Strike Zone

by Dale Brown

  Granted, he was a hard worker and a decent guy, but he wasn’t first-team material. If he were, he’d’ve been in Eagles like Starship before transferring here.

  “Be advised there are now two MiG-21s off Da Nang, bearing at three-one-five,” said McNamara. The Megafortress copilot customarily kept the crew apprised of the location of other players on the field. “Climbing through eight thousand feet, accelerating—looks like they want to come say hello.”

  Like many of the members of Dreamland’s Megafortress fleet, the Pennsylvania was named for a famous battleship, in this case the venerable battlewagon Pennsylvania, a member of the Iowa class that had served after World War II. She was equipped with a powerful AWACS-style radar, which rotated in a fuselage bulge around the wing root; augmented by a phased array unit in her nose and a host of other antennas and sensors, Penn could sniff out targets five hundred miles away. She and her sisters were intended as replacements for the venerable and considerably more vulnerable E-3 AWACS Sentry, though more mods and updates were planned before the type went operational with the “regular” Air Force.

  Like Zen, Starship used a special control helmet to help him fly the robot plane; while heavier than the brain bucket he would have donned for an F-15 flight, it seemed more intuitive than the panels at the control station where he was sitting, which could also be used if he wished. Infinitely configurable, the display screen in the helmet could be divided into several panels. This allowed the pilot to simultaneously see what was in front of him, glance down at a “sitrep” of the area fed from the EB-52’s sensors, and a full array of instrument readings. Though he wasn’t yet rated to handle multiple planes, the helmet could in theory control up to four Flighthawks at a time, switching its views, sensor, and instrument data between them by voice command or keyboard toggle. Most times, Starship used a standard screen view that provided a nose camera shot in the top screen, with a sitrep at the lower left and various flight info on the right.

  The MiGs blinked in the sitrep, two red triangles flying above the gray-shadowed coastline toward the light blue ocean. Penn was about two hundred miles east of them. If they were headed here, it was because of the ground radar and a controller; their own radars were far too limited to see the Megafortress.

  And the Flighthawk was invisible to just about everybody, with the exception of Penn.

  On the far right of the sitrep, a green-hued rectangle bore the tag YUBARI. If Starship asked for the information, C3 would have looked into its memory banks and announced that Yubari was a Japanese patrol ship, carrying some surface-to-air missiles but primarily intended for antisubmarine work. She was sailing roughly a hundred miles to the east, part of the ASEAN exercises. The ship was working with an Australian cruiser, which was temporarily off the screen further east.

  “Those suckers got to be thirty years old,” said Kick, wearing a headset and standing behind him. He was referring to the MiGs, which indeed had been built before any of the men on the Flighthawk had been born.

  “The sucker we’re flying in is close to fifty,” said Zen.

  “I meant it in a good way,” said the other pilot.

  “The ground radars picked up the Megafortress and scrambled these guys to take a look,” Zen added, using a voice that sounded to Starship like the one his Philosophy 101 professor used to explain Plato’s theory that humans saw reality like shadows on a cave. “The MiGs are still picking up speed, but they’re not going to come on too much faster or they’ll end up with fuel issues. C3 has already figured out an intercept. See it Kick, on the dedicated screen?”

  “Got it.”

  “Obviously, it relies on you to know the ROEs,” said Zen, referring to the rules of engagement that governed when—and if—force could be used. “As far as the computer is concerned, war is always in order.”

  “As it should be,” said Kick.

  Brown nose.

  “Still coming at us,” said Starship. He’d told Zen he’d gotten the nickname because of his first name—Kirk, as in James T. Kirk, the commander of the starship Enterprise. That was partly true—his parents had been serious Trekkies, and had the show in mind when they named him. But he’d actually earned the nickname during flight training for rashly predicting that he would pilot the space shuttle or its successor someday.

  A prediction he meant to make good on.

