Sword of Allah (44 page)

‘Shogun two, turning cold,’ Burns said. He rolled thirty-five degrees to the right and pulled gently on the stick. He goosed the throttle slightly and felt the Hornet accelerate. The added speed gave the aircraft more manoeuvring authority. He kept slight back pressure fed into the stick until two-nine-five degrees came around on the HUD. He levelled out at three-zero-five on the UAV’s reciprocal track.

It wasn’t long before Burns heard the boss say, ‘Shogun one, turning hot.’ Burns’ radar had Corbet’s IFF code painted on his screen. He watched the flight lieutenant alter course. A few moments later, he would be doing the same. Burns looked out to his right, into the mist. He couldn’t see Corbet, but he knew he was there. He shook his head. How in God’s name were they going to find something designed to be invisible?

Corbet heard Burns call his turn onto the hot leg. He
told himself to try to think positive. They had a definitive patch of sea to look at, didn’t they? That was a better situation than the one they’d left Tindal with, wasn’t it? Maybe, just maybe, they’d get lucky and –

‘Tally bandit! Repeat, tally bandit! Bullseye one-two-eight thirty-two. I am padlocked!’

Christ! ‘Shogun two, you have the lead,’ Corbet said, keeping his voice as flat and professional as possible. ‘I’ll join in on you.’ He wanted to shout, ‘Go, you good thing!’ such was the relief that swept over him. ‘Padlocked’ meant Burns had eyeballed the Prowler and was orbiting it. No matter what happened, the flying officer wouldn’t let the sucker out of his sight. Shit! He knew the boy’s eyes would come in handy, goddam it! Corbet rolled to eighty degrees and pulled hard on the stick as he pushed the throttle to military power. The Hornet responded, leaping forward with a roar.
Warning! Warning!
‘Yes!’ said Corbet aloud. He throttled back as the fighter completed the 220-degree turn that would put him on a heading to intercept his wingman and the drone.
Warning!
There was an annoying sound in his ’phones. What is that? He glanced at the HUD.
Warning!
And suddenly, he knew what it was, but Trailerpark Tammy was too la–

As Burns completed an orbit of the drone, he expected to see the flight leader’s return register on his HUD, but it wasn’t there. ‘Shogun one, are you there? Boss
…
where are you?’ he said, wondering where the flight lieutenant had disappeared to. He continued to circle the Prowler, prepared to look away from it but only for a second or two at a time. ‘Shogun one, I can’t hear your transmission,’ he said, fighting off the realisation that there was a damn
good reason why he couldn’t hear the flight leader. Burns swallowed, his heart racing, the perspiration pouring from him.

Leading Seaman Mark Wallage was watching the display on the Vectronics master display in the operations room of the
Arunta
when the IFF code denoting Shogun one suddenly disappeared. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath, hoping it was some kind of malfunction but knowing otherwise. He’d been buzzing, full of self-confidence, because he’d just managed to unequivocally identify the UAV’s return signal as that of a school of flying fish, only one flying impossibly between thirty and fifty feet above the water. The F/A-18 orbiting over the drone, positively marking its position, had helped him enormously. He was thinking that now, no matter what happened, he’d be able to nail the UAV’s whereabouts because its return signature was programmed into the Vectronics’ memory, not that losing it again seemed likely when the RAAF were about to shoot the crap out of it. He’d watched the screen as Shogun one executed a tight turn to rendezvous with his wingman when the return on his screen just disappeared.

‘Commander Drummond? Leading Seaman Wallage. I’m afraid th–’

‘I’m watching the screen now, Mark,’ said Drummond. He knew full well what had just happened.
Christ!

And then, through the speakers and crackling with
static: ‘
Arunta
. Shogun two. Have lost contact with lead.’

Drummond said, ‘Shogun two,
Arunta
…’ After a pause, he continued: ‘Despatching search and rescue.’

Silence.

There was no time for speeches or sentimentality. This was not Hollywood. Options were reducing by the minute. He said, ‘Shogun two, don’t let us down.’

Silence, then: ‘Yes, sir,’ said the voice through the speakers.

Static overwhelmed any further communications. Briggs gave Drummond a nod. The Bayu-Unadan gas and oil fields were getting awfully close. If Canberra was right, that was the target, and if the Prowler got through with its load of VX, the people there would die.

Burns told himself to get a grip. He checked the radar display and discovered that, in the tragedy of the moment, he had wandered off track. There was no panic. He altered his course, readjusted his radar altimeter to 300 feet AGL and descended to 800 feet. Burns picked the Prowler up almost straight away. Its track had not changed. It was sitting just off his right wing’s leading edge, crawling along, guided by some invisible hand on its deadly mission. Burns marked the coords on his INS in case he lost it again.

