Final Storm (42 page)

Hunter knew that if he had let the terrain avoidance gear take its normal course, it would raise them up several hundred feet above the ground—easy bait for the speedy Soviet interceptors. Instead he had no other choice but to attempt to clear the ridge at a lower altitude, perhaps avoiding detection a little longer. Keeping one eye on the terrain display on his second CRT, and the other on the altimeter reading, he twisted the B-1 to one side and powered it over the ridge at a steep angle.

The howling blast from the bomber’s four engines shook the ground just fifty feet below. Once the bomber was clear of the ridgetop, Hunter pushed the stick forward again to force the big plane down to the protective terrain below.

But there was no time to congratulate himself for the maneuver’s success, as Toomey clipped out another warning.

“Missile alert!” JT yelled so loudly his TV image actually became scrambled for a moment. “They must’ve tagged us just as we crossed the ridgeline. Signal indicates tracking radar now.”

Hunter had only seconds to react before the low wailing of the threat warning blared out an octave higher, filling the narrow cabin with its shrillness.

“Missile lock signals now … He’s launched one!” Toomey hollered above the sound of the threat warning, as he hurriedly attempted to jam the missile’s guidance signals.

“Must be the damn Foxhound,” said Jones. “He closed that distance in a couple of seconds.”

“The Foxbats won’t be far behind, either,” Hunter reminded them. “Can you jam the missile, JT?”

“Negative jam, repeat, negative jam.” Toomey’s voice was slightly rushed now. “Break left and climb, Hawk! It’s a heat-seeker—Ben, blow off some flares!”

Wa punched a button on his console that immediately ejected two high-intensity decoy flares, one from each side of the aircraft. The white-hot phosphorous mini-rockets resembled brilliant fireworks shells that arced swiftly out a hundred yards and burned with a blue-white fire. In slow motion freefall, the small flares presented a hot target larger than the bomber itself.

Even before Hunter heard Toomey call for the break and climb, he had planned the evasive maneuver he intended to take. Hauling the big bomber’s stick up and to the right, he forced the B-1 to climb on a hard bank, snapping the big plane around like it was tethered on a line. The banking turn continued until he was near one thousand feet.

He took several deep gulps of oxygen and tapped the flag in his pocket.

“C’mon, baby,” he whispered. “Don’t give out on me now …”

The Soviet missile had been fired at maximum range, and the first target it encountered was the brilliantly burning decoy flare Wa had launched off the bomber’s left side.

Like a mute airborne attack dog, the big AA-6 missile lunged for the flare, which was now descending in a slow spiral toward the ground. The air-to-air detonated on contact with the heat source, exploding in a yellow-white fireball.

By the time he saw the missile’s flame, Hunter had already leveled out of the punishing turn he’d forced on the ailing B-1, and now he rammed the stick forward to dive back down
under
the attacking fighters. The bomber screamed back down in a steep dive, passing below the sharp ridgeline they had risen above earlier. Hunter cranked out the bomber’s wings to provide more lift at the lower altitude, but he didn’t level off again until the altimeter warning sounded, indicating that he was back below two hundred feet.

By doubling back on himself, Hunter was trying to use the Soviets’ greater speed to their disadvantage. The tactic worked, as evidenced by the deafening thunder that enveloped the B-1 as the three front-line Soviet interceptors roared past overhead.

“Okay, JT, let’s give those bastards a kick in the ass,” Hunter growled as he prepared for the next maneuver.

He tightened his grip on the stick and flashed a glance at the CRT display showing the Soviet fighters’ positions. “Say when ready, JT.”

Toomey had previously configured his radar screen to accommodate the B-1’s defensive air-to-air launches, and he quickly prepared the deadly rockets, still nestled snug in their rotary launcher suspended inside the aft weapons bay. The red “Ready” lights confirmed the procedure.

“Missiles ready. Commence attack maneuver … now!” Toomey shouted.

Hunter did so and was instantly thrown back into his seat by the airplane’s violent motion.

He had pitched the bomber up sharply in a rapid climb, cranking the wings in toward the fuselage as the B-1 shot through the thin air to rise above the racing Soviet fighters. The steep climb leveled out at five thousand feet, where Hunter called back to Toomey to fire when ready.

