Battle Born (41 page)

“Steering is good to the release track,” he said a few moments later. “Stand by for weapon release in ninety seconds. Give me point nine Mach, pilot.”

Just as Rinc began pushing the throttles forward, Warren shouted, “Hey, I’ve got a search radar up . . .
and it’s staying up too. Ten degrees right, twenty-five miles.”

“Drop on all three targets,” Rinc said. “We have no way of knowing which . . .” Suddenly, he pointed out the window and shouted, “Look! There’s a rocket lifting off, right in front of us! I can see it! Holy shit, I’ve never seen a rocket launch before.”

“Pilot, I want max afterburners
now
!” Patrick shouted. “I want you to aim the nose right at that missile until you can’t hold it any longer!”

“What? You want what?”

“I said, max AB
now
, and keep us pointed right at that rocket for as long as you can!
Go
!”

Rinc shoved the throttles all the way to the stops and swept the wings back to full. The Bone leaped forward like a meteor. The rapid acceleration and gradual but unrelenting pressure of increasing G-forces pressing Patrick into his seat felt great, like the power and exhilaration of a race car or speedboat. Rinc kept on raising the nose, and the G-forces kept right on coming. It was easy to think he was an astronaut, riding a column of fire into space.

But unlike a spaceship, the Bone couldn’t keep on raising its nose and accelerating at the same time. Patrick had started a timer when Rinc began the maneuver, and after only twenty seconds and twenty degrees above the horizon, the speed was already dropping off. In full blower, they might have to hit a tanker if they kept this up much longer. But about then, Rinc said, “Hey! The rocket is nosing over—it’s starting to descend.”

“That was just a test rocket—it burned out just to make sure it didn’t fly outside the range,” Patrick said. “Good job, Major.”

“What do you mean, good job?” Seaver asked as he
leveled off and pulled the throttles to normal power settings. “What did I do?”

“Later,” Patrick said. “Okay, crew, let’s go back and get those launchers back there.”

“What? Now you want us to bomb those targets? Why didn’t we do that be—” But Rinc stopped his protests as the lightbulb finally popped on in his brain, and he turned back to the first target. At 32,000 feet, the altitude he had climbed to when he stopped the chase on the test rocket, the JDAM satellite-guided bombs could glide over fifteen miles. As fast as the rotary launcher could spit them out, the JDAMs dropped into space.

A few minutes later, after clearing off to the voice SATCOM channel, Patrick reported, “Good work, everyone. Three good hits, all within thirty feet, which is pretty good for JDAM. One bomb hit within ten feet—a shack. Only one was the launcher, but the other three were simulated maintenance and crew vehicles—legitimate targets in anybody’s book. Let’s head back to the orbit area.”

“Okay, General, what was that climb for?” Rinc asked as he started a turn back for the patrol anchor. “We gonna chase rockets now?”

“Just wanted to distract you a little.”

“If I can speak freely, General sir—bullshit,” he said. “You don’t just want to go after launchers—you want to go after missiles too! Tell us, General—do we have a weapon that can take down a ballistic missile? You got a weapon you can put on a Bone that’ll take down a ballistic missile?”

“No comment.”

“So you
don’t
work for the Air Force chief of staff, do you, sir?” Long asked. “You work for some R and D unit—maybe even for the supersecret squirrels down there at Dreamland, huh?”

“Time out, all of you. That’s the last we talk about any of this,” Patrick warned. “You say a word about this to anyone outside this airframe, and your life will turn into an endless maze of courtrooms, lawyers, investigators, and maximum security cells. Do you all understand?”

“Fine, fine, General,” Rinc said. “Now tell us: What do you have in mind? What’s the mod? Is this what Block G is going to do? You gotta tell—”

“Hey!” Ollie shouted as the crew heard a slow-paced
deedle deedle deedle
tone on interphone. He had to remember to key the mike switch in his excitement: “SA-4 up.” The SA-4 “Ganef” is a mobile high-altitude SAM, an older system, but still deadly to any aircraft flying higher than five or six hundred feet. “Better get our asses down, boys!”

“Not quite yet,” Patrick said. “Max range of an SA-4 is fifty miles, but lethal range is about twenty miles, so we should be safe—they’ll wait until we get well within lethal range. They can see us up here, but they won’t attack yet. Let’s make the SA-4 our next target. Ollie, keep on feeding us position data.”

“Okay,” Warren said. “Rodeo, right ninety degrees, target at thirty miles.” Rinc made a tight turn and rolled out precisely on heading.

