Wings Of Fire

by Dale Brown

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all the folks I met and spoke with at the Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate and Airborne Laser Special Projects Office, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Special thanks to my old friend Colonel Ellen Pawlikowski, ABL SPO commander, for inviting me to visit her incredible staff and facilities; Lieutenant Colonel Joel Olsen, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Neice, Major Steve Smiley, Captain Carey Johnson, Captain Barrett McCann, Captain Dave Edwards, Captain Lynn Anderson, and Tim Foley, ABL SPO; and Rich Garcia, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Alley, Captain Eric Moomey, Conrad Dziewalski, Dr. Bob Fugate, Mike Connor, and Dr. Kip Kendrick of the Directed Energy Directorate.

  Special thanks to Ken Englade, I SPO public affairs, for all his hard work in setting up a great tour of all the facilities at Kirtland.

  Thanks to David and Cheryl Duffield, Susan Bailey, Dean and Meredith Meiling, Sandy Scarcella, and Ed Bolecky for their extraordinary generosity.

  Thanks to Robert Gottlieb, Neil Nyren, and Suzanne Tarantino for their help and support.

  As always, To Diane for her love and support.

  To the memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001,

  and to the men and women who have answered the call to arms in the war on terror.

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to realworld persons, places, events, or organizations is coincidental.

  Your comments are welcome! Please visit I:// www.megafortress.com on the World Wide Web to leave your comments and to learn about upcoming works, projects, appearances, or events. I read every comment.

  REAL-WORLD

  NEWS EXCERPTS

  WAITING ON CAIRO-STRATFOR Intelligence Update, www. stratfor.com. 13 October 2000-Within the Arab world, the Egyptians occupy a unique position, the very reason that they have been propelled to the center of the situation. Although it wields one of the largest Arab militaries, Cairo is also the largest Arab state to continue ties with Israel; even Morocco has called its diplomatic representative home for consultation .. .

  . . . Arab nations-even those that have signed peace agreements with Israel-are under intense pressure to join together and take a unified stand against Israel...

  U.S. AID FUELING THE DEVELOPMENT MODERN EGYPT The

  Washington Post, December 26, 2000-Egypt, a preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy for the last quarter-century, has been the second-largest recipient of American foreign aid during that period. The $52 billion program, so far, has rebuilt mosques, constructed new schools, promoted family planning and transferred high-tech weapons like F-16 warplanes and M1-A1 tanks at a $2-billion-a-year clip ...

  CONSEQUENCES A NEW U.S. DEFENSE STRATEGY STRATFOR

  Global Intelligence Update, www.stratfor.com. I March

  2001-In Washington, an internal Pentagon review of American defense strategy is likely to call for a dramatic reduction in U.S. troops deployed overseas . . . Such a historic shift would reduce the vulnerability of U.S. forces to attack and lower the profile of a seemingly imperial military presence. Over the long term, however, such a strategy may force allies and adversaries alike to build new regional alliances or adopt independent, antagonistic defense strategies ...

  LIBYA: GAINING LEVERAGE IN CENTRAL AFRICA STRATFOR, 5

  June 2001-Chad and Libya reportedly deployed several hundred troops, attack helicopters and other military equipment to the Central African Republic on May 30, the BBC reported. . .. The unsuccessful uprising has opened the door for Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi to send Libyan troops into central Africa and closer to Chad's southern oil fields ...

  AIR FORCE TURNS 747 INTO HOLSTER FOR GIANT LASER-The

  Washington Post, July 22, 2001-USAF plans to shoot down a Scud-type missile with a giant laser fired from a modified

  747 within two years. That test would be to prove the feasibility of destroying an attacking missile in the "boost" phase shortly after launch.

  3 STUDIES FOCUS ON CUTTING OVERSEAS DEPLOYMENTS The

  Washington Times, July 25, 2001-Secretary Rumsfeld ordered three Pentagon reviews of foreign troop engagements in order to determine how best to reduce the type of oyerseas deployments that mushroomed during the Clinton era.

  of

  PROLOGUE.

