Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  Just before the Sidewinder missile exploded, the Cuchillo pilot had performed a clearing turn—a sharp high-banked turn in both directions so the pilot could see behind him for signs of pursuit—and it was the last-moment maneuver that saved his life. The heat-seeking missile missed the Mirage’s hot exhaust, flew over the fuselage and across the left wing and exploded beside the cockpit. The canopy of his fighter had been all but blown away by the near-hit, sending pieces of the canopy driven by the eight-hundred-mile-per-hour windblast right into his upper body. The Mirage was still functioning, but the windblast and the wounds he had sustained were driving him to the edge of unconsciousness and he was forced to reduce speed to keep the windblast from snapping his neck.

  Ejecting from his stricken fighter was not an option for the young pilot. The plane was still flying, he was still alive, and Colonel Salazar had told him he’d return to a hero’s welcome if he accomplished his mission. Although he knew that the Colonel spoke like that often, and he also suspected that eventually he would have to eject, he would rather do it in Cuban or Haitian waters than in international or American waters.

  For now, the only thing he thought about was how to protect himself from another attack, and the answer was . . . turn and fight. He had six hundred pounds of ammunition and two French Matra R-550 Magic heat-seeking missiles. It was time to use them. But it had to be fast and unexpected—he knew the American pilots and their F-16 fighters were nearly unstoppable in close-range dogfights.

  In spite of his wounds and the fact that he had no canopy or protection from windblast except his helmet, the Mirage pilot pulled his nose skyward, completing a half-loop in just five seconds and five thousand feet. While inverted at the top of the loop, he set his radar to air-to-air mode, selected a missile, and scanned the sky in his wake for any attackers. Without waiting for the Matra Magic missile to signal a lock-on—unlike the AIM-9L Sidewinder it was not able to lock onto a target in head-to-head engagements—the Cuchillo pilot squeezed the trigger and launched the missile as soon as the radar picked up an air target.

  Aboard the F-16 Fighting Falcon, Trap Two

  The sudden maneuver that registered on the APG-66 attack radar was somewhat unexpected—no fighter pilot was going to let another pilot shoot missiles at him all night without fighting—but the sudden quick flash of light he saw caught him by surprise. A head-to-head missile engagement was low percentage, even with an advanced Sidewinder. But these guys weren’t playing percentages—they were going for the kill, the missile had to be countered no matter how great the odds were against that missile hitting.

  There was no “MISSILE LAUNCH” signal from the threat-warning receiver, so it had to be either an unguided missile or a heat- seeker. The Falcon pilot rolled up onto his right wing and made sure he was in full power without any afterburners lighting up the sky behind him. Rolling up on one side presented the smallest and coolest profile to the missile’s seeker-head. He watched as the missile’s motor burned out, held the wing-high attitude for two seconds, rolled wings-level, then began a sharp climb. The Falcon pilot had to put as much cool metal between his hot tailpipe and the missile’s seeker-head, or the missile might just track. He quickly lost sight of the missile as its solid-rocket motor burned out, but the missile had obviously not been tracking because it appeared to be passing well behind him, without any telltale wobbling in the motor glare that would indicate that it was tracking him.

  Now, concentrate on the fighter itself. The enemy fighter was coming down right for him, but now he had the speed advantage. The speed at which the fighter had suddenly turned and the speed at which it was descending told the F-16 pilot that his attacker might still be inverted. One thing to do—turn hard, reverse course and avoid flying underneath the fighter, where his high position would give him a speed-and-angles advantage.

  The F-16 quickly completed a 180-degree turn, and he found his threat-warning receiver quiet—if the attacker had not been inverted he would have been able to get behind the F-16 for another missile or gun attack. The American pilot used some pent-up speed to extend for several seconds, waited for the first hint of a search radar being aimed at him, then turned hard and reversed course again. Following the indications on his heads-up display, he managed to use the Falcon’s tight seven-G turn capability to line up with his adversary, who had managed to get turned around himself and was starting to come for him.

