Final Storm (43 page)

C
APTAIN MURSK READ THE
computer screen message twice before he was able to absorb it all.

Once he had, however, he immediately transferred the message to the air marshal’s screen, then sprinted over to his superior’s desk.

“Is this an accurate report, Captain?” the air defense minister asked, slightly startled.

“It has to be,” Mursk answered. “It’s being confirmed throughout the network.”

Porogarkov read the message one more time. In a nutshell it stated that an American bomber was just minutes away from entering the immediate airspace around Krasnoyarsk, after having destroyed four scrambled interceptors fifty miles from the radar station.

“Then it will be here in a matter of minutes …” the air marshal said, more to himself than to Mursk. Instantly he knew that whatever had happened out over the Bering Sea had been a ruse.

“Our SAM crews have been alerted, sir,” Mursk said, his voice also a little shaky. “Plus there are still six reserve interceptors tracking the enemy airplane.”

Porogarkov immediately started punching buttons on his console. An instant later, a klaxon began blaring inside the entire radar station. Large shutters automatically lowered in front of all windows and exposed doorways. A recorded announcement broadcast via a continuous loop track, ordered that all personnel should to go the station’s deep underground bomb shelter immediately.

Mursk turned toward the exit, then stopped.

“You
are
coming, sir?” he asked Porogarkov. “The SAM crews will handle the intruder.”

“No, Captain,” the senior officer said. “You go … there are things here I have to do …”

“But, sir—”

Porogarkov waved away the younger man’s protests. “Go, Captain …”

“But I will stay with you, sir.”

Porogarkov’s face turned crimson. “Captain, this is an order,” he said: “Go to the shelter … immediately.”

The air marshal turned back to his console and punched in a series of red buttons, all of which produced a glowing amber light on his screen. Mursk took one look at his superior’s action and felt a chill run through him. The senior man was arming at least a half dozen SS-19 ICBMs that were located at a refurbished Red Star base near Leningrad.

Porogarkov pushed another series of buttons, and a low whine began to emanate from his console. Mursk knew this was the “in-system” signal for the weapons targeting satellites—at the speed of light, tracking and targeting information was being relayed between the high-orbiting satellites and the mini-computers within the SS-19s themselves.

“Sir, the fuel in those rockets …” Mursk began to say.

Porogarkov’s pistol was out of his belt in a second.

“Captain, I will say this one last time,” the marshal hissed at him. “Go to the shelter.”

“But, sir,” Mursk foolishly protested. “There’s no way of knowing whether the fuel mixture in those rockets is adequate. Our technicians needed one more week to re-confirm the First Launch mixture …”

Porogarkov fired one shot—into the air. But with the blaring klaxon, the constantly repeating air raid warning and the general confusion inside the control room, the gunshot was hardly heard.

“The next one will be aimed at your heart, Captain,” Porogarkov said.

Finally, Mursk turned to go. That’s when he heard the air marshal mutter: “How do they do it? These
damn
Americans! How could they have flown a bomber halfway around the world and through our outermost radar defenses, without us seeing them?” For the first time in a long time, Mursk had no ready answer.

“Starting bomb run checklist now …”

With that, Wa began rattling off a long list of procedures that eventually would transform the fat, lifeless cylinders in the B-1’s forward weapons bay into the lethal bombs that could “fly” with deadly accuracy to the target now being programmed into his offensive systems computer.

All the while, Hunter’s arms were straining just keeping the bomber steady. He had shut off the automatic terrain avoidance gear after being hit by the flying wreckage—its computers were not sophisticated enough to handle a B-1 with a cracked back, a chopped-up left wing, and a shredded tailplane, flying only one hundred feet above the ground.

Only a pilot—a
human
pilot—could do that.

“I read twenty plus one to target,” Jones told Hunter over the now very-shaky TV monitors.

“Roger,” Hunter said, in between checking off the bomb run procedures with Ben.

At that moment, Hunter felt a very familiar tingling in the back of his head. An instant later, JT’s voice crackled from the cockpit speaker.

“I got two bandits!” he yelled. “About eleven miles behind you. Looks like a pair of MiG-21s. They are riding high at Mach 1.2.”

