by Tom Kratman
“But the cost?”
At that Janier bid his cool farewell. He grabbed the flyboy by the collar, shouting into his face, “You fucking simpleton; you moral cripple, you total fucking imbecile; the cost to the ground forces if you do not drop those bridges is destruction! Maybe in your warped technocratic view, a couple of hundred pilots are of greater value than a couple of hundred thousand soldiers and marines, BUT THEY FUCKING ARE NOT!”
Janier let go the collar and reached for the pistol hanging from his belt. Lavalle and his colonel moved in to stop him, in case he was serious, which they thought he just might be. “Those bridges come down or I will fucking shoot you myself for dereliction of duty. Clear?”
The Anglian turned a ghastly pale and answered, meekly, “Yes, sir, we’ll do our best . . . bu’ . . . bu’ . . . but there’s something you need to know.”
“What’s that?”
“The enemy killed the president of Cienfuegos, along with his entire family, and many of his key followers. Also, they have attacked all six of our bases there, mining the runways and blasting a good deal of the infrastructure, along with quite a few parked aircraft. I have about one hundred and fifty planes coming in, about half and half air superiority—including radar and command and control—and ground attack. I can put them on the bridges but they’re going to be it for a while.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“In any envelope except nose down and full throttle, the F-100 was inferior to the F-86H.”
—Colonel Les Waltman, Maryland ANG
Cayuga Field, Cienfuegos
High in the post-midnight air, Squadron Commander Halpence circled the field, waiting for the rest of his strike package to take off and form up. It was a small package that would join up with several others from the other five bases enroute to the target. The waste of fuel, therefore, was minimal. There were, on the other hand, some serious prices paid for that efficiency in the form of mixed ground crews on the bases, along with incompatible ordnance and spare parts.
But what can we do? If we assign bases by nationality, it would take so long for one airstrip to get a strike package in the air that it would cut into ordnance.
Yawing a bit left Halpence thought he caught sight of something, a quick glimpse of something slow and even a bit birdlike. It was only for the barest millisecond, before the thing disappeared into a cloud.
Maybe it was a . . .
Whatever it was, Halpence forgot about naming it instantly, as a tent city near the airfield was briefly lit up as bright as day. He couldn’t see much from this altitude, of course, but he did happen to know where the ground crews were billeted, in relation to the field. That whatever-it-had-been was right over the section of tentage containing his own ground crews evacuated from Santa Josefina as everything went south there.
“My God,” he said aloud. “All the work they put into . . . What the fuck happened?”
There was no answer by voice. A second huge fireball erupted, this time over a peace-symbol shaped parking and dispersal area northwest of the field. There were more than a few secondary explosions and fireballs from that, as ruptured fuel tanks spilled their contents to the continuing explosion, the fuel then feeding the blast and blaze.
A third fireball erupted, and then a fourth, though Halpence wasn’t sure precisely what was under those blasts. There were two smaller eruptions over the airfield itself, but those weren’t even noticed by the pilot amidst the other blasts. On the ground, for someone lucky enough to have found him- or herself not under a thermobaric bomb, the last two looked a bit like a fuse for demolitions, a linear sparking thing tracing a track across the sky.
Senior Aircraftman Bateman was sometimes called by his peers, “Esquire,” for his penchant for commenting on laws about which he was utterly ignorant, likewise incompetent, by both training and intellect, to comment. He thought firearms were icky, hence, he had left his rifle behind when he left his tent and went off to masturbate in the bushes a hundred and fifty or so meters from ground zero for the first bomb. He was also incredibly turned on by any kind of notoriety, such as he hoped to gain by reporting on Janier’s meeting with the air commanders. That, too, tended to explain his current activity.
However, at the range he was from ground zero, Bateman was not one of the lucky ones, the ones killed more or less instantly. He saw a small flash, followed within a couple of seconds by a larger one. The heat from that was intense enough to flash fry his eyeballs and cook the skin of his face and uncovered arms. There was no hair to burn away, since Bateman was as bald as a billiard ball (and approximately as intelligent), but his formerly shiny dome of skull erupted in blisters and charring.
