Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (79 page)

 
          
“Tracking
radar,” Atkins called out over the computerized warning voice. “SA-10,
ten o’clock
. I’m getting warning messages on UHF and
VHF
GUARD
channels.” The yellow sky
seemed to undulate, then disappear and reappear at long intervals, showing the
effectiveness of Atkins’s jamming.

 
          
Kellerman
activated her navigation radar. “Land fall in two minutes. First terrain,
fifteen miles, not a factor at this altitude. First high terrain twenty-five
miles, starting to paint over it.” She plotted her position on a chart,
cross-checked it with the GPS satellite navigation readout, then turned the
radar to standby.

 
          
Carter
released his back pressure on his control stick, allowing the terrain-following
autopilot to bring the B-52 back to one hundred feet above the
Caribbean
. The radar warning had changed to solid
yellow, then changed briefly to red before being blotted out.

 
          
“Did
they get a missile off, EW?”
Cheshire
called out.

 
          
“No
uplink signal,” Atkins replied. “We’re at the extreme outer range of the SA-io.
I don’t think they can . . .”

 
          
“There, I see it,”
Cheshire
said. She pointed out the left windscreen.
Just over the horizon was a short glowing line of fire spinning in a tight
circle, growing larger and larger by the second.

 
          
Carter
jerked the control stick hard left toward the missile. “Chaff, flare.” Atkins
hit the ejector buttons, sending bundles of radar-decoying chaff and heat-decoy
flares overboard.

 
          
Carter
hit the voice-command stud. “Set clearance plane fifty feet.”

 
          
“Clearance plane fifty feet, learning low
altitude, clearance plane one hundred feet.”
Carter’s turn was so tight
that, had the computer set the lower clearance plane, the B-52’s left wingtip
would have dragged the water.

 
          
“It’s
still coming,”
Cheshire
called out as Carter rolled out. The B-52 dipped as the lower clearance
plane setting kicked in.

 
          
“I
can’t find the uplink, something must be guiding it but I can’t find it . . .”

 
          
The
glow was getting brighter—Carter would swear he heard the roar of the missile’s
rocket-motor as it sped closer and closer, jamming wasn’t working . . . what .
. . ?

 
          
“Stop
jamming, EW,” Carter suddenly called out. “It must be homing in on the jamming
source. Go to standby. Fast.”

 
          
The
result was near-instantaneous. The fast-circling flight- path of the missile
began to wobble, and the tail flame of the missile’s engine began to elongate
just as it burned out. Carter nudged his B-52 as low as he could safely go. It
was too late to try to make a turn, too late even for more decoys . . .

 
          
They
heard a
thud
against the fuselage,
then silence. The B-52 shook as if a giant hammer had hit it.

 
          
“It
missed,”
Cheshire
shouted, “that was the supersonic shock
wave, it missed . . .”

 
          
“It
must have been a SA-15 SAM,” Atkins said. “SA-15S . . . they just started
deploying SA-15S in the
Soviet Union
.
Now they got them in
Nicaragua
?”

 
          
Carter
forced calm into his own dry throat. “Be ready—our intelligence briefing was
obviously missing a few details.”

 
          
But
Atkins was still rattled. “SA-15 . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize it. . .
they’re not supposed to have SA-15S in
Nicaragua
... I could’ve gotten us all killed ...”

 
          
“Snap
out of it, Bob.” But Carter understood what Atkins was going through. No one on
this crew, including himself, had ever flown a combat mission—as a matter of
fact, until Dog Zero Two was ready to fly two months ago, none of his crew
members had been aboard a military aircraft for several months. After months or
years with their mostly deskbound duties at Dreamland they had become more like
engineers than combat crew members. Now they were being shot at by the
Soviet Union
’s most advanced surface-to-air missile. He
was sure the rest of the crew was steeling a panic—Atkins was just the first
one to let loose.

 
          
“All
of you, settle down and pay attention,” Carter called over interphone. “They
took a shot and missed. Fly this mission as briefed. But we’ve gotta pull
together and back each other up. All of you know your stuff—now it’s time to
put it into action. All right. Check your stations and minimize electronic
emissions.
Nancy
, get another power-plant check.”

 
          
The
radar sky had turned back to yellow. Carter maintained his new heading for a
few moments, then turned back to the right and let the autopilot take control.

 
          
“Do
you think we should go back on the same course?” Scott asked. “It’ll be easier
to find us that way.”

 
          
“No
use in doing that until we get over the mountains,” Carter said. “The faster we
get inland the better. Besides, I’ll bet there’s no big secret where we’re
heading. The entire Nicaraguan air force is probably waiting up there for us.”

 
          
“Crossing
the coast now,” Kellerman announced. Carter checked out the cockpit window—when
only fifty feet above the surface, the transition from water to land occurred
very fast. He double-checked that the terrain-following system was working
properly and set a two-hundred-foot clearance plane.

 
          
“Tracking
radar up again,” Atkins said shakily. The yellow sky was back for only a few
moments when it completely blanked out again.

 
          
“They
get another missile off?”

