Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (80 page)

 
          
Maraklov
took another drink. It didn’t matter, he thought— he’d be out of this backwater
country in a few hours. And who knew .. . maybe one of the MiGs would get
lucky. It happened . . .

 
          
A
soldier came up to Maraklov’s revetment, showed an I.D. card to the guard, and
ran to the platform set up beside DreamStar. He was hesitant to climb up the
ladder, but Maraklov saw that he had a message in his hand, motioned him up,
and asked for the paper.

 
          
He
got an instant headache after reading the first word. Assuming he could read
Russian, the Spanish-speaking radio operators had scrawled the message out in childlike
Cyrillic characters. Maraklov had enough trouble reading Russian, but reading
this gobbledygook would be next to impossible. He had to get the soldier’s
attention away from the interior of DreamStar’s cockpit by hammering his
shoulder.

 
          
“Read
this for me,” he said in English.

 
          
The
soldier looked at him in surprise. “You speak English, mister?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
The
soldier looked at the message for a moment, then looked at Maraklov as if he
was going to hit him. “I am sorry, I cannot read this. This is Russian, no?”

 
          
“This
is garbage Russian, yes. Go back to the radio operator and tell him to write
the message out in English.” Maraklov grabbed a pencil from the shoulder’s
shirt pocket just before he scrambled off the platform—at least while he was
getting the message translated he could work on deciphering this junk.

           
The MiG-23s were still idling at the
end of the runway—that probably meant that the GCI radar was being jammed or
had been destroyed, and the pilots were being held until a heading to the
intruder’s position could be established. Don’t bother launching, Maraklov
thought. Let the MiGs at Sebaco handle the American attackers—Sebaco was
obviously the American’s target—and leave the Puerto Cabezas MiGs in reserve
for when the attackers try to withdraw. If they chase the attackers they could
wind up getting shot down themselves or run out of fuel before engaging the
stragglers . . . But a moment later the MiG-23S began their runup and
minimum-interval takeoffs. So much for reserve interceptors. Maraklov guessed
that none of these MiGs would return.

 
          
Maraklov
had the scribbled Cyrillic characters deciphered now, but remembering the
phonetic pronunciations for each character was tougher, and it took a few
minutes to make the message intelligible—luckily, most of it was numbers. It
was a satellite message from
Moscow
informing him that Soviet air forces would
be in place in five hours, ready to escort him out of the
Caribbean
basin into the open
Atlantic
. The message gave last-minute backup or anti-jam
frequency changes and other useless information. If the Americans were
broad-band jamming their primary communications frequencies, they were
listening in as well and were probably vectoring fighters into the source of
their transmissions. With such a large force of combat aircraft involved,
everything relied on secrecy and radio silence, not secondary and tertiary
frequencies.

 
          
The
fighters were on the downwind side of the runway, the long, bright flames of
their afterburners still visible. They had no tankers in Nicaragua (except the
one that was lying on the bottom of the Caribbean), so if those guys in the
MiG-23s didn’t come out of afterburner they’d flame out before getting a shot
ofiF at the intruders.

 
          
Maraklov
asked himself, “Why am I ragging on those pilots? DreamStar is safe—if the
Americans had pinpointed DreamStar here in Puerto Cabezas this whole base would
be a smoking hole.”

 
          
Was
it because he itched to get into battle? No, even if he had enough energy to
take DreamStar aloft, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t risk it. With the MiG-2gs
gone
Nicaragua
was wide open to attack—for all he knew
there was an aircraft carrier sitting off the coast with fifty F-18
fighter-bombers ready to take him on. It would be suicide to try.

 
          
He
took another drink of water, emptying the bottle. The real problem here was
that he just wanted a future, and every step being taken just seemed to drive
him farther and farther from it. DreamStar, he felt,
was
his life. His whole being was intermeshed with it, and the
thought of its eventual dismantling or, worse, destruction was as obscene to
him as the idea of a mother killing her newborn baby. But he was also a
soldier, obliged to obey orders—and he had been ordered to deliver DreamStar to
Russia
. But could he obey those orders, knowing
what they would do to his aircraft—and what they would probably do to
him
as well? He was already suspect . .
. too American . . .

 
          
All
the dead-end thoughts he was having were giving him a headache even worse than
before. He tossed the plastic water bottle at one of the Nicaraguan military
guards at the mouth of the revetment.
“Agua,
por favor”—
probably the only three words of Spanish he knew. The soldier
began filling the bottle from one of his canteens—no doubt more of the brackish,
parasite-ridden water of this country. The thought of getting diarrhea while in
the metallic flight suit made him laugh and cry, but dying of thirst and trying
to withstand these migraine headaches were even worse prospects.

 
          
Soon,
it would be over, he thought. He’d be on his way out of this godforsaken
country and back to . . .
Russia
. Back to . . . what?

 
          
He
was too tired to think any more about that. As the flickering lights of the
fires in the SA-15 radome subsided, exhaustion overtook him, and he drifted off
into a fitful sleep.

