Red Hammer 1994 (31 page)

Ledermeyer drew a blank. “Negative, Buck. They won’t transmit until the first bombers make landfall. No sense giving the ASATs a frequency to home in on.”

Joe looked up from a crumpled navigational chart, worried. He had been mentally rehearsing alternate mission routes, measuring the total flight distance to Turkey, and then calculating fuel consumption. The answer always came back the same—a slim chance of making the distance. He looked over at the boss.

“Maybe the Mainstays were caught on the ground, Buck. We could come up in altitude for a couple hundred miles and save a hell of a lot of fuel. The interceptors are blind without the Mainstays.”

Buck frowned. The same idea had momentarily crossed his mind.

“We’ll stick to the plan,” he said curtly. He felt like a fat duck flying straight toward a well-concealed hunting blind.

The Obskaya Guba or Gulf of Ob suddenly sprang into view, the bright sunlight masking the long, flat shoreline. The plane was grossly out of position, screaming over the flat earth toward SAM sites protecting the Russian homeland from the twin shores. At over six hundred knots, Buck had only an instant to override the autopilot, pop up, and veer sharply to port to line up on the channel centerline. He eased back to one hundred feet after the hasty maneuver.

“You jackass,” he scolded himself. “We could have flown over some damn air-defense radar.”

“Shit, I could have sworn we were dead on track,” answered Joe.

“Take a GPS fix and update the autopilot. I don’t want that to happen again.” Buck settled back in his ejection seat, shaken and embarrassed. Hopefully, flying over the water would give them another half an hour of peace from radars blinded by excessive sea return. Problem was, there weren’t any radars, at least according to the ESM gear. Their state-of-the art avionics would carry them only so far. Buck knew that. Human skill and instinct, and the human emotions that came with the package, would make or break the mission. Since the days of the first air combat in World War I, it had always been the same; brave men with unflagging determination had won the day.

The time ticked by, the water becoming less green and choppy in this protective finger. The featureless shores in the distance continued to sparkle and gleam in the afternoon sun.

Twenty-five minutes down the chute, Jefferson screamed into the intercom.

“Mainstays! Two of ’em! Bearing 030 and 270. Signal strength strong. Shit, they’ve got to be right on top of us.”

“God dammit,” shouted Buck, fumbling at the controls. “The bastards were lying in the weeds.” His mind raced for an answer. Sure as shit, they’d been detected, and within minutes, the interceptors would swoop down from above to blow them out of the sky. He cursed himself for being so stupid, so predictable. Ivan now had the upper hand. Well, he wouldn’t make it easy, not by a long shot.

“Ledermeyer, stand by for a SRAM shot.”

“Against an air target? We won’t hit anything.” The offensive weapons officer panicked. Mentally, he wasn’t ready. He had only seconds to ramp up.

“Just do it. We don’t have time to screw around.”

Buck banked hard to starboard, hugging the ground, leaving the shimmering Gulf trailing in the distance. He lined the bomber’s nose on the 270 degree Mainstay bearing, praying the fighters had already received an intercept vector and were committed for their initial pass. Jefferson worked feverishly, manipulating the sensitive defensive avionics, sucking up the Mainstay’s radar energy, massaging the pulses, instantaneously reradiating the subtly shifted waveforms. Hopefully, the Mainstay’s range gate would wander, feeding erroneous data into the Russians’ highly centralized air-defense network. As a last resort, Buck could shift to active jamming. Black boxes crammed within the fuselage could randomly flood the airwaves or selectively attack a range of Russian sensor frequencies.

“Where the hell are you going, Buck?” asked Joe.

“Heading straight for the Mainstay. Then we’ll break southwest for the northern-most point of the Urals. Maybe we can bluff them into thinking we’re heading west.”

“Foxhound!” exclaimed Jefferson excitedly. The Russian fighter had delayed turning on his look-down/shoot-down Pulse Doppler radar for maximum surprise, relying on the Mainstay’s directions. Chaff dispensers and IR decoy flares spit out in rapid succession from the bomber’s fuselage. It was all happening too fast.

“Bearing?” shouted Buck, glancing over his left shoulder. Before Jefferson could answer, a glistening silver blur blasted down their port side, one thousand feet overhead. The Foxhound’s fire-control radar disappeared from Jefferson’s scope. Two air-to-air missiles, shot out of pure desperation, drifted off into the distance, leaving white smoke trails that quickly dissipated in the wind.

