Air Battle Force (63 page)

“Any trouble from Baku radar?”

“We were never within their airspace, sir. We stayed out over western Kazakhstan and west of the Aral Sea, then a straight shot across Turkmenistan to Chärjew. No radar coverage in that area at all. We didn't need electronic jammers.”

“What support do you need for the follow-on attacks, General?”

“Only one: more fighter protection for Engels Air Base, sir,” Kudrin said. “I'd like at least another air-defense regiment in the area, preferably using the civil airfield at Saratov. Engels is definitely full now: The second strike team will be over Chärjew in about two hours, and I've got a third team ready to launch in fifteen minutes, just before the first strike team lands at Engels. We've got over one hundred heavy bombers flying out of here now every ten hours.”

“All of your bombers are launching out of Engels?” Gryzlov asked. “Isn't that risky? If the Americans attack, won't that disrupt all your attack plans?”

“The Tu-22Ms already require one prestrike and one poststrike refueling launching out of Engels, sir,” Kudrin replied. “If they launched out of Ryazan or Belaya, we'd need to give them an extra prestrike refueling. Coordinating all those launch and rendezvous times became too time-consuming and cumbersome. Engels has plenty of fuel and weapons—all they needed were the airframes.”

“General, I didn't put you in charge so you could cut corners and make life less time-consuming and cumbersome for yourself,” Gryzlov said. He didn't want to sound too angry—Kudrin was one of his most experienced air force commanders—but this plan didn't sound right at all. He had a very bad feeling about this. “If you need more tankers and more mission planners, ask for them. I don't want to overload Engels's resources, and I sure as hell don't want all our bombers knocked out by one attack on one base.”

“Yes, sir.” Gryzlov heard a frantic passing and rustling of papers, then, “In that case, I'd like to gain the tankers and fighters from the Eight-fortieth Fighter Regiment at Lipeck and the Ninetieth Fighter Regiment at Morozovsk,” Kudrin went on. “I'll deploy the Eight-fortieth to Morozovsk, and we can set up another air-refueling anchor near Volgograd for the Tu-22Ms coming from Belaya and Ryazan. The fighters can use the refueling anchor as well.”

“Now you're saying what I want to hear, General,” Gryzlov said. Kudrin worried too much about the wrong things sometimes—but usually all he needed was a little push in the right direction and he was back in step. “Your request for those units is approved—you'll have authorization to deploy those regiments immediately. You're doing good work out there. Let me know if you need anything else.” There was no reply, just the clicking and beeping of digital static. Oh, well, Gryzlov thought, Kudrin wasn't much of a chitchatter. . . .

That same time

Kudrin had hung up the phone in a hurry because, at that moment, he received the first warning that his base was under air attack.

“Search radar, SA-10, twelve o'clock, forty miles,” Daren Mace reported. “Coming quickly into detection range. Let's step it on down, Rebecca.”

Rebecca pressed the command button on the control stick of her EB-1C Vampire bomber and spoke: “Terflew clearance plane one hundred feet.” The Terflew, or Terrain Following, system commanded the autopilot to fly lower until the aircraft maintained at just one hundred feet aboveground—less than a wingspan's distance away. “Clearance plane set. How are we doing?”

“Shit, that SA-10 is going to nail us,” Daren said. The terrain in this area was completely and utterly flat, with only a slight rise north of the Volga River. Daren hit his command button. “Launch two TALDs.”

“Launch two TALDs, stop launch,”
the computer responded. Seconds later two devices resembling large, fat lawn darts ejected from a bomb bay in the Vampire's tail and began gliding away. The TALDs, or Tactical Air Launched Decoys, were small gliders with electronic emitters on board that, when activated, appeared as gigantic, slow-moving aircraft on an enemy's radarscope.

“Still tracking us,” Daren said. “It's got us and the TALDs together. Our trackbreakers can't shake it.”

“Hang on,” Rebecca said. “Terflew off.” She jammed the throttles to full afterburner and hauled back on the stick. The Vampire bomber shot skyward at fifteen thousand feet per minute.

