Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  “I don’t think so,” Atkins said. “The Rainbow indicates impact—we got it ”

  Cheshire slapped her armrest. “All right ”

  “Celebration over, copilot,” Carter said. “We’ve got a long long way to go.”

  * * *

  In a matter of only a few minutes the Nicaraguan military airbase of Puerto Cabezas was in chaos. One moment it was quiet and peaceful, a warm, lazy summer evening with a hint of an evening storm brewing. The next, air raid sirens were screaming into the night, Russian missiles raised from concrete canisters like demons rising from their crypts, and the roar of jet fighters began to fill the air with the pungent odor of kerosene.

  The first SA-15 missile, installed on the coastal Nicaraguan base only a month earlier in the ongoing Russian fortification of Nicaragua, screamed off its launch rails less than twenty seconds later, filling the air with burning acidic exhaust gas. The missile crews, Nicaraguan with Russian commanding officers, stood and watched the missile disappear into the night sky until a Soviet officer yelled an order to prepare the launcher for reload. Another SA-15 missile was completing its gyro-alignment—the Nicaraguan soldiers were skilled at aligning one missile at a time for launch . . .

  It was this deficiency that had probably saved the crew of the Megafortress Plus. Just before the second missile was ready for launch a huge explosion lit up the small sandy hill where the SA-15 tracking and guidance radome was positioned. The golf-ball-like radome exploded like a burst balloon, scattering pieces of the antenna within for hundreds of meters.

  From his vantage point in a low-covered concrete revetment near the flight line, Maraklov saw the golf-ball radome split apart and explode; now it looked like a cracked egg in a boiled egg holder. Men were running toward the flight line, but he knew the attack on the SA-15 guidance radome was a prelude to the real assault. If it was a Tacit Rainbow cruise missile the attack would not be for a few minutes because the AGM-136 had a range of almost a hundred miles; if it was a AGM-88 HARM missile the follow-on attack could be any second. Either way it was going to be an air raid—the attackers had obviously been waiting for the SA-15 to come up before blowing it up, and with the radar gone the whole north coast of Nicaragua was open to air attack.

  Maraklov took a deep pull from a plastic jug of distilled water as he watched the radar control center begin to burn. Sebaco, he was sure, was next—except whoever was staging this attack wasn’t going to stop at a radar site.

  But DreamStar—it was safe. He was sitting in DreamStar’s cockpit, still wearing his flight suit, his helmet resting on his lap in front of him. Less than one hour earlier he had landed at Puerto Cabezas after a low-altitude run from Sebaco. Because he knew that the American AWACS radar planes would be looking for a high-speed aircraft leaving Sebaco, he had made the flight under two hundred miles an hour and at the lowest altitude he could muster, flying deep within mountain valleys and jungle river beds to avoid detection. His gamble that his flight-profile would resemble anything but a jet fighter had apparently worked.

  To avoid detection he had landed on the taxiway at Puerto Cabezas instead of the broad ten-thousand-foot runway, taxied to the semi-underground concrete shelter and waited with engines running for any sign of pursuit. None. He shut down but maintained the ANTARES interface and remained strapped in place, configured and ready to fire up DreamStar. But still no sign of pursuit. Exhaustion overtook him, so he shut down the interface and directed the ground crewmen to begin refueling his fighter. He had been off the ANTARES interface only fifteen minutes when the attack began.

  DreamStar was ready for a fight. She carried two more Lluyka in-flight refueling tanks on the wing pylons plus two radar-guided missiles on wing pylons and, this time, two infra- red-guided missiles on hardpoints on the underside of the fuselage. The two IR missiles were more of a hazard than a help—if DreamStar’s canards were down in their high-maneuverability position, the missiles could possibly hit the canards after launch—but for the long ferry mission, the extra weapons were considered necessary. The twenty-millimeter cannon was also fully reloaded—DreamStar was at its heaviest gross weight ever, well over one hundred-thousand pounds.

