As members of the Russian army’s 345th antiaircraft missile brigade, which was under contract to Iraq as mercenaries, Sergeant Zubilin and his crew had been deployed with their ZSU-23-4Shilka roughly halfway between the Turkish border and the Gomazal Valley. Their vehicle looked like a light tank with a turret containing four 23- mm cannons, each capable of firing a thousand rounds a minute. Normally aimed by a powerful radar, theShilka was a formidable weapon against low-flying aircraft.
“Yidi na khui, Kapitan!Go suck your cock, Captain!” he swore, kicking the wall in frustration. Barefoot, he stubbed his toe and hollered.
“What’s the matter?” one of his crew asked.
“Get up!” Sergeant Zubilin shouted while kicking at the bodies of his crew still wrapped in blankets. “Get up! We’ve got to man the damned guns.”
“But the radar is broken, Sergeant!”
“I know!” he yelled. “I just told that shithead captain that too. He said to man it anyhow and shoot at anything that flies by us.”
“In the middle of the night?” Boris, one of the men, complained. “How do we see? How do we aim the damn thing?”
“How the hell do I know?” Sergeant Zubilin answered as he pulled on his boots. “We merely follow orders.”
G G G
Cleo came in as low as she could, guidingMary Lou down the side of the hill. Jerry Rodell glanced out of the cockpit and cringed as the boulders zipped by. She unerringly veered left and right to avoid them.
Seconds later, they reached the bottom of the valley. Cleo began weaving up the hill madly, dashing just over the heads of the soldiers. Even though most of them scampered for cover, one or two tried to aim their rifles at the fleeting dark shape as Jerry and Cleo roared up the hill. Moments later, they reached the top and Cleo snap-rolled over the crest of the hill and through the edge of the smoke, where it barely touched the top of the valley.
“I can’t see,” she cried. Abruptly, she flicked the airplane on its side and jarred Jerry as his body pulled heavily against the restraining straps.
“What the hell?” he yelled.
“There’s something in the smoke!” she warned. An instant later, the aircraft jerked violently to the right as Cleo barely dodged something else. Jerry ducked as they flashed by it. She did it again, and yet again. At last, they were through the smoke and under it.
“Jeezus, barrage balloons!” Jerry exclaimed when he saw the cables, hundreds of them. “Goddamn barrage balloons!”
“What?” Cleo asked, confused by his reference. Now able to see the cables hanging down from the cloud of smoke, she began to thread their way through the maze, throwing Jerry around as she veered the aircraft frantically from side to side to avoid the cables.
“Barrage balloons,” Jerry replied as he braced himself. “Like from World War II. They used them to ensnare airplanes on the cables. See, there’s one over there, just below the smoke.”
About a thousand yards off to the left was what appeared to be a small blimp, complete with tail fins. However, instead of having motors and propellers to move it around, it simply floated in the air, attached firmly to the ground by a stout steel cable—a cable strong enough to do serious damage should Cleo hit one. Suddenly, the balloon burst into flames. Seconds later, another one fell from the smoke cloud in a ball of flames.
“What the?…” Jerry mumbled as he noticed the fine green streaks dancing up from the ground. “Tracers!” he shouted, “the place is filled with antiaircraft guns!”
He glanced down, but all he saw wasMary Lou ’s fuselage. “Transparent!” he called to Cleo. An instant later, he saw the threads of green tracers arching up from the ground. There were hundreds of them. But they were inaccurate, he realized. Apparently Cleo’s frantic maneuvering, combined with the special smoke screen had confused their gun- aiming radars.
“A goddamn trap, that’s what this is,” Jerry grumbled. “A mouse trap, set for us!”
Cleo banked into a seemingly impossible turn. A stream of green tracers flickered up to where they would have been. “They’re getting our range,” she warned.
“Where’s the cannon?” Jerry asked anxiously. He was more than ready to leave, except that they hadn’t completed their mission.
“Over there, under that cliff,” Cleo said.