The blast wave entered his open mouth, ripping his lungs from the inside. From the outside the overpressure wrought considerable damage to his other organs. The damage done to the exposed head of his penis was unspeakable.
Clothing afire, Bateman was picked up by the blast wave and tossed, trailing fire and smoke, before he was impaled on the sharp branch of a tranzitree, breaking off the bulk of a small branch as he did so. The worst part of the initial injuries was that they were insufficiently serious to prevent him from feeling himself abdominally raped by a tree.
There he hung, writhing like a worm on a hook, for seconds that seemed eternal, until the blast reached its ultimate extent and, rapidly cooling, turned into vacuum. At that point, the hook analogy became altogether too accurate. The vacuum not only ripped Bateman’s lungs half out his throat, while explosively pulling out his eardrums, but it also pulled him from the tranzitree, dragging him back to ground zero. The tree’s small branch, however, the one that Bateman’s body had knocked the end off during his impalement, had become a large hook thereby. His intestines caught on this newmade hook, and were pulled out his back as he flew.
After a dozen feet his intestinal limit was reached. The small intestine tore at the point where the hook had caught it. Thereafter Bateman flew with what appeared to be a flapping tail. He landed on the tarmac of the runway and skidded for fifty or sixty feet. That abraded off the bulk of the charred skin of his face, leaving the bone exposed.
Only then—not weeping only because he lacked eyes with which to weep—did Bateman finally begin to die.
Halpence had about half his group assembled when the next aircraft to try to take off exploded as it turned into the wind on the runway. The message from the tower—it had survived, surprisingly—was that the enemy had mined the runways and that he should expect no more planes until they were cleared. His radio then spoke up in the voice of another pilot, “Same story at Santa Julio, Santa Clarita, and La Paloma, friend; they’ve all been hit hard and none are going to be operating soon.”
At that point, Halpence signaled his force, what there was of it, “We have to go; we don’t have to come back. Assume heading three-five-zero.”
Halpence knew better than to ask why the Balboans could hit accurately and the Tauran forces couldn’t, GLS is useless over the central part of Balboa but functioning just fine everywhere else. Bastards.
Enroute to Trans Balboa Highway Bridge,
Rio Gamboa, North of the “Parilla Line,” Balboa
Halpence had had a bit over an hour to think about the problem, winging it for Balboa and the bridges. In the first place, the artillery, firing at that density and rate of fire, pretty much refutes the “small bullet-big sky” theory. At that rate, the sky isn’t so big and, if many of those shells are proximity fused, they might as well be an anti-aircraft barrage.
The balloons? Well, they’re only low to south, to give room to the artillery. But if I try to go in that way they’re denser than a convention of Eastminster whores waiting for the theaters to get out. That would suck like that very same convention on a payday. In fact, every side of the area has a thick barrage of balloons and you apparently can’t tell where the wire is from the position of the balloon because a lot of them are double and triple wired.
That means take my chances goin
g through or go high and over them. But high and over them means exposing myself and the rest to their air-defense umbrella, not least their fucking lasers.
Okay, I make our best chance—not a great chance but the best one—to come in low from the flank, try to dodge the balloons’ wires, follow the river valley and lay the bombs at point-blank range. No time for anything fancy and no room either.
But, then, shit; small arms fire alone, going up that river, is going to collanderize our planes.
Hmmm . . . .the wires are invisible but the balloons are not. The wires might be two or three per balloon, spreading out as they descend, but right up at the balloon they’ll be underneath.
Okay, then, we come in front the flank, try to skip from balloon to balloon, and then dive down once we’re past them, lay our bombs, and try to do the same thing on the other side to get away.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” said one of the pilots of his package. “Seriously?”
“Best chance we’ve got,” Halpence replied.
