Ride of the Valkyries

by Stuart Slade

  Through the defenses? No hope of that. Nanda's radar warning receiver was already screaming its warning. The dots showing the threats lined in front of him and touching the center of the display. Surface to air missiles, already on their way up. Now was the time for chaff; the flares had done their work and it was time for the aluminum foil to do their share. If the intelligence reports on Chimp SAM units were correct, there were 27 missiles down there, ready to be fired in waves of three. How many waves could the launchers get off before the bombers were within their minimum range? The thick white trails of the missiles were already rising from the ground; the threat was obvious but in launching, the batteries had revealed their positions.

  Lieutenant Paromita Shastri's section had been assigned flak suppression. His Skyhawks were carrying Bullpups rather than thousand pound bombs on their wing racks. Three of his four Skyhawks had survived and their Bullpups streaked out towards the battery positions. One Skyhawk took a direct hit from a Guild missile and vanished in a black ball. Its Bullpups went ballistic into the sea, but the other pair of Skyhawks sent their missiles into battery positions. One of the red threat dots vanished as the radar truck exploded. Then the remaining pair of Shastri's section were racing across the harbor. One didn't make it; a shoulder-fired missile from the base area hit its tail and it staggered for a few second before plowing into the hillside. The survivor swept over the missile battery positions, dumped his retarded 1,000 pound bombs and vanished over the ridgeline, safe at last.

  Lieutenant Alam Srinivas's section had the priority target, the big seaplane tender anchored in the harbor. That ship was the depot ship for the whole enemy squadron; take it out and the base would be crippled. He also had three of his four Skyhawks left as they made their run for the seaplane carrier. The Guild missiles took out one of his aircraft. The other pair made good drops, their bombs fell in neat sticks across the target. The seaplane carrier vanished behind the white eruptions of near misses and the red-black balls of at least three direct hits. As Srinivas made it over the ridge he saw the seaplane carrier was burning aft and already starting to settle by the stern.

  Lieutenant Prem Shantiar Jha's section was assigned to the maintenance area. His section had take the worst of the battering, he had the only Skyhawk left of his four. Fighters had hit the other pair and a Guild had destroyed a third. On his own, Jha saw a set of quays with five seaplane fighters anchored next to them. That had to be the maintenance area, it had to be. He opened up with his pair of wing-mounted 20mm cannon, the orange-red tracers floated out, into the anchored fighters. Then the red pip of his continuously-computed impact point bomb sight started to cross the area and he salvoed his thousand pounders into it, the bombs dropped clear and their tail fins spread to slow them and get them clear of the aircraft that had dropped them.

  Even so, the lurch from the blast was much worse than Jha had expected. Only when the controls on his Skyhawk started to freeze that he realized it had been more than just blast. Anti-aircraft fire, either guns or a shoulder-fired missile had hit him and his hydraulics were gone. It had taken just a second for the controls to freeze completely and it took even less for Jha to realize the game was up. He reached over his head and pulled the eject lever, his seat blasted him clear of the crippled Skyhawk just before it turned over and crashed.

  That left Commander Nanda's section. Miraculously, all four aircraft had survived - so far - and he, as Commander, had the hardest job. Try and find the ammunition and fuel dumps and hit those. His Skyhawk was lurching as it was hit. Mostly small arms fire he guessed. He still fired off the last of his chaff and flares. Then, half buried in a gully and surrounded by berms, he saw the great black sausages filled with fuel. He altered course slightly, watching one Skyhawk stream black smoke and tighten its turn until it spun into the sea below. Then his CPIP started to approach the dumps and he released his bombs over the facility below.

  Clear of the target area, Nanda looked around. Six Skyhawks had survived the run over the base. Jha's section had vanished completely, the others were sorely battered. At least two of the survivors were trailing smoke and/or fuel. Time to go home, there was no need to worry now; it had become an unwritten rule of this strange war that wasn't a war at all. Once a battle was over, nobody tried to chase down the crippled survivors limping home. Nanda, like all the Indian pilots, regarded that as being unsporting. The Chimps probably had their own reasons; against the warrior's code or something. He could see the pyre of black smoke rising from where the Sugu Bay naval base lay tucked in the hills. The Skyhawks had paid heavily but they'd done their job. How well? There was no way of knowing.

