McLanahan glanced at the weapons arranged along the SMFD, then spoke, “Unsafe . . . ready,” to ready all weapons. Each weapon icon changed from red to green, indicating all were ready for release. “Weapon status verified, full connectivity.”
Cobb turned to look, then nodded his agreement. “Checks.”
McLanahan relocked all weapons, then unlocked the SLAM rocket bomb only. “Left bay SLAM selected,” he told Cobb.
Another quick glance from Cobb, then he resumed his seemingly petrified position. “Checks. Left bay weapon unlocked. All others locked.” McLanahan thought Cobb looked a little like the Lincoln Memorial, sitting erect and unmoving in his seat, hands on either side of him, staring straight ahead.
McLanahan selected a special symbol in the upper-right corner of the SMFD with his head-pointing system. He spoke “Active” and it began to blink, indicating that it was active and preparing to send data. “I’m calling up satellite-targeting data from the latest NIRTSat surveillance scan,” he told Ormack. “In a few minutes I should have an updated radar image of the target area, and with the composite infrared and visual data, I should be able to program the SLAM missile for a direct hit. We got this bomb run wired.”
ABOARD THE F-23 WILDCAT FIGHTERS
The F-23 pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Mirisch and Captain Ed Milo, felt as if they were chasing a ghost ship—there was an attacker out there, but he barely registered on any of their sensors. If they didn’t find him within the next five minutes or less, they would lose max points for any intercepts done outside the MOA.
Well, Mirisch thought, this mystery plane couldn’t escape the Mark One attack sensor system—their eyeballs. Jarrel’s Air Battle Force had B-1 and B-2 bombers in it now, so just maybe this attacker was one of those stealthy beasts. Mirisch noted the direction of the shadows on the ground and began to search not for the airplanes themselves; but for big, dark shadows—a bomber’s shadow was always many times larger than the plane itself, and there was no camouflaging a shadow . . .
Got it!
“Tally ho!” Mirisch shouted. He was so excited that he forgot his radio discipline: “Jesus Christ, I got a B-2 bomber, one o’clock low! It’s a fucking B-2 bomber!”That’s why their attack radars wouldn’t lock on or the infrared scanners wouldn’t work—the B-2 was supposed to have the radar cross-section of a bird, and birds don’t paint too well on radar. Mirisch was expecting a black aircraft, but this bat-winged monstrosity was painted tan and green camouflage, blending in perfectly with the surrounding terrain. It was flying very low, but the late afternoon’s shadows were long and it was a dead giveaway. At night, Mirisch thought, it would be next to impossible to find this bastard. “Raider flight, this is Raider Two-Zero flight, we got a Bravo Two bomber, repeat, Bravo Two, at low altitude. Closing to . . .”
Suddenly there was the worst squealing and chirping on the UHF radio frequency that Mirisch had ever heard. It completely blotted out not only the UHF channel, but the scrambled FM HAVE QUICK channel as well. Except for the Godawful screeching, the jamming was no big deal—they had a visual on the bomber, and no B-2 was going to outrun, outmaneuver, or outgun an F-23. This guy is toast. The newcomer, whoever he was, was too far out to matter now. He would deal with the B-2, then go back and take care of the newcomer with the big jammer.
Mirisch had a solid visual on the B-2, so he took the lead back from Milo and began his run. The B-2 had begun a series of S-turns, flying lower and lower until his shadow really did seem to disappear, trying to break Mirisch’s visual contact. In fact it did take a lot of concentration to stay focused on the bomber as it slid around low hills and gullys, but the closer the F-23 got, the easier it was to stay on him. Now, with the B-2 noticeably closer, the attack radar finally locked on at four miles. The heavy jamming from the bomber occasionally managed to break the range gate lock and spoil his firing solution, but the F-23’s attack radar was frequency-agile enough to escape the jamming long enough for the lead-computing sight to operate. No sweat . . .
