Final Storm (25 page)

Blue managed a laugh, then climbed down off the F-16’s access ladder and gave Hunter a salute.

“Good hunting, Captain!” he yelled. “And Lord help the rest of us!”

With that, Hunter brought his screaming GE turbofan engine up nose to full power. He was soon shooting down the crowded runway, gaining speed and altitude as the all-white F-16’s tricycle nose wheel lifted off the ground first, pointing the little fighter’s tapered snout into the sky. Another hundred feet and the main gear had lifted off, too.

Hunter was airborne once again.

C
LIMBING HIGH INTO THE
sun above Rota, Hunter tucked the landing gear under the wings and leveled off.

The rest of the 16TFW was already aloft and grouped. Hunter moved up into the formation and took his customary place off Jones’s right wing. They circled high above the base like that for the next ten minutes until the rest of the NATO aircraft were airborne and grouped. Then, as one, the huge air armada set out to engage the enemy in the gray skies over France.

Much maneuvering followed as Jones ordered the “Wild Weasel” F-4 Phantoms to go ahead first, followed closely by the F-15s, the Tornados, and the smaller F-16s. His reasoning, he had explained to Hunter in the briefing room, was to send the first sweep over enemy-held territory in successive waves, leading off with the SAM-killing, radar-jamming Weasels to put a dent in the Soviets’ air defense system. They would have the advantage of surprise, and even a temporary edge in numbers, until the enemy figured out what was going on. More than a hundred Phantoms, each carrying four HARM anti-radar missiles, would have the Soviet gunners thinking the sky had fallen on them, in large, high-explosive pieces.

But it would also tip off the Reds that something big was up, and bells would go off all the way from the front back to Moscow. Once the size of the NATO force was reported, the Soviets would be forced to launch all available aircraft, starting with their state-of-the-art fighters. That’s why Jones wanted his heavy artillery to go in first. The allied air-superiority fighters like the F-15s, the Tornados and the dogfighting F-16s would draw the Soviets’ first echelon interceptors—Su-27 Flankers, MiG-29 Fulcrums, plus the new MiG-31 Foxhounds—into battle in its opening stages.

If the NATO top dogs could hold the Reds off until the second wave of NATO fighters—launching from Holland—arrived, the Soviets would have no choice but to call up some of their reserves, thus matching the French Mirages and F1s, plus the rest of the interceptor F-4s and F-5s, with the roughly equivalent MiG-23s and Su-17 Fitters.

Following the same progression, the next wave of NATO planes—coming in from England—would include the older Star-fighters, the National Guard Delta Darts and Daggers, the A-7s, and the G-91s. Ideally, they would face the East Bloc nations’ less modern MiG-21 Fishbeds and Su-15 Flagons; and so on down to the scraps at the bottom of both forces’ barrels: NATO antiques like the Turks’ F-100 Super Sabres and the National Guard Voodoos, plus the Brits’ Jaguars would be engaging MiG-19 Farmers and Su-9 Fishpots of similar vintage.

But Hunter and Jones both knew that such equivalent matchups were by no means preordained—if the Soviets held back a few flights of Fulcrums or Foxhounds, they would make mincemeat of the slower NATO fighters in the later waves. But this was a gamble and they had to reason that such rough parity would exist, if only in the first few hours of the battle.

One thing was for certain: As soon as both sides had scrambled once, the melee would be on in full swing, and more than forty years of jet fighter development would be on display, over the crowded skies of eastern France.

Then it would be every plane—and every pilot—for himself …

Up near the front line, the Soviet forward SAM crews were tired and tense, weary from a night of non-stop NATO artillery and mortar attacks, and worried about what this day would bring.

Usually the NATO forces would save their harassing fire for the forward trench line or the massed Soviet armor near the front. But this past night and on into the morning, the sky had been alive with American rockets, mortars; and shells screaming over the heads of the foot soldiers and into the ranks of the mobile SAM-11 antiaircraft missile launchers, some two miles behind the lines.The attacks seemed to come in short bursts, then fade away as Soviet long-range artillery responded. Although the American fire was scattered and sporadic, an occasional high-explosive shell or rocket found its mark directly on or under one of the heavy missile trucks, exploding munitions, missiles and men with a deafening thunderclap.

