by Dale Brown
“StealthHawk engaging the second pickup,” Patrick said. “Missile two away. . . .”
The StealthHawk leveled off two thousand feet above the ground and headed for its second target, a column of two Toyota pickups filled with guerrilla soldiers. This time the occupants saw it coming. “Split up! Split up!” Zarazi screamed. He raised his AK-74 rifle and opened fire, and the other five men in the back of the pickup opened fire as well.
It was like looking down the barrel of a gun just before the trigger was pulled—and then realizing the barrel was pulled away right at the very last second. Moments after Zarazi’s truck veered away, the first truck disappeared under a tremendous explosion. Zarazi and the guerrillas in the second pickup saw the other pickup emerge from the cloud of flame and smoke looking as if the truck had been blasted apart by a giant shotgun, set afire, and then tossed across the ground. “Allah, have mercy,” Zarazi muttered. “Allah, get us out of this, and I promise I will avenge myself on the infidels that send these demon robot planes to kill your faithful servants—I swear it!”
• • •
“Oh, baby!” Patrick exclaimed. The mini-Mav’s infrared sensor clearly showed the second pickup truck and its terrified occupants as the missile homed in. At least six automatic rifles were firing at both the mini-Mav and the second StealthHawk, but it was too late. He switched to the first StealthHawk’s imaging-infrared camera as the mini-Mav missile hit, and its picture disappeared. Tires, engine, fuel tank, ammunition, and bodies exploded in perfect unison, and the truck cartwheeled in a cloud of fire across the wasteland. “Got the sucker!”
“Got one more truck trying to get away!” Furness exclaimed. “He knows we’re on his tail, and he’s hauling ass.”
“Don’t worry, the StealthHawk has lots of ammo and fuel,” Patrick said. “That third truck is toast.” Patrick entered commands to launch a third mini-Maverick . . .
But instead of the missile’s releasing and gliding to its target, the StealthHawk UCAV itself started to descend. “Check altitude . . . altitude two thousand . . . check altitude, altitude two thousand . . . Shit, I think I lost contact with the UCAV.”
“Well, at least we get a ringside seat for the impact,” Rebecca said. But the unmanned air vehicle didn’t make impact—instead it leveled out at two hundred feet aboveground, clearly in view of the Taliban fighters below, and began flying westward. “Okay, General, where in hell is it going?” Rebecca asked.
“Damned if I know,” Patrick replied. “But it’ll run out of fuel in forty minutes.”
“Another one bites the dust.”
“But it might not bite the dust. It might make a nice soft landing in the desert,” Patrick said worriedly. “And if it does . . .”
“Then those Taliban goons or anyone else who gets their hands on it will have themselves the latest in American UCAV technology,” Rebecca said. “In forty minutes it’ll be halfway to the Persian Gulf. Can’t you self-destruct it?”
“I have no control over it at all,” Patrick said. He thought for a moment; then: “Follow it.”
“What?”
“Maybe if we can get closer to it, it’ll respond to our direct datalink signals.” He spoke commands into the computer, and the heading bug on Rebecca’s multifunction display swung westward. “There’s your heading bug. Center up.”
“No way, General,” Rebecca said. “That’ll take us over . . . hell, General, that heading takes us over Iran!”
“We’ll stay in the mountains—fly some terrain-avoidance altitudes,” Patrick said. “We’ve got to cut off that UCAV before we lose it.”
“We’re not authorized to fly over Pakistan, and we’re sure as hell not going to overfly Iran,” Furness repeated. Because the United States had had to take the “war on terror” into its former ally, Pakistan, to hunt down the last remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorist cells, a rift had developed between the two nations. Pakistan now prohibited overflights by any military aircraft, and it regarded any military combat aircraft flying over Afghanistan as hostile.
Despite this ban, President Thomas Thorn had authorized McLanahan to launch a StealthHawk unmanned aircraft to patrol Afghanistan, even though it obviously had to overfly Pakistan to reach its patrol area. One or two unmanned aircraft flying over a remote part of Pakistan were not a threat—at least that would be the Americans’ argument, if the stealthy UCAVs were ever discovered.
