Alpha Kat

by William H. Lovejoy

  “I heard Offut lost twenty-five percent of its personnel,” Soames said. “That has to have a hell of an impact on the local economy. Omaha will be reeling for years.”

  The number of operational aircraft was being reduced also, with different reductions assigned to different types of aircraft, and as a result, the pilot corps was going through a planned attrition.

  “Hurts a lot of people.”

  “A reduction in force affects everyone, civilians included,” Soames said.

  “That’s another reason I’m glad I got out on my own. With my luck, I’d have been fired.”

  “I doubt that, Alex.”

  “That was my luck before KAT, A.J. It’s changed now.”

  “It’s changed for all of us,” Soames agreed.

  “What I can’t believe is the way the Pentagon is covering its ass. You see the quotes. ‘Air power should be treated as a unified whole,’ the Air Force Chief of Staff said. ‘Desert Storm taught us what Air Force leaders have believed for years.’”

  “And spent most of their time resisting,” Soames added. “Still, I can’t fault the Billy Mitchells and Curtis LeMays.” Lemay had shaped the Strategic Air Command. “They did the right thing for their time.”

  “It’s a new time, A.J. Wait’ll we show them what the Alpha Kat can do. She’ll be something else they’ve believed in for years.”

  *

  Jimmy Gander and Mel Vrdlicka arrived at Miami International Airport at noon and went down to the baggage carousel to retrieve their flight gear. They ate hamburgers and French fries in a concourse lounge before hauling their duffle bags outside and flagging a cab.

  The cabbie, probably Cuban, liked the size of the fare, and cheerfully catapulted his wheeled wreck out of the terminal area, heading for Coral Gables and then Homestead.

  “Jesus, Jimmy, I didn’t know I’d become so acclimated to the desert. This humidity’s going to do me in.”

  Vrdlicka was originally from Montana. Gander wouldn’t guess at the nationality of the name, but the man sported neat, clipped hair that was brick red and eyes green as unripened apples. He was fit, of medium stature, and had well-developed shoulders and arms. Gander thought he had taken to lifting weights. He had been a first lieutenant, overdue for captain, when he got out. Like himself, Vrdlicka had both jet ratings and multi-engine ratings. He was the communications specialist for KAT, and Gander had always thought that appropriate. Anyone lacking a necessary vowel in their name ought to be a communications specialist.

  “You’re almost thirty, Mel. You don’t notice the climate until you’re thirty.”

  “I’m aging fast, in that case.”

  In the Operations Office at Homestead, they ran into the bureaucratic wall that Gander had expected.

  The duty officer was a major named Blankenship. When Gander finally got him to the counter, he said, “I’m here to pick up a C-141.”

  The major looked him over, almost leaning over the counter to take in the jeans and cowboy boots. He took a long, not appreciative, look at the Stetson hat. “You’re an Air Force pilot?”

  “Not any longer, Major. You should have orders that were forwarded to you yesterday. A copy went to your flight line people, and the airplane should be ready to go.”

  “We don’t allow civilians to fly our aircraft,” the major said.

  Gander was struggling to be polite. “First time for everything, Major. Maybe the Air Force needs the rental income, huh?”

  Blankenship took ten minutes to search through in-baskets before he found the orders, and despite their origination in the office of the Chief of Staff, had difficulty believing them. He called in a colonel who was the operations officer.

  The colonel called in a general, who wound up calling the Pentagon.

  The orders verified, another carnival ensued in which Gander’s and Vrdlicka’s licenses and flying logs had to be confirmed through the FAA and which, after forty-five minutes of phone calls, were.

  “Insurance,” Blankenship said. “You don’t have insurance for that bird.”

  Gander produced the quickly purchased policy. A damned expensive one, too.

  “This doesn’t have a tail number,” the colonel said. “It just says a C-141B.”

  A half-hour of phone calls and faxing around with the insurance carrier produced an insert for the policy which had the correct tail number. The major photocopied the policy.

  With extremely obvious misgivings, Major Blankenship allowed them to file a flight plan and leave his office for the flight line.

  Walking across the hot tarmac, Vrdlicka said, “Just like the old days, hey?”

  “The good old days.”

