Fortunes of War (18 page)

“The computer is the brain of the plane. You're just the loose nut on the stick.”

“Yeah.”

When the session was over and she was standing on the floor under the simulator, Joe Malan replayed her mission on a videotape. He had just started the tape when Bob Cassidy came in, stood behind Dixie, and watched silently.

“He came in so fast from the front I couldn't get a missile shot.”

“He was inside the envelope,” Malan said. “Did you try to switch to the gun?”

“Never occurred to me,” she admitted.

“I don't think you could have gotten the nose over quickly enough for a shot. You had only about three-quarters of a second, maybe a second. You must ensure you don't cross his nose, give him a shot at you. That is critical.”

“Yes, sir,” Dixie Elitch said.

“Even in a no-radar environment, this guy is making a lot of heat. Your IR sensors will pick him up; the computer will identify him, track him, show you his position at all times. Don't go lollygagging, cranking your head around to try to track him visually. Keep focused on those displays, keep flying, and take a shot when you get one. While you're
engaged with this guy, somebody else might be sneaking up to put a knife into you, so kill him as quickly as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Go get some rest. See you back here at eleven tonight. Tonight, we'll do two bogeys at a time.”

“Terrific.”

As Dixie went through the classroom area, Aaron Hudek passed her on his way to the simulator. “Stick around, babe,” he said, “and see how it's done.”

“Watching people get zapped in that thing nauseates me,” she shot back.

 

At the instructor's console of the simulator, Bob Cassidy asked Joe Malan, “How is she doing?”

“Pretty good. Picks it up quick. All these kids do. The speed with which they absorb this stuff amazes me.”

“Video games. A lifetime of video games.”

“All life is a video game to this generation. Hudek is next, then you.”

Aaron Hudek was standing beside them. “Make yourself comfortable, Colonel. I'll show you how it's done.” The humble one grinned.

Cassidy snorted.

“I can talk it and walk it, Colonel.”

“I hope.”

“Just watch.” Hudek went up the ladder toward the cockpit, which stood almost ten feet off the floor on massive hydraulically actuated arms.

“I like Fur Ball's brass,” Malan muttered.

“I'll like it too,
if
he can fly.”

Hudek could. Malan started with in-flight emergencies and Hudek handled them expeditiously, by the book. Interceptions were no problem, nor were dogfights where he bounced his opponent. After three of those, he was bounced by a single opponent. He quickly went from defensive to offensive and shot the opponent down. The second opponent was wiser, more wily, but Hudek was patient, working his plane, taking what the opponent gave him, waiting for his enemy to make a mistake.

“He's damned good,” Malan told Bob Cassidy, who was watching
Hudek's cockpit displays on the control panel in front of Malan. “Maybe the best we have.”

A simulator was not a real airplane, nor were the scenarios very realistic. They were merely designed to sharpen the pilots' skills. “The problem,” Cassidy told Malan, “is going to be getting close enough to the Zero to have a chance at it. In close, with smart skin and infrared sensors, the F-22 has the edge. Getting there is going to be the trick.”

“I thought you said the F-22's electronic countermeasures would allow us to detect the Zero before it could see us on radar?”

“Theoretically, yes. Say it works—you know the enemy is there, but his Athena protects him from your radar. You can't shoot an AMRAAM—it won't guide. How do you get in to Sidewinder range?”

“I don't know.”

“We'd better figure that out or we'll be ducks in a shooting gallery.”

 

The following day was even more frustrating for Yan Chernov than the previous one. Everything that could go wrong did. Electricity to the base was off; fueling had to be done by hand; only three airplanes were flyable—three out of thirty-six. The others had mechanical problems that the men were trying to fix, or had been scavenged for parts to keep the other planes flying. One of the three was fueled and armed. Chernov intended to use it to give the Japanese some grief.

The 30-mm cartridges for the cannon were so old that some of them had swelled; these defective cartridges would jam the gun when they were chambered, so all the cartridges had to be checked by hand with a micrometer, the defective ones thrown away, then the good ones loaded by hand into the linkages that made them into a belt. At last, the belt went into Chernov's plane.