Hunter shook his head and gritted his teeth. He didn’t need this. The B-1 was in bad enough shape as it was. But within twenty seconds, it would be in the range of yet another barrage of enemy AA-2 Atoll air-to-air missiles.

In the cramped cockpit of the lead MiG-21, the young Soviet trainee was flying at top speed, hugging the rugged terrain as near as he dared to close the distance to the American bomber.

The B-1’s dark shape loomed before him, silhouetted against the fiery glow from the bomber’s four exhaust nozzles. Trying his best to remember his lessons, he locked in the targeting coordinates for his one and only Atoll missile, suspended from the fighter’s fuselage.

At this range, he believed nothing could prevent the deadly explosive dart from penetrating the bomber’s innards, drawn into the heat of the flaming exhausts.

The Soviet pilot pushed the missile release trigger on his control stick. The Atoll missile screamed out from under his airplane toward the B-1’s tail at twice the speed of sound.

The B-1’s automatic tail warning system was alert, scanning the skies behind the speeding bomber with an unblinking infrared eye, watching for a “hot spot” in the cold skies of Soviet Central Asia. When it detected the fiery plume of the Atoll, it triggered a pair of red “warning” lights on the consoles of both Hunter in the cockpit and Toomey back in the sub. Simultaneously, the system independently launched a pair of decoy flares and several chaff bundles in a last-ditch effort to draw the missile off its target.

Instantly Toomey was hollering for Hunter to begin evasive maneuvers.

“It’s not falling for it,” Toomey reported grimly as his instruments told him that the heat-seeking missile was ignoring the glittering chaff deviating only slightly toward the super-hot light of the white phosphorous flares.

Hunter was already reacting to his own warning light. He took a quick look at the threat display on his CRT screen; he would have only one glimpse to tell him where the missile was coming from, and he would have to decide in the next two seconds how he was going to escape it. As if time were moving in slow motion, Hunter stared at the tiny screen, waiting for the refresh of its blinking scope trace.

There it was—as he had guessed, launched from low and to the left.

Hunter quickly yanked the bomber’s control stick back all the way as he floored all four throttles to full afterburner. The big bomber protested with groans from the battered wings and roars from the engines as it attempted to respond to Hunter’s commands that literally attempted to stand the huge plane up on its tail in midair, momentarily past the maximum safe angle of flight programmed into the bomber’s flight envelope.

It was a maneuver Hunter had perfected in his F-16, and it served him well in the larger bomber. The B-1 reared up like a bucking bronco, its wings flexing dangerously at the high-g stress. Multiple stall warnings sounded in the cramped cockpit as the plane strove to remain in the air, struggling against the principles of aeronautics to meet Hunter’s demands.

Just as the B-1’s forward motion had almost stopped, the sixty-pound warhead of the streaking Atoll missile detonated, confused by the sudden shift in its selected infrared heat source—the B-1’s right outboard engine. The powerful explosion rocked the upright bomber like a paper airplane, and although the deadly cloud of spreading shrapnel and debris was mostly directed away from the plane, several large flaming pieces impacted on the bomber’s starboard wing. At the same time a ragged hailstorm of metal pellets, some of them searing white-hot, struck the exposed topside of the B-1’s fuselage as it was buffeted by the explosion.

All at once, lights flicked off and on in the tilted cabin. Console displays and computer screens flickered out as power supplies failed in the complex systems. The explosion-rocked bomber shook like it was being electrocuted as it began to tumble, out of control, toward the hard earth below.

It was only by the quick combination of Hunter in the bucking cockpit and Jones at his remote-control console that prevented a massive flameout from stalling all four engines. Wrestling the uncooperative stick forward again, Hunter once again rapidly slammed the four-throttle handle down to full military to give the fluttering bomber some forward airspeed to restore control.

Jones pushed a button that cranked out the tapered wings to their full extension to prevent a fatal spin, and slowly the green heavily smoking bomber regained altitude and settled its nose into a more horizontal track.

Already Toomey and Wa were pushing buttons and twisting dials, trying to bring the wounded bomber’s systems back on line. Wa particularly continued to struggle with both the MAPS display and the bombing computer, both of which had failed during the attack.

