Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (24 page)

 
          
“Missile
attack!”
the commander shouted. “Missile evasion tactics, now! Shut down
the radar! Countermeasures ready!” He punched the hot button on his intercom
panel so he could talk to both the ops crew and flight crew. “Missile attack,
missile attack, pilot, turn ninety left and descend to angles one- zero
now."
At the same time, the crew defensive systems officer began sending out radar
and infrared jamming signals and ejecting chaff and flare bundles, trying to
spoof and decoy the incoming missiles.

 
          
But
it was far too late—once the R-60 missile locked on, there was little a big
aircraft like an E-3 AWACS could do to evade it. The missiles plowed into the
aircraft with a direct hit, the first missile into the rotodome and the second
missile into the forward fuselage section.

 
          
He
could see it all clearly right in front of him, even though it was over three
miles away: the decoys flying out of the AWACS plane, the flares a hundred
times brighter and hotter than the aircraft; the AWACS plane trying a steep
turning descent, one that the crew had obviously practiced before but tftill
looked so steep and fast that it was doubtful if the crew could have pulled out
of it even if they survived the missile attack; then the twin streaks of light,
the huge blossoms of flames, the pieces of the jet flying apart, and the
rolling, tumbling mass of burning metal and jet fuel on its final flight,
straight down.

 
          
“Target
destroyed,” Yegorov reported.

 
          
“I
see it,” Stoica gasped. “My God. How many?”

           
‘Twenty crew members. Sixteen
operations, four flight.”

 
          
Stoica
switched the multifunction display to another mode so he wouldn’t have to watch
the plane bum on the ground, “They should have gone home when the Americans
did,” he murmured. “Leaving an AWACS radar plane up here, all alone, with no
air cover? It was suicidal.”

 
          
“It
was homicidal—and we did it,” Yegorov said. “But we’ve got a job to do, just
like they did, Business is business.”

 
          
The
Mt-179 Shadow headed southwest, still in a shallow, high-speed descent As they
approached the Yugoslavian republic of Kosovo, Stoica increased his descent
rate until they were at five hundred feet above the ground at six hundred knots
airspeed. Ground radar coverage was much better in United Nations-patrolled
Kosovo, and they had to be at terrain- masking altitude long before they
reached the radar pickets. Using the infrared scanner, Stoica could easily see
all the terrain even in pitch darkness. Ten minutes later, they crossed the
Albanian border and swept down the gently rolling hills across the
Drin
River
valley to the town of
Kikesi I Ri
, or New Kukes, in northeastern
Albania
.

 
          
New
Kukes was a relocated town, built by the Albanian government only thirty years
earlier with Soviet assistance; the old town had been deliberately flooded
after construction of a hydroelectric power-generating dam on the
Drin
River
. The
Drin
River
valley is narrow and hilly, with what seems
like a perpetual foggy haze obscuring the ridges and mountain tops nearby. The
native population of twelve thousand had swelled to over one hundred thousand
with Kosovo refugees, although that number had decreased to just a few thousand
refugees since KFOR had established its peacekeeping force in 1999 and allowed
the refugees safe passage across the border. The huge Kukes carpet factory
employed nearly a thousand workers, and the copper and chromium mines in the
region employed another few thousand. But by far the biggest employers in the
region were the black-market weapons salesmen, the Albanian Mafia, the drug lords,
and the prostitutes, preying on the refugees and supporting ethnic Albanian
Kosovar freedom fighters in their continuing struggle to form an independent
Muslim nation in Kosovo.

           
The center of both legitimate and
illegitimate commerce in northeastern
Albania
was the Kukes carpet factory, several
kilometers from the center of town; it was by far the biggest industrial
facility in the entire valley. The refugee camps that had been set up near the
factory were smaller than before, but the remaining parts of the camp had
evolved into a semipermanent series of shacks, tents, and wooden buildings,
reminiscent of an Old West mining camp evolving into a real town, with
ankle-deep mud streets, wooden sidewalks, almost no running water, and just as
many animals wandering the street as vehicles. Several of the larger wooden
buildings, two or three stories high, were saloons, restaurants, or shops on
the ground floor, with offices on the middle floors and apartments on the upper
floors for the wealthier merchants, government officials and bureaucrats, and
underworld bosses and lieutenants.

 
          
Behind
the wooden buildings were the shacks for the workers, and beyond those was the
tent city, built by NATO military engineers and international relief
organizations, for Kukes’ other group of residents—the Kosovo Liberation Army
training center. At any given time, over five hundred men, women, and children
as young as fourteen and as old as sixty were in training at the Kukes camp by
Kosovar instructors, overseen and administered by the Albanian Army. They
trained in hand- to-hand combat, mountaineering, land navigation, basic
maneuvers. and small-arms tactics, along with political and religious
indoctrination courses. The top twenty percent of each class were sent to
Albanian regular army bases at Shkoder, Gjader, and Tirana for advanced
military training; the top five percent of those, who showed especial aptitude
in military arts as well as hotter than usual hatred for non- Muslims, were
sent to training centers in Libya, Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria for advanced
combat and terrorist training.

 
          
Under
the NATO peacekeeping umbrella, safe from hit- and-run raids by Serb
paramilitaries and border police, the Kukes training camp was allowed to grow
and flourish. In exchange for food, housing, and training, the recruits worked
the carpet factory and mines, provided security for the smugglers and drug
dealers, and did odd jobs around the tent city. An hour before sunrise, with
the first hints of the morning light filtering through the low overcast, the
day shift workers were having breakfast and getting ready to head to work, and
the graveyard shift for both the mines and the carpet factory were just getting
ready to leave—when the Metyor-179 Shadow stealth bomber began its bomb run.