“Right five degrees, twenty-nine miles . . . okay, dead ahead, twenty-eight miles.”

“Stand by.” Long moved his cursor control out the proper amount, then adjusted the gain and brightness controls to tune out the terrain features on the radar-scope. He then moved his cross hairs onto the largest radar return still on the radar image. “I’m going to take a patch. Left fifty, pilot,” he ordered. Rinc made the turn. With the target offset the proper amount, Long was able to take a high-resolution “patch” of it, then
examine the magnified image. “There it is. Pretty good look at an SA-4 Ganef SAM.”

“Cool!” Warren exclaimed, straining over to look. It didn’t actually look like much—just a group of boxes—but on one box, the upraised missiles could clearly be seen. “Hey, that’s pretty neat.”

“I’ve got the coordinates loaded . . . bombing computers are programming JDAM . . . programming complete,” Long announced. “Okay, pilot, steering is good to the release point. Give me Mach point nine, right turn to the release point, stand by for countermeasures and evasive action.”

No sooner had Rinc shoved in the throttles to full military power and finished the turn than the threat-warning receiver issued another alert tone, this one a faster-paced
deedledeedledeedle.
“Missile warning,” Warren called out. “Pilot, stand by for maneuvers . . .” Then they heard another warning tone, and Warren watched as the left chaff dispenser counter clicked. “
Missile launch! Break right
!”

Seaver reacted instantly, yanking the control stick hard right and pulling, waiting until their speed had slowed to cornering velocity, then rolling out and shoving in full afterburner again to regain their speed.

“Should we go low?” Rinc shouted on interphone.

“Uplink down . . . height finder down . . . SA-4 back in search,” Warren said.

“If we descend, we’ll have to fly closer to the target,” Long said. “Stay up here. Center up, steering is good. Twenty seconds to release. If we get another launch, pilot, we have to stay wings-level until bomb’s away. Don’t turn until I tell you. Fifteen sec—”

Another warning tone. “Missile alert! Height finder up!” Warren shouted.

“Hold heading! Ten . . . doors coming open.” The rumble of the doors was not as loud as before, since
with a JDAM bomb release from the rotary launcher, the bomb doors needed to open only halfway.

Another warning tone. “Missile launch!” Warren shouted, reading the blinking alert message on his multifunction display. “Chaff! Chaff!”

“Hold heading!” Long shouted. Ollie swore and hit the CHAFF EJECT button as fast as he could. Chaff bundles shot out of the ejectors atop the forward part of the fuselage, creating a larger cloud of radar-decoying metal slivers that ballooned the radar cross section of the B-1 several hundred times. “Bomb away! Doors closed!
Pilot, scram left
! Clear to descend!”

Rinc immediately started a hard turn and hit the TERFLW button on his autopilot control—but he didn’t wait for the computer to point the nose earthward, he rolled the B-1 nearly inverted. The terrain-following fail-safe fly-up system immediately pulled the B-1’s nose downward, and the Bone plummeted to earth.

Seaver jammed the throttles to idle and popped the spoilers to try to slow down while descending at the same time. He kept the bomber nearly inverted until the nose was over forty degrees below the horizon, then pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to temporarily disconnect the autopilot. But when he tried to roll upright, nothing happened. He shook the stick, pulled it in every direction—the nose stayed down, airspeed kept on decreasing, and the earth was rushing up to meet them in a hurry.

“Five thousand to level, pilot,” Patrick warned. “Check your attitude.”

Rinc pulled the pitch interrupt trigger all the way to disconnect the autopilot, then tried the controls again. Nothing. He shoved in full military power and tried to roll wings-level—nothing. He swept the wings forward right to the airspeed limit “barber pole”—still nothing. No stick control at all.

#x201C;Four thousand!” Patrick shouted. “Pilot,
roll out
!”

“Can’t!” Rinc said. “I got no roll response!”

“Three thousand!”

Patrick tried his own control stick—still no response. “We’re mushing . . . no response . . . we’re in a full stall, dammit . . . we got the nose down and mil power and we’re in a full damned stall . . . What in hell’s happened?”

“Two thousand!” Long shouted. “Seaver, you motherfucker, you got it?
You got it?
”

Rinc reached over with his left hand and hit the
PREPARE
TO EJECT switch. A yellow warning light illuminated over every crew station.

“Hey, what the hell?” Ollie asked.
“Rodeo?”

“
One thousand feet
!”