At last, Jones asked the critical question: “Can you still hold her, Hawk?”

“Affirmative,” Hunter yelled into his radio, the noise inside the battered airplane being so loud he could barely hear the straining engines. “Where the hell are those two bandits right now?”

“They’ve circled out a mile or two after launching the missile,” Toomey answered, adjusting his sunglasses. “My guess is they didn’t want to pick up bits and pieces of your remains if that missile had gone where it was supposed to have gone.”

“Can you jam him up?” Hunter asked, “Prevent him from popping us again?”

“Not unless the system comes back up on line,” Toomey said in a flat tone, “It may not be for another four minutes.”

“By that time, we’ll be on target,” Jones said grimly. “And there’s not a Goddamn thing we can do about it.”

As if to confirm Jones’s pessimism, the menacing shapes of the two delta-winged MiG-21s flashed in front of the bomber’s cockpit just a few hundred yards ahead, as if they were inspecting their prize. Hunter quickly noticed that neither airplane was carrying any more air-to-air missiles.

But it didn’t really matter. He knew that while the B-1 still had close to full engine power, the speedy MiGs could easy keep pace with him, blasting him out of the sky with their podmounted GSh-23 twin-barrel gun, slung between the forward airbrakes.

“JT!” Hunter called out. “What’s our defensive status?”

“Jamming system is gone. It’s busted,” Toomey responded, glancing at the blinking console lights.

“You’re twelve miles from target,” Jones told him, through his flickering TV screens.

“Ben!” Hunter called out sharply, his voice shaky from the incredibly rough ride. “What’s our weapons delivery status?”

“Bad, Hawk,” Ben replied firmly. “The bomb computer is completely greased. Ditto our back-up here. As of this moment, I can’t even launch the bombs on Krashnoyarsk.”

“Keep trying to reset, Ben,” Hunter ordered, as he scanned the width of the horizon, searching for the MiGs.

As if on cue, a stream of tracers suddenly poured across the B-1’s green nose—a deadly cascading rainbow arcing right in front of Hunter’s face ripping up the first few feet of the bomber’s nose.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “They’ve got the range now. What’s the distance to target?”

“You are at eight and a half,” Jones told him quickly.

Hunter stared up through the B-1’s cockpit and saw that the MiGs were flying directly above him, like cowboys riding herd on an unruly steer. He knew that another strafing pass was inevitable.

Suddenly, Hunter deliberately reached down on his center console and activated the B-1’s landing gear doors, opening them to lower the bomber’s wheels. Back on the sub, Jones, Wa, and Toomey immediately recognized what Hunter was doing: lowering one’s wheels during an engagement was considered the universal signal of pilot surrender.

“Hawk, you can’t be—” Wa said incredulously. “You’re not going to—”

Suddenly, Wa’s TV screen blinked out. He turned to Jones and Toomey and saw their screens too had instantly been flooded with static.

All three men desperately punched their back-up TV transmission buttons but to no avail. From that point on, all communication with the bomber was lost.

A
IR MARSHAL POROGARKOV CHECKED
his console screen for the last time.

The six amber lights on the control board had now turned a dullish orange. This told him that the warheads atop the SS-19 JCBMs were fully linked and locked on with the orbiting targeting satellites.

With one long, slow deep breath, he punched six more buttons. One by one the orange lights began to glow red.

That confirmed it—the six ICBMs, each carrying a small 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead, were on the way to independently selected targets on the East Coast of America.

Porogarkov felt a chill, even though the control room was now very, very hot. He was past thinking about how many lives he had just condemned to death. He was past thinking about what this would do to the ultimate goals of Red Star. His own goal was that if the American bomber attack was successful, he wanted to be sure that Red Star massive retaliation was on the way before the intricate satellite-to-warhead system was destroyed.

His act done, Porogarkov quickly walked to the main hall of the now-deserted radar station.

Once there, he switched on a nearby security radio and quickly dialed in the frequency he knew was used by the fighter planes charged with protecting the region.

Within thirty seconds he had learned that the American bomber—the trainee pilots claimed it was a B-1—had been severely damaged and had lowered its landing gear and flaps in an apparent attempt at surrender.