This one was hardly a challenge.
In the cockpit of Quantum 66, James Holland had killed most of the cockpit lights to keep his eyes glued to the sky ahead. An attacker would be running without lights, he figured, which would make him difficult to spot, and even though he hadn’t believed the ridiculous warning on Rachael’s cellular phone, it was wise to be alert.
“I don’t see anything out there!” he announced.
Dick Robb was staring wide-eyed as well. Rachael sat on the jump seat behind Holland, holding the Iridium phone in her hand.
It rang again and she looked at Holland, expecting him to signal her not to answer.
Instead, he thought for a second, then held out his hand, and she placed the phone in it.
Holland punched the ON button and put the receiver to his ear, recognizing the same voice.
“Okay, Mr. Sanders,” he said, “where’s this alleged attacker? We just passed your magic coordinates.”
Dick Robb reached down and turned on the weather radar. Suddenly the screen came up full of uncharacteristic interference lines spiraling and spoking across the display.
Holland’s eyes were drawn to it instantly, and a frown crossed his face.
“What’s all that garbage?” Robb asked.
Holland stared at the radar scope, his mouth slightly open. Then, quickly, his left hand moved to the yoke and clicked off the autopilot as he banked the 747 sharply to the left, his eyes scanning out the left side of the aircraft.
“Dick! Kill the position lights and the strobes! Now!” Holland ordered.
Dick Robb hesitated, then complied, alarm showing on his face. “What is it?”
There was no answer as Holland concentrated all his attention out the side window. The huge Boeing was now forty-five degrees off its original heading and turning left with a forty-degree angle of bank. Holland’s eyes were still glued out the left window as he spoke.
“Digital radars seldom do that unless someone nearby is blasting radar in your direction.”
“You mean someone with weather radar?” Robb asked.
Holland shook his head. “Too strong. That’s a tactical radar.”
Holland picked up the Iridium phone again with his right hand as his left hand continued to hold the yoke in the turn. Maybe he had been too hasty. Maybe the call was legitimate, and if so …
“What was your name again?” he asked Sanders with a renewed urgency.
Rusty told him.
“I want you to hang on the line a minute.”
“Are you seeing something, Captain?”
“Just stand by, Doctor.”
With a deep sinking feeling in his gut, Holland handed the phone to Rachael and reached up to snap on the seat belt sign and select the PA. Rachael spoke briefly into the phone and then fished a pen from her purse to write down the phone numbers Rusty was giving her.
Holland announced:
“This is the captain. Everyone take your seats and fasten your seat belts, immediately, please. Flight attendants too.”
A thousand fleeting thoughts crossed his mind all at once. Memories of tactical procedures and maneuvers, war games, actual combat encounters in Nam. He had helped formulate methods for large transport aircraft to evade fighters under some circumstances, but not a 747 at altitude!
If anyone’s out there aiming for us, we’re a lumbering bull’s-eye. They couldn’t miss!
Yuri brought the Gulfstream to redline speed and began to level off at thirty-seven thousand feet. The 747 was five miles ahead, just as he’d planned. He had noticed a slight course change on his last sweep of the attack scope. Now he belatedly realized his target was turning sharply left.
At that moment the position lights and strobes of Quantum 66 winked out.
He knows! Somehow, he knows! Yuri concluded, trying to imagine what was happening on the other flight deck. Well, turn away, friend, it will do you no good. You can’t outrun me in a tub that big!
Yuri yanked back the throttles and hit the extend switch for the left bank of two missiles. He heard the small hydraulic motors and felt the intrusion in the aircraft’s slipstream as the missile rack came out, causing a slight left yaw. He flipped down the transparent targeting sight on the Heads-Up Display and let his eyes adjust for a few seconds to the lines and numbers swimming across the horizon in his field of vision. The attack radar was already engaged, and he nudged the ship left a bit to follow the turning jumbo, tracking the aim point on the HUD to the vicinity of the number two engine, the left inboard power plant on the left wing of the 747. The angle was increasing as the 747 continued to change heading. The growling of the warheads rose in intensity as the spot of intense heat ahead excited their circuitry.
Yuri frowned. He would have to squeeze off a shot within seconds, or maneuver around behind the 747 and follow him, waiting for him to stop turning.
It was a split-second decision, but the instant he made it he knew he was wrong. He felt his finger already in motion and heard the click of the trigger. The missile’s warhead tracking unit had been stalking the number two engine, and he had unleashed it. A loud roar staggered the Gulfstream as the missile streaked off its rack, its steady tone still filling his ears. It should have been on target, headed inexorably for the infrared profile of the jumbo’s left inboard engine.
But the jumbo was turning too fast, masking the tailpipe with the left wing, and raising the outboard engine on the right wing into view instead, its tailpipe pulsing with infrared light.
Yuri held his breath and waited.
The tiny silicon mind of the missile guidance system had seen only the flare of IR light the pilot had indicated. It had agreed electronically and locked its entire being on flying to that spot and exploding.
But suddenly that spot had faded, and in its place rose another bright spot of pulsing IR light, much brighter than the first one now was.