  Farmhouse south of San Diego, Mexican side of the border

  Humberto didn't like this job and he didn't like the people he was dealing with. His orders were to take them over the border, or, in this case under it, but that was it. He would be heartily glad when the job was over. They were, without a doubt, the most unpleasant people he had ever had to deal with. To make matters worse, they were quite obviously sick and getting worse., The final touch being that he and his men had undoubtedly caught whatever it was they were suffering from. It was inevitable, he supposed; the long truck drive up across Mexico had put him in constant touch with the passengers in the back. Whatever they had, it was likely he had. With luck, he would be rid of it as soon as he was rid of them.

  That would be soon. He was leading them under the border in a purpose-built tunnel; tall enough for a man to stand in, wide enough for him to walk comfortably. Concrete-lined so it stayed dry, with battery-powered lights so those using it could walk safely along its length. Humberto had designed it himself and his men had built it, a project that had taken them almost a year. The tunnel was almost a mile long. It started at a disused garage on the Mexican side of the border and ended in a small country store the American side.

  Like most Coyotes, Humberto was a self-employed contractor. He accepted jobs from the cartels when they were offered and ran his own groups of illegals to America when they weren't. His tunnel meant that Humberto got paid top dollar for his services. That was fair for, in his way, Humberto was an honest man. When he agreed to take a party of illegals across the border, that's what he did; all the way across and he made sure when he left them they knew what to do and where to go. Few of their jobs were legal, Humberto was no fool and knew that crossing the border legally was so easy that all the legitimate jobs were filled by legals. So the jobs his clients were going to were illegal. Still, they'd paid him honest money to be taken to those jobs and Humberto was an honest man. He made sure they got there, alive and well.

  In the disused garage almost a mile behind him, men in white suits had closed in on the entrance to his tunnel. They'd found it quickly enough. That wasn't surprising since they'd been told where to look by a man who preferred to spend his life sentence playing golf in a minimum-security Federal "correctional institute" to playing survival in the general population of a maximum security penitentiary. Only, the men in white suits didn't open the tunnel. They were welding the entrance shut, piling heavy timbers on top of it and securing everything down. Others were placing thermite bombs in the truck that had brought the people down in the tunnel and setting others around the old garage. These were people who knew how to burn things down properly.

  In the tunnel, Humberto and one of his men had reached the steps up to the American end of the smuggling route. Humberto sent his man up first to open the manhole cover, then frowned as he reported the hatch was jammed. Shut tight; it wouldn't move. Suddenly, Humberto noted the hatch was different. It had a wide pipe built through it. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. As if to confirm that impression, he heard a roar the ground shook and dust rained down from the concrete lining.

  Outside the tunnel was a SAC emergency deployment refueling tanker, one of the ones used to pump fuel into a B-70 Valkyrie when it was operating off an Interstate Highway Emergency airstrip. It could blast thousands of gallons of fuel a minute into an aircraft's tan
ks. Here, its capacity and pumping power were being used to the max. The hose joining the tank to the manhole cover bulged and flexed with the sheer volume of fuel pouring down it. The needles in the pump controls were all far into the red, but that didn't matter. The limits were set by what the aircraft fuel tanks could stand, not what the pumps could deliver. The object of the game was to get as much raw gasoline into that tunnel as quickly as possible. This time, the red lines were a challenge, not a warning.

  Inside the tunnel, the effects were catastrophic. The fuel didn't pour into the tunnel, it hit the bottom with the force of a hydraulic ram. Gasoline cracked the concrete and bounced down the passageway. Humberto's man was killed outright by the sheer force of the liquid column that broke his neck. Behind him, Humberto's legs were also broken by the force and he was blinded by the spraying gasoline. Further down, the illegals he was bringing over panicked at the sight and ran. No good; the tidal wave of gasoline overtook them and spread down the tunnel. The wave lost force as it did so but by then it didn't matter.

