Red Storm Rising (1986) (27 page)

 

“Turning right now. Car three, close in. Car one, turn left at the next intersection and get ahead of them.” Colonel Weber spoke over a tactical radio of the sort used by FIST—fire-support team—units. The ambush had been ready for several days now, and as soon as their targets had emerged from their safe house, the word had been flashed all over the Federal Republic. NATO establishments already on alert were brought to full battle-readiness. This could only be the opening move in a shooting war . . . unless, Weber admitted to himself, they were simply moving from one secure place to wait further in another one. He didn’t know which way things would turn, though surely it had to begin soon. Didn’t it?

 

The two trucks were now in a rural part of Western Germany, driving southeast through the German-Belgian Nature Park, a scenic route often traveled by tourists and sightseers. They had chosen this side road to avoid the military traffic on the major highways, but as they passed through Mulartshutte, the lead driver frowned as he saw a military convoy of tanks on low-hauler trailers. Strangely, the tanks were loaded backwards, with their massive guns facing aft. British tanks, he saw, new Challengers. Well, he hadn’t expected to see any German Leopard tanks on the Belgian border. There had never been any possibility of preventing a German mobilization, and he tried to convince himself that the rest of the NATO countries had not moved as quickly as they could have. Ah, if this mission were successful, then NATO’s communications would be seriously damaged, and maybe the armored spearheads would indeed come to rescue them. The convoy slowed. The driver considered pulling around them, but his orders were to be inconspicuous.

 

“Everyone ready?” Weber asked from his chase car.

“Ready.”
Bloody complex op, this,
Colonel Armstrong thought.
Tankers, SAS, and the Germans all working together. But worth it to bag a bunch of Spetznaz.
The convoy slowed and stopped at a picnicking area. Weber halted his car a hundred meters away. It was now in the hands of the English ambush team.

Flares erupted around the two small vans.

 

The KGB driver cringed at being in the center of so much light. Then he looked forward to see the barrel of the tank just fifty meters ahead of him rise from its travel-rest and center on his windshield.

“Attention,” a voice called in Russian over a megaphone. “Spetznaz soldiers, attention. You are surrounded by a company of mechanized troops. Come out of your vehicles singly and unarmed. If you open fire, you will be killed within seconds.” A second voice began speaking.

“Come out, Comrades, this is Major Chernyavin. There is no chance.”

The commandos exchanged looks of horror. In the lead vehicle the captain started to pull the pin on a grenade. A sergeant leaped on him and wrapped his hand around the captain’s.

“We cannot be taken alive! Those are our orders!” the captain shouted.

“The devil’s mother we can’t!” the sergeant screamed. “One at a time, Comrades—out with hands high. And be careful!”

A private emerged from the back door of the van, one slow foot at a time.

“Come to the sound of my voice, Ivanov,” Chernyavin said from a wheelchair. The major had told much to earn the chance to save his detachment. He had worked with these men for two years, and he could not let them be slaughtered to no purpose. It was one thing to be loyal to the State, another to be loyal to the men he’d led in combat operations. “You will not be hurt. If you have any weapons, drop them now. I know about the knife you carry, Private Ivanov . . . Very good. Next man.”

It went quickly. A joint team of Special Air Service and GSG-9 commandos collected their Soviet counterparts, hand-cuffed them, and led them off to be blindfolded. Soon only two were left. The grenade made it tricky. By this time the captain had seen the futility of his action, but it proved impossible to locate the pin for the grenade. The sergeant shouted a warning to Chernyavin, who wanted to come forward himself, but couldn’t. The captain came out last. He wanted to throw the grenade at the officer who, he thought, had betrayed his country, only to see a man whose legs were swathed in plaster.

Chernyavin could see the look on the man’s face.

“Andrey Ilych, would you prefer that your life should end for nothing?” the major asked. “The bastards drugged me and learned enough to kill you all. I could not let them do this.”