ABOARD WHISPER ONE-SEVEN
The throttles were at full military thrust, and Cobb had the three-hundred-thousand-pound bomber right at three hundred feet above the ground, and occasionally he cheated and nudged it even lower. He knew the wild S-turns ate up speed and allowed the fighters to move closer, but one advantage of the water-based custom camouflage job on the B-2 that had been applied specifically for this mission was that it degraded the one attack option that no B-2 bomber could defend against—a visual gun attack.
With the fighter’s attack radars in standby or in intermittent use, the B-2’s most powerful sensor was the ALQ-158 digital tail-warning radar, a pulse-Doppler radar that scanned the skies behind the bomber and presented a picture of the positions of the fighters as they prosecuted their attack. Each time the fighters began to maneuver close enough for a gun shot, McLanahan called out a warning and Cobb jinked away, never in a predictable pattern, always mixing sudden altitude changes in with subtle speed changes. Without their attack radar, the F-23 pilots had to rely on visual cues to decide when to open fire. If nothing else, they were losing points or wasting ammunition—at best, the B-2 might escape out of the MOA before the fighters closed within lethal range.
Plus, they had one more ace in the hole, but they were running out of time. “Guardian must be around here close to be blotting out the radios like this,” McLanahan told Cobb and Ormack, “but I have no way of knowing where he is. He might be only a few minutes away. . . .”
ABOARD THE F-23 WILDCAT FIGHTERS
“Fox three, Fox three, Raider Two-Zero, guns firing,” Mirisch cried out on the primary radio. The B-2 had finally remained steady for the first time in this entire chase, long enough for Milo to safely join on his wing and for Mirisch to get his first clean “shots” off at the big bomber’s tail. The B-2 had accelerated, really accelerated—it was traveling close to six hundred nautical miles per hour, much faster than he ever expected such a huge plane to travel.
Suddenly the threat scope lit up like a gaudy Christmas wreath. There was a powerful fighter radar somewhere up ahead, dead ahead, not a search radar, but a solid missile lock on. A “Missile Launch” warning soon followed. It wasn’t coming from Milo—there was another fighter out there, and it was attacking them! His RHAWS was indicating several different threats in several different directions—surface-to-air missiles, fighters, search radars, at least a dozen of them. It was as if six VPVO sites and six “enemy” fighters had appeared all at once.
Mirisch had no choice. He couldn’t see his attackers, he had no radio contact or data link with GCI to tell him what was out there, he was less than two thousand feet above ground, and the loud, incessant noise of the jamming on all channels, bleeding through the radios into the interphone, was beginning to cause disorientation. He checked to be sure where Milo was—the kid had managed to stay in formation with him, thank God, and had not yet moved into the lead position—then called out on the emergency Guard channel, “Powder River players, this is a Raider flight, knock it off, knock it off, knock it off!”
Whoever was jamming him obviously heard the call, because the noise jamming stopped immediately. Mirisch leveled off at two thousand feet, waited until Milo was back safely in position on his wing, then scanned the skies for the unknown attacker.
He spotted it that instant. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
It was a damned B-52 bomber. But it was like no B-52 he had ever seen before.
As it banked right, toward the center of the Powder River MOA, Mirisch saw a long pointed nose, a rounded, swept-back V-tail, eight huge turbofan engines, and twin fuel tanks on each wingtip. But the strange bomber also sported a long wedge-shaped fairing on its upper fuselage resembling a specialized radar compartment, and . . . he saw pylons between the fuselage and the inboard engine nacelles, with what looked like AIM-120 air-to-air missiles installed!
“Lead, I’ve got a tally on an aircraft at our eleven o’clock high, five miles . . .”
ABOARD WHISPER ONE-SEVEN, OVER POWDER RIVER
MOA, MONTANA
General Ormack strained against his shoulder harness to look out the B-2 bomber’s cockpit windscreens just in time to see the huge EB-52 Megafortress do a “wing wag” and then bank away to the north. “Jesus, what a beautiful plane. We could use a hundred of those.”