“Where?”
“Under that cliff. I’ll highlight it in red. You can’t see it from where we are now, but I saw its doors.”
A transparent red dot covered part of the cliff face on the east side of the valley. Jerry noticed several gravel roads leading to the site. However, there were many roads and paths in the valley. Thus, the roads by themselves were not adequate identification.
“Do you have its location pinpointed?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “I’ll turn back to west side of the valley and see if I can get a laser—oh, fuck, that isn’t going to work!”
“What?”
“You can’t see them, but they have the whole damn valley illuminated with lasers. Here, I’ll show you.”
Jerry looked down and saw what Cleo meant. She had transcribed the infrared light of the lasers into a blue color. Blue dots were dancing all over the west side of the valley. Any laser-guided bomb would surely be misled by the rapidly moving laser beams.
“Are you sure that they’re using the same wavelength as our laser?” he asked hopefully.
“Hell, they’re using them all,” she gasped. “It doesn’t matter what wavelength laser we use, they have at least one using that wavelength as well, and theirs are a whole lot more powerful. They’ve got us completely jammed. Our bombs are guaranteed to miss if we try to guide them.”
“You make it sound like that we’d be better off just dropping the ordnance.”
“Hey!” Cleo exclaimed. “That’s it! I can lock the controls on the bombs’ guidance systems and drop them.”
“Are you crazy? That would be like putting pickles into a barrel with your eyes closed.”
Cleo was silent for a moment. “Yes, I think that I can do it. What we need to do is put one of our bombs into the doors covering the firing port and blow them open so that I can then put the second one right down the tunnel.”
“You’re crazy,” Jerry remarked. “You’ll need a computer to do that!”
“I am a computer,” Cleo replied frostily.
“I apologize—I somehow keep forgetting. If you think you can do it, then try. And may the force be with you.”
“Huh?”
“What?”
“What you just said—something about the force.”
“Just an old movie I saw when I was a kid, except the hero turned his targeting computer off.”
“I am not a targeting computer—how crude can you be!” There was a tinge of anger in her voice.
“Cleo, if you think you can do it, do it,” Jerry said, trying to control his exasperation.
The aircraft banked sharply as Cleo dodged another steam of tracers. She weaved back and forth like a staggering drunk as she made her way to the west side of the valley. “Here we go!” she yelled as she turned.
For the first time Jerry saw the steel doors that protected the super cannon. They were recessed into the cliff so that any attacking bombs or rockets would have to be traveling almost parallel to the floor of the valley to reach them.
“That’s a tough shot,” he noted quietly.
Cleo ignored him but concentrated instead on not only making the bomb run, but also evading the now considerable flak that was drifting up from the many guns in the valley. She dived and spun to the right then left, feinting like a prizefighter moving in for the knockout. Suddenly she flew straight and level. The plane shuddered as a bomb fell.
“Number two away!” she shouted. Cleo dove at almost full power. A second later, Jerry felt the second bomb release.
“There goes number one,” she called. “Now let’s get the hell out of here!”
“You got that backwards,” Jerry observed as they flipp
ed into a vicious turn.
“What?”
“You drop bombs as number one and then two.”
“Oh,” Cleo replied with a surprised sound. “I was counting them the way they would hit. I dropped the second one first and then flew a ballistic curve so that the first bomb that I dropped second would hit the doors 5.3 seconds before the second. Understand?”
Jerry shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t give a damn if you counted in Swahili, as long as you get that goddamn cannon. Now let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t!” Cleo shouted. “I can’t see through those clouds.” She turned one way and then the other looking desperately for a way out of the trap they were in. The hole that they had come in through was now covered by solid smoke.
