Ride of the Valkyries

by Stuart Slade

  Slower than the B-70 she might be, but Xiomara still chewing up the distance that lay in front of her. The Middle East might look big on a map but cruising at Mach 2.7 made perceptions shrink a lot. It hadn't been this way with Marisol, for all her supersonic dash capability, the RB-58C had cruised at subsonic speeds. Xiomara was a true supersonic bird. The comparison made Kozlowski feel guilty, as if he was somehow betraying his first love. Mentally he apologized to Marisol's ghost and transferred his attention to the navigation display. It was only a small repeater screen, the main display was in the cockpit behind him but it showed the first edges of the defensive concentrations around the Iraqi industrial facilities.

  As if to confirm that the secondary display was telling him the truth, a message came through from behind him. "Mike, multiple transmissions ahead. Search radars, both 3-D and 2-D, target acquisition and fire control. Also airborne search radars, large numbers of them. If what we can see is correct, there are defensive systems all over the place. This is going to be interesting."

  "Thanks Xav. Open communications to the Valkyries, let them know what we detect and what we blow up. Right people, here we go. Time to earn the big bucks the government pays us."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: MELEE

  The Military Command Center, Dezful, Iran Satrapy, The Caliphate.

  The attack was developing exactly as Morteza Farzaneh had predicted. The two larger formations of bombers were running in to hit north-east and south-west, in this case Iran and Iraq satrapies respectively. Ahead of them, the strategic reconnaissance bombers dismantled the defense systems while the fighters carved a path through the defending interceptors. It was like watching a very well-performed ballet, although watching such things was not permitted in the Caliphate. Not officially, anyway. Unofficially, many things had been saved from the prying eyes of the religious zealots.

  The Americans were indeed very predictable. Farzaneh had predicted what had happened to date and now he was prepared to predict what was about to happen. The Satrapy of Iraq had gone its own way in setting up its defenses. They'd concentrated their industry into a few complexes and stacked their defenses around them. Missiles were massed around each target with fighters between them. They'd boasted that they could bleed the Americans to death but Fazaneh didn't believe it would be the Americans who would do the dying. They'd spent almost of a quarter of a century honing their skills for just that sort of attack.

  By Caliphate standards, Iraq Satrapy had used the rich man's defense. Iran hadn't been able to afford that level of missile procurement so their facilities were spread out and camouflaged. They would lose many of them, but some might escape.

  Once again, Farzaneh looked at his map. The destruction of the Gulf hadn't been expected but it wasn't really consequential. The Caliphate could do without oil revenues for a few years. Those revenues were used to purchase military equipment. If they weren't there, that equipment would have to be built in-country. It wouldn't matter that much, the truth was that the Caliphate didn't need that much military power and if it stopped provoking people it would need less. What was important that being thrown on its own resources would mean more industrial development. Such development would transfer yet more power away from the useless theocrats in the Ruling Council and towards the surviving technicians and bureaucrats who were slowly rebuilding an industrialized society.

  One thing disturbed him. There was a small knot of aircraft over an industrial site in Syria Satrapy. Farzaneh looked it up - it was supposed to be just a concrete plant. But the Americans had dumped two of their biggest warheads on it, using surface bursts. That was the way they treated buried targets. So what had they spotted there? And come to think of it, why was a concrete plant defended by Syria's scattered handful of missiles? There was something not right there and Farzaneh guessed that plant was a whole lot more than it appeared to be.

  Concrete production. A uranium extraction facility looked like a concrete plant, a little bit anyway. But why would Syria want uranium? There was only one answer to that, they were trying to build nuclear weapons. The Caliphate didn‘t have nuclear weapons or the facilities to build them, so the Ruling Council had declared them blasphemous. They'd forbidden the nuclear research they couldn‘t undertake anyway. But did Syria have a nuclear program and if so why?

  Farzaneh sighed. The Caliphate was such a disordered and chaotic structure that almost anything could be going on. And probably was.

