by Andy Farman
“We head to the right…you lead.” he directed Petrov, but Petrov held out the radio’s telephone-type handset.
“It’s the boss, ‘Al’fa Odin’, and he sounds unhappy, sir.”
When didn’t Lieutenant Colonel Boskoff sound unhappy? Major Limanova thought, but kept it to himself.
“Al’fa Dvukh receiving Al’fa Odin, over?”
He reached behind Petrov and undid the locking screw securing Petrov’s headset lead, unplugging it before answering the commander of Militia Sub-District 178. Further embarrassment was something he could well do without right now.
“Go ahead Al’fa Odin from Al’fa Dvukh, over.”
The duty watch keeper at Moscow Air Defence Centre had contacted Lt Col Boskoff regarding the major’s sighting report, and now Boskoff saw fit to give his deputy an ear blistering for wasting the time of the air defence forces and more seriously, embarrassing Lt Col Boskoff.
Limanova stood his ground, explaining what had occurred and his intention to reconnoiter the old airstrip.
“Phantom aircraft indeed…you are letting you imagination get the better of you, so get your head out of your ass and get your ass back here immediately Limanova…do you hear me? Immediately!” there was the briefest of pauses, too brief in fact to give even a one syllable reply “Al’fa Odin, out!”
Like hell he was.
He knew with absolute certainty something illicit was taking place at the airstrip and that a jet aircraft had taken off, and he was damned well going to prove it.
The major reconnected Petrov’s headset lead, and acting as if nothing were untoward he sent Petrov away on point.
Pulling the butt of his elderly AKM-74 into his shoulder he allowed Petrov to get ten feet ahead before he followed on. It was odd how less secure you felt at night the darker it grew he mused to himself, and turned to look back down the track briefly.
Everything looked the same; he concluded and turned back, immediately feeling a stab of panic as he could no longer make out his driver.
He increased his pace despite the way ahead being as black as pitch.
He walked into the back of Petrov who had a moment before walked into the back of an armoured fighting vehicle which was sat unattended in the firebreak.
It was a BMP-1, or to be more precise, it was their BMP-1.
They had become completely turned around and had re-emerged from the trees close to where they had originally started out an hour or so before.
“Okay, this is not as bad as it seems as I know exactly where we are now.”
“You mean you didn’t know before, sir?”
The major ignored the remark and with a nudge directed Petrov to continue in the direction they had been heading.
The logging trail was indeed where the map had shown it to be and Petrov followed it to the left, feeling more uneasy with every step that took them further away from the solid armour of his vehicle.
Two pairs of ears registered a slight discord in the normal sounds of the night in this forest. Neither would be able to say precisely what it was, and a layman would use the term ‘sixth sense’, but it was that keenness of the senses that comes with being in tune with your environment.
Neither man could see particularly well but they were after all a listening post and not of the observation variety.
The earlier radio conversation had not gone unnoticed at the airstrip command post where they had been monitoring the radio transmissions of the militia, floundering about in the woods twelve miles away to the south. It was not something the Green Beret detachment was going to begin an immediate evacuation for, but half of a field radio conversation taking place just less than a mile north had caused concern.
The listening posts rapid clicking of their transmission switch now initiated a general ‘stand-to’.
Ten more minutes walking brought the major to where he believed the runway began to run parallel with the trail they were on.
Now was the time to stop and listen.
Despite the major’s conviction that there was some form of illegal activity that had taken place here, he nonetheless felt the need for some form of confirmation that he was in fact right, and therefore his immediate superior, the sub-district commander, was again wrong on all counts.
He could smell the heather and the scent of the pine forest, he could hear the very faint rustle of some animal but he could discern nothing else.
They broke track with Major Limanova taking point now, but after just a dozen steps another frightened hare broke from cover by his feet and crashed directly away, straight into the killing area of the hasty ambush the Green Berets had set up on hearing their approach.