  Their C-141 Starlifter had a gaggle of ground crewmen surrounding it, and Gander located a master sergeant who spent twenty minutes with him, going over the logs and paperwork, then touring the monster for a visual inspection.

  The wingspan was 159 feet, supporting four 21,000-pound thrust Pratt and Whitney turbofans. At 168 feet, the B-model’s extended fuselage seemed to go on forever. The cargo bay could accept loads up to seventy feet long and ten feet wide, and the second model of the airplane had been the primary transport for the Minuteman IGBM.

  Gander climbed through the entry hatch just aft of the cockpit and took a look through the doorway back into the cargo bay and found it empty. The compartment behind the cockpit had a few bunks in it for extended flights that required relief crews, and Vrdlicka was sitting on one of the bunks, changing into his flight gear. His duffle bag was open on the deck at his feet, his personal oxygen mask and helmet on top. The helmet was silver blue, with “Downhill” handpainted in red script across the front of it. Vrdlicka was an avid skier.

  “You want to drive, or should I?” Vrdlicka asked. “You go ahead. Bus-driving bores the hell out of me.” Gander didn’t bother donning his flight overalls. He did change out of his high-heeled cowboy boots and retrieved his helmet and mask from his duffle bag.

  He climbed the ladder and settled himself into the copilot’s seat, pulled his helmet on, and plugged the communications cable into its receptacle. He hooked up the oxygen line, also. The transport was pressurized, but emergencies were always possible.

  The checklist was on a clipboard hanging from the center pedestal, and he called it off as Vrdlicka scanned the instrument and switch settings. They were operating without a flight engineer, and Gander handled those duties also. Finally, communicating with the crew chief hooked in by cable to an exterior connector, Vrdlicka fired up the turbofans.

  “How do they look, Jimmy?”

  Gander checked the pertinent pressure and temperature gauges. “Four’s lagging a little, still cold. All of them are in the green, though.”

  “Go ahead and call us in.”

  Gander dialed in the Nav/Coms for ground control. “Homestead Ground, this is Starlifter six nine.”

  “Six nine, Homestead.”

  “Six nine, requesting permission to taxi.”

  “Six nine, you may proceed to runway two seven left and hold. Go to Air Control now.”

  “Thank you, Homestead Ground. Six nine changing to Air Control.”

  Vrdlicka waved to the ground crew, then advanced the inboard throttles. The huge plane began to roll.

  Gander watched the gauges on number four, but by the time they reached the runway and braked short of it, the exhaust temperatures and pressures, as well as the oil pressure, had risen to match the other three jet engines.

  He called Air Control, and after a C-130 Hercules landed, they were given permission to take off.

  “Can I have some flaps?” Vrdlicka asked.

  “Whatever your little heart desires.” He lowered the flaps and checked the warning light panel for open hatches, clamshell doors, and the like. “Okay by me, Mel.”

  “Punching it.”

  Vrdlicka advanced the throttles to full ahead, and the RPMs came roaring up the scale. Without a load, they needed less than half the runway, and Vrdlicka rotated into
a steep climb.

  When the end of the runway passed several hundred feet below them, the pilot said, “Gear and flaps.”

  Gander retracted both and got green lights. He cleared with Homestead Control, then said, “She’s all yours, Mel. I’m catching some Z’s.”

  “So much for decent company,” Vrdlicka complained.

  *

  Bryce Kimball sat in the right seat of CX-41, N17732, the second Kappa Kat off the assembly line. CX-41, N17668, the first Kappa Kat, had been selected by Tex Brabham as the tour craft, and it was undergoing a thorough maintenance checkup. Three Two would be used for the training sequences.

  Kimball couldn’t quite believe, as he was sure the others couldn’t quite believe, that they were training for a combat mission. When they had formed KAT, the idea had been to create a better multi-role fighter and, personally for each of them, to keep up their flying skills in a hot fighter available to civilians. They had intended to train themselves for demonstrations and to utilize the secondary academic and engineering talents each of them professed to have.

  The risk factors of engaging hostile aircraft had been left behind them, Kimball had thought. Now, those factors were back in place, and as far as he could tell, no one was unhappy about the change. They were as eager as dogs in heat.

