Razor's Edge d-3

by Dale Brown

  “I’m not sure I follow,” said Dog.

  “Tecumseh, how much do you know about Razor?”

  In any given week, ten or twelve of the pieces of paper that came across his desk dealt with Razor, the favored nickname for the S-500 mobile deuterium chemical laser system. Ground-based, it was being developed as an antiaircraft weapon and had an accurate range of roughly three hundred miles. Aside from some niggling problems in the cooling system and some glitches in the targeting computer and radar, the system was ready for production. Indeed, Dreamland was slated to receive some of the first production units for its own air defense system any day now.

  “I know a little about it,” said Dog.

  “My suspicion is that the planes were taken out by a clone. It would account for the fact that the radars weren’t on long enough for a missile to acquire the target. The damage is consistent with a Razorlike weapon.”

  “Everything I’ve heard points to missiles.”

  “Everything you’ve heard is driven by CIA estimates and conventional thinking,” said Elliott. “The problem is, no one believes Saddam has a laser, so naturally they’re looking for something else.”

  Deuterium lasers were cutting-edge weapons, and it was difficult to believe a third world country like Iraq could develop them or even support them. Then again, few people had believed Iraq had a nuclear weapons program until the Gulf War and subsequent inspections.

  “If this were the Iranians or the Chinese,” continued Elliott, “everyone would connect the dots. Let me let you talk to someone who was there.”

  Before Dog could say anything, Mack Smith came on the line.

  “Hey, Colonel, how’s the weather back there?”

  “Mack?”

  “Hi, Colonel. I bet you’re wondering why I’m not in Brussels. General Elliott borrowed me. He’s on some sort of task force thing, investigating a shoot-down, and since that’s my area of expertise, I hopped right to it.”

  Dog rolled his eyes. Elliott obviously said something to Mack, and Mack’s voice became somewhat more businesslike.

  “So what do you want to know, sir?” asked Mack. “I’ll give you the whole layout. I saw it. Wing came off clean.

  Has to be a laser. Iraqis must have stolen it.”

  “Did you take pictures, Mack?”

  “Yes, sir. Being processed now. CIA has its head up its ass, but what else is new, right?”

  Elliott took back the phone. “You know Major Smith,”

  he said, in a tone one might use when referring to a way-ward child.

  “Yes,” said Dog. “I’d like to get some of my people on this.”

  “I agree,” said Elliott. “Dr. Jansen—”

  “Jansen’s no longer here, I’m afraid,” said Dog. Jansen had headed the Razor development team at Dreamland.

  “I’ll have to check with Dr. Rubeo to get the people together. If we could look at the damage ourselves—”

  “Wreckage was blown up in the tangle Mack got involved in,” said Elliott. “Some of the people from Liver-more who worked on high-energy weapons have been analyzing it for the CIA.”

  “And they don’t think it was a laser?”

  “They hem and they haw. The NSA has been picking up information about new radars, and the Iraqis have been working on adapting the SA-2,” added Elliott.

  “What’s CentCom’s opinion?”

  “Their intelligence people are split. There were a lot of missiles in the air, and at one point the AWACS does seem to pick up a contact near the F-16. On this other shootdown, the AWACS had moved off station and the F-15s were temporarily out of range. Heads are rolling on that.” Elliott’s voice had a certain snap to it, the quick un-derstatement a commander used to indicate someone down the line had screwed up royally. “Their view is that it’s irrelevant to their planning — they have to proceed no matter what the threat. Saddam can’t get away with this.”

  Dog agreed that CentCom had to press its attacks, but a weapon like Razor changed the tactical situation a great deal. Razor had considerably more range and accuracy than conventional antiaircraft weapons, and defeating it was much more difficult. Most SAMs would be neutralized by jamming their radar. In Razor’s case, however, that was problematic. The jammer itself was essentially a target beacon, alerting a sophisticated detection system to the plane’s location, giving it all the coordinates needed to fire; once the weapon was fired the electronic countermeasures were beside the point — the ray worked essentially instantaneously. On the other hand, waiting to turn the ECMs on until the laser’s targeting radar became active was nearly as dangerous. In theory, though not yet in practice, Razor could work on a single return — by the time the radar was detected, it had fired. Other detection systems, including infrared and microwave located far from the laser itself, could also be used to give the weapon targeting data, making it even more difficult to defeat.

