' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (6 page)

"They seem to have 'Favorites' and 'Grumbles' for long and medium range, a trio of 'Geckos' and a 'Zeus' or six for point defence of the target site...
oops
, check the high ground at the IP!" a ZSU 23-4 and a Gecko mobile launcher sat at a little pre-war picnic spot overlooking the river. The RORSAT had them identified by their thermal signatures and radar returns. The symbols appeared on the screen accordingly, sat dead ahead.

Caroline automatically put the nose down to skim the rivers surface as close to the tree lined bank as she dared, hiding from the feared 'Zeus' in the ground clutter but this only made their own thermal fingerprint a little more obvious to the Gecko. Both systems were linked
, although the heat seeking missiles could not guide on the ZSU’s radar. The ZSU’s turret traversed to point up-river, its quad 23mm automatic cannons dipping below the horizontal, slaved to the mobile Gecko launchers thermal sensor. A whir of servos also sounded as the Gecko's erector also rose up into the firing position. It was too faint for a lock but it grew in intensity by the millisecond.

Aboard the A-50 the general alert by Moscow Air Defence had come as a rude shock. Major Limanova's sighting report was now the subject of reappraisal by the watch keeper’s immediate superior. The absence of any radar trace was now being regarded as evidence of the presence of at least one enemy stealth aircraft operating in the skies near the capital, rather than a lack of evidence of a conventional one being abroad.
             

The scrambling of fighters and active use of radar and thermal sensors in and around Moscow had spread rapidly to surrounding air defence zones and beyond.

Two pairs of MiG-29s north of the Volga received the Gecko’s feed via the A-50 Mainstay and banked hard, heading in their direction.

"I have the Zeus and Gecko locked up via our support and if that A-50 keeps coming we will have him at extreme range in thirteen seconds."

"Okay, let’s get busy." The nose came up twenty degrees, the belly launcher cycled and a single AGM-65E sped away, aiming for a spot on the small shingle covered parking area midway between the two launchers, which were only forty feet apart. The amount of ordnance they carried was limited so any opportunity to buy-one-get-one-free was welcomed by Patricia.

Caroline levelled off at two hundred feet above the river, holding steady for a few seconds. The launcher cycled a second time and an AIM-120 dropped free to light off twelve feet below them and accelerate ahead, climbing sharply and also under third party control.

Caroline jinked left, putting warmer trees in their background instead of the cooler River.

Aboard the A-50 the heat source disappeared from the operators screens five seconds before the AIM-120 impacted with the underside of the A-50’s right wing. All beyond the starboard inner folded backwards and upward before shearing away. With the one remaining starboard engine on fire the huge aircraft rolled onto its back, beginning a long terminal dive with a two hundred foot tail of flame streaming behind it and its large radome still rotating.   

Command and control was disrupted, although the hunters knew enough to know where to start looking.

Caroline throttled back, raised the nose ten degrees and stood the Nighthawk on its wingtip in order to make the turn into the narrower valley.

As the aircraft left the river valley it was illuminated by exploding Gecko missiles which were tearing apart the burning launch vehicle, and hazarded by the spectacular fireworks display created by cooking-off 23mm cannon ammunition in the flame enshrouded ZSU now laying on its side. Tracer flew off in all directions, including into the path of the F-117X, and worryingly there were six cannon rounds they could not see for every tracer round that they could.

Caroline held the turn, her jaw set and half expecting to feel a hammer blow resound through the airframe but they were through and clear without damage. She levelled the wings and let out a relieved breath, but that relief was premature.

  "Mother of ..!" Caroline exclaimed a heartbeat later.

They should have expected that this close in the KGB ground troops, the Premier’s Pretorian Guard, would also be defending the site by any means at hand. Tracer arose to meet them from scattered positions where AFVs sat in defensive berms and hull-down fighting positions. Firing blind, trying for the Golden BB shot, the 20 ruble bullet that brings down the billion dollar aircraft.

The small arms fire flicked by but the heavier guns sent apparently molten globs of green fire aimed directly between the pilot’s eyes. It emerged from the darkness below as small glowing green dots that rose towards them with deceptive slowness before suddenly growing in size and velocity. It seemed that each one must inevitably smash straight through the cockpit screen, but at the last moment they curled away, flashing passed either below, to the right or to the left. 

An audible alarm sounded as a super cooled sensor in their tail detected a shoulder launched heat seeking Strela missile locking on. Flares were pumped out automatically and the alarm fell silent.   

Patricia saw none of this; she secured the uplink between the weapon and the
Vega
, updated the status of the Vandenberg launch and set to with the business of the bomb run.

"Twenty seconds." she keyed calmly "Weapon is hot and the uplink is established, this is as good as it gets..."

Caroline centred the icon for the mine shaft at their 12 O-Clock.

"Fighters coming down" Patricia warned. "That kerfuffle back there zeroed our location for them, we have two Zhuk radars crossing our six from the eight o-clock position at six thousand...now four thousand, those boys are hustling."

"Bad country to be diving on burner...this is where those boys find out how well built their rides are…but we will be outahere in seconds."

Behind them the Fulcrum’s Klimov 33D turbofans were indeed producing over eighteen thousand pounds of thrust but the afterburners were cut as warnings sounded in their pilots ears from the Russian’s ground proximity warning systems.

"Pop-up in five...four...
SHIT!
" The symbols and icons vanished from the screens as the RORSAT turned into an expanding cloud of low orbit debris. Their up to the second threat coverage vanished and the
Vega
communications satellite lost its targeting data.

“Patty, what’s the status on Two and Three?”

“One minute fifty and six minutes forty five…the second
Ariane
is launching as we speak.”

Caroline silently blessed the triple redundancy and the mission planner’s foresight, but made a mental note to check on whether theirs was the single most expensive sortie in history.

