Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  Hardcastle made the first contact. “You need to watch out for autogyration, Rush,” he said. “When you fix on a small lighted object against a dark background the object will start to move on its own even though you’re steady. If you try to chase it you’ll be all over the sky. Concentrate on staying level with the tanker, and just guide the probe in toward the drogue. When you’re in close you can tweak the probe in. Keep your eyes moving and use the tanker’s profile to keep your horizon perspective.” As he talked Hardcastle gently glided the probe into the bushel-basket-size drogue. “Two-Nine contact.”

  “Three-Three contact, taking fuel.”

  "Two-Nine.” Hardcastle took on a few hundred pounds of fuel, then ordered a disconnect and backed out. “You got the airplane.”

  “I’ve got it,” Masters acknowledged. With their target only a hundred miles away, Masters wasn’t about to let anything go wrong—he plugged the AV-22's long boom receptacle into the extended drogue on the first try as if he had been doing it all his life.

  “It’s amazing how a little pucker-factor improves your air-refueling performance, Rush,” Hardcastle said.

  “Damn straight,” Masters muttered, not taking his eyes off the lighted white ring in front of him. They completed their final air refueling hookup twenty miles outside the turnpoint and start-descent point, and the tanker-configured Sea Lion broke away and headed back to rejoin the E-2 Hawkeye over Great Inagua Island.

  “You’ve got fifteen Seagulls on your tail,” McLanahan reported on the secure radio channel after they made their turn inbound toward Haiti. “I aborted four on you—two because of connectivity faults with the Sea Stingers, one because of an engine problem, one because the data link seemed to get weaker at longer ranges. All the rest looked good, Admiral. You’re clear to descend. I’ll work the drones down behind you and keep them five hundred feet above you the whole time.”

  “Thanks, people. Two-Nine’s in the green with twelve thousand pounds,” Hardcastle replied. “Talk to you in a few.” On interphone he said, “Ready any time you are, Rush.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Roger. Autopilot is on, heading hold on, altitude hold off. Radar and radar altimeter.”

  “On and checked,” Masters replied. “Radar altimeter-alerter bug set to five hundred feet. Radar on terrain-avoidance mode, fault lights off, press-to-test good.”

  “My left MFD set for TA, thirty-mile range,” Hardcastle said, setting his left-side nine-inch color-computer monitor so it showed a wedge-shaped radar display with five-mile-range marks and flight- data information arranged along the edges. He set his second MFD to show engine and performance data, and the center MFD to show infrared scanner pictures. “Checked and set.” He put his hands on the control stick and power control. “I’ve got the airplane.”

  “You’ve got the airplane,” Masters acknowledged, transferring control to Hardcastle so he could set up his own MFD configuration. He set his right MFD to show the radar data and the left main MFD to show engine performance indicators in large numerals and graphic displays so he would immediately notice any engine malfunctions. “My MFDs are checked and set. Let me test the IR picture first ... if it’s good I’ll use it for landfall.”

  Hardcastle punched the FLIR scanner controls on his control stick to ON, and the ten-inch nitrogen-cooled eye unstowed itself on the Sea Lion’s nose and activated. They could easily see Haiti on the horizon ahead of them as a strip of white, with the coastal headlands looming cold and dark beyond. Masters lowered his helmet-targeting visor and activated the TADS/PNVS system, which slaved the scanner ball—and the Chain Gun pod when activated—to point at whatever he was looking at. The image projected clearly and without much distortion on the visor, still allowing him to see out the window and look at his MFDs and controls when he wanted. “My sights look good.” He raised his targeting visor, glanced over at Hardcastle and put his hands on the controls once again. “I’ve got the aircraft. Check out your sights and take another look around the cockpit. Make sure I’ve got the exterior lights off.”

  “You’ve got the aircraft,” Hardcastle verified, placing his fingers on the light switches to double-check—there would be no use flying low to avoid detection if all the anti-collision, strobes, position and running lights were still on. “Exterior lights are off.”

  On interphone Masters announced, “Crew, prepare for low-level descent. Helmets, jackets, gloves, strapped in and secure.”