But a high-tech B-1 bomber was a completely different story.
“General, we can’t remain hidden long enough,” Rebecca argued. “We stay in the mountains a short time, but eventually we get over the desert, and there’s nowhere to hide. . . .”
“Rebecca, it’s now or never,” Patrick insisted. “If we fly over the Mach above the unpopulated areas and slow down near the populated areas, we’ll catch up to the StealthHawk in about twenty minutes. We’ll have just enough time to get it turned around before we have to bingo and refuel.”
“Get approval from the Pentagon first.”
“There’s no time,” Patrick said. “Center up on the bug, push it up to Mach zero point nine, and descend to COLA to penetrate the coastline. I’ll get a new intel satellite dump, and we’ll pick the best course.”
“Oh, God, here we go again,” Rebecca muttered as she commanded the bomber to accelerate and descend to COLA, or Computer-generated Lowest Altitude. The flight-control system commanded a twenty-degree nose-down pitch, automatically sweeping the EB-1’s wings all the way back and altering the curvature of the fuselage to gain as much speed as possible.
As soon as they headed northward, the threat-warning receiver blared, “Caution, SA-10 search mode, ten o’clock, one hundred ten miles, not in detection threshold.”
“The Iranian coastal-defense site at Char Bahar,” Patrick said. “No factor.”
“ ‘No factor,’ huh?” Rebecca retorted. “Aren’t those things capable of shooting down a bomber-size aircraft at treetop level?”
“Not this bomber, it won’t.” They were headed for the Pakistani coastline between the towns of Kapper and Gwadar, just fifty miles east of the Iranian border—well within range of the high-performance SA-10 antiaircraft missile system—but the threat-warning computers measured the signal strength of the search radar and determined that it was not strong enough to get a good reflection from the stealthy EB-1C Vampire. “Keep going.” He keyed his secure command satellite net’s mike button. “Control, Puppeteer.”
“We see it,” Patrick’s friend and deputy, Brigadier-General David Luger, replied. Luger, a fellow navigator and aeronautical engineer who had been partnered with Patrick since their early days in B-52 bombers, was watching the mission from the “virtual cockpit,” a system that displayed all of the EB-1C Vampire’s flight information on computer screens back home and allowed crews and technicians there to monitor and even partially control the actual flight mission. “I’ve issued recall instructions to the surveillance StealthHawk—it’ll ditch itself in the Arabian Sea, and the Navy will retrieve it for us. Still no contact with the strike StealthHawk—it’s still operating normally, still looking for targets but not responding to satellite steering commands.
“I’ve got a call in to the State Department,” Luger went on. “I strongly recommend not crossing the Pakistani border until you get permission. Do I need to remind you about your Russia mission?”
“You do not,” Patrick said. The last time he’d been in a bomber, an EB-52 Megafortress over southwestern Russia, he made a decision to violate orders to help a special-ops mission in trouble—and that decision had almost cost him his life. “Put in a call to Hal and Chris, too,” he said.
“They’re monitoring everything and are briefing up an insertion mission,” Luger said. Stationed in the Gulf of Oman on board a large civilian freighter was Patrick’s backup rescue team: Hal Briggs, Chris Wohl, and ten highly trained commandos, outfitted in Tin Man electronic battle armor. Hidden in the freighter’s cargo hold was an MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet airc
raft, an MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft modified with jet engines to give it more range, speed, and load-carrying capability. With a range of over two thousand miles, air-refuelable, and with the capability of flying below radar, the Pave Dasher was the ideal way to insert rescue or attack troops deep inside hostile territory. “They’re working several problems: They’ll be right at the extreme range of the Pave Dasher—the farther the StealthHawk flies into Turkmenistan, the more problematic the situation becomes, and there’s some pretty bad weather closing in.”
“Let me know what they say,” Patrick said. “If there’s any way they can try it, I want it done.”
“Stand by,” Luger said.
Rebecca Furness rolled her eyes in exasperation. “We can’t ‘stand by,’ “ she said. “We’ll be feet-dry in”—she glanced at her navigation display and muttered—“now. We’re in violation of I don’t know how many international laws.”
