Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “Low-level-descent checklist!” Leborov shouted, and simultaneously pushed the nose over and pulled the throttles of his four Kuznetsov turboprop engines back to keep the airspeed below red line. “Copilot, notify the formation, evasive action, proceed to opposed ingress routes immediately.” In order to ensure that the maximum number of planes made it past the defenses, the four six-ship formations would break apart and go in single-ship, following slightly different routes—some planes were separated by only one or two degrees of track, less than a hundred meters’ altitude, or less than a minute’s time. Borodev’s voice was as excited and high-pitched as a woman’s as he got on the radio to notify the rest of their package that enemy fighters were inbound.

  That would be the last transmission to his comrades until they all met back at base…or in hell.

  An F-16! They hadn’t expected an F-16 up here for another hour at least. He adjusted the propeller pitch of the rearmost propellers to increase drag so he could increase his descent rate. “Has he seen us yet?” It was a stupid question—they had to assume that the American fighter had them. They also had to assume that there was more than one fighter out there—the American Air Force almost always traveled in two-plane formations. Fortunately, the F-16’s radar did not have a true look-down/shoot-down capability, so they had a chance if they could make it to low level. The radar clutter of the Arctic Ocean and then the ruggedness of northern Canada would hide them very effectively.

  “I don’t think so, sir,” the EWO responded. “His radar is still in long-range scan, and his track has not changed. He’s heading northeast, across but away from us. He might lose track in a couple of minutes.”

  But then again, Leborov thought, if he did what he was supposed to do and establish a patrol orbit, along the most probable inbound path for bombers from Russia to take—like the one they were on right now—he was bound to find them. They were quickly running out of time. “Any word from our support package, copilot?” Leborov asked.

  “Negative,” Borodev responded woodenly. “No idea where they are.”

  “Are we on time?”

  “About two minutes early,” the navigator responded. “Good tailwinds.”

  “Good tailwinds, my ass—two minutes is all the time that F-16 needs to sound the alert.” Shit, thought Leborov. Soon the entire American and Canadian air forces would be howling after them. Mission and radio security was one thing, but shouldn’t they know where the rest of their strike package was? “Okay, we can’t stay up here any longer,” he said. He put the airspeed needle right on the red line by dumping the nose even lower. “Our best chance is to try to duck under his radar cone before he comes around on his patrol orbit—we may be able to slip past him.”

  Leborov unconsciously let the airspeed creep up past the red line in an attempt to get down faster, but soon he could feel Borodev pulling back on the control column. “Let’s not rip the wings off this old hog, Joey,” he said. “We’ve still got a long way to go.” He pulled the nose up to get the airspeed back down below the red line. Damn, Leborov thought, how many of his wingmen had started their descent? How many were still up high? He hoped everyone used proper crew discipline and was ready when that fighter appeared—or they’d be dead meat.

  Aboard an F-16C Fighting Falcon Fighter,

  Over the Beaufort Sea

  That same time

  Knifepoint, Knifepoint, Hunter Four, blue four.”

  “Hunter, this is Knifepoint, strangle mode three and Charlie, go active, stand by for mickey check…. Hunter, acknowledge. Verify you’re single-ship this morning.”

  “Knifepoint, Hunter checks, I’m single-ship. My wingman will join up later.”

  “Copy that, Hunter. Negative contacts, cleared into track Gina-two, deploy, advise joker.”

  “Hunter copies, wilco.”

  To tell the truth, thought U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Forman, she preferred being up here by herself, without having to keep an eye out for a wingman or flight lead. The Alaska sky was an absolute delight to fly in—clear, crisp, and cold, with only the stars above and a very, very few lights below. She sometimes felt as if she were the only person in the sky right now….

  Which was obviously not true, or else she would not have been sent up here on such short notice.