  But Maraklov himself wasn’t as prepared for either a long flight or a fight with American fighters. This had been the first time he had made two flights in DreamStar within twenty-four hours and the physical and mental strain was immense—like running the Boston Marathon, getting twelve short hours of rest, then going out and running a few more Heartbreak Hills. His body had not recovered from the first mission, but the necessity was clear—DreamStar was in danger if it was left there at Sebaco. That had just been confirmed.

  The whine of high-speed jet engines made Maraklov painfully turn to scan down the runway. Four MiG-23 fighters were taxiing to the end of the runway preparing for takeoff. The Soviet government had not been able to send any more MiG- 295 or Russian pilots to Nicaragua on such short notice, so those four MiG-23s were manned by Nicaraguan pilots. The Mig-23s were twenty years old, the pilots young or ill trained in night intercepts. If whoever was attacking Nicaragua destroyed the search and ground-controlled intercept radars as well as the surface-to-air missile radars, the MiG pilots would be forced to hunt for the attackers blind, using their own look-down, shoot- down pulse-Doppler radars to scan thousands of square miles of territory for their quarry.

  Maraklov took another drink. It didn’t matter, he thought— he’d be out of this backwater country in a few hours. And who knew .. . maybe one of the MiGs would get lucky. It happened . . .

  A soldier came up to Maraklov’s revetment, showed an I.D. card to the guard, and ran to the platform set up beside DreamStar. He was hesitant to climb up the ladder, but Maraklov saw that he had a message in his hand, motioned him up, and asked for the paper.

  He got an instant headache after reading the first word. Assuming he could read Russian, the Spanish-speaking radio operators had scrawled the message out in childlike Cyrillic characters. Maraklov had enough trouble reading Russian, but reading this gobbledygook would be next to impossible. He had to get the soldier’s attention away from the interior of DreamStar’s cockpit by hammering his shoulder.

  “Read this for me,” he said in English.

  The soldier looked at him in surprise. “You speak English, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  The soldier looked at the message for a moment, then looked at Maraklov as if he was going to hit him. “I am sorry, I cannot read this. This is Russian, no?”

  “This is garbage Russian, yes. Go back to the radio operator and tell him to write the message out in English.” Maraklov grabbed a pencil from the shoulder’s shirt pocket just before he scrambled off the platform—at least while he was getting the message translated he could work on deciphering this junk.

  The MiG-23s were still idling at the end of the runway—that probably meant that the GCI radar was being jammed or had been destroyed, and the pilots were being held until a heading to the intruder’s position could be established. Don’t bother launching, Maraklov thought. Let the MiGs at Sebaco handle the American attackers—Sebaco was obviously the American’s target—and leave the Puerto Cabezas MiGs in reserve for when the attackers try to withdraw. If they chase the attackers they could wind up getting shot down themselves or run out of fuel before engaging the stragglers . . . But a moment later the MiG-23S began their runup and minimum-interval takeoffs. So much for reserve interceptors. Maraklov guessed that none of these MiGs would return.

  Maraklov had the scribbled Cyrillic characters deciphered now, but remembering the phonetic pronunciations for each character was tougher, and it took a few minutes to make the message intelligible—luckily, most of it was numbers. It was a satellite message from Moscow informing him that Soviet air forces would be in place in five hours, ready to escort him out of the Caribbean basin into the open Atlantic. The message gave last-minute backup or anti-jam frequency changes and other useless information. If the Americans were broad-b
and jamming their primary communications frequencies, they were listening in as well and were probably vectoring fighters into the source of their transmissions. With such a large force of combat aircraft involved, everything relied on secrecy and radio silence, not secondary and tertiary frequencies.

  The fighters were on the downwind side of the runway, the long, bright flames of their afterburners still visible. They had no tankers in Nicaragua (except the one that was lying on the bottom of the Caribbean), so if those guys in the MiG-23s didn’t come out of afterburner they’d flame out before getting a shot ofiF at the intruders.

  Maraklov asked himself, “Why am I ragging on those pilots? DreamStar is safe—if the Americans had pinpointed DreamStar here in Puerto Cabezas this whole base would be a smoking hole.”

  Was it because he itched to get into battle? No, even if he had enough energy to take DreamStar aloft, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t risk it. With the MiG-2gs gone Nicaragua was wide open to attack—for all he knew there was an aircraft carrier sitting off the coast with fifty F-18 fighter-bombers ready to take him on. It would be suicide to try.