  OVER CENTRAL LIBYA

  "This has got to be the most insane idea in the history of aviation," retired Navy commander John "Bud" Franken muttered. "Let it go and let's get this over with."

  Retired Air Force brigadier general Patrick McLanahan smiled, then fastened his oxygen visor in place with a snap. "That's the spirit, AC," he said happily. "It only seems insane because no one's ever done it before."

  "Yeah, right. Just unzip your pants over there and let's go home."

  "Here it comes," Patrick said. He hit a small stud on his computer trackball and spoke: "Deploy array." The computer acknowledged the command, and the attack was under way:

  Far behind them, in a fairing between their aircraft's twin V-tails, a small oblong cylinder detached itself from its mounting and began to trail behind the aircraft on a thin carbon-fiber-reinforced fiber-optic cable. The tiny object, soon trailing several hundred feet behind the AL-52, was an ALE-50-towed electronic countermeasures decpy. Just three feet long and six inches in diameter, it was invisible to

  the Libyan air defense radars that surrounded them at that moment.

  The aircraft was a modified B-52 Stratofortress bombernot a U.S. Air Force warplane, but an experimental aircraft modified by Patrick's company, Sky Masters Inc., called an AL-52 Dragon. The warplane he was sitting in was so advanced that even Patrick, who had been involved in its development both in and out of the Air Force for years, was truly amazed. What he was really sitting in, he realized with a mixture of awe and glee, was ... the future. "Star Wars" was no longer a Reagan-era pipe dream or the name of a hugely successful science-fiction motion picture series-it was right here, right now. The AL-52 Dragon combined the absolute state-of-the-art in laser technology, high-speed computers, miniaturization, stealth systems, and systems integration to produce the world's first true twenty-firstcentury weapon system, using technology that had never been deployed on an aircraft before.

  The airframe itself was based on the EB-52 Megafortress modification of the B-52H Stratofortress bomber, with stealthy composite fibersteel skin and frame, four powerful turbofan engines replacing the original eight turbofans, a Vtail stabilator replacing the big cruciform tail, and an advanced self-protection suite, including radar and infrared jammers, towed arrays, decoys, and Stinger aerial land mines. The original six-person crew had been replaced by enough state-of-the-art computers and artificial intelligence systems that now only two crew members, an aircraft commander and a mission commander, were required to be on board-and, in an extreme emergency, either could bring the plane home alone.

  The Megafortress was designed as a stealthy flying battleship, able to penetrate heavily defended targets deep behind enemy lines and employ every air-launched weapon in the American arsenal-and a few that had been dreamed up just for it-with great precision. The Dragon variant of the Megafortress battleship retained the conventional attack capabilities-it could carry up to twelve thousand pounds of ordnance on wing hardpoints, including cruise

  missiles, air-to-air missiles, and even antisatellite and antimissile weapons. Patrick knew all about the devastating warfighting capabilities of the EB-52 Megafortress-he had spent more than fifteen years of his life working on it. Sky Masters Inc. still flew several versions of the EB-52 for flight test and research purposes, still hoping that the Air Force would someday take the roughly one hundred B-

  52H Stratofortress bombers in flyable storage out of mothballs and have the company convert th
em to either EB-52 Megafortresses or AL-52 Dragons.

  "Here we go, Bud," Patrick said. To the computer, he said, "Activate array." In an instant, the towed array, which normally was all but invisible to radar, blossomed to the electromagnetic equivalent of a Boeing 747.

  That move had its desired and expected effect: All of the Libyan air defense radars, which had just been searching the skies seconds before, almost immediately locked on to the towed decoy. Now instead of peaceful search and air traffic control radars, Patrick's threat scope was suddenly alive with dozens of antiaircraft threats-surface-toair missile sites, antiaircraft artillery, and fighter-intercept radars. "Warning, SA-10 acquisition mode, ten o'clock, twenty miles," the computer responded. "Warning, SA-9 acquisition mode, two o'clock, ten miles ..." The warnings kept coming, until: "Warning, missile launch, SA-10, ten o 'clock, nineteen miles . .. warning, missile launch, SA-10, ten o'clock, nineteen miles. .."-the SA-10 missiles always launched in pairs. "Countermeasures not activated."