Toomey had already found the trio of Soviet fighters on his scope, and the tracking signals of the B-1’s powerful search radar illuminated their positions for the missile guidance system. When three small cursors appeared beside the white “enemy aircraft” icons on the scope, he mashed the fire control “pickle” three times.

“Missiles away!” JT said loudly.

At the same instant Hunter could hear the rotary launcher smoothly pump three of the lethal torpedoes out of the open weapons bay. The big AMRAAMs fell into the bomber’s slipstream and quickly armed themselves. When the complex guidance circuitry came alive in the missiles’ warheads, they ignited their small rocket motors and shot away from the B-1 toward the fleeing Soviet interceptors.

The two outboard AMRAAMs worked as advertised. Each selected a separate target, fed in by the attack computer seconds before launch from the B-1’s weapons bay. Each missile’s solid fuel propellant drove it toward the selected target at better than Mach 3.

And each missile came within twenty yards of a Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat before erupting in a blinding flash of high explosives and jagged metal, engulfing each Soviet plane in a destructive fireball.

But the center missile was a half-second late in reaching its target—the MiG-31 Foxhound leading the squadron. When the squadron leader heard his own missile warning alarm go off, he punched the powerful engines to full afterburner, shooting the interceptor forward like a bullet from a gun.

Major Mikh Iosifovich Guryevich saw his wingmen perish in the unholy flames of the AMRAAMs’ explosions, and he felt the buffeting of massive turbulence behind him. The missile intended for his plane had been detonated by the other two explosions, and only his incredible speed had saved Guryevich from the fate of his comrades.

Anger burned within the Soviet pilot as he saw the flaming wreckage of two planes cartwheel crazily to the ground. He didn’t know how the Americans had done it—launching missiles from one of their B-1s—but Guryevich was determined to exact revenge for the death of his pilots.

He quickly snap-rolled the speedy Foxhound around to give chase to the wily American.

“Two away!” Wa called out jubilantly, watching the icons disappear from Toomey’s scope. “One to go.”

“Yeah, but that’s the deadly one,” Toomey responded grimly. “Hawk, we missed the Foxhound, and he’s coming around. Range twenty miles.”

Hunter wasted no time in reacting. He punched the B-1’s throttles down past the stops to full afterburner, and the big bomber streaked through the sky directly toward the oncoming Soviet fighter.

Guryevich checked his radar scope and couldn’t believe his eyes. The insane Yankee was coming straight at him…. In the blink of an eye, the range between the two planes closed at a combined speed almost four times the speed of sound.

There was no time for the Soviet pilot to check his radar again before the menacing green shape of the B-1 filled his cockpit canopy. There was no time to launch a missile or even squeeze the trigger to spray the big bomber with his internal gun. The only thing his brain commanded him to do was to break away—to escape the mad rush of this crazy American.

Guryevich swung the MiG’s stick sharply down and to the left to dive out of the path of the huge green bomber, dropping his plane down as the B-1 thundered overhead, smashing his smaller plane with the jetwash from its four powerful turbofans.

By the time he regained control of his fighter, the B-1 had disappeared over a ridgeline to the east.

“Damn this lunatic …” Guryevich thought. “Doesn’t he know I will certainly catch him?”

The puzzled Soviet pilot rammed his throttle down again to pursue the spot on the horizon where the American bomber had vanished.

“Guess he’s never played Chicken Kiev, General,” Hunter said grimly, turning toward the bank of TVs facing him. “Ready on my signal, JT?”

“Ready status confirmed,” Toomey answered, quickly preparing another AMRAAM for launch, already sensing what Hunter had planned.

“Okay,” Hunter said evenly, “just keep your finger on the launch button, and let me know when that bandit comes close enough to nail.”

“Fifteen miles … Picking up tracking signals …” Toomey began, his voice trailing past each sentence as his sunglassed eyes remained locked on the defensive systems scope. “Pump some chaff out, Ben.”

Wa obliged by pressing the “Chaff Release” button sharply, knowing it would send two half-pound bundles of the tinsel-like metal shavings into the air beyond the bomber. The dense clouds of chaff would appear as huge blips on the Soviet fighter’s radar screen. It would distract the pilot, perhaps only for a fraction of a second.

