Orbital: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 3)

by FX Holden

  Alakeel’s target was an S-300 air defense array known to be sited on the mountain range, with a 360-degree overwatch on the airspace surrounding Natanz. Three other arrays dotted around the plains below supplemented its coverage and had also been marked for destruction, along with the Buk mobile anti-air missile launchers linked to them. His attack was timed to take place exactly as his other three air suppression aircraft had rounded the other side of the mountain range and were releasing their HARM missiles, so that when the Iranian air defenses went down, they went down in a single wave.

  The four ‘wild weasel’ anti-air-defense aircraft, Alakeel included, would then use their passive sensors to search for air targets and provide cover for the six ground attack aircraft that would blow through after them.

  He had picked up the signal from the S-300 acquisition unit on the hills overlooking the western approaches to Natanz about twenty minutes earlier, and it had grown stronger by the minute, without showing any sign of picking up his approach. It operated at multiple frequencies – from VHF, UHF to L and S bands – in an attempt to pick up even low-observability aircraft like the F-35. But it had to do more than just detect. It had to track, and then hand off a target to the Buk vehicles parked on the hillsides around it which then also had to track and lock up his aircraft to get a firing solution.

  The F-35 was made for attacks like this.

  He saw his HARM launch waypoint approaching in the helmet-mounted display projected on his visor. If he had not been bound by radio silence, he would have announced he was beginning his attack, and wished his men good luck and Godspeed. As it was, he locked up the signals from the S-300 array, confirmed its position, and fed the data to one of the HARM missiles as he armed them.

  As he crossed the waypoint at 50 miles out from the mountains shielding Natanz, he fired.

  His weapons bay doors flicked open, the big missile dropped out, and then they closed again. The flare of the missile’s flaming tail blinded him momentarily as it raced ahead of him at 1,420 miles an hour, well over the speed of sound. But he was already searching for his next target. As soon as his HARM missile struck home he expected other shorter-range air defense radars to wake up and start searching the skies. He wanted a Buk, but he’d settle for one of the mobile ZSU-57 tracked anti-air guns that also dotted the complex.

  His Lightning rose and fell, following the terrain below. He eased the nose up slightly, taking his machine from 1,000 feet up to 2,000, but keeping his nose pointed directly at the S-300 signal to minimize his radar profile as he watched the track of his missile on his tac screen.

  Come on … come on…

  Before it reached its target, he saw another icon appear on the screen from behind one of the aircraft rounding the mountain ranges to the north. Air to air missiles?

  Three of his aircraft had made their ingress and would have fired their HARM missiles like him, but his fourth, one of the HVPW attack aircraft, had just been fired at. He saw it desperately break off and turn toward the source of the attack as the missiles closed on it and…

  It was down. He had lost another man before the attack had even begun.

  Gritting his teeth, he pulled his machine into a hard bank to port and pointed it at the bearing for the missile launch, popping up to 5,000 feet and focusing his infrared and electro-optical sensors on the sky ahead of him. He barely registered the signal as his HARM missile struck home, and the S-300 signal from the hills over Natanz went dead.

  Somewhere ahead of him was a Russian stealth fighter. Had to be. And it was hunting his men.

  Three more HARM missiles struck home, and he saw the radar signatures of two more S-300 units go down, even as a half dozen others sprang to life as the air defenders around Natanz realized they were under attack and woke their units to life, desperately searching the skies around them. Looking over his shoulder, he saw lines of tracer fire sweeping the sky, firing blind. More HARM launches, fewer air defense radars up now. The rest of his squadron would be powering in to deliver their bunker buster bombs now…

  Another air-air missile launch ahead of him. Another of his men broke away, trying to avoid it. He could stay on passive sensors no longer. He quickly powered on his phased array radar and scanned the sky ahead of him. It would alert the Russian fighter to his presence immediately, and give the pilot a vector to Alakeel’s aircraft, but that was what he wanted. Anything to pull that damn Russian away from Natanz.

  Tone! His radar had gotten a hit on an aircraft low to his northeast. Then lost it again. Su-57 for sure. Nothing else could attack so invisibly, and disappear from his radar so easily. He firewalled his throttle, taking his machine beyond 900 miles an hour and banking left, guessing where the contact was headed.