 
          
“I
don’t think so,” Atkins said. “The Rainbow indicates impact
—we got it
”

 
          
Cheshire
slapped her armrest. “All
right
”

 
          
“Celebration
over, copilot,” Carter said. “We’ve got a long long way to go.”

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
In
a matter of only a few minutes the Nicaraguan military airbase of Puerto
Cabezas was in chaos. One moment it was quiet and peaceful, a warm, lazy summer
evening with a hint of an evening storm brewing. The next, air raid sirens were
screaming into the night, Russian missiles raised from concrete canisters like
demons rising from their crypts, and the roar of jet fighters began to fill the
air with the pungent odor of kerosene.

 
          
The
first SA-15 missile, installed on the coastal Nicaraguan base only a month
earlier in the ongoing Russian fortification of Nicaragua, screamed off its
launch rails less than twenty seconds later, filling the air with burning
acidic exhaust gas. The missile crews, Nicaraguan with Russian commanding
officers, stood and watched the missile disappear into the night sky until a
Soviet officer yelled an order to prepare the launcher for reload. Another
SA-15 missile was completing its gyro-alignment—the Nicaraguan soldiers were
skilled at aligning one missile at a time for launch . . .

 
          
It
was this deficiency that had probably saved the crew of the Megafortress Plus.
Just before the second missile was ready for launch a huge explosion lit up the
small sandy hill where the SA-15 tracking and guidance radome was positioned.
The golf-ball-like radome exploded like a burst balloon, scattering pieces of
the antenna within for hundreds of meters.

 
          
From
his vantage point in a low-covered concrete revetment near the flight line,
Maraklov saw the golf-ball radome split apart and explode; now it looked like a
cracked egg in a boiled egg holder. Men were running toward the flight line,
but he knew the attack on the SA-15 guidance radome was a prelude to the real
assault. If it was a Tacit Rainbow cruise missile the attack would not be for a
few minutes because the AGM-136 had a range of almost a hundred miles; if it
was a AGM-88 HARM missile the follow-on attack could be any second. Either way
it was going to be an air raid—the attackers had obviously been waiting for the
SA-15 to come up before blowing it up, and with the radar gone the whole north
coast of Nicaragua was open to air attack.

 
          
Maraklov
took a deep pull from a plastic jug of distilled water as he watched the radar
control center begin to burn. Sebaco, he was sure, was next—except whoever was
staging this attack wasn’t going to stop at a radar site.

 
          
But
DreamStar—it was safe. He was sitting in DreamStar’s cockpit, still wearing his
flight suit, his helmet resting on his lap in front of him. Less than one hour
earlier he had landed at Puerto Cabezas after a low-altitude run from Sebaco.
Because he knew that the American AWACS radar planes would be looking for a
high-speed aircraft leaving Sebaco, he had made the flight under two hundred
miles an hour and at the lowest altitude he could muster, flying deep within
mountain valleys and jungle river beds to avoid detection. His gamble that his
flight-profile would resemble anything but a jet fighter had apparently worked.

 
          
To
avoid detection he had landed on the taxiway at Puerto Cabezas instead of the
broad ten-thousand-foot runway, taxied to the semi-underground concrete shelter
and waited with engines running for any sign of pursuit. None. He shut down but
maintained the ANTARES interface and remained strapped in place, configured and
ready to fire up DreamStar. But still no sign of pursuit. Exhaustion overtook
him, so he shut down the interface and directed the ground crewmen to begin
refueling his fighter. He had been off the ANTARES interface only fifteen
minutes when the attack began.

 
          
DreamStar
was ready for a fight. She carried two more Lluyka in-flight refueling tanks on
the wing pylons plus two radar-guided missiles on wing pylons and, this time,
two infra- red-guided missiles on hardpoints on the underside of the fuselage.
The two IR missiles were more of a hazard than a help—if DreamStar’s canards
were down in their high-maneuverability position, the missiles could possibly
hit the canards after launch—but for the long ferry mission, the extra weapons
were considered necessary. The twenty-millimeter cannon was also fully
reloaded—DreamStar was at its heaviest gross weight ever, well over one
hundred-thousand pounds.

 
          
But
Maraklov himself wasn’t as prepared for either a long flight or a fight with
American fighters. This had been the first time he had made two flights in
DreamStar within twenty-four hours and the physical and mental strain was
immense—like running the Boston Marathon, getting twelve short hours of rest,
then going out and running a few more Heartbreak Hills. His body had not
recovered from the first mission, but the necessity was clear—DreamStar was in
danger if it was left there at Sebaco. That had just been confirmed.

           
The whine of high-speed jet engines
made Maraklov painfully turn to scan down the runway. Four MiG-23 fighters were
taxiing to the end of the runway preparing for takeoff. The Soviet government
had not been able to send any more MiG- 295 or Russian pilots to
Nicaragua
on such short notice, so those four MiG-23s
were manned by Nicaraguan pilots. The Mig-23s were twenty years old, the pilots
young or ill trained in night intercepts. If whoever was attacking Nicaragua
destroyed the search and ground-controlled intercept radars as well as the
surface-to-air missile radars, the MiG pilots would be forced to hunt for the
attackers blind, using their own look-down, shoot- down pulse-Doppler radars to
scan thousands of square miles of territory for their quarry.