  “Mission commander’s call on how to proceed,” said Zen, still in instructor mode. “On a typical radar mission, the profile we’re following, your job is going to be to run interference. But the pilot of the EB-52 is going to have to balance the situation. Let’s say you have two bandits. If they’re hostile and coming at you, he may be under orders to get the hell out of there. Never mind that a Flighthawk could take them in a snap.”

  Zen paused. Starship knew the major was speaking from experience—he had a lot of notches on his belt.

  “What you don’t want to do is put the Flighthawks in a position where they’re going to get deadheaded,” said Zen. “So you keep with what the EB-52 is doing.”

  Deadheaded meant that the command link had been severed. When that happened, the Flighthawk would revert to a preprogrammed mode and fly back toward the mother ship. It happened just beyond twenty-five miles, depending on the flight conditions. Because the U/MFs were so maneuverable and the EB-52 was flying its own course, it could happen relatively easily in combat.

  But loss of a connection was the ultimate spanking, and Starship meant to avoid it. He was currently fifteen miles ahead of Penn, accelerating slightly.

  “Zen, they’re going to afterburners,” said Major Merce Alou, the Penn’s pilot. The pilot’s decision to communicate the information signaled that he was concerned about the situation.

  “Roger that. I think we can hold on course,” Zen told him. “We’re plotting an intercept.”

  “Roger that. We’re monitoring them up here. They’re not targeting us at this time.”

  “You get all that?” Zen asked Starship.

  “Yup,” said Starship. He had the Flighthawk at 27,000 feet on a direct line toward the lead MiG; they were now closing to fifty miles. “If this were an F-15, I could take them out in sixty seconds.”

  “Yeah, what’s a little court-martial for creating an international incident?” said Kick.

  “What do you think of what the computer is suggesting?” asked Zen.

  “It has me slashing down and getting that lead plane, then whipping back for the second in one swoop,” said Starship. “Awful optimistic with a cannon.”

  “Yeah, especially for you,” said Kick.

  “Hey, I’ve seen you on the range, Mr. Marksman,” snapped Starship. “They put you in a Hog so the bullets would be big enough that you couldn’t miss.”

  “It is optimistic. The computer thinks it never misses. It’s almost right,” added Zen. “But the thing here is that it’s figuring that the MiGs will stay on course. You can tell it to anticipate what they’ll do, and it’ll give you more options.”

  “I thought I shouldn’t do that because we’re not in attack mode,” said Starship. He also felt that he was a bit beyond taking combat cues from a computer. That was okay for Kick, whose cockpit time had been spent largely in a ground-attack plane. Starship’s entire training had been for air-to-air combat, and he’d flown against MiG-21s in numerous exercises.

  Of course, he’d never gotten this close to real enemy fighters in an F-15.

  Not that the Vietnamese MiGs were the enemy. They had as much right to be here as he did.

  Starship checked his airspeed and heading carefully, trying to will away the dry taste in his mouth. He could feel Kick hovering over his shoulder, waiting for the chance to jump in.

  “They’re not acknowledging,” said Alou after he hailed them, first in English, then with the help of the translation module in the EB-52’s computer. He tried again, giving the MiGs his bearing and location, emphasizing that he was in international waters and on a peaceful mission.

&nbs
p; The MiGs still didn’t respond.

  “Let’s give them a Dreamland welcome,” Zen told Starship.

  Starship took a breath, then flicked the control stick left. The U/MF tipped its wing and whipped downward, its speed ramping toward Mach 1.

  The odd thing was the feel. Rather than having his stomach pushing against his rib cage, it stayed perfectly calm and centered in the middle of his body. The disjunction between the Flighthawk and the Megafortress was one of the hardest things for the pilot to get used to.

  Zen had warned him about that.

  “Flares,” said the Flighthawk pilot. He kicked out flares normally intended for deking heat-seeking missiles, making himself clearly visible to the Vietnamese fighters, who were now roughly two miles away.

  The Vietnamese pilots reacted immediately, turning together to the north, possibly convinced they were seeing UFOs or the fiery manifestation of a Buddhist god.