McLanahan laughed. “Well, it just sent those F-23s running, didn’t it? That thing is tailor-made for the Air Battle Force. You give every heavy bomber going in a Megafortress to provide jamming and air-defense support, you’ve got an awesome force.”
McLanahan and the other participants at the Strategic Warfare Center had been hearing about the EB-52 for weeks. Nobody had expected it to show up during the exercises. But it had, and McLanahan was right, it was awesome. It had a radome on its spine that had been taken off an NC-135 “Big Crow.” The radome could probably shut down all communications in and out of Rapid City. It certainly jammed everything the F-23s who’d been on McLanahan’s tail had on them. The plane also had capability of carrying twenty-two AMRAAMS—twelve on the wings, up to ten internally on a rotary launcher, including rear-fighting capability. Plus HARM missiles, TACIT RAINBOW antiradar missiles, rear-firing Stingers, Harpoon antiship missiles, conventional cruise missiles, SLAM and Maverick TV–guided missiles, Striker and Hammer glide-bombs, Durandal antirunway bombs . . .
General Brad Elliott had six such planes. One was under repair and two more were authorized.
They would revolutionize SAC and SWC.
RETALIATION
FROM THE WAR
IN 2020
by RALPH PETERS
Besides being one of the best military thriller writers today, former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters is an outspoken commentator on world events and the current state of the United States military, with his essays and interviews appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, and on the PBS television show Frontline. Author of the nonfiction book Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?, he has seen first hand the good and the bad in the military, and is not afraid to speak his mind.
In the following excerpt from his novel The War in 2020, Peters takes us to the front line in a vicious future, where top-of-the-line high-tech Japanese equipment combines with the groundpounding savagery of Iranian soldiers to create a new, lethal threat to American interests and world peace. Against this enemy the U.S. military unleashes the M-100, an aircraft with advanced tactical imaging systems and the biggest anti-armor gun out there. And on this night raid, bigger is definitely better. So saddle up with the high-tech, hard-hitting cavalry soldiers of the future and their armored, fire-breathing flying machines of 2020.
3 NOVEMBER 2020
EARLY MORNING HOURS
“Ruby minus ten minutes,” the copilot said.
“Roger,” Heifetz responded. “Combat systems check.” He glanced down at the control panel. “Weapons suite?”
“Green.”
“Target acquisition suite?”
“Green.”
“Active countermeasures suite?”
“Green.”
“Go to environments check.”
“Roger,” the copilot said.
Throughout the regiment, Heifetz knew, other combat crews were running through the same drill. Making sure. One last time.
The environments check took them through the range of visual “environments” in which they could choose to fight. The forward windscreens also served as monitors. The first test simply allowed the crew to look out through the transparent composite material the way a man looked through a window. Outside, the night raced with snow, the big flakes hurrying toward the aircraft at a dizzying speed.
“Better and better,” the copilot remarked. The storm meant that even old-fashioned visually aimed systems on the ground would have added difficulty spotting their attackers.
“Go to radar digital,” Heifetz said.
The copilot touched his panel, and the night and the rushing snow disappeared. The big windscreens filled with a sharp image of the terrain over which they were flying, as though it were the middle of a perfectly clear day.
“Ruby minus eight minutes,” the copilot said.
Heifetz briefly admired the perfection of the radar image before him. The view had the hyperreality of an especially good photograph, except that this picture moved with the aircraft, following the barren plains gone white under the snow and the sudden gashes and hills of waste that marked the open pit mines scarring the landscape. Then he said:
“Go to enhanced thermal.”
The copilot obliged. The windows refilled, this time with heat sources highlighted over a backdrop of radar imagery.
“Target sort,” Heifetz directed.
Immediately, each of the heat sources that the on-board computer had identified as a military target showed red. Hundreds of targets, near and far, filled the screen, as though the display had developed a case of measles. Below each target, numbers showed in shifting colors selected by the computer to contrast with the landscape. These were the attack priorities assigned by the computer. As the M-100 moved across the landscape, the numbers shifted, as new potential targets were acquired and others fell behind.