The major and Petrov hugged the ground, their eyes wide with shock at the unexpected thunder of a claymore mines detonation and accompanying automatic fire.
The violent sundering of the quiet of the forest echoed beyond its southern boundary.
“Al’fa Dvukh receiving Al’fa Odin, what the hell’s going on out there?”
Major Limanova was well aware that only blind luck had spared them from a sudden and brutal death. He could smell the odour of warm urine as Petrov pissed himself.
“Al’fa Dvukh receiving Al’fa Odin, answer me Limanova! What’s happening?”
The major could not help himself, he had been insulted, treated like an imbecile in front of his men and abused all day.
His self-control now snapped and he groped angrily for the radio handset.
Not thirty metres away a dozen Special Forces troops were laying waste to a small area of woodland and the roar of automatic weapons was such that he had to shout into the mouthpiece in order to be heard.
“Al’fa Odin from Al’fa Dvukh, nothing is happening, nothing at all…haven’t you heard imaginary Phantoms having a firefight before? You...Fat...Stupid...Moronic...ASSHOLE!”
The MiG-29s had drunk deeply and returned to their previous station, and the Mainstay switched its radar to standby before departing its racetrack orbit for its own turn at tanking. The timing could have not been much better.
"Four minutes to IP, two more minutes to weapon release...everything is green back here."
The Nighthawk crested a low hill and dropped down above the Medveditsa River which it would follow to the IP at the foot of the hill valley in which their target was situated. A hard left turn at the Initial Point would be followed by them opening the throttles and performing a pop-up maneouvre two minutes later to toss the weapon towards the mine shaft.
If the shaft was indeed housing the Russian Premier's bolt hole it had very disciplined defences. The screens had no more than tinted yellow with low power radar radiation since departing the vicinity of Moscow's formidable air defence zone.
Luck was with them this nigh...
The mainstay suddenly banked right, breaking off its approach to its tanker support and a wave of pink washed over the At-A-Glance plasma screens as the Soviet AWAC turned its attention abruptly toward the national capital at the Nighthawk's 5 O-Clock.
"We've got fighters lifting off at Petrovsk and Sharkovka… and air defence radars coming up…'Tombstones', 'Clamshells'..." the screen began to populate with ground threats and the airborne variety alike. "...shit, did someone suddenly get wise to us?" Patricia meant the question for herself, but she spoke aloud.
"Or they were waiting for us, and this is all just an elaborate trap." Major Caroline Nunro muttered.
"You got to stop sleeping with spooks Caroline, it’s making you paranoid...I think maybe someone just noted the orbits of the Vega package and the Ariane's RORSAT and connected the dots together, but it kinda verifies Svetlana's intel though.
Previously unknown air defence sites were appearing on the screen, most of them mobile and air portable weapon systems which could follow the Premier around as he moved from bunker to bunker.
"They seem to have 'Favorites' and 'Grumbles' for long and medium range, a trio of 'Geckos' and a 'Zeus' or six for point defence of the target si
te...oops, check the high ground at the IP!" a ZSU 23-4 and a Gecko mobile launcher sat at a little pre-war picnic spot overlooking the river. The RORSAT had them identified by their thermal signatures and radar returns. The symbols appeared on the screen accordingly, sat dead ahead.
Caroline automatically put the nose down to skim the rivers surface as close to the tree lined bank as she dared, hiding from the feared 'Zeus' in the ground clutter but this only made their own thermal fingerprint a little more obvious to the Gecko. Both systems were linked, although the heat seeking missiles could not guide on the ZSU’s radar. The ZSU’s turret traversed to point up-river, its quad 23mm automatic cannons dipping below the horizontal, slaved to the mobile Gecko launchers thermal sensor. A whir of servos also sounded as the Gecko's erector also rose up into the firing position. It was too faint for a lock but it grew in intensity by the millisecond.