“I have a live grenade!” the captain said loudly. “I will throw it into the truck.” This he did before anyone could shout to stop him. A moment later the truck exploded, destroying the group’s maps and plans for escape. For the first time in a week, Chernyavin’s face broke into a wide grin. “Well done, Andrushka!”

 

Two other Spetznaz groups were less lucky, and were intercepted within sight of their targets by German units privy to Chernyavin’s capture. But twenty additional groups were in the Federal Republic, and not every NATO site had gotten the word in time. A score of vicious firefights erupted on both sides of the Rhein. A war to involve millions began with squad- and platoon-sized units fighting desperate actions in the dark.

The view would have been frightening to most men. There were solid clouds overhead at four thousand feet. He flew through showers that he more heard than saw on this black night, and the dark outlines of trees appeared to reach up and snatch at his speeding fighter. Only a madman would be so low on such a night—so much the better, he smiled inside his oxygen mask.

Colonel Douglas Ellington’s fingertips caressed the control stick of his F-19A Ghostrider attack fighter, while his other hand rested on the side-by-side throttle controls on the left-side cockpit wall. The head-up display projected on the windshield in front of him reported 625 knots Indicated Air Speed, a hundred six feet of altitude, a heading of 013, and around the numbers was a monocolor holographic image of the terrain before him. The image came from a forward-looking infrared camera in the fighter’s nose, augmented by an invisible laser that interrogated the ground eight times per second. For peripheral vision, his oversized helmet was fitted with low-light goggles.

“Raisin’ hell over our heads,” his back-seater reported. Major Don Eisly monitored the radio and radar signals, as well as their own instruments: “All systems continue nominal, range to target now ninety miles.”

“Right,” the Duke responded. It had been an automatic nickname for Ellington, who even looked vaguely like the jazz musician.

Ellington relished the mission. They were skimming north at perilously low level over the angular terrain of East Germany, and their Frisbee, never more than two hundred feet off the ground, jerked up and down to the pilot’s constant course adjustments.

Lockheed called her the Ghostrider. The pilots called her the Frisbee, the F-19A, the secretly developed Stealth attack fighter. She had no corners, no box shapes to allow radar signals to bounce cleanly off her. Her high-bypass turbofans were designed to emit a blurry infrared signature at most. From above, her wings appeared to mimic the shape of a cathedral bell. From in front, they curved oddly toward the ground, earning her the affectionate nickname of Frisbee. Though she was a masterpiece of electronic technology inside, she usually didn’t use her active systems. Radars and radios made electronic noise that an enemy might detect, and the whole idea of the Frisbee was that she didn’t seem to exist at all.

Far over their heads on both sides of the border, hundreds of fighter aircraft played a deadly game of bluff, racing toward the border and then turning away, both sides trying to goad the other into committing to battle. Each side had airborne radar aircraft with which to control such a battle and so gain the advantage in a war which, though few yet knew it, had already begun.

And we’re getting a quick one in,
Ellington thought.
We’re finally doing something smart!
He’d had a hundred missions over Vietnam in the first production F-111A fighters. The Duke was the Air Force’s leading expert on covert low-level missions, and it was said that he could “bull’s-eye a chuckhole in a Kansas tornado at midnight.” That wasn’t quite true. The Frisbee could never handle a tornado. The sad truth was that the F-19 handled like a pig—a consequence of her ungainly design. But Ellington didn’t care. Being invisible was better than being agile, he judged, knowing that he was about to prove or disprove that proposition.

The Frisbee squadron was now penetrating the most concentrated SAM belt the world had ever known.

“Range to primary target is now sixty miles,” Eisly advised. “All on-board systems continue nominal. No radars are locked onto us. Lookin’ good, Duke.”

