Cherkov’s hands shook with emphasis. “Nicaragua is hardly an ideal safe haven. Your base at Sebaco is a prime target—you must feel the same way, judging by the haste with which you want to fly the fighter out of there. I expect Sebaco will come under attack. It is an isolated base, obviously not part of the Nicaraguan armed forces, and now nearly unprotected. The President can call it a ‘communist-terrorist headquarters,’ a rallying cry for most Americans. If I were Secretary Stuart or General Kane, I would order an attack on Sebaco immediately.”
“Then it is even more urgent that the fighter be moved without delay,” Kalinin said. “It’s too late for talking about what should have been done. I have instructed Colonel
Maraklov, the XF-34’s pilot, to do everything in his power to see that the aircraft survives. I want to order him to fly the aircraft to the Soviet Union, and I want to provide him with all available military support. If we hesitate, we are, as you say, inviting defeat. If we act now, we can be successful ...”
There was silence around the conference table. The General Secretary stared at Kalinin, and from across the table Kalinin forced himself to return the General Secretary’s icy stare with one as determined and convincing as he could manage. He was sure that the General Secretary was trying to think days and weeks ahead, assessing possible consequences of defeat and failure for both of them. But he also realized that the General Secretary really had no choice—to back away from this operation now, when the Americans had given them such a lengthy chance to recover and regroup, would show indecision and timidness. Over time that lack of initiative could be translated into political weakness, which would mean a further loosening of his tenuous grasp on the reins of power.
“Very well,” the General Secretary said, “you are authorized to requisition and command the forces you have outlined to bring this aircraft home. But understand, I am not convinced that this one fighter is worth a major confrontation with the U.S., no matter how advanced it may be. Be prepared to terminate your operation and obey the orders of the Kollegiya should you be so ordered. Am I clearly understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Kalinin said automatically. The General Secretary had relented, as Kalinin expected. His caveat was pro forma, face-saving.
Vladimir Kalinin’s rise to power had begun.
Over the Caribbean Sea
Sunday, 21 June 1996, 2100 CDT
“Tegucigalpa Control, Sun Devil Three-Two is with you at flight level one-eight zero, position one-zero—zero nautical miles north of LaCieba. Over.”
The Honduran military radar operator checked his display and quickly located the data block, then the primary radar return belonging to the American aircraft one hundred miles north of the military airbase on the north coast of Honduras.
He cross-checked the information with the newcomer’s flight plan. The aircraft, he knew from the flight plan, was a modified McDonnell-Douglas DC-io belonging to the U.S. Air Force— that would explain the very large radar return even at this distance.
Satisfied, he replied in thick Latino-accented English, “Sun Devil Three Two, this is Tegucigalpa Control, radar contact. Clear to intercept and track airway Bravo eight-eight-one until overhead Goloson Airport, then follow airway alpha seven- five-forty to Toncontin International, maintain flight level one- eight-zero. Over.”
The copilot of the KC-io Extender tanker from the 161st Air Refueling Group, the very same group unlucky enough to get involved with all these “questionable” (for which read technically illegal) missions into Central America, checked the clearance with his computer flight plan and nodded to his pilot—it was the clearance he had been expecting. “Sun Devil Three- Two, roger. Out.”
The pilot switched over to the scrambled number-two radio. “Storm Zero Two, we’re in contact with Tegucigalpa. Cleared on course.”
“Roger, Mike,” J. C. Powell replied. “Right on time.”
The KC-io’s copilot said, “You expected something else?”
McLanahan scanned outside Cheetah’s bubble canopy at the huge gray-green tanker, a massive, shadowy figure in the growing twilight. The tanker aircraft was on its third mission for him and J.C. in almost as many days—they had gotten to know each other very well during their videophone flightplanning sessions. Although Tegucigalpa and all the other Central American radar operators only knew of a single aircraft on this flight plan, there were actually two—McLanahan was borrowing the tactic the Russians had used the morning before to try to get DreamStar to Cuba. The two aircraft were sticking tightly together in order to merge their radar returns.