Patrick frantically scanned the instrument panel, then reached down, not to his ejection handles, but to the center console, and flipped the four SPOILER OVERRIDE switches back to NORMAL. The airspeed immediately began to build. Seaver shoved the stick to the right, and the bomber responded. Barely five hundred feet above the ground, the B-1 bomber rolled upright, easily nosed skyward, and started a rapid climb. The abrupt pull-up from the steep dive squished them all into their seats, but the Bone settled into a fast two-thousand-foot-per-minute climb.

“Hol-ee shit!” Warren exclaimed. “What happened? Did we stall? Did we lose an engine?”

Rinc looked at Patrick. In order to start a rapid descent with the wings swept back, he had had to raise the spoilers—and to do that with the wings swept back, he had to override the flight control computers. But when he raised all four spoilers after rolling nearly inverted, he didn’t have the flight control authority or the airspeed to roll upright again.

“My fault,” Rinc said. Patrick shut off the
PREPARE
TO EJECT
light. “I had switches out of position for TERFLW. I fucked up. The general found my spoiler switches out of position. He saved our asses.”

“Good going, sir,” Ollie said.

“Everybody relax,” Patrick said. “Climb back to the new patrol anchor. I’m clearing off to SATCOM. Everyone else toggle off.” He switched his interphone panel, then keyed the mike: “Firebird, this is Two-One, requesting scores.” No conversation this time: Patrick copied down a string of numbers and letters, cleared off SATCOM, then used a decoder document to decode the message.

“TOSS bomb score on the SA-4 site, guys: two-nine-five degrees, sixty-seven feet. Not too shabby. With a two-thousand-pound bomb, I’d call that a kill.” No one celebrated this time—they were still too stunned by the near-crash. “Now for the bad news: first SA-4 missed by three hundred eighty feet. We might have survived that one. Second SA-4 . . .”

“Second?”

“SA-4s always fire in salvos of two, like a Patriot system,” Patrick said, “and each SA-4 battery has three launchers. Second SA-4 estimated miss distance was only one hundred twenty feet. With a two-to-three-hundred-pound warhead, I think we would’ve taken a major hit.”

“Well, it’s bullshit going after something like an SA-4 with a JDAM,” Ollie said. “We still gotta fly within its lethal range, even if we drop from high altitude—which exposes us even more.”

“Damn right,” Rinc said. “Give us a HARM or a Maverick or SLAM, and we can take it out without getting shot down.”

“Let’s wrap this up, folks—I think we’ve had enough for the day,” Patrick said. “Let’s head back to the first
patrol anchor and pick up our wingman. Then I’ll give you vectors for our new destination.”

“New destination?”

“We’re not going to Tonopah.”

“We’re not? You get something on the SATCOM? Are we going back to Reno?”

“I did get some news on SATCOM, and I decided to change our itinerary,” Patrick said. “Get Two-Zero tied on radar.”

“What’s the story, General? Where are we going?”

“Somewhere over the rainbow, boys and girls,” Patrick said. “Somewhere over the rainbow. I just hope we don’t run into a wicked witch after we get there.”

The rejoin with Aces Two-Zero went off without a hitch, and soon both bombers were in close fingertip formation, visually inspecting each other for any signs of damage or hanging ordnance after their live releases. Each plane did a turn over and around the other, checking all possible sides. “You look clean, lead,” reported the copilot aboard Two-Zero, Annie “Heels” Dewey, on the secure HAVE QUICK interplane frequency. “Hey, where were you guys?”

“We can tell you—but then we’d have to kill you,” Rinc said, but there was no humor in his voice.

“Put a cork in it, Rodeo,” Furness said.

“Crew, I’m clearing off to SATCOM voice,” Patrick said. “Make sure you’re toggled off.” Patrick switched over to the secure satellite communications channel and reauthenticated with Dave Luger. “How are we coming, partner?”

“We’re ready and waiting, boss,” Dave replied. “Foxtrot row is ready. We’ve diverted Aces Three-Zero and Aces Three-One, and they’ll be arriving in your patrol anchor shortly. You can come in as a four-ship. We might have problems with the three planes that were supposed to deploy to Tonopah, however.”

“Problems?”

“Muck, half the world is hopping mad at you right now,” Luger said. “Air Combat Command has been screaming at the Nevada Air Guard and at us for the last hour, asking if your guys and you have gone off your collective rockers. They’re pissed about the ROE violations, and they’re ready and anxious to prosecute all of you for dropping live ordnance over R-4808 without prior coordination. They’ve issued orders to the three planes still in Reno to cease all operations. The Nevada adjutant general isn’t arguing with ACC.