Arc Light (49 page)

“Splash one!” the distant sound of jubilation could be heard from above.

“Ten miles,” Ramirez said.

Ten miles! Jesus, where was I? Fuel: fuel's green. Eyes up . . . CHRIST!
O'Brian's heart stopped as he saw the readout from his radar altimeter on the HUD:
85 feet!

O'Brian eased the aircraft up with the slightest back pressure on the stick to rejoin the flight leader, who had missed his nearly fatal transgression while doing his own check, O'Brian figured. He made a special point to concentrate on the altimeter, watching it bounce between 148 and 152 feet. His heart was pounding and he could feel each beat tap the carotid artery of his neck against his flight suit.
Eighty-five feet!
he thought—the lowest he had ever been in bad weather.
Jesus!

“Break! Break!” he heard from high above.

“Nine,” Ramirez said, his voice coming loudly by comparison. “I'm going hot,” the distant voice said. O'Brian saw a picture of his aircraft's eighteen conventional bombs show up on the HUD and read “Armed—Fuse Alt. 0.”
Surface burst,
O'Brian thought.

O'Brian concentrated hard to keep the edges of the line inside the box while keeping the blurred outline of his flight leader's aircraft in the corner of his eye. He could feel sweat begin to flood out of all his pores, cold and uncomfortable.

“Pull! Pull! Burners!”

“Eight miles,” Ramirez counted down, the surprise of the loud voice causing O'Brian to flinch.

O'Brian abandoned his instrument check after the scare of allowing the nose to settle.
I screwed up. I waited too long to get started with it,
he thought, having gotten wrapped up in the sounds of the battle above.

“Splash two. Got another one!”

“Stay with me, Viper Two,” the flight leader said from above and to the left. O'Brian pressed forward on the throttle almost imperceptibly with his left hand and banked again to the left, moving closer to the other Strike Eagle before recentering in the box.

“Seven miles,” Ramirez said, his voice an octave higher than usual.
Ramirez is nervous, tight,
O'Brian thought, knowing that Ramirez watched what O'Brian could not yet see: the rugged shoreline toward which they rushed, his face pressed against the padded blinders surrounding his imaging screen.

O'Brian heard the faint wisp of a tone from in front of his aircraft, wavering in and out, getting stronger each time it came back.

“Watch for SAMs,” O'Brian's lead said as they got within range of the enemy surface-to-air missiles.

The skin of their aircraft was being “painted” by the first weak pulses of energy from the transmitter of a radar system that must just have been turned on. One good return to the radar's receiver and the brilliant flame of a missile's exhaust would be seen ahead. The missile would quickly turn level with the water and hurtle straight at O'Brian's plane, its flight time just a few seconds at their tremendous closing speeds. The proximity detonator would put a fog of shrapnel in front of their speeding aircraft that would shred them as they flew through it. O'Brian put the line back in the box.

“Six miles,” Ramirez said. “You see that power line off to the right?”

O'Brian glanced down at his own FLIR screen. Ramirez had it on maximum magnification, and the black-and-white picture of the shoreline was strikingly clear. “Got it,” O'Brian said as he looked up into the dark sky ahead. He concentrated on memorizing the location in the real world of the cold black metal towers and power lines dimly visible on the screen.
No quicker way to die than to plow into those.
As he looked at the shore, they burst out of the squall line and the ocean and horizon and flight leader all became clear. The low clouds streaked by the top of O'Brian's canopy.

“Triple A,” O'Brian's lead said.

O'Brian could see now the antiaircraft artillery bursting in golden plumes of death beneath and inside the clouds ahead.
“The
Golden BB,”
he said to himself, marveling at his first sight ever of the heavy Russian gun defenses.

Suddenly, O'Brian felt death's cold grip reaching out for them, waiting for them ahead. From the ocean below—at twenty feet the F-15's jet air intakes would gulp water right up from the surface. From the lead aircraft thirty feet away from O'Brian's Plexiglas canopy—one light tap against his horizontal stabilizer and both aircraft would begin the rapid and inexorable process of midair disintegration. From the blazing fireworks ahead, the ragged metal chunks filling the air right in the middle of the release box on the HUD. From the fat radar-guided missiles that sat on their rails waiting, their arrival presaged by the threat-warning hums in O'Brian's ears. From the small heat-seeking missiles that came at you with no warning—you had to see them to survive. From the power lines and hills and even birds scared to flight by the passage of the two F-15s just ahead whose red-hot exhausts O'Brian could barely see.