“Right. Well, I will be most happy to follow you.”
“Yeah, I intended to go first anyway.”
Halpence descended to almost sea level, pulling back on his stick just in time to rise above the tree line. The central cordillera, the mountain range that was the spine for two continents, arose ahead of him, dark and forbidding. He had as good a night vision and radar capability as money could buy, so skimming the trees wasn’t all that hard or dangerous. Even so, he improved his chances by getting in a river valley outside the battle area and following it to the north. A quick pull on the stick, which pressed him down into his seat, was followed by a push and a rapid descent which saw his harness as the only thing keeping him from hitting the canopy with his helmet. Past the mountain range and down, he banked hard right, then waited two minutes before sending, “Everybody still with me?”
A chorus of “rogers” came back. Whew; didn’t lose anyone I started with.
With the cordillera to his right and the main highway, the Trans-Colombian Highway, to his left, Halpence began scanning for the balloons. It was made easier by the steady flashing of the masses of cannon firing ahead.
Though heat contrasts between the ambient air and the balloons and the steel cables holding them up showed pretty plainly in his display, the cables intermeshed in every which direction, making it impossible to tell which ones held which balloons. He thought the density of balloons was not less than ten per kilometer, which meant anything from ten to thirty wires.
An average of maybe fifty meters between wires. Sounds like a lot until you realize that your aircraft has a fourteen-meter wingspan and you just might have misjudged a space.
Halpence felt something pass by his aircraft. He imagined it as a battery of large guns, spitting shells that he almost coincided with.
Hmmmm . . . try to knock down the balloons with cannon fire to make a path for the rest? No, they’d have to wait while one or two of us tried and . . .
A radar warning alarm sounded in Halpence’s ears. He started to dive to try to lose it when he realized, No, I’m already too low for a missile. But if we try to stick around while we down balloons, we will be on the receiving end of cannon fire. He aimed for the left side of what he thought was the nearest balloon. Passing it, easily, he nosed down slightly, aiming for the right side of the next one. Then came a frantic call followed by a scream that cut off abruptly. He sensed rather than saw a fireball in the night.
“Fucking balloon just shot at us!” someone exclaimed.
“Aerial mines?” asked another. “Now that is just fucking unfair.”
“How do you do that?” someone asked.
“What difference, at this point, how or who or why?” Halpence asked. He turned his plane on its side, passing close enough to a balloon that the shock wave actually broke it, causing it to burst, to release its gas, and to begin a graceful, fluttering fall. “Just follow me; we’re almost through. Who did we lose?”
“It was the ECM bird.”
“Shit.”
Halpence pushed his stick forward into the narrow river valley just, and only just, in time. Behind and above him, twin arcs of fist-sized tracers ripped up from either side. His radar warning became a continuous shriek in his ears. Like lightning, his fingers input targeting data for both banks as he pulled the stick back to shoot skyward. The guns below tried to track him, but he was too fast for them or their radar. He felt a sudden pain in his eyes. Lasers. Motherfucking lasers. But they must have been trying for someone else or I’d be blind rather than just in pain. He blinked repeatedly to try to clear away the spots.
Near apogee he felt the plane shudder as it released a pair of cluster bombs. Those continued upward for a space, as he, stick still pulled to his gut, completed his loop. He pushed forward, toward the first of the bridges, as twin bursts of firecrackers behind him said that, if nothing else, his bombs had managed to hit the ground. I’ll be happy if they’ll just shake the gunners a bit.
“There’s some secondaries down below, south side of the river. I’d say you got at least one, Squadron Commander.”
No time for self-congratulations. Halpence could see the bridge ahead in his display. Push-click-push-click-push-click-push-click: He selected the target, then a pair of thousand-kilo bombs, and the engagement method, which was lob. The plane showed him a window on his display and an airspeed he had to match for a perfect toss. He gave the Hurricane a little more throttle, and was rewarded with a change in image and a sort of “well-done-happy” tone.
