by Mack Maloney
Now he had the gap he needed to take off. He yanked back on the controls and the minijet lifted off the ground. He could see the startled looks on the otherwise fierce faces of the cavalrymen as he rose up and over them. Some of the riders managed to fire at him as he raced to get altitude, the tracer bullets lighting up the sky but missing him by a wide margin.
But he still had problems. The power takeoff and the emergency ascent had sucked up a lot of his precious fuel. He still had quite a distance to fly. As he turned the craft westward, he programmed the computer to give him his maximum distance at his current fuel use rate. Once again, the numbers came back bad. He couldn’t climb; he would use too much fuel getting up to the higher altitudes to catch the stronger winds. Yet, if he stayed low to ground, he’d run out of gas more than 150 miles short of the nearest Sea Stallion rendezvous spot. And with all those SAMS in place, he wouldn’t even think of asking that a PAAC craft come any closer than the western fringe of the Badlands.
His only solution was to get more fuel.
There was only one place he could think of that might have jet engine fuel out here in the ’Bads. With a turn slightly to the northwest, he plotted a course for the small auxiliary Yak base he’d spotted near the Kansas-Nebraska border.
It was still two hours before dawn when he reached the small airbase. It had been a cinch to relocate it; its buildings were the only things that broke the monotony of the vast midwest plain. Approaching from the south, he could see the five Yaks bathed in spotlights, sitting in the middle of a square metal take-off and landing platform. Several Hind helicopters waited in the shadows nearby. A radar dish turned lazily atop one of the four buildings surrounding the small installation. Nearby sat two SA-2 mobile SAMs—the same kind that American pilots dodged over North Viet Nam years before.
Hunter figured the Soviet fuel supply would be heavily guarded; he guessed it was like gold to the Soviet infiltrators. He knew this because despite all the airpower the Russians had sneaked in, he had yet to see any of it flying around. The reason had to be an order by the high command to conserve all the available Soviet jet fuel until it was really needed.
Two gallons would get Hunter where he had to go. The question now was: how to get it. He cut the jet engine and drifted over the base. His guess was right, there were at least a dozen soldiers on guard duty near the base’s fuel dump. Another dozen or so were guarding the Yaks. No one was watching the SAMs though; apparently the Soviets weren’t expecting any air attacks. He counted 26 soldiers in all, awake and armed. He had no idea how many other soldiers were sleeping somewhere on the base.
The situation called for a diversion. He landed the mini jet about a half mile away from the base and started crawling—not toward the installation but rather to a point north of it. He carried with him his two remaining wing missiles, his last HE grenade and his two signal rockets and his now-empty 5-gallon water jug. The trusty Uzi was also strapped to his back.
Reaching his destination and working quickly, he fashioned two delayed-reaction bombs. Each one contained a wing missile and a signal rocket. The missile’s internal fusing system would serve as the timers, the HE inside would serve as the explosive and the signal rockets would add a little fireworks. He set one timer to go off in 30 minutes, the other would tick just two minutes longer. He was hoping the first explosion would get everyone’s attention at the base and that second one would bring most of them running. By that time, he would have crawled up to the edge of the fenceless base and, with luck and a lot of confusion, he could withdraw some gas, head back to the hidden minijet and be gone before the Soviets started looking in other directions.
It was a good plan, he thought. But even the best of plans go awry …
Chapter Twelve
HUNTER HAD JUST FINISHED fusing the second bomb when he heard a loud whining noise coming from the base several hundred yards away. He couldn’t believe it; it was the sound of a jet engine coming to life. It was still dark; dawn being more than an hour away. Yet for some reason, someone was warming up one of the Yaks.
It didn’t make sense. If the Soviets were flying only when absolutely necessary—if at all—who would be wanting to take off in a Yak, especially at this hour? Could it be they were going to fly out a couple of hundred miles and check on that little commotion he caused back in the ravine? He quickly discounted the theory. They’d send the Hinds for that.
