Thunderbolt

by M. L. Buchman

  Arturo could only shake his head in surprise. Civilians were able to leap so effortlessly from the ridiculous to the relevant. Before all his years of training in regimented military thinking, had he been able to think that way?

  “Holly?” Miranda asked softly.

  “Control lines look clean. There are a couple of crucial panels that we can’t see behind until we get her up out of the dirt, but otherwise clean. I’m ready to unplant this bird and get it back to a hangar.”

  “What are we missing?” Again, such a simple-seeming question from Miranda.

  She was five-four, weighed about the same as an M134 minigun without the mount or ammo, and appeared otherwise non-descript with mouse-brown hair.

  Yet her mind was sharper than a honed blade. And she also had absolute control of her team, just not in any way that he could identify.

  “No microburst weather systems,” Jeremy stated.

  “No obvious broken control surfaces,” Holly spoke up.

  “The only pilot I’ve met less likely to be flustered by a mishap is probably you,” Mike aimed a smile at Miranda. “I tried to mess him up and couldn’t.”

  That assessment had Arturo turning to study Mike again. Clearly he’d found out things that Arturo had never intended to say, including how Shara had tried to take him for all he was worth.

  But perhaps Mike had been testing and learning about him in ways Arturo hadn’t anticipated? If so, what did it say about Miranda that Mike Munroe had said Miranda was even harder to fluster than he was?

  Twenty years in the A-10s, he knew them cold and had always prided himself on flying them that way. In his opinion, those were the best type of pilots. Not Maverick, but Iceman was the proper Top Gun. Ice cold and never screw up; just wear ’em down.

  He now understood that was how Miranda dealt with crashes.

  Not just with control, but with a chill brilliance.

  He liked that.

  A lot.

  11

  Keep chill, dude. Keep chill.

  Billy chanted the mantra to himself.

  He wanted to rip off the simulation’s heavy goggles that were tracking his eye movement—and probably the tightness of his shoes and whether he was wishing he’d had a club sandwich instead of a double serving of lasagna for lunch, which was sitting pretty heavy.

  But that wouldn’t be chill.

  Focus on the moment.

  So, he was on his own.

  Billy knew that the eye scanner wasn’t the only thing monitoring his actions and transmissions. He wasn’t sitting in an A-10 Thunderbolt II. He, at least, remembered that Lt. Colonel Kiley would be listening and assessing as well.

  Well, if the flight leader wasn’t worried about fifth-gen stealth fighters sneaking up on him, Billy still was.

  If there really were Su-57s in the area, what would be the best way to spot them? If they were as stealthy as intelligence briefings claimed, he wasn’t going to pick them up on radar until he’d already stood out like a sore thumb on theirs.

  Think, man. Think.

  Su-57s were painted to blend in if viewed from above. If the Su-57s were even five thousand feet below the flight of Lightning IIs, they’d be tough to spot against the desert background.

  The only realistic way to spot them was visually. Against the rough earth, much less likely. They’d be far easier to see as motion against the perfect blue backdrop of the simulated Syrian sky.

  To see them sooner?

  Get down.

  He nosed over into a steep dive.

  Billy kept glancing up, but all he could see was his own flight of five.

  Not a word from Major Ass-face. Who probably wished Billy would “Go fuck yourself, Rook.”

  Billy kept his thoughts about offering a basic anatomy lesson to himself.

  He’d drop ten thousand feet. Two miles down and still six above the Syrian countryside.

  Still nothing above except the original two blips.

  He’d descend down another three miles, then—

  Something snagged his attention.

  What?

  What had changed?

  His instrument display revealed nothing. Both engines running clean. Hydraulics at full pressure.

  Nothing from the threat detector.

  The background roar of the simulated A-10 remained unchanged over his headphones.

  No, something outside the aircraft.

  Again, nothing high. Not even a sun-glint off a canopy.

  Down below. A pair of gray-white specs slashing across the black background of the Es Safa basaltic flows.

  Su-57s? If so, he’d need help from above and he’d need it fast.

  He tapped the zoom control on the flat LED of his targeting screen.

  Not Su-57s. The wing configuration was wrong. But he knew what these were.

  Su-25 Frogfoots. Frogfeet?

  Ground assault aircraft. Appropriately enough—near the ground.

  Rules of engagement said no firing before he was fired upon.

  But it didn’t say a word about scaring the shit out of some Ruskies. Time to show just what his plane could do.

  A final glance aloft.

  “Flight lead. This is Alpha-one pursuing two bogies at two o’clock.”

  No response, but at least he was doing his damned job.

  He nosed his A-10 Thunderbolt II the rest of the way over until he was plummeting straight down.

  A vertical mile later, and not a goddamn word from on high.

  “By the way, flight lead, you have a pair of Su-57s coming up fast on your six.” He’d spotted them on his last glance aloft—their distinctive wing configuration and white edging on the paint job made them easily identifiable once spotted.

  Not even a squeak from above.

  Well, fuck them all.