  “Crew ready for descent,” the report from the I-Team commander came.

  “Very good. Here we go.” On the command channel Masters called out, “Two-Nine starting descent.”

  “Roger, Two-Nine,” Elliott said on the radio. “Good hunting. You’ve got the Seagull gaggle ready to go behind you.”

  “Roger.” Masters gently pushed the control stick forward and the altitude slowly began to wind down. He trimmed the aircraft for a thousand-foot-per-minute descent rate and checked the radar altimeter to be sure it was responding. “Good radar altimeter, good radar. Nacelles still at zero.”

  “Checks,” Hardcastle replied. He let his crosscheck cover the cockpit, the instruments and out the windows as well. He could see a faint outline of the rugged coast ahead, but everything else was dark. Punching up the satellite-navigation system he double-checked the navigation data with three shore-based navigation radios. “Looks like the satellite data’s good. Right on course.” He made another scan.

  “We would’ve heard something from Seven-One if we were off,” Masters said. “Passing ten thousand feet for five hundred.” “Checks,” Hardcastle replied.

  Several minutes later the AV-22 leveled off at five hundred feet above the waters of the Golfe de la Gonave, thirty miles before reaching Haiti’s west-central coast. Masters engaged the autopilot on hard-altitude hold and rechecked the radar altimeter, terrain-avoidance/terrain-following radar system and scanner system as the coastline approached. “I’ve got a pretty good picture with the FLIR so I’ll stick with that,” Masters announced. Hardcastle flipped the multimode radar to STANDBY so as to avoid detection by Haitian coastal defense units. They could hear a few isolated radio reports from airliners and small commercial planes heading into Port-au- Prince and Gonaives, but no alerts, either in Spanish, French or English about the presence of the AV-22 or the drones.

  “Feet dry for Two-Nine,” Hardcastle reported to Elliott as they crossed the coastline. He turned to his interphone: “Ten minutes to target crossing, crew.”

  “Here’s where it starts hitting the fan,” Hardcastle muttered, tightening his lap and shoulder belts and rolling his sleeves back down. “We should start seeing the drones move ahead of us.” There were no messages from the E-2, no visual contact with the drones, no radio calls on any frequency. “Six minutes,” Hardcastle announced. “The drones should be approaching Verrettes soon.” “Sure is quiet,” Masters said.

  “I’ve got a feeling Salazar won’t issue us any warning messages,” Hardcastle said, searching the sky all around them. “If he finds us, he’ll be right on our tail. McLanahan briefed that they didn’t start getting challenged until they were relatively close to the base, and the drones are a lot smaller than a fighter.”

  They waited another minute; by then, with only five minutes to go before the AV-22 arrived over Verrettes, they should have heard something—the attack couldn’t be going this well ... “I can’t stand it any longer,” Hardcastle said. “I know I shouldn’t break radio silence, but I gotta know what’s going on.” He switched to the command frequency. “Seven-One, this is Two-Nine. What’s our status?” No reply. “Seven-One, how copy?”

  “Loud and clear, Two-Nine,” McLanahan replied.

  “Where are the drones? What’s going on? Are they engaging?” A slight pause, then: “Two-Nine, the drones are RTB at this time.”

  “What? You’re sending them back? All of them?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Elliott, dammit, what the hell is going on? What are you do
ing? Are you sending us in there by ourselves? We don’t have the firepower to do it by ourselves. What’s going on? Are you under attack?” “Negative, Two-Nine. We’re in contact with you . . . and with Shadow One-One flight.”

  “Shadow flight? Who are they?”

  “Check out your two o’clock position, two miles.”

  “What the hell... ?” Masters engaged the terrain-avoidance radar to help them stay above the rolling ground, engaged the autopilot, then used the infrared scanner to look out to his right. Hardcastle lowered his helmet-targeting visor and also looked out.