Halpence pulled back once again on his stick, which pushed him down into his seat. The plane, itself, announced “bombs away,” at the same time as he got another radar warning. He broke hard left and dove before righting himself at an eye-popping closeness to the ground. Then he forced the plane to climb again, because the amount of small-arms fire in the form of tracers he saw rising to meet him was nothing short of ridiculous. Gentlemen, really, I appreciate the honour, but I’m not that important. Save your ammo for the ones coming behind me.
He was just beginning to feel a small touch of confidence that he might make it back to Cayuga in one piece when two things happened. The first was that the sun shone on the top balloons ahead of him. That was no problem; if anything, it made steering a safe course easier. The second was that, in the still darkened area below, he saw half a dozen very bright rockets that cut out suspiciously soon.
Oh, shit; I was hoping to avoid those. On the plus side, the lasers cease fire when their own planes are in the air.
Santa Cruz, East of Arnold Air Base, Balboa
“Two . . . one . . .”
Oh, shit, thought Tribune Ordoñez, as the rocket kicked in, propelling him and his Mosaic D fighter outward at about a forty-five-degree angle. Others, depending on the configuration of their launch positions, went almost straight upward. He counted down from there, silently, one . . . two . . . three . . . four; it’s not supposed to take fucking four!
Fortunately, the jet did kick in, continuing his climb skyward. Unfortunately, two of his pilots’ jets did not start. One continued trying to start his on his own, mixing prayer with still more devout cursing all the way down until he crashed. He never even screamed into his radio. The other didn’t try, but pulled his eject lever as soon as he realized the jet hadn’t started.
“Report,” Ordoñez ordered. The result of that was, Fuck; my own wingman rode his in. There was thus one standard pair and two singletons, counting Ordoñez, himself.
“Number Three, you’re on me.”
“Roger. Shame about Ignacio.”
“We’ll do our crying over a beer, later.”
“Roger.”
Some woman—her voice fairly dripped sex appeal—at ground control at Sixteenth Legion Headquarters reported, on the general frequency, “Half a dozen to eight enemy fighter-bombers, trying to escape the defended area after dropping their bombs. Look to the east of the balloons. Take them out or we’ll probably see them again
.”
“Ordoñez and three more Mosaics on it,” he said. Several other flights piped in with similar reports. Ordoñez counted, mentally, and came up with twenty-three Mosaics moving to intercept the Taurans.
If drachma were combat power, we’d be fucked. As is, I make it as a slight edge to us.
“Roger,” continued ground control. “Be advised, the lasers are back on weapons tight except on the arc southwest to southeast.”
“Is that all that’s tight?” asked someone from some other flight.
The woman at ground control replied, still sweetly but with an edge to her voice, “I can loosen up the lasers, again, if you like.”
The answer to that sounded most chastened, “Oh, no, no thank you, madam. Sorry, ma’am.”
More flights of Mosaics reported in and were given instructions by ground control. Ordoñez tallied up, Jesus, about two hundred and fifty of us in the air. Maybe one hundred of them or fewer. We’re going to take this round.
Ordoñez stopped his climb and turned the Mosaic over to scan the skies by the edge of the balloon barrage. He spotted them and announced, “Bandit, bandit, three-one-five, level, intercepting.”
His new wingman acknowledged and conformed, loosely, to the flight commander’s attack path. “A Hurricane, is it? I’ll go for the one after.”
“Yeah . . . missile lock . . . firing . . . shot . . .”
Another air-to-air missile shot past on a slightly different vector from his own. The target aircraft began to weave, more or less violently, while dispensing flares. Sadly, this missile was on active radar guidance, not heat seeking. It exploded in front of its target, sending out a pattern of seven continuous rods. These expanded, into somewhat irregular metal circles. The target aircraft must have passed through at least one of them, for when it emerged from behind the dense black cloud it was missing part of one wing, half the tail, and was spinning like a top.
