by Dale Brown
“Take your time,” Hal said. “We have a long way to go.”
“Someone open a window,” Marines Corps Staff Sergeant Emily Angel said after Bastian began cleaning his gear. Emily had no call sign because everyone called her by her very apropos last name: Angel. With short dark hair, glittering dark eyes, and a body honed by five years in some of the toughest infantry units in the U.S. Marines Corps, Angel had been handpicked by Chris Wohl to join the Battle Force ground team after he’d watched her compete in an urban-warfare search-and-destroy course competition at Quantico. The reason for recruiting new members there was simple: The Battle Force stressed small-unit tactics, speed, and maneuverability over strength and endurance. It was no surprise to Chris Wohl that the winner was a woman.
“Bite me, Angel,” Bastian said, but he gratefully accepted her help as he began cleaning. They all helped because they knew that, but for the grace of God, they could’ve been the ones who’d thrown up in their helmets.
The four members of the Battle Force team were aboard an MQ-35 Condor special-ops infiltration/exfiltration aircraft. They had just been dropped about eighty miles east of the Kamchatka Peninsula over the Bering Sea from an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet from inside an unmanned EB-52 Megafortress bomber. Briggs, who flew on the first Condor flight over Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, was ready for the gut-wrenching descent after dropping from the bomb bay, but no one else on board had ever had that experience before—and no amount of briefing could prepare someone for it.
“Condor, Control, you are at best glide speed,” Major Matthew “Wildman” Whitley, the remote piloting technician controlling the Condor from Battle Mountain, reported. Matt Whitley of the Fifty-second Bomb Squadron was one of the first technicians, or “game boys” as they were called, trained at Battle Mountain to fly the Megafortresses, Condors, and the other experimental aircraft without first being a pilot—his background was in computer-simulation programming. He was proud of his accomplishment, and he was looked up to by all of the other nonrated fliers in the unit as a junior god.
“How’s everybody doing?” asked Brigadier General David Luger, commanding the Air Battle Force from the Battle Management Center at Battle Mountain.
“Except for one smelly helmet, fine,” Briggs reported.
“They let us get an extra sixty miles closer to the coast than we figured,” Wilde said. “We can use every mile we can get.”
“How are we looking, Matt?” Briggs asked.
“Stand by.” He checked the computer’s flight plan, which updated their flight profile constantly, based on glide performance, winds, air temperature, and routing. “Right now we’re looking at a six-one glide ratio—six miles for every thousand feet. That means if we descend you down to ten thousand feet, you can glide for about one hundred and fifty miles, or one hour flight time, before we have to fire up the engine. That will put you roughly over the Central Kamchatka Highway just west of Mil’kovo. Then it’s a thousand-mile cruise into Yakutsk on the turbojet, or about three hours.
“You’ll have less than ten minutes of fuel remaining—if everything goes to plan. Any shift in the winds, ice buildup, or malfunctions can put you on the wrong side of the fuel curve fast. We’ll keep you up as high as we can, but as soon as you leave Magadan’s radar coverage you’ll be in Yakutsk’s, so we’ll have to contend with that. At ten thousand feet, you can glide for another sixty miles once the engine quits, so that’s probably all the reserve you’ll have.”
“Sounds lovely,” Briggs said wryly. “What are the bad guys up to?”
“The threat situation looks about the same as before,” Luger responded. “Numerous fighter patrols all around you. The Russians have set up a picket of patrol and warships every fifty to seventy miles across the Sea of Okhotsk. We’ll reroute you around the ones we detect, but be prepared to do some more gliding down to lower altitudes if necessary. They’re being very careful and not radiating with anything but normal surface-and air-search radars. Long-range surveillance radars at Petropavlovsk, Yakutsk, Komsomol’sk, and Magadan are active, but all of the previously known SA-10 and SA-12 sites along the coast are silent. They’re not exposing any of their air-defense stuff, which will make it harder for us to target them.”
“Was this supposed to cheer us up, Dave?”
