Death Orbit (8 page)

This night though would be different.

It happened exactly at midnight. The Seamaster had been in the air three hours after sea-launching from Key West shortly after sundown. It had already completed three transits of its patrol pattern when suddenly its on-board long-range air defense radar went wild.

First one, then two, then four, then
ten
blips popped up on the screen, almost simultaneously. Even worse, the radar was telling the Seamaster crew that these unknowns were carrying aerial weapons which were just one step away from being fired at somebody or something.

The Seamaster flight commander immediately had the radio officer send a scrambled message back to Key West, telling them what they’d detected. The 10 airplanes were approximately 35 miles south of the Seamaster’s position, which was about 65 miles southeast of Key West itself. They were flying in a staggered-V formation, cruising at 270 knots and heading due north. With their weapons systems lit, they appeared to be heading for a combat-imminent situation.

The urgent message was received at Key West, and four UA combat fighters—old and creaking F-106 Delta Darts—were dispatched in short order. Five additional aircraft, A-7K Strikefighters in the air already, were vectored toward the Seamaster’s position, as were two A-6P armed electronic warfare aircraft, who happened to be returning from a training sortie out over the Lower Bahamas. These 11 airplanes, plus the Seamaster itself, would present a counterforce to the ten bogies, whoever they were and whatever their intentions.

Then ten more mystery airplanes showed up.

Like the first group, they simply popped up on the Seamaster’s radar screen as if they’d materialized out of thin air. They were hard on the heels of the first group and they, too, appeared to be carrying weapons ready to be fired.

Just as the crew of the Seamaster was absorbing this new information,
another
ten aircraft suddenly appeared, right behind the second group. The UA airplanes streaking toward the location now were facing 3-to-l odds. And still they had no idea what the intention of the mystery airplanes might be.

The Seamaster got the first visual sighting on the lead wedge of intruders. Because of the location of its engines and several other factors, such as radar-absorbing paint, the Seamaster had a certain amount of stealth capability. It encountered the lead chevron of trespassers at a position about sixty-two miles due south of Key West, picking them up on its long-range LANTIRN scope, while staying undetected for the moment.

What the radar officer saw in this NightVision-type device were ten white jet fighters, wings bulging with missiles and bombs, flying a course that would bring them right to Key West, now just a few minutes’ flying time away. But what was even more startling was the type of airplane these were: not the B-list jets that the majority of air units in the UAAF flew. These were F/A-18 Hornets, top-of-the-line naval fighter attack craft, the likes of which had not been seen in the postwar world ever since… well, ever since the Fourth Reich had invaded North America nearly three years before.

When the Seamaster’s radar officer zoomed in on the lead airplane, the first thing he saw were the blood-red swastikas emblazoned on the Hornets’ wings and fuselage.

“Son of a bitch,” the radar officer breathed into his microphone. “The goddamn Nazis are back…”

It was just pure good luck that another UA fighter diverted toward the oncoming strike force was being flown by Captain John O’Malley, former president and CEO of the Ace Wrecking Company, sometime business partner of space traveler Elvis Q, and now in possession of the hottest warplane this side of Hawk Hunter’s own F-16XL.

Having lost his much beloved F-4X Super Phantom during the battle for Lolita Island, Crunch had acquired a new, even ballsier airplane. It was an F-101X Super Voodoo, a reconditioned, kick-ass Century fighter with a massive GE 404 engine under the hood and every new air-combat gadget known to man crammed into its cockpit.

Crunch had spent his R & R time following the action in the South China Sea fixing up the elderly airplane, which he’d purchased for a song from the infamous used-airplane salesman Roy from Troy. Crunch and his new airplane just happened to be on a layover at Key West on their way to Cape Canaveral, which was the main provisional headquarters of the United American Armed Forces these days. When the call came in about the strike force of 30 jets heading toward UA territory, Crunch was in the air not five minutes after the F-106 Delta Darts had been scrambled. Crunch’s new airplane had not been tested in combat yet. He figured this was as good a time as any.