  "Commit Dragon," Patrick spoke. He had to consciously bring his breathing and voice under control. In all the times he had been on an attack run, this was the first time he did not react when a threat came up. If this didn't work, they'd be dead in fifteen seconds.

  "Caution, Dragon activated. . . caution, Dragon engaging," the computer responded. Patrick watched in fascination as the newest and most sophisticated computer system ever placed aboard any aircraft automatically began prosecuting the attack and activating the most devastating airborne weapon ever produced:

  The AL-52 Dragon's LADARs, or laser radar arrays, which electronically scanned hundred of thousands of cubic miles of space in every direction thirty times per second, tracked the Soviet-made SA-10 missile with millimeter precision. At the same time the LADAR also instantly measured the dimensions of the rocket, determining where its motor section was. Tracking computers then began measuring the rocket's speed, altitude, and directioneven predicting its probable impact point and relaying the data to friendly forces downrange.

  At the same moment, the Dragon itself came to life.

  Turbopumps in the belly of the AL-52 Dragon immediately began pressurizing hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide inside a reaction chamber. Chlorine gas and helium from storage tanks in the cargo section of the modified B-52 bomber were then sprayed under pressure into the chamber, forming an energized substance called singlet delta-oxygen. In another reaction chamber, iodine and helium were injected into the substance, which released the high-energy photons from the gas, creating laser light.

  At the same time, the AL-52's laser radar locked onto the rocket rising through the atmosphere and immediately began to send target airspeed, altitude, direction, acceleration, and flight path data to targeting computers. The computers immediately fed the data to the gimbaled turret in the nose of the AL-52, and the turret unstowed itself from inside the bomber's nose and turned and swiveled until the laser's telescope and four-foot-diameter mirror were aimed at the rocket. The pilots could feel a slight rumbling under their toes as the huge fifteen-foot-high turret slewed toward the target, but otherwise it did not affect the flight characteristics of the heavy bomber.

  When all this information was received, processed, analyzed, and instructions sent-eight seconds after target detection-Patrick received a simple "LASER READY" computerized voice in his headphones. "Cockpit's ready for launch."

  "Roger. COIL in attack mode ... now."

  The attack was purely automatic-there was no big red

  "FIRE" button anywhere on the plane. The laser radar system instantaneously measured the exact size of the SS-12 rocket and aimed the laser at the rocket motor section, the point of maximum pressure on the missile. The laser radar also provided an atmospheric correction to the laser telescope's deformable mirror to adjust for temperature gradients from the Dragon to the target. Finally, the big COIL, or chlorine-oxygen-iodine laser, fired. A four-foot-diameter

  beam of high-energy laser light shot from the nose of the AL-52 and was focused by the deformable mirror down to a spot the size of a basketball on the motor section of the first rocket. The beam was completely invisible to the cockpit crew-they could see the mirror turret moving slightly, tracking the target, but nothing else.

  Patrick switched the large full-color supercockpit display on the right-side instrument panel to the telescope view. He was now looking right down the barrel of the laser, watching an optical presentation of what the laser attack computer was looking at. The SA-10 missile was clearly visible, tracked and illuminated by the laser radar arrays and focused to razor-sharp clarity by the deformable mirror. The crosshairs in the center of the display were dead on the rear one-third of the missile-the center of the SA-

  10's rocket motor. Patrick increased the magnification and was even able to read markings on the side of the missile.

  As the missile flew higher and higher in the sky, its thermodynamic pressures were building as well-pressure from the force of the engines, pressure from the atmosphere, pressure from gravity, pressure from building speed, and pressure created by the guidance system acting through the rocket's fins and gyros. Finally, the heat from the laser burned through the missile's skin enough that the skin surrounding the motor section couldn't contain the immense internal pressures or structurally hold the outside air pressures, and the missile ripped apart like a rotten banana and exploded.

  "Missile destroyed!" Patrick shouted. "We got it!"

  The attack computer immediately shifted to the Second SA-10 missile, launched seconds after the first, and the re-

  sult was just as successful and just as spectacular. "Missile two destroyed! Towed array in standby ... laser's ready to shoot again, all threats down. Hot damn!"