It was a bloody ugly critter, he thought to himself as he circled. There were many who thought such aircraft were the future of military aviation. They were cheap to make and operate. Pilots, on the other hand, cost millions to train, had to be rescued when they were shot down behind enemy lines, got married, or went off to fly commercial jets. Burns wondered how long it would be before military
planners and strategists worked out that a human at the controls was more of a liability than an asset. One more generation of fighter pilots? Maybe two? At that moment, Burns realised he had come face to face with the air force of tomorrow and he was damned if was going to be beaten by it. Not here. Not today.

As he watched the drone, Burns revised the tactical situation. What would happen now was totally up to him. He hadn’t trained for this kind of fight and there was no one around who could tell him how to splash the UAV. He was going to have to think through the options himself. It was flying so close to the water, it appeared to hop across the wave crests like some kind of avian kangaroo. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t ploughed under. Like the boss. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath.
Concentrate.

Burns took a glimpse inside the cockpit at his radar. The rolling map on screen told him he was getting close to the Timor Gap and that almost certainly several gas tankers and drilling platforms were getting too close for comfort. And the drone was closing, the safety margin reducing with each passing second. Training told him to do a quick ops check. The last thing he needed was to run out of fuel. Fine for the moment, he saw, but the combined tanks were down to a bit less than a quarter full. Four point seven. Four thousand seven hundred pounds. Fifty minutes’ flying time, give or take. Getting back to Darwin was fast disappearing as an option. Jesus, there was not a lot of time to muck around. These slow orbits were soaking up a lot of juice. His radar also told him the KC-130 was on station, but he had to deal with the bandit first. He could not let it out of his sight.

The UAV was flying seemingly at a walking pace, and very low. It had a small petrol engine, which, it was believed, wouldn’t produce enough of a heat signature to excite the AIM-9s sitting out on the end of his wings. That theory would have to be put to the test. The GE turbofans roared as he dialled in more thrust, banked into the turn and unloaded the stick. Doing this pushed out the diameter of his orbits. The missile had a minimum range. If he shot it off inside this range, the missile wouldn’t fuse. The complication was that the minimum range was about half a mile, at the very limit of his ability to eyeball the Prowler. The damn thing was so low it seemed to get lost amongst the swell lines. Burns extended his orbit still further, and began a run towards the Prowler. The missile’s IR heads began to actively seek for heat sources. Burns could assist that search by guiding a small green circle displayed on his HUD, placing it on the drone. Only, Burns had lost the drone. After a moment’s frantic anxiety, he picked it up again, and then lost it against the water. His eyes began to stream with tears of stress. He spotted it again, just as he overran the missile’s minimum range, swore aloud, and then went round again. Concentrate, concentrate, he said to himself. A headache was starting to build in one temple, pounding away. All the while he kept his eyes totally glued on the bandit.

‘What the hell’s that all about?’ said the engineer overseeing the attachment of another thirty-foot length of drill string.

‘Fucked if I know, but I’m sure not hanging about to find out,’ said the rigger closer to him.

‘Hey, you can’t just leave.’

‘That siren says I can, mate,’ he said.

‘What about the blowout preventers?’ asked the engineer. He looked about him, confused. The day was bright and sunny for a change. The monsoon had finally ended. The drilling was progressing nicely…So what the hell was the panic about? He knew the evacuation procedure as well as anyone and the price that could be paid for dawdling. But there’d been no explosion and, up until the siren started screaming, no hint of any trouble.

‘Mate, if you want any help from me, make a decision – fast,’ said the rigger, anxious to get to his lifeboat station.

‘Okay, okay!’ said the engineer, annoyed. Snipping the drill string was the quickest way to secure the well, but it wasn’t exactly the most elegant.

The siren had been blaring for five minutes and the rig manager was starting to feel the panic rising in his chest. Time was nearly up. The weapon could burst over them at any minute and only two lifeboats had been launched into the sea that was still rolling with a heavy monsoonal swell. Two men had broken their arms in the second boat away when it dropped heavily into the trough of a wave.

Rumours were starting to circulate amongst the cooks, crane operators, IT communications, riggers, medics, technicians and others gathered on the evacuation deck. They knew what was in the sky, heading their way, yet they were quiet, orderly. The rig manager put the calm down to a mixture of disbelief and shock.

‘Let’s go! Hurry! C’mon,’ said someone as the lifeboats
filled. Several rolls of plastic sheeting were thrown inside each boat to help keep the nerve agent out. There were sudden yells of concern as another lifeboat swung precariously out over the heaving rollers.