  Above them, the fuelling tanker had emptied and was driving away. An Air Force Engineer walked over to the manhole cover and dropped a small four pound thermite incendiary down the hole where the fuelling hose had connected. Then he ran. As fast as he could, for the thermite charge had a time delay and he wanted to be a long way off when it ignited. He was still running when the ground behind him erupted in a long, snake-like column of smoke and dust.

  Inside the tunnel, the effects were instantaneous. A fuel-air explosion ripped down the length of the tunnel, killing everybody and everything inside it. It didn't just kill them, it incinerated them leaving only a fine charcoal dust. Although he never knew it, Humberto got his reward for being an honest man, after his fashion. He died instantly, incinerated so fast his nerves never had a chance to tell the body about pain. That saved him from the days of agony dying of blackpox and was a reward for honesty worth appreciating.

  At the Mexican end, the explosion was the sign for the garage to be blown, adding its fires to the inferno. Then began the long, hard and unpleasant job of backtracking the truck's trip across Mexico and finding anybody who had been infected by its lethal cargo

  The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D. C.

  "And so Mister President, on behalf of the mothers of America I must ask that you institute a speed limit of 25 miles per hour on all roads in America, regardless of whether they are Federal, State or county funded."

  LBJ had called it "meeting Miss Whole Milk." What Richard Milhous Nixon called it was unprintable. Whatever the President called it, the job was the same. Meeting with people who represented organizations, hearing what they had to say and then finding ways to forget about it as quickly as possible. Sitting behind and to one side of him, Naamah found herself detesting the woman who was wasting their time.

  She was the President of the Women's Road Safety League, an organization that had just over a thousand members, eighty percent of whom were over 65 years old and ninety three percent of whom had pet cats. This woman even looked like a cat; the same round face, puffy cheeks and vacuous smile. Naamah disliked cats. Her train of thought was broken by her intercom phone bleeping. She answered it and quickly took down the message.

  "My apologies ma'am, Mister President, a very urgent message." She handed him the note, a simple comment, ‘two down, one to go."

  "Thank you Naamah. That's most gratifying. Now, Mrs. Salamon, I'm sorry to say the 25 miles per hour speed limit you suggest is quite impossible, the economic consequences would be a disaster and.....'"

  "But Mister President, do you know how many children are killed on our roads every year? Won't somebody please think about the children. Mister President. Look into my heart. . . ."

  Naamah leaned forward and spoke confidentially. "Mister President, I do know a good Aztec priest..........

  Flight Deck, INS Viraat, South China Sea

  Eighteen Tigers and twelve Skyhawks left. Almost half the airgroup was gone and some of the survivors were too badly damaged to fly. Still, the seaplane base had been given a good pounding and that meant the threat should diminish now. The effectiveness of those seaplane fighters had been a nasty shock; they were something nobody else had taken seriously. Still, with their tender sunk and their base hammered, they wouldn't be around for some time. That would give Viraat time to repair the damaged aircraft down in her hangar deck. She could still cover the Army troops on Pattle Island; that was the important thing.

  Mart's train of thought was wiped out by the roar of two Fairey Defenders taking off. In addition to her fixed-wing aircraft, Viraat carried four ASW and four AEW Rotodynes. They were being used hard, providing air and surface cover for the carrier group. Even with the birds on the destroyers and frigates, it was a hard job keeping full 24-hour coverage. The truth was, the squadron simply wasn't big enough to do the job. They needed two carriers and double the screen; the Indian Navy just didn't have the front-line ships.

  If that was so, then why are we sticking our neck out like this? Mart's skin crawled at the thought. He'd voted for the Hindu Nationalist Party last election and was now wishing he hadn't. This whole operation was turning out to be one bite more than the Indian Navy could chew. It had all sounded so simple; establish a presence on the Island, stay put and the Americans would force a cease-fire-in-place rather than have a war. Only it hadn't worked like that. The Americans had washed their hands of the whole business and forced the Teas and Ozwalds into doing the same. So now, the Indian Navy was carrying the load by itself. Still, despite its mauled air group, Viraat was still the trump card. As long as they had Viraat the game was still afoot.