  “Stay on your game plan,” coached Zen.

  Starship realized he’d started to pull up a little too sharply. He easily compensated, but he felt apprehensive nonetheless; Kick was standing behind him, after all, taking mental notes.

  Even an F-15C Eagle would have had trouble climbing back and turning as tightly as Starship’s Flighthawk as he whipped his plane onto the tail of the opposing flight, aiming to paint the enemy cockpit with his shadow.

  Not enemy. Not enemy, he reminded himself. Relax.

  “How long do you want me to sit here?” he asked Zen.

  “Break off once they turn,” said Zen. “There you go,” he added as the first MiG changed direction. “Come on back to Penn. They look homeward bound.”

  “Roger that.”

  Aboard the Dragon Prince, South China Sea

  1506

  PROFESSOR AI HIRA Bai monitored the communist MiGs as they circled northward, away from the American Megafortress. The planes were more than one hundred miles from his own UAV, the Dragon, well out of range of its onboard sensors. To see them, he would ordinarily have had to rely on the limited data fed from the buoy network that helped guide the small robot plane, but the ASEAN maneuvers provided better opportunities.

  The ships involved in the exercise were testing links that allowed data from one ship to be shared among the entire task force over a wide area. Since Professor Ai had been able to tap into an Australian frigate’s communications system, he too had a full data set that included wide-ranging radar coverage courtesy of two Japanese Aegis-equipped destroyers.

  Ai watched the screen with fascination. He was interested in the performance of the Flighthawk, though this was difficult to ascertain from the radar data, even as the robot plane passed almost directly overhead of one of the ships. The craft was clearly faster and more maneuverable than his own plane. Its data flow with the mother ship, of course, was extremely rich—he’d known that since their long-range intercepts of the signals. He would have given much to be able to decode the information that passed between them.

  On the other hand, his own invention was not without its advantages. The buoy and satellite system that relayed its control signals allowed him to fly the aircraft far beyond its remote station—although in some circumstances there was a noticeable lag as the commands were transmitted. And his plane was not only stealthier, but its signal carrier included what he called a “mocking device” that could spit back bits of intercepted code to confuse a nearby Elint gatherer.

  “Should we engage?” asked Kuo, who was helping fly the UAV.

  “No,” said Professor Ai. “Not today. Let us simply observe and see what our friends do. We may have only one chance, and we must choose it wisely.”

  Aboard Penn, South China Sea

  1538

  STARSHIP HAD JUST traded places with Kick when the pair of Chinese fighters appeared. These were Shenyang J-8IIs, more formidable than the ancient MiGs the Vietnamese had sent, but they too made a rather pedestrian and predictable approach, flying a routine intercept about fifty miles east of Guangdong.

  “Same routine as Brother Starship,” Zen told Kick.

  Starship tensed, even though he knew Zen meant it as a joke.

  Kick started his move about six thousand feet above the interceptors, rolling into a banking turn that would take him across their course. But they broke before he went for his flares, apparently in response to the Megafortress pilot’s hail. Kick held on to his disposables and began to climb again, intending to circle back close to the Megafortress until it was clear what the Chinese were doing.

  Conservative move, Starship thought. He would have tucked back toward them and hit the gas.

  “They’re looking for you,” Zen told the two lieutenants. “They know the Megafortresses fly with U/MF escorts. They want to draw you out.”

  “What should I do?” Kick asked.

  “Give me the controls,” said Starship without missing a beat.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Wait until they come out of that turn,” said Zen. “They aren’t particularly maneuverable, and it’ll be obvious where they intend to go. You’ve got good position.”

  One of the J-8s—in some respects it was a supersized J-7, itself a kind of new and improved MiG-21—swung into a wide arc, trying to get nose on nose for the Megafortress, which the computer’s dotted line showed would happen at about sixty miles away. The other plane ducked down toward the waves heading in the opposite direction.

  “Trying to get lost in the clutter,” suggested Starship. “Ain’t gonna happen.”