Each time, the cursing Soviet SAM crews had scrambled onto their massive vehicles and lurched the heavy trucks to new hiding places, only to have the Americans locate them again after they had set up the launch tubes and remounted the radar masts of their anti-aircraft missile batteries.

This exhausting game of hide-and-seek had lasted all night and well into the morning along the entire front-line.

It was past noontime before the skies had suddenly become quiet.

A bleary-eyed young Soviet lieutenant stared into the hypnotizing green screen of his mobile radar battery, blinking as the rotating sweep arc illuminated his tense face twice per second.

Like most of the SAM crews around the old French fortress near Verdun, he hadn’t slept in almost 36 hours, thanks to the exasperating enemy attacks the previous night. Against standing orders, his captain had staggered off to sleep after ordering half the crew to stand down and get some rest. The lieutenant was left to monitor the droning radar screen.

The young officer muttered a curse and rubbed his bloodshot eyes hard with the heel of his hand, trying to relieve the incessant itching. What he needed was sleep, he thought, not more of this senseless game. He hadn’t been able to string together more than 12 hours of sleep since the war began and even then he had been tired, his unit just having returned from maneuvers in the Urals a scant two hours before they were ordered to move west quickly.

Even he, a lowly junior officer, knew that the SCUD attack on Western Europe had caught just about everyone in the Red Army by surprise.

Now his gaze wandered about the inside of the control compartment on the back of the huge SAM launcher, straying from the assigned task of monitoring the radar screen.

If he could only close his eyes for a few seconds …

Suddenly, the radar’s steady beeping changed tone, rising in pitch as the relentlessly sweeping beam detected an object in the French skies. The Soviet operator was instantly awake, horribly aware of his drift into semi-consciousness.

As he forced his swollen eyes to focus on the green arc, he realized that he must have slept through the initial seconds of radar contact. The southern perimeter of his screen was now alive with fast-moving blips—dozens of them! For a long, terrifying split second he stared at the bright spots on his screen as the sweep arc illuminated them. He had never seen so many indications before…. In one last terrifying second, he hoped that his screen was malfunctioning. Or maybe he was hallucinating.

Recovering his composure, he slammed down the red alarm button on his console, shouting hoarsely into the intercom:

“Multiple radar contacts! Distance forty miles! Bearing north-northeast, altitude one-hundred meters!”

The warning blared through the cracked speaker in the missile fire control compartment, rousing an enlisted technician from his own half-sleep. Cursing loudly, he flipped on the missile arming switches and opened the covers of the long tubes that extended up from the truck’s flatbed at a forty-five degree angle.

Scrambling across the compartment to where the fire control officer should have been, the Soviet soldier was desperately trying to engage the SAM’s targeting radar to lock the missile onto the speeding intruders.

Frustrated, he hollered back into his own intercom at the radar operator. “More power … Fire control
will not lock
target … Repeat,
more power
…”

The young lieutenant responded to the request immediately, cranking the output of the spinning radar dish up to the maximum as he scanned the screen again. Just at that moment, his captain burst through the door, holding his boots and clutching his pants to keep them from falling around his bare feet.

With a panicked look, he screamed for the position and range of the radar contacts, berating the hapless junior officer at the same time.

“Fool! How did they get so close? Give me range and speed of approaching targets
now
!”

The lieutenant sputtered out the information, nearly babbling. He was certain the captain would begin pummeling him in a rage. But instead, the senior man froze in his tracks, his eyes narrowing into slits when he heard the new position and altitude of the incoming contacts.

He started to reach across the radar console in front of the cowering junior officer, his hand traveling toward the intensity control knob. Contacts at that speed and altitude could only mean one thing—SAM killers. But the NATO anti-aircraft suppression flights were usually only four or six planes—here there were two dozen or more.

The captain had lived through three similar attacks by the lethal American “Weasels,” surviving by turning off his active search radar quickly enough to avoid the deadly grip of the Yankee anti-radar missile’s probing guidance mechanism.

This time he was too late.

