Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (8 page)

 
          
Just
then, Mauer glanced off to his right and saw it—a cloud of black smoke over the
industrial site. Mauer had been hoping to reacquire the bandit on this
southbound jog before it turned westbound again toward the industrial site, but
he was too late. The industrial site was hit. Dammit, looked like a direct
fucking hit—wait, no, not quite. The bad guys intel was obviously poor—the hit
was on the center of the big building, mostly crating and shipping stuff and
empty space. The bandit got a hit, but it didn’t do much harm!

 
          
Westbound
again, radar on in wide-area look-down search—got him!
BANDIT
one o’clock
low, twelve miles,
Sharon
advised.

 
          
“Lock
bandit, arm AIM-120, AIM-120 shoot,” Mauer ordered immediately.

 
          
BANDIT LOCKED . . . ROGER, AIM-120 ARMED,
WARNING, WEAPONS ARMED . . . AIM-120 SHOOT, AIM-120 SHOOT, WARNING, WEAPONS
DOORS opening . . . aim-120 away,
Sharon
responded in rapid-fire succession, and his
last AMRAAM missile was flying. But almost as soon as it launched, Mauer could
see its white smoke trail wobbling, then breaking first hard to the left, then
in a wide sharply arcing curve to the right, then again to the left in an even
wider arc. He knew it was going to miss well before the “time to die” meter ran
down to zero. That bandit had made two high-G jinks that again beat the hell
out of the highly maneuverable AIM-
120
missile.

 
          
Another
cloud of black smoke
—another
hit on
the industrial site, and this time it was on the smaller building southeast of
the large building, where a lot of finished munitions and products were stored
awaiting transportation. That son of a bitch had actually gone all the way
around and
reattacked,
with a fighter
on his tail! He had balls, that’s for sure— any mud-mover worth his wings would
hit, then get out of the defended area as fast as he could.

 
          
Enough
of this super-automated datalink shit, Mauer thought—time to call in some help.
They were supposed to stay off the voice radios and use the datalink as much as
possible, but he was in deep shit and his first priority was to defend his
territory. He rocked the radio switch on the throttles up to the
UHF
position: “Saber One-Two, this is
One-One on Red.”

 
          
“One-Two,”
replied his fellow hunter, Captain Andrea Mills. She had a slight twinge of
sarcasm already in her voice, and Mauer almost regretted calling her—he knew
she knew he was having trouble.

 
          
“Come
give me a hand with this bandit,” Mauer said.

 
          
“Roger,
I’m on my way,” Mills replied, the sarcasm gone. Mills looked for every
opportunity to rub her fellow fighter jocks’ noses in the macho hunter-killer
game they all relished, but when it came time to get down to business, she was
serious, focused, and as deadly as any swinging dick.

 
          
Mauer
switched his heads-down supercockpit screen to a God’s-eye view and expanded it
until Mills’s fighter symbol appeared—good, she was off to the north, racing
southwestbound to cut off the bandit from the other major ground target in the
area, the fighter base and Patriot missile emplacements. Mills was staying
high, establishing a high patrol, so Mauer pushed his stick forward and zoomed
down lower, closer to the bandit’s altitude. He had two missiles left, both
heat-seekers with a max range of only seven miles, and he had to make them
count. If the bomber got the airfield and the Patriot site, their forces would
be left wide open to attack, the airborne fighters would have to find someplace
else to land, and the fighters on the ground were sitting ducks and wouldn’t be
able to depart.

 
          
At
3,000 feet above the ground, the hills and buttes looked close enough to scrape
the bottom of Mauer’s fighter. He kept the power up at full military power,
speeding westbound at Mach 1.5, searching for the bomber . . . but Mills’s
radar locked on first. The JTIDS datalink transferred the bandit’s position to
Mauer’s attack computer, and he again locked onto the bomber and began his
pursuit—
twelve o’clock
,
nine miles . . . eight. . .