“Jesus,” the copilot said. “Just look at that.”
Heifetz grunted. It was as close as he would allow himself to come to admitting that he was impressed.
“Makes you just want to cut loose,” the copilot said. “Blow the hell out of them.”
“At Ruby.”
“Ruby minus seven,” the copilot reported.
“Go to composite,” Heifetz said.
The next image to fill the screen resembled the “daytime” digital image with targets added as points of light. This was a computer-built image exploiting all on-board systems plus input from space systems and a programmed memory base. In an environment soaked with electronic interference, or where radar countermeasures buffeted a single system, the computer reasoned around the interference, filling in any gaps in realtime information from other sources. The result was a constantly clear pure-light image of the battlefield. Further, if a particular target held special interest for the crew, they had only to point at it with a flight glove and the magnified image and all pertinent information appeared on a monitor mounted just below the windscreen.
“Ruby minus six,” the copilot said. “Initial targets on radar horizon.”
“Roger,” Heifetz said. Then he entered the command net, calling Lieutenant Colonel Tercus, the First Squadron’s commander, with whom he was tagging along.
“Whisky five-five, this is Sierra one-three. Over.”
“Whisky five-five, over,” Tercus responded. Even over the comms net the squadron commander managed to sound dashing, flamboyant. Tercus stretched the regulations when it came to the length of his hair, and he wore a heavy cavalryman’s moustache that would have been permitted on no other officer. Tercus was simply one of those unusual men in the Army who managed to make their own rules with baffling ease. Tercus seemed to be the eternal cavalryman, and he was always ready for a fight. In the past his valor had always outdistanced his occasional foolishness, but Taylor was taking no chances today—and so he had sent Heifetz along to make sure Tercus did not gallop out of control. “Superb officer,” Taylor had remarked to Heifetz, “as long as you keep him in his sandbox.”
“This is Sierra one-three. I’ve been off your internal. Status report. Over.”
“Roger,” Tercus responded. “All green, all go. Ruby minus five. Going to active countermeasures at minus three. Jeez, Dave. You been watching the target array? Unbelievable.”
“Roger. Active countermeasures at minus three. Weapons free
at minus one.”
“Lima Charlie. And another great day for killing Indians. Over.”
“One-three out,” Heifetz said. He turned to his copilot. “Maintain composite.”
“Composite lock. Alpha Troop diverging from main body.”
“Roger. Stay with them.” Alpha Troop had been assigned the mission of striking the Japanese-Iranian repair and marshaling yards at Karaganda, while the remainder of the squadron went after the headquarters and assembly areas of the III Iranian Corps. Heifetz had elected to maneuver along with Alpha Troop, since the squadron commander would remain with the main body of his unit. Heifetz could assist in controlling the action—and he could add additional firepower for Alpha Troop’s big task.
“Ruby minus three.”
“Activate jammers.” For all his self-discipline, Heifetz could not help raising his voice. He felt the old familiar excitement taking possession of him.
“Jammers hot,” the copilot said. “Full active countermeasures to auto-control.”
There was no change in the sharp image that filled the M-100’s windscreen. But Heifetz imagined that he could feel the electronic flood coursing out over the landscape. The simple stealth capabilities and passive spoofers had hidden the systems on their approach to the objective area. Now the attack electronics would overwhelm any known radar or acquisition systems. Enemy operators might see nothing but fuzz on their monitors, or they might register thousands of mock images amid which the First Squadron’s birds would be hidden. The jammers even had the capability to overload and physically destroy certain types of enemy collectors. The latest technology allowed powerful jamming signals to “embrace” enemy communications, piggybacking on them until they arrived at and burned out the receiving-end electronics. It was a war of invisible fires; waged in microseconds.
On Glorious Wings Page 36