“Uh, five . . . five miles,” Ramirez said. He sounded as if he was nauseous.
This isn't the way it's supposed to be,
O'Brian thought, the chill growing from his chest to grip his entire body as his confidence waned.

“Leopard One, check your six, check your six!” O'Brian heard from the “furball,” the multiaircraft dogfight, high above.

And from enemy interceptors,
O'Brian remembered.

“Where is he?” came distantly over the headphones, panic-stricken.

“On your six, on your six! Two miles back!”

“I don't have him! I can't see him!”

“He's right on you! I'm goin' guns! Break right!”

“Four miles. Pass the stick.”

“He's still on me, Two! Shoot him, shoot him! He's got
lock!”

“Pass the stick, O'Brian!” Ramirez yelled. “Three point five miles!”

O'Brian tore himself from the sounds of the battle above and felt the top of the stick with his thumb, jabbing the auto release switch forward. Control over the aircraft for the terminal bombing phase had now been transferred to the onboard computer. “Passed—sorry,” O'Brian said as he felt the stick begin to make slight corrections on its own. He kept his hands lightly on the stick as all pilots did to override if necessary.

The line was centered now in the growing box.
Right down the pipe,
O'Brian thought, trying to calm himself as he watched for the bright flash of a missile ahead, reminding himself with a start not to break left into the flight leader if one was spotted.

“Three miles,” Ramirez said, continuing his mantra.

“He fired, he fired!” Despite the distance, the voice of the fighter pilot was loud, shouted at a high pitch.

“Ho-ly . . . Je-sus!”
the prey's voice came from above, the breath pressed out of the pilot's lungs as the Gs of his violent maneuvering crushed his diaphragm.

“Eject! Get outa there!
Get outa there, Rod!”

“Two miles,” Ramirez said. “Weapons hot. Here we go!”

There was a short burst of static from above, a ghost of a sound that in O'Brian's mind was a scream of agony. “Aw, God. Oh, Jesus,” a voice said from on high. “A-a-h,” and then a pause. “Ah, Rimfire, this is Leopard Two,” the voice said. “Leopard One is . . . he's down, repeat, Leopard One is down.”

“One mile,” Ramirez said.

“You need C-SAR?” a voice asked from a great distance and behind O'Brian's head, offering Combat Search and Rescue forces to fight their way in for the downed pilot.

“Ah, negative, negative. He . . . uh . . . he didn't get out.”

O'Brian saw the eruption of bright orange explosions ahead as the bombs of the two lead aircraft struck. Suddenly, the stick jerked back and O'Brian was pressed momentarily into his seat as his aircraft rose, his visibility dropping to near zero as his canopy was enshrouded in clouds. A second surge skyward could be felt even though the stick remained steady.

“Bombs away!” Ramirez cried, and the HUD shifted automatically to its air-to-air readout.

O'Brian seized control of the stick and followed his lead in a steep bank to the left and descent toward the deck, breaking out of the clouds and therefore not able to follow as the stick of eighteen Mark 83 thousand-pound general purpose bombs flew up almost a thousand feet into the clouds and then began to settle back down to earth. The computer had lobbed the bombs skyward with a jerk up of the aircraft's nose in order to spare the strike plane the danger of flying straight over their target. As the F-15s continued their wide turn back out to the safety of the sea, the bombs plunged down toward the busy wharves of Kronstadt Naval Base.

O'Brian was inland almost even with his target and half a mile to the north when the first of the bombs began to rain down. In the next second and a half, the eighteen bombs, which had been released milliseconds apart to place them in a long line, began impacting. The first bomb fell into the water thirty yards short of a line of missile patrol boats tied up to the wharf. The blast wave created by the 445 pounds of Tritonal explosive would have sunk the nearest boat by crushing its hull with a pressure wave had not the next bomb struck it squarely amidships, blowing its bow and stern ten feet into
the air. The severed ends sunk immediately to the sandy bottom.

