' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (4 page)

The raised port wingtip first sagged as the main spar buckled in the intense heat, and then launched upwards and outwards, cartwheeling into the jungle a hundred metres away as the port wing tank finally exploded in a spectacular display of petrochemical based violence that any Hollywood SFX technician would be proud of.

Bombing up
Poseidon One Eight
and hot refuelling the aircraft, the refilling of the fuel tanks without first shutting down the engines, took place even closer to the terminal than it had before. If the airport manager had any fresh objections to these further breaches of regulations he kept them to himself.

With six depth charges and four Mk-46 torpedoes in the bomb bay, virtually all the remaining available ordnance, plus two active and five passive sonar buoys in the belly launch tubes,
One Eight
taxied further down the tarmac, disappearing into the acrid black smoke before pivoting to face back up the runway.

The enshrouding smoke was whipped away by the twin Rolls Royce Tyne turboprop engines as they ran up.

Two hundred metres behind, the flames flared, fanned by the prop wash and sending myriad sparks gusting away.

With two hundred metres less runway to play with, full tanks and a full bomb bay, the brakes remained on until the Atlantiques nose dipped, like a bull pawing at the earth. The brakes were released and the Atlantique rolled forward, the engines temperature gauges right on the limit of tolerance but they could not reduce the rpm.
One Eight
stayed stubbornly reluctant to leave terra firma until well past the point of no return, committing them to the take-off and only then reluctantly, did the nosewheel become unglued.

Poseidon One Eight
left the tarmac perilously close to the runway’s end and raised its undercarriage immediately, roaring just above the trees before banking left across sleeping Cayenne, and out over the Atlantic once more.

A satellite’s life is dictated by its fuel supply at the time of having stabilised at its correct orbit. Ten to fifteen years of use remains before it is boosted away from earth into a scrapyard orbit, three hundred kilometres further, out once only three months’ worth of normal station keeping fuel is remaining.  and a commercial satellites fuel use is mainly spent on north-south station keeping in geostationary orbit.

The small communications satellite lofted towards geosynchronous orbit above the Volga River by the Italian
Vega
rocket carried a larger number of hypergolic propellant tanks for its maneouvring thrusters in order to survive the game of orbital dodge ball that had been running since day one of the war.

The
Vega’s
satellite would control not only the B61 weapon for attacking the bunker, but the Nighthawk’s air to air and ground attack ordnance also. But it needed a RORSAT to provide the required radar and thermal data on the targets.

Russia

Major Caroline Nunro allowed herself a glance at the watch on her wrist as if distrusting the digital time being displayed on the instrument panel before her.

“I don’t know.” Patricia said, anticipating the question.

The plan called for dedicated satellite support and that support simply had not materialised.

There was no way to know if there was a delay or whether…

Her comms panel lit up as the communication satellite that the Italian
Vega
had carried aloft sent an authentication query. It would not open a downlink until it was satisfied with their bona fides.

Patricia’s fingers flew, inputting the correct response and then breathing a sigh of relief at the data which flooded down.

The cockpit screens and panels giving virtual views through 360 ° began to light up with updated mission specific information on static and mobile air defences. It was being fed to them in the form of an encrypted datalink from a CIA ground station in Illinois where the mission was being run. There was no voice transmission only data.

“How current is this?” Caroline queried.

“Thirty six hours.” Pat replied.

“Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick…” Caroline responded “Can you bring up the target area as a map overlay?”

The rolling hills had given way to open ground with little in the way of habitation on their line of flight. She let the aircraft systems take over and concentrated on what was her first look at their target.

They were both silent as they took in the defences they needed to defeat, by stealth or force.

“Tatischevo, Sharkovka, Petrovsk, Engels, Saratov West and Saratov airport.” Caroline read off the airfields nearby.

“Tatischevo is a deactivated ICBM
base; Sharkovka is a MiG-29 base, ditto Petrovsk….” Patricia narrated the intelligence data for the area that had been collated since they had sent the information supplied by Svetlana’s contact.

“…Engels is a bomber base, Tu-95 ‘Bears’ and an aircraft museum, Saratov is a civilian airport and Saratov West is deactivated, a graveyard for old military helicopters.”

“Saratov West is the closest to the target but it is thirteen miles away…” Caroline mused.

“Doubting Svetlana’s contact?” Pat asked.

“We have no reason to trust them.”

“The runway looks well maintained.” Patricia was bringing up the satellite photos of the base taken a year before.  Beside the runway, on the untended grass field were row upon row of early production troop transport Mi-8s, and many of those without rotor blades.

For a downgraded airbase though the tower and hangars looked better maintained than the other buildings.

The mine workings near Topovka were thought to be a mile deep but what was above ground just looked as you would expect a mine that had been worked out for twenty years to look like. The satellite images, being a year old, bore no signs of recent activity, or the lack thereof, to confirm or deny its alleged purpose.

“Would you have a car park next to a mine shaft?” Patricia asked.

“I’ve no idea why you wouldn’t, if that is any help, so I guess we just waste the place and hope the information was kosher.”

A Soviet nuclear bunker could reportedly survive a hundred kiloton near miss owing to them being super-hardened boxes supported on all sides by giant shock absorbers, so their B61 weapon’s relatively small dialled-in 30kt yield warhead had to be delivered on target and bury itself as deep as possible. After a time delay in which the F-117X needed to put distance between itself and the target the weapon would detonate, and produce a shockwave that would destroy the bunker.

