Final Storm (30 page)

Suddenly he knew the heavy Foxbat was directly behind him—almost three miles out—and moving at near its maximum speed of Mach 3. Sooner or later, the Russian’s crude radar would lock on his F-16 and another big missile would be fired.

Hunter’s computer-like brain was flying through a series of calculations even as the radar threat warning’s wail notched up an octave. The Soviet pilot had him locked in…. The Acrid missile was seconds away from launch. Closing at three times the speed of sound, there really was no way the Soviet pilot could miss.

A supernatural calm descended over Hunter in the tiny cockpit as the seconds turned into hours. As if time were suspended, Hunter was thinking about his first combat flight instruction, back at Nellis. He could hear Jones’s gravelly voice giving a dogfighting “Golden Rule:”

“The surest way to scare the hell out of a bandit diving on your six is to flip over and fly straight at him,” Jones had said. “It is guaranteed to make rookies panic and grown men wet their flight suits.”

Hunter knew what he had to do. Even as the threat warning siren song reached its crescendo, he snap-rolled the agile fighter and executed a punishing high-g turn that put him in a steep climb directly toward the diving Foxbat. He punched the afterburner, and the F-16 quickly reached its maximum climbing speed as the two adversaries closed on each other at an incredible combined rate of five times the speed of sound.

The Foxbat pilot had just pushed the missile release when he noticed the distortion in his radar trace. What was the American up to now? he wondered. Searching the skies ahead, all he saw was the blazing trail of the big missile streak ahead of him. The heavy Foxbat was slicing through the sky right behind the missile when he saw a black dot directly ahead of him, growing larger.

The Soviet pilot’s jaw sagged in disbelief, held in place only by his oxygen mask. The crazy Yankee was
charging
the missile—and him! Before he could react, he saw the American plane deftly jink and stand the speedy little F-16 up on its wing to evade the missile’s flight path as he continued the hair-raising climb.

The deadly Acrid missile zoomed past the streaking American plane, unable to acquire it from a head-on angle at that unbelievable speed, and unable to make the turn to allow the infrared sensors to lock onto the hot exhaust. The missile plunged harmlessly to the ground where it exploded near an abandoned French village.

Still the all-white F-16 was closing on the larger Foxbat, using the Soviet’s speed in the dive against him. The instant the two airplanes came within range, they both opened up with their cannons. Tracer shells filled the rapidly decreasing space between the fighters as the two pilots tried to aim and fire their powerful cannons in the few seconds before their planes passed each other.

At the final split second, the Soviet flier hesitated. Surely the American would pull up now … A thousand yards away—now five hundred! And still the F-16 was climbing directly at him, firing away with the nose cannon. Tracer shells whizzed by the Soviet’s canopy, adding to the tension. A hundred yards’ distance disappeared in less than the blink of an eye. The distracted Soviet pilot had but one thought: The crazy bastard is going to ram me.

Instinctively, the Soviet pilot jammed his stick hard left to avoid the collision he felt was inevitable. Bracing himself in his diving fighter’s cockpit, he shut his eyes as the roar of the F-16’s engine shook his plane violently. He heard the dull thud of shells lancing his wings as the American fighter sprayed the Foxbat with 30mm cannon fire. He was sure the end would come any second …

But then—silence. Or at least relative silence compared to the deafening din of the past few seconds. Only the dull roar of the Foxbat’s own engines rushed in the pilot’s ears. The threat was suddenly gone. There was no enemy plane. No engine noise. No cannon fire. It was as if the American had simply vanished like a spirit.

Slowly, the Russian regained his composure. He leveled the big interceptor out and checked for damage. A few holes in the wings and fuselage, but no critical wounds. Radar was operable, although it showed no trace of the F-16. Now his relief turned to anger, then to furious rage. How dare the crazy Yankee play this insane game, causing him to panic and turn away?

Suddenly his threat alarm sounded again … Missile fired from above and behind …

Now, incredibly, the ivory F-16 was diving on
him.
Its pilot fired one of the deadly Sidewinder air-to-airs at the Foxbat’s red-hot exhaust nozzles. There was no time for fancy maneuvering, just a burst of raw speed to escape the lethal arrow. The Foxbat rolled sharply and began to dive again.