Meanwhile, three thousand feet below, the first of the bombs smashed into the steel doors. The tenth of a second delay fuse allowed it to penetrate almost all the way through the half-meter of solid steel before exploding. The blast did the rest, blowing a five-meter diameter hole through the door. Five seconds later, the second bomb hit slightly off center and so glanced on the edge of the hole. Timed with a ten- second-delay fuse, it bounced and caromed off the walls of the tunnel and the cannon itself until it hit the bottom. Once there, it smashed into the blast-proof doors leading to the powder magazine. The sheer inertia of the bomb smashed them open. The gunners saw what had happened and began to run. Two seconds later, it exploded.
The blast ripped the blast-proof doors apart like a child’s toy. Fiery gases flashed down the tunnel to the powder magazine where they licked at the stacks of bagged propellant destined to fire the Javelins toward Israel. Microseconds later, the powder ignited.
“Good god, what was that!” Jerry exclaimed when he saw the flame erupt from the cannon’s port. The entire magazine had exploded in one massive detonation and blew theNew Babylon cannon and its ponderous steel doors out over the valley. The jet of flame itself reached out for hundreds of meters, burning the cables of the barrage balloons in its way as though they were mere threads.
“I got it,” Cleo replied matter-of-factly. “I said I would.”
“Jeezus, you sure did,” Jerry uttered in amazement while he watched the spectacle. “There’s nothing left.”
They circled the valley. The antiaircraft fire had ceased. The explosion had knocked many of the gunners senseless. Others had simply stopped firing to watch in awe. A few seconds later, the rumbling of the explosion shook the aircraft, waking Jerry from his preoccupation. It was then he noticed that the entire mountain had collapsed, sealing whatever was left of theNew Babylon cannon and its deadly missiles under thousands of tons of rock.
“Look! The tunnel collapsed!” he cried. “The goddamn tunnel collapsed!”
“Lock-on!” Cleo called.
Jerry glanced to his left and saw the bright glow of a missile launch. The defenders were recovering their wits. The missile climbed for a few seconds and then hit one of the cables and exploded. Two more missiles shot off their launchers and started to climb. This time, both seemed destined to reach their target.
“Time to leave, Cleo,” he announced as he watched the missiles anxiously.
“But I can’t see in that cloud. We’re sure to hit one of those cables,” she protested.
“I’ve got it!” He grabbed the flight controls for the first time. “And do what I want without any arguments, Cleo,” he added, shoving the throttles to full afterburner and yanking the stick back. An instant later, they were rocketing straight up into the cloud. First one dark image and then another flashed by as they narrowly missed two of the balloons. A second later, the two missiles chasing them self-destructed when they lost their quarry in the thick smoke.
“MiGs,” Cleo called the instant they punched through the top of the cloud.
“How many?” Jerry demanded. He glanced around in a near panic. He didn’t see them yet, but he knew that if Cleo said that they were there, they were.
“Eight,” she told him. “MiG-39s.”
Two sets of four red dots appeared on the canopy image screens. One set of the MiGs was between them and the border.
Chapter Forty-three
“Voy on!There he is!” Major Viktor Yevseyevich Chebrikov heard Captain Fedotov call over the radio. “It just popped out of the smoke, like a turd.”
Major Chebrikov studied the smoke cloud about twenty kilometers away and saw the American aircraft ascending vertically. Even though he was at five thousand meters, it took the American only a few seconds to reach his altitude. The plane suddenly leveled off and headed toward Chebrikov and his flight of four MiG-39s. He smiled. It would be an easy kill.
“Captain Fedotov,” he called over the radio, “since you saw it first, you may have the first shot.”
An instant later, Fedotov and his wingman peeled off and began their attack.
“Here come the first two,” Cleo warned. She lined upMary Lou ’s nose on the first of the attacking MiGs. “Oh, fuck! Our cannon is jammed.”
“Jammed?”
“Yes—like in non-operational.”
“Clear it!”
“I can’t. I’ve already tried.”
“Oh, shit,” Jerry murmured.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!” she barked.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Shooting at him, if our goddamn cannon worked,” she replied bitterly.
The first MiG fired its cannon. Cleo easily rolled out of the way.