  He enjoyed the rest of the ride down toward the two ground-attack aircraft just swinging clear of the Es Safa.

  12

  Colonel Arturo Campos still didn’t know what to make of Miranda Chase, except that the woman was a total lunatic.

  The CH-47F Chinook he’d called for from the base had lowered a cargo cable with a four-point lifting harness already hung. They’d picked his A-10 less than ten feet above the desert when Miranda called out for them to hover in place. Near the massive twin-rotor helicopter’s load limits, that was a hard thing to do. A hover took much more power than maintaining altitude with forward motion.

  While the pilots struggled to hover stably, Chase walked directly underneath the dangling A-10 before he could grab her.

  His shout to warn her of the danger was drowned out by the sound of the pounding rotor blades.

  The Jeremy kid looked up as he hesitated for a long moment—then rushed to join her despite the obvious danger.

  She wasn’t looking up.

  Instead, she moved quickly, looking down—quartering back and forth across the slight depression his aircraft had punched into the soil.

  Near where the tail section had rested, Jeremy pointed. She nodded sharply, shed her vest, and tossed it down on the ground.

  Jeremy knelt on it, pinning it in place. Or like they were getting ready for final prayers.

  She looked up for a long moment at the aircraft dangling a bare meter above her head.

  Then, with an abrupt wave, she signaled him to dismiss the helicopter.

  He radioed for them to return to base and place guards around the aircraft once they had it on the ground.

  As soon as the helo cleared the area, he raced over to her. “Are you crazy? Standing underneath a thirteen-ton sling load and a fourteen-ton helicopter?”

  She waved a hand around her as if that explained anything, but didn’t deign to speak with him. He had no idea what the woman was thinking but she was clearly insane.

  Squatting, she eased up the edge of her vest.

  The young Jeremy shook loose a clear plastic sample bag.

  “What the hell?” But they weren’t paying any attention to him.
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  “You see it, right, mate?” The blonde Australian had arrived by his elbow.

  “All I see is a woman with a death wish. And a young punk so into hero worship that he’d follow her right off a cliff.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s quite on. Though you may be right about Jeremy. What you see is a woman who has faced death and decided that it is of no interest to her one way or the other.”

  He turned to Holly. “What do you mean by that?”

  It was one of the hardest lessons there was to teach a soldier. Only the very best Special Operations people learned that fearing death made death more rather than less likely when the margins got narrow. He’d learned it by ejecting from his aircraft—twice—and he still wasn’t comfortable with the thought.

  Fear caused hesitation. And out at the edge, hesitation meant death. That much he’d learned.

  This Holly understood that—which said even more about the quality of Miranda’s NTSB team. It made him wonder at both of their backgrounds.

  “What you should be seeing is the ground,” Holly made the same gesture that Miranda had made.

  He inspected the sand at his feet, but didn’t understand whatever these women seemed to think he was supposed to be seeing. Pancaking his jet to the ground hadn’t even particularly packed the loose soil—just plowed it up into a neat furrow.

  Except the furrow wasn’t so neat.

  The down-blast from the heavily laden departing Chinook helicopter had blown the light sands wildly the moment the wind shadow of the hanging A-10 had been moved aside. The deep furrow was still evident, but it had lost most of its definition.

  “She walked under a potentially lethal weight load because…” He couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.

  “Because,” Holly thumped him on the shoulder hard enough to hurt, “she cares that much about what causes a crash.”

  Just what had these women been through?

  He turned to watch his A-10 being carried back toward base. The Chinook had climbed to a thousand feet as it headed back toward Davis-Monthan.

  Yet even as he watched—the two aircraft separated.

  It was such a small, lazy motion.

  One moment they were connected by a long lifting wire with a cargo hook attached to a four-point sling carrying his A-10.

  The next, there was a gap and the winch cable was dancing about with the sudden load release.

  In slow motion, the two aircraft just…separated.

  Then lighter by half, the helicopter had climbed abruptly.

  And his jet, still wrapped in the lifting harness, fell from the sky.

  Two crashes in one day was apparently too much for it. His A-10 Thunderbolt II hit tail first—hard.

  Then exploded in a massive fireball that had them all ducking even though it was a mile distant.

  “The same aircraft crashing twice,” Holly commented close by his elbow. “That’s not something you see every day.”

  Cargo hook failures didn’t happen, not on helos in his command.

  At least not until now.

  13

  The Cray XC50 at the Eglin Air Force Base was running a training flight for five F-35s and a special A-10 flight.

  Deep inside a different section of the code, it had been testing the variable R14A10DAVIS for eight hours.

  The code finally tested true.

  The subroutine proceeded through the next four steps:

  Generate a one-word message.

  Deliver the word to three separate secure cellphones.

  After all three phones provided a delivery confirmation, drop the external connection.

  Finally, the subroutine erased itself and the program that had called it.

  14

  Five thousand feet and eight seconds above the pair of Su-25 Frogfeets, Lieutenant William “Poet” Blake flipped on his missile targeting computer.

  Billy could easily imagine the high squeal that would sound in the Russians’ cockpits.