  But he knew there was no way Saddam could manage the sophistication needed to develop such a complicated weapon, let alone field it. He couldn’t even build a secure phone system.

  “Is ISA involved?” asked Dog.

  “No. We’re up to our ears with China and the rest of the Middle East right now. This is CentCom’s show. Things are ramping up quickly here, Colonel,” said Elliott. “I wanted you to know what you might be up against. The Megafortresses would be prime targets.”

  Dog leaned back in the chair. The seat, the desk, everything in the office had once belonged to Brad Elliott. He’d built this place, fashioned it into a high-tech center comparable to the fabled Lockheed Skunk Works, maybe even Los Alamos, if you adjusted for the difference in budgets and the times.

  Then he’d been kicked out, sacrificed because of politics. No, not entirely, Dog amended. Elliott did bear some responsibility for the so-called Day of the Cheetah spy scandal, if only because he was sitting at this desk when it happened.

  He’d landed on his feet with ISA, and yet …

  “I appreciate the information, General,” Dog told him.

  “I’m going to take it under advisement.”

  “I don’t want our people, your people, getting surprised,” said Elliott.

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Dog, sharper than he intended.

  Elliott said nothing. It occurred to Dog that the retired general had probably had a hand in getting the Whiplash order issued — in fact, it may have been the reason he’d been sent to investigate in the first place.

  “Thank you, General,” Dog told him. “I appreciate the heads-up.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The line went dead. Dog keyed his phone. “Ax, get Rubeo over here. I need to talk to him.”

  “Dr. Ray is on his way,” said Ax. “How ’bout lunch?”

  “How’d you know I wanted to talk to him?”

  “Musta been a coincidence,” said the chief master sergeant. “Ham or roast beef?”

  “Neither,” said Dog.

  “Yeah, I know you want a BLT. I was just testing you.”

  Dog was tempted to call Ax’s bluff by saying he’d have something completely different, but before he could, there was a knock on the door and an airman entered with a tray.

  “Ax,” said Dog, still on the phone, “if—”

  “Light on the mayo, easy on the burn,” said the chief, sounding a little like a short-order cook. “Anything else, Colonel?”

  Chapter 29

  Incirlik

  28 May 1997

  0700

  Torbin dressed quickly and then headed over to the squadron ready room, skipping breakfast. Though he’d managed nearly six hours of sleep, his body felt as if he’d spent the time driving a jackhammer into several yards of reinforced concrete. He walked with his head slightly bent, nodding as others passed without actually looking at them. He’d gotten a few steps into the building when a lieutenant called his name and told him that General Harding wanted to talk to him.

  Harding was in charge of the wing Glory B was ass
igned to. Torbin didn’t know where his office was and had to ask for directions.

  “General, I’m Captain Dolk,” said Torbin when he finally arrived. He stood in the doorway of the office, one hand on the doorjamb.

  “Come in, Captain. Close the door, please.”

  The general began talking before Torbin sat. The first few words blurred together — rough out there, all hell breaking loose, a difficult job. “The Phantom is an old airframe,” continued the general. “I used to fly them myself, back in the Stone Age.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Torbin.

  “Things have changed tremendously. Hell, we’re using AWACS, standoff weapons, GPS — we’re even going to have a pair of Megafortresses helping out. The Wild Weasel mission belongs to an earlier era.”

  He thinks I fucked up, Torbin realized.

  “These days, we can jam radars with ease. Locate ’em, knock ’em out before they turn on. That’s the way to go.

  Much safer than waiting for them to turn on. I have a pair of Spark Varks and a Compass Call en route.”

