Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (77 page)

 
          
“I
don't think
Turkey
would be stupid enough to interfere with this incident,” the captain
said. “It doesn't make sense—
Turkey
helping a bunch of idiotic terrorists
trying to hijack an oil tanker. Where do they think they are going to go? We'll
put a stop to this in no time.”

Codlea
,
Bulgaria

That same time

           
“Wake up!” Fursenko shouted wildly.
“Wake up, damn you, or he'll kill us all!” He could smell alcohol, and beads of
sweat popped on the back of his neck.

 
          
Ion
Stoica's head felt as if it was going to explode, and his mouth and tongue felt
as dry and as rough as sandpaper. He rolled wearily onto his side. “What in
hell do you want, Fursenko?”

 
          
“One
of Metyor’s oil tankers in the
Black Sea
is under attack,” Fursenko exclaimed. That got Stoica’s attention. “Someone has
hijacked it! Comrade Kazakov wants you to launch immediately!”

 
          
Stoica
struggled to his feel, put on his flight suit over a pair of lightweight cotton
underwear, stumbled into his boots, and headed out of his room in a small
building adjacent to the main hangar. That little wooden building had been his
home now for over eight months. Up until three months before, he had had to share
it with Gennadi Yegorov, his weapons officer aboard the Metyor Mt-179 stealth
fighter, but he’d finally convinced him to get his own place. Yegorov had made
up a place over the main hangar—the noise from the aircraft maintenance crews
below didn't bother him.

 
          
They
made their way across the dark dirt streets toward the security checkpoint to
the main hangar where the Mt-179 Tyenee had been stored. Except for just a few
test flights, they hadn’t flown the bird too often. NATO and Romanian air
patrols had come fairly close to the base, but the Mt-179 had been able to
dispatch them quickly and easily.

 
          
“You’ve
been drinking!” Fursenko said, horrified, as they passed through the outer
security post.

 
          
“Screw
you. Doctor,” Stoica said. “I've been holed up in this place for over half a
year with no leave and no time off. The food is lousy and I haven't seen a
woman worth fucking in three months. I bought some homemade wine from one of
the locals, and if I'd had a chance to drink some then, I probably would’ve
fucked the old hag. Now shut up. You’re making my head hurt.”

 
          
Yegorov
was already inside, drawing on a chart of the
Black Sea
and northern
Turkey
. The guy was unreal, Stoica thought— noise,
loneliness, quiet, and deprivation didn't bother Yegorov one bit. He didn’t
smoke, drink, play cards, or party like the others assigned here. He had a lot
of male friends in the maintenance department—maybe Gennadi was curing his
loneliness with some late-night visits to the maintenance group’s barracks.
Maybe that’s why he’d agreed to relocate to over the maintenance hangar.

 
          
“Ion’s
here, sir,” Yegorov said to a speakerphone.

 
          
“Nice
of you to join us, Stoica,” the sneering voice of Pavel Kazakov came over the
speaker.

 
          
“Sorry,
sir. I came as soon as I heard.” He stopped himself from making an obscene
gesture to the speakerphone, motioned to a maintenance officer for coffee, and
pulled out a cigarette from a flight suit pocket. “Some retards are attacking
one of your tankers?”

 
          
“A
group of terrorists—the exact number is unknown, but around eight to
twelve—fast-roped onto the tanker
Ustinov
a couple hours ago.” Yegorov summarized. “They have shoulder-fired antiaircraft
missiles and have shot down a Navy helicopter. The tanker is heading south into
Turkish waters, destination unknown.”

 
          
Stoica
shook his head, totally confused. He took a big sip of coffee. “So what are we
supposed to do?”

 
          
“Two
Russian maritime patrol aircraft, a Sukhoi-24 and Tupolev-95, were attacked by
an undetected aircraft en route to the tanker,” Yegorov explained. “Mr. Kazakov
believes someone—NATO, the Americans, or perhaps the Turks—have sent stealth
aircraft into the area to keep the Russian aircraft away. He wants us to
investigate. Tonight”

 
          
“Yes.
sir.” Stoica said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “If someone’s up there, we’ll
nail his ass to the wall.” He turned to the maintenance officer. “How long
before we are ready to fly?”

 
          
“About
twenty minutes, sir,” the officer said. Stoica nodded, inwardly groaning. It
was going to take him a lot longer than that to sober up. Maybe coffee and some
one hundred-percent oxygen would help.

 
          
“There
is a Russian destroyer pursuing the tanker, getting ready to land some naval
infantry on the tanker to recapture it,” Kazakov said. “If there’s another
aircraft out there, I want you to get it. Don't let anyone get a shot off at
either the tanker or the destroyer I want that tanker recovered intact and the
oil safe. Do you understand?” The line went dead before anyone could respond.

 
          
Stoica
finished the coffee with a gulp. “Good luck to you. too, sir,” he muttered
sarcastically.

Aboard the Russian Federation Navy destroyer
Besstrashny

A short time later

           
With the captain back on the bridge
monitoring the attack, their plan got under way. The tactical action officer
(TAO) fed in information from his India-band surface-search radar when it came
within range, followed by more precise targeting information from its optronic
telescopic night sight and laser rangefinder. The tanker was on a constant
heading and speed, so targeting was easy. “Bridge, combat,” the TAO radioed,
“we’ve got a clear sight of the target. Captain.”

