by Dale Brown
* * *
The French-built Exocet missile carried a relatively small warhead at 364 pounds; while the explosion destroyed the bridge it would not by itself have been enough to sink the ship. The more damaging blow was landed by the second weapon, fired a bare second and a half after the first; this missile struck at the waterline just ahead of the exact middle of the ship. The warhead carried through the hull before exploding; the vessel shuddered with the impact and within moments began to settle. Nearly a third of the crew had been killed or trapped by the two blasts; the others were so stunned that it would be several minutes before most even got to their proper emergency stations. By then the ship would be lost.
Five miles away, the man who had given the order to launch the missiles stood over the small video screen, watching through a long-range infrared camera as the doomed merchant ship began to sink.
The attack had been an easy one; a bare demonstration of the Malaysian navy vessel’s capabilities. Named the Barracuda, the experimental high-speed craft was every bit the voracious predator, clothed in dark black skin made of metal and fiber-glass arranged in sharp facets to deflect radar waves. The craft used a technology known as “wing-in-surface-effect,” which allowed it to skim over the water at high speed; it could reach over four hundred knots, though to fire effectively it had to slow to below one hundred, and had to go even slower in choppy seas and bad weather. A one-of-a-kind vessel built in secret as part of a concerted effort to upgrade the Malaysian military, the Barracuda heralded a new age for the nation that spread out over more than a thousand miles of the southeastern Pacific.
A new age, and new opportunities, thought the vessel’s commander, Captain Dazhou Ti. He had great wishes for the future, and above all a lust for revenge against the family that had wronged his ancestors. The Barracuda would make it possible to achieve all of his goals.
Dazhou straightened, then looked around the red-lit command area of his vessel. The space was barely ten by twenty feet, and every inch was utilized. Eight men and the captain worked here; another two were assigned to the rear compartment as weapons handlers to watch over the automated equipment and, if the need arose, to work the thirty-millimeter cannon.
“A job well done,” he told his men.
The crew was well disciplined, and not one man looked up from his station or said the slightest word. This pleased Dazhou greatly.
“We will return,” he announced. “To your course, helm.”
The vessel began picking up speed instantly, slipping into the morning mist that hugged the coastline. Dazhou returned to his station at the center of the deck, mindful that he fired but the opening salvo in a long, long war.
II
“WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?”
Chapter 8
Off the coast of Brunei
8 October 1997, (local) 0523
Mack Smith banked hard right, putting the A-37B Dragonfly at a right angle to the Megafortress’s radar. Had the radar been an older unit, he might have succeeded in confusing it. Pulse-Doppler radars had difficulty picking up returns from objects at a ninety-degree angle; many were the pilots who had managed to escape an enemy’s grip because of it. But the Megafortress unit wasn’t about to be fooled; the crewman aboard the EB-52 sang out loud and clear with his bearing and speed.
Hallelujah, thought Mack to himself.
It was probably the first time in his life that he actually wanted to be caught. Mack took a hard turn north and did a quick check of his instruments. The Cessna wasn’t a fancy beast, but it was sure and dependable, and the indicators showed she was in prime condition.
“Dragon One, this is Jersey,” said Breanna Stockard, who was aboard the EB-52. “Looks like we’re through with the low-altitude hunts. What’s your pleasure?”
Mack checked his watch and fuel. “Let’s move out to sea and practice some sea surveillance,” he answered. “That okay with Deci?”
Deci Gordon was a Dreamland radar specialist who was aboard the EB-52 helping train Mack’s men.
“Good for me,” answered Deci. “Your people did very well on the low-altitude stuff. A-pluses all around.”
He was being kind. The two pilots who had taken stints at the stick had flown decently. But the equipment operators tasked with finding Mack while he flew at low altitude around the nearby mountains had batted only about .300 — great in baseball, fatal in war.
Mack knew that working the radar involved a heck of a lot more than hitting a few keys and jiggling some toggles, but his people had a long, long way to go before they would be competent enough to find a MiG hell-bent on nailing a real target.
Two weeks before, Mack would have vented his frustration at the poor score, or at least let the crew aboard the EB-52 know that they had to step it up. He was learning, however, to be more laid back, or at least more selective with his criticism.
He had to be. The two specialists aboard Jersey were the last two he had. The other two had quit.
As Mack adjusted his course and started to climb through five thousand feet, he saw something flare in the right side of his windscreen. It took a moment for him to realize he was seeing a fire.
“Jersey, this is Brunei Dragon One. I think I see a ship on fire. Stand by.”
Mack gave the throttle a shove and turned in the direction of the flames. From this distance, the fire looked more like the sparkle of a gem, glittering red. The ship itself was a gray shadow around it.