Maybe it was a training exercise. He knew that Soviet conscripts—the rookies, the greenhorns—were sometimes roused early from their sleep and put to work for an hour or two before breakfast. It had something to do with testing their Marxist mettle. Would they be firing up a Yak to let these guys work on it?
Again, unlikely. But whatever the reason, it was bad news for him. The airplane would be making a racket the entire time it was running and he wondered if anyone at the base would even hear his explosions. Or a hovering pilot might spot him or the minijet or both from the air.
Then he heard a second whine start up, then a third. Now he knew no one would hear his time bombs going off. But maybe it didn’t matter. He could tell by the pitch of their engines, these three Yaks were not just warming up. They were preparing to take-off.
Suddenly, he felt a tingling go down his spine. He turned around and looked into the still-dark, northern sky. The feeling was coming over him. Way off in the distance, he could see four sets of red twinkling lights. They were at about 10,000 feet and coming fast. He watched four more sets of red lights appear behind the first group. Soon they were directly above him. They were Yaks, eight of them, dispatched, he figured, from one of the Soviet zone’s northern bases.
Without so much as a wag of their wings, the eight fighters streaked over their countrymen and off to the south. Their roar had not yet died down when Hunter heard a fifth Yak start up at the base nearby. The Soviets had their air units on the move. It could only mean one thing: Something big was up.
Flattened out on the ground, Hunter watched as the first Yak, then the second, rose slowly over the nearby base. As always, he found himself fascinated by VTOL jets. They looked almost unreal as they hovered on a cushion of downward jet wash. The noise was intense, the jets’ vertical thrusters churning up a heap of dust around the small take-off platform. Then, with the flip of a switch inside the cockpit, the jet’s powerful thrust was diverted backward. In the snap of a finger the Yaks accelerated and were gone.
Now a third Yak rose, the first lights of dawn catching reflections from its steel gray body. Hunter could see hard ordnance hanging from its wings, but no air-to-air missiles. He knew the jets were going on a bombing mission, and not an aircraft interception.
“This is too good to be true,” he thought, instantly knowing he had to take advantage of the situation. Grabbing the two makeshift time bombs, he shifted gears and started running in a low creep directly toward the base.
If he was lucky, he wouldn’t even have to change the bombs’ timers …
The Soviet captain in charge of the auxiliary Yak base hadn’t yet put his boots on. There was no time. He had received the highly unusual urgent message just ten minutes before, and now he was following orders and getting four of his five planes armed and into the air. There was trouble to the south. His superiors didn’t tell him so, of course, as no one in the high command would stoop so low as to tell a mere captain what was going on. The Soviet officer simply deduced that if the high command had ordered 20 of the Expeditionary Force’s 50 Yaks stationed in the zone to arm up and head south, then it must be a critical situation.
Did this mean he’d see action at last? the Soviet wondered. He’d already spent 14 months out in the middle of this nowhere, breathing this bad air, eating the bad food and avoiding the water at all costs. He had already suffered through three unintentional bouts with low-level radiation sickness—each episode being worse than the previous one. And he was sick and tired of fighting with the others over the now-dog-eared copy of Playboy they had found a year ago.
&
nbsp; What was worse, the Russian wasn’t even sure what the hell he was doing over here in the first place. When he had somehow survived the big war in Europe, he thought his troublesome service days were over. In reality, they were just beginning. Not three months after the armistice was signed, his unit began training for this American “Expeditionary” mission.
First came the survival classes on how to operate the Yaks in a foreign environment. Then he was schooled on the proper supervision needed to operate a SA-2 missile system. Then, inexplicably, his commanders put him and 80 other officers aboard a creaky wooden glider and the next thing he knew, they were all vomiting en masse, as the glider battled fierce Canadian crosswinds high above the Great Lakes.
That had been just over a year ago. He had heard that his commanders were using a battle being fought between two American cities as a cover to infiltrate him and his support troops. He was deposited out in the deserted American plain and told that the Yaks—being flown in via Siberia and the American arctic—would arrive any day. They came exactly one year later.