  Control Room, HIJMS I-531 Shinohara, South China Sea

  "Sonar trace Sir! Multiple screws bearing two-three-five. We got them!"

  The Shinohara was drifting, trimmed so she was in balance with the surrounding water, neither rising nor diving. Just drifting, doing her best to emulate a hole in the ocean. Captain Aki Hento had noted the course and speed of the aircraft formation his navigation radar had spotted that morning, projected it back and moved his boat to a calculated intercept position. Trying to catch a fast-moving surface combat group in a diesel-electric submarine was almost futile. The nukes could manage it but a diesel-electric didn't have the speed or the underwater endurance. Mobile minefields; that was what the nuclear submarine drivers called diesel-electrics.

  Well, that was what Aki had done. He'd moved his submarine to a calculated position and hoped that the Indian carrier group would run into him. It was the fifth time he'd tried it and four times he'd failed. There were seven other diesel-electric boats in the area and they'd all tried at least as often. Was it too much to ask that, after nearly fifty attempts, the gods would smile on them and one of the submarines would be in the right place at the right time?

  "Range 23,000 meters Sir, speed estimated 22 knots. Course, it's hard to say, they're zigzagging. Mean is, one-three-five. They're coming our way."

  Aki grunted and looked at the plot. The line representing the Indian group was approaching them all right but it would cut across ahead. Minimum range would be about nine thousand meters. Well, that was acceptable. The Shinohara had four 61 centimeter torpedo tubes, but what to load them with? Homing torpedoes were all very well but they had reduced range, speed and warload compared with the unguided weapons. The unguided torpedoes had a lower probability of a hit but a much bigger warhead, and they were faster and longer-ranged. Homing torpedoes could be decoyed; unguided ones could not. Unguided torpedoes could be evaded; homing ones could not. Which to choose? Aki snapped his fingers. "Load unguided torpedoes. All four tubes."

  "Unguided torpedoes?" the First Officer's question was a tiny inflection noticed only by Aki and the officer himself.

  "Unguided. We've got one shot at this and we've got to make it a good one. If we use guided torpedoes, we can only fire one at a time. This way, we can fire a spread of four so we've a better chance. And the heavy warheads
on the straight-runners will really hurt when we do hit."

  The plot fed the course of the Indian formation into the fire control system. It compared the course, speed and range, calculated the optimum firing position and fed the appropriate data to the torpedoes. The outer doors to the tubes slid open, immersing the torpedoes in water ready for launch. Then, at the moment calculated by the fire control system, the torpedo engines started up and the four torpedoes swam out. Their gyros gave each a slightly different course. Hopefully one, or more, would end up in the Indian carrier.

  ASW Combat Direction Center, INS Vindhyagiri, South China Sea

  "Torpedo Warning Red, Red, RED! High-revving HE in the water Sir! Bearing oh-four-five relative. Say again Oh-four-five relative. Estimated speed, 65 knots. Sir, they're Chimp 61 centimeter torpedoes."

  "Target, what's the target? And why didn't we hear a launch transient?"

  "Wait One, Oh my God, Sir, target is Viraat. Spread of four eels, probably unguided. They must have used a swim-out launch Sir. Time to impact three minutes.

  "Viraat. Flash warning. Four heavyweight torpedoes approaching relative oh-four-five targeted on you. Evade NOW!" As he put the intercom down, Captain Andahal reflected that it wasn't often that a lowly frigate commander got to give orders to an Admiral. "Weaps, get our Rotodyne off now. Full autonomous ASW load; if she hasn't got it already, you're court-martialed. Engines power down to fifty percent. Ops, stream our VDS unit. Set for 150 feet. Comms, alert Arnagiri tell her to get her Rotodyne up, stream VDS, set for.... Number One, what's the inversion layer here."