“Wendy? Angelina?”
Angelina nodded at Wendy, who reported, “Ready, General.” “Landing and taxi light-switches off. Setting two thousand feet.” Elliott twisted the clearance plane knob from COLA to 2000, and the Old Dog’s SST nose angled skyward.
The Soviet pilot was busy cursing himself and his low-powered radar when the American B-52 suddenly appeared from nowhere just off to the right of his MiG’s nose. The radar range gate immediately set, azimuth locked on and his last AA-3 radar missile aligned and reported ready for launch. “He’s right behind us,” Angelina called out.
“Missile alert,” Wendy followed, and hit the right chaff ejector. “Jink left.”
Elliott put the Old Dog in a sharp turn to the left just as the MISSILE ALERT indication changed to a MISSILE LAUNCH.
“Missile launch, break left!” Wendy punched out eight bundles of chaff from the right ejector as Elliott threw the bomber from a twenty to a forty-five degree bank to the left.
The MiG pilot watched in frustration as another huge radar target appeared on his scope. The aiming reticle moved across to the bigger, brighter, unmoving blob just as he thumbed the LAUNCH button... and watched as his last missile disappeared into empty space.
Immediately he shoved the throttles of his twin Turmansky engines to maximum afterburner and swerved to the left to get into cannon-firing position . . .
“Range decreasing rapidly,” Angelina said. “Still no automatic lock-on. I’m setting the detonation range for the airmines manually.”
“Range decreasing,” Wendy reported. “Stand by for a break to the right.”
“If we have our gear and airbrakes hanging out,” Ormack said, “and then break to evade a missile we’ll stall for sure. We may not have enough altitude to recover.”
“Three miles and closing fast,” Angelina said.
“If he was going to launch one, he’d do it now,” Wendy said. “Two miles.” She was staring hard at the threat video. The bat-wing interceptor threat symbol hovered behind them, inching closer and closer. “Approaching one mile . . . now. Hit it.”
“Gear. Airbrakes six,” Elliott ordered. Ormack dropped the landing- gear handle and flipped the airbrake lever full up. The Old Dog pitched down, throwing everyone hard against his shoulder straps. Elliott brought the power back to eighty percent, then quickly back to full military thrust as the initial buffet to stall again rumbled through the bomber. He had lost a thousand feet before he was able to bring the Old Dog under control.
The Russian pilot wasn’t caught unaware. He had just throttled back to cut his closure rate on the B-52 when he noticed the radar range gate rapidly decreasing.
He immediately disregarded the indication. He had no radar-guided missiles to launch anyway, and the B-52’s jamming probably had broken the range lock. Catching glimpses of the huge bomber’s outline against the snowy backdrop, he kept his power in minimum afterburner and rested his finger against the cannon trigger.
The range gate wound past one thousand meters—well inside firing range. He stepped on the right rudder to completely align himself, and took a deep breath.
He saw several bright flashes of flame from the rear of the bomber, instinctively rolled his fighter left to begin S-turning behind the B-52. The .50-caliber machine guns could never hit the bomber without reliable radar guidance, he thought, and his own twenty-millimeter shells had a greater range and reliability. He started a right roll and pressed the trigger.
The flashes of light suddenly grew into huge, pulsing shafts of color. Immediately he threw his fighter into ninety degrees of bank to the right and pulled on the stick, breaking hard away. He caught a glimpse of his airspeed indicator—in his attempt to match speed with the intruder he had allowed his airspeed to decrease drastically.
He rolled until the stall-warning horn came on again, then rolled out. His stick would not respond to his control. He was sinking fast, in the grip of a near-stall. His MiG-25 wasn’t made for low-altitude intercepts, it was designed for fast high-altitude dogfighting. It was with huge relief that he saw his airspeed increasing steadily. Ochin. In a moment, he thought, he’d finish this Amirikanskaya.
He looked out the left side of his canopy just in time to see a colorful line of fireworks explode less than fifty meters outside his canopy, the blossoms of light reminding him of starburst fireworks he had once seen—big and bright with thousands of tiny stars racing out from a red center.