Aboard the A-50 the general alert by Moscow Air Defence had come as a rude shock. Major Limanova's sighting report was now the subject of reappraisal by the watch keeper’s immediate superior. The absence of any radar trace was now being regarded as evidence of the presence of at least one enemy stealth aircraft operating in the skies near the capital, rather than a lack of evidence of a conventional one being abroad.
The scrambling of fighters and active use of radar and thermal sensors in and around Moscow had spread rapidly to surrounding air defence zones and beyond.
Two pairs of MiG-29s north of the Volga received the Gecko’s feed via the A-50 Mainstay and banked hard, heading in their direction.
"I have the Zeus and Gecko locked up via our support and if that A-50 keeps coming we will have him at extreme range in thirteen seconds."
"Okay, let’s get busy." The nose came up twenty degrees, the belly launcher cycled and a single AGM-65E sped away, aiming for a spot on the small shingle covered parking area midway between the two launchers, which were only forty feet apart. The amount of ordnance they carried was limited so any opportunity to buy-one-get-one-free was welcomed by Patricia.
Caroline levelled off at two hundred feet above the river, holding steady for a few seconds. The launcher cycled a second time and an AIM-120 dropped free to light off twelve feet below them and accelerate ahead, climbing sharply and also under third party control.
Caroline jinked left, putting warmer trees in their background instead of the cooler River.
Aboard the A-50 the heat source disappeared from the operators screens five seconds before the AIM-120 impacted with the underside of the A-50’s right wing. All beyond the starboard inner folded backwards and upward before shearing away. With the one remaining starboard engine on fire the huge aircraft rolled onto its back, beginning a long terminal dive with a two hundred foot tail of flame streaming behind it and its large radome still rotating.
Command and control was disrupted, although the hunters knew enough to know where to start looking.
Caroline throttled back, raised the nose ten degrees and stood the Nighthawk on its wingtip in order to make the turn into the narrower valley.
As the aircraft left the river valley it was illuminated by exploding Gecko missiles which were tearing apart the burning launch vehicle, and hazarded by the spectacular fireworks display created by cooking-off 23mm cannon ammunition in the flame enshrouded ZSU now laying on its side. Tracer flew off in all directions, including into the path of the F-117X, and worryingly there were six cannon rounds they could not see for every tracer round that they could.
Caroline held the turn, her jaw set and half expecting to feel a hammer blow resound through the airframe but they were through and clear without damage. She levelled the wings and let out a relieved breath, but that relief was premature.
"Mother of ..!" Caroline exclaimed a heartbeat later.
They should have expected that this close in the KGB ground troops, the Premier’s Pretorian Guard, would also be defending the site by any means at hand. Tracer arose to meet them from scattered positions where AFVs sat in defensive berms and hull-down fighting positions. Firing blind, trying for the Golden BB shot, the 20 ruble bullet that brings down the billion dollar aircraft.
The small arms fire flicked by but the heavier guns sent apparently molten globs of green fire aimed directly between the pilot’s eyes. It emerged from the darkness below as small glowing green dots that rose towards them with deceptive slowness before suddenly growing in size and velocity. It seemed that each one must inevitably smash straight through the cockpit screen, but at the last moment they curled away, flashing passed either below, to the right or to the left.
An audible alarm sounded as a super cooled sensor in their tail detected a shoulder launched heat seeking Strela missile locking on. Flares were pumped out automatically and the alarm fell silent.
Patricia saw none of this; she secured the uplink between the weapon and the Vega, updated the status of the Vandenberg launch and set to with the business of the bomb run.
"Twenty seconds." she keyed calmly "Weapon is hot and the uplink is established, this is as good as it gets..."
Caroline centred the icon for the mine shaft at their 12 O-Clock.
"Fighters coming down" Patricia warned. "That kerfuffle back there zeroed our location for them, we have two Zhuk radars crossing our six from the eight o-clock position at six thousand...now four thousand, those boys are hustling."
"Bad country to be diving on burner...this is where those boys find out how well built their rides are…but we will be outahere in seconds."
