Battle Born (56 page)

“But we didn’t pick up any radar indication on him,” Nancy said. She continued a moment later: “A MiG-29. It’s gotta be a Japanese MiG-29, using GPS for navigation and his IRSTS for targeting.” The IRSTS, or infrared search and track system, was a sophisticated Russian-designed heat-seeking sensor that allowed a MiG-29 to scan large sections of sky for enemy aircraft without being detected. Used along with GPS satellite navigation, the MiG would never have to use his radar except for very long-range attacks—most enemies would never know he was there until he fired his missiles. “Are they still patrolling the peninsula with the Koreans?”

“I’m sure the Koreans are happy to have them up here,” Patrick said. “Korea might be providing the ground control information for the MiG. I think that as long as we stay farther than twenty miles from that MiG and we don’t aim our exhausts right at him, he won’t spot us. Dave, why don’t you drop a note to General Samson and ask him to ask the White House to find a way to tell the Japanese we’re up here. I’d hate to be jumped by a Japanese MiG. Maybe we can exchange Mode Two codes or something.”

“You got it,” Luger said. “I should be able to find out what his interplane or command frequency is too, so if the shit really hits the fan you can talk to him. You can . . . Hey, looks like fighters launching from Korea.” When Patrick expanded his supercockpit display
to a full God’s-eye view, he saw the new information: relayed from Korea’s own air traffic control radar system, two high-speed aircraft were climbing rapidly through the night sky, headed northeast. “Two fighters off from Seoul, headed your way.”

“Getting crowded up here,” Nancy said. “Maybe we should go low and hide in some . . .”

Just then the LADAR system issued a shrill warning tone, and an icon began blinking near one of the suspected Nodong missile units.
“Launch detection
!” Patrick shouted. “Missile in the air! Left forty and full blowers, Nance!”

Nancy Cheshire shoved all four throttles to max afterburner and yanked the EB-1 Megafortress to the left. They could see the missile launch clearly: a tiny sparkle of light on the horizon, followed by a bright yellow column of fire rising rapidly through the atmosphere. Patrick’s turn pointed the nose in precisely the right direction to lead the missile as it climbed.

“Bomb doors coming open! Wolverine away!” Patrick had immediately launched one of the powered glide bombs at the Nodong launcher. “Bomb doors closed! Okay, Nance, follow that missile!”

Nancy raised the nose only slightly to start her tail-chase climb. At first it seemed as if they might overfly or pass the missile—the Nodong didn’t look as though it was accelerating so fast, while the Megafortress was rapidly picking up speed. But this was an illusion. Seconds later it was obvious how fast that ballistic missile was traveling. In the blink of an eye the Nodong was above them, accelerating rapidly on a tongue of fire. By this time, Nancy had the speed built up to almost Mach 1 and she easily kept the nose aimed at the missile. They never reached the Mach, however, and the higher Cheshire pulled the nose up to point it at the Nodong missile, the quicker the airspeed bled off.

“Punch it out quick, sir,” Nancy urged him. “Airspeed’s falling way off already. You got about six seconds . . .”

“Stand by . . . doors coming open . . . missile away!” Seconds later they heard a loud thundering rocket blast, and one of the Lancelot missiles shot past their windscreen on its own plume of fire. “Clear to unload, Nance! Doors closed!” Nancy released back pressure on the control stick, lowered the nose to the horizon, and pulled the throttles out of afterburner. They were rewarded by a spectacular multicolored globe of sparks and fire in the sky as the Lancelot intercepted its quarry.

“
Ya-hoo
!” Nancy shouted. Both crew members had to turn away from the brilliant flash of light and shower of sparks. “Man, did you
see
that! Was that a nuclear detonation?”

“Could have been,” Patrick said. “Maybe a partial yield, five or ten kilotons. Lancelot intercepted it about fifty-one miles downrange, eighty thousand feet altitude.” Then a heavy rumble of turbulence rocked the Megafortress. “Yep, maybe a nuclear burst, all right. All our systems look okay.” Patrick switched to the imaging infrared view from the Wolverine missile, only long enough to clearly see the outline of the Nodong missile train. He had just enough time to roll the aiming cursor onto the car with the erector-launcher still extended in firing position before the missile hit.