After all that, four AA-10 missiles were loaded onto the missile racks. Chernov suited up, strapped in, then tried to start the engines. The left engine wouldn't crank.

Another hour was wasted while mechanics changed the starter drive.

Chernov went back to the dispersal shack and tried once again to call regional military headquarters. At least the telephones worked. But no one answered the ringing phone at regional HQ. The phone just refused to ring at the GCI site in this sector. Maybe the lines were down somewhere…or perhaps the Japanese had fired a beam-rider antiradiation missile at the radar to knock it off the air.

Chernov went out onto the concrete ramp and sat down in the shade of a wing so he could watch the mechanics work. He had a lot of things on his mind: antiradiation missiles, telephones that didn't work, Japanese soldiers, and a dead pilot.

To resist a Japanese attack on the base with a few dozen men would be suicidal. He had ordered the base personnel to leave, taking all the military families with them. In the absence of orders from higher authority, the responsibility was his.

Oh well, he would probably be dead in about an hour, so what did it matter what the Moscow bureaucrats thought when they got around to wondering why the antiaircraft guns at the Zeya Air Base were not manned.

He was nervous. Maybe a little scared. He had never been in combat before yesterday. The action then hadn't taken the edge off. His stomach was nervous, his hands sweaty. He was having trouble sitting still.

Today, he knew, there would be Zeros. There should have been Zeros yesterday.

He could do it, though. He told himself that over and over. He was a professional. He had a good airplane; he knew how to use it.

The odds were against him. One plane against…how many? An air force. Their ECM gear would pick up his radar….

He would leave it off, he decided. Eyeball-to-eyeball would be his best chance.

Maybe his only chance.

“Major, what if the Japanese attack?”

One of the mechanics was standing in front of him, holding a wrench, examining his face with searching eyes. “You're sitting under the biggest target on the base, the only armed fighter.”

“All these planes look good from the air,” he replied, gesturing toward rows of Sukhois and MiGs parked in revetments.

The mechanic rejoined the others. Chernov stretched out, using his survival vest for a pillow, and watched the sky. The sun was shining through a high cirrus layer. There were scattered clouds at the middle altitudes. The clouds subdued the light, made the sky look soft, gauzy.

Yan Chernov took a deep breath, tried to force himself to relax.

Finally the mechanics came to him. “We're finished, sir.”

“Good. Very good.”

“It should work.”

“Yes,” he said.

“What do you want to do, Major?” the crew chief asked.

“Help me strap in. Have the men work on getting another plane fueled. Arm it. Check the ammo, load four missiles. If there is time this evening, I will take it up.” If he was alive this evening, that is.

“Some of the other pilots want to fly.”

“No.”

Chernov had no orders to launch strikes on the Japanese. He had already lost one man. Russia might need these men later. No sense wasting them.

This time the left engine started, as did the right.

When the ordnance men and mechanics were satisfied, Chernov gave the signal for the linesmen to pull the chocks. They did so, and he taxied.

He made no radio calls. He didn't turn on the radar or the radio. The ECM panel received careful attention, however, and he tuned the volume so he could hear the sound of any enemy radar the black boxes detected.

He taxied onto the runway, stopped, and quickly ran through his preflight checks. Satisfied, he released the brakes as he smoothly advanced the throttles to the stops, then lit the afterburners.

The heavy Sukhoi accelerated quickly. Just seconds after the plane broke ground, Chernov came out of burner to save fuel.

Airborne, with the gear up and flaps in, Yan Chernov pointed the fighter southeast, down the Amur valley. He leveled at twenty thousand feet and retarded the throttles to cruise at .8 Mach.

The afternoon was getting late. The rolling plain below looked golden in the summer haze, like something from a fairy tale. Here and there were clumps of trees, pioneers from the boreal forest to the north, trying to make it in low places on the prairie. Occasionally a road could be discerned through the haze, but no villages or towns. The haze hid them.