  Checking to be sure he had selected his cannon, the F-16 pilot continued his hard right turn to lead his target before opening fire. The fire-control radar and attack-computer drew a line on the display, indicating the computer’s best guess at the target’s flight path— the F-16 pilot used that lead-computing line to position his aiming reticle before opening fire. The enemy plane—he still had no idea who it was or what kind of plane he was about to shoot at—had apparently realized that the F-16 had the angle and was turning into the F-16 and accelerating to decrease the time in the box, w’ithin the lethal cone of fire. The F-16 pilot opened fire when the range decreased to below one mile, keeping the aiming reticle of the display directly on the lead-computing indicator and tracking it in toward the radar-target square. He had time for five short squeezes of the trigger before the target zipped away and had to turn hard to pursue.

  Now out the right side of his bubble canopy he saw small spurts of flame erupting from the side of the enemy fighter. “Aladdin, this is Trap Two. My target is on fire. I am closing again to pursue. Over.”

  No reply. The F-16 pilot checked his navigation display with his charts—he was over sixty miles south of Key West. With the KEYSTONE radar down and the air-traffic mess in south Florida he had probably drifted out of radio contact thirty miles ago. He wouldn’t be able to pick up his Hammerhead controller unless he climbed back up to a higher altitude. He took a quick fuel check: he was only minutes away from his return point at this range and considering the traffic over south Florida he was probably beyond it—if he had to divert to MacDill or Jacksonville he was going to be running on fumes if he delayed any longer. He began a turn northward, started a gradual climb and opened his checklist to the performance section to look up the best range-speed for his aircraft weight and configuration.

  He had just passed ten-thousand feet when the radio chatter began to increase again and he felt safer. “Aladdin, this is Trap Two. I am RTB hot with nine thousand pounds, fifty south of Key West, code one. Over . . .”

  “Trap Two, Trap Two, this is Aladdin. We’ve been trying to reach you. You have bogeys now at your six o’clock, nine miles. Six o’clock, nine miles and closing. We read three bogeys, repeat, three bogeys

  Suddenly the hunter had become the hunted. The F-16 pilot selected full military power and started a steep but controlled descent. As he did the threat-warning receiver came to life, squawking and beeping the message that he already knew—he was probably too late.

  The attackers were much smaller, much less capable, and much slower than the F-16 Fighting Falcon—the moment the F-16 pilot pushed his throttle up to military power he was flying one-hundred knots faster than his pursuers—but the tiny Albatros attack-trainers of Salazar’s Cuchillos had the element of surprise, which meant disaster for the lone F-16. The Albatros jet trainers were airborne to provide terminal air cover for the returning strike fighters; each carried two 1800-liter external fuel tanks, a single underbelly GSh-23 cannon and two Bofers RBS-70 heat-seeking missiles mounted in bulky single-missile pods on each wing. Like the Hammerheads’ Sea Stinger missile, the RBS-70 was a modified man-portable anti-aircraft missile, adapted for use on aircraft and capable against air, sea and land targets.

  One by one each Albatros launched missiles at the fleeing F-16. The range between the aircraft had decreased to five miles, just inside the lethal range of the tiny RBS-70 missiles, but the F-16’s speed had jumped to nearly Mach one in military power. The first missile missed the F-16 by only a few meters, causing the pilot to begin a series of violent vertical and horizontal moves to break th
e lock of any other missiles fired at him. The other two missiles never had a chance to lock on—even at the missile’s top speed of Mach two, they could not maneuver fast enough to keep up with the agile F-16 and quickly broke lock, self-destructing after fifteen seconds of flight.

  But even without a kill, the Albatros attackers had done their job. The F-16 fighter, forced to waste more fuel escaping the surprise attack, did not have the fuel to turn and counterattack, and was forced to head for home.

  A half-hour later the surviving Mirage fighter safely ejected just off the west coast of Haiti, within a hundred yards of a boat waiting to pick up the pilot.

  The battle did not go as well for the Cuchillos attacking the Hammerhead Two platform. With the matchup now two-on-two instead of two-on-one, a third F-16 on the way and with a much less cluttered air-traffic scene, the battles were brief and decisive. The MiG carrying his load of cluster bombs and Kingfisher missiles was forced to jettison them overwater when he found himself jumped by the two F-16s—and even the added speed and maneuverability he gained by getting rid of the clumsy bombs could not make up for the superiority of the F-16 over the aged MiG-21. Both MiGs were destroyed by missiles—neither F-16 had to move closer than six miles to his target to destroy it. .