  The twenty-six-year-old mother of two boys was a newly operational F-16C Fighting Falcon pilot in the Eighteenth Fighter Squadron “Blue Foxes” out of Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. Although the Blue Foxes were a ground-attack fighter unit, using the LANTIRN night-attack and low-level navigation system, they were often tasked with the air-defense mission as well, operating with the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron’s F-15 Eagle fighters and the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron’s E-3C AWACS radar planes out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. But tonight she was all by herself. Even after an hour, she was still by herself—her wingman was still broken, still on the ground. Another F-16 had just taken off a few minutes earlier, with one of the 168th Air Refueling Wing’s KC-135 tankers based at Eielson, and wouldn’t rejoin for another thirty minutes.

  Forman was two hundred miles northwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, over the seemingly endless expanse of the Arctic Ocean. She had just entered her assigned patrol orbit, which was a narrow triangular course aligned northwest-southeast, at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. She was the “low CAP,” or combat air patrol, the altitude that allowed her APG-68 radar to see all the way down to the ocean’s surface, at her radar’s optimal range of eighty miles, and all the way up to thirty thousand feet, on its normal long-range-scan mode; once her wingman joined her, he would take the high CAP, twenty-four thousand feet, so he could see as high as fifty thousand feet.

  As briefed, Forman reduced speed to save fuel and started her turn northwestbound in the triangle. “Hunter Four’s established in Gina-two,” she reported to Knifepoint. Knifepoint was the call sign of the Alaska NORAD Regional Surveillance Center, based at Elmendorf Air Force Base, which combined radar information from the North Warning System, Federal Aviation Administration, Transport Canada, and other military and civil radars into one regional control center. Knifepoint was different from an air-traffic-control center—unlike air-traffic controllers, who strived to keep aircraft safely separated, the Knifepoint controllers’ job was to maneuver fighters as close as possible to other aircraft.

  “Roger, Hunter,” the controller responded. “No contacts.” Up here, at the top of the United States, Knifepoint relied on the North Warning System radars to see any intruders—the FAA radars in Fairbanks and Anchorage did not have the range to see this far north. The North Warning System, or NWS, in Alaska consisted of four long-range partly attended radars, nicknamed “Seek Igloo,” plus eight short-range unattended radars, called “Seek Frost,” which closed the gaps in the longer-range systems.

  Air patrols were a combination of monitoring the instruments, keeping track of the aircraft in its patrol track, twisting the heading bugs at the corners to head down the next leg, watching the radar and radar-warning receivers for signs of aircraft—and staying awake. Forman enjoyed air-defense exercises because she knew there was going to be an intruder, and it was her job to find it. In the real world, she had to assume there was an intruder out here in all this darkness. Many times air-defense fighters would be launched after being detected by the FAA or North Warning System, and she would be vectored into position while radar-silent and intercept the intruder from behind to attempt an identification. Those were damned exciting.

  Not so this time. She didn’t know the exact reason she’d been launched and sent to this patrol, but so far there was no sign of intruders. Often fighters were sent into air patrols because the Russians had spy planes nearby, or because NORAD, the Air Force, or the Canadians wanted to test or observe something. It was impossible to know, so she assumed there was a bad guy out here that needed to be discovered.

  But she’d been launched right at the end of her duty day, after studying for a pre-check-
ride written exam while doing her normal training duties. An eight-hour duty day followed by several hours’ flying in the wee hours of the morning…swell. This could turn into a very, very long morning.

  She had just turned eastbound after completing her initial fifty-mile northwest patrol leg when she heard, “Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight, blue four.” It was Forman’s wingman, finally checking on with the NORAD controller.

  “Hunter Four, Knifepoint, your company is on freq.”

  “Roger that, Knifepoint. Hunter Four checking off to talk with company aircraft. I’ll monitor your frequency and report back up.”

  “Roger, Hunter, cleared as requested.”

  Forman switched over to her secondary radio: “Eight, this is Four on tactical. ’Bout time someone showed. Girls don’t like being stood up, you know.”

  “Sorry about the delay—nothing’s working right on the ramp this morning. Must be a full moon. We’re about two hundred miles out. How’s everything going?”

