could see several missile batteries sitting in plain sight. He snapped four fast pictures of the base area with a digital camera. When he got back to Zeya, he could plug the camera into a computer and print out the pictures: instant aerial photos. Paul headed west after his second strafing pass and Cassidy joined on him. They lit burners and climbed away. No one had fired a shot at the Americans.

  Dick Gvelich was ten miles behind his intended victim and closing at Mach 1.8 when the bogey dot on the HUD moved left. The guy must be turning, he thought.

  He dropped his left wing to compensate and centered the dot. There, he could see him, just a speck slightly above the horizon, turning left. Five miles, four, now the Sidewinder tone…, and Dick Gvelich squeezed off the missile. It leapt
off the rail in a fiery streak and disappeared into the blue sky, chasing that turning airplane ahead. A flash on the enemy airplane! Got him.

  Hudek pulled off right and watched the Zero. It rolled upside down, its nose dropped, and then the ejection seat came out.

  Lee Foy’s Zero was potting along straight and level. Foy’s ECM was picking up enemy radar transmissions, but the Zero was pointed in the wrong direction to see the F-22’s. Precisely what the Japanese pilot was doing, Foy couldn’t imagine. He just prayed that the enemy aviator kept doing it for a few more seconds. At four miles with the enemy in sight, Foy was closing fast, overtaking him with maybe three hundred knots of closure.

  Half a world away from the warehouse, Foy decided not to waste a missile. He clicked the cursor on the gun symbol on his main MFD and pulled off a gob of power.

  His speed bled down quickly. The enemy pilot kept flying straight and level.

  Foy checked his tac display. Nobody around except Gvelich, stalking his victim six miles to the west. Because he didn’t have religious faith in these gadgets, Foy checked over both shoulders to ensure the sky was clear.

  The Zero was still potting along like an airliner going to Newark.

  One mile away, a hundred knots of closure.

  A half mile, seventy knots.

  Now, Foy reduced power, put the crosshairs in the bull’s-eye made by the horizontal and vertical stabilizers. The center of the bull’s-eye was the exhaust pipe.

  Foy was coming up from dead astern. Whum? — he entered his victim’s wash and began bouncing around.

  Closer still, no more than three hundred yards.

  Still closer … At a hundred yards, Foy stabilized. Although his plane was bumping along in the Zero’s wash, the crosshairs in the heads-up display were skittering around on the enemy plane’s tailpipe.

  I should have used a Sidewinder/th isn’t aerial combat — this is murder.

  Unable to pull the trigger, he sat there staring at the Zero. At ninety yards, he could wait no longer.

  The Gatling gun hammered at the enemy plane, which seemed to disintegrate under the weight of steel and explosive that was smashing through the fuselage from end to end.

  As the Zero faded in a haze of fuel, an alarm went off in Lee Foy’s head. He released the trigger as he pulled back hard on the stick. The F-22 responded instantly, climbing away from the gasoline haze just as the Zero caught fire.

  The fire ignited the vapor trail, which became a flame a hundred yards long. Then the Zero blew up.

  Lee Foy bit his lip, glanced at his tac display to see where Hudek was, then turned that way.

  For a moment there, he had flown with his heart, not his head, and he had almost paid the price. He had come very close to dying with the Zero pilot.

  “Sorry, pal,” Foy Sauce whispered.

  Cassidy, Gvelich, and their wingmen were fueling from a bladder on the ground at Chita when four Zeros came hunting late in the summer evening. The Zeros were radiating, searching for airborne bogeys. The F-22 raid on Zeya had caused a seismic shock in the war room in Tokyo.

  Two sergeants had just finished setting up a Sentinel battery twenty miles east of Chita on a dirt road that ran through the forest. It had taken every minute of two hours to make that journey over the ruts of a terrible road. They feared the Sentinel would be damaged from all the bumps and jolts.

  Finally, the GPS said they were twenty miles east, so they stopped, disconnected the trailer from the Humvee, and activated the unit. First the solar panels had to be turned to the south, then five switches thrown and a key removed, so the unit could not be turned off by anyone wandering by. The whole deal took about a minute, and most of that involved setting the solar panels.

  The sergeants had just gotten back into the Humvee and were trying to get it turned around when the first missile leapt upward from the battery, spouting fire. With a soul-shattering roar, the rocket engine accelerated the missile upward too fast for the eye to follow. By the time the sergeants were looking up, all they could see was the fiery plume of the receding missile exhaust.

  Even as they craned their necks, too awed to move, the second missile ignited.

  As the thunder faded, the sergeant behind the wheel gunned the Humvee’s engine and popped the clutch. He careened past the battery, still on its trailer, and shot off down the rutted road toward Chita.