  What they saw were two dark shapes that reminded Masters of two huge flying cockroaches. They had flat undercarriages, an unusually curved upper fuselage, stubby low-mounted wings and a very thin, steeply sloped aft section topped off with two thin, radically swept stubby vertical stabilizers. Unlike a normal aircraft’s image in an infrared scanner, with a hot aft-end near the engine exhausts and a hot spot near the cockpit, this one appeared cool and dark all over with no telltale heat emissions to give itself away—its infrared signature was cooler than the surrounding countryside. Masters zoomed in on the two buglike aircraft, but even at high magnification he could make out little detail. The two planes slowly accelerated away from the AV-22 and were soon lost in the darkness—even looking at their aft end with the infrared seeker they could see no hot exhaust dots, no rear profile, not even an exhaust trail.

  It had simply disappeared into the night. It was definitely out there, just a few miles away—easily within detection range of both the infrared scanner and the multimode radar—but none of their systems was picking them up.

  “Did you see that?” Masters said. “What were they?” He set the infrared scanner to full wide view—still nothing. “I’m not picking them up on the FLIR. Did they go supersonic?”

  “I don’t think so,” Hardcastle replied. “Stealth fighters don’t go supersonic—”

  “Stealth fighters? Those things were Stealth fighters? What are they doing here?”

  “I think Elliott has just declared war on Salazar and the drug smugglers,” Hardcastle said in a low voice. “He’s not going to keep on using only Border Security assets to deal with those guys—he’s brought in his own air force.”

  “But.. . can he do that?” Masters asked, taking the AV-22 off hard autopilot and returning to manual flying with the scanner. “I mean, how can he pretend this is a simple Border Security Force reconnaissance run when he’s got Stealth fighters flying around out here? Can Elliott order planes like that to—”

  Masters paused, his mind racing as he realized what was happening. “Elliott really did declare war on these guys,” Masters said cross-cockpit. “He’s going to bomb the bloody hell out of Verrettes . . .”

  The town of Verrettes was located in the Artibonite River valley, a gently sloping fertile plane in the west-central part of Haiti. The F-117A Stealth fighters stayed at low altitude, less than five hundred feet above ground, hugging the crest of the hills and staying away from the road and railroad lines down toward the river. Unlike the AV-22 Sea Lion, the Stealth fighters did not use radar to search out the terrain—they employed a computerized navigation database to pick the minimum altitude along their route of flight, then used an infrared scanner to circumnavigate the occasional man-made obstructions not on the database.

  The Stealth fighter was designed to avoid detection in several ways . . . Its multifaceted, bug-like shape did not allow radar energy to reflect directly back at enemy radar receivers, which reduced its radar signature. Its twin turbofan engines used a complex system of baffles to cool the engine exhaust to reduce the heat signature, making acquisition by passing heat detectors much more difficult. It used no radar transmitters for navigation, so it could not be detected by passive radar threat-warning receivers—it used infrared scanners, both forward- and downward-looking, for navigation and bombing. The Stealth carried no external weapons or fuel tanks—they had to bring a KC-135 tanker from their base in Tonopah, Nevada, all the way to the Great Inagua Island rendezvous point—a post-attack refueling was essential. All of the fighter’s weapons were carried in semi-recessed fuselage wells in the belly, which reduced drag and radar signature. Although the F-117A could travel at supersonic speeds the sonic booms and shock waves would be a dead giveaway, so they stayed at a much more conservative, fuel-efficient speed of nine miles per minute as they sped toward Verrettes.

  The Stealth’s fighter crews were prepared for evasive maneuvers and even lower bomb-run altitudes but they received no indications of attack as they started their run. Instead of evading all the way to the runway, they were able to roll into their target and stabilize for several seconds, picking their aimpoints.

  Each fighter-bomber carried two Durandal runway-cratering bombs and four infrared-imaging guided Maverick missiles. Taking ten-second separation between planes, the first Stealth fighter raced over the main runway, dropping the Durandal bombs along the runway centerline in two-thousand-foot intervals. The Durandal bombs had rocket-propelled warheads in them that dug several feet into the runway, then detonated with the shattering force of five hundred pounds of dynamite. The underground explosion heaved the steel reinforced concrete runway ten feet high out of a thirty- foot-wide crater, causing huge slabs of concrete to fly out of the hole like a deck of cards thrown into the wind. Because Verrettes had a wide parallel taxiway, the second Stealth fighter attacked that taxiway in the same way.