A moment later those stars riddled the entire left side of his MiG-25. The canopy became one giant mass of holes and jagged cuts, yet somehow stayed intact, but the left engine flamed out immediately, then seized as the engine oil drained from a hundred punctures in the engine cowling.
The radar signature of the MiG blossomed momentarily as the Soviet pilot ejected from his stricken fighter, but neither Wendy nor Angelina noticed. Angelina was congratulating her partner, who was busy watching her frequency video display. One transmitter band at the top of her display began to show low-power, high-energy activity.
She watched it, studied it—and her sweat turned cold.
“Activity, Wendy?” Ormack asked amid the quiet jubilation of the Old Dog’s crew.
“Search radar . . . twelve o’clock.”
“Identification?”
Wendy answered, but the words were uttered too softly to be understood.
“Say again?”
“Kavaznya.” Wendy’s voice was flat now, emotionless. “Kavaznya. The laser. It’s looking for us.”
20 Fifty Miles from Kavaznya
The throttles were at maximum—the right outboard engines had been pulled back to ninety percent to compensate for the destroyed number one engine but all the rest were at full military power.
General Elliott tightened the throttle friction lever on the center throttle quadrant—he wasn’t going to move any one of those throttles unless he had to shut down another engine. The number two engine had been restarted for the target run, but the RPMs were erratic and the vibration from the engine pod threatened to shear what remained of the left wing loose from the fuselage.
“Bomb run checklist,’’ Dave Luger announced.
McLanahan nodded, taking a quick glance at his partner. The navigator had one finger on the checklist page ready to read off each step, but his hands were a shade unsteady.
“You all right, buddy? You look a little nervous.’’
“Me? Nervous? Why should I be nervous? Just because we’re about to send the Russians a candygram loaded with TNT? What’s to be nervous about?’’
“Think positive, the man said.”
“I’ve been trying—”
McLanahan interrupted. “We’re going to shove this one down their throats and get out of here quick like a bunny. Okay?”
“Yeah, right, like a bunny.”
McLanahan turned back to his instrument panel.
“Weapons monitor select switch,” Luger recited.
“Center forward.”
“Low altitude calibrated mode selector.”
“Automatic.”
“Target coordinates, elevation, and ballistics.”
“Set, displayed, checked, locked in,” McLanahan then made a swift check of the coordinates. “Ballistics set for glide mode.” His response was reflexive; he had no master printout to check the coordinates.
“Consent switches, pilot and radar,” Luger answered.
General Elliott painfully reached back along his left side instrument panel and checked that the three gang-barred consent switches—the permission switches for the forward and rear-firing Scorpion missiles and the Striker glide-bomb and bomb decoys—were in the full UP position.
“Pilot’s switches are—”
A warning tone sounded in the crew’s headsets, and the Old Dog pitched violently skyward, its pointy nose at a high, unnatural angle.
Ormack hit the AUTOPILOT DISCONNECT button on his control yoke and pushed the nose back toward the ground. “Flyup. Nav, clear terrain f
or me and get us back down. Radar, what happened?
McLanahan was already investigating. “The terrain-data computer dropped off* the line.” He looked over at Luger. “Dave, clear terrain for him. I’m going to reset the computer and reload the data.”
“High terrain, three miles,” Luger called out. “I’m starting to paint over it. Don’t descend yet.”
McLanahan’s gloved fingers flew over the switches. “Computer’s back on-line.” He flipped the cartridge lever from LOCK to READ. “It’ll take a few moments more.”
“The Kavaznya radar is getting stronger,” Wendy reported. “Well above detection threshold now.”
“Clear of terrain for twenty miles,” Luger said. “Start a slight descent. Possible high terrain in ten miles.”
“Fighter radars have all gone down,” Wendy said. “The Kavaznya radar has blotted them all out—or the fighters are now getting their vectors from that big radar . . .”