  Cockpit, B-70C Spear Lady 35th Heavy Bomb Group, 77,800 feet over Iraq Satrapy

  "Belle Ringer is calling in, Dennis. Reporting running into heavy defenses around Salman Pak. Engaging Gammon and Ganef missiles. They're sending as much data as they can back to us. Even without the data link, we're getting the data back on emitter locations in almost real time. We're downloading the data into DAMS as fast as we get it. Belle Ringer is also reporting a lot of decoys and false emitters down there that are making things a lot harder. The Caffs are using their kit well. Burst transmissions from the search radars, buried in the signals from the decoys. The fire control radars don't switch on until the last minute, doesn't give the ladies much time to react."

  "Any air-to-air reported?" Major Dennis Novak absorbed the information coming in from Lieutenant Benjamin Savitz in the copilot's seat. The Caliphate opposition was a lot heavier that had been expected and their technical skills had improved dramatically over the last six years.

  "None at the moment. Not in our sector anyway. The Navy have reported heavy fighter opposition down south and the Russians up North but none in the middle. Looks like they might have cleared the air for their SAMs. The Navy reported mostly older types, Irenes and Brandis, but the Russians have run into Elles and Faiths. Had some trouble with both types, we're getting reports of some fighters down and others damaged. The Russians are getting through to their targets though."

  Novak nodded thoughtfully. Clearing the air for the SAMs was logical; filling the air with friendly fighters would just confuse the tactical picture and give the American bombers more targets. There were a very few fighters that had a marginal capability to engage a B-70; the Elles and Faiths weren't in that category. The Russian bombers were much slower and lower flying than the racing Valkyries and Novak suspected the Russian fighters, mostly designed as defensive interceptors, weren't too good at combat against hostile fighters. So the Caffs had pitched their fighters against the Russians and the Navy and would try and stop the Valkyries with SAMs. Which raised the obvious question.

  "What does the DAMS picture look like?"

  "Like the ladies said, it's oscillating. I'll put a picture on the mini-screen forward for you. The Caffs are flipping from search radar to search radar and from target acquisition set to set. The stuff coming back from the ladies is helping us filter out the decoys and dummies but it's still confused. The long-range search sets are picking us up, there's no doubt about that. But then they probably saw us hundreds of miles back. Won't do them much good."

  Lieutenant Charles Andrews looked again at his DAMS display. The display was constantly shifting as the radars on the ground switched on and off. The Caliphate air defense people really had learned a lot, none of the radars remained on the air long enough to allow an anti-radar missile to home in on them. At least that was what their crews had been taught. Savitz looked at the repeater screen for the DAMS display. Already bright green dots were appearing on the black background, the position of the emitters being detected by the electronic surveillance systems on the RB-58s in front of them and the B-70s own electronic warfare systems. Then it was being stored in the memories of the systems and compared with the known and developing threat libraries. Slowly, the decoys were identified and filtered out.

  In the defensive systems position at the rear of the flight deck, Andrews had the full version of the display and could see the patterns being formed by those emitters. Once the RB-58G became standard, a whole mass of electronic data would be coming back instead of the bare information on position and activity
that was sent by the F-models. Still, what was coming back was good enough for the moment. The defenses were being mapped out and that map was growing in detail and accuracy by the minute. Briefly, Andrews wondered just how hard the RB-58 crews were having to work for this information. Their Hustlers would be twisting and turning in the defense zone, dodging missiles while identifying and destroying the defenses. Belle Ringer's crew had sounded casual and relaxed but that fooled nobody.

  Already, the picture was stabilizing as the decoy emitters were identified and filtered out, just leaving the genuine fire control sets. It was easy to tell the difference. The decoys were omnidirectional while the fire control sets produced a thin beam that was locked onto the intended target. Of course, determining which was which meant getting that beam locked on to the aircraft making the investigation. That added a level of urgency to the task. Not only had the RB-58s got to map out the defenses and erode their capability, they had to do so in time to help the B-70s following behind them, closing in at 37.5 miles per minute.