However, despite having a small shaft to aim the thing down and a narrow, defended valley with interceptors based nearby this would not be a re-run of Luke downing the Death Star.

The 5000lb weight of the weapon seemed excessive for its size, but the body had originally been part of the barrel of an 8” artillery piece and the penetrator was constructed of depleted uranium. Attached to the tail was a JDAM tail unit containing GPS, FMU-143 delay fuse, a satellite downlink for guidance, along with a solid fuel rocket to assist ground penetration. 

The F-117X would have to pop-up to five thousand feet to toss-bomb the weapon but from the moment of its release, getting out of Dodge would be the young women’s principle concern.

Kourou

Six thousand two hundred and eighty five miles away the
Ariane
rocket carrying the first RORSAT dedicated to
Guillotine
cleared the tower in French Guiana.

Nine thousand miles north-west of the launch site and one hundred and thirty miles above the sand sea of the Taklamakan Desert,
Èmó 16
, a Chinese ‘Demon’ killer satellite, initiated a fourteen second burn to alter its orbit and speed to intercept. The speeds and trajectory range of the
Ariane
for reaching the required orbits for their payloads was a matter of record and all technical details of the Vulcaine 2 engine had been freely shared, pre-war. It was therefore a cause for concern at Chinese Space Command when data on the launch arrived from a surveillance satellite tracking the
Ariane
on radar. Its trajectory was as predicted but its speed was not, in fact if anything the flight profile was that of an older engine, a Vulcaine 1.

250,000 pounds of force was being exerted against the pull of the Earth’s gravity, 51,000 pounds less than the Vulcaine 2 was capable of.

Èmó 16
had accelerated from 17,000 MPH to 23,000 MPH in order to make the interception and in non-technical terms it was now seriously over-cooking it.

The
Èmó 16
carried out a radical maneouvre, pivoting about its axis whereupon its small main engine began a sustained burn. The problem the Chinese now faced was in deciding why the older engine was being employed by the French. Had ESA simply run out of their most modern engines? If that was the case then the second stage should be the twelve year old Aestus booster.

Those who were trying to solve this puzzle were rocket scientists and it did not occur to them that the substitution of a Mk 2 for a Mk 1 was simple game-playing, a deception designed to wrong foot the Chinese and buy a little more time before the inevitable happened.  The calculations were made and at the appointed moment
Èmó 16
pivoted about its axis once more, held steady for 4000th of a second and self-destructed, sending 10,000 small cubes at the point in space where the
Ariane
’s second stage would be in three minutes and nine seconds.

The second stage cleared the planned point of interception a full one point four seconds ahead of the gradually expanding cloud of cubes and its powerful modern HM-7B engine cut out prior to payload separation.

Russia

“Bingo!” Pat said with feeling, punching the air within the confines of the small cockpit behind Caroline. The ‘At-a-glance’ system truly came to life as real-time data populated the screens.

“We …are…in…
business
!”

"Ordnance uplink underway..." Once completed, they could guide all air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons via data-link to their satellite support. The targets would be unaware that they had been locked-up.

"Time until Vandenberg launches number two?" Caroline asked.

"Nineteen minutes, forty two seconds, and ESA should have the second
Ariane
on the way to the launch tower at Kourou. So if our luck holds out we will have continuous support for the mission’s duration...perhaps for the egress too."

So much time and effort had gone into this mission, Patricia mused, so many weeks kicking their heels in the farmhouse waiting for Svetlana's end of the mission,
Guillotine
, to bear fruit. If she had been told this time last year that she would be behind the lines in a war, creeping around in the night with a silenced pistol she would have found the suggestion ludicrous, she was an electronic warfare officer and not made of the stuff of a secret agent. A life was one of discoveries, both of the unexpected and also the unsuspected it seemed.

With that thought she stared for a moment at the back of Major Nunro's helmeted head.

"What is it the Brits say?  Take off in the morning, save the Free World and then home for tea and cookies!"

Caroline's head was on the business of flying, or rather monitoring the instruments to ensure the aircraft was flying itself, but she keyed the intercom with a correction.

"Biscuits."  

"Whatever..." Patricia satisfied herself that Russian ground radars and Mainstay AWACs were alert for generalised threats from without, rather than a specific threat from within. The Russian air defences would be crapping bricks if they knew a stealthy aircraft had breached their security, but they continued to look beyond their borders rather than inside of it.

"So any plans for after the war?"

"That is a red jersey question, but no." there was no humour in the answer and the set of Caroline Nunro's shoulders was stiff.

"You just know that after all this that guy's magazine is going to triple its offer to get you on its centrefold." Patricia meant the remark to be light-hearted but Caroline did not take it that way.

"So go ahead and broker a deal then; myself and Svetlana in the buff and "Look who I did in the war" as a caption." Her tone was cold; the embarrassment of Pat catching her with the
Russian girl earlier was now turning to anger. No matter how courageous and resourceful a combat pilot she may be, her career in the military would be finished once word got out. She hadn't liked the label 'Pinup Pilot', especially as she had turned the offer down, and 'USAF's hottest dyke' would be equally demeaning.

In complete contrast, Svetlana's reaction to their being caught in the act was one of indifference. She did not have a bashful bone in her body. But to come back to the earlier question, what was she to do after the war; did she and Svetlana have a future?