Hunter cursed as the missile overshot the fleeing Foxbat, plunging out of sight in the cloudy sky. He followed the Sidewinder’s downward track, flashing the F-16 past the big Soviet jet. Once again, Hunter was preparing to use the Foxbat’s superior speed as an advantage.

Busy evading the missile, the Soviet pilot cursed aloud when he saw the F-16 fly over him in a shallow dive. He would show this cocky American what a Foxbat could do with full afterburners in a steep dive. Snap-rolling the heavy interceptor and nosing over to follow Hunter, the Soviet began to quickly overtake the slower American plane. He had the Yankee’s tail section in his gunsights as the distance between the two fighters closed rapidly.

Just a few more seconds, and the American would be scattered to the four winds in a million pieces, victim to the Foxbat’s 23-mm internal gun.

The screaming whine from the F-16’s radar threat warning pierced Hunter’s ears with its shrill one-note alarm. Calmly, he reached out and switched it off. His radar screen showed the Foxbat descending on him at Mach 3. Despite the extra thrust provided by the F-16’s afterburner, the big GE turbofan was being outrun by the bigger Soviet engines in the Foxbat.

But this was exactly what Hunter wanted …

With a deliberate move, Hunter armed the Sidewinder missile on the jet’s right wingtip. Then he gently cupped the side-stick controller in his right hand and placed his left hand on the manual override flap controls. At the last possible second, he cut the throttle back, hauled sharply up on the stick, and dropped every square inch of control surface on the F-16 to its full “down” position, all in one smooth motion.

If the F-16 could have left skid marks in the sky, they would have tracked the fighter’s abrupt deceleration from almost fifteen hundred miles per hour to just under three hundred in just a few seconds. Hunter was thrown hard against the shoulder harness of his reclining seat by the impact, recovering just in time to see the dark shadow of the Foxbat pass overhead at full speed, overshooting him.

With the merest flick of the side-stick control, Hunter found the Foxbat’s twin tails dead in his radar sights. He released the Sidewinder that covered the short distance in seconds and disappeared into the left-side exhaust nozzle of the diving Foxbat.

The Soviet pilot never saw the missile coming. His fingers had just tightened on the cannon trigger, when the American plane had simply disappeared. It was as if the small F-16 had stopped dead in the air, hovering like a bird of prey before striking. Unable to stop or even slow the heavy Foxbat, the startled pilot could only watch as the Yankee trickster vanished beneath him.

A split second later, he realized the American’s tactic. But it was too late to maneuver. The deadly air-to-air missile from the F-16’s wingtip exploded deep inside the big interceptor, blowing apart the left-hand engine and severing the left wing at its junction with the fuselage.

The stricken Foxbat crumpled like a paper airplane caught in the grasp of an invisible hand. The left wing section fluttered away in flames as the main body of the plane began a sickening wobbly spiral down to the ground, propelled by the intermittent thrust of the right-hand engine. When the plane’s violent spasms finally choked off its life-giving fuel, the remaining engine coughed and died, leaving the huge interceptor to plunge to the earth by the force of gravity alone.

The last thing the Soviet pilot heard as he helplessly plummeted to the ground, desperately clawing at controls that were no longer connected to wings that were no longer connected to his aircraft, was a voice that had either come from inside his head, or from the crazy American, who may have somehow found the proper radio frequency.

At that instant, he realized in horror that he would have the rest of eternity to figure it out.

“Dos vadanya, tovarich,” the strangely-accented voice echoed amid the swirling chaos inside his cockpit.

Then the blackness came.

Far below, Toomey had witnessed the intricate battle between Hunter and the huge Foxbat.

Alternately screaming and cheering during the fight, the American pilot was hoarse—too hoarse to yell down at the patrol of French soldiers that were now passing below him.

Thinking quickly, he undid his left flight boot and let it drop. It hit the last man in the patrol, square on the head, stunning him. The rest of the soldiers turned their weapons upward, ready to fire on the source of the flying boot. It was only Toomey’s wide grin and animated waving that saved him from joining the swelling ranks of the war dead.