Then came another warning message blinking on the supercockpit display. “Another missile launch! Left ninety, max AB,
now
!” Nancy followed Patrick’s instructions. This time Nancy kept the Megafortress’s nose down until Patrick had launched another Wolverine missile and the Nodong missile crossed the horizon; it was enough to accelerate past Mach 1. The nose lifted quickly, it felt much steadier, and the airspeed drop-off
was less drastic—although the fact that they were six thousand pounds lighter on weapons and four thousand pounds lighter on fuel certainly helped too.

“Stand by . . . doors coming open . . . missile away!” Patrick shouted. Nancy shielded her eyes from the bright glare of the Lancelot missile’s first-stage rocket motor as the big missile streaked into the night sky. “Doors closed, clear to—”

“Warning
!” Dave Luger shouted on the satellite commlink. “
Bandit at seven o’clock ten miles
! Get out of there!”

He was interrupted by a high-pitched
deedledeedledeedle
and a large MISSILE LAUNCH warning on the supercockpit display. “Break left!” Patrick shouted. Nancy yanked the Megafortress to the left—it was already in a slight left turn—and pulled hard right to the stall warning stick shaker. At the same instant, Patrick ejected several TALDs from the bomber’s right ejector racks, then quickly reeled out the first towed decoy and activated it. The tactical air-launched decoys immediately deployed their radar fins and activated infrared and radio emitters—to an air-to-air missile they were hundreds of times larger than the escaping EB-1. Both enemy missiles hit the TALDs without a single look at the Megafortress.

They saw another explosion in the sky, not as big as the first one, but spectacular nonetheless. “Looks like we got the second Nodong,” Patrick said, “but I don’t know what happened to the second Wolverine. It might’ve been shot down.”

“By who? Who is shooting at us?” Nancy shouted.

“That motherfucker Japanese MiG-29 sneaked up behind you when you plugged in your ’burners and shot two missiles at you!” Dave replied.

“Why would he do that—other than the fact there are missiles flying everywhere and he might’ve thought
we launched all of them,” Patrick declared. “You got his frequency yet, Dave?”

“I’m getting it now,” Dave replied. “He’s talking to Seoul GCI and those two Korean fighters. I think they’re going to try to box you in . . . I got it. I set the freq in radio two. They’re unsecure.”

“Let me talk to ’em,” Nancy said. She moved her comm switch to radio number two and keyed the mike button: “Hey, boys, we’re on your side. Stop shooting at us!”

“Unidentified aircraft, this is the United Republic of Korea Air Force,” a voice replied in a thick Korean accent. “You have violated Korean airspace. Roll wings level, slow down, and lower your landing gear immediately or you will be shot down! This is your final warning!”

The supercockpit display showed the deployment of the air targets. “Looks like those Korean fighters are F-16Ks, judging by their radar signature—they don’t have us on radar yet,” Patrick said. “We are well inside Seoul radar coverage, but we can be out of it in less than two minutes at mil power. The MiG-29 might still have us on IRSTS. There’s squat we can do to escape him unless we get beyond his sensor’s max range, which is about ten miles. That’s pretty unlikely—he can fly just as fast as we can up here.”

“Unidentified aircraft, this is your final warning!” the Korean voice repeated. “Slow and lower your landing gear now or we open fire!”

“Warm up a Scorpion missile, Patrick,” Nancy Cheshire said. “We’ve got no choice—it’s him or us.”

“I’d rather not shoot the bastard down, Nance—he may have shot at us, but he’s a good guy.” Instead, Patrick activated the laser radar once more, got a fix on the MiG-29, then designated a Wolverine cruise missile
against it. “Doors coming open . . . missile away! Get ready for a mil power TERFLW descent, Nance!”

“You got it, boss,” Nancy said happily, quickly configuring her autopilot switches. Patrick opened the bomb doors and commanded the ground-attack cruise missile against the MiG-29.

The Wolverine-powered cruise missile normally had a fifty-mile range, but this time it was heading up against a MiG-29 fighter, so its range was considerably less. But it was enough. Patrick and Nancy watched on the supercockpit display as the Wolverine missile flew closer and closer to the MiG. About two miles away, the MiG’s infrared search and track system must have detected the missile on a collision course, and it did a spectacular snap-turn to the right, followed by a roll and a steep dive away from the missile. The little cruise missile tried to follow, but it quickly lost track of the MiG and crashed harmlessly into the Sea of Japan.