  “Nice and quiet. Established in the low CAP. The bird is doing okay.” She punched instructions into her navigation computer, checking her fuel reserves. “Joker plus one on board.” The “joker” fuel level was the point at which she had to leave the patrol area and head for home; she had one hour left on patrol before she had to head back in order to arrive with normal fuel reserves, which in Alaska were substantial. Because weather and airfield conditions changed rapidly here, and because suitable alternate airfields were very, very few and far between in this big state, every fighter flying in Alaska took as much fuel as possible with it on patrol; Kelly’s F-16 had two 370-gallon drop tanks on board, along with four AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles, two AIM-9L “Sidewinder” heat-seeking missiles, and ammunition for the twenty-millimeter cannon. Aerial-refueling tankers were precious commodities.

  “Roger that. I brought the gas can with me. Any sign of Roadkill?” “Roadkill” was the Blue Foxes’ name for their brethren in the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron—their squadron emblem, a stylized gamecock, looked to many folks like a squished critter on the road. The F-15Cs of the Nineteenth, coming with their E-3C AWACS radar plane, were the air-defense specialists; the F-15s had much longer legs, two-engine reliability, and a better look-down, shoot-down radar to find any bad guys that might be up here. They would undoubtedly take over the air-patrol mission once they arrived, although the F-16s liked to play with them as much as possible, too.

  “Negative.” There was a lot of static on the channel all of a sudden, which was fairly common at the higher latitudes, usually because of sunspot activity. The northern lights were beautiful up here, but the solar flares that caused the sky to light up with waves and waves of shimmering light played havoc with the radios.

  “Rog. I’ll give you a call if I hear from them. See you in a few.” Despite the growing static, Kelly instantly felt much better. Although she enjoyed flying by herself, it sure was comforting to hear a friendly voice on the airwaves, to know that friendly forces were on the way—especially the tanker.

  Forman was a couple minutes from her turn to the southeast when the radar target box winked on, at the extreme center-left edge of her heads-up display. Got a nibble, she told herself as she made a hard left turn to center up on the newcomer. It was high enough so it probably wasn’t an ice floe or some other—

  When she rolled out of her turn, she couldn’t believe what she saw: radar targets everywhere. She thought she had a radar malfunction, so she turned her radar to STBY, then back to RADIATE—and the targets were still there. Maybe two dozen targets, all at different altitudes.

  “Ho-lee shit,” she muttered to herself. Frantically, she switched back to the command channel on the primary radio. Through a haze of static, she radioed, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Four, ‘gorilla,’ I say again, ‘gorilla,’ northwest two-four bull’s-eye.” “Gorilla” was the brevity code for a large formation of unidentified planes in indeterminate numbers. Forman gave the target’s position relative to an imaginary point that changed on every patrol. She couldn’t give the targets’ altitude, speed, or any more precise information because there were so many of them out there.

  “Say again, Hunter.” There was a loud squeal in the radios that the frequency-hopping communications system couldn’t eliminate. “Be advised, Hunter, our status is ‘bent,’ repeat, ‘bent.’ Keep us advised.”

  Jamming—someone was jamming them! Forman switched to her secondary radio and found it hopelessly jammed. The squealing was drowning out all recognizable sound even before she keyed the mike. Maybe whoever was jamming her radios was jamming the North Warning System radar, too—the “bent” code meant that the ground radar was inoperative. So now she was all alone up here with a huge number of planes bearing down on her, with no way to contact anyone.

  The only thing she had left were her orders and her tactical doctrine: Any unidentified aircraft entering the Air Defense Identification Zone had to be identified, and if they acted in a hostile manner, they were to be shot down immediately, as quickly as possible before reaching U.S. airspace. She was to continue the interdiction mission until she reached “bingo” fuel, which gave her the minimum fuel state over the intended recovery base only.

  Forman thumbed her stick controls and designated the lead aircraft in the lead formation, placed the radar pipper just to the left and below center in her heads-up display, and headed toward it. This guy was screaming for the deck, descending at fifteen thousand feet per minute. Too late, pal, she thought—I got you….