But it was all the time Hunter would need.

“Ten miles … We’ve got a missile alert!” Toomey called out as a threat warning started its rising-pitch song, which was rapidly reaching a crescendo as the Soviet prepared to launch a deadly AA-9 missile at the fleeing B-1.

“Five miles …” JT said, his screen once again going briefly to static. “He’s going to launch in a second … Missile lock now!
He’s firing
…”

Hunter had simultaneously yanked all four throttles all the way back past their full afterburner position to a near stall, at the same time pushing the wing sweep lever down hard, cranking the big wings out to their full fifteen-degree swept out position. A split second later, Hunter had dropped full flaps and lowered the landing gear and weapon bay doors.

The result was a dramatic decrease in airspeed, as if the plane had simply screeched to a halt in midair. The “enemy aircraft” blip on Toomey’s screen disappeared momentarily as it streaked through the center of the sweep arm, indicating it had passed the B-1 overhead.

The Russian pilot was at first annoyed by the huge chaff clouds that spread across his radar screen, momentarily interfering with his weapons lock on the tail of the American bomber. He wasted several precious seconds waiting to zoom clear of the metallic mess before re-targeting his missile.

His annoyance quickly turned to dismay as the large silhouette of the green bomber suddenly filled his whole canopy, as if the B-1 had been instantly increased to giant proportions. The distance between the two planes had been slashed to nothing as the Mach 3 speed of the MiG had brought it to a near collision with the tail of the stalling bomber.

Guryevich’s finger was still pressing the missile’s release button when he shot like a rifle bullet over the top of the fluttering plane that appeared to hover in midair. The missile leaped off his wing just as the B-1’s green blur disappeared beneath the streaking Soviet Foxhound. Unable to acquire a target that was now behind it, the missile whizzed off toward the horizon and exploded harmlessly.

The Soviet officer knew he had been tricked again. But this time there would be no chance to even the score with the bold Yankee air pirate. Even the crude Soviet radar threat warning couldn’t fail to pick up a ten-foot air-to-air missile being launched from the B-1 at point-blank range less than a hundred yards behind his speeding fighter.

Even before he could turn to look back, the huge AMRAAM impacted the rear of his canopy. In a heartbeat, the Soviet airplane and its pilot were obliterated.

Large and small pieces of the shattered Foxhound went cartwheeling across the sky, some drifting back to earth, some falling directly into the path of the slow-moving American bomber.

“Got him!” Wa cried out as he saw the explosion blossom across his TV screen.

A second later they all heard the staccato rattling of metal shards striking the topside of the B-1’s fuselage as the big bomber flew right through the cloud of debris that had only a second before been a Soviet fighter.

Hunter had to rapidly accelerate the big bomber to prevent a stall, punching all four throttles up to full military before he reclosed the landing gear and weapons bay doors. Despite the lightning-quick maneuver, the bomber still collided with a large piece of what had been one of the enemy fighter’s engines.

Hunter felt a shudder run through the entire airplane, complete with a creaking groan.

“We ran right into the wreckage,” Hunter reported over his suddenly static-filled radio. “It sounds like half his Goddamn airplane bounced right on top of me.”

Instantly all three of the remote-control crew members started scanning their consoles for damage evaluation.

“I
do not
have FOD to the engines,” Toomey said through a gasp of relief.

“Confirm Foreign Object Damage is negative,” Hunter called back, rapidly scanning his instrument panel and pressure gauges to confirm normal engine operation, even as he raised the landing gear. “But I can hear a hole in the roof about halfway back, and it is definitely affecting the flight controls.”

No one bothered to ask Hunter if he thought he would be able to still control the big airplane. They knew if anyone could keep the B-1 aloft, it was Hunter.

“And now we’re out of bullets,” the pilot added grimly. Greasing the four enemy airplanes had taken all of his enormous flight skills, and his body was shimmering with the solid feeling of success.

But he knew he had a lot of problems.

“Any sign of the other bandits, JT?” he asked, after a few deep gulps of oxygen.

“As of now, I’ve got negative radar contact, Hawk,” Toomey responded after checking the TV scope in front of him.

Hunter checked the MAPS display. He was now thirty-two miles from the target.