  The pilot of the Zero that took the first missile never even saw the thing coming. He was checking his displays, scanning the sky, and keeping an eye on his flight lead when the missile detonated just a foot away from the nose cone of his aircraft. The shrapnel sliced through the side of the plane, sprayed the nose area where the radar was housed, and shattered the canopy. Shrapnel cut through the pilot’s helmet into his skull, killing him instantly. He never even knew he’d been hit.

  The second Sentinel missile had been tracking the same radar as the first missile, and when the radar ceased transmitting, the second Sentinel tried to shift targets. It sensed other radars emitting on the proper frequency and selected the strongest signal. The canards went over and the missile began its turn … far too late. The flight leader was looking toward his doomed wingman, the flash of the detonating warhead having caught his eye, when the second missile streaked harmlessly between the two planes.

  “Missiles coming in!” He said it over the air.

  “What kind of missile?” That was Control.

  “I don’t know. One just struck my wingman, though, and the plane appears to be out of control. He is going down now. Eject, Muto! Eject!

  Get out while you can!”

  Muto was past caring.

  The three remaining Zeros were trying to get it sorted out when a Sentinel missile struck another Zero. The pilot lived through the warhead detonation, but his plane was badly crippled. He pulled the throttles to idle to get it slowed while he turned back toward Khabarovsk, where these planes were based.

  The flight leader was mighty quick. He turned off his radar and ordered the surviving wingman to do the same. Few pilots would have correctly diagnosed the problem in the few seconds he devoted to it.

  Three seconds later, another missile went sailing past a mile away, out of control.

  “Beam-riders,” the leader told Control.

  He initiated a turn to the east, intending to make a 180-degree turn and head for home.

  Halfway through the turn, Dixie Elitch and Fur Ball Hudek came roaring in with their guns blazing. The wingman lost a wing on the first pass.

  The leader rolled upside down and pointed his nose at the earth. He had his head swiveling wildly when he caught a brief glimpse of afterburner flame coming from a barely discernible airplane; then the plane was gone.

  He had no idea how many planes he faced, and he correctly concluded that the time had come to boogie. He punched out chaff and decoy flares as the Zero rocketed straight toward the center of the home planet.

  One of the flares saved his life. Hudek triggered a Sidewinder, which went for a flare.

  “Let’s not waste fuel,” Dixie said over the air, calling Hudek off. “Gimme a break, baby. Let me kill this Jap.”

  “You heard me, Fur Ball. Break it off.”

  Hudek could see the Zero pulling out far below. “And to think I could be selling used cars in Hoboken.” He flipped on his radar, tried to get a firing solution for an AMRAAM. Ahh … there it was! The radar was looking right at it. Should I or shouldn’t I.”

  “Get off the radio, Fur Ball.”

  “You bet, sweet thing. I’ll get my COULDS going again.”

  “Muto and Sugita were hit by missiles. I think they were guiding on our radar beams. When I turned the radar off, several missiles went by, striking nothing. Then we were jumped by fighters. I do not know how many. I think they killed Tashiro then. I ran for my life.”

  “Do not be ashamed, Miura. You are still alive to fight again.”

  “Colonel, I have not yet told you the most unbelievable part. Do not think I am craz
y. Believe that I tell you the truth.”

  “Captain Miura, give us your report.”

  “I could not see the enemy fighters. They were invisible.”

  The colonel looked shocked. Whatever he had been expecting, that was not it.

  “Are you sure, Miura? It is often difficult to see other airplanes in a dogfight. Light and shadow, cloud, indistinct backgrounds …”

  “I am positive, sir. I got a glimpse of one, saw the afterburner plume. The plane was shimmering against the evening sky, barely visible. It was there and yet it wasn’t. Then the angle or the light changed and I lost it. The enemy fighter was there, but I couldn’t see it.”

  In the silence that followed this declaration, Jiro Kimura spoke up. “That would not be impossible, Colonel. I have read of American research to change the color of metal using electrical charges.”

  The colonel was not convinced. “I have heard of no such research by the Russians.”

  “I doubt if the Russians could afford it,” Jiro answered. “These may be planes from the American Squadron that we have heard about. If so, they are American F-22 Raptors.”

  “Write up your report, Miura,” the colonel said. “I will forward it to Tokyo immediately.”

  In the ready room the other pilots had a tape going on the VCR, a tape of a broadcast on an American cable channel, Jiro merely glanced at the television as he walked by … and found himself looking at Bob Cassidy. He stopped and stared. Cassidy’s voice in English was barely audible, overridden by a male translator. Cassidy! Oh my God!

  “Hey, bitch! You cost me a kill. I could have got that lap.”

  “You call me a bitch again, Fur Ball, and you’d better have a pistol in your hand, because I’m going to pull mine and start shooting.”

  Aaron Hudek’s face was red. He shouted, “Don’t ever pull another stunt like that on me again. Got it?”