  The powerful gear aboard Penn could track him right to the water, and probably a few fathoms below.

  “So what should Kick do?” Zen asked.

  “I’d go for the snake, get in his nose, show him there’s no hope,” said Kick.

  “I wouldn’t,” offered Starship.

  “Why not?” asked Zen.

  “Because first of all, dropping down like that, he’s going to have an impossible climb before he can deal with us,” said Starship. He pointed over at Zen’s screen. “Even if he goes to his afterburner when he’s in position, he’s going to be way gonzo in front there. You can splash number one, then come for number two.”

  “We’re not splashing anyone today,” said Zen. “Just remember that.”

  Starship felt his face redden.

  “I think Starship’s right,” Kick told Zen.

  “Well then make sure the Megafortress knows what you’re doing,” said Zen, implicitly agreeing.

  ZEN WATCHED KICK slash across the Chinese Pilot’s nose, timing his maneuver to match a jink east by Penn. It came off well, the Chinese interceptor turning to the right—an instinctive move that widened the gap between him and his ostensible target.

  “Okay, so how’d we know he was going to go right?” Zen asked.

  “We didn’t,” said Kick.

  “Well, most pilots do,” said Starship.

  “Western pilots, maybe,” said Zen, still playing teacher. “But you have something to go on beyond that.”

  “He moved that way earlier,” said Starship. “Plus it takes him closer to his base.”

  “Yeah,” said Kick, getting it.

  Zen said nothing as the Flighthawk pilot brought his plane around to intercept the second J-8, which as predicted was climbing off the deck, throttle nailed to the afterburner slot. He’d turned into him a little too soon, probably nervous about retaining his connection to Pennsylvania, which of course was moving in the opposite direction.

  It wasn’t exactly a huge mistake, but it was enough to convince Zen that he’d put Starship in the pilot’s seat tomorrow. Lieutenant Andrews was a somewhat better pilot and had better tactical instincts as well—possibly a function of his time in Eagles. The difference between the two men would probably disappear in a few weeks’ time, but for now it was enough to make Starship the clear choice.

  As the second J-8 jock pulled off, Pennsylvania cut to the south, having reached the end of its practice search track. Zen watched as Kick rode the Flightha
wk up through the clouds toward the mother ship.

  “Not too quick. Hang back between the Megafortress and the J-8s,” Zen told Kick.

  “I know,” snapped the pilot.

  “Relax, Kick,” said Zen.

  A warning tone bleeped in the headsets.

  “RWR,” said Kick. “Wow—they’re trying to spike us.”

  Zen’s screen showed that the Chinese planes had activated their targeting radars. The planes carried PL-7A homers—semiactive radar missiles—but they had almost no hope of hitting the Flighthawk at what was now close to fifty miles. Nor were they in position to fire on the Megafortress.

  Maybe they were newbies too.

  “That’s a hostile act,” said Starship. “I’d splash him.”

  “You can’t splash someone because they turn their radar on you,” said Kick.

  “That’s not an air traffic control radar,” said Starship. “That’s weapons, baby. Hostile act, per ROE.”

  “Radar’s off,” said Zen.

  “What was he doing?” asked Kick.

  “Busting your chops,” said Zen.

  “Why?” asked Starship.

  Zen laughed.

  “We could’ve spun around, targeted him ourselves.” The lieutenant seemed indignant. “I could have shot him down.”

  “Well, from his point of view, he could have shot you down,” said Zen. “The Chinese pilots like to push things to the limit. I’ve dealt with these jokers before. Believe me, that’s nothing. They’ll do a lot worse tomorrow.”

  “How will I know whether they’re serious or not?” asked Starship.

  “My call as mission commander. No matter who is flying the Flighthawk,” Zen added, emphasizing that he hadn’t made his decision yet.

  Or at least not announced it.

  “Good time to tank?” asked Kick.

  “Yup. You think you can do better than Starship?”

  “I made it on the first try.”

  “There’s always room for improvement,” said Zen.

  Brunei

  1900