Cheetah was right on the tanker’s left wingtip. She was carrying two conformal FAST PACK fuel tanks for added range, and she was armed with four AIM-120 Scorpion missiles in semi-recessed wells along the underside of the fuselage, four AIM-132 infrared homing dogfighting missiles on wing pylons, and five hundred rounds of ammunition for the twenty-millimeter cannon. Cheetah also carried a combination infrared and laser seeker-scanner under the nose that could provide initial steering signals for the AIM-120 missiles without using any telltale emissions from the attack radar.
It was armed and ready for a preemptive strike against the KGB base at Sebaco. The mission was to retaliate against the theft of DreamStar and the Soviet reneging on the deal struck between Moscow and Washington. It was also to try to flush out DreamStar and engage it in one last aerial battle. Better a dead bird than in Soviet hands to copy . . .
But Cheetah was on this mission only if DreamStar or other high-performance fighters challenged the strike aircraft. The original plan proposed by General Elliott had Cheetah armed as both an air-to-air and air-to-ground fighter, but surprisingly J.C. had vetoed the idea—surprising because Powell rarely backed away from a challenge, and because he was an excellent air-to-mud pilot. He had argued that Cheetah would be too heavily loaded down if it had to carry any bulky iron bombs or complicated laser-infrared target designators. He recognized the real possibility that the Russians would use DreamStar to defend Sebaco against attack, and he wanted to be ready with all the power and maneuverability he could get. If DreamStar was going to launch, he wanted to be right there on top of him.
There was a surprise third party on the satellite conference call involved with planning the strike mission, a project director from HAWC. He had been silent most of the conversation, until J.C. had voiced his objections. Then he had stepped in, presenting his options and his estimates for success. In short order his proposals had been approved by General Elliott, and less than an hour later approved by the Secretary of the Air Force.
This fight had become personal—it was as if the President and the DOD had agreed to let the men and women of HAWC deal with the traitor from their own ranks, because that was how they thought of him—as Ken James, not a Soviet man named Maraklov. There were more concrete reasons, of course: The unit was cloaked in secrecy, with fewer persons involved who could alert the media or enemy agents; they commanded the most high-tech weapons in the American military arsenal; and, especially during the recent events, were able to generate a strike sortie faster than an active-duty military unit.
The two men in Cheetah’s cockpit were quiet. J.C. concentrated on maintaining close fingertip formation with the KC- io, and McLanahan checked and rechecked his equipment and watched the setting sun dipping behind the low Maya Mountains near the coast of Belize off the right side of the fighter. The Islas de la Bahia island chain was off to the left, with tiny lights twinkling in the growing Caribbean twilight. It was a pleasant, romantic sight—until the view of those tranquil islands was obscured by the row of AIM-132 missiles slung under Cheetah’s wings, the missile’s large foreplanes slicing the Isla de Roatan neatly in half.
“How are you doing back there, sir?” Powell asked, finally breaking the strained silence. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m okay.”
“Radio’s free. Want to call back to the command post again?”
“No, not right now.” Since leaving Dreamland earli
er that afternoon he had made one UHF radio phone-patch back to HAWC’s command post to ask about Wendy. She was, they told him, undergoing laser surgery to remove areas of scarred and damaged tissue in her lungs. The last word he had gotten was that they were searching for possible donors for a single lung transplant. Only a few hundred of these transplants had been done in the United States in the past few years, and only a handful of recipients were still alive.
“She’ll be okay,” J.C. said.
Patrick said nothing.
Silence again as they approached the Honduras coastline and the tiny city of La Cieba came into view. Then J.C. asked, “You figure we’ll run into James up here?”
“You mean Maraklov. ”
“Still can’t help thinking of him as Ken James.”
“By any other name he’s still a murderer. I don’t think of him as a Russian or an American or even as a person. I won’t have any trouble pulling the trigger on him.”
According to General Elliott’s plan, Cheetah was meant to go up against DreamStar, to engage with missiles from long range, close, engage at medium range with missiles, and if necessary close and engage with guns.