He also knew it was too simple to blame his cement-headed superior officers for the unbelievable delay; the air forces operating on the American continent were known even to the Russian infiltrators as being top notch. The Soviets needed guarantees from their turncoat American allies like the Mid-Aks and The Family, that before the Yaks—or anything else belonging to the preciously small Soviet military machine—came over, at least half the continent had to be in their hands.
Thus the Soviet leaders had watched the battles pitting the Mid-Aks and The Family against the democratic forces with great interest. Despite the battering the Soviet puppets had taken, the power of the democratic forces had shifted to the west coast. All that was left east of the Badlands were isolated islands of democracy—The Syracuse Aerodrome, Football City, to name two. In theory, these would be mopped up once the time was right.
But even he, a Soviet captain, who had spent 14 lonely dull months shooting at jack rabbits for their fur, knew that further promises had been made. Somehow, the Mongolian People’s Mounted Army became involved; most likely someone knew the American plains were well-suited to use good old fashioned cavalry. But foremost of all, the Soviets were demanding their American allies provide an infantry to do the fighting once the Soviet infiltration was complete.
That’s where this man they called “Viktor” came in …
The Russian officer’s thoughts were broken as the fourth Yak lifted off. The fifth and final Yak would stay; he had ordered the jet warmed-up only as a stand-by in case one of the first four had to return to base due to a malfunction. He would keep the Yak warm for 15 minutes and if none of the others were back by then, he’d shut it down. After all, he was under strict orders to save as much fuel as possible.
He turned to go back to his quarters and finally retrieve his boots when his attention was drawn to a long plume of black smoke that was rising from the SAM launch vehicles parked nearby.
“I’ll be shot for this,” was his first thought. “The SAM is on fire and will soon explode and I’ll be court martialed and shot for it.” He immediately started screaming orders to his troops, frantically pointing at the burning missile launcher.
Some of his soldiers were already taking action. The base had a small trailer containing fire extinguishing equipment and now a dozen of his troopers were dragging it down the hill and toward the SAM site. From where the captain stood, it appeared that only the launch vehicle’s rear tires were ablaze. But he knew in less than a minute, the fire would reach the fuel tanks of the four missiles on the launcher’s back and the whole fucking thing would go up.
He ordered his other troops—mechanics, guards, everyone—to grab anything they could and go and fight the fire. A second fire brigade—armed with small fire extinguishers and five-gallon water containers—ran out of the base. Now the only ones left were the captain and the pilot of the warmed up Yak. The captain was finding cold comfort in the fact that the explosion from the four missiles blowing up would probably destroy the whole base anyway, killing him instantly and thereby sparing him from the slow death of Soviet military justice. As for the pilot waiting in Yak, he was also watching the fire and thinking that now might be a good time to take off and escape the conflagration to come.
But then something else caught the captain’s attention. A man—wearing black clothes, a blackened face, and what looked like an American fighter pilot’s helmet—was scrambling underneath the Yak. Amazed, the Russian watched as the man attached a loose chain to the bottom of the jet then ran to its other side. What’s was going on here? the Soviet thought. Who the hell is that guy?
Amid the confused panic of the blazing SAM launcher, and the awful racket of the whining jet, the Soviet officer started screaming at the Yak pilot. But it was useless; the pilot couldn’t hear him for the noise and couldn’t see him because he was still looking the other way, nervously taking stock of his comrades’ losing battle against the SAM fire.
In desperation, the Soviet officer looked around for a weapon. An AK-47, dropped when its owner was pressed into service as a fireman, lay nearby. The officer retrieved it and took aim at the man in black. By this time, the interloper had climbed the small ladder leading to the Yak cockpit and was pummeling the unsuspecting pilot. The officer squeezed off a burst of automatic gunfire which sailed far over the top of the airplane. He aimed lower and fired again, shooting out the Yak’s front tires, causing the entire airplane to shudder. Suddenly it dawned on the Soviet officer that he was firing at a fully-bombed up, fully fueled airplane. A stray bullet could ignite a blast that would make the SAM’s inevitable explosion sound like a firecracker. The Russian immediately ceased firing.