“Roger.” Ellington pushed the stick forward and dived as they passed over the crest of a small hill, then bottomed out at eighty feet over a wheatfield. The Duke was playing his game to the limit, drawing on years of experience in low-level attacks. Their primary target was a Soviet IL-76 Mainstay, an AWACS-type aircraft that was circling near Magdeburg, agreeably within ten miles of their secondary target, the E-8 highway bridges over the Elbe at Hohenroarthe. The mission was getting a lot hairier. The closer they got to the Mainstay the more radar signal hit their aircraft, its intensity growing at a square function. Sooner or later, enough signal would be reflected back to the Mainstay to be detectable, even by curved wings made of radar-transparent composites. All the Stealth technology did was to make radar detection harder, not impossible. Would they be seen by the Mainstay? If so, when, and how quickly would the Russians react?

Keep her on the deck,
he told himself.
Play the game by the rules you’ve practiced out.
They had rehearsed this mission for nine days in “Dreamland,” the top-secret exercise area in the sprawl of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Even the E-3A Sentry could barely make them out at forty miles, and the Sentry was a far better radar platform that the Mainstay, wasn’t it?

There were five Mainstays on duty, all a hundred klicks east of the inter-German border. A nice safe distance, what with over three hundred fighters between them and the border.

“Twenty miles, Duke.”

“Right. Call it off, Don.”

“Roge. Still no fire-control emanations on us, and no search stuff is lingering our way. Lots of radio chatter, but mostly west of us. Very little VOX coming from the target.”

Ellington reached his left hand down to arm the four AIM-9M Sidewinder missiles hanging under his wings. The weapon-indicator light blinked a lethal, friendly green.

“Eighteen miles. Target appears to be circling normally, not taking evasive action.”

Ten miles to the minute,
Ellington computed in his mind,
one minute forty seconds.

“Sixteen miles.” Eisly read the numbers off a computer readout keyed to the NAVSTAR satellite navigation system.

The Mainstay would not have a chance. The Frisbee would not begin to climb until she was directly underneath the target. Fourteen miles. Twelve. Ten. Eight. Six miles to the converted air transport.

“The Mainstay just reversed her turn—yeah, she’s jinking. A Foxfire just swept over us,” Eisly said evenly. A MiG-25 interceptor, presumably acting on instructions from the IL-76, was now searching for them. With its high power and small arc, the Foxfire stood a good chance of acquiring them, Stealth technology or not. “The Mainstay might have us.”

“Anything locked on us?”

“Not yet.” Eisly’s eyes were glued to the threat-receiver instruments. No missile-control radars had centered on the Frisbee yet. “Coming under the target.”

“Right. Climbing now.” Ellington eased back on his stick and punched up full afterburners. The Frisbee’s engines could only give him Mach 1.3, but this was the place to use all the power he had. According to the weather people, these clouds topped out at twenty thousand feet, and the IL-76 would be about five thousand above that. Now the Frisbee was vulnerable. No longer lost in the ground clutter, her engines radiating their maximum signature, the Stealth aircraft was broadcasting her presence.
Climb faster, baby
. . .

“Tallyho!”
Ellington said too loudly over the intercom as he burst through the clouds, and the night-vision systems instantly showed him the Mainstay, five miles away and diving for cover in front of him. Too late. The head-on closing speed was nearly a thousand miles per hour. The colonel centered his gunsight pipper on the target. A warbling tone came into his headset: the Sidewinders’ seekers had locked onto the target. His right thumb toggled the launch-enable switch, and his forefinger squeezed the trigger twice. The Sidewinders left the aircraft half a second apart. Their brilliant exhaust flames dazzled him, but he did not take his eyes off the missiles as they raced for the target. It took eight seconds. He looked them all the way in. Both missiles angled for the Mainstay’s starboard wing. Thirty feet away, laser proximity fuses detonated, filling the air with lethal fragments. It happened too fast. Both of the Mainstay’s right-side engines exploded, the wing came off, and the Soviet aircraft began cartwheeling violently downward, lost seconds later in the clouds.

Jesus!
Ellington thought as he rolled and dived back to the ground and safety.
Nothing like the movies. The target was hit and gone between blinks. Well, okay, that was easy enough. Primary target gone. Now for the hard part . . .