“Ken . . . Maraklov seems like he’s still on top of his game,” J.C. said. “He scared the hell out of those F-16 Air National
Guard guys. Faked one with a missile shot, follows him in a horizontal climb, then hoses him while the F-16 descends on him. He busted up one other guy—”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
But that wasn’t altogether true—in reality, McLanahan was, in a way, fascinated by him. Not just because of the amazingly successful espionage operation that he had managed all these years, but because of what sort person was out here. He was a Russian, a Soviet agent—he must have been worried about being captured every day, yet he not only successfully penetrated the most top-secret flight research lab in the U.S. but became the only pilot of the most advanced flying machine in the whole world. How anyone could keep calm and collected through all that without going crazy was unbelievable. Add on that he had to fly DreamStar itself—and in Maraklov’s case take it into battle, with no “knock it off” calls or prearranged attack scenarios, no “wait ten seconds then come and get us” stuff. And Maraklov had proved himself in battle, handily defeating two F-16 ADF interceptors . . . “How the hell does he do it?”
“He’s tuned into the ANTARES computer as if it was made especially for him,” J.C. replied immediately, as if he was thinking the very same thing as McLanahan. “It’s logical, though—if he’s a Russian mole like they say he is, he had to forget completely about being a Russian and transform himself into an American. It’s like he can ram-flush his own mind and fill it with whatever he wants. The same with ANTARES—he can empty his mind of everything and allow that machine to take over. I don’t know how he snaps out of it—he must keep back a bit of his brain, enough to remind himself that he’s a human being—sort of like leaving bread crumbs behind in a maze to help find your way out . . .”
“But how can a guy fight like that? I’ve flown lots of different high-performance fighters, including Cheetah’s simulator, and it takes every ounce of concentration I have just to keep the thing flying straight. How can a schizy guy like that fly one?”
“Practice helps,” J.C. said. “Sure, you’ve flown a lot of fighters—always with an instructor pilot and always in ideal day VFR conditions—but you don’t have many hours. Maraklov has got hundreds of hours in DreamStar. And let’s face it—the man is good. With or without DreamStar, he’s a top fighter pilot. I’m no psychologist, so I don’t know too much about his mental state, but just because you’re schizy doesn’t mean you can’t function normally or even above norm. Hell, they say most of us fighter pilots are schizoids anyway . . . But ANTARES is the key, Patrick. If you had a full-time, high-speed computer telling you what to do each and every second you were at the controls, you could fly any jet in the inventory. The problem you and I have is that we can’t interface with ANTARES. Maraklov is the opposite: he’s probably at a point where he can’t exist without ANTARES. He’s not whole unless he’s hooked up to that machine. When he’s not hooked up he’s less than himself. He’s probably more dangerous when he’s not hooked up. When he’s hooked into ANTARES he’s sort of at the mercy of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, no matter how far we’ve come with high-speed integrated circuits, micro-miniature computers and neural interfaces, there’s no unlimited amount of info you can take on board an aircraft. We call ANTARES artificial intelligence, and in a way it is, but the critical difference between my brain and ANTARES’ computer is that ANTARES can’t learn. And learning creates an unlimited pool of info that you rely on in combat. There’s a lot of it available on DreamStar, but it has a limit, and we know what the limit is. James—Maraklov—can call on his own experience and training to improve his own pool of information, but we’ve seen before that he doesn’t do that. He relies more and more on ANTARES to make crucial decisions for him. So his advantage can become a disadvantage for him, and that’s a one-up for me. On Cheetah I’ve got a lot of options available. Including ones I dream up or choose. He doesn’t—” “But ANTARES has hundreds of options available,” McLanahan said, “and it can execute them much faster than you can—”
“ANTARES executes a maneuver based on what it figures out I’m doing, true,” J.C. said, “but he also makes moves based on the probability of what I’ll do in the future, based on what I do now. ANTARES is thinking ahead and maneuvering to counter or press the attack based on what it thinks I’ll do. But what if he’s thinking the wrong thing?”