  Over his right shoulder, he saw the ripple of massive bomb blasts light the sky as the 2,000 lb. bombs of his ground attack element struck home. Saw the radar signatures of two more Buk units go down. For you, Zedan … he thought to himself. Now his men were free to do some hunting of their own, to pull away from Natanz and look for the aircraft attacking them.

  His radar warning receiver screamed at him. Missile launch. Before he could react, or in fact because he was too slow, the F-35’s combat AI wrenched his machine into a rolling bank and pointed it at the ground, firing chaff and flares as it dropped. He grabbed the stick back in time to see the missile that had been fired at him flash behind him and detonate in one of the chaff clouds.

  Where was the dog?

  Tone. He got another lock. It was close. Too damn close. A dark shape flashed past his wing and tried to swing in behind him. For the first time in this war, Alakeel had eyes on his enemy, and it was just a shadow in the visor of his helmet. Black against black.

  The F-35 wasn’t made for knife fighting. It was no slouch, but it wasn’t as nimble as the Su-57 behind him. His trainers at Nellis in Nevada had analyzed engagements with the Su-57 over Turkey and Syria and shared this conclusion with their Saudi counterparts – if you let it get on your six, you will die.

  The one thing his Lightning had going for it right now was 360-degree awareness thanks to sensors located all over the airframe. His infrared sensors had locked onto the Russian and even though his head was pressed back against his seat and his vision compressed by the force of maneuvering he could ‘see’ the enemy fighter behind him, a bobbing, weaving glowing icon in his helmet display, trying to get a guns solution on him. But he had trained in exactly this situation in Nevada. Trained and trained and trained again, against the insanely maneuverable American F-47 drones, which could turn with g-forces no human pilot could match.

  Ninja Star, that was his only option. That was what the Nellis instructors called it. It was completely counter-intuitive, which is why it sometimes worked. But he needed altitude and bullied his machine in a yawing, spiraling roll up to ten thousand feet, pulling the Su-57 up in his wake, keeping it in his rear left quarter where it couldn’t get a guns solution. Going vertical…

  Now! He pulled his machine over onto its back before his airspeed bled away to nothing, dragging the machine into a grindingly slow loop at the same time as he kicked in hard right rudder. The Lightning went into a flat spin, shoving him hard against the left-hand cockpit wall, his helmet slamming into the cockpit glass. He saw the Russian fighter try to follow him up, jink in surprise as he stalled and fell away and then peel off, trying to extend away to get a new solution on him. But his nose was coming back around as his machine fell toward the ground like a 30,000 lb. leaf in an uncontrolled flat spin that would have been fatal to any other machine. As his nose swung giddily around, his AI lined up on the Russian fighter, got an infrared lock and sent one of his Sidewinders after it. Fox One, dog.

  The missile closed on the Russian in less than a second and the explosion lit up the night sky in a cloud of flame and metal.

  Breathing heavily, Alakeel countered the spin and his fighter gained forward momentum again, creeping up over 200 miles an hour to 300, 400 … If there had been another S
u-57 on his six out there he could have been a sitting duck. But he got control of his aircraft again and pointed it back toward Natanz. His tac display told him all of his men were now bugging out, heading for the egress point that would take them back to Kuwait as planned.

  But not all of his men.

  As he pointed his nose at the ground and plotted his own course west, he saw the blinking icon of a rescue beacon on his helmet visor, flashing the downed Saudi pilot’s location to satellites above. The man had ejected about five miles northeast of Natanz.

  Three down, and they still had to fly four hundred miles through hostile skies to get home; with every Iranian air defense unit on the ground and Russian fighter pilot in the sky looking for them.

  Alakeel looked at the location for the emergency beacon and knew there would be no chance of rescue. The pilot was four hundred miles inside enemy territory and he had just helped inflict significant hurt on the Iranian nuclear program. He might very soon wish he had died with his machine.