  “Hi, boys. You wanna just head your sorry asses back home or do you wanna play?”

  The lead bird rolled in a sharp twist and tried to bring its guns to bear.

  It fired too soon.

  Billy was able to peel aside without a hit. As he did, he launched a pair of 70mm Hydra missiles at each aircraft.

  Number Two was too slow and lost a wing.

  The pilot ejected even as his aircraft went into a tumbling fall.

  But the lead bird had kicked a load of chaff to fool the missiles and was still after him.

  Billy banked over ninety degrees, cutting a hard turn to the right.

  Without hesitating, he slammed just as abruptly to the left.

  He’d worked this out one long night on the simulator back during Pilot Next training.

  As the S-shape crossed him ahead of the remaining Frogfoot, he released a round of flares right in front of the guy’s nose. Then, rather than continuing the turn or making an expected climb for altitude, he took advantage of his speed and twisted into a dive.

  He kept the joystick full forward, riding the edge of the Warthog negative-three g load limit. Billy imagined he could feel the blood rush to his head as his Hog swept through the downward loop that aimed him successively at the ground, upside down at the far horizon, then had him climbing straight up underneath the remaining Russian Frogfooter as it broke through his chaff wall.

  “When in doubt, overkill is the best kind of kill,” his dad used to tell him about his time flying in Desert Storm. Dad and his own A-10 Thunderbolt II had been on the team that killed over two thousand vehicles, including twenty-eight Russian-built Iraqi tanks, along the “Highway of Death” over two days in that miserable February—miserable for Saddam and his people at least.

  Billy fired off an AIM-9M air-to-air Sidewinder missile, and then lit the big cannon.

  Less than two seconds in range, but it was enough. Of the hundred rounds he fired, over fifty ripped into the belly of the Su-25 Frogfoot.

  Then the missile struck.

  Nine-point-four kilos of high-explosive dead-centered into the right-wing fuel tank.

  The plane didn’t explode.

  It shattered.

  Once he was clear, he looked back—and lost the view off the edge of the simulator screen.

  Crap! The system was so good, he’d forgotten he wasn’t flying.

  This was incredibly awesome.

  And he’d never get to fire off a six hundred-thousand-dollar missile in a real practice flight.

  Doubly awesome!

  He turned his A-10 enough to get a clear view on the simulator screen of the Su-25 moments before it crashed into one of the smaller peaks of Es Safa. No pilot ejection.

  He’d totally rocked it!

  “Splash two,” he called out on the radio. The call meant that he’d killed off two aggressors, even if they were a long way from any water in this barren land.

  No one answered, of course.

  15

  The code on the Cray XC50 supercomputer in Subbasement 2 of the AFAMS building at Eglin kept testing the variable R14A10SYR.

  It remained false.

  A new instruction was loaded into the system. The load demand had surged in other parts of the system. Several milliseconds passed before the new code was executed.

  16

  Billy looked aloft and wondered how the F-35s were doing up above.

  Certainly no one was helping him.

  All jabbering on some other frequency.

  Bastards.

  He hoped the simulation was kicking their asses—hard.

  He could climb six thousand feet per minute, which placed him seven full minutes below his flight. His own aerial battle had lasted under thirty seconds—theirs would probably be just as brief if they had to engage. He checked fuel, then began the long climb.

  Once back at altitude, he’d have less than fifteen minutes on station before he either needed a refueling tanker or to turn for home.

  No sign of any f
alling aircraft or battle flashes on high.

  Maybe they’d all bugged out, in which case he’d kill the Ass-face as soon as he was out of the sim.

  Best to climb up and see if he could help, but he’d keep an eye out below.

  Less than a thousand feet into his climb, he heard a high squeal on his threat detector.

  The tone was wrong for a Russian missile.

  But it was right for an American one.

  “Break off! Break off! This is Alpha-one that you’re targeting!” They should see that clearly on their screen.

  The tone didn’t cut out until several seconds later.

  If they hadn’t heard him before, they probably didn’t now.

  He had the feeling that the targeting tone had stopped because they’d fired—not because they’d stopped tracking him. Once the missile was fired, it would lock onto his jet passively, either visually or by heat signature, and would no longer need external targeting guidance.

  Speed and distance were now his friends.

  He twisted into a hard dive and redlined the twin TF34 turbofans.

  Heating-seeking.

  If they’d fired at him, it was probably a heat-seeking missile.

  And here he was, diving with his ass in the air and twin-engine exhausts making fifteen-hundred-degree bullseyes.

  Head-on, the slender missile had the radar profile of a fat seagull, so he had no way to see how close it was.

  Hopefully far enough.

  17

  The A-10PCAS program had been cancelled before it was truly begun.

  DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—had technically abandoned using an unmanned A-10 Thunderbolt II in 2012 as part of its Persistent Close Air Support program.

  The PCAS program had successfully moved on to other aspects of the electronic battlefield.

  But the unmanned A-10PCAS Thunderbolt II Warthog wasn’t forgotten by the Air Force.