McLanahan glanced at the radar altimeter readout as the LOADING DATA indication appeared on his screen. The Old Dog’s fail-safe flyup maneuver, designed to protect the aircraft in case of a failure of any of the components of the terrain-following computer, had zoomed the huge bomber to over two thousand feet above the terrain. The engines were at full military thrust, holding the bomber in the sky.
“Altitude’s still increasing,” McLanahan warned.
“Dammit, I know,” Ormack said. He leaned on the yoke, helping Elliott force the SST nose of the Old Dog toward the protection of the rough Kamchatka hills. The Old Dog crested the flyup at twenty-three hundred feet above the ground before Ormack and Elliott together finally had it descending again.
“Fighters at seven o’clock,” Angelina called out. “Maneuvering to intercept. . She steered the circle cursor of the airmine rocket tracker over one of the attackers but an electronic quiver in the scope sent a shower of interference waves through the display, sending the tracking cursor spinning off the radar return. “Something’s screwing up my radar.”
“Terrain-data computer is back on-line,” McLanahan reported. Ormack immediately reengaged the autopilot to the computer, and the Old Dog nosed earthward.
“First HARM missile programmed and ready,” Wendy reported to Angelina. “Bay door coming open.”
Wendy hit the LAUNCH button. The aft bomb-bay doors snapped open and the hydraulic launcher rotated to position one of the High-speed Anti-Radar Missiles on the bottom launch position. Wendy had already entered the radar’s frequency range into the missile’s sensor. Powerful ejectors pushed the missile into the slipstream, its rocket motor ignited and the launcher immediately rotated to put another HARM missile into launch position.
Wendy monitored the HARM TRACK light on her missile status panel, indicating that the missile had found the source of the preprogrammed frequency transmissions and was heading straight for it. Suddenly Wendy’s entire threat panel and missile status board flickered. The HARM TRACK light illuminated again for a moment, then disappeared.
“It’s the Kavaznya radar,” Wendy said. “It’s creating the interference in my equipment. The HARM missile won’t track ...”
Luger held his breath as a stream of ridgelines rushed toward them, their shadows speeding toward the edge of his wedge-shaped radar scope. As the Old Dog climbed over them, he stared transfixed—
“Dave! We got the computer back,” McLanahan said as he finished recycling the computer. “Let’s finish the checklist.” He reached across to his left instrument panel and flipped a red-guarded switch up. “Radar’s consent switch on.”
Luger had to tear his eyes away from the scope to read the checklist. “Weapon and decoy power.”
“On and checked,” McLanahan said, and moved the tracking handle once more to check that the Striker's seeker-head was still activated.
“Bomb-release lights.”
Elliott sat forward and pressed-to-test his indicator lights. “Off and checked.
“Off and checked down here too,” McLanahan replied.
“Release configuration check,” Luger read. “Special weapons lock.”
Suddenly the Old Dog threw itself skyward once more. Ormack swore, punched off the autopilot once again. Immediately Luger’s full attention was riveted on the narrow wedge-radar display. “High terrain, five miles.”
“Reset the computer,” Ormack ordered, but McLanahan was already resetting the computer power-switches. He tried the circuit reset-switch. It corrected the fault but only for a few seconds, and then the computer faulted once again. He tried several more quick resets. “Something’s wrong, it’s not resetting. I’ll have to recycle it. Maintain heading . . . goddamn, the inertial navigation computer died. We’ve lost navigation information. I’ll try to reset . . .”
“Just do it,” Ormack said. “Nav . . .”
“Clear to descent,” Luger told him. “Slowly. Small ridge three miles, but we should clear it okay—”
“Fighters are closing,” from Angelina. “It’s hard to keep tracking them, my radar keeps spooking out.”
“It’s Kavaznya,” Wendy told her. “The radar is interfering with all our equipment.”
“We’ll be flying right over that thing,” Elliott said.
“Pilot, turn right! Fighter swinging over to eight o’clock on a left quartering attack—”
“McLanahan, can I turn?”
“We’ll get shot down if you don’t. Do it.” The Old Dog banked to the right and moments later the muffled puffs of three airmine rockets rumbled through the bomber.