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
“Rainbow
two showing impact,” Atkins reported. The green search radar indication on
Carter’s laser-projection cockpit display had disappeared—the Tacit Rainbow
missile had destroyed the Cuyali radar site, the last large-scale search radar
system before Sebaco.

 
          
“Coming
up on the initial point, crew,” Alicia Kellerman announced. They were deep
within the Rio Tuma river valley, which snaked out of the Cordillera Dariense
mountains north of
Managua
and fed
Managua
Lake
. Their initial point was, of all places,
the town of
Los
Angeles
thirty miles upriver from Sebaco.

           
“Bomb run briefing, crew,” Paul
Scott, the radar navigator, began, “we’ll be approaching Sebaco from the
northeast on the military crest of the river valley. There’s one SA-io site on
the top of
Iinotega
Mountain
at our
one o’clock
position, but according to Powell and
McLanahan in Cheetah it’s a mobile site.”

 
          
“The
system can use infrared to acquire its targets,” Atkins chimed in. “Even though
it needs radar for guidance they can launch on IR azimuth commands and then go
to guidance uplink once the missile is in flight. We could see a snap-launch
profile, where all we get on the threat-warning receivers is a
MISSILE LAUNCH
warning—we won’t get a
symbol or
MISSILE warning.”
Carter
was relieved to hear Atkins back on top of his game—he was pretty shook after
their first encounter with the SA-15.

 
          
“Our
last hazard on the run is the town of
Matagalpa
, where some Soviet troops could be
garrisoned. Watch out for triple-A radars. SA-14 or SA-7 shoulder-fired
missiles may also be a factor but if we stay low and fast we should be able to
beat an SA-14.

 
          
“We’ll
approach Sebaco from the southeast side of the base. Powell and McLanahan saw
one antiaircraft artillery battery on each end of the runway—it’ll be worth
lobbing a HARM or even a Striker in there if it engages us. They also saw
helicopter gunships on the base. These can carry air-to-air heat-seeking
missiles too. Our targets are the three hangars on the southwest side of the
base and the underground headquarters building three hundred yards southeast
from the hangars. The hangars are primary. We’ll also drop the CBU cluster-bomb
units on the runway and the taxiway-parking ramp area, with emphasis on destroying
any aircraft. If the defenses are minimal we can make a circle to the north or
northeast and come around for another pass. After the attack, we beat feet to
the northeast, terrain-follow in the Cordillera Isabella mountains, and exit
along the Honduran border. If we’re drowned and each module crew gets
separated, evade north or northwest toward
Honduras
and get a ride to
Tegucigalpa
. We’ve all been briefed on the pick-up
points in
Nicaragua
where we can maybe get assistance from
Contadora sympathizers. We’re using channel Charlie on the survival radios.”

           
They had time to prebrief the
details of the mission and talk about their recommended actions in case they
were shot down or somehow separated, but it was much different this time— they
were actually over hostile territory, surrounded by the military forces of two
nations. It had suddenly all become very real.

 
          
“J-band
search radar at
six o’clock
,”
Atkins called out. “Batwing symbol—there’s a fighter up there looking for us.”

 
          
“I.P.
inbound, crew,” Kellerman said. The Megafortress made a slight left turn,
hugging the side of the rugged, tree- covered mountains.

 
          
Suddenly
a green mushroom-shaped dome appeared briefly on Carter’s windscreen. “
Warning
,
search radar,
twelve
o’clock
. ”

           
“We’ve got something out ahead of
us,” Carter called out.

 
          
“Looks
like triple-A,” Atkins said, studying his threat receiver. The computer
confirmed it seconds later by drawing a tiny gun-icon underneath the green
mushroom. “I’ve got a HARM aligning against it.” Just then, the mushroom turned
yellow.

 
          
“Warning, threat radar tracking,
twelve o’clock
.”

           
“Should we go around it?” Carter
asked.

 
          
“No
room,”
Cheshire
said. “We’d have to climb five thousand
feet to clear these mountains.”

 
          
“Descend
and accelerate,” Atkins said. “Stand by for missile launch . . . now.”

 
          
The yellow
bay DOORS OPEN
light came on.
“
Caution,
bomb doors open . . . warning, HARM missile launch command . . . missile launch
. . . bomb doors closed. ”

           
“Missile away.” The
one-thousand-pound HARM missile was a yellow streak as it roared away into the
darkness. Seconds later there was a splash of fire on the horizon and the glow
of flames. The yellow mushroom was gone.

 
          
“Warning, airborne threat radar,
six o’clock
.”

           
Karbayjal activated his fire-control
radar and slaved it to the threat receiver so the beam from the tail-mounted
tracking radar would look in the exact direction of the threat. The readout he
got made him yell into his oxygen visor. “Fighter at
six o’clock
, five miles, descending rapidly.” He hit
the voice- command button on his armrest. “Radar lock. Airmine launch one.
Launch two. Launch three.”