All the remaining bombs struck with an awesome tearing sound along the shore in a steep angle to the waterline. Each of the blasts threw over four thousand cubic feet of concrete and soil high into the air as it made a crater eighteen feet deep and twenty-five feet wide. The Russian dockworkers who had flung themselves to the ground when the two lead aircrafts' bombs began impacting some four hundred yards up the wharf were bounced into the air as the shock wave snapped through the earth. Many died from the trauma of the jolt, equivalent to being struck in the chest by a falling log, and others died from collapsed lungs as the blasts' overpressure washed over them. The dockworkers who were still running for cover, however, suffered worst of all. Almost everyone standing within six hundred feet of a blast died as the bomb casings disintegrated by design and the irregularly shaped shrapnel—some pieces large, others small—ripped through their bodies at hundreds of feet per second.

The eight F-15Es' 144 bombs fell on the docks in sixteen seconds of hell, and one of Russia' greatest naval bases was knocked out of action for weeks to come.

During the conflagration O'Brian was struggling to stay close to Viper One. As he watched the glowing exhaust of the lead's twin afterburning turbofans, O'Brian suddenly saw bright dots pouring out of the tail of his partner—six to a group.

“SAM! SAM! SAM!” the flight leader's voice cried from just ahead.

As the lead F-15 suddenly broke steeply to the left, O'Brian expected to see the small heat-seeking missile fly straight up its tailpipe. By the time O'Brian thumbed his own flare-dispenser button and banked right, his fate was sealed. The shoulder-fired SA-7 surface-to-air missile that was locked onto his superhot exhaust was successfully decoyed by the even hotter flares that O'Brian ejected from his aircraft's tail, but it detonated only eight feet behind the F-15. The flash lit the instrument panel in front of O'Brian in a strobe of stark white light, and the sphere of steel rods expanding from the small missile's warhead riddled the rear of the aircraft. Nine lights—some clustered in the row of engine indicators, others widely dispersed—switched instantly from green to bright red, bypassing the early warning yellow as the ragged skin of the torn fuselage caused the aircraft to buffet. Three distinct tones blared into O'Brian's ears, warbling, buzzing, and bonging insistently. But over all those sounds, the instantly triggered woman's voice was all he heard: “Eject.”

In rapid succession, the supercombustible JP-4 jet fuel spewed
out of a ruptured fuel line directly onto the engine of the fighter-bomber, igniting in midair from the engine's radiant heat even before making contact. “Eject,” the calm voice of the woman repeated as O'Brian jerked his left hand from the throttle for the eject handle, jamming his eyes shut. “Ejec . . . ” the cool voice of the computer began, but the fire leapt in the wink of an eye back through the source of the leak, following the maze of fuel lines up into the honeycombed wing tanks of the aircraft.

God was merciful. O'Brian and Ramirez never felt a thing.

Filipov saw that Razov had given up on conducting a formal
STAVKA
meeting as the senior officers were now almost constantly on the phone to their various commands. The vote on the American C-SPAN was still ongoing.

“Ukrainian Air Defense reports significant contact inbound north of Lvov. Probable FB-111s, low altitude, high speed, heading zero seven seven degrees.”

The captain who had read the report ran out to tear another off the teletype, and a waiting junior naval officer read, “ ‘Subsea sensors in Gulf of Finland report contact, probable American hunter-killer submarine, headed east fourteen kilometers north of Tallinn. Fast missile patrol boats have put out from Kronstadt to intercept.' ”

By the time he had finished, there were two others in line behind him waiting to speak to the senior officers, most of whom were in animated conversations over the telephone and heard nothing. But Filipov, and Razov in front of him, listened. Without a field command, Razov's job as commander in chief of the Supreme High Command was the big picture, and Filipov was Razov's aide.

“Commander of 103rd Motorized Rifle Division reports leading elements reaching third objective ten kilometers east of Michalovce, Slovakia. Resistance on the ground is reported to be light, but air interdiction efforts are intensifying. Requests permission for extension of timetable for fourth objective, which is Michalovce itself.”