  Rodriguez was late for school. The school bell was ringing, she could hear it, but she wasn’t even dressed. Oh my God, it wasn’t morning, it was afternoon! She was standing in the hall outside class and five hundred kids were about to come piling out of their classrooms and see her standing there naked!

  Wait, no. She rubbed her eyes, realizing she was waking from a dream. But there was a bell ringing. Levering herself up on one elbow she fumbled for her cell phone and squinted at the clock. 0300? And the caller. Seriously?

  She could hear music and voices in the background. “O’Hare, there better be a nuke inbound or there is going to be one, outbound.”

  “No ma’am but I have an idea that can’t wait,” the voice at the other end shouted.

  “Where are you?” Rodriguez grumbled. “If I’m not mistaken that’s 'I Will Survive’ playing in the background.”

  “Hank’s Bar ma’am and I’m on mocktails, so it isn’t a booze inspired idea for a girls’ only tour of the Caribbean though I do think you, me and Zeezee should totally do that,” O’Hare said. “No, ma’am, I was thinking how you said we need a different attack vector, one Russia can’t counter.”

  “I did?” Rodriguez asked blearily. “When did I say that?”

  “Right after I drove our only orbiting X-37C into a Russian kill vehicle ma’am,” O’Hare said. “Though you might have used more colorful language.”

  “Now I remember,” Rodriguez frowned. She rubbed her eyes again. “What is your idea O’Hare?”

  “Well, I was looking over your inventory ma’am,” O’Hare said. “It is going to take you weeks to get a launch slot for Avenger and get it into orbit...”

  “If I’m lucky,” Rodriguez told her. “It seems nothing short of a Presidential Executive Order will get anyone to step out of the launch queue for us.”

  “Sure ma’am, I believe you,” O’Hare said. “But I noticed you have an X-37B, last gen, in a hangar in Vandenburg...”

  Rodriguez lay her head back down on her pillow and sighed. “I’ve inspected it personally O’Hare. It can be launched, but it can’t be recovered. Besides which, it is an unarmed X-37B. It gets near a Groza, they will just shoot it out of orbit with their cannon or a damn Shakti, so we’re just out one more X-37.”

  “What if it wasn’t unarmed?” O’Hare asked. “What if … hey, mate, I’m still drinking that!”

  “What?”

  “Bartender tried to take my Mockhito, ma’am, sorry,” O’Hare said. “What if I told you DARPA has a project running with Air Force to arm its X-37Bs?”

  “I haven’t heard about that,” Rodriguez said.

  “Well, you aren’t out drinking Mockhitos with the right people, ma’am. I am. And my DARPA buddies tell me Air Force has a weapon that can slot right into the payload bay of your old X-37B, plus an Atlas nose cone already prepped to take it. The 37B is smaller. It doesn’t need a heavy-lift rocket, you can send it up on an Atlas V or Falcon 9.”

  Rodriguez levered herself back up onto one elbow, suddenly wide awake. “That could solve one problem. But I don’t happen to have a free Atlas V rocket lying around the Cape ready to boost that old crate into space…”

  “No, but Space Force Vandenberg does ma’am. I checked; they’ve got an Atlas V satellite launch scheduled for a few days from now. That’s a call Brigadier Parsons should be able to make on his own authority. So if he can commandeer that Atlas V for you, I may just have a new attack vector. In case China doesn’t come through.”

  “OK, O’Hare,” Rodriguez said, pulling herself up into a sitting position. “I’m listening.”

  After a few minutes of listening to O’Hare yell into her ear to the accompanying thump of Bohemian Rhapsody, Rodriguez realized her next call was going to be to a gator-hating engineer called Ross Hardy at Vandenberg. And assuming he didn’t laugh outright, the one after that would be to Brigadier General Parsons.

  For the first time in days, Rodriguez felt her frustration replaced by something new. Hope.

  Amir Alakeel needed reason to hope.

  He’d lost one man crossing the border into Iran. Two more over Esfahan itself. He had known the Iranian air defense units and Russian aircraft patrolling Iran’s western borders would be on high alert and expected he might lose one pilot more getting his remaining seven aircraft out of Iranian airspace. Each pilot was flying fast and low, relying on their stealth profiles to get them past the enemy hunting them. The other six aircraft were all ahead of him, making for the Iraq-Iran border.

