by Walt Gragg
Schoenfeld was a smoking ruin.
The other pair of sergeants tried notifying the German and English air bases in the northern half of the country. Without Schoenfeld, it was a call that would be impossible to complete.
The MiGs came on.
“Major, this isn’t working. Spangdahlem’s operations center’s been notified,” Brennan said, “but no matter what I try, I can’t seem to get through to either Mildenhall or Lakenheath.”
“I’ve gotten ahold of no one, sir,” Rodgers added. “Not a single German fighter base has been alerted.”
Major Colemen looked at the final member of his team. Mitchell shook his head, indicating he’d also met with complete failure.
“What’re we going to do, sir?” Rodgers asked. “Obviously, we need to try something else if we’re going to have any chance at all of completing our mission.”
Coleman stared at Rodgers and Mitchell, his mind racing. “Get onto German civilian landlines and keep trying. I’m not sure if that will work any better than what we’ve already attempted, but don’t give up no matter how long it takes. We’ve got to get in touch with the Germans and British.”
Without further word, both began furiously dialing, attempting to get an outside line. They would quickly discover, however, just how overwhelmed the civilian communication system was. Millions upon millions of harried souls had overpowered its capabilities many times over. And an annoying busy signal was all that greeted the frantic airmen’s every effort.
Outside, they could hear thunderous scores of American F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s coming to life and heading for the runways. The response, while incomplete, was getting under way.
In the middle of the absolute chaos within Germany, Coleman knew reaching England by landline was beyond impossible. But there was one thing his team could still try.
“Sergeant Brennan,” he said, “do you have any friends at Lakenheath or Mildenhall?”
“Lots of them, sir.”
“Any chance you’ve got their cell-phone numbers?”
“Got a handful of close friends at Mildenhall and a few at Lakenheath programmed into my phone.”
“I’ve got the same. You take Mildenhall. I’ll go after Lakenheath. If you get through to anyone, explain the situation and have them contact their base operation’s center immediately.”
“Will do, sir.”
Both the sergeant and the major were soon on their cell phones, desperately attempting to break through the snarl of maddening busy signals that also greeted them.
It would take a frantic hour’s effort for Major Coleman to contact an old friend at Lakenheath. By then, Lakenheath’s fighters would be too late to influence the outcome of the air battle that raged throughout the skies over Germany.
They would never reach Mildenhall.
• • •
Twenty-four F-16s met the Russians at the German border. Like Jensen and his platoon’s hopeless stand on the snowy ground below, the pilots knew they were here for one purpose—to buy precious minutes of time. In the sparkling darkness preceding the dawn, twenty-four attacked one thousand. The battle was joined.
The Americans were clearly better. Better aircraft. Better pilots. Although not so much better that they could withstand the ridiculous odds they faced.
The F-16 pilots expected the skies behind them to hurriedly fill with American, British, and German fighters. It didn’t happen. The Americans began responding out of Ramstein, and minutes later out of Spangdahlem. But without effective command and control, the British and Germans didn’t arrive in time to be a significant factor in the initial air battle of the new war. At Mildenhall, the Americans never left the ground. With the sluggish Allied reaction, the Russians were in a position to gain temporary control of the skies over Germany. For the moment, that was the only thing they wanted. One hour’s control of certain parts of the skies over their ancient enemy was all General Yovanovich had asked of them.
The majority of the Russians blew through the screening force of F-16s like they weren’t even there. One thousand MiGs were inside Germany. In bits and pieces, two hundred scattered American fighters would eventually race east to challenge them. In what would be recorded as the classic duel in the short history of man’s flight, the world’s greatest aircraft met in the enveloping darkness that masked the coming morning. High over central Europe, the talented American pilots battled the MiG-29s and Su-35s to the death.
It was a far different form of air combat than any of the pilot’s grandfathers had experienced in these same skies during the Second World War. Eighty-three years earlier, a pilot’s anguished defeat had been up close and filled with gut-wrenching emotion. But as the years passed and technology leaped forward, death in air combat had become almost sterile and impersonal. Rather than pitched battles with machine guns blazing and the pilots so near they could see the terrified look on their vanquished opponent’s bloody face, the Americans and Russians dueled from vast distances.
The American Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles and the Russian Archer and Aphid missiles ripped through the remorseless skies from up to forty miles apart. And when armed with AIM-120 AMRAAMs, the American planes’ range grew by nearly three times that.
Sitting in front of their screens, Fowler and Morgan watched the burgeoning air battle. With each passing minute, the clashes multiplied. The Patriot team’s reaction to what they were witnessing was part fascination and part horror as the triangles from the west and the triangles from the east tore into each other. Death was coming to scour the heavens and weed out the unworthy.
A hundred miles from the closest clash of pilots and planes, they could see the tiny images of the air-to-air missiles streaking through the sky. Upon impact, the losing triangle would distort and break up. Any trace of the defeated aircraft would then disappear from the screen. The battle raged for half an hour, with neither side gaining a clear advantage. More of the triangles from the east than triangles from the west were falling. Still, the American victories weren’t so overwhelming as to overcome the enemy’s five-to-one edge. The mesmerized pair sat staring at their screens as the Russian steamroller slowly pushed their opponent back. The American pilots faltered.