“Can’t tell if I got them . . .” Angelina said.
“I’ve got nothing to jam,” Wendy said, pounding in frustration on her ejection seat armrests. Her threat display was now a solid sheet of white— every frequency band that was possible to be displayed was filled with endless waves of energy. A jamming package put up against the energy transmitted by the nuclear-powered Kavaznya radar was lost in the spillover created by Kavaznya radar’s sheer power.
“Clear of terrain for thirty miles.” Luger double-checked his radar. They had cleared the last of the high coastal mountain ranges surrounding Kavaznya. At the edge of the scope was blackness—the Bering Sea, he suddenly realized. Only a few hundred miles further on was home— friendly territory. Right now, though, it seemed like a million miles away.
At the very edge of the sea was a huge, compact blob of radar returns. He got two sweeps of the radar on the Kavaznya complex itself before the ground-map scope blanked out.
“Just lost my radar, Kavaznya’s at twelve o’clock, thirty miles.”
McLanahan heard the warning and glanced over at Luger’s blank five-inch radar scope, but he was concentrated on recovering the navigation and terrain-data computers. The first computer recycle failed, so he began the second.
“Try recycling your radar, Dave,” McLanahan told him. Luger furiously switched the radar controls from STBY to TRANSMIT. The radar scope would paint a picture for only a few sweeps, then blank out again.
“It’s not working, we’re blind down here.”
“You said we were clear of terrain—the pilots should be able to see enough out the cockpit windows to keep us from hitting the ground. We’ll use the radar as much as we can later on. Keep the radar down until we make our escape turn.”
“Two fighters at six o’clock,” from Angelina; then, “My radar’s failed, I can’t see them anymore ...”
McLanahan shook his head, then slapped his hands excitedly as a green NAV light illuminated on the computer monitor at his workstation. “Nav computer’s back on-line. Pilot, center up on the target and try like hell to hold your airspeed steady. Dave, get a groundspeed and mileage to the target and start a watch. We might have to start the glide-bomb and decoys with a dead-reckoning position.”
Luger immediately wrote down the mileage to the Kavaznya target and the groundspeed and started the timer on his wristwatch. When he rechecked it a moment later he found that his electronic LCD watch, like the three radar s
copes on the Old Dog, had failed. He started the tiny forty-year-old wind-up ship’s clock on his front panel and made a mental note to compensate for the extra twenty seconds lost.
“Reloading terrain data,” McLanahan said, but before he could move the cartridge lever from LOCK to LOAD the navigation computer failed again.
“Four minutes to go,” Luger announced.
“It’s not going to come back up,” McLanahan said. “The Kavaznya radar’s interference is just too strong.”
Ormack and Elliott had managed to get the Old Dog’s nose down after the flyup, but after flying with a terrain-following computer for so long they weren’t ready to fly at the same low altitudes. Ormack trimmed the bomber for level flight at about a thousand feet altitude and rechecked his instruments before the actual weapon release. Unfortunately the effect of the change to higher altitude was to make the Old Dog an all-too-easy target for the two Soviet fighters chasing it.
Taking vectors from interceptor radar operators at Ossora Airfield near the laser complex, the MiG-29 Fulcrum interceptor pilots didn’t need their sophisticated look-down shoot-down equipment to launch their missiles. The controller gave the pilots range and azimuth information to ideal launch positions. Once they visually acquired the huge bomber, they maneuvered around it to stay away from its deadly tail and turn their missile’s seeker-heads away from the glare and heat of the city beyond it.
“We can’t drive into the target like this,’’ Wendy said. “Colonel, I need you to make random maneuvers all the way toward the target—”
“We’ve got to program the weapons in a DR position,” Luger interrupted. “We can’t—”
“She’s right, Dave,” McLanahan said. “We’ll get hosed if we drive straight and level all this way. Clear to maneuver.”
“Random jinks,” Wendy said. “Not left and right. . . left twice, right once, random all the way. I’ll eject chaff just before each reversal.”
Ormack nodded and began the first jink to the left. “Now we sound like a fighting—”
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