They proceeded in silence for the next hour, but the tension built up quickly and precipitously as they cleared the coastline of the central Kamchatka Peninsula and approached the engine-start point. “Okay, crew, listen up,” Briggs said. “The emergency-egress procedures are as briefed: If the engine fails to start, we’ll turn south and continue our glide to the planned emergency landing zone along the Central Kamchatka Highway. We then make our way to Petropavlovsk and wreak as much havoc there as we can from the ground. There are no plans at this time for anyone to rescue us, so we’re on our own. Our mission will be to disrupt air-defense and surveillance operations on the Kamchatka Peninsula in order to offer follow-on forces an easier ingress path. Questions?”
“Has the engine ever not started, sir?” Angel asked.
Briggs turned to glance behind him, then replied by saying, “Are there any other questions?” Not surprisingly, there were none.
“Coming up on engine start,” Whitley reported. “Stand by…. Engine inlet coming open…inlet deicers on…starter engaged…fifteen percent RPMs, igniters on, here comes the fuel…. Stand by…. Ignition, engine RPMs to thirty…thirty-five…” Suddenly the engine’s whirring sound stopped. “Igniters off, fuel off. We got a hot start, guys. The engine inlet might be blocked with ice.”
The crew felt the Condor turn, and shoulders slumped. “Okay, guys, here’s the plan,” Dave Luger said. “We’ve turned you southbound on the planned emergency routing. We’ve got to wait three minutes before we can attempt another start. You’ll lose about two thousand feet altitude and go about twenty miles. We’ll keep the inlet deicers on longer in case we got some ice restricting airflow for the three minutes, then try one more restart. We might have time for another restart if the second one doesn’t work, if the battery doesn’t run out with all the starter activations. We—”
“Caution, airborne search radar, seven o’clock, sixty-five miles,” came a computerized voice—the threat-warning receiver.
“Petropavlovsk—the fighter patrols,” Luger said. “They’ve got fighters everywhere. Hopefully they’re looking out over the ocean and not up the peninsula. We should be—”
“Warning, airborne search radar and height finder, seven o’clock, sixty-four miles.”
“How about we give that engine restart a try now, Dave?” Hal Briggs suggested nervously.
“I think that’s close enough to three minutes,” Dave said warily. “Starter on, igniters—”
“Warning, radar lock-on, MiG-29, eight o’clock, sixty miles.”
“C’mon, baby, start,” Matt Whitley breathed “Time just ran out.”
Six Hundred Miles North of the Condor,
Over Far Eastern Siberia
That same time
Control, Yupka-Three-three flight has radar contact on unidentified air target, five-zero kilometers, low,” the lead Mikoyan-23B pilot reported.
“That’s your target, Three-three,” the ground-intercept controller said. “No other targets detected. Begin your intercept.”
“Acknowledged. Wing, take the high CAP, I am turning to intercept.”
“Two,” the pilot of the second MiG-23B responded simply. His job was to stay with his leader and provide support, not chat on the radios.
Based out of Anadyr, the easternmost military air base in Russia, the MiG-23B Bombardirovshchiks were single-seat, swing-wing, dual-purpose fighter-bombers, capable of both medium-range attack and air-interceptor missions. All interceptor-tasked MiG-23s based at Anadyr were armed with twin twenty-three-millimeter cannons in the nose with two hundred rounds of ammunition, two R-23R radar-guided missiles on fuselage hardpoints, two R-60 heat-seeking missiles on wing pylons,
and one eight-hundred-liter external fuel tank.
The thirty-eight bomber-tasked planes at Anadyr had different weapon loads: three external fuel tanks on the fuselage hardpoints for extra-long range—plus two RN-40 tactical nuclear gravity bombs on the wing stations, each with a one-hundred-kiloton yield. If the United States tried to attack Russia, their orders were to launch and destroy military targets throughout Alaska and Canada. The fighter-equipped MiGs were there to hold off an attack by either American planes or cruise missiles long enough for the bombers to launch and get safely away from the base.