“Khyi s nim!Screw him!” Fedotov snarled when he saw how easily the American had avoided his cannon fire. The strange-looking airplane with its forward-swept wings had been lined up perfectly in his gunsight. However, the instant he touched the trigger, it dodged out of the way in an impossible turn.
“Flight two, attack,” Major Chebrikov called over the radio. Even though he would like to have had his own chance at the American, his orders were precise. He was to shoot down the American airplane at any cost, and do it as quickly as possible. The American was turning continuously, trapped between his two flights of four MiG-39s each. Captain Pankratov, the second flight leader, and his wing man peeled off to make their run from behind the American, while Major Chebrikov and his wing man did the same from the front.
“Here they come,” Jerry called needlessly.
“Their missile guidance radar is on,” Cleo said. “I have one lock-on, two, now three … all four have us, Colonel.”
“Well, do something!” he shouted.
“Launch!” she warned as Chebrikov fired aVympel R-73M missile, known in the West as the AA-11 Archer. Cleo pulled a twelve-g turn. Jerry felt his intestines twitch as she activated the neural-nexus link. The slight sensation of nausea was quickly overcome by a flood of adrenaline caused by stark-naked fear.
Although claimed by some to be capable of 50g turns and turning around to chase its target, the missile nevertheless lost its lock-on.
“So much for the media hype,” Cleo commented dryly as she and Jerry watched the missile self-destruct.
“If I only had something to shoot back with!” Cleo muttered angrily as she dodged a second missile fired by the other pair of MiGs.
Major Chebrikov realized that the attacks were futile. Although he had the American boxed up between his eight MiGs, all attempts to bring it down were thwarted with laughable ease. It was almost as if the American were playing with them. Even though they out-numbered him eight-to-one, he simply danced out of the way of every missile and bullet fired at him.
“Well,zalupa ,” he swore to himself. “If we can’t fuck you one at a time, we’ll fuck you all together.”
“They’re up to something,” Cleo warned ominously.
“What?” Jerry watched as the eight MiGs formed a circle around them. Suddenly, the MiGs turned toward them in unison.
“Gang bang time,” Jerry remarked when he realized that they were going to make a mass attack. “They’re going to fill the sky with missiles,” he added quickly. A few moments late
r, his prophecy came true. Four of the MiGs launched a missile in unison.
“They got us,” Cleo called an instant later. “I can’t dodge them all.”
“Bullshit!”
“See,” she answered. Cleo filled the screens around Jerry with the projected paths of all the rockets and her possible evasive maneuvers. She could avoid three, but only at the cost of veering into the path of the fourth.
“Do it anyhow,” he ordered. “What’s the max-g’s you can pull?”
“Twelve with you aboard,” she replied.
“Without me?”
“Fifteen g’s.”
“GODDAMNIT!” Jerry screamed angrily. “Forget the goddamn rule book and do what the fuck it takes to survive. If it takes fifteen g’s to survive, pull the fifteen fucking g’s! NOW DO IT!”
Cleo snapped the ATASF into an impossible-looking turn, losing the first missile, which self-destructed. An instant later, she yanked back on the controls, leaving Jerry speechless as she danced away from the second missile and then reversed in a twelve-g turn, losing the third and dashing right into the path of the fourth missile.
“I’ve got it,” Jerry yelled as he grabbed the controls for the second time. “When I shout ‘do it’, I want a fifteen-g turn. The max possible, understand?”
Major Chebrikov watched in awe as the American performed the impossible maneuvers. The strange airplane just barely avoided, one after another, the missiles fired at him. Chebrikov smirked when he saw his adversary finally make a mistake. The American flew right into the path of the last missile.
Abruptly, the enemy plane veered directly toward Chebrikov. Unlike the earlier maneuvers, this turn was slow, almost sloppy. The fourth and last missile easily followed the American. Chebrikov grinned while he watched it quickly close the gap between its target.
The Espionage Game Page 36