  In the left seat, as command pilot, was Sam Miller, a former captain and F-111 driver, and a current systems engineer. His undergraduate education had been accomplished at Dartmouth, the source of his nickname, “Dart.” Beneath the raised visor of his helmet, his face was beefy and sported a Pancho Villa-shaped, utterly black moustache. He had the Kappa Kat at 32,000 feet over the desert floor south of Casa Grande. The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was thirty miles ahead, and beyond that was the Mexican border. The Papago Indian Reservation was directly below.

  In the back, beneath a separately sectioned canopy, at the twin radar consoles, were Phillipe “Speedy” Contrarez and Conrad “Frog” Billingsly. Contrarez, an ex-major who had spent most of his time as a navigator on fuel tankers, was a hydraulics engineer who was so happy most of the time, it was ridiculous. His controller colleague on this flight had retired as a full colonel and was Director of Flight Operations for Kimball Aero Tech. Billingsly had gone prematurely gray in his mid-thirties, and now at forty-eight, featured fluffy, pure white hair. His eyes were warm and sincere, and he had a deep, throaty voice. He sang bass with a pick-up quartet on weekends. Billingsly was a widower and empty-nester, having had cancer strike both his wife and his daughter.

  Kimball had already decided that Soames and Billingsly would be his air controllers, with Contrarez and Dave Metger as backups. The four of them would get the most rehearsal time in the backseat of the Kappa Kat.

  The Airborne Warning and Control craft was a larger version of the Alpha Kat. The modified delta wing configuration was the same, though fifteen feet greater in span, and she had the same twin, inward-canted rudders. The fuselage was longer and wider, to accommodate twin turbofans, and the nose was wide and flattened, allowing for the four seats and the package of ultra high-tech avionics, electronic countermeasures gear, and radars. Except for her stealth characteristics and her decoys like chaff and flares, she was pretty much defenseless. The Kappa Kat carried no ordnance, and her centerline hard-point was utilized for a conformal fuel tank that gave her two-and-a-half hours more endurance than the Alpha Kats. Her weight kept her top speed almost 400 knots slower than the fighters.

  Since she mounted all of the high-cost electronics, the Kappa Kat was the most expensive craft in the KAT fleet, delivered to any purchaser for a mere twenty-four million dollars each. The basic configuration of an Alpha/Kappa tactical unit called for one Kappa Kat and six Alpha Kats, though the Kappa Kat controllers could handle up to twenty-four fighters. The Kimball Aero Technology brochures recommended one backup Kappa Kat for each one to three tactical units since the Alpha Kats were pretty much useless without a controller craft available.

  With the unit price of an Alpha set at 3.5 million dollars, one minimal tactical unit of six Alpha Kats and a Kappa Kat ran to a total of forty-five million dollars. That compared to seven F-15 Eagles for 140 million. Because of the sliding scale of manufacturing and raw material costs, Kimball could offer discounts on larger orders. The cost per tactical unit dropped substantially as more Alpha Kats were added to each Kappa Kat.

  The cost efficiency on the more sobering side, of course, was that losing one Alpha Kat to hostile fire was considerably cheaper than losing one F-15.

  One of the great selling points, or so Kimball had thought until making his pitch to the American air services, was that the odds of losing an Alpha Kat were considerably less than those of losing a conventional fighter. The stealth characteristics were responsible for that. One couldn’t shoot down what one couldn’t see.

  Billingsly’s voice sounded in his earphones. “Two and Three, go HICAP.”

  “Ah, Frog!” Jay “Barnfire” Halek came back.

  “Maintain radio discipline, Two. Execute.”

  Kimball turned slightly sideways to look back at Billingsly. He had his eyes locked onto the screen of the AN/APG-67 radar as if it pictured his whole world, which Kimball was certain that it did. The advanced radar of the Kappa Kat was an all-digital pulse-Doppler and allowed the detection and tracking of targets at all altitudes. Each set, and there were two aboard the Kappa Kat, was capable of identifying and tracking sixty targets at up to 150 miles away. Unwanted targets and debris were filtered out, leaving the screen’s display clearly defined.

  Halek, who was something of a firebrand, was objecting to Billingsly’s random selection of himself as one of the high-level Combat Air Patrol pilots. Billingsly was fond of shaking up the order of things, giving different pilots different assignments as CAP, as wingmen, and as flight leaders at any given time. Kimball agreed with him; he wanted all of his pilots capable in all roles.