 
          
The
first targets to hit were the antiaircraft defensive emplacements. Like most
Soviet-era client-state factories, the Kukes carpet factory had several
antiaircraft gun emplacements mounted on the rooftops, mostly twin-barreled
37-millimeter optically guided units with a few single 57-millimeter
heavy-caliber guns. Kukes had six 37-2 emplacements and two 57-1 emplacements,
scattered throughout the compound, with the 37s at the comers and on the east
and west sides of the compound along the river and the 57s in the center of the
compound; two additional 37-2 units and two 57-1 units were situated near the
hydroelectric power plant east of the town.

 
          
But
most of these weapon systems had been decimated by the Albanian civil war of
1997 and had been only partially refurbished in response to the Serbian
aggression in neighboring Kosovo. The radars and electro-optical sensors had
long ago been stolen and sold for food or drugs, leaving the guns with only
iron sights with uncalibrated and grossly inaccurate leadcomputing mechanisms.
The gun emplacements on the dam were not a threat—it was easy to maneuver
around them, and the gunners never reacted to the jet’s presence anyway. The
smaller-caliber guns were probably not a threat, especially if they were only
optically or manually guided. But the big 57-millimeter guns could be trouble.
They had to be neutralized.

 
          
Using
the infrared sensor, Yegorov targeted the two gun emplacements from ten miles
away, well outside the antiaircraft gun’s maximum range. The Mt-179’s laser
rangefinder/designator clicked down the range. Inside seven miles, the Mt- 179
Shadow started a steep climb to three thousand feet above the ground. Inside
five miles to the target, well outside the antiaircraft artillery’s maximum
range, Yegorov opened its right bomb bay doors and released a Kh-29L
Ookoos,
or “Sting,” missile.

           
The Kh-29L Sting missile dropped
free of the right bomb bay, fell for about a hundred feet as it stabilized in
the slipstream, then ignited its solid-rocket motor. The missile’s semiactive
laser guidance seeker homed in on the reflected energy of the Shadow’s laser
designator. Yegorov had only to keep the crosshairs on the target, carefully
magnifying and refining his aimpoint. He steered the missile in for a direct
hit on the base of the 57-millimeter gun emplacement, blowing a hole in the
roof and sending the gun crashing through to the dozens of workers below.
Yegorov immediately switched to the second 57-1 emplacement and sent it
crashing through the roof just like the first.

 
          
Yegorov
then switched his infrared sensors to the front of the carpet factory,
targeting another Sting missile at the main administrative entrance to the
plant and the last missile at the main worker’s entrance, where hundreds of
workers were leaving or entering. Each Sting missile had a six-hundred-pound
high-explosive warhead, and the devastation was enormous. Secondary explosions
from each of the Sting missiles fired on the factory blew out windows with
tongues of fire, finally collapsing part of the administrative section. Rolling
waves of fire belched from the workers' entrance as the Sting missile broke
open gas and fuel lines inside the plant.

 
          
Stoica
started a steep climb, then rolled left to survey the damage. “
Ahuyivayush’iy
,
Gennadi,’' he said. “Right where we planned it.”

 
          
“Shyri
zhopy nip’ornish
, ” Yegorov replied. “Couldn’t have missed that if 1
tried.”

 
          
Stoica
flew outbound about three minutes—long enough for folks to think the attack was
over and start coming out of hiding—then executed an easy turn back toward the
plant at five thousand feet above ground. Yegorov immediately locked his
infrared sensor on the last four remaining targets: the refugee center, which
according to Kazakov’s intelligence acted as the terrorist training center; the
Red Cross/Red Crescent Aid Center, suspected of being a terrorist headquarters
because supposedly it would never be targeted in an attack; the distribution
center, where food and supplies were unloaded from trucks or rails, warehoused,
inventoried, and disbursed to the camp residents; and finally the building with
the largest restaurant and shops, suspected of being owned by and filled with
Muslim terrorists.

 
          
The
Mt-179 made only one pass, dropping just two weapons—two PLAB-500 laser-guided
fuel-air explosive canisters. Each FAE canister created a cloud of highly
flammable gas several hundred feet in diameter. The gas mixed with oxygen in
the air, and was then detonated by releasing explosive charges into the cloud.
The resultant explosion, resembling a miniature nuclear mushroom cloud, was a
hundred times greater than the equivalent weight of TNT.

 
          
Over
two hundred men, women, and children died instantly in the two huge fireballs;
another one thousand persons died or were injured and thousands more were left
homeless in the ensuing firestorm as the entire town was consumed in the
galloping wildfires caused by the fuel-air explosives. The fires would last for
days, spreading to char hundreds of thousands of acres of surrounding forests.
Investigators would later find nothing but devastation.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Kremlin,
Moscow
,
Russian Federation

Less than an hour later

           
“Minister Schramm. What a pleasant
surprise. Good morning to you.”

           
“Let us dispense with the
pleasantries, Mr. Filippov,”
Republic
of
Germany Foreign
Minister Rolf Schramm snapped. He was in
the living room of his residence in
Bonn
, with only a jogging suit on, surrounded by
his senior advisors. “I am watching the news of your little attack on
Kukes
,
Albania
. My God, man, has Sen’kov lost his senses?
Or is he not in charge of the government anymore? Has the military finally
taken charge?”