  "190 miles to target." Savitz gave the read-out, just a touch more than five minutes to weapons release. They would be hitting the outer edge of the air defense zone within a few seconds. Had they been flying B-52s, they would already have been just within reach of the Caliphate Gammon, depending, of course on exactly which version Chipan had sold them. The early Gammons were limited to 81 miles range and 66,000 feet altitude. That made them close-but-no-cigar for the racing B-70s, but put the B-52s squarely in their sights. The later Gammons had a 160 mile range and could reach up to 116,000 feet, well above the maximum ceiling of the B-70.

  "Data dump coming in!" Andrews whistled. Racing to catch up but still far behind them, Xiomara was the only RB-58G in the formation. She had been on-site for a Gammon launch and her ESM systems had recorded the signatures of the Caliphate electronic gear. Now, it was being relayed forward. As if by magic, more than three quarters of the contacts vanished from the display as the new data allowed the decoys to be filtered out. That was the good news; the bad part was what Novak needed to know right now.

  "Dennis, Xiomara reports the Gammons did a ballistic missile interception, shot down a Skybolt." That meant late-model Gammons, the earlier versions didn't have that capability. As if on cue, another emitter cut in, one that had remained quiet as the RB-58s had passed overhead. Andrews guessed that the missile fire control crews had kept everything shut down, relying on the input from the other radars in the defense zone. The American bombers weren't the only people who could relay data.

  It wasn't as easy as that, of course. The Gammon, like all missiles, used most of its energy climbing so the actual radius the missile could cover was dramatically reduced. In fact, even the Gammon had a maximum range of only fifty miles up here. The catch was that it had a minimum range of 32.5 miles. This left an intercept zone that was a donut only 18 miles wide. Spear Lady could cross it in less than 30 seconds. Nevertheless, the ground radar crews had timed their light-up to perfection. The green donut was in front of the B-70, a bit to the left but well placed for a shot. Or, as the Caliphate obviously preferred, six shots. That was the number of Gammon missiles that were being fired at the approaching bomber.

  Up in the pilot's seat, Novak responded instantly to the threat warning. He pulled Spear Lady into a tight right turn, swinging away from the missile site, hoping to force the missiles into a stern chase that it had to lose. On paper, the Gammon had a 300 feet per second speed advantage over a B-70. In a stern chase that was far too little for an intercept. Unfortunately the enemy radars had opened up far too late for Spear Lady to complete that turn. The missiles were still coming in although at a steadily increasing angle off the nose.

  This is where other factors cut in. Missiles were a compromise. They had to be small and light enough to have the agility to make an intercept yet the demands of range and altitude meant they had to carry large amounts of fuel. The contradiction was solved by giving Gammon four large boosters. However these prevented the missile maneuvering at all until they fell away. By that time, the missile was out of the relatively dense air lower down and was entering the thin stratospheric air. There, the small control surfaces of the missiles were virtually ineffective compared with the much larger surfaces of the bombers. As a result, the maneuverability of the missile was severely constrained even after the intercept stage was free to change its course. A missile that could pull 20 or 30 gee lower down would be lucky if it could manage five percent of that up here. Very lucky indeed.

  The net effect was that Spear Lady was out-turning the Gammon missiles aimed at her. Even while they made the attempt, Andrews was using his electronic warfare equipment to intercept the pulses from the ground-based fire control units. A simple counter would have been to pour electronic energy into the frequencies, drowning them out with white noise. Barrage jamming was too simple for what Andrews wished to achieve. Instead, his deception jammer was re-transmitting the received pulses, amplified and subtly distorted, with the severity of the distortion increasing steadily. The result was that the apparent course seen by the guidance radars was steadily diverging from Spear Lady's real track. Andrews was attempting two distinct tasks, one was to mask the turn Spear Lady was making so that the incoming missiles wouldn't try to match it even if they could. The other was to position those missiles perfectly for a Frisbee shot at any that looked like they were coming too close.