 
          
The
captain got up, went to the aft part of the bridge, and checked the repeaters
of the targeting screens from the
Combat
Information
Center
. The sights were clearly locked on the
upper portion of the large white superstructure. “Very well. Range?”

 
          
“Twenty-one
kilometers, sir.”

 
          
“Any
change in target heading or speed?”

 
          
“No,
sir.”

 
          
“Any
other aircraft or vessels nearby?”

 
          
“No
vessels within ten kilometers of the tanker, sir. All of the vessels nearby
have been accounted for. No threat to us.”

           
“Very well. Launch the surface and
air attack teams.” A small team of six Russian Federation Naval Infantry
commandos were launched aboard the
Besstrashny's
Ka-27 helicopter and
sent to try to secretly board the tanker; at the same time, they loaded a
launch w ith two dozen Naval Infantry commandos to attempt a raid from the sea.

 
          
When
fifteen kilometers out. the stem section of the tanker was in clear sight on
the optronic monitors. “Still no change in target heading or speed,” the TAO
reported. “It looks like it’s simply going to ground itself on the northern
Turkish coast, about halfway between the Turkish naval base at Eregli and the
coastal resort city of
Zonguldak
.”

 
          
“Any
oil facilities there?” the skipper asked his intelligence officer. “Any way the
Turks can off-load the oil?”

 
          
“You
mean,
steal
it?” the intel officer asked incredulously.

           
“Just answer the damned question.”

           
“Zonguldak is a coastal residential,
resort, and university town,” the intel officer said. “Large desalinization
plant, large nuclear-power-generating facility there, but no oil refineries or
oil off-loading or transshipment facilities.”

 
          
“A
nuclear power plant, eh?” the captain mused. “Is it on the coast?”

 
          
“It’s
about twenty kilometers south of the projected impact area and about two
kilometers inland, closer to the naval base.”

           
The captain was still considering
the eco-terrorist angle, but it was starting to distract him. and he didn’t
need that right now. "Comm, Bridge, send one last message to fleet
headquarters, requesting permission to begin our operation.”

 
          
A
few moments later: “Bridge, Comm, message from Fleet, operation approved,
commence when ready.”

 
          
"Very
well.” He picked up the ship’s intercom. “All hands, this is the captain. We
will commence attack operations immediately.” To the officer of the deck, he
ordered, “Sound general quarters.” The alarms and announcements began, and the
captain was handed his helmet, headphones, and life jacket. “Release battenes.
Commence . ..”

 
          
“Bridge,
Combat, high-speed air bandit, bearing zero-five-zero, range three-two
kilometers, low, heading southwest at nine two-zero kilometers per hour!”

 
          
“Byt
v
glubokay zhopi,
there's our mystery attacker,” the captain swore,

 
          
“Recommend
heading two-three-zero, flank speed, and canceling the attack on the tanker,
sir,” the executive officer said.

 
          
“My
orders are to stop those terrorists from taking that tanker into Turkish
waters,” the captain said. “Maintain course and speed, stand by to open fire.”

           
“He’s not turning,” the satellite
surveillance officer reported. “Increasing speed to twenty knots.”

 
          
“Looks
like he’s not going to break off his attack on the tanker,” Jon Masters said.
“We might be too late.”

 
          
“Not
yet,” David Luger said. “I’ll push AALF up and take it down, and let’s see what
he does.”

 
          
Masters
and Luger, along with a team of technicians, were aboard Sky Masters Inc.’s
DC-10 carrier aircraft, orbiting sixty miles north near Ukrainian airspace. The
satellite images they were viewing came from a string of six small imaging
reconnaissance satellites called NIRTSats (Need It Right This Second
satellites), launched earlier by Masters specifically for this operation. The
satellites, beaming their signals to a geosynchronous relay satellite that then
sent the images to the DC 10 launch aircraft, would provide continuous images
of the entire
Black
Sea
region for the
next week.

           
Luger happily entered commands into
a keyboard. Fifty miles to the south, a small aircraft began a steep dive and
accelerated to almost the speed of sound. The small aircraft was called
“AALF," an acronym that stood for Autonomous Air Launched Fighter Launched
from the DC-10, AALF was a sophisticated, high-speed, highly maneuverable
cruise missile with a brain. AALF was not steered like other unmanned aerial
vehicles. It was simply given a task to do, and AALF would use its neural
computer logic functions, combined with sensor and preprogrammed threat data,
to determine its own way to accomplish the mission. David Luger simply acted as
the coach, telling AALF what they wanted it to do. After it had been first
launched from the DC-10, AALF had been ordered to be an interceptor, and it had
sneaked up on the Sukhoi-24 and Tupolev-95 aircraft and attacked them with
internal Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.

 
          
Right
now, Luger wanted AALF to pretend it was a sea- skimming antiship missile. AALF
descended until it was less than two hundred feet above the
Black Sea
, then accelerated to six hundred miles an
hour and headed for the destroyer
Besstrashny\
making an occasional
zigzag pattern as a sophisticated antiship missile would do. The
Besstrashny
responded as expected, turning hard to starboard to present as small a target
to the incoming missile as possible and also to bring its aft 130-millimeter
dual-purpose guns and aft SA-N-7 antiaircraft missiles to bear.