 
          
HIGH TERRAIN, high terrain!
Sharon
cried into the intercom. Mauer yanked back
on the stick to crest a sharply rising razorback ridgeline directly ahead.
Jesus, this was
nuts
—trying to
concentrate on the pursuit while dodging hills and ridges was going to get him
killed. But as soon as he lowered the nose again, the bandit was dead in his
sights, straight ahead.

 
          
“Arm
Sidewinder,” Mauer ordered. “Open weapon doors.”

 
          
ROGER, AIM-9 ARMED, WARNING, MISSILE ARMED
. . . WARNING, WEAPON doors opening.
As soon as the door opened, the AIM-9
Sidewinder missile’s seeker head slaved to the attack computer’s steering
signal, saw the hot dot from the bandit’s exhaust, and locked onto it, matching
its seeker azimuth exactly with the attack computer’s target bearing,
aim-9 locked on,
Sharon
reported.

 
          
“AIM-9
shoot,” Mauer ordered.

 
          
Aim-9 shoot, aim-9 shoot, aim-9 away.
The
smaller, faster Sidewinder fired from the weapons bay in a flash, wobbled a bit
as it stabilized itself in the air, then homed straight and true. . . .

           
Flares! Mauer saw them immediately—a
line of white dots hanging in the sky, hot and very bright even over six miles
away. The radar-lock square jutted sharply left as the bandit made its
customary first left break, but the decoy flares hung in the sky straight ahead
for several seconds before winking out. The Sidewinder wobbled as if it were
trying to decide between locking onto the decoys or turning to chase the
bomber. It decided on the decoys, then changed its mind as the decoys began to
extinguish. But just as it made a sharp left turn to pursue, the bomber ejected
more flares and jinked right, and the Sidewinder locked solidly on the new,
brighter, closer decoys and would not let go. The Sidewinder exploded
harmlessly a full five miles behind the bomber.

 
          
One
missile to go, Mauer reminded himself, as he turned to pursue. He had closed to
within four miles of the bandit, and now he was straining hard to see what in
hell it was. The virtual display made it easy to focus on where the target was,
no matter which way it jinked. It was small, probably an F-16, judging by its
size and its maneuverability, or maybe some experimental job. . . .

 
          
A
cruise missile! Mauer got a good look at it as it made another hard right turn,
heading right for the airfield—a goddamn cruise missile! No wonder it was so
maneuverable—there was no pilot on board to get knocked unconscious by hard G
turns. It was the first cruise missile he had ever heard of that ejected decoy
flares, could obviously detect enemy fighters’ and missiles’ radars, and could
attack multiple targets and even reattack targets it missed the first time
around! It was a little bit bigger than a Tomahawk or standard Air-Launched
Cruise Missile, but it had no wings—it was almost like a big fat flying
surfboard. When it was straight and level, it was almost impossible to see.

 
          
“One-One,
bogeydope,” Mills radioed.

 
          
“One-One
has a single cruise missile, and it’s haulin’ ass,” Mauer said, grunting
against the G-forces as he turned hard left again to stay behind the missile.
“I got one heater left. C’mon in and nail this bastard if my last shot misses.”
The time for being macho was over, Mauer thought— this cruise missile had beat
him pretty good, and it looked as if it was going to take both of the F-22s
working together to nail it.

 
          
“One-Two
has a judy.”

 
          
“Take
the shot,” Mauer said. “I’ll try to nail it in the ass while you shoot it in
the face.”

 
          
Mills
didn’t reply—she let her AMRAAMs do the talking. The JTIDS datalink showed
Mills launching her first AIM-120, followed by her second AMRAAM five seconds
later. The cruise missile made its usual left break—Mauer was close enough now
to see that it was ejecting chaff decoys, trying to get the radar-guided
missile to lock onto the tinsel-like chaff! But Mauer anticipated that left
break, and at the exact right moment, Mauer launched his last Sidewinder, then
began a right turning climb to clear the area. The Sidewinder would get a good,
solid look at the missile’s entire profile, and it couldn’t miss.

 
          
But
as he turned, he looked to the west and saw three bright explosions and another
cloud of smoke—the airfield was hit, this time with some kind of binary weapon,
a fuel-air explosive or a chemical weapon. No one was going to be landing or
taking off from that airfield for a long, long time.