  But the damage had already been done . . .

  On Board an Air Force C-20B Transport

  Several Minutes Later

  “Thank God,” Elliott said on board the transport, a modified Gulf- stream III business jet fitted with special communications facilities, speeding to south Florida from Washington. “NAPALM wasn’t touched?”

  “They didn’t get within twenty minutes of the platform this time,” Hardcastle replied, speaking to him from the Border Security Force headquarters at Aladdin City. “The F-16s got both planes trying to attack Hammerhead Two, and we think we got one of the group that attacked KEYSTONE. But that F-16 ran into three more planes flying up from Cuba and was forced to turn back.”

  “Cuban planes?”

  “Negative. The RAZORBACK ROTH unit tracked them flying out of central Haiti. We don’t have an exact base of origin, but except for Port-Au-Prince the only other hard-surface runway in Haiti that could have handled jets big enough to carry air-to-air missiles is Verrettes. Salazar staged an attack on the Hammerheads’ radar units. I still don’t believe it.”

  “Stand by,” Elliott said, and stared out one of the tiny round windows in the back of the C-20 . . . The Border Security Force was in serious trouble. The overwhelming attack on Hammerhead One and CARABAL had wiped out half the Force’s precision long-range detection capability, and the personnel loss on the Hammerhead One platform was devastating. The entire Caribbean basin would be newly open to air and sea smugglers unless an interim radar platform was set up ... “I’ll get the contingency plan in effect as fast as I can,” Elliott radioed to Hardcastle. “I think we can get the Oriskany in position within the week. The President’s already authorized the Navy to assist in the Caribbean region. We might have F-14’s flying chase missions with our Sea Lions.” Hardcastle’s original proposal for a forward air base for the V-22 tilt-rotor interdiction plane included using aged, retired aircraft carriers as air-operations platforms. A Navy training or reserve aircraft carrier would be positioned in critical drug-trafficking routes; they already had several vessels lined up for possible use, most likely the retired U.S.S. Coral Sea or the research and training Essex-class Oriskany, which had been repeatedly rescued from the scrapyards by various government agencies wanting a carrier to play with.

  “I’m not interested in what we’re going to do about sealing off the borders right now, Brad,” Hardcastle said. “I want to know what we’re going to do about Salazar and his outfit.”

  “Well, if we want to get Salazar and his terrorists we’ve got to do it now. By this time tomorrow they could be long gone—”

  “Then, damn it, get your F-lll back and bomb the hell out of Verrettes,” Hardcastle said. “Or ask the President to send in the Rapid Deployment Force, or Delta Force, or the Special Forces. Brad, they killed over forty people on Hammerhead One. Michael Becker was on that platform—”

  “I know, I know.” Hardcastle had rattled off options that Elliott was already considering, and he thought of some others too—his strike aircraft at Dreamland topping the list. Ever since organizing the Sukhoi-27 flight into Haiti, Elliott had put his second-in-command, John Ormack, and his staff to planning other reconnaissance and strike options against Verrettes, including aircraft not in any active Air Force operational squadron.

  As if he could read Elliott’s thoughts, Hardcastle asked, “How long would it take the Air Force to come up with a plan to strike Verrettes, Brad?”

  “All tactical fighter and Special Operations units have contingency plans for various regions of the world, prepackaged and ready to be implemented—but I don’t think Haiti is one of them. With computerized flight planning combined with the intelligence data we received from our own mission we could assemble a package in, say, four hours, brief it, get the aircraft and crews together and be airborne in six hours.”

  “Then let’s do it . . .”

  “All that presumes we get a White House okay for a strike against Verrettes,” Elliott added quickly. “Ian, you know as well as I do that the main bottleneck in any operation like this is getting the authorization. Most Air Force units can’t load one bomb on a plane without permission from someone at least at the Secretary of the Air Force’s level, and to execute a mission like this ... it would probably need the President. He’s been notified of the attack, of course, but he won’t convene the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs until morning—at least six hours from now.”