“Mack, we see it,” said Breanna. “We’ll have GPS coordinates in a second”
“You got a Mayday or something?” Mack asked Breanna. “Nothing”
Mack alerted his ground controller, who staffed a combat center at the International Airport control tower back in the capital. (As in many other smaller countries around the world, the International Airport or IAP handled military as well as civilian flights.) Besides calling out the navy and local harbor patrol, Mack told the controller to contact the Malaysian air force at Labuan. The small air station there — the only other air base besides Brunei IAP on the northern side of Borneo — operated a squadron of French-built Aerospatiale SA 316B Alouette Ills for search and rescue.
“We’ll stay in the area until rescue is underway, give ‘em some hope, anyway,” Mack added.
Breanna reported that the ship had not answered any of their hails.
“Roger that,” said Mack. He was now within two miles of the ship, and could see that the vessel had settled low in the water. “I’m going to get close and see what I can see.”
Low and slow was one thing the A-37B did really well. Mack decided to pop on his landing lights, not so much because it would help him see better, but because it would show survivors he was there and help was on the way. His speed notched down steadily until finally it seemed as if he were going backward.
As he approached, it looked to him as if there were two ships on fire. He banked, hand gentle on the stick as he slipped around for another look.
The ship had broken in half somewhere around the superstructure.
Must’ve been one hell of an accident for it to blow up like that, thought Mack, sliding around for another pass.
* * *
The Megafortress pilot had forgotten to tell the computer that the exercise was over, and so it kept blinking a warning at him that he was outside of the programmed flight area. It was nothing more than an annoyance, since the plane wouldn’t override the pilot’s commands, but the flash was driving Breanna crazy. Still, she avoided the temptation to turn it off herself, or even to bring it to his attention. In a few days she wasn’t going to be here to straighten him out; it was time to take the training wheels off.
But boy, it bothered her.
Finally, the pilot turned to her and announced: “I have a difficulty with the warning system.”
“It just needs to be acknowledged. Tell the computer the exercise is over. You might check your course, as well,” she added, noticing that he had allowed his heading to drift well to the west.
Something else bugged her. The crew was, well, quiet.
In an American plane, certainly on a Dreamland crew, the specialists would be singing out, talking about contacts and the like. But the two men at the mission stations behind her on the flight deck were silent. Breanna’s copilot station allowed her to peek at their contact screens; she did so and saw that the men were refining their equipment and seemed to have a competent handle on things — they just didn’t talk about it.
By now, Mack had completed a third orbit of the stricken vessel and reported that he saw no boats in the water. He switched to a different frequency and began talking to the harbor patrol, which had been alerted by their ground controller.
“Captain, what do you think of this?” asked Deci. “Hit that two scan, low resolution. I’m feeding it.”
Enhanced by the computer, the image showed a dark blur in the left-hand corner of the screen, racing along the coast toward Malaysia.
“Just a ghost?” asked Breanna.
“No. There’s something there,” said Deci. “Moving real fast — out around three hundred knots.”
“What boat goes that fast? Cigarette speed boat?”
“Never heard of one even half that fast. Has to be a plane, but according to the radar it’s at three feet.”
“Three feet?”
“I know it’s weird,” added Deci, “but it’s a live contact. The computer has never seen it before”
“I’ll bet.” Breanna flipped into Mack’s circuit. “Brunei Dragon One, we have an odd contact you might want to know about,” she said. “Indications are it’s a plane flying very low, but it may be a weird radar bounce off a boat of some sort. Moving to the east, northeast at a very good clip. You might want to check it out.”
“Give me a vector,” he snapped.
* * *
Clean, throttle lashed to the last stop, and a good wind at its back, the manual said the A-37B Dragonfly could do 440 knots.
Mack had it nudging 470 as he tracked in the direction Breanna had fed him, running up the coastline. He was about thirty seconds from the spot where she’d gotten the first contact just a hair under four miles — but he had nothing on his radar and couldn’t see anything, either.
He leaned his head far forward, as if the few inches of extra distance would help his eyes filter away the shadows and mist.
“Dragon One to Jersey — yo, Breanna, where is this thing?”
“Stand by.”
She came back again with a GPS location.
“Hey, I’m in the Stone Age, remember? I don’t have a GPS locator on board.”
“Sorry — you look like you’re almost on top of it. Two miles.” Mack reached for the throttle, easing off on his speed. The shoreline was an irregular black haze to his right.
Sixty seconds later, Breanna announced that they had lost it. “Stand by:’ she added.
Stand by yourself, he thought. He had let his altitude slip to two thousand feet. He was passing just over a marina, but moving too fast to sort out what he saw.
“Pleasure boat,” he said with disgust, snapping the speak button as he tucked into a bank to check it out. “Hey, Jersey girl — did you have me chase a pleasure boat? There’s a marina down here.”
“You know a pleasure boat that goes three hundred knots? Stand by. We’re looking for it.”
Mack circled around. There were at least two dozen boats in the marina, but no airplanes.
“Not a seaplane?” he asked, though he didn’t see one. “Seaplane? If so the computer couldn’t find it on its index. Hold on.”
Mack pulled out the large area map from his kneeboard and unfolded it, checking to see where he was.
