The Fourth War (23 page)

Bradley frantically rubbed his hands over his eyes. He turned toward Tia, a new fear on his face. “Weapons!” he screamed above the roar of the wind. He signaled toward his data control panel, lifted three fingers, and began to count down. Tia reached for her data panel, then followed his command. Together, they flipped the master arm switch. The nukes powered down. Bradley motioned for “safe” and Tia flipped the red-guarded switch. The internal computers inside the warheads scrambled the arm codes.

“Jettison!” Bradley screamed.

Tia hit the jettison switch and felt a deep rumble as the bomb bay doors opened into the slip stream. The ejection pins fired and she felt a solid
knock.
The weapons tumbled away and the bomb bay door closed again. Bradley glanced below the nose of the aircraft, seeing a pale dirt road shining in the moonlight along the side of a small hill. Then another road passed underneath him and intersected the first, forming a tight V at the crest of the hill.

The aircraft buzzed under their seats, then suddenly lurched to the right. The differential thrust mechanism failed from the lack of hydraulic power. Bradley selected
TAKEOFF/LAND
on the flight parameter switch, then pushed at the throttles to eke out more power. The aircraft began to buffet violently and the
WING FIRE
light flashed in his face. The thick smoke swirled in the darkness, burning his eyes. Bradley pointed to the altimeter. They were less than two thousand feet above the terrain. The valley loomed before them. He glanced at his console as the airspeed was bleeding below 162 knots.

They had done all that they could. It was time to get out of the jet.

He glanced toward Tia. She was looking up in anguish at the damaged panel directly over her head. He followed her eyes and his heart sank in his chest.

Her ejection sequence lines dangled from the gash in the cockpit. The pneumatic lines had been severed.

Tia's hatch wouldn't blow.

She could not eject.

Tia studied her hatch, then glanced over at him. She sat back in her seat, braced herself, closed her eyes and pulled her ejection handles. Bradley heard a low pop, but the seat didn't move and he saw the glow of terror begin to build in her eyes. Yellow flames licked around them and Bradley recoiled from the heat. A rocky peak passed to their right. The aircraft was losing altitude.

Tia turned quickly to Bradley, motioned for him to eject. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the wounded jet.

“Go!” Tia screamed.

“No,” he shouted as he fought to maintain control.

“Don't be stupid!” she cried.

Bradley shook his head. No way he was bailing out of this jet!

Tia reached over for Bradley's ejection handle.

Kill 31
Over Eastern Afghanistan

Col. Shane Bradley pushed Tia's hand away from his ejection seat handle. “No! he shouted angrily as he pushed it away.

“Go!”

“There's an airfield.”

She looked at him blankly, unable to hear, the initial blast of the depressurization having left a shrill ring in her ears.

She reached for his ejection handles again and he pushed her hand away. Straining against his shoulder straps, he leaned toward her. “Lyangar,” he shouted, pointing to the east.

Tia pulled back and tried to remember. Lyangar? She knew the name, but her thoughts came so slow. Lyangar? Yes, Lyangar. It came to her now. Like her hearing, her mind was beginning to clear.

Lyangar lay two miles on the other side of the Tajikistan border, beside the narrow finger of land that stretched toward China, deep in the Baroghil Valley between Kashmir and Tajikistan. The airfield was tiny, isolated, and dangerously close to the mountains. No way they could land a B-2 down there.

“No!” Tia shouted, “The runway's too small.”

Bradley didn't answer and Tia screamed again. “Don't be a hero, Colonel, just get out of here.”

Bradley ignored her as he searched the night. He motioned to his left, then banked the aircraft up on her side. He pointed with authority, lifted one finger, then five. One five miles to the airport. He had the rotating beacon in sight. “Checklist!” he commanded above the scream of the wind.

More smoke billowed into the cockpit, greasy, toxic, and thick. Tai reached again for Bradley's ejection handle, but he had already inserted the red safety pin, locking the handle in safe. The fire heated the cockpit as the aircraft lost more altitude. The
FIRE
warning lights illuminated their faces in red.

“Sir!” Tia shouted. “Get out of here!”

Bradley leaned toward her and screamed in her ear. “I'm not leaving you, Captain. Now you can either help me land this aircraft or you can sit there and whine. I would appreciate your help. So what are you going to do?”

Tia sat stunned, the aircraft bucking under her seat. The fire was spreading through the right engine bay. It burned through the primary flight control systems and the backup system kicked in. The fire was spreading, engines failing, systems dropping off line. They had only three or four minutes to get the jet on the ground.