  Within minutes the runway and main parallel taxiway at Verrettes were made completely unusable to fixed-wing jet aircraft—only a helicopter or light plane could safely avoid the craters.

  The Stealth fighter crew had their eight Maverick missile’s targets very carefully laid out in advance. The fighter-bombers peeled off to the south of the base, executed several clearing turns to scan for pursuit or ground fire, then turned north back toward the base and lined up on their targets. Two missiles were immediately designated for the alert shelters at the end of the main runway; the rest were targeted against the larger hangars and fuel stubs where jet aircraft had been parked when McLanahan and Powell made their reconnaissance trip. One by one the Stealth crews searched out a target with their scanners, locked the image in their sights and launched the Maverick missile at a one- to two-mile range. The first F-117 would head in, fire a missile, clear the target, execute a clearing turn and turn in toward the next target while the second fighter made its attack. The two planes were like incessant insects, pouncing on a target, flying away out of reach, then zooming in again and again.

  It did not take long to expend eight Maverick missiles. The Stealth fighters made one more pass over the base to examine the damage and consider reattacks on any targets that had only minor damage or for targets of opportunity. Each Stealth fighter also carried an internal twenty-millimeter gun with five hundred rounds of armorpiercing high-explosive ammunition, but no targets of opportunity seemed to be evident.

  “Lion Seven-One, this is Shadow Flight. Off the target and clear. We will rendezvous and stand by for damage assessment by Lion Two-Nine. Over.”

  “Seven-One copies. Clear of traffic.” The E-2 Hawkeye would continue to scan for any signs of pursuit as the Stealth fighters made their way out of Verrettes at treetop level and clear of Haiti. Once out over the Gulf of Gonave with no pursuit, they began a climb to a more fuel-efficient altitude and set up to refuel with the KC-135 tanker orbiting with the E-2.

  Within two minutes the second raid of the F-117 Stealth fighter— the first had been against the Panamanian Defense Force in January of 1990 before the capture of Manuel Noriega—was successfully completed.

  The AV-22 made its first pass over Verrettes at high speed—nearly five miles per minute—in case the base’s air defense units had not been completely destroyed and had been reorganized after the Stealth fighter’s attack. With the Sea Lion on hard autopilot, Hardcastle and Masters searched the base for signs of activity—the winking of anti-aircraft guns, scrambled taxi lights, e
ven missiles being fired at them. Nothing. No lights on the base, none near the parking ramps, no sign of activity at all. The two switched between the FLIR scanner and regular visual checks—nothing.

  Regardless, Masters performed a hard, sweeping combat break- and-clearing turn at the end of the runway in case they were pursued after their pass. He used the Sea Lion’s proprotors and maneuverability to quickly change direction, swoop down to below treetop level and skim the ground at low altitude. He headed for a clear section of ground right behind the alert hangars—his first targets.

  “Cannon and missile pods deployed,” Hardcastle called out. “Pods armed and ready. TADS/PNVS to enable and COMBAT.”

  Masters hovered twenty feet above ground behind the open backside of the alert shelters, searching for aircraft, soldiers, vehicles— nothing. The two Maverick missiles from the Stealth fighters had turned the insides of the shelters into burnt hulks of charred wood and twisted metal. The roof had collapsed, only small sections of the block walls were still standing. Masters searched hard and fast for a target—and found nothing.

  “Time,” Hardcastle shouted. Masters poured the power on, sending his Sea Lion into a hard climb over the shelter. He quickly pivoted around at the top of the climb, pushed the nose down and zoomed back facing in the opposite direction, training the Chain Gun on the buildings and few trees behind the alert aircraft shelters. Again he searched for vehicles or troops that might have tried to get behind the AV-22 while it was in its hover—nothing.

  “No aircraft in these shelters,” Masters called out. “I see no vehicles, no troops, no bodies. The place looks deserted. This morning they had a jet-fighter squadron here—we saw the pictures. They must’ve had two dozen planes here, maybe two hundred men. How could they have packed up so fast?”