Behind them the Fulcrum’s Klimov 33D turbofans were indeed producing over eighteen thousand pounds of thrust but the afterburners were cut as warnings sounded in their pilots ears from the Russian’s ground proximity warning systems.
"Pop-up in five...four...SHIT!" The symbols and icons vanished from the screens as the RORSAT turned into an expanding cloud of low orbit debris. Their up to the second threat coverage vanished and the Vega communications satellite lost its targeting data.
“Patty, what’s the status on Two and Three?”
“One minute fifty and six minutes forty five…the second Ariane is launching as we speak.”
Caroline silently blessed the triple redundancy and the mission planner’s foresight, but made a mental note to check on whether theirs was the single most expensive sortie in history.
"Warm up a pair of Sidewinders, we are going around again!" Caroline declared, pulling back on the side stick, taking them up in a half loop and rolling out at the top to loose off an AIM-9L Sidewinder at each of the MiG-29s that were now entering the valley. She laughed cruelly as they received the same greeting from the ground defenders as they had. There was the sudden appearance of a tail of flame followed by a ball of fire as the trailing aircraft of the pair, seriously damaged by friendly ground fire, flew into the hillside. A parachute opened briefly, rewarding its pilot for his quick reactions. The lead MiG-29 released flares and pulled up into a vertical jink, avoiding a direct hit by the Sidewinder targeting it but the missile’s proximity fuse activated ten feet from its tail. It departed eastwards trailing smoke. The second AIM-9L flew into the already burning wreckage of its target which was scattered over the valleys steep side.
“How are we playing this?” Patricia asked.
“Those guys back in the valley have got their eye in now…no future there.”
Patricia had to agree with that.
“So I suggest we try an up and over, back into the river valley to do a straight in south to north approach over the hills?”
“We will have to trust that the Vandenberg RORSAT will be overhead by then.”
“No future in hanging around here either.” Caroline declared.
Even without the RORSAT’s downlink the plasma screens were providing ample warning of seven MiG-29 radars and over a dozen mobile air defence radars searching for them. Fortunately there were no longer any fixed air defence radar sites on the hill tops as their presence would have alerted the West that Russia had something worth targ
eting, somewhere in that area.
“I’ve got activity over at Saratov West, air traffic control radar just came up, so not so deactivated after all…and now a pair of radars lifting off, probably Hind Ds.” Patricia informed her pilot. “Someone in the bunker just called for his bug-out transport to be standing by when the raid is over…we could always fox ‘em into thinking we left, then take him out with an AMRAAM?”
“He’ll have a regiment’s worth of CAP and we have just one AIM-120 remaining.” Caroline pointed out. “Which one is the premier’s helo, and which one is riding shotgun?” the pilot asked rhetorically. “We stick to the plan and hope to hell there isn’t a cab rank of killer ‘Sats’ waiting up in orbit.”
Avoiding the guns in the valley entrance by cutting the corner, skimming over the hill tops and back into the wider river valley Caroline throttled back and flew east, reducing their heat signature and economising on fuel. Major Caroline Nunro was not that type of pilot who would ever complain of having too much fuel.
As the RORSAT launched from Vandenberg came over the horizon the screens again filled with information.
“Are we good?” Caroline asked.
They still had their link to the communication satellite and the RORSAT confirmed it was feeding that with targeting data.
“We’re good!”
This wasn’t familiar terrain by any means and more than a few pilots had attempted to hug the contours only to find that the crest of the hill they thought to be the top was in fact a false summit. Forward inertia takes time to translate into a climb and many an aircraft has bellied into the earth and rock of those snares for the bold and unwary, with the controls pulled all the way back in a last instinctive act. Those rare, lucky ones, learned a valuable lesson, but the unlucky ones next ride was a hearse.
The RORSAT provided them with a moving map and their own precise height, speed and position. Patricia would find them the lowest and quickest way to the target from the back seat and Caroline would follow her instructions.
“Re-entrant coming up between two hilltops on the left…standby to turn…now!”