“That's good . . . that's all we need.” They were passing five thousand feet—way too high with an SA-10 in the area. “Rebecca, let's get our nose down, we're
too high!
”

“Warning, SA-10 height-finder, twelve o'clock, twenty-five miles,”
the threat computer reported in a silky female voice. Seconds later:
“Warning, missile launch, SA-10 . . . warning, missile launch, SA-10!”
The computer announced four more missile launches—an entire SA-10 launcher unit had just opened fire on them.

“Break right!” Daren shouted. Rebecca threw the Vampire bomber into a hard right turn. “Full countermeasures!”

“Countermeasures active,”
the computer responded. From canisters in the tail, a bullet-shaped device unreeled itself at the end of an armored fiber-optic cable. The ALE-50 towed decoy was an external antenna for the Vampire's jammers, designed to move the source of the bomber's jammers away from the aircraft itself in case an enemy's antiaircraft weapons could home in on the jamming.

The first SA-10 missile went right for one of the TALDs and scored a direct hit. The other three SA-10 missiles guided right for the Vampire bomber. The defensive computer system released two more TALDs, and one SA-10 guided on it—it was too inviting a target to ignore. Flying at three times the speed of sound, the last two SA-10s were only seconds away from impact. . . .

“Break left!” Daren shouted. Rebecca instantly reversed her turn, flying toward the oncoming SA-10 missiles. But because of the turn, the towed decoy slowed down and moved sideways, making itself an even larger target. Both SA-10s guided on this big fat target, one hitting the towed decoy and the other detonating as it hit the debris field of its brother.

“Give me a right one-eighty and let's get away from here,” Daren said. He unreeled a second towed-decoy array as Rebecca turned south. “SA-10 radar still tracking, six o'clock, twenty-three miles.” The modern Russian SA-10 antiaircraft system could control as many as twelve four-missile launcher vehicles and engage up to six targets simultaneously with two missiles per target—they were definitely still not out of the woods. “Base, did you take a picture yet?”

“Got it coming in now,” David Luger responded from Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base. “The NIRTSats just downloaded the images. Stand by.” Days earlier Patrick McLanahan had ordered a constellation of NIRTSats—Need It Right This Second Satellites—inserted into a low earth orbit, designed to cover the region between Engels in Moscow—the largest bomber base in Russia and the origin of the air attacks against both Chechnya and Mary in Turkmenistan—and the Arabian Sea. Sixteen NIRTSats were launched four at a time from a rocket carried aloft by a modified DC-10 aircraft and inserted into their orbits. The TV-size satellites contained high-resolution synthetic-aperture radar sensors that could see and identify objects as small as an automobile from eighty miles in space. Sixteen satellites meant that one satellite passed over the area every three minutes.

The problem was, the images were high-resolution radar images—they saw everything that could reflect radar energy, including decoys and other targets that looked like threats, and threats could easily be concealed inside buildings or even simple shelters. The only way to draw the decoys out to plot their position was to give them something to shoot at. The cruise missiles carried by the Vampires—FlightHawks, StealthHawks, and Wolverines—were too small and stealthy to fool a strategic surface-to-air missile battery. They needed the real thing.

The SAR images were downloaded to Battle Mountain's BATMAN Center and displayed on the large screens. The computers picked the most likely targets and quickly displayed them. “There it is,” Luger said. The image he was looking at definitely showed a standard brigade-level SA-10 engagement battery: a command-launcher vehicle, its four missile tubes already erect; two more simplified launcher vehicles, separated by about two miles from one another, only one of which had its tubes raised to launch position; a radar vehicle; a towed, mast-mounted radar for detecting low-flying aircraft and cruise missiles; and several service vehicles, including trailers with extra missiles and cranes to lift the reloads onto the transporter-erector-launcher vehicles. Other SAR images showed the front-level command vehicle, about six miles away, which coordinated the activities of several SA-10 engagement brigades.

“Nice to see you guys,” Luger said. He rolled a set of crosshairs onto the command-launcher vehicle and pressed a button. The geographic coordinates of the vehicle were instantly transmitted via satellite to the Vampire bomber and loaded into the attack computer. He repeated the process with the rest of both the SA-10 brigade and the front-level vehicles in order of priority. “I got all my pictures, guys. I'm ready anytime.”