“Dragon One, we have it twenty-five miles to your northeast, along the coast:’ said Breanna over the radio.
“Your sure about that, Jersey?”
“We’re as sure as — stand by,” she added, a note of disgust creeping into her voice.
Mack started a turn in the direction she had advised, but as he came to the new course Breanna told him they had lost the contact completely.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re trying.”
“I’m looking at empty ocean.”
“You’re right on the vector.”
She added that the Brunei authorities had just reported a ship underway to rescue survivors at the stricken ship, which had now been identified as a freighter due to dock at 6 A.M. in Brunei. Mack flew about ten miles to the east-northeast, then banked into an orbit fifteen hundred feet over the waves, riding a curlicue as he looked for Breanna’s contact. He began heading toward the masts of a group of fishing vessels further northward on the shore.
“Flight Jersey to Dragon One,” said the airborne radar operator aboard the EB-52. “Report: Two Su-27s coming in your direction from the south. Report: bearing one-six-five. Report..
Mack listened incredulously to the contact information. The two planes were over Malaysian territory, on a course that would take them out over Mack’s position. But Malaysia didn’t have any Su-27s, and all eighteen of their MiG-29s were over at Subang, a good thousand miles away. As the MiGs were the most capable planes in the region, two spies at the airport there were paid good money by the prince to keep them informed.
Two others were paid so-so money. All of the air bases operated by Indonesia and Malaysia, including the two Malaysian and one Indonesian fields on Borneo, were covered around the clock by spies. Mack surely would have known by now if these planes were operating there.
Whoever they belonged to, they were moving at a good clip — the radar operator warned that they were topping six hundred knots.
“We’re sure they’re not MiGs?” asked Mack.
“Yes, Minister. We’re sure.”
“Yeah, those are definitely Su-27s, and they’re hot,” confirmed Deci.
“Roger that,” said Mack, pulling back on his stick and climbing off the deck.
* * *
Breanna did a quick run through the screens that showed how the Megafortress was performing, and then brought up the fuel matrix, which gave the pilots a set of calculations showing how long they could stay up with the fuel remaining in their tanks. The Megafortress computer system could make the predictions seem terribly precise-42.35 minutes if they spent it doing these orbits and then headed straight home — but in reality fuel management remained more art than science. The screen gave the pilots several sets of reasonable guesses based on stock mission profiles as well as the programmed mission. It could also make calculations based on data inputted. Breanna brought a “profile map” up at the side of the touchscreen and quickly built a scenario from it by tapping a few options. They could climb to twenty-five thousand feet, engage the two Sukhois, and then slide back home.
Just.
Not that they could actually engage the Sukhois. They weren’t carrying any anti-air missiles. They didn’t have any shells for the Stinger air-mine tail weapon; the shrapnel discs were in relatively short supply and weren’t needed for training.
“Captain, what are your intentions regarding the Sukhois?” she asked the Megafortress pilot.
He replied that he would remain on station until Mack gave him other orders. It wasn’t the wrong response, exactly, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of answer that was going to set the world on fire.
“Should we take the initiative and ask the minister what he wants us to do?” she said, her patience starting to slip a little. “Maybe suggest we try and establish contact with the bogeys and get them to declare their intent? Maybe prepare an offensive or defensive posture?”
“By all
means,” answered the pilot. “But the minister may prefer to deal with them himself.”
“The A-37B is a sitting duck,” she said.
To her surprise, the pilot chuckled. “The minister would not lose an engagement,” he said.
“He’s unarmed.”
The pilot chuckled again, his laughter implying that she didn’t understand the laws of physics — or Mack Smith. The minister could not be shot down, and anyone foolish enough to attack him would get their comeuppance — even if they were flying cutting-edge interceptors and he was in an unarmed plane designed as a trainer.
Breanna, no longer able to contain her frustration, hit the talk button. “Dragon One, what’s your call on the Sukhois?”
“I want to see what the hell they’re up to and where they came from:’ replied Mack. ‘Because there are no Sukhois on Borneo. Malaysia’s MiGs are way over in West Malaysia near the capital.”
“Mack, I can assure you, those are Sukhois, not MiGs and not ghosts. Your people are not screwing this up. Those planes are coming hot. What are you going to do if they turn hostile?”
“Hey, relax Bree. I’m cool.”
“You’re a sitting duck. And they haven’t answered our radio calls. If they get nasty—”
“Oh, give me a break, will you? I can handle them.”
One’s loonier than the other, Breanna thought.
* * *
Mack continued his lackadaisical climb, trying to conserve his fuel while making sure the pointing-nose cowboys running for him knew he was here. They were now about eight minutes away, flying at roughly twenty thousand feet, separated by about a quarter-mile. Their radars were not yet in range to see the Dragonfly.
But given their speed and direction, it seemed highly coincidental that they were flying in his direction on a whim. “Mack, you’re in radar range of the Su-27s.”
“About time,” he said.
“You want us to jam them?”
“Hell no! I want to see who these guys are.”