  But somewhere before Bandar Mahshahr, fifty miles from Iraq, he lost three aircraft. He could see no enemy aircraft on his screen. No indication enemy radar had locked onto any of his pilot’s aircraft. So the hunters could only be Russian stealth fighters.

  His men were still radio silent, and they died silently. But one by one, Alakeel saw their encrypted ID signals disappear from his tactical situation screen.

  Three did make it through.

  Alakeel was the last.

  But he was no longer looking to escape. He had one remaining Sidewinder missile, and before he left Iran, he intended to take at least one Russian fighter with him.

  He was not blinded by rage. Turning away from the fighters he knew must have been waiting for him over Bandar Mahshahr, he pointed his F-35 southeast, hammering low and fast along the low coastal hills of Iran’s northern coast. With complete certainty, into the teeth of another Russian patrol, but hopefully one that was not expecting him.

  He kept his phased array radar switched off, relying only on passive infrared and electro-optical sensors to scan the skies around him.

  And then he saw it. Not literally. It came up on his threat warning receiver as a big blob of radar energy that his onboard AI took several moments to analyze and identify.

  Russian Beriev A-100 Airborne Warning and Control (AWACS) aircraft! Now he knew how his men had died. The A-100 was equipped with a Vega Premier Active Phased Array Radar, specifically designed to detect stealth aircraft as far as 370 miles away. Though it had probably not got a solid lock on any of his squadron’s aircraft, it had apparently picked up enough returns to plot their egress route and vector Russian fighters to intercept them.

  It would not be alone. There would be at least two Su-57 fighters escorting it, possibly more. And it was circling 100 miles further inland, over the city of Shiraz.

  He hesitated, checking his fuel state. To attack it would be suicide. Even if he did manage to close on it without it picking him up, even if he did get through the fighter escort, he would barely have enough fuel left to make it back to the Gulf and Saudi airspace.

  But it was the flying equivalent of the frigate Sahand. Iran did not possess any airborne warning aircraft – their last flying AWACS aircraft had been destroyed in an accident in 2009 and never replaced. So this aircraft, like the others patrolling the Iranian coast, was on loan from Russia, and no doubt crewed by a Russian aircrew.

  Alakeel made a simple calculation. He had lost six airc
raft. Six men. He had destroyed one Su-57 over Esfahan. The crew of an A-100 was, by memory, at least fifteen.

  Even if he traded his own life for the Beriev, Russia would still stand to lose double the number of men in this one engagement than he had lost, and what was probably the most expensive asset it had moved into the theater.

  With that thought, any hesitation he felt was lost. He looked at his terrain guidance screen. He was approaching the Heleh Protected Area wetlands, which were 20,000 acres of uninhabited wetland extending from the coast 50 miles inland. From there he could pick up Highway 86, a four-lane highway that wound through low hills and ranges east of Shiraz, and then it was 40 miles to the provincial city and the Beriev circling over it. It was still semi-dark, but there would be traffic on the highway. If he stayed low … really low … any returns the Beriev picked up might be confused with ground traffic.

  At 600 miles an hour, it was nine or ten minutes’ flying time.

  It was insanity.

  And that was why it might work.

  He flung his fighter onto its port wing and dropped toward the dark water that was the Heleh wetlands, leveling out 200 feet above the ground. He flinched several times as flocks of birds, startled by the subsonic approach of his aircraft, lifted into the air around him, but they didn’t rise high enough, and quickly fell away behind him. He let the terrain-following autopilot keep altitude for him as he concentrated on hitting the northeastern exit from the wetlands and picking up Highway 86. He nearly missed it in the gray early-dawn light, but pulled his machine into a screaming right-hand bank that sent him into the valley the highway cut through. It felt like he was so low he could clip the aerials off the cars and trucks that flashed past underneath him, but his focus was on ensuring he didn’t fly his machine into a hillside as the highway snaked left and right toward Shiraz, the electronic signature of the Beriev growing stronger by the minute. It apparently felt invulnerable on its perch high above him.