Or was that the first one? The confusion was measured in microseconds as the computer chips struggled with the decision to stay locked on a fading image or to conclude that the brighter image was really the correct one and shift the trajectory accordingly.
There was no contest, it concluded. The brightest IR image was the one it was supposed to fly to, and instantly the guide vanes on the tail of the missile were averaged upward a tiny bit, altering the corkscrewing flight path at the turning target, which was getting larger by the millisecond.
James Holland let the nose of his ship drop in the turn, losing several hundred feet of altitude, experience telling him to be unpredictable and keep turning.
“If there’s someone out there,” Holland said, “I don’t see him.”
Satisfied that closing rate, flight path, speed, and target lock were all satisfactory, the missile’s tiny computer waited for the tip of the warhead to touch the structure of the target. The IR flare grew to enormous proportions in the eye of the tracker, until the signal was received, and the missile did precisely what it was programmed to do: explode.
Holland’s voice was drowned out suddenly by something approaching from the left. A thunderous roar of light and sound whooshed over the top of the 747 at incredible speed and in the same instant a shuddering explosion of light and sound and force erupted on the right side of the aircraft.
“WHA!” Robb’s indistinct cry of alarm filled the cockpit as his head swiveled in the direction of the sound. There was a small, indistinct cry from Rachael. Holland’s heart rate doubled in an instant as a river of adrenaline entered his bloodstream and the reality of what had happened sank in.
My God, we’re hit!
There really is someone out there!
Instantly, Holland and Robb both looked at the forward engine panel. The indications for number four engine all read zero.
All Holland’s combat instincts snapped on-line. Jumbo jet or not, Flight 66 had become a target, and that status had to be terminated instantly.
Holland yanked the throttles back to idle and increased his left bank to almost
ninety degrees as he jammed his foot on the left rudder to slice the nose down toward the cloud cover some thirty thousand feet below. His right hand snaked out and pulled the speed brake handle at the same time, and the 747 began shuddering under the disrupted airload as it began a high-speed descent.
“Dick, do we have a fire out there?” The impact had shoved the 747 to the right.
“No fire!” Robb reached up and snapped on the leading edge lights. He looked back to the right. “It’s gone! There’s no engine on number four strut!”
Controls! Do I have flight controls? Holland thought. He glanced at the hydraulics. System four was dead, but everything else seemed to be working. His controls were responding.
The assailant was somewhere on his left. Whoever it was would undoubtedly lock him up again and shoot a second time as soon as he could get a good firing solution on the turning jumbo.
Which was exactly what James Holland intended to prevent. They might survive one hit, but not two, and there was no way to know how bad the structural damage might be on the right. The whole wing could disintegrate. His only hope was to keep turning into the attacker and get down, cooling the engines as much as possible to lower the infrared signature.
The radio! Convince him you’re hit!
“Dick, tune up one-twenty-one-point-five in number one radio! Say we’re hit and we’re going down, right wing’s severely damaged, aircraft uncontrollable. Make them think we’re dead. I’ll do the same on HF!”
“What the hell WAS that?” Dick Robb insisted, his voice an octave higher than normal.
“An air-to-air missile.”
Robb spun the frequency dial to 121.5 and began yelling into his microphone:
“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! QUANTUM FLIGHT SIXTY-SIX HAS BEEN HIT BY A MISSILE. RIGHT WING BADLY DAMAGED, AIRCRAFT UNCONTROLLABLE. WE’RE GOING DOWN!”
Robb added the latitude and longitude coordinates as Holland did the same on HF radio.
Holland glanced around at Rachael. He reached down in front of her knee and grabbed the interphone handset.
“Punch one and then three, Rachael, and tell whoever answers downstairs the captain said to kill absolutely every cabin light this instant!”
Robb snapped off the leading edge lights as Rachael nodded, grabbing the handset from Holland’s hand as he snapped his head back to the instruments. Their descent rate was frightening and dangerous. If the wing was too damaged, the dive could pull them apart.
But it was a chance Holland had to take.
Yuri Steblinko had watched the missile streak away toward its target, but he could see no fireball. There had been a flash, but far more anemic than expected. That was strange, he thought. The jumbo’s left wing had been in his view the entire time. He’d locked up the left engines, but then the jumbo’s pilot had been doing a good job of evading the missile with the tight turn.
All at once a nearly hysterical voice was on the emergency frequency declaring “Mayday” and talking about damage to the right wing.
The 747 had nosed over in a left bank and begun to dive, consistent behavior for a large airplane that had just lost an engine and perhaps part of a wing on the left side. But the pilot had said the right wing had been damaged. Could he have missed a fireball on the far side of the plane? If so, why were they in a left bank?
Something didn’t make sense, but there was no time to analyze it. The 747 was too close now to follow. Yuri guided the Gulfstream several thousand feet over the diving jumbo and then banked sharply left to follow him down. He pulled out the speed brakes and retarded the throttles to idle, rapidly calculating whether to try another shot. If the 747 was truly in a death spiral, another missile wasn’t needed. He should just follow him down and confirm impact.