  He rotated his head back to the front, checked his Head-up Display, which repeated the same targets Billingsly had on his scope, and then leaned forward and sideways to peer through the canopy.

  The six Alpha Kats were in a diamond formation, with two of the craft trailing in staggered echelon, two thousand feet below the Kappa Kat. As he watched, numbers two and three rose out of the diamond and climbed quickly. The trailing aircraft moved up and filled in the diamond.

  Far below, the earth was beige and tan and barren. There was no welcome glint of sun reflecting off water.

  Halek and Ito Makura, flying the second CAP aircraft, spread apart as they climbed and finally assumed stations a thousand feet above, and a half-mile off each side, of the Kappa Kat. They served as the defensive cover for the Kappa Kat and were also a reserve against unexpected emergencies.

  “Hawkeye, Bengal Two on station,” Halek reported. Kimball had assigned the codenames for the demonstration tour.

  “Bengal Three ditto,” Makura said.

  “Roger that,” Billingsly replied. “Four, take the lead. One, you’re on his wing. Bengal Five, you have the second element.”

  A chorus of “rogers” replied on the radio.

  “We have two intruders,” the air controller said. “I designate them Tango and Sierra. Four, go to one-seven-four. Tango is on a heading of zero-zero-nine, speed four-five-zero knots, angels one-two, three-two miles. Five, your target is Sierra. He is heading three-one-five at four-two-five knots, altitude two-six-thousand, distance four-one miles. Hawkeye Four, take the second element.”

  “Roger, I have the second element. Five, go to Tac Three,” Contrarez said.

  Aboard the Kappa Kat, the pilot was Hawkeye One, the navigator (Kimball today) Hawkeye Two, and the controllers were Three and Four. Contrarez had just taken control of Bengals Five and Six and moved them to another scrambled radio channel in order to separate his and Billingsly’s dialogue with the fighters.

  Since he wanted to monitor both actions, Kimball keyed in a second receiver and listened to the conversations on bot
h Tac Two and Tac Three.

  On the Head-up Display (HUD), Kimball picked out the blips of Bengals Four and One turning to the left and accelerating. Next to the blips were numbers that kept decreasing — 291 … 289 … 286. The numbers represented the altitude of the aircraft, 28,600 feet and falling off rapidly as the two Alpha Kats dove toward an interception with their target. The aggressors, Tango and Sierra, had not yet changed their courses.

  Bengals Five and Six were also turning, to the right, and gaining speed, intent on Sierra. Their quarry was headed north, forty miles away.

  “Four, turn left to one-seven-zero. Hold altitude,” Billingsly ordered.

  “Roger, Frog.”

  On Tac Three, Bengal Five, piloted by Thomas Keeper, asked, “Hey, Speedy, you sure I’m aimed right?”

  “Right on, Miner Forty-niner. Intercept in four minutes.”

  “I trust you, guy.”

  The fighter pilots had to trust their controllers implicitly and totally for the fighters did not carry search and attack radar. The lack of radar aboard the attack craft served several purposes. It saved weight and cost, of course, but it also kept the stealth aircraft stealthy. One drawback to radar was that, when it was radiating energy, it was identifiable to hostile forces. Since they never transmitted search radar emissions, the Alpha Kats could move unseen into firing positions on their targets. All they needed was clear directions from the Kappa Kat controllers and active data links.

  The tactic had presented two problems. The communications problem had been solved by Mel Vrdlicka’s adaptation of existing radios with new technology. His black boxes for the tactical channels two through eight in both controller and fighter aircraft scrambled voice transmissions and changed radio frequencies every second. If the black boxes sensed electronic countermeasures in the form of jamming, the jammed frequencies were avoided as the radios leapt from one frequency to another.

  The second problem was unavoidable. Though they were stealthy and undetectable on enemy radars, the Kappa Kats were required to utilize their search radars almost continuously if they were to direct the attack planes. The strategy was to keep them high, with more time to detect surface-to-air missile launches, and a suitable distance from the action of the fighters. An enemy aircraft or radar site which detected the Kappa Kat was not therefore guaranteed the location of the Alpha Kats.