The Red Horseman (32 page)

“I understand.

He examined her face. She was a beautiful
woman, but right now she wore a look of confidence and
determination that would have set well on any man
Jake had ever flown with. Satisfied, Jake
turned to Dalworth.

“Stay with the helicopter. Don’t let the pilot
wander off.

Wave money at him if you have to. And
don’t let anyone here touch that machine. If we
aren’t back in three hours, get the hell out of
Dodge.

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Let’s get at it,” Jake Grafton
muttered to Rita as he pulled his helmet on.

“Oh, Admiral,” Rita said. “Thanks.”

Jake looked at her, not quite clear on what she
meant.

She drew herself to attention and saluted.

He nodded at her and a puzzled Spiro
Dalworth and, with his charts in one hand and his oxygen
mask in the other, walked toward his plane.

JAKE’S AIRCRAFT DIDN’T WANT
TO COME UNSTUCK FROM the runway. With the engines
at full power it was accelerating nicely, but the
nose wheel remained firmly planted. He tugged
experimentally on the stick.

The trim! He had guessed at the takeoff
setting. He blipped the trim button on the
stick with his thumb and eased the stick back. Now the
nose came up. And the mains were off. He was flying.
The wings rocked and he overcontrolled with
flaperons as he reached for the gear handle.

It wouldn’t move. He pushed it in,
then pulled it out.

Now it moved. Had to be ulled.

Trimming nose down, airspeed increasing. Gear
indicates up. When he felt comfortable he looked
for the flap handle, then moved it to the up position.
Here they come …

At a thousand feet he retarded the throttles
some, lowered the nose a little and dropped the left wing
about fifteen degrees. The plane stabilized in a
level left turn. No warning lights, no
gauges with pegged needles. He hit the switch
to segment the hydraulic system.

He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of
Rita’s plane.

His aircraft was decelerating. Not enough power. He
added a little, readjusted his nose attitude,
cursed himself for being so far behind the plane.

His oxygen mask didn’t fit right. It was leaking
oxygen around his cheeks, making flatulent noises
that he could hear above the background roar of the engines.
He tried to tighten the retaining straps with his left
hand, and finally gave up.

Another glance at Rita, who was turning with him
and closing.

She’s a good stick. Don’t worry
about her. Fly your own plane.

When Rita was stabilized behind him and out to the right
side, Jake began looking at the ground. The
base was small by U.s. standards, the buildings
grouped tightly together, probably to keep everything
within walking distance. Surrounding it were miles of
forests.

There was the telephone line leading off, and there by the
road intersection, wasn’t that some kind of junction
box mounted on that pole?

He reversed his turn, and when the plane
stabilized, reached for the master armament switch. He
lifted it. There was no locking collar like U.s.
planes possessed. Now the gun switch.

As he turned it on he felt a thud. That would
be the gun charging. He hoped. Bombsight on,
reticle lit. What had that Russian pilot
said?

Ten mils deflection for the gun? He twisted the
adjustment knob.

Now into a left turn, looking again for the road
intersection. It was several miles away off the
left wing, slightly behind it, so he turned steeply
to get the nose around.

More power in the turn, as the wings come
level back off some. This will be a nice slow
pass, plenty of time to aim.

He was too fast. Throttles back more, nose
down a smidgen and trim.

He concentrated on finding the pole in the
bombsight.

Small target. Too goddamn small …

There!

Damn, he was too close. He slewed the
nose a tad with rudder, adjusted the nose
attitude with stick, then quickly centered the rudder and
squeezed the trigger.

The gun vibrated hard and he saw the muzzle
flashes through the sight.

At night the muzzle blast would be blinding. Now
off the trigger and stick back smartly. With the nose
well above the horizon he rolled the plane
ninety degrees and looked. Careful, boy, you’re
carrying a hell of a load low and slow!

Pole and box down!

Level the wings … raise the nose. More power.
Safely away from the ground, let’s turn on
course 130.

He craned his neck. Rita was back there,
stepped out and up. As he watched she eased
in a little closer and gave him a thumbs up.