The Russians came on. Holes appeared in a number of places in the American fighter defenses. By their sheer numbers, the MiGs broke through. Russian aircraft poured into the heart of Germany.
Behind the American air forces, the air-defense units braced for the attack. Close to the front, the Stinger shoulder-mounted missile and other shorter-range systems were assigned the task of supporting the ground units. Those weapons didn’t have the capabilities to stop the high-flying Russian fighters headed for the rear of the American defenses.
Patriot and Hawk waited. The role of these long-distance killers was to protect the air bases, command and control centers, and support systems. Shoulder- and Humvee-mounted Stingers were also assigned to work in unison with their more powerful brothers. With their five-mile limit, the Stinger would try to protect the vulnerable close-in area created by a diving aircraft that the Hawk and Patriot couldn’t activate in time to defeat.
Only Patriot and Hawk stood between the onrushing enemy and the total destruction of America’s strategic assets. As the Americans had done to the Iraqis during Desert Storm, and later in the second Iraq war, the first objective of the Russian air armada was to destroy the thing that could destroy it.
Patriot and Hawk had to die.
• • •
In the early 1990s, a joint American and German proposal called for the permanent assignment of seven American and four German Patriot battalions within the Republic of Germany. If the original plan had been carried out, the Russian attack on that January morning would have been met by forty-four Patriot batteries. Each battery would have been capable of firing thirty-two missiles without reloading. The seven hundred surviving MiGs would’ve been g
reeted by twice their number in Patriot missiles.
At one billion dollars per battalion, however, such peacetime expenditures for Patriot hadn’t been politically supportable. Instead, there were two German and two American Patriot battalions assigned the task of protecting the critical assets of the West from the threat approaching in the dawning skies. One of the plan’s original Patriot battalions had been diverted from Germany for duty in Saudi Arabia. Another had been given to the Israelis as part of the Desert Storm agreement. The final three battalions had arrived in Germany only to be deactivated and sold to the Japanese.
With the arrival last night of Fowler’s battalion, the West presently had twenty firing batteries with a little more than six hundred missiles inside Germany. Unfortunately, four of those batteries containing over one hundred missiles would be of no use in the coming battle.
Delta Battery of the Texas battalion was trapped on Rhein-Main Air Base by the ever-growing flood of panicked German refugees. They’d just received word to set up on Rhein-Main itself. It would be another hour before they’d be ready to fire their first missile. And three of the sophisticated Patriot batteries—two American and one German—were presently down with maintenance problems and would never join in the fray.
Without the four batteries, the remaining sixteen stood poised with slightly under five hundred missiles to engage seven hundred MiGs. The Patriot batteries knew they’d be the enemy’s first objective.
Nevertheless, the Patriot was going to be a difficult target for any attacker, no matter how determined, to kill. It couldn’t be said they were impossible to destroy, for the Patriot could be conquered. What they were was hard to discover from the air. With their passive radar systems, they didn’t put out any easy-to-track radar emissions. Yet given enough time, the Russians would detect the Patriot’s signal. And once that signal had been discovered, the MiGs would move in for the kill.
The Patriot needed nine seconds after launching for its huge missile to activate and kill. It was far too large to handle close-in targets. If a fighter could get inside the system’s defenses, the Patriot would be unable to defend itself. From that point on, the MiG would stand an excellent chance of fooling the little Stinger missiles and destroying the Patriot. All it would take was a single air-to-ground missile into the Engagement Control Station, and the Patriot, no matter how many missiles still waited on its launchers, would be out of the war forever. For that reason, in wartime a Patriot battery never stayed anywhere for more than eight hours. Four hours was even better.
From this moment on, nearly one-quarter of the Patriots that survived the initial attack would be unavailable as they shut down, moved, and reinitialized.
Early in the century, the American military had phased out the Hawk Missile System. But when the threat reappeared in the East, with a Hawk battery costing one-tenth the price of a Patriot, the decision was made primarily for budgetary purposes to reactivate them for use in Europe by both the Germans and the Americans.
The seven older Hawk systems, each with eighteen missiles, made for an even easier target. With its three radars emitting strong signals, the Hawk provided a clear beacon for the Russians to follow straight to their objective. The Hawk batteries were twenty to fifty miles in front of the Patriots. It was Hawk that would engage the first wave of Russian fighters.
The MiGs came on.
The Americans waited. Their missiles were at the ready. While they steeled themselves for the attack, they were unaware the Russians had mapped each Hawk and Patriot battery.
The moment the war began, just as the Russians had anticipated, the air-defense units moved from their permanent locations to new firing positions. Russian operatives watched every battery move to its new location.
Sitting in an ancient car on a distant hilltop overlooking Rhein-Main, three men in worn overcoats had used night-vision equipment to detect the new Patriot battalion’s arrival at a little after midnight. From the moment the three batteries drove out of the air base’s main gate until they arrived at their destinations, they were never out of sight of a vast web of Russian spies.