  He took another drink of water, emptying the bottle. The real problem here was that he just wanted a future, and every step being taken just seemed to drive him farther and farther from it. DreamStar, he felt, was his life. His whole being was intermeshed with it, and the thought of its eventual dismantling or, worse, destruction was as obscene to him as the idea of a mother killing her newborn baby. But he was also a soldier, obliged to obey orders—and he had been ordered to deliver DreamStar to Russia. But could he obey those orders, knowing what they would do to his aircraft—and what they would probably do to him as well? He was already suspect . . . too American . . .

  All the dead-end thoughts he was having were giving him a headache even worse than before. He tossed the plastic water bottle at one of the Nicaraguan military guards at the mouth of the revetment. “Agua, por favor”— probably the only three words of Spanish he knew. The soldier began filling the bottle from one of his canteens—no doubt more of the brackish, parasite-ridden water of this country. The thought of getting diarrhea while in the metallic flight suit made him laugh and cry, but dying of thirst and trying to withstand these migraine headaches were even worse prospects.

  Soon, it would be over, he thought. He’d be on his way out of this godforsaken country and back to . . . Russia. Back to . . . what?

  He was too tired to think any more about that. As the flickering lights of the fires in the SA-15 radome subsided, exhaustion overtook him, and he drifted off into a fitful sleep.

  * * *

  “Rainbow two showing impact,” Atkins reported. The green search radar indication on Carter’s laser-projection cockpit display had disappeared—the Tacit Rainbow missile had destroyed the Cuyali radar site, the last large-scale search radar system before Sebaco.

  “Coming up on the initial point, crew,” Alicia Kellerman announced. They were deep within the Rio Tuma river valley, which snaked out of the Cordillera Dariense mountains north of Managua and fed Managua Lake. Their initial point was, of all places, the town of Los Angeles thirty miles upriver from Sebaco.

  “Bomb run briefing, crew,” Paul Scott, the radar navigator, began, “we’ll be approaching Sebaco from the northeast on the military crest of the river valley. There’s one SA-io site on the top of Iinotega Mountain at our one o’clock position, but according to Powell and McLanahan in Cheetah it’s a mobile site.”

  “The system can use infrared to acquire its targets,” Atkins chimed in. “Even though it needs radar for guidance they can launch on IR azimuth commands and then go to guidance uplink once the missile is in flight. We could see a snap-launch profile, where all we get on the threat-warning receivers is a MISSILE LAUNCH warning—we won’t get a symbol or MISSILE warning.” Carter was relieved to hear Atkins back on top of his game—he was pretty shook after their first encounter with the SA-15.

  “Our last hazard on the run is the town of Matagalpa, where some Soviet troops could be garrisoned. Watch out for triple-A radars. SA-14 or SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles may also be a factor but if we stay low and fast we should be able to beat an SA-14.

  “We’ll approach Sebaco from the southeast side of the base. Powell and McLanahan saw one antiaircraft artillery battery on each end of the runway—it’ll be worth lobbing a HARM or even a Striker in there if it engages us. They also saw helicopter gunships on the base. These can carry air-to-air heat-seeking missiles too. Our targets are the three hangars on the southwest side of the base and the underground headquarters building three hundred yards southeast from the hangars. The hangars are primary. We’ll also drop the CBU cluster-bomb units on the runway and the taxiway-parking ramp area, with emphasis on destroying any aircraft. If the defenses are minimal we can make a circle to the north or northeast and come around for another pass. After the attack, we beat feet to the northeast, terrain-follow in the Cordillera Isabella mountains, and exit along the Honduran border. If we’re drowned and each module crew gets separated, evade north or northwest toward Honduras and get a ride to Tegucigalpa. We’ve all been briefed on the pick-up points in Nicaragua where we can maybe get assistance from Contadora sympathizers. We’re using channel Charlie on the survival radios.”

  They had time to prebrief the details of the mission and talk about their recommended actions in case they were shot down or somehow separated, but it was much different this time— they were actually over hostile territory, surrounded by the military forces of two nations. It had suddenly all become very real.