She shook her head, then moved her hands through the cockpit, setting up the aircraft for landing while configuring the wings.

 

The runway at Lyangar was only six thousand feet long, half of the distance the B-2 normally required to land. It was narrow as a ribbon and almost hidden in trees. Situated deep in the valley, with steep mountains rising up on three sides, the airfield was barely adequate for a WWII transport, let alone a three-hundred-thousand-pound high-performance jet whose landing speed was faster than the old bombers used to fly.

Built by Indian slaves during WWII, Lyangar had been used as an emergency airfield for Allied transports humping over the pass, supplying arms and munitions to the American–Iranian Command on the southwestern front. During the last half century the airfield had fallen into crumbling disrepair. The concrete was cracked and the tarmac was rubble. All the buildings, simple wooden barracks set on cinderblocks, had been deserted until the Afghan–Russian War. Then, late in the fall of 1981, members of the 191 Air Speciale, 41st Mobile Regiment, the elite Russian troops that had come to Afghanistan to get their teeth kicked down their throats, had attempted to reclaim the airfield. They spent four months resurfacing the runway and repairing the buildings, then abandoned the base in a hasty retreat.

Lyangar fell in the center of what was known as the Crimson Basin, the bloody, and lawless valley that lies between Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. The inhabitants of Crimson Basin utterly refused to recognize authority of any kind, and operated outside the influence of any police or military force. As a result, the valley provided sanctuary for Muslim militants and common criminals, as well as the most bitter political outcast and dangerous insurgents from the Muslim territories. The only regular occupants of Lyangar were Taliban leaders and Mongolian warlords who smuggled weapons and opium.

The runway was unmanned for most of the year, from November to May, when the winters snows fell. It didn't have any runway lights or navigational aids. Under ideal conditions, landing at Lyangar would have been stupid at best. Landing there at night, in a stricken bomber, was asking for death.

 

Toxic smoke poured into the cockpit, greasy and thick. It burned Bradley's lungs and made it nearly impossible to see. He pulled back the throttles on engines one and four, the only good engines he had left. The bomber slowed too quickly and he shoved the power back in. Tia turned on the landing lights and configured the jet. “Dumping fuel!” she called out. The colonel nodded in reply. High-octane JP-8 began to stream from the wingtips, creating dual streams of vaporized fuel. Tia started to pull down any unnecessary electronic equipment to reduce the drag on the remaining generators. “Defensive systems coming down,” she announced as she looked up very quickly. “Have you got the airfield in sight?”

Bradley squinted against the wind, then shouted, “Yes!”

“Okay, I'm bringing down the radar. The ZSR-63 is coming down, too.” Tia finished powering down the energy-draining systems, then glanced around the cockpit, looking for a chart that would have the coordinates for Lyangar. It was bare, having been sucked bone dry. She recalled the latitude and longitude as best as she could and plugged the coordinates into the navigational computer. “One fifty-eight is your approach speed,” she called above the sound of the wind. Bradley pushed up the power. The aircraft wallowed at one hundred forty-five knots. Bradley stopped the descent and flew toward the rotating beacon. Was he lined up on the runway? It was impossible to tell.

They were flying too slow. “Power!” Tia called. Bradley shoved the throttles forward. It took full power on the two good engines to maintain level flight. Tia desperately searched the darkness for the runway threshold. The valley was so dark. Black mountains rose up on both sides. The aircraft buffeted in the wind, rocking from side to side. Bradley struggled to keep it level, fighting the backup flight controls. Smoke was so thick that he raised a hand to his face, using his glove to filter the air. The smoke billowed in through the air vents like water through a hole in a dam. And it was hot. Very hot. The fire was growing very bright. Would his fuel tanks blow? His radar altimeter read nine hundred feet. He felt a tug on his shoulder and saw Tia sweep her left arm in an arc, then point toward the field. Bradley banked the aircraft gently. Tia pointed outside again. The runway was there, a dark ribbon off to his right. But he was high. Really high. Bradley pushed the nose down. The airspeed picked up quickly as the aircraft dropped toward the ground. He pulled back the power to compensate for the descent.

“Airspeed,” Tia called and he felt her pull back the power. Bradley concentrated on the runway. “Gear?” she called out.