Okay!

Airborne and still alive. Okay!

The two Su-25’s soon left the last of the
forest behind and found themselves over the steppe. Jake had
descended to about two hundred feet above the rolling
terrain, which meant that he was constantly jockeying the
stick and adjusting the trim as the plane rose and
fell with the land contours. Below them the grass spread from
horizon to horizon, broken only by stands of wheat
and an occasional dirt road.

This broad valley of the Volga had been
peopled since ancient times, yet now the fallout
would deny it to future generations. The enormity of the
Serdobsk tragedy intruded into Jake’s thoughts
even as he worked on holding course and altitude.

Farther south, below the radioactive fallout
zone, stood the city of Volgograd, formerly
Stalingrad, the city built in the 1.920’s and
1930’s as a civic monument to the new Communist
way of life. In the last half of 1942 it had
been the site of the stupendous battle with the German
army that marked the turning of the Nazi ride. The
battle destroyed Stalin’s city, of course, and
nearly everyone in it. When the Red Army
counterattacked and trapped the German Sixth
Army, Hitter sacrificed over a quarter
million men rather than give up that pile of rubble.

Stalingrad, that shattered monument to a generation
sacrificed in a titanic struggle between two
absolute despots, was rebuilt after the war.

Soon the radioactive particles and mud
carried by the Volga would make the city a deathtrap
once again.

He had loved this type of flying when he was.
younger.

Racing low across open country, working the stick and
throttles to make the airplane dance gracefully,
sinuously, in perfect rhythm with the rise and fall
of the land-this was flying as it ought to be, a harmonious
mating of man, machine and nature.

Today the magic of it never occurred to him. He was
thinking of shattered dreams and tyrants and a people
poisoned as his eyes scanned the terrain ahead and
occasionally flicked across the instrument panel.

On one of these instrument checks his eye was caught
by a light, a small bulb that flicked on, then
off, then on again.

He looked carefully, identifying it. He was
being painted by a fighter’s radar. Perhaps they
had not located him yet, but the fighters were looking.

Damn!

He and Rita were flying two subsonic attack
planes, and somewhere up there above the clouds fighters
were stalking them. Oh, yes, they’re after us. Jake
Grafton assumed the worst. That was the only way
to stay alive. Automatically he tugged at the
straps that held him to the ejection seat, tightening them
still more.

Without warning the warplanes crested a low rise
and the great river lay before them, with clouds and swatches
of blue sky reflecting on its wide, brown
surface.

The planes cleared a power line and then shot out
over the water. The sky reflections on the water
drew Jake Grafton’s eyes upward. He
scanned, and saw contrails …

two pairs. In seconds the eastern shore
swept under the nose and Jake Grafton eased
into a gentle climb to stay just above the rising land.

Contrails in pairs … they could only be made
by fighters in formation. Fighters. Looking for . . .
his

This eastern shore of the Volga was heavily eroded
into combled pop corrugated ravines and
streambeds. Jake Grafton picked a decently
large creek and dropped into the valley it had cut
flowing west toward the river.

He was down here in the weeds hiding from radars that
sat on the surface of the earth. These radars would
provide vectors to the fighter-interceptors when
they found him. If he stayed below their horizon, they
couldn’t.

But fighters aloft-the new generation of Soviet
fighters possessed pulse Doppler radars that
allowed them to look down and identify a moving
target amid the ground clutter.

And the new missiles would track a target in the
ground clutter.

“Look-down, shoot-down” the techno-speak
guys called it.

The light blinked on and off several more times.

What’s the worst airplane that could be up there?
The MiGo-29? It was sure deadly enough, but no.
The absolute worst plane that he could think of was
another masterpiece from the design bureau of
Pavel Sukhoi, the Su-27 Flanker.

Designed in the mid-1980’s to achieve air
superiority against the best planes the West
possessed, the Su-27 was thought by some
Western analysts to be able to outfly the F-14,
F-15, F-16 and F-18, plus every fighter
the French, British and Germans have-all of them.