This unidentified radar contact may have been a prelude to such an attack, which was why nerves were on edge all over the district. The first counterattack by the United States had to be blunted at all costs, and the MiG-23s at Anadyr and the MiG-29s at Petropavlovsk were the first lines of defense against the expected American attack.
The lead MiG pilot kept his PrNK-23N Sokol attack radar on long enough to get a firm idea of the unknown aircraft’s position in his mind, flicked it to STANDBY so his radar wouldn’t give away his position, then rolled right and started a descent into firing position. The target was moving slowly, far more slowly than a jet-powered aircraft. It was also flying at extremely low altitude, barely two hundred meters above the coastal mountain range. It was too dark to be able to see it, so a visual identification was not going to happen.
It was far too late for that anyway—this guy was already well inside Russia’s borders and was not squawking any identification codes. An intruder, no doubt about it. He was going down in flames.
The MiG-23 pilot rolled out and continued his descent. He wished for night-vision goggles so he could see the rugged terrain below, but those were luxuries left for the MiG-29 pilots and the bombers, not the old fighter guys. The pilot had already checked his minimum terrain-clearance altitude, which would keep him safe within a fifty-by-fifty-kilometer box—plus, he added a few dozen meters’ altitude as an extra safety measure “for the wife and kids,” as he and his fellow fighter pilots liked to say. He would be low enough to lock on to and engage this target and still clear the terrain.
As he continued in on his intercept run, the MiG pilot activated his ship’s TM-23 electro-optical sensor, and a blip appeared right away, exactly where he thought it would. The sensor did not display an image of the target, just a simple dot on a screen when a bright or hot object was detected; once locked on, the system fed target bearing and altitude to his fire-control computer, allowing him to give his air-to-air missiles almost all the data they needed to attack.
Using his skill and situational awareness, he kept the dot on the lower edge of the screen and mentally calculated when he would be in firing range. A few seconds later, he flipped on his Sokol attack radar, which was also slaved to the enemy aircraft’s azimuth by the TM-23 sensor. The radar locked on instantly. As soon as he selected an R-23 missile, he received an IN RANGE indication. He flipped open the red cover to the arming switch and then—
At that instant his Sirena-3 radar-warning receiver blared and a red LAUNCH light snapped on—his threat-warning receiver had picked up the uplink signals transmitted to steer surface-to-air missiles, meaning that a missile was in flight and aimed at his plane! His reaction had to be instantaneous: He immediately punched out several bundles of radar-decoying chaff, chopped the throttle, and threw the fighter in a hard right break. In ninety degrees of bank, he pulled on the control stick until he heard the stall-warning horn, leveled out, punched out more chaff, and then hit his afterburner to speed up again. When the radar-warning receiver blared again, he did another break, again to the right, hoping to turn around far enough to lay his radar on his attacker. The stall-warning horn screamed quicker this time, so when he leveled out, he dipped the nose to help speed up.
The second time, he saw it—an explosion, just a few meters away. A missile had missed him by a fraction of a second! Another moment’s hesitation and he could be dead right now.
He had no choice but to bug out; he had received no warnings from his ground controller, and his radar had not locked on to anything—he was completely blind. He pulled the throttle back to full military power to help conserve fuel, then started a turn to the north and a fast climb away from the terrain. His only choice was to disengage, hope the newcomer would follow him up to altitude so the ground radar could see him, then try to reengage.
Kurva! Where in hell did he come from? “Control, Yupka Three-three, I’m under attack!” the pilot radioed frantically. “I was painted by fire-control radar, and I just evaded a missile!”
“Three-three, Control, we do not show a second aircraft, only your target at your seven o’clock position, twenty-eight K.”
“I tell you, Control, I was under attack!” He tried but failed to get his head back into the fight. His brain was hopelessly jumbled—he had a wingman up there to worry about, one known enemy target, and another completely unseen foe that had just attacked him. “Three-three wing, I’ve lost the attack picture, so you engage the target. I’ll take the high CAP.”
“Acknowledged, Lead,” his wingman radioed. “Control, give me a vector.”