“Set three hundred clearance plane,” Daren said. When they climbed to the proper altitude, he said, “Here they go.” Daren uploaded the target coordinates to the weapons in the aft bomb bay. The bay held a rotary launcher with eight AGM-165 Longhorn Maverick missiles. The two-thousand-pound Longhorn missile had a two-hundred-pound thermium-nitrate warhead, a two-stage solid-rocket motor that gave it a range of almost sixty nautical miles, and an imaging-infrared guidance sensor. Once he'd programmed the target coordinates, Daren ordered, “Attack commit Longhorn SA-10 brigade.”

“Attack commit Longhorn, stop attack,”
the computer responded. After a short pause the aft bomb doors opened, and one by one the Longhorn missiles were shoved into space. After they'd fallen about sixty feet, their rocket motors ignited and the missiles shot ahead, then arced over and above the Vampire bomber and headed back for the SA-10 missile site.

Thirty seconds before impact the Longhorn missiles began transmitting imaging-infrared images via satellite to both the Vampire bomber and to the Battle Management Center back in Battle Mountain. David Luger recognized the very same SA-10 brigade photographed by the NIRTSats just minutes earlier. The Longhorn's crosshairs were only a small distance off the command-launcher vehicle. He used a trackball to move them back on target, then locked them on. “Got target one,” Luger announced.

“I got targets two and three,” Daren said. He was looking at the infrared images being transmitted from the second and third Longhorns in a window on his supercockpit display. Again the crosshairs needed only slight adjustments to bring them dead on target, and he locked them on. Daren then switched to the first Longhorn, and he was able to watch as the Longhorn missile got closer and closer to the command-launcher vehicle, destroying it moments later. “Good hit on target one! Yeah, baby!” he crowed. Targets two and three were destroyed shortly thereafter, and the SA-10 threat from that site was gone. There were other SA-10 batteries in the area, and Luger loaded their coordinates as well, but they were far enough away at the moment not to be a threat. They needed the Longhorn missiles to knock down any threats closer to their target complex.

Daren selected a waypoint on his supercockpit display. “SA-10s are down. We're heading in, guys. Center up, Rebecca. Clearance plane two thousand.” She made a hard right turn toward Engels Air Base. With the surface-to-air-missile threats reduced, they could afford to climb a bit higher to stay away from any optically guided antiaircraft artillery sites that might pop up in front of them.

Now that the SA-10 site had been destroyed by Longhorn missiles, the road was clear for an attack on the base itself. From then on, the Vampire bomber was little more than a manned missile-launching truck. David Luger had already identified two large antiaircraft artillery sites near both ends of the base's long runway, and Daren fired a Longhorn missile at each of them and destroyed it moments later. One Longhorn took out the base's surveillance-radar antenna, and the last two missiles were sent into the middle of the petroleum-storage facility, setting the entire complex of storage tanks afire.

But the main target was still alive—Engels's huge inventory of bombers, poised to strike Turkmenistan again.

The center bomb bay contained a rotary launcher with eight AGM-177 Wolverine cruise missiles. The turbojet-powered cruise missiles had three internal bomb bays that could hold a total of three hundred pounds of ordnance, plus a fourth high-explosive warhead section. The Wolverines had been preprogrammed with their own “mission” to fly, so it was just a matter of flying within twenty miles of Engels Air Base, opening the center bomb bay, and letting them go. They were not as fast or as pinpoint-accurate as the Longhorn missiles, but they were perfectly suited for this mission.

One by one the Wolverine missiles flew over Engels's twelve-thousand-foot-long runway, northern taxiway, and the mass aircraft-parking ramp, about two thousand feet aboveground. As the missiles cruised in, they dropped small canisters on parachutes. Called the CBU-97R Sensor Fuzed Weapon, or SFW, each canister had a small radar sensor in the nose that detected targets below, and it would steer itself and rotate its business end at its targets according to images picked up by the tiny radar. At a computed point in its fall to earth, the SFW canister detonated. Ten copper disks instantly melted and fired from the front of the canister, aimed toward the detected targets below. The white-hot blobs of molten copper could pierce steel up to three-quarters of an inch thick. But as the copper slugs pierced the outer armor they cooled, preventing them from blowing out the opposite end. The result: Each blob of molten copper became thousands of red-hot BB-size pellets that ricocheted around inside at the speed of sound,
creating an instantaneous but deadly meat-grinder effect.