  "But we can start to get the ball rolling before authorization.”

  “We can draw up all the charts we want, gather intelligence, formulate options—but no wing commander is going to authorize the use of one of his crews, a plane or even one lousy iron bomb until he has permission from his boss. Air division won’t approve it without permission from numbered air force. They won’t approve it without permission from the major command. It goes up higher and higher and takes longer and longer—

  “Then we’re going to lose Salazar. We’re going to just let the guy go. Is that it?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered as he let his finger off the TALK button and cursed into the air. He had to do something to protect his force. If he didn’t act others might move in and take charge, or decide for him that they should disband. If there was one thing he had learned in ten years as a general officer it was that everyone expected the commander to take charge and do something. If he didn’t do it someone else would.

  His facts were still right—no military commander would authorize the use of his assets for a strike mission without approval from higher headquarters. But Elliott was a commander—he could order his own troops to go anywhere within their capability. He was also the past commander of another flying organization—Dreamland, the High Technology Aerospace Weapon Center. He had weapons there, all highly classified, weapons that few in the world had even imagined let alone used in battle. John Ormack and the senior staff at Dreamland still consulted him on a regular basis—in effect he was still running things there too, although Ormack, now an Air Force one- star general, was in command.

  Elliott went through his briefcase on the seat beside him, to Hardcastle’s earlier facsimile transmission—the plan he and Patrick McLanahan had drawn up for an attack on Verrettes. He had had a chance to read it only briefly after it was received, and again briefly while being taken from Andrews to the White House earlier that day. “Ian, this plan you and McLanahan drew up . . . you want to use the Seagull drones to draw out Salazar’s air defenses—I read that much. Then what?”

  “Use Sea Lions and Seagulls armed with rockets to take out the buildings and any targets of opportunity. After that. . . we’d have to land troops on Verrettes and capture Salazar and as many of his men as we could, but—”

 
“How many drones and Sea Lions are available right now?”

  “Stand by, I’ll check.” It took only a few moments for Hardcastle to call up the operational status of every air-breathing vehicle in the Hammerheads’ inventory. As Elliott suspected, most of the available rotor-driven air machines were involved in search-and-rescue operations: “We have twenty Seagulls, twelve Sky Lions and one Sea Lion here in Aladdin City. Five Sky Lyons and four of our Sea Lions are involved in rescue operations. NAPALM has four Seagulls, five Sky Lions and one Sea Lion on board. Two of their Sea Lions are involved in rescue operations. We have six other Sea Lions deployed in the Caribbean, Key West and along the Gulf, including two involved with recovery operations on Grand Bahama Island and two at the Cudjoe Key aerostat site—”

  “All right.” The fixed-wing, speedy, well-armed Seagull drones were unsuitable for search-and-rescue operations so none were being used—that left the Seagull fleet available. “Ian, I need to find out—”

  “About the airborne drone-control system,” Hardcastle anticipated. “I just buzzed McLanahan. Are we going to do this? Are we finally going to kick some ass around here?”

  “I’m considering an authorized Border Security long-range search operation,” Elliott replied. “We’re not going out to kick any ass but with KEYSTONE, HIGHBAL and CARABAL down we’re going to need some long-range eyes up there until we get our replacement picket-ships operating.”

  “McLanahan here, General. You want to know the status of the airborne drone control system? If we can get our E-2 back from Mobile I can have the sensor software changed in about an hour. That’ll put control of the drones in the hands of the senior radar controller—”

  “I’ve already recalled the E-2 from Alabama,” Hardcastle said, referring to a sophisticated aircraft carrier-based radar plane that could scan thousands of cubic miles of airspace at a time. Customs had acquired several of these planes for drug patrols and they were then turned over to the Hammerheads. With the aerostat sites in the southeast, the E-2 patrols were moved farther west, where aerostat coverage had not yet been established. “His ETA is about thirty minutes. I was going to put him on patrol in the Santaren Channel to assist in recovery operations.”