“The chances of it computing the wrong thing are slim,” McLanahan said. “It computes dozens, sometimes hundreds of combinations to any situation—”
“But it can only execute one of them,” J.C. said. “The one it executes is based on current activity and probability—highly accurate mathematical statistics and historical averages but still chance, educated guesses.”
“So if you do something different, it recomputes on that move, executes the maneuver, and computes another dozen situations . .
“You got it. And when it stops and thinks—and I don’t care how fast it does it—I have some advantage. If it’s thinking instead of fighting that’s good for me.”
McLanahan’s head was pounding. “You’ve got a machine that can think and react faster than a human being. A lot faster. How can you get the advantage over that?”
“Because of the way it’s programmed,” J.C. said. “DreamStar is a fighter,” McLanahan said. “It’s been programmed to fight. Attack. It can compute a dozen different ways to attack every second. Where’s the advantage?”
“What would you do?” J.C. asked, “if you were chasing down a bogey at your twelve o’clock and you had the overtake on him but you both had a lot of smash built up? What would you do? Would you go max AB, firewall the throttle, close on the guy and attack?”
“I could, but it wouldn’t be smart.”
“Why?”
“Because if I had a lot of overtake, the bogey could reverse on me easier. Then I’d be on the defensive—”
“Exactly. DreamStar does not think like that. DreamStar has not been programmed to hang back, match speed and power, maintain spacing, look for an opening. DreamStar goes for the kill when the target is presented to it. It will always engage. If you’re ever in doubt about what it will do, it will attack. You can count on it. Remember our last flight test with DreamStar?”
“Sure. James almost pancaked into those buttes.”
“He did that because even in what we would call an unsafe situation, DreamStar’s computers will press the attack no matter what. If there’s the slightest opening, the tiniest chance for success, DreamStar will use it in its attack equation.”
“I wasn’t involved with the programming part of DreamStar’s computers,” McLanahan said, “but to me it doesn’t make sense. Isn’t defense as much a part of do
gfighting as offense? Why wouldn’t DreamStar’s computer programmers teach it about defense?”
“Who knows? DreamStar was probably programmed by some computer weenie who never was in a cockpit. But then again, I suppose if you have the ultimate fighter, the most agile and fastest there is, it would be easy to ignore defense and concentrate on offense. But it can afford to ignore cut-and-run options because it has the speed and the agility to turn tiny mistakes into victories. Guys lose because they’re amazed by how fast it is. It’s not fast—you’re dead because you did exactly what DreamStar figured you would do, and it was right there waiting for you. Boom. Dead meat.”
“So if you make DreamStar play defense . . .”
“DreamStar does not play defense, Patrick,” J.C. said, pounding on the canopy sill to drive home his point. “The only defense maneuver programmed into that system is high-speed escape, and that’s only if the ANTARES interface is broken or damaged. As long as it’s fully functional, it never thinks defense. DreamStar is always thinking attack. Always. If you force it into a defensive role you know that DreamStar is thinking about how to attack in response. And when it’s thinking, you have the advantage. True, it may only be for a second or two, but during that time you have an advantage, and that’s when you have to take him out.”
“Sounds like you got this all figured out, J.C.”
“Hey, DreamStar’s a fantastic machine, you can’t beat it in technology or maneuverability—you have to think at a level where even ANTARES has a weakness. You fly unpredictable, fly in three dimensions, fly by instincts instead of by the book or by some computer. ANTARES has problems handling that ...”
As the KC-10 began a shallow turn right toward Tegucigalpa in southern Honduras, J.C. gently yawed Cheetah around to follow. They had just crossed the north coast of Honduras directly over the Honduran Air Force base of La Cieba. Even though the Hondurans had only twenty-five aircraft, La Cieba was a large, modern, high-tech base—mostly because of the U.S. military, which used the base for “joint training missions,” and subsequently “assisted” with base improvements that virtually built an American air base at La Cieba. There were often more American planes at La Cieba than other aircraft in all of Honduras.
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