“Totally out of position,” crowed Joe. “He’ll never get another shot.”

“Yeah, but they got us cold,” Buck reminded him.

“Foxhound to starboard. Radar’s locked on!” Jefferson was working his gear like a madman. More chaff dispensers spewed forth.

Buck jerked the bomber upward to break-lock.

“Missile launch!”

The second Foxhound had anticipated the course change and was dead on their ass. A pair of air-to-air missiles, released seconds apart, streaked toward them, the white exhaust trails signaling an excellent shot. Jefferson frantically switched to pulse jamming and simultaneously began ejecting white-hot flares to confuse any IR seekers. Cranking the B-1B hard through 180 degrees, the first missile passed three hundred feet to stern, trailing-off harmlessly. The second followed by half a mile. A last minute midcourse correction sent it close to starboard, detonating in an intense reddish-yellow fireball that partially engulfed the right wingtip of the B-1B. Hot shrapnel from the fragmentation warhead pierced the wing, puncturing fuel tanks and scattering metal fragments throughout the forward fuselage.

The concussion snapped the plane to port. Portions of the front windscreen shattered, cutting visibility. Dazed, Buck shook off the worst effects and nursed the wounded bomber back to base course, once again dropping low. Blending into the protective ground clutter before either Foxhound could regroup and re-attack was their only chance for survival.

“Damage report!”

“My God,” gasped Ledermeyer, “Jefferson’s hit. His shoulder’s torn up bad.” He could barely be heard over the rushing wind generated by the irregular holes punched by the warhead’s razor-sharp fragments. Ledermeyer released his harness and hunched over, tending his gravely wounded comrade. Jefferson lay limp against the bulkhead, his head lifelessly bouncing each time the plane pitched upward. Ledermeyer peeled back the blood-soaked flight suit, only to see a gaping chest wound. He recoiled in horror.

“Shit!” he panted. “His whole chest is torn open.”

Buck suffered silently, forcing himself to focus on the brownish-gray ground zipping by at an incredible six hundred knots. He loved Jefferson like a brother.

“What about the gear?” he asked coldly. “Come on, Ledermeyer, answer me.” The response came haltingly.

“Hard to tell. It’s gonna take a while to sort out. My stuffs OK.”

Joe was unscathed, battling to shake off the blast effects. He scanned meters and digital readouts, mentally calculating the health of the bomber. A glance to starboard confirmed the worst. Fuel from one of the main wing tanks sprayed like a garden hose from the pockmarked wing. His voice cracked. Joe’s confidence, stretched to the breaking point by hours of uncertainty, collapsed in a split second.

“Wing’s fucked up. Tip’s gone.” Joe eased a switch, which triggered the whine of hydraulic pumps. The swept wings slowly inched forward.

“Mechanical controls check out,” he announced, relieved. “No sign of trouble with any of the engines.” He glanced right once more. Hundreds of gallons of precious fuel were being atomized by the rushing air.

“We’ll never make it now,” he groaned, slumping in his seat.

Buck ignored the protest. He held the control stick in one hand and grabbed the aeronautical chart in the other. A glance showed them less than one hundred miles from the mountainous spine that separated Europe from Asia. Two formidable obstacles blocked his path. Layered SA-10 batteries, backed by older SA-6s, would make the Americans earn the protection of the Urals. That plus the second-string interceptors orchestrated by the GCI sites. If he hesitated, the pursuing Foxhounds would chase him down. He prayed that the fireball had been sufficient for the MiG pilot to score it as a confirmed kill and move on.

“Ledermeyer, stand by for defense suppression!”

Ledermeyer edged back to his station, staring at the maze of switches, buttons and digital readouts curved around his ejection seat. Taking a last look at Jefferson, his jaw tightened as he flipped a Plexiglas cover shielding two rows of sequentially numbered buttons. Twenty-two pairs were dimly lit, one for each SRAM missile resting in the weapons bays. He punched the first, triggering a digital readout to life. A light signaled the warhead ready to accept a data stream.

“Target,” he said. He closed his eyes and said a prayer. For all the hours in training, he was about to fire a nuclear weapon in anger.

Buck barked out a grid number while Ledermeyer punched the coordinates into a keypad. Fire-control software converted the ASCII digits into precise targeting data. The computer performed a sanity check based on a target database generated by satellite photos.

“Target accepted.”

Buck shouted a second stream of digits as Ledermeyer repeated the procedure for the next SRAM.