But if he wasn’t hit fatally …
Yuri pushed the nose over more steeply, aware of the rising scream of the slipstream past the cockpit.
On the flight deck of Quantum 66 the altimeter was descending through a digital readout of thirty thousand feet as the big jet shook and bucked its way toward redline airspeed. In the cabin below, passengers and crew members clung to their armrests in near total darkness, their stomachs protesting the strange gyrations, their minds rebelling at the thought they might be crashing. The explosion of the missile was an indelible memory of sound and motion.
A food service cart had careened out of control against door 3L, and two of the flight attendants had been forced to dive for their lives. A collective guttural cry of alarm had greeted the explosion; another, the rapid dive.
Holland kept the bank angle at nearly seventy degrees, holding firm back pressure on the yoke to keep the speed under control. The flight controls seemed perfectly normal, as if the outboard right engine had been surgically removed with no wing damage.
At twenty-eight thousand feet, Holland reversed the turn, entering a tight spiral to the right—as tight as he dared. Whoever was back there would be trying to formulate a new firing solution, he knew. He had to screw it up big-time.
“What are we doing?” Robb almost yelled at him.
“The cloud cover! I’m trying to get us into the undercast. If we can get close to the surface, whoever’s after us may not have look-down/shoot-down capability. We may be able to lose him.”
“Do you … do you think he heard the calls? You think he believes we’re hit?” Robb asked, a pleading tone in his voice.
Holland shook his head. There was no way to know.
Yuri cursed in Russian. The 747 wasn’t where he expected it to be. He scanned his attack scope and realized the aircraft was off to the right now.
He’s reversed the turn!
If the 747 was really uncontrollable, how could that happen?
Yuri calculated the odds. If the other pilot was fighting for control, he might have been able to change the direction of his spiral. But the course reversal could indicate he was still intact and trying to evade.
That had to be the explanation!
He had to get off another shot!
“James, we’re overspeeding! We don’t know what we’ve got out there!” Robb’s voice was tinged with fear as he watched the airspeed indicator push past the red line and heard the characteristic clacking sound that signaled an overspeed.
Holland shallowed the bank a little and pulled more back pressure, arresting the increase as he reversed course again back to the left.
“Dick, call my altitude in thousand-foot increments, please.”
“Roger. We’re, ah, twenty-one, ah, thousand now, ah, ah, going down over six thousand feet per minute.”
“He’ll fire again. Just before we hit the clouds, he’ll fire again, and even if we make the clouds, if that’s an F-15 or a MIG-29, he’ll get us from above.” Holland was talking to himself. He reversed the spiral back to the right again, expecting an explosion at any second. There would be a bright light and a huge shudder, then a rapid decompression as the cabin structure gave way to the shrapnel of the exploding metal from the warhead.
His controls would go slack, and if a wing had blown off, they’d start to spin, faster and faster, until impact—and he would be unable to do anything but hang on.
Holland shook himself mentally. He wasn’t going to give up until there was nothing left, dammit! They still had a fighting chance!
The Iridium phone had been handed back to Rachael many tense seconds before. Rachael realized she was clutching it to her chest. She raised it to her ear now, as if the person on the other end might help somehow.
The line was dead.
Why was someone trying to kill them? She wanted to ask a thousand questions, but she had no voice all of a sudden, just a cold void where her stomach had been. She lowered the phone and held it in a shaking right hand as her left hand grasped the back of James Holland’s seat. He was the only hope they had.
With a new firing solution at hand, however briefly, Yuri’s index finger massaged the trigger again—the second missile having been locked on the gyrating, diving target
below. Without the look-down/shoot-down capability of sophisticated fighters, he had to outdive the 747 and then point the nose of the Gulfstream at the target before launching. The Gulfstream had protested all the way as he risked sliding it through the speed of sound to an uncertain structural fate. But he had to get one last shot.
And now the jumbo was back in his electronic sights.
He could hold the dive for only a few seconds more. The 747 was below fourteen thousand now, with a cloud deck—an undercast—looming below it.
Suddenly the infrared signature of the jumbo began fading, and Yuri knew it was now or never. The computer had been slow to lock on the target. Now it unlocked. Yuri realigned the pipper—the small target circle in the middle of the HUD—and relocked, all in a matter of seconds. The jumbo was entering the clouds, the IR radiation from its engines submerging into the suspended water droplets of the cloud formation.
Now! His mind snapped the command to his finger, then rescinded it just as quickly. This time his finger complied instantly, and the missile remained on its rails.
The target had unlocked again.
Dammit!
Nearly six thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., Rusty Sanders sat on the edge of the hotel bed in a cold sweat and stared at the telephone receiver. The connection had been broken, probably by the wild gyrations of Quantum 66 as it spun out of control.
Sherry Ellis was sitting beside him. Her ear had been pressed to his at an angle with angle, with the receiver in between. She was equally stunned.
Rusty turned to her. “Did … did you hear that?”
She exhaled loudly. “I … thought I heard someone yelling they’d been hit and were going down. I thought I heard a bang before that.”
Rusty nodded slowly and looked back at the receiver, swallowing hard.
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