 
          
Mauer
got visual contact on Mills’s F-22 high and heading in the opposite direction.
Just as he began his climbing left turn to join up, he heard Mills report,
“Splash one bandit—but I think he got the Patriot site and the airfield first.”

 
          
Good
job, Scottie, Mauer told himself angrily—the F-22 Lightning, the best fighter
ever to leave the ground, beat out by a robot plane. Shit, shit,
shit!

 
          
He
saw Mills wag her F-22’s tail back and forth, clearing him into right fingertip
formation. Might as well let Andrea lead for a while until he got his composure
back, he was too angry right now to make any decisions as flight lead.

 
          
Just
then, Mauer’s heads-down display blinked—another inbound bandit had been
detected by the AWACS. Mills rocked her wings up and down, the signal to move
out to combat spread formation to get set up for the intercept, then started a
thirty-degree bank turn to the left toward the new bandit. She was the only one
with missiles now, Mauer thought forlornly, so he slid out to wide-line-abreast
formation and got ready to back up his leader on this intercept. He was backup
now, he thought, just backup. The bad guys were three for fucking three. . . .

 
          
“Three
for three, General,” Patrick McLanahan said matter-of- factly. “The Wolverine
autonomously located four preprogrammed targets, attacked three, reattacked
one, and was on its way to nail the fourth one before the F-22s got it. Pretty
good hunting, I’d say.”

 
          
“Unbelievable,”
Samson finally muttered. “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Even in the EB-52B
Megafortress bombers wide cockpit, Lieutenant General Terrill Samson’s big
frame barely seemed to fit—his shoulders were slightly slumped, his knees high
up on the instrument panel. Terrill “Earthmover” Samson, a former B-52 and B-1B
bomber pilot and wing commander, was commander of U.S. Air Force’s Eighth Air
Force, in charge of training and equipping all of the Air Force’s heavy and
medium bomber units. The Air Force general was in the modified B-52 s left
seat, piloting the experimental bomber. Copiloting the EB-52 Megafortress was
Air Force Colonel Kelvin Carter, a veteran bomber pilot and a former EB-52 test
pilot at HAWC, the
High
Technology
Aerospace
Weapons
Center
. Retired Air Force Colonel Patrick
McLanahan was seated behind and to the right of Samson in the aft section of
the upper crew compartment in the OSO, or offensive systems officer’s, console,
and to McLanahan’s left in the DSO’s, or defensive systems officers, seat was
Dr. Jon Masters, president of a small high-tech satellite and weapons
contractor from Arkansas.

 
          
The
EB-52B Megafortress was a radically modified B-52 bomber, changed so
extensively from tip to tail that now its size was the only sure point of
comparison. It had a long, pointed, streamlined nose that smoothly melded into
sharply raked cockpit windows and a thin, glass- smooth fuselage. Unlike a line
B-52, the Megafortress’s wingtips did not curl upward while in flight—the
plane’s all-composite fibersteel skeleton and skin, as strong as steel but many
times lighter, maintained an aerodynamically perfect airfoil no matter how
heavily it was loaded or what flight condition it was in. A long, low,
canoe-shaped fairing sat atop the fuselage, housing long-range surveillance
radars for scanning the sea, land, or skies for enemy targets in all
directions, as well as active laser anti-missile countermeasures equipment and
communications antennae. The large vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the
tail were replaced by low, curving V-shaped ruddervators. A large aft-facing
radar mounted between the ruddervators searched and tracked enemy targets in
the rear quadrant; and instead of a 20-millimeter Gatling tail gun, the
Megafortress had a single long cannon muzzle that looked far more sinister, far
more deadly, than any machine gun. The cannon fired small guided missiles,
called “airmines,” that would fly toward an oncoming enemy fighter, then
explode and scatter thousands of BB-like titanium projectiles directly in the
fighter’s flight path, shelling jet engines and piercing thin aircraft skin or
cockpit canopies.