  “General, we can still do the job.”

  Harding drew himself up in the chair and held his round face slightly to the side. His cheeks, ruddy to begin with, grew redder. “There’s no mission for you today, son. You’re to stand by until further notice.”

  Torbin waited for the general to continue — to ball him out, to say he screwed up, to call him an idiot. But he didn’t.

  “I didn’t screw up, sir,” said Torbin finally. “I didn’t.

  My pilot didn’t and I didn’t.”

  Harding stared at him. He didn’t frown, but he sure didn’t smile. He just stared.

  “I’ll do anything I can,” said Torbin finally. “Anything.

  The radars that came on, the missiles — they were too late and too far to hit those F-15s.”

  “I appreciate your sentiments,” said Harding.

  Torbin felt the urge to smash something, kick the door or punch the wall. He wanted to rage: No way I screwed up! No stinking way!

  But he took control of himself, nodded to the general, then walked slowly from the office.

  Chapter 30

  Aboard Quicksilver, over southeastern Turkey 1300

  Zen felt a sudden shock of displacement as the Flighthawk slipped away from the Megafortress, launching herself as the mothership rose on the stiff wind’s eddy. No matter how many times he did this, it still took a moment to adjust to the difference between what his body felt and what his eyes and brain told him it should feel.

  And then he was in the Flighthawk, seeing and feeling the plane through his control helmet and joystick. He fingered the speed slider and nudged toward the rift in the peaks where the scratch strip sat.

  “Systems in the green,” said Fentress, monitoring the flight from his station next to Zen.

  “Thanks.” Zen pushed the Flighthawk downward against the violent and shifting winds. A thick layer of clouds sat between the Flighthawk and the airstrip, but the synthesized view in his screen showed every indentation in the rocks and even gave a fairly accurate rendering of the brownish-gray concrete that formed the landing area.

  It looked to be in much better shape than they’d expected.

  Still, even if Danny’s plan worked, the strip was going to be on the narrow side. Zen slid the Flighthawk into a bank, gliding five thousand feet above the shallow ridge that formed the main obstacle to lengthening the runway.

  “I’m going to get under the clouds so we can get the precise measurements,” he told Breanna over the interphone.

  “Go for it.”

  “Looks narrow down there, Bree,” he added.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  Zen slipped under the clouds and manually selected the video feed for his main display. Mountaintops spread out on the horizon, giants sleeping beneath green and brown mottled blankets.

  “Bree could slide pickles into an olive jar,” said Chris Ferris, the copilot.

  “Watch your language,” joked Breanna.

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it,” Zen said. “I said it would be tight.”

  “I thought you slept on the way over,” said Breanna.

  “I did. Why?”

  “You sound a little testy.”

  “Airspeed dropping,” said Fentress.

  “No shit,” snapped Zen, turning his full attention back to his plane. Indicated airspeed had nudged below 300 knots. He backed his power off even more, letting it slide through 250. The small-winged U/MF became in-creasingly unstable as its speed dropped, but Zen needed the slow speed so they could get a good read on the target area. “Computer, begin dimension survey as programmed.”

  “Computer,” acknowledged the Flighthawk’s C3 flight system. “Dimension survey initiated.”

  “Captain Fentress, give the feed to the flight deck,” said Zen.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Fentress, apparently trying to joke — a new development that Zen had to leave unremarked, as the Flighthawk hit a gnarly gust of wind. He ramped up thrust but was nudged off course and had to start the whole run over again.

  “If we had more altitude, I could get a better angle for Captain Freah,” said Fentress, who was giving Freah the feed so he could plot his jump after the missiles did their work. “Save some time.”

  “Curly, let me fly my plane, okay? We’ll do it like we rehearsed.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fentress.

  They were silent until he reached the end of the runway area and began recovering.

  “We’ve got it up here, Jeff,” said Breanna. “Glitch downloading the targeting data to the missiles. Take us a minute.”

  “Flighthawk commander acknowledges.”