  Sky Masters Inc. needed a realistic real-world test of its airborne laser technology, so Patrick McLanahan, overseeing the program, thought of the easiest and fastest way to test it out-fly over a country that liked to shoot missiles without warning and see if it worked. Libya filled the bill nicely. Libya had the best military hardware its oil money could buy, and they were notorious for firing on stray aircraft without warning. Plus, most of Libya south of Tripoli was open desert, so there was little risk of anyone being hurt by falling debris or misses-or, if the test didn't work, falling pieces of the AL-52 Dragon.

  "Have we had enough, boss?" Franken asked. "I sure have."

  "I don't want to hang around here any more than I have to, Bud," Patrick said. "But I'd sure like to wring the laser out a little more." At that moment, both crew members received a warning message on their threat receiver, one of the multifunction displays in the center of the Dragon's instrument panel. "Just got swept by fighter radar," Patrick said. "I think it might be time to head home."

  "Good deal," Franken said. He started a slow left turn to the north, mindful of the towed array still extended behind them-they could easily turn quickly enough to wrap themselves up in their own array's cable. "Just keep those puppies off us."

  "LADAR coming on," Patrick said. He activated the laser radar for only a few seconds, but the laser radar's power and tight resolution drew an amazingly detailed picture of all air targets within a hundred miles. "We've got a flight of two MiG-29 interceptors, coming from Tripoli," Patrick said. "When you roll out, they'll be at your nine-thirty position, sixty-one miles, high. Heading zero-onezero will put them at your nine o'clock." The pulse-Doppler radar on the MiG-29, another Libyan purchase from the Russians, could not detect a target with a closure rate equal to the aircraft airspeed.

  This was not looking good, Patrick noted immediately. "Warning," the female-voiced threat computer reported, "MiG-29 nine o 'clock five-zero miles, flight level threethree-zero, acquisition mode. Warning, trackbreakers are in standby."

  "Either this guy is very lucky, or very good," Patrick said. "The leader

  is coming right in on us. Something's not right." He hit the voice command stud: "System status."

  "All monitored systems are functioning normally," the
computer said after a slight pause. Then: "Warning, MiG-

  29 at nine o'clock, forty miles, tracking."

  "Oh, shit," Patrick said. 'Trackbreakers coming on." But it was then that he found the problem: "The ECM system faulted-it shut itself down completely." Patrick powered it back up.

  "Warning, towed array not in coordinated flight," the computer reported.

  "That's what happened," Patrick said. "When we made the turn, it must've knocked the array out of whack and faulted the system. It's been back there spinning away like a great big pinwheel. I'm cutting it loose." But that didn't work. "The array won't jettison. It's totally faulted. I'm going to try an ECM system reset. LADAR coming on. It'll be the only threat warning we have now."

  "Warning, MiG-29 at seven o'clock, thirty miles..." But moments later, they heard, "Warning, missile launch detected on radar, nine o 'clock, twenty-six miles. Time to intercept, fifty seconds."

  "Break left!" Patrick shouted. Franken shoved the throttles to full military power and yanked the control stick full left, rolling the AL-52 up on its left wing in a tight ninetydegree bank turn-they had to risk flying into their own cable to try to defeat the incoming radar-guided missile. At full bank, he started to apply back pressure to tighten the turn even more, presenting the smallest possible radar cross-section on the MiG-29's radar. He let up on the back pressure when the computer issued a stall warning and started to pull the control stick forward. Meanwhile, Patrick was frantically trying every countermeasures

  switch he could. "ECM is completely dead-chaff, flares, jammers, everything."

  Out the cockpit window, the sight was horrifying. They could clearly see a trail of fire arcing across the sky-the Libyan radar-guided missile, heading right for them. There was no time to turn, no time to try anything, no time to even speak.. ..

  The missile dove right at them-then passed just behind them, making a direct hit on the spinning array, missing them by less than three hundred feet. To the two men in the cockpit of the AL-52, it looked as if the missile had been aiming right at the middle of their foreheads.