“The SA-10 is down,” Patrick told her. “They lost us. No other threats detected, just search radars, all below detection levels.”
“Bad news, Muck,” Luger radioed a few minutes later. “The weather is getting worse down there in eastern Turkmenistan. Hal says it’s your call.”
“What do you think, Texas?”
“If it was to pick up any of our guys, no question,” Luger replied. “But to pick up a two-thousand-pound UCAV from across a hostile border in Turkmenistan, with the Pakistanis, Iranians, and maybe the Russians looking on? Sorry, Muck. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
“General?” Rebecca Furness asked. “You lost it. Let’s get back over the Arabian Sea, get our gas, and go home.”
“Just keep going,” Patrick said. “We’re clear of the Pakistani coastal-defense sites—take it up to Mach one point one, five-thousand-foot clearance plane.”
“This is not a good idea,” Rebecca said—but she found herself pushing up the throttles anyway.
“I’m running your range numbers,” Luger radioed, studying the fuel-flow data being transmitted to him via satellite from the Vampire. “At your current fuel consumption, and assuming you don’t take extra time retrieving the StealthHawks or dodging air defenses, you’ll be almost at emergency fuel state at the scheduled refueling control point. If you couldn’t tank, you might not have enough fuel to make it to Diego Garcia.”
“Copy,” Patrick responded.
They skirted along the Iran-Pakistan border and descended to three hundred feet terrain-following, giving an extremely wide berth to the Iranian border city of Zahedan, which had the largest fighter-interceptor wing in all of Central Asia. They detected more SA-10 surface-to-air units and several short-range, radar-guided antiaircraft artillery units situated along the border—they all had their search-and-acquisition radars on full power. Soon they also detected Iranian fighters—more than a dozen of them, a mixture of French, Russian, and even former American jets. “Damn, we’ve got the entire Iranian air force looking for us,” Rebecca said.
“The closest one is forty miles away,” Patrick said, “and he doesn’t have us. The Iranian jets aren’t crossing the border either.”
Just then one Iranian MiG-29 surprised them—he suddenly turned directly toward them, illuminating them with his radar, and headed quickly east, crossing the Pakistani border near the town of Saindak. “Caution, MiG-29 search mode, nine o’clock, thirty-three miles, high, below detection threshold,” the threat-warning computer reported.
“General . . .” But the Vampire bomber had already responded—it activated its radar trackbreakers and unreeled the ALE-55 fiber-optic towed decoy from a fairing in the tail. The ALE-55 was a small, bullet-shaped device that transmitted jamming and deception signals to hide the bomber and deflect any incoming threats away from it. It was a very effective but definitely last-ditch device to help the bomber escape if it was under direct attack. “We will never launch on a mission ever again without having defensive weapons on board, I promise you that,” Rebecca went on. The Vampire could carry a wide array of defensive air-to-air missiles, from short-range Stingers to extremely long-range Anaconda missiles—but this wasn’t supposed to be an attack mission.
“Pakistani search radar, three o’clock, forty miles,” Patrick reported. “Well below detection levels.”
“Warning, MiG-29 tracking mode, nine o’clock, twenty-five miles.”
“Trackbreakers active,” Patrick reported, punctuating the report with a curse. The trackbreakers could spoof and interfere with the fighter’s tracking radar but would also tell anyone around them that a warplane was in the area—and enemy fighters might be able to track the origin of the jamming signal or fire a missile with the ability to home in on the signal.
“Puppeteer, this is Control,” Luger radioed. “Step it on down to COLA and head northeast. He doesn’t have a solid lock on you yet.”
Patrick studied the large supercockpit display on his forward instrument panel. The terrain to the northeast near the Pakistan-Afghan border was completely flat, with several dry lake beds farther north. A bomber the size of a B-1, even as stealthy as it was, would be easy to track against a flat desert from a MiG-29 chasing it from above. The MiG-29 also had an advanced infrared sensor that could spot the B-1’s red-hot engines over twenty miles away—it wouldn’t need its radar to attack.
“Hard left ninety-degree turn,” Patrick said.
“What? You want me to turn toward Iran?”