No sooner had his hand touched the knob when his eyes widened in horror, watching each of the speeding blips give birth to four more faster blips. The tiny dots of light rapidly increased their distance away from their host blips, streaking down toward the center of the radar screen where the hub of the sweep arc was anchored in its. constant rotation.

In his last few seconds of life, the Soviet captain realized exactly what was on the screen before him. The large blips were NATO attack planes, probably American F-4 Phantoms. The small blips were high-speed anti-radar missiles. The center of the screen was their SAM battery’s position.

A silent scream rose in his throat as he futilely snapped off the power to the rotating radar dish. The incoming missiles’ complex electronics had already locked on to the strongest radar signal available, supplied by the eager young lieutenant’s boost to full intensity. Now two of the racing HARMs had homed in on the launch vehicle.

The Soviet captain knew there was no time to abandon the steel box that would become their tomb.

The two missiles struck the SAM launcher a split second apart, lifting the heavy truck completely off the ground in a thundering explosion. The high-explosive warheads detonated in the guts of the SAM vehicle, ripping it in two with powerful blasts that in turn set off the volatile anti-aircraft missiles stored within.

The two Soviet officers, their crew, and the entire vehicle were consumed in the yellow-white eruption that burst from the secondary explosions. Chucks of debris from the wrecked SAM site were flung in all directions, some more than a hundred yards.

When the smoke and flames cleared, all that was left was a burning mass of twisted metal, and the Soviet captain’s boots, both of which had somehow survived the holocaust.

Less than a minute later, a wave of thirty F-4 Phantoms flashed over the smoking hulk, flying at a mere two hundred feet.

Captain “Crunch” O’Malley didn’t even take a fleeting glance at his handiwork, needing to keep full concentration on the chore of flying nearly twice the speed of sound over the frozen French countryside.

But his weapons officer, Elvis, confirmed the kill from his rear-seat vantage point.

“Looks like we got ’em, Captain …” the young man drawled with characteristic understatement.

Crunch was too busy to celebrate; he knew there were more dangers in the sky.

As if on cue, the shrill wail of the F-4’s airborne threat warning sounded, filling the small cockpit with its urgency.

“We’ve got company!” Elvis was instantly riveted to the tiny screen, calling out over the intercom as he identified the source of the radar’s warning. “I’ve got multiple bogies at twelve o’clock, moving fast. Could be Foxhounds.”

A sharp chill ran up Crunch’s spine. The MiG-31 Foxhounds were big, two-seat interceptors with lots of speed and plenty of air-to-air missiles on board. All the Phantom had left after shooting the HARMs were a couple of decoy flares and several chaff cannisters to ward off the Soviet missiles.

But Crunch knew what he had to do.

“Steady, boys,” he said tightly into his radio to the speeding Phantom flight stretched out on either side of his aircraft. “You know the drill—let ’em see us and then we pull a fast U-turn and make tracks … On my order …”

His voice trailed off in anticipation of the next bit of data he would receive from his back-seater.

“Not yet, Cap’n,” Elvis near-whispered into his intercom, “A little closer … no movement yet … OK …
now
! They’re breaking!”

Crunch savagely yanked the stick over to pull the shrieking Phantom in a gut-twisting high-g turn. The sturdy fighter shuddered at the strain, then bolted for the horizon with the MiGs in hot pursuit.

“Send the message, Lieutenant,” Crunch shouted to Elvis over the roar of the Phantom’s afterburner-boosted engine. “And let’s hope those bastards don’t catch us.”

Hunter felt the presence of the Soviet planes several moments before they were acquired on his F-16’s radar.

The larger F-15s ahead of him already had targets for the huge AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles) slung under the fuselages of their speeding fighters. The Eagle pilots saw two sets of speeding blips appear on their screens—the ragged line of Phantoms escaping at low altitude was being rapidly overtaken by an orderly formation of faster MiG-31 Foxhounds.

In another ten seconds, the Soviets would be firing their own large air-to-air missiles at the fleeing F-4s. But the Eagle flight leader was holding a steady course toward the two flights of planes ahead, breaking radio silence to give instructions to his men.

“Fast Lane One, Fast Lane One,” the deep voice crackled over the radio, “Bogies are dead ahead forty miles out. Do not launch until Weasel flight goes through.”