If those were Flankers up there, they were probably
carrying AA-10 “fire and forget”
antiaircraft missiles with active radar
seekers.

And a missile could be on its way down right now.

He lowered the nose and dropped to fifty feet
above the rocky creek.

Rita was still with him, in tighter now, only forty
or so feet away and a little behind.

The warning light was on steady.

They’ve found us. Missile to follow. Or a
lot of missiles.

The land was a rough wilderness devoid of trees.
Rock Outcroppings, meandering creeks in rocky
draws, sandy places-Jake Grafton was working
hard holding the attack plane in the draw.
Several times he couldn’t make a turn and lifted
the plane across the rim with only several feet of
clearance, then banked hard and slipped the plane
back into the draw, Vaguely he was aware that
Rita had slipped into trail behind him where she could
ride just above his wash.

“We have fighters above us,” he told her on the
radio.

No response. Radio silence meant radio
silence to Rita Moravia. If she heard A
flash on his left. He glanced over and saw a
rising cloud of dirt and debris as it swept aft
out of his field of vision. A missile impact!

“They’re shooting,” he announced over the
radio.

He lifted the nose of the plane and cleared the little
valley, then dropped the left wing. Throttles
to the stop, stick back-the Gs tugged him down into the
seat.

Another flash, this time on his right side.

Jesus, each Flanker can carry up to eight
missiles! How many have they fired?

When he had completed about ninety degrees of
turn he rolled wings level, eased the nose
back down. He was running only twenty feet
above the high places in the lumpy ground, which gave
him a tremendous sensation of speed.

The warning light was blinking.

A pulse Doppler radar identified moving
targets by detecting their movement toward or away from
the radar. If he could fly a course
perpendicular to the searching fighter, its radar could not
detect him.

When it lost him the searching fighter would probably
turn to alter the angles and try to acquire him
again. Still …

Trying to ensure he didn’t inadvertently feed
in forward stick, he craned his head to see aft.

The missiles will be coming at three or four times
the speed of sound, fool! You’ll never see them. But
you will kill yourself looking for them.

He concentrated on the flying. After twenty
seconds on this heading, he rolled into a fight
turn, then leveled the wings after ninety degrees of
heading change. Back on his original course,
southeast. The warning light went out.

A small miracle. A temporary
reprieve. Jake Grafton was under no
illusions-he was flying a plane designed
to destroy tanks and provide close-air
support to friendly troops: those Sukhoi
masterpieces above were designed to shoot down other
airplanes. The Russians couldn’t make a
decent razor or even an adequate toothbrush,
but by God they could build great airplanes when they
put their minds to it.

He looked for Rita.

Not there.

Did they get her?

How much fuel have those guys got? He and Rita
were late getting off.

Maybe the fighters were already airborne and are
running out of fuel.

There’s a maybe to pray for.

The warning light was blinking again.

He rolled into enough of a turn that he could look
behind him.

Visibility was truly terrible out of this Soviet
jet! Clear right. He rolled left and twisted his
body around. Uh-oh.

Up there at the base of that cloud, coming down like an
angel on his way to hell-a fighter!

And Jake was still toting ten 250-kilogram
bombs, about 5,500 pounds of absolutely dead
weight. He was going to have to get rid of the bombs or
he would be meat on the table for the fighters.

He turned hard left to force the fighter into an
overshoot, make him squirt out to the right side because
he couldn’t hack the turn. As he did so, Jake
worked the armament switches. In a strange plane
he had to look to check each one, all the
time pulling Gs and hoping the fighter was doing what he
wanted him to do.

He couldn’t just pickle off the bombs, not this
close to the earth: they would hit the ground almost under him
and might detonate. If they did the shrapnel and
blast would destroy his aircraft, and him with it.

When he had the switches set, he rolled hard
right and stabilized in an eighty-degree bank,
four-G turn. Then he pickled the bombs. The
G tossed them out to the left. The instant the last
one went he tightened the turn to six Gs.