E
VEN AS THE DOGFIGHT
raged over the torn countryside north of Paris, preparations were underway a few hundred miles outside of another European capital.

In the quiet woods surrounding the Greenham Common NATO air base in the north of England, sixty huge camouflage nets lay strewn in large green lumps amid the deep tracks of hundreds of huge tires. Freshly cut trees that had stood for centuries now lay at crazy angles across the rutted fields, short stumps marking their original positions.

The ruts marked a random network of tracks leading across the fields that separated the edge of the forest from the base’s runways.

Just a few hours ago, the base had been a beehive of activity, ground crews and armament specialists frantically working to complete the nearly impossible task of preparing a huge airborne armada for an operation known as “Rolling Thunder.”

Now all was quiet, even peaceful. The only sound was a soft wind through the trees and the rustle of leaves on the ground.

But this would be temporary.

At the end of the field, the quiet was shattered as eight huge engines coughed to life and began an ear-splitting din as they were cranked up to full power. When the sound had reached its deafening crescendo, the engines lurched forward on the empty tarmac, dragging half a million pounds of plane and payload reluctantly down the runway.

The huge tapering wings sagged almost to the ground at their tips, separated by more than 160 feet of steel skin from end to end. In fact, small wheels and struts had been added to the wingtips to support the thousands of gallons of jet fuel that sloshed in the bomber’s massive internal wing tanks.

As the massive airplane gathered speed down the runway, the wing sag diminished rapidly until the small wheels left the ground, floating up several feet as the wingtips flexed. The huge fuselage trundled along the tarmac, as four sets of twin tires mounted on massive struts crabbed the plane slightly to center it on the runway. The wheels straightened out, and the engines’ roar increased another measure as the heavily laden aircraft began to pick up speed for takeoff.

Slowly, but inexorably, the dark green behemoth ascended into the cloudy English sky, undergoing the transformation from balky, droop-winged bomb truck to graceful, winged warrior.

When the thunder of the bomber’s engines had faded, the deep quiet descended on the base once more.

Almost a hundred miles ahead, inside the cockpit of the Strategic Air Command B-52 Stratofortress, Lt. Colonel Rick Davis of the 52nd Bomb Wing’s headquarters staff was adjusting his oxygen mask and intercom microphone.

Seated in the left-hand seat of the big bomber, Davis had just received confirmation that the last plane in his formation had left the ground back at Greenham Common, and was now joining the long formation at thirty thousand feet.

Minutes later, the grouped-up B-52s reached their jumping off point just off the eastern coast of England. With a single radio burst from Davis in the lead bomber, instructions were transmitted to the navigators in each crew. In turn, the navigators fed in a series of complex targeting coordinates to their bomb-coordinator counterparts seated next to them in the cramped confines of the big bomber’s innards.

Once the sixty heavy bombers had computed their individual targets and flight plans, they began to peel off the formation and dive for the deck. Davis managed to sneak a quick look at the orderly formation’s blossoming, as bombers on either side rolled off on their outboard wings to plunge into the darkness below. Each had a separate target, and eventually each would take a different route to get there.

The 52nd Bomb Wing had been ordered from their SAC base in California to the tiny Greenham Common field two days after the war broke out.

Flying in pairs, they had hopped across North America to the windswept airport at Gander, Newfoundland, then on to Keflavik, Iceland. There, two bombers previously stationed at the base would fly in a huge semicircle at high altitudes, almost reaching the Canadian coast. Then they would drop down to a heart-stopping two-hundred feet above the frigid Arctic sea and race back to Iceland undetected.

Later, covered under the dark of night, the two SAC B-52s would lift off from Iceland and skim the waves over to England’s rocky coast, setting down with not too much room to spare on Greenham Common’s short airfield. Once the base was secured by the SAS unit, the big bombers were concealed in the woods surrounding the base. Hundreds of trees were lopped off to allow the huge B-52s to ease into the edge of the forest. Then the cut trees were propped back up in huge holes dug by British engineer crews.

From the air—or from a photo satellite’s probing eye—all that could be seen was the dense green of England’s woods. Even the heat signatures of the big bombers had been blotted out by covering the airplanes with a blanket of C02 foam.