  “Getting awful formal,” said his wife.

  “Just doing my job, Quicksilver leader.”

  Breanna didn’t answer. Chris Ferris marked the location on the Megafortress’s automated targeting system, then opened the bomb bay doors. The two hand-built missiles whose noses looked like spherical clusters glued together sat on a massive rotating bomb rack in the rear of the plane.

  Ferris gave a countdown to launch, handing the process to the computer at five seconds. A sharp metallic trrrrshhhhh sounded over the interphone circuit as the first missile launched; 3.2 seconds later the second tore away.

  “Ground wire loose somewhere,” said Louis Garcia, who was sitting in the rear bay. “Going to have to fix that when we get down.”

  “Three seconds to target,” said Ferris. “Two, one—”

  Chapter 31

  Over southeastern Turkey

  1310

  When the back door of the MC-17 opened, the temperature inside the hold dropped dramatically. The cold bit at Captain Danny Freah’s skin despite the layers of thermals and special drop suit he wore. But at least it meant they’d be getting to work soon — the worst part of any operation was the wait.

  Danny moved his hand up to the visor of his combat helmet, clicking the control to increase the resolution on the feed he was receiving from Zen’s U/MF. A fair amount of smoke lingered from the explosion, but the weapons seemed to have done their job perfectly.

  “We’re up next,” said the transport pilot. The communications and video were piped in through a hardwire; the MC-17B/W did not yet have an internal wireless connection. “Should be good to go in zero-one minutes.”

  “Show’s under way,” Danny told the others in his team.

  “Look alive, look alive,” said Hernandez, the team jumpmaster. Though he’d already checked everyone’s equipment twice in the past five minutes, he began one last inspection.

  “First pass is for the ’dozers,” Danny said, though the reminder wasn’t necessary.

  “Sure I can’t ride one down?” asked Powder.

  “Next jump,” said Danny.

  “He just wants to make sure he gets his turn driving,”

  said Egg Reagan. “Trying to bump me.”

  “I ain’t bumpin’ you. It’s N
ursey who shouldn’t be at the wheel. You ever ride in a Humvee with him?”

  “I’m not the one who lost his license,” answered Nurse.

  “Who lost their license?” asked Danny.

  “Just a rumor,” said Powder.

  “We’re cleared,” said the MC-17B/W pilot. “Dust is settling. Okay, boys, look good.”

  One of the loadmasters near the tail ramp waved a fist in the air, then pushed a button on the thick remote control panel in his hand. The bulldozer closest to the doorway jerked forward on its skid; lights flashed above the opening. In the meantime, the MC-17 slowed dramatically, its jet engines whining and shuddering. Danny tightened his grip on the rail behind him as the plane turned herself into an elevator, gliding down ten stories in the space of a few half seconds. The two bulldozers lurched forward on their automated launch ramp. They slowed as they cleared the door, seeming to stop in midair before bobbing outward, one after another.

  Danny turned his gaze back to the top half of his visor and its feed from the Flighthawk. A lot of dust, nothing else. Then a large black rock furled into view, followed by another. As the U/MF flew past, smoke and dust started to clear and Danny saw the drogue chutes chuttering off to the right, the ’dozers sitting on the ground.

  “Fuel’s up,” said the loadmaster. Two more crates made their way toward the door. These were perfectly square. Four barrels of diesel fuel for the ’dozers, along with some hand pumps and additional equipment, were contained inside custom-made cylinders packed into the spidery interior lattice of the special shock-absorbing crates. Following the fuel were two more skids with jackhammers and assorted gear. After they were out, the MC-17 began climbing to give them a little more room for their jump.

  “Wind’s a bitch out there, boys,” said Hernandez. “Be sharp.”

  “As a pin,” said Powder.

  Danny took a breath as the yellow light came on above the door, indicating that they were almost ready. He took his place in the second line, still holding the rail as they waited for Hernandez’s signal. The seven men on the team went out practically together, two teams abreast holding hands.