There was no dispute that the Super Voodoo was the quickest thing in the air at the moment—it was much faster than the F-106s Darts or the Strikefighters. So when Crunch heard a Mayday call from the big Seamaster, he opened up the afterburner in his enormous power plant, threw it into fifth gear, and rocketed away to the south. He had the big seaplane on his radar screen less than ninety seconds later.

He hadn’t arrived a moment too soon. The oncoming Nazi Hornets had spotted the big seajet by now, and four of them had peeled off to engage it with their nose cannons, two from the front, two from the back. It was only through the Seamaster’s incredible speed and surprising maneuverability, that the big amphibian hadn’t been shot down already. Still, the quartet of agile Hornets were obviously closing in for the kill, while the rest of the Nazi strike force continued north toward Key West.

Crunch came upon this one-sided engagement and immediately took steps to even the odds. He was lugging four Sidewinders under his wings, plus a dual M-61-A1 rotary cannon pod attached to the belly. The two Hornets attacking the Seamaster’s rear had just peeled off, scoring a few hits on the seaplane’s high-tail. Crunch voice-commanded his weapons systems to lock onto the trailing Hornet—and nothing else. At such close quarters, he couldn’t risk his own missile being sucked up by the Seamaster’s huge wing-mounted engines.

The Super Voodoo’s target acquisition computer locked onto the unsuspecting Hornet a few seconds later. Crunch was still ten miles away from the battle and about a half mile above it. Like any pilot in the heat of aerial combat, the Hornet driver was not watching his own six o’clock. He was too busy ganging up on the big seaplane.

It would be a fatal mistake.

Crunch’s first Sidewinder went off the rail three seconds later. It stayed true to the course the weapons’ radar had proposed for it, quickly locking on to the F/A-18’s hot exhaust. The missile slammed into the Nazi’s left-side pipe, slicing the extended tail off the attack plane and putting it into an instantaneous spiral. The left wing broke off a second later, Crunch could see it clearly in the bright flash resulting from the plane’s fuel tank going up. The Hornet went ass over and began the long plunge down to the sea. It hit with another large explosion and quickly sank beneath the waves. There was no parachute. In all, the Super Voodoo’s opening attack had taken less than 15 seconds.

One A-hole down, Crunch thought. Three to go…

He’d dipped down to 7,500 altitude by this time and was now just a few hundred feet above and six miles behind the air action. The big Seamaster was still in desperate straits; the three Hornets, afraid to use their own Sidewinders in such close quarters, were now screaming in for murderous cross-fuselage cannon runs. The seaplane had no defense for attacks on its flanks. Its pilots could do only one thing in this case: they booted their throttles and headed down to the wet deck.

Crunch followed them down, closing to within two miles of the big seaplane. The Hornets went down, too, sending streams of ugly tracer fire into the amphib’s midsection. Crunch could hear the Seamaster’s radio man desperately calling out their ever-changing position—if they were going down, they wanted rescue forces to know where to look.

But Crunch didn’t want the Seamaster to go into the drink. It was much too nice a plane for that—and besides, the chances were good that he knew some of the guys on board. He kicked in his afterburner once again and felt the jolt as gallons of raw fuel were dumped directly into his engine’s exhaust flue. Inside of ten seconds, he was right on the trailing Hornet’s tail.

It took a squeeze, a jink, and another squeeze of his cannon trigger to shred this pussy’s tail. True to form, the Nazi pilot ejected even before his ass got hot. The F/A-18 did a slow twist and then went nose down, exploding about two hundred feet above the water.

The remaining Hornets now knew that Crunch was there, and more out of anger than anything, they peeled off the Seamaster’s tail and turned their sights on him—a foolish thing to do. Not only did it give the Seamaster extra time to get down near the deck, it put the Hornet pilots in the position of trying to find a smaller target in what had suddenly become a very large and empty sky.

Crunch yanked up on his stick, booted his throttle again, and put the F-101 on its tail. The Super Voodoo had outstanding climb characteristics, especially straight up, which it could do at Mach 1.2 without breathing hard. The Hornets, on the other hand, weren’t such great tree-climbers. Because the F/A-18 was half-fighter, half-attack craft, things such as climb rate, turn rate, acceleration, and speedy AOA had been compromised to some degree. The Nazi birds had to huff and puff it to catch up to Crunch—which was exactly what he wanted them to do.