  “J-band search radar at six o’clock,” Atkins called out. “Batwing symbol—there’s a fighter up there looking for us.”

  “I.P. inbound, crew,” Kellerman said. The Megafortress made a slight left turn, hugging the side of the rugged, tree- covered mountains.

  Suddenly a green mushroom-shaped dome appeared briefly on Carter’s windscreen. “Warning, search radar, twelve o’clock. ”

  “We’ve got something out ahead of us,” Carter called out.

  “Looks like triple-A,” Atkins said, studying his threat receiver. The computer confirmed it seconds later by drawing a tiny gun-icon underneath the green mushroom. “I’ve got a HARM aligning against it.” Just then, the mushroom turned yellow.

  “Warning, threat radar tracking, twelve o’clock.”

  “Should we go around it?” Carter asked.

  “No room,” Cheshire said. “We’d have to climb five thousand feet to clear these mountains.”

  “Descend and accelerate,” Atkins said. “Stand by for missile launch . . . now.”

  The yellow bay DOORS OPEN light came on. “Caution, bomb doors open . . . warning, HARM missile launch command . . . missile launch . . . bomb doors closed. ”

  “Missile away.” The one-thousand-pound HARM missile was a yellow streak as it roared away into the darkness. Seconds later there was a splash of fire on the horizon and the glow of flames. The yellow mushroom was gone.

  “Warning, airborne threat radar, six o’clock.”

  Karbayjal activated his fire-control radar and slaved it to the threat receiver so the beam from the tail-mounted tracking radar would look in the exact direction of the threat. The readout he got made him yell into his oxygen visor. “Fighter at six o’clock, five miles, descending rapidly.” He hit the voice- command button on his armrest. “Radar lock. Airmine launch one. Launch two. Launch three.”

  A warning tone sounded on interphone, followed by the hard, short thuds of the Stinger airmine rockets being shot away. “Radar lock automatic . . . warning, launch command issued. . . airmine launch . . . launch two . . . launch three. ”

  But moments later the fighter was still coming—all three airmine rockets had missed. “He’s still coming. Prepare for infrared missile attack,” Karbayjal called out. “Two miles . . . one mile . . .—break left now.”

  Carter yanked the Megafortress into a hard left turn. The terrain-following computer immediately commanded a
climb to allow for terrain clearance. At the same time Karbayjal punched two flares and chaflF out the right side ejectors.

  “One mile . . . half mile . . . he’s still coming.” Nothing was decoying this guy—chaflF, flares, jammers, even airmine rockets .. .

  The fire-control radar tracked the fighter as it flew closer and closer, but a few seconds later the reason for its daringly close pass became obvious as Karbayjal watched the fighter’s altitude wind down lower and lower until it finally read zero.

  “He crashed, ” Karbayjal called out. “He—”

  Suddenly they heard on the scrambled discrete strike frequency, “Dog Two, this is Storm Two. Your tail’s clear.”

  “Powell. McLanahan.” Cheshire shouted the names. “Way to go.”

  Carter let out his breath. He tasted blood and found he had bit his lower lip almost all the way through. As he steered the Megafortress back on course he opened the radio channel. “Thanks, guys.”

  * * *

  J.C. raised Cheetah’s nose until he was level with the tops of the tree-covered mountains, making several tight turns left and right to clear behind them, searching for a second fighter. McLanahan, his night-vision visor lowered, searched the sky behind the F-15. “Clear visually, clear on the threat receiver,” he said.

  “That MiG pilot had balls,” J.C. said. “Diving down from twenty-thousand feet like that, it could have paid off for him.”

  “But where’s his buddies?” McLanahan asked.

  J.C. climbed another five-thousand feet, well above the mountains, and continued his clearing turns. He used the radar sparingly, relying more on the infrared-laser scanner to avoid telltale electronic emissions that could give away their location. “Nothing. One MiG working alone? Unusual.”

  “They’re not up here,” McLanahan said. “That means they’ve got to be on the deck, flying down that same river valley as the Old Dog. We either use the radar to look for them . .