  The radar-warning receiver blared again—but this time, instead of a steady electronic tone, they heard a fast, high-pitched, raspy sound. “Fighter has locked on,” the electronic-warfare officer said. “Eleven o’clock…moving into lethal range.”

  Leborov couldn’t believe the speed of that thing—it seemed only seconds ago that they first got the warning. “What the hell should I do?” he shouted.

  “Turn left, head into him!” the EWO shouted. “That’ll increase his closure rate, and he’ll be forced to maneuver.” That wasn’t necessarily so with an F-16—they could shoot Sidewinder missiles directly into your face all day long—but he had to give the pilot something to do until they got low. “All jammers on and operating…chaff and flares ready.”

  “Passing two thousand for five hundred,” the navigator said.

  “Screw that, nav—we’re going to one hundred meters,” Leborov said. “If he wants to come down and play, let’s get way down into the weeds!” Bravado? Maybe, but he wasn’t going to get shot down without a fight, and there was one place the Tupolev-95 liked to fly, and that was down low.

  Thirty miles…twenty miles…the plane was still heading down, passing five thousand feet and descending fast. She was at ten thousand feet, not real anxious to chase this guy down until she started rolling in behind him for an ID. He turned slightly into her, so they were going nose to nose now. She configured her cockpit switches for low-light operations and lowered her PVS-9 night-vision goggles. The view was matte green and with very little contrast, but now she could see a horizon, the shoreline far behind her, details of the outside of her jet—and a spattering of bright dots in the distance: the unidentified aircraft. There were so many that it looked like a cluster of stars.

  Forman thought about trying to contact the plane on the international emergency “GUARD” frequency, but the jamming was too heavy and getting stronger as she closed in. Was that considered a “hostile act” right there? Probably so. Fifteen…ten…

  Suddenly one of the other myriad radar targets on her heads-up display scooted across the scope to her right, traveling…Shit, the guy was supersonic. She immediately pulled up, jammed her throttle to zone-five afterburner, and turned hard right to pursue. The first guy never went above four hundred knots, even in a screaming-ass dive, but this newcomer was going twice as fast! He would reach the coastline way before these others—if she didn’t catch him first.

  Again she tried to radio Knifepoint
and her wingman of the new contact—but the jamming was still too heavy. Each one of those incoming planes must have enormous jammers to take out digital radios and even the North Warning System radars at this range! Even her APG-68 radar was getting spiked, and it had plenty of antijam modes.

  The fast newcomer was at forty-three thousand feet, traveling just over the speed of sound, heading east-southeast. Forman locked him up on radar easily after getting behind him and tried to interrogate his Identification Friend or Foe system. Negative IFF—he was a bandit, all right. Supersonic, no modes and codes, flying way off transpolar flight routes through a curtain of electronic jamming—unless it was some Concorde pilot hot-dogging it for his rich passengers, he was a bad guy.

  The bandit was passing Mach 1.1, the speed limit for her F-16 Fighting Falcon’s external fuel tanks. No Alaska fighter pilot ever wanted to punch off external fuel tanks, especially if there was a tanker anywhere in the area, but she would never catch him otherwise, so, reluctantly, off they went. As soon as this guy was ID’d and the Nineteenth showed up, she was done for the evening—even with a tanker on the way, no fighter pilot played very long up in Alaska without plenty of extra fuel.

  It was funny the things you thought about at a time like this, Kelly mused to herself. Here she was chasing down a bandit, in the midst of hostile jamming, and all she could think was that someone was going to have to pay for a couple 370-gallon fuel tanks.

  She tried the IFF interrogate switch a couple more times—still negative—then hit her MASTER ARM switch and selected her twenty-millimeter cannon instead of her radar- or infrared-guided missiles. This guy definitely met all the criteria of being a bad guy, she thought, but she had enough gas right now to try to do a visual ID. At Mach 1, he was still fifteen minutes from reaching the Canadian coast. She had forty-five minutes to bingo fuel—a number that was dropping rapidly every minute she spent in zone-five afterburner—so she decided to go in close for a visual.