“Not until we are over the runway!” Bradley stared through his windscreen at the dark ribbon of cement. He could see the outline of the taxi lights, but the runway was dark. And it was short. Very short. He was going to have to plant the jet on brick one, then get on the brakes and ride them all the way to the end. The trees crowded him on both sides. Would his wings even fit? He adjusted the power and lifted the nose. The radar altimeter read two hundred feet, and still he was high! He let the nose drop, feeling the aircraft sink under his seat.

“One hundred feet,” Tia called. “Let it down, sir. Get it right on the numbers.”

“Got it,” Bradley answered. Black smoke billowed in. Another caution light flashed as the number one engine temperature screamed through one thousand degrees. It was essentially on fire, though the heat had not yet erupted into flame. The aircraft shook, the left wing dropped, and the nose rose in the air. Bradley's main computer screen shattered, sending shards of glass into his lap.

“Shut the engine down!” Tia demanded. “It's going to explode!”

“No! Keep it going! I need power
now.
”

Bradley adjusted his aim point. The wing dropped. “Airspeed,” Tia screamed again.

Bradley pushed up the power, commanding every ounce of energy out of the jet. Flames curled into the cockpit through the gap in the hatch. Bradley fought the dying aircraft as the flames singed his skin.

“Gear!” Bradley shouted.

Tia dropped the landing gear handle and the wheels fell into place. The bomber dropped like a stone from the additional drag. Hydraulic pressure collapsed and the aircraft's nose pulled into the air. The left wing dropped again and the aircraft fell from the sky. The bomber hit like a rock, almost bending the gear. Bradley slammed his throttles to idle and threw his rudder/brakes out, then stomped on the brakes with all of his weight. Tia shut down number one and hit the fire suppression system, but left the number-four engine running to provide hydraulic power for the brakes. The end of the runway was approaching with terrifying speed. A pine tree rushed by Bradley's left side and was cut down by the tip of his wing.

Halfway down the runway, the three-hundred-thousand-pound bomber decelerated through a hundred knots. With two thousand feet remaining, it decelerated through eighty. Then the brakes exploded in flames as the wheels locked up. The main tires blew apart, spitting strips of burning rubber behind the jet. A thousand feet to go, and the
Lady
was still traveling faster than fifty knots.

Bradley saw the end of the runway pass under his nose. He closed his eyes and bent over, still holding the brakes. Tia shot the final bottle of fire suppressant to shut the last engine down. The aircraft crashed over the runway threshold and into the overrun, a patchwork of asphalt and uneven cement. The bare wheel rims sunk into the soft asphalt and Bradley was thrown forward in his seat. The right landing gear collapsed and the wing dropped onto the cement. The aircraft jerked to a stop. Bradley took a deep breath.

Tia unstrapped from her ejection seat and moved toward the hatch as Bradley reached up to turn the battery off. Tia blew the emergency crew entry hatch door and the egress hatch in the floor behind their ejection seats, and the egress ladder slammed into the asphalt below. She grabbed Bradley by the arms and pulled him out of this seat. The pilots stumbled from the aircraft and onto the ground, then ran under the wing and clear of the jet. A hundred feet from the aircraft, they stopped and looked back. The
Lady
sat on one knee, a broken shadow in the night. The fire was dying now, though it still billowed smoke. With no fresh fuel to feed it, it soon would die out.

Bradley fell to his knee as he coughed from deep in his chest. He filled his lungs with air, then placed his hands over his face.

Tia knelt down beside him. “Amazing,” she whispered.

Bradley glanced at her, then back at the aircraft. “We should get a medal for that.” He smiled. Tia started to laugh to hide the tears in her eyes. She brushed them away. Bradley took another deep breath.

Behind them, they heard it. Bradley's heart slammed in his chest. He slowly cocked his head. Tia watched Bradley's eyes.

The soldier moved toward them, grunting an unknown command. His brown robes flapped in the wind, and his beard reached almost to his chest. More soldiers emerged from the darkness, all of them dressed in desert attire.

Bradley started to stand, but the soldiers pushed him to the ground. Tia looked over and cried out, her face frozen in fear. A soldier grabbed her by the throat and pushed her face to the dirt. Bradley felt a cold knife against his neck. He pushed back, pressing upward, trying to struggle to his feet but another soldier knocked him over with a knee to his spine. A steel-toed boot smashed into his head, then he heard Tia scream. He moaned and fell back, then cursed and pushed himself up again, lifting the men, almost making it to his feet. The soldiers yelled at each other and knocked him back to his knees. Another kick to the head, and he fell on his face. A stab of pain rolled between his eyes and all the way down his spine. Then he felt himself falling into a bottomless pit.