Chernov turned on his handheld GPS, a battery-powered Bendix-King unit made in America and sold there for use in light civilian airplanes. Within seconds, his position came up on the unit. He keyed in the lat-long coordinates of the Svobodny airfield and waited for a direction and distance. There!

One hundred and twenty miles from Svobodny, Chernov's ECM picked up the chirp of a Japanese search radar. He was probably too far out for the operator to receive an echo, which was good. Chernov turned ninety degrees to the left and began flying a circle with a 120-mile radius, with Svobodny at the center. The GPS made it easy.

Yan Chernov concentrated on searching the afternoon sky and listening intently to the ECM.

Not another aircraft in sight.

That was certainly not surprising. Acquiring another aircraft visually was difficult at best beyond a few miles. At the speeds at which modern aircraft flew, when you finally saw it, you might not even have enough time to avoid it. And in combat, the performance envelope of air-to-air missiles was so large that if you saw the enemy, either you or the other pilot had made a serious mistake, perhaps a fatal one. Still, Chernov kept his eyes moving back and forth, searching the sky in sectors, level with the horizon, above it, and below it. He was alone, which was not the way modern fighters are designed to fight.

The radar that his GCI controller normally used was off the air. Perhaps it had been damaged by a Japanese beam-riding missile. Perhaps the power company had turned off the electricity. Maybe the GCI people had piled into trucks and fled west to escape the Japanese. No one was answering the telephone there, so who knew? Perhaps it didn't matter much one way or the other.

And this was an old plane, an obsolete fighter. Once, not many years ago, the Sukhoi-27 had been the best fighter in the world, bar none. But after the collapse of communism in '91, development of new fighters in the new Russia dried up from lack of money. The nation couldn't even afford to buy fuel for the fighters it had; everything was tired, worn, not properly cared for.

Amazingly, Japan had plenty of planes that performed equal to or better than this one. As Russia rusted, the Japanese built a highly capable aircraft industry.

And here Chernov was, in an obsolete, worn-out plane that hadn't flown—according to the logbook—in nine months and three days, hunting Japanese planes with his naked eyes.

Out here asking for some Japanese fighter pilot to kill him quick.

Begging for it. Kill me, kill me, kill me….

According to an intel officer hiding in the city of Svobodny whom he had spoken to on the telephone that morning, the Japanese were flying supplies in from Khabarovsk and bases in Japan.

He thought he saw a plane, and he changed his heading to check.

No. Dirt on the canopy.

He checked his fuel, checked the GPS…. He wasn't going to be able to stay out here for very long, not if he expected to get back to base flying this airplane.

He was coming up on the Bureya River when he saw it, a speck running high and conning. The guy must be 36,000 or 38,000 feet, headed northwest.

Chernov turned to let the other plane pass off his right wing on a reciprocal heading. If it was a Japanese transport—and all the planes in these skies just now were Japanese—it must be going to Svobodny. Right heading, right altitude…

If it was a transport going to Svobodny, there were fighters.

The Russian major glanced at his ECM, listened intently. Not a peep, not a chirp or click.

Well, damnit, there must be fighters, not using their radars. They must be below the transport, below the conning layer, and too small to be visible at this distance.

Thank God he had his radar off, or they would have picked up the emissions and be setting a trap right this minute.

His heart was pounding. Sweat stung his eyes, ran down his neck…

He checked his switches—missiles selected, stations armed, master arm on.

The transport was still eight or ten miles away when it went by Chernov's right wingtip. He laid the Sukhoi into a sixty-degree angle of bank and stuffed the nose down while he lit the afterburners, shoved the throttles on through to stage four.

The heavy jet slid through the sonic barrier and accelerated quickly: Mach 1.5, 1.7…1.9.

Passing Mach 2 he raised the nose into a climb, kept the turn in.

The AA-10 was a fire-and-forget missile with active radar homing. When its radar came on, the Japanese were going to get a heady surprise.

So was Chernov if the Japanese had a couple of fighters fifteen miles in trail behind the transport. He looked left, then right, scanning the sky hurriedly. The sky looked empty. Which meant nothing. They could be there.