"Warm up a pair of Sidewinders, we are going around again!" Caroline declared, pulling back on the side stick, taking them up in a half loop and rolling out at the top to loose off an AIM-9L Sidewinder at each of the MiG-29s that were now entering the valley. She laughed cruelly as they received the same greeting from the ground defenders as they had. There was the sudden appearance of a tail of flame followed by a ball of fire as the trailing aircraft of the pair, seriously damaged by friendly ground fire, flew into the hillside. A parachute opened briefly, rewarding its pilot for his quick reactions. The lead MiG-29 released flares and pulled up into a vertical jink, avoiding a direct hit by the Sidewinder targeting it but the missile’s proximity fuse activated ten feet from its tail. It departed eastwards trailing smoke. The second AIM-9L flew into the already burning wreckage of its target which was scattered over the valleys steep side.

“How are we playing this?” Patricia asked.

“Those guys back in the valley have got their eye in now…no future there.”

Patricia had to agree with that.

“So I suggest we try an up and over, back into the river valley to do a straight in south to north approach over the hills?”

“We will have to trust that the Vandenberg RORSAT will be overhead by then.”

“No future in hanging around here either.” Caroline declared.

Even without the RORSAT’s downlink the plasma screens were providing ample warning of seven MiG-29 radars and over a dozen mobile air defence radars searching for them. Fortunately there were no longer any fixed air defence radar sites on the hill tops as their presence would have alerted the West that Russia had  something worth targeting, somewhere in that area.

“I’ve got activity over at Saratov West, air traffic control radar just came up, so not so deactivated after all…and now a pair of radars lifting off, probably Hind Ds.” Patricia informed her pilot. “Someone in the bunker just called for his bug-out transport to be standing by when the raid is over…we could always fox ‘em into thinking we left, then take him out with an AMRAAM?”

“He’ll have a regiment’s worth of CAP and we have
just one AIM-120 remaining.” Caroline pointed out. “Which one is the premier’s helo, and which one is riding shotgun?” the pilot asked rhetorically. “We stick to the plan and hope to hell there isn’t a cab rank of killer ‘Sats’ waiting up in orbit.”

Avoiding the guns in the valley entrance by cutting the corner, skimming over the hill tops and back into the wider river valley Caroline throttled back and flew east, reducing their heat signature and economising on fuel. Major Caroline Nunro was not that type of pilot who would ever complain of having too much fuel.

As the RORSAT launched from Vandenberg came over the horizon the screens again filled with information.

“Are we good?” Caroline asked.

They still had their link to the communication satellite and the RORSAT confirmed it was feeding that with targeting data.
“We’re good!”

This wasn’t familiar terrain by any means and more than a few pilots had attempted to hug the contours only to find that the crest of the hill they thought to be the top was in fact a false summit. Forward inertia takes time to translate into a climb and many an aircraft has bellied into the earth and rock of those snares for the bold and unwary, with the controls pulled all the way back in a last instinctive act. Th
ose rare, lucky ones, learned a valuable lesson, but the unlucky ones next ride was a hearse. 

The RORSAT provided them with a moving map and their own precise height, speed and position. Patricia would find them the lowest and quickest way to the target from the back seat and Caroline would follow her instructions.

“Re-entrant coming up between two hilltops on the left…standby to turn…now!” 

Once again the throttles opened after they banked into a hard left climbing turn.

“That’s good, hold this angle…flat ground for a mile beyond then it rises in steps to a saddle. A mile of carefree flying and then it’s all downhill from there…there’s another Mainstay lifting off from Engels but it’ll take him time to get up high enough to safe operating height.”

Caroline lowered the nose and they skimmed the saddle, shielded from radar energy by the earth until cresting its far edge.

They were the visiting team and the defenders had the home advantage. Every attack scenario had been tried and tested during regular exercises before the war, before the West knew that the East was controlling what the satellites thought they saw. They knew all the approaches and the air defence radars had ceased 360° radiation, reverting instead to covering pre-assigned arcs, quartering the ground they knew an attacker must appear from.

Immediately upon reaching the far side of the saddle the screen flared red as powerful radar painted them.

“A Tombstones got us…Favorite’s launching at ten o’clock, six miles…pop-up coming up…Five…Four…Three…Two…One!”

Getting down in the weeds was their best tactic of breaking the radars lock but they were committed now and Caroline brought them out of their shallow dive, zooming up five thousand feet like a Pheasant flushed by the beaters, presenting their least stealthy profile, flares and bundles of chaff being pumped out automatically by the Nighthawk.

“Launcher cycling…weapon away!”

Fourteen radars, the seven MiG-29s, three Tombstones and four Clamshells had them locked up, their MWS was screeching its warnings that no fewer than seventeen radar-guided missiles were in the air. Favorites, Grumbles, AA-12 Adders and AA-10 Alamos were homing in on their radar return.

Patricia’s stomach churned as Caroline rolled hard with chaff bundles ejecting into their wake. She was taxing an airframe that was not built for aerobatics, sending them into a forty five degree dive on their egress heading, as steep as she dared take them. The Nighthawk’s twin General Electric F404 turbofans were a tried and tested design, the same engines that powered the F/A-18 Hornet and the French Dassault Rafale A, but unlike those combat aircraft the F-117A’s power plant had no afterburner ability purely and simply to reduce the stress on the airframe.

“Pull UP
!... Pull UP!... Pull UP!...Pull UP!”
exhorted the GPWS, replacing the Missile Warning System’s jarring tone as the aircraft’s attitude and proximity to the ground broke the missile locks more effectively than the chaff.

Back in the river valley, with the hills between themselves and the target Caroline wondered at what point she had simply stopped breathing. Sweat trickled down her face, the salt stinging her eyes.