Thirty minutes prior to the launch of the Russian armada, the last message on the American and German air defenses had been transmitted. As the MiGs broke through, they knew exactly where every Hawk and Patriot battery was emplaced.
The three American and four German Hawk units prepared to fire. Normally, they’d have sat with their radars off until the last possible moment, depending on the AWACS to tell them the precise instance to turn on their systems. But with the AWACS’ ground communication capabilities destroyed, the Hawk batteries were on their own. Without the AWACS, the only way they could see the enemy was through their own radars.
As the Russian fighters burst deep into Germany, the Hawk batteries turned on their equipment. Their radars started putting out loud, clear signals. Each unit knew they’d signed their own death warrants. The air-defense crews were well aware that their radars’ strong emissions would lead the enemy right to them. Still, they had no choice.
The outer net of Hawks began to die. The American battery at Wurzburg was the first to fall. Its crew fired two missiles—two successful kills—before a MiG-29 broke through and rammed a rocket into the Hawk Engagement Center. The rocket had followed the homing beacon the Hawk radars had provided straight to the target.
One hundred miles north, a dozen MiG-29s demolished the German battery at Cuxhaven. Not a single Hawk missile had been fired. The MiGs then turned their attention to the German battery fifty miles south at Friesing. One, and then another, and finally a third of the MiGs tumbled from the sky from the determined German battery’s missiles. The fighters fought their way through the beleaguered Hawk’s defenses. The battery succumbed in a hail of air-to-ground missiles.
The remaining four Hawk firing batteries remained in the fight. At least for the moment.
The Russians roared deeper into Germany. The time had come to challenge the immense power of the Patriot.
Scores of westward-moving triangles headed toward their targets.
CHAPTER 27
January 29—8:11 a.m.
Charlie Battery, 1st “Cobra Strike” Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment
A Deserted Parking Lot on the Eastern Edge of Stuttgart
Six triangles leaped from the melee. They raced toward the southwest. Unless stopped, they’d reach their objective in the next five minutes.
“Here they come!” Morgan said. “I’m starting the interrogation.”
“Ready to target as soon as they’re identified,” Fowler said. “Paul, it’s too early to tell if the MiGs are heading for us. But just in case, notify the three Stinger teams to get ready to repulse a fighter attack. Then tell the communication van to direct everyone to get away from the launchers and take cover.”
“Roger.”
“First two aircraft have been identified as hostile,” Morgan said. “Authorized to engage when they are within fifty miles.” She could feel the first sticky beads of sweat rolling down her spine.
“Roger, Lieutenant. Verify on my screen, first two aircraft are hostile. Beginning targeting information. Hostiles are approximately eighty miles out and closing. Am locking into the computer.” Fowler started typing on the keyboard in front of him. “Will intercept the moment they’re in range.”
Less than thirty miles, and the enemy fighters would be within the giant missile’s reach. With their present speed and course, that would occur in precisely ninety seconds.
“Roger,” the lieutenant said. “Verify engagement procedures have begun on first two targets. Last four aircraft have also been identified as hostile. Final four are cleared for engagement.”
“Locking in coordinates on the final four targets. Computer has been directed to engage the moment they’re within range.” Fowler’s mouth was so dry that his lips clung to his teeth and fought against his anx
ious words.
“Verify four additional targets are locked in and engagement sequence has been initiated,” Morgan said while staring at the symbols on her screen.
“Paul, notify regiment that we’re in the process of engaging six hostile aircraft,” Fowler said.
“Roger. Notifying of ongoing engagement.”
There was nothing more to do. The computer would take it from here, automatically selecting the missiles and firing once the targets came within fifty miles of the Patriot.
The Patriot’s nearly flawless kill rate might be slightly lower at so great a distance. But at this moment, the air-defense team didn’t care. They were far more concerned with another problem. Nearly all of the American Patriot air-defense systems had received a software upgrade more than a decade earlier. Each Engagement Control Station could now engage up to nine aircraft simultaneously. Unfortunately, the missile system that Fowler and Morgan were controlling had been repurchased from the Japanese a few months earlier. The system had never received the updated software. All four of the battalion’s Engagement Control Stations were scheduled for the upgrade within the next three months. At the moment, however, that was of little comfort to the air defenders. During the coming war, the Patriot computer they were controlling could only fire at and engage five targets at any one time. And six were on the way. Any way they looked at it, one of the rapidly closing aircraft wasn’t going to be attacked until a first had been destroyed.
If they waited too long to engage the MiGs, there was a real possibility of the final aircraft breaking through. It was a chance they dare not take.
Fowler and Morgan stared at the screens. One by one, the seconds ticked by. The triangles continued their unyielding march across the ever-brightening heavens. With each passing instant, they grew closer to the battery. The determined MiGs inched ever nearer to the Patriot’s firing point. The Americans could do nothing but watch as death crossed the skies intent on claiming them.