  As it happened, it wasn't necessary. Deception jamming caused the inbound missiles to chase after the wrong track, turning away from the bomber rather than towards it. Combined with their inability to match Spear Lady's turn at this altitude, they passed aft of the bomber. A long, long way aft. They missed by more than 7 miles, so far that their explosions didn't even shake the B-70. Spear Lady said nothing but a disdainful sniff could be clearly heard throughout the cockpit. The crew took a second to grin at each other. There were times when words weren't needed.

  "Conventional warhead. It wouldn't have mattered though. We were outside the lethal radius of the Gammon nuke." A few seconds later, a flash of brilliant light illuminated the cockpit. An RB-58F had seen the launch and dived in to eliminate the battery with one of its AGM-76s. Andrews continued deadpan, as if nothing had happened. "We were outside the radius of that one as well. And if we weren't, I'd have had very strong words to say with the 305th."

  "Three minutes to weapons release." Savitz was splitting his attention between the radar mapping display and the view through Spear Lady's raised visor. Ahead of him, the huge Salman Pak industrial complex was covered by a fine yellowish fog, the emissions from its dozens of chemical factories. Savitz remembered the briefings, the complex was more than forty miles long and fifteen wide, bridging the gap between the Tigris and the Euphrates. A solid mass of petrochemical and chemical industry plants, ammonia, urea, sulphur, phosphates, cryogenic gas, vinyl acetate, dioctyl phthalate, propylene, acetic acid, chlorine - and the targets for today's exercise, plants that were coyly described as ‘Pharmaceuticals,' ‘antibiotics,' ‘insecticides' and ‘pest control.' The plants that were the home of blackpox and who knew what else.

  Eight Valkyries were targeted on Salman Pak. They would release twelve weapons, varying in yield between 50 and 150 kilotons. The formation had four weapons in reserve in case of unexpected targets or the defenses getting lucky. Another formation was hitting a second massive complex around Samarra; a third would be dropping on a smaller, more compact group around some place called Didiwanyah. Then a strange thought passed through Savitz's mind "Just what the hell is dioctyl phthalate?"

  "Lord knows. You'll have to ask the brainiacs when we get back." Captain Tony Simeral, the offensive systems operator squeezed off an AGM-76 at a Ganef battery fire control radar. On paper, Ganef was effective to about 90,000 feet, making it much more marginal than the late model Gammons. The catch was that it was a much more energetic missile. It climbed faster and was more agile. At this altitude, its maximum engagement range was a mere 5 miles and its minimu
m was 4.3. The threat zone was a tiny 3,500 feet wide and that was far too small to be worried about. Simeral blew the battery apart with a 25 kiloton warhead anyway, more as a matter of principle than anything else. Then he reset for his bomb drop, feeling the slight vibration as the bomb bay door slid forward into its closed position and the aft bay door followed it to open the way for the two Mark 61s in the rear.

  "Nav attack system running now." Spear Lady was on course and had the radar picture of the target loaded into her computer. She would calculate the release point for herself and, unless a member of the crew over-rode her decision, she would release the first device herself. Then, she would make a slight turn and search for the radar picture of the second drop point. Unless something went very wrong, there was no need for the humans to touch the release system at all.

  "Releasing now." The slight lurch was hardly noticeable, lost in the continuous bouncing from the initiations all over the target area. Some weapons aimed at destroying the complex; others the fire-storm deaths of the missiles that had been installed to protect it. There was a slight tilt as Spear Lady changed course then another ripple-like feeling as the second warhead dropped. "Right, that's it. Let's go home."

  War Room, Underneath the White House. Washington DC

  "The 35th are hitting their targets now." The report coming in had a ring of triumph about it. "First indications are good laydowns."

  "Opposition?" Power and the Seer spoke simultaneously, then grinned at each other. For their different reasons, both needed the answer to that question quickly.