It was no use anyway. The man in black had subdued the pilot and literally dragged him up and out of the cockpit. The pilot fell a long nine feet to the hard metal surface of the landing platform below. Barely conscious and battered, the Russian pilot nevertheless hurriedly dragged himself out from under the Yak. He collapsed at his officer’s feet.
The Soviet captain watched helplessly as the man in black climbed into the pilot’s seat and started to quickly scan the airplane’s controls. Suddenly the jet’s irritating low whine leaped into full roar. The Yak started to ascend. In desperation the Soviet officer began firing the AK-47 again. But it did no good. The airplane was picking up speed and moving away. The man in black was smiling down at them and saying something so distinctly, both Russians could read his lips. He was saying: “See you later, boys.”
The Soviet troops fighting the fire on the SAM barely noticed the Yak taking off. Still bootless, the Soviet captain ran down the hill toward his troops, grabbing half of them and yelling at them. He was pointing at the Yak with one hand and back toward the base with the other. Quickly, a dozen of the Soviet soldiers ran back to retrieve their weapons, leaving the other 12 to battle the fast spreading flames.
The Yak was still hovering nearby. It had not sped off as the Soviet officer thought it would. Perhaps the man who commandeered it was having trouble flying it. The Russian captain could not let it escape. Losing a SAM to a fire was one thing; having one of his jet fighters stolen was quite another.
Now the Yak was very slowly moving away toward the east. The pilot had closed the canopy and brought up the landing gear. Most of the Russian soldiers had their weapons in hand again and were shooting at the jet fighter, but the pilot somehow managed to avoid the concentrated barrage. Below the airplane hung the eight-foot length of chain the strange man had fastened beneath it. A large hook was conveniently attached to the bottom end. The airplane moved even further away but then stopped and hovered over a point about a half mile from the base. Now it looked to the Soviet officer that the pilot was lowering the Yak down. All the while his troops were hurrying to the spot, stopping and firing at the airplane as they advanced.
Using his binoculars, the Soviet captain watched as the Yak descended even lower, the chain dangling just 10 feet or so
from the ground. The airplane hovered for a moment, then moved forward. The hook at the end of the chain snagged something and in one motion, the Yak started to quickly gain altitude.
The SAM’s blew up a few seconds later—not from the fire but from a time-bomb hidden underneath the launcher. Three of the SA-2 missiles were obliterated immediately along with most of the Soviet soldiers fighting the fire. The fourth missile actually launched itself, traveled a brief, spiraling path and impacted on the side hill less than a mile from the base.
Flaming pieces of shrapnel from the explosion started to rain down on the base, touching off many small fires. It didn’t matter. Exactly one minute after the SAM blew up, a second time-bomb went off under the base’s precious fuel supply. Within seconds the installation was a mass of flames, growing higher with every exploding barrel of jet fuel.
The last thing the Soviet captain saw was the stolen Yak-38 turning toward the west and accelerating, the smaller minijet hanging underneath it.
Chapter Thirteen
THE TWO PAAC F-105 Thunderchiefs were at full afterburner when they intercepted the Yak somewhere over Wyoming. The jet fighters were on armed air patrol when the PAAC Early Warning Radar net detected an unidentified aircraft coming out of the Badlands. The Thunderchiefs were immediately vectored to the area.
When they arrived at the coordinates, the PAAC pilots observed the Yak, its landing gear deployed, its collision lights blinking frantically, plus it was flying completely upside down. The F-105s got no response after ordering the airplane to identify itself. Normally, at this point, they would have shot it down. But this airplane was flying so oddly, the Thunderchiefs decided to hold their fire and investigate.