“Three-three wing, steer forty right, your target will be at your one o’clock, forty-three K, low, lead will be at your two o’clock, eighteen K. Clear to descend to your minimum vector altitude. Three-three lead, come twenty right, continue climb to your patrol altitude, your wingman will be at your three o’clock, eighteen K, in a descending turn.”
“Wing acknowledges. Turning right.”
“Lead acknowledges.” The lead MiG-23 pilot was quickly regaining his mental picture of the battle space—minus the newcomer, of course. Or did he just imagine that “attack”? Maybe it was some spurious signal from the radar site on the ground or from his wingman, perhaps checking his weapon stores or briefly firing up his radar? Just forget about it, he told himself. Concentrate on getting the one known target and then—
Suddenly he saw a flash of light and a short trail of fire off in the darkness—and he knew he hadn’t been imagining anything. “Oleg!” he shouted on the command radio. “Attacker at your six o’clock position! Break! Do it now!”
“I’m not picking up any—” And at that instant the threat-warning receiver blared. Unlike the MiG-23, this attacker could launch a missile without having a radar lock-on.
“Chaff! Flares! Break!” the lead pilot shouted. But he knew it was pointless. His wingman’s reaction had to be immediate and aggressive, with no hesitation or second-guessing whatsoever. By the time he thought whether or not he should react and then how to do it, it was too late. The lead pilot spotted a bright flash far off to his right, followed by a large explosion, and then a trail of fire that wobbled briefly through the night sky before being swallowed up by the darkness.
Splash one, Crowbar.”
“Thank God—and thank the propellerheads,” the mission commander aboard the U.S. Air Force MC-130H Combat Talon transport plane, Marine Corps First Lieutenant Ted Merritt, said half aloud with a rush of relief. He felt as if he hadn’t taken a breath of air in several minutes, and his throat was dry and scratchy. A veteran special-operations officer of the Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit, Special Operations Capable, Merritt was accustomed to handling any kind of contingency on the ground—what he couldn’t handle was being engaged by the enemy while still aboard the transport plane.
Merritt was leading a force of forty-eight Marines on a covert insertion mission deep inside Russia. Their MC-130H had lifted off from Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico, shortly after being given the warning order from U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida. Its seven-member crew flew to Camp Pendleton, California, and embarked Merritt’s Marine Special Purpose Force platoon of fifty-one men, including three thirteen-man infantry squads and three four-man fire teams, that were part of the Fifteenth Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Fifteenth MEU had just completed its twenty-four-week qualifi
cation course and had just earned its Special Operations Capable designation before preparing to deploy on a six-month Pacific Ocean cruise.
The Marine Special Purpose Forces, once known as Direct Action Platoons, were composed of highly trained and experienced special-operations soldiers who specialized in light, mobile, and highly destructive missions deep inside enemy territory. Their job was to go in ahead of a Force Reconnaissance battalion or other heavy Marine unit to map out the forward edge of the battle area, hunt down and kill enemy scouts, pinpoint and relay locations of air defenses and fortifications, and create diversions to confuse, exhaust, and harass enemy forces.
The MC-130, using in-flight refueling, had flown nonstop since leaving Camp Pendleton, receiving hourly intelligence briefings and mission updates and plans via satellite while en route on the torturous fifteen-hour flight across the northern Pacific. The plane made several inflight refuelings, with the last one just north of the Aleutian island of Attu, right before entering Russian radar coverage. Once within range of Russia’s long-range airborne early-warning radars at Kavaznya and Petropavlovsk, the MC-130 descended to just a few hundred feet above the ocean using its satellite-navigation system, then used its terrain-following radar once over land to stay at treetop level.
Merritt was hopeful: They hadn’t had one indication of any threats during the entire long overwater cruise through Russian offshore airspace. But just minutes after going feet-dry and hugging some of the roughest terrain on the entire route of flight, where they should be the best protected from radar, they were jumped. Combat Talon II birds had an extensive electronic defensive suite, including jammers and decoys that were effective against ground and airborne threats, but the highly modified C-130 turboprop transports were very large, slow, inviting targets.