“If we get caught in the open, we’ll be a sitting duck,” Patrick said. “We’ll stay in the higher terrain to the west.” Rebecca did not argue further but turned sharply left. The tactic worked. Once they turned ninety degrees from the MiG-29’s course, the MiG’s pulse-Doppler radar detected no relative speed difference and squelched out the radar return. “The MiG broke lock,” Patrick reported. “He’s moving to seven o’clock, twenty-five miles. We’re out of his radar cone.”
They weren’t out of the woods yet, but soon they left the fighters from Zahedan behind them. There were still several short- and long-range surface-to-air missile sites along the border, but as they flew along the Mighand Highlands northbound, they were actually flying behind them. As soon as they were clear of the dry lake beds, Patrick steered the EB-1C back across the Afghan border. They were able to climb up to fifteen thousand feet, high enough to escape visual detection and stay away from any antiaircraft artillery units that might pop up unexpectedly.
“Puppeteer, this is Control,” David Luger radioed. “I show you going across the Turkmen border. The Turkmen army uses lots of Russian antiaircraft systems, and a lot of that stuff is right in front of you.”
“I’m going to make one try at linking up with the StealthHawk, and then I’ll bug out,” Patrick responded.
Minutes later Patrick had locked the StealthHawk’s encrypted beacon up with his laser radar, and they began a tail chase with the StealthHawk drone, which had already crossed the border into Turkmenistan. Rebecca turned the bomber to the northeast, closing the distance rapidly on full military power. “We’re sucking gas like crazy,” she mused. “How much longer before you’re in direct datalink range?”
“About five minutes,” Patrick said, “if our range calculations are . . .” As soon as they did close to within ten miles, Patrick was able to reestablish the uplink to the StealthHawk. “Got it!” Patrick crowed. “It’s responding!”
At the same instant their threat-warning receiver came to life. “Caution, SA-4 surveillance radar, twelve o’clock, thirty-eight miles, well below detection threshold,” the threat-warning computer announced. The SA-4 was a high-performance mobile antiaircraft missile—even launched from so far away, it could reach them in less than two minutes.
“For Christ’s sake, General, we’re flying right for that SA-4 . . . !”
“Keep going, Rebecca. We’ve almost got it.”
“Warning, SA-4 target-acquisition mode, twelve o’clock, twenty miles.” The system activated their countermeasures system, including the towed countermeasures arr
ay—they were an item of interest again. But there was nothing they could do until they got the StealthHawk turned around.
“Damn . . . the Turkmen might be picking up our datalink signals,” Patrick said. Although the signals between the bomber and the StealthHawk drone were encrypted, the transmissions themselves could be detected. Soon, the Turkmen could pinpoint their location, no matter how stealthy they were.
“Let’s get out of here, McLanahan!”
“Almost got it. . . .” He quickly entered in instructions for the StealthHawk to turn around, and it responded. “StealthHawk responding!” Patrick said. Rebecca immediately started a hard left turn. “Wings level, pilot . . .”
“I can’t—we’re going to get shot right in the face by that SA-4!”
“Closer, Rebecca,” Patrick urged. “It’s turning away from that SA-4. We’ll be okay. Head back toward it and at least give me a chance of nudging it back.”
“No way.”
“Then descend,” Patrick said. “It’ll keep us clear of that SA-4. If we go below two thousand feet, it’ll lose us.”
“Two thousand feet! You expect me to descend below two thousand feet?”
“If we lose that StealthHawk, it’ll be the military and diplomatic embarrassment of the decade,” Patrick said. “A few more minutes, that’s all, Rebecca.”
Furness looked at Patrick with an expression of fear and anger—but she made the turn and pushed on the control stick. “Damn it, General, this better work—and fast.”
It did. As soon as they cruised back within the ten-mile arc of the StealthHawk, they were able to get it turned back toward them. They were fifteen miles inside the Turkmen border, but at least they were headed away from the long-range SA-4 missile site. The warning of the SA-4’s “Long Track” surveillance radar still blared in their ears—they were still being detected, possibly tracked. Patrick entered commands into the UCAV’s control computer, and the StealthHawk performed a rejoin on the EB-1C Vampire bomber.