“Standby,” Buck ordered, leveling the bomber. Ledermeyer crisply depressed the first missile’s arming button while grabbing a mechanical level near his leg. The bomber’s forward weapons bay doors swung open with a metallic thud, revealing the rotary launcher. The launcher whined as it positioned the proper bird.

“Fire one.”

The pointed, thin missile dropped silently from the bay, wings and fins popping from the fuselage. Hanging in midair, a bright burst of orange flame signaled the solid rocket motor springing to life. The SRAM jumped in front of the bomber, disappearing off into the distance at supersonic speed. The second trailed by a short ten seconds.

“Number two away.”

In forty-three seconds, the first SRAM would detonate thirty miles down range to port of their track. The second would follow three seconds later to starboard, at approximately the same range. The two missiles, packing a double 150-kiloton dose, would vaporize the older SA-6 sites and catch any mobile SA-10s within weapon’s range, smashing fire-control radar antennas and crushing control vans and launchers.

The downside was that minutes later, they would be forced to forge through a no-man’s land carved out by the nuclear detonations in their lightly shielded bomber. Calculated aim points had provided a theoretical corridor of nearly a mile in width, but Buck knew they would catch significant radiation flying near the reddish-black nuclear clouds. He studied his watch, mentally counting the seconds. Suddenly a brilliant flash engulfed the entire sky, as if the sun had unexpectedly dropped in for a visit. Specially coated faceplates attached to their helmets protected them from the destruction power of the UV light. But the double thermal pulse cooked them in their heavy flight suits. Stinking sweat poured down their faces. Heat exhaustion was a real possibility. The bomber’s ventilation system worked overtime.

Awestruck, they didn’t notice the second fireball emblazoned against the afternoon sky. The incandescent fireballs roiled and tore at the atmosphere.

“My God,” cried Joe, frozen in his seat. He mumbled something else to himself, his eyes locked on the toroid’s that blocked the sunlight, their surfaces constantly shifted by violent winds sucking up cooler air from below.

Buck experienced the same numbness. It was impossible to describe how he felt at that moment. The first real thoughts about the wave of death he was about to unleash hit home. The power contained in the belly of his bomber took on an almost religious air.

“It’s the end of the world,” he muttered. “The goddamned end of the world.” He knew at that moment that he would die regardless of any skill or luck he might possess. And maybe that was fitting.

Three more SRAMs were quickly expended, assuring a straight shot for the eastern slope of the Urals. Already they were becoming hardened to the awesome firepower personally unleashed against the Russians. Buck edged the plane starboard to avoid nuclear debris. Built-in radiation-detection devices clicked persistently as they skirted the edge of the dissipating cloud. Bomber crews feared the invisible radioactivity as much as the Russian air defenses. It could silently penetrate their bodies, destroying tissue, sapping their strength.

Breaking back to port, the Urals jutted to the sky, their stark appearance befitting the surrounding bleak terrain. Not high in elevation, they nevertheless presented an awesome spectacle.

“There,” announced Buck calmly. Ahead was the memorized landmark pointing directly to his flight path along the eastern slope. It was over seven hundred miles to the IP for their first target north of Sverdlovsk. Over an hour of pushing a broken airplane two hundred feet above treacherous mountain terrain with the Russians’ breathing down their necks. The odds against them mounted with each passing minute. Buck had to remind himself that he wasn’t alone, that he still had a crew depending on him. He had to keep them working.

“Ledermeyer?”

“Yeah, Buck.” He sounded exhausted.

“You OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Start weapon allocation. Baseline mission. Use the gravities, save the SRAMs.”

“Roger.” The reply trailed off into the reverberating cabin. Buck twisted in his seat to provide a reassuring gesture. Then he jabbed Joe’s thigh, getting his attention.

“I need to know how much fuel we’re going to have and where I can land this crate. How far can we go?”

Joe looked over, but before he could respond, a piercing alarm sprang from Jefferson’s damaged console. The still-working ESM gear had detected an unknown fire-control radar to port. Buck was trapped. Already at low altitude, his best option was to climb rapidly, leaving the protection of the ground clutter and exposing his plane to a host of air-defense radars. Instead he popped flares and inched even lower, praying the missile’s sophisticated seeker would be overwhelmed by the confusing radar pulses reflecting off the sheer cliffs and deep ravines. But the old Soviet SAM was blindly flying toward a point in space, its guidance immune to manipulation. Armed by the tremendous G-forces at launch, its 10 KT thermonuclear warhead detonated when the internal counter decremented to zero.