Burns turned back in on the drone and placed the circle floating on his HUD directly on the UAV. He was just outside the missile’s minimum range and the missile heads were uncaged. ‘Pick up the fucker, for Christ’s sake,’ he said aloud as the distance to the drone closed. The circle danced around the UAV, framing it, nailing it, but there was no tone in his headphones to indicate that the missile would guide itself to the target. A Fox one – guided ordnance – was not an option. Damn! And those oil fields were getting close. With its current speed of 70 knots over the water, the VX-laden craft would be within range of the Bayu-Unadan field in less than ten minutes.

Burns toggled the weapons select switch and selected guns. He saw that the armourers had had the good sense to give him a full store of ammunition for the M16A1 twenty millimetre Vulcan cannon located in the Hornet’s nose. He had 578 rounds to play with, or just over five and a half seconds worth. A half-second burst would toast the fucker. He swept over the UAV and it passed briefly under his wing. He turned to look at it, then back at his altimeter to ensure he wasn’t losing altitude. And then he saw his fuel load. Jesus! One point nine! He had fuel for three passes at the thing – max.

The nose of the F/A-18 came around sharply and the g forces accentuated the pounding in Burns’s head. He felt
like vomiting. He unclipped the oxygen mask from his face and let it hang from his helmet, and then dived down at the Prowler. It shimmied in his HUD, buffeted by the prevailing breeze as it climbed and then descended. Burns kept the gun-aiming circle projected on his HUD on the UAV as best he could and then, when he was a thousand metres out, his index finger squeezed the trigger mounted on the control stick and kept it there. The Hornet vibrated and shook. Puffs of smoke exhausted from the plane’s nose as the rounds spewed from the gun’s revolving barrels. He tried to walk the tracer into the drone, leading it. But the perpendicular vectors of each aircraft combined to make Burns’ aim miss by metres. The flying officer pulled back on the stick at the last possible instant. The Hornet shot past the drone’s nose, pulling out of the dive merely ten feet above the water. Burns suddenly realised the crests of the waves were breaking above him and that he was flying insid
e
a trough. He jammed the throttle forward, rotating it past the detent stop. The afterburners lit, punching Burns back into his seat. The Hornet rocketed skywards as a wave rolled into the space the fighter had occupied barely a spit second earlier.

Burns gagged for air. The headache at his temples was now like a vice squeezing his head and the pain was almost blinding. He swung his head round as the F/A-18 climbed and picked up the UAV tracking beneath and behind him. It was also staggering out of a wave trough. Something had happened to it. His wake turbulence had nearly knocked the UAV into the drink. Shit, of course! Wake turbulence. The pressure waves streaming off the back of the Hornet’s wings combined with the thrust of
those GEs in full afterburner could flip a twin-engine Cessna on its back and send it spiralling out of control. The lightweight UAV would never be able to survive that kind of onslaught. And he could come in low and slow, line the fucker up and then, at the last instant, when the Hornet was above the drone, bang the throttle to its stops.

And then the Master Caution warning sounded –
DEEDLE! DEEDLE!
Trailerpark Tammy added ‘Bingo, bingo, bingo, bi–’ He punched the Master Caution to shut her up. For once, fuel was not his biggest priority. From here on, he was flying inside the Hornet’s fuel safety margin. Running dry was now a real possibility because not all the F/A-18’s fuel load was usable. He glared at the fuel numbers as if they were traitors. The KC-130 was near, but it might as well have been circling Tierra del Fuego for all the good it could do him. The UAV would be delivering its cargo to the intended target any minute and there was no time to refuel. He had to splash this thing or die trying. Burns decided against using his wake turbulence. He would use up too much of the precious fuel with nothing left if he failed. And besides, he reasoned, he’d have to take his eyes off the bandit. It would be obscured by the Hornet’s nose for too long while he lined up on it.

And then, like the cruel punchline of some sick joke, the drone began to climb. Burns knew what that meant. The bloody drone was on short final, setting itself up for the delivery of its cargo. When the UAV exploded at altitude, the VX would spread and the Prowler’s job would be done.

Burns continued to circle the UAV while it climbed, and reviewed what he and Corbet had been told about the
aircraft at the briefing, hoping that another answer to its destruction might present itself. The VX would more than likely be loaded into a fuselage bay on the aircraft’s centre of gravity, or a little forward of it. As observed already, it would fly nap of the earth to avoid detection until a pre-programmed point was reached, whereupon it would climb several thousand feet and then the cargo would be atomised for maximum dispersion, most likely through an explosion. He watched the UAV clamber for height. The experts had been right about its flight plan, which meant they were also probably right about the presence of explosives on board. He checked his altimeter: 2500 feet and climbing. They were still upwind enough from the Bayu-Unadan for the VX, once atomised, to descend harmlessly to the sea. But that margin was shrinking with every foot of altitude climbed.