At the same instant the MiG-29 did its wild evasive maneuver, Nancy rolled the EB-1C inverted and pulled. The bomber plummeted toward the sea in a steep thirty-thousand-foot-per-minute dive. She pulled the power to idle to keep from overstressing the plane. At five thousand feet above the ocean, she rolled upright, engaged the terrain-following system, and pushed it to full military power. They leveled off smoothly two thousand feet above the ocean, accomplished a systems check, then stepped it down until they were two hundred feet above the dark waves.

Nancy made a turn south to parallel the Korean coastline, in case the MiG tried to pursue them along their last known track, while Patrick scanned the skies around them with the laser radar. “The MiG is fifteen miles at our five o’clock, heading southeast,” he reported. “I don’t think he’s got us. Good job, Nance.
Let’s work our way back to our patrol orbit and see if we can catch any more Nodongs tonight!”

“It stinks that we had to take a shot at a good guy and waste a perfectly good Wolverine just so we wouldn’t get shot down ourselves,” Nancy said. “But I guess he’s just doing his job. And we actually got two missiles tonight! Awesome!”

The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful. The Megafortress crew stayed in their patrol orbit over central Korea for another hour, easily skirting all of the search radars and fighter patrols over Korea. By this time there was a general air defense alert over the entire region, but the Megafortress crew was easily able to evade all searchers. There were no more missile launches from either side. They then broke off and hooked up with a KC-135 tanker over the Sea of Japan, 150 miles west-northwest of Kanazawa, Japan. With full tanks, they returned to their patrol orbit until an hour before sunrise, then headed back toward Japan and terminated their first successful night of antiballistic missile patrol.

They refueled again with the tanker, then flew to their “due regard” point, the coordinates in their military flight plan where they would again be back in radar contact. The Japanese military air traffic controllers on the island of Hokkaido, where the Megafortress crew checked in, might have suspected that the unidentified aircraft near Korea was this mysterious B-1 with the “Fortress” call sign, but there was nothing they could do but let the plane go on its way unmolested. Once it crossed the “due regard” point outbound outside Japanese airspace, its business was its own. As long as it crossed the proper point inbound at the proper time and squawked the proper transponder codes, it was a legal return flight and could come back without
question with a valid flight plan and full air traffic control service.

With their identity confirmed and their flight plan reactivated, they continued on uneventfully and a little over two hours later set down in Adak, Alaska. Total flight time: twenty-one hours. They had taken off from Dreamland just after sunset and were landing just before arctic sunset—the sun would be up again in a couple of hours.

The ground crews immediately prepared the Megafortress for relaunch, while the flight crew made their way to the hangar where their new headquarters had been set up. David Luger himself picked up Nancy and Patrick from the plane, fed them sandwiches and drinks, escorted them to maintenance and intelligence debrief, and then to the conference room where they could sit and relax and talk about the sortie.

Waiting for them on a secure satellite videoconference hookup was Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, calling from Dreamland. “Helluva job, you two,” Samson said proudly. “Congratulations. How do you feel?”

“We need to get some more-comfortable chairs in that plane,” Nancy said. “And we need to get the microwave oven and hot cup working again too.”

“Why bother, Nance? You never unstrap or even lower your oxygen mask anyway,” Patrick said with a smile. To Samson, he said, “What’s the word from Korea, sir?”

“The word, thank God, is ‘what the hell happened?’” Samson replied. “Both China and Korea observed the exact same thing: two ballistic missile launches originating in southern Chagang Do province, followed by two large explosions, one a nuclear burst, high in the atmosphere. Very little damage and few injuries to anything or anyone on the ground. No response from China this time, no further action by
Korea except to declare an air defense emergency. Japan claims it intercepted and attacked a bomber over the Sea of Japan and chased it away. Officially, they did not speculate on its identity. Unofficially—well, my phone’s been ringing off the hook. State Department. Pentagon. Gold Room. Oval Office. They all wanted a briefing.”

“And?”

“And I told them we had a winner on our hands, and we needed to fully implement it.” Samson beamed. “They virtually handed me a blank check. We got tankers, manpower, weapons, whatever we need ready to go. It’s our show too. No argument this time—Pacific Command was never even considered. The operation stays black all the way—we still don’t want to send any more carriers or combat aircraft into the region until things cool down. Except for the two carriers already stationed around Korea, we’ll be the only other combat unit in the entire northern Pacific. So just tell me what you need, Patrick, and it’ll be on its way.”