All this was taking place in the dead of night, and against a moonless sky. The Hornet had some night-fighting capability, but it was more on the rudimentary scale, maybe enough to keep its pilots out of trouble, but not much more. Crunch, on the other hand, had a ton of nocturnal combat crap stuffed into his super-plane. Two AWG-9 radars slaved to a main on-board computer. A LANTIRN see-in-the-dark pod. Plus a NightVision capability built into his HUD. Crunch was like a cat in the dark. The pair of F/A-18s—well, they were like a couple of puppies.

It was a classic rule of dogfighting that you never, ever, put yourself in a position that makes it easy for your opponent to get on your tail. Yet this was exactly what the pair of Hornets did. When they broke through a cloud layer at 27,000 feet and found Crunch was not there, they leveled off and began searching for him with their acquisition radars. Crunch in the meantime had broken through the clouds not fifteen seconds earlier and had performed a classic loop, turning the Super Voodoo on its nose, pitching back down through the clouds just as the Nazis were coming up and poking through again once they’d leveled off. That’s when he switched on all his night-fight gear, getting images of both ’Nets just as if it was daytime. Before the Huns knew it, he was delivering an AIM-9 right up the tailpipe of the trailing F/A-18 and into its reserve fuel tank. The explosion was so huge, it lit up the sky for miles.

This left just Crunch and the lone Ratzi, and not to Crunch’s surprise, the Hornet decided to run. It was also a classic rule of dogfighting that if an opponent decided to beat it, it was probably wise to let him go. But Crunch was never one for this page of the book. He hated Nazis, hated everything about them. And even though the chances were good that these guys were actually mercenaries simply flying for some Nazi cell, just the fact that they would climb into a plane lugging a swastika was enough for Crunch to want to kill them.

So he took off after the Hornet. Booting up his huge engine and keeping his eye on the prize despite the darkness, he was on this guy in less than a minute. But it appeared that the Hornet was trying to flee south toward Cuba, and not to some aircraft carrier from which Crunch had just assumed it had come.

Now
this
came as a surprise to Crunch—one that was big enough to make him change his tactics.

Maybe it would be wiser just to follow this guy for a little while, he thought.

To see exactly which hole he was heading back to crawl into.

The wounded Seamaster had made it down to the watery deck.

It was flying so low at the moment, the crew was amazed that they were still airborne.

This was just the thing to do though. Stay down, stay hidden, and try to put as much distance between yourself and the people who were trying like crazy to shoot you down.

The damage sustained in the Hornet attacks had been extensive, however. One crewman, a gunner’s mate, had been killed, and three others had been wounded, including the co-pilot. The plane was now running on three engines, and the way number four outboard was smoking, the pilot knew he’d have to shut it down soon, too. The guidance systems and the long-range radar had been destroyed. There was a large hole in the starboard wing, and gas was flowing out of it like a body wound. The primary electrical systems were kaput, and the backups were functioning at only fifty percent. Their weapons systems were all okay, though, if low on ammo, and their radios, both primary and backups, were still functioning.

Still, the Seamaster was in a tight fix. It was heading southeast and really didn’t have the strength or fuel to get back up to a reasonable altitude, turn around, and dash home to Key West. The only option left was to get to another friendly base before the Nazis spotted it again. And in this area, there was only one place like that: a UA radar station set up on a small island about halfway between Florida and Cuba called Double Shot Rocks.

Navigating by starlight, the pilot figured they were about thirty-five miles west of Double Shot. Though they were now flying on only two engines, he was fairly confident they could make it—
if
they could find the island. One doodad that could help them do this was the LANTIRN set, a kind of electronic see-in-the-dark device more at home on night fighters. The pilot had switched it on earlier simply because the plane was flying so low. He was legitimately concerned they might run into a ship mast or even a particularly high outcropping of rocks.

When the device finally warmed up to maximum power and the first long-range images became clear, the pilot and crew knew that running into some rocks was suddenly the least of their problems.

The Seamaster crew saw a line of warships that stretched literally from one end of the horizon to the other. It didn’t take an expert to know exactly what kind of vessels there were. Long, with low bows; massive superstructures with enormous guns both fore and aft.