Arc Light (48 page)

Lambert heard Thomas standing next to him uncharacteristically losing his cool. “Sink the thing! You got free-fire rules everywhere except the Kara Sea Bastion!”

“General Fuller, execute Operation Avenging Sword.”

“O-o-okey-dokey.” The line clicked, and Lambert stared at the phone for a second before looking at the next number on his list: the U.S. Space Command, whose specially modified F-15s would begin knocking down Russia's satellites one by one.

“Shouldn't you call the President?” Thomas asked as he dialed his next number.

Lambert hesitated.
What an awful call,
he thought, but he knew he should make it. He dialed Mount Weather. “This is Greg Lambert. Get me President Livingston, please.” There was a brief pause before a ringing tone. Livingston picked the phone up himself on the second ring.

“Mr. President, it's Greg Lambert.” There was an awkward pause.

“It's all right, Greg. Thanks for calling.”

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“It's started already, hasn't it?”

The war,
Lambert knew he meant. “Yes, sir, it has.”

“You remember our talk, Greg. You just remember our talk. I'm counting on you being my voice, my conscience, in all those meetings that are coming. I'm counting on you, Greg.”

“To save the world,”
he left unspoken, and Lambert came very close to objecting to the absurdity of the obligation. “I'll do what I can, Mr. President.”

“It's just Walter, Greg,” the President said. “Walter Livingston.”

Cry “Havoc,” and let slip the dogs of war.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
Julius Caesar
Act 3, scene 1, line 273

“Viper Two, stay on me,” Captain Patrick O'Brian heard through his left ear. He glanced over in the direction of the sound to see through the pouring rain the dark form of the F-15E Strike Eagle that was his leader.

“Two,” O'Brian said simply in reply, maintaining his concentration on the gray surface of the ocean one twitch of his stick arm beneath his massive strike aircraft. With the thumb of his left hand on the throttle he flicked the speedbrake closed and then back open to bleed twenty knots off his airspeed, which he replaced with a little throttle after he had fallen into position slightly behind his flight leader.

“Twenty,” O'Brian heard through the speakers of his helmet from behind, much clearer than the artificially produced “coke-bottle” sound of incoming calls. The aircraft's communications bay vectored sound, whether communications or threat warnings, to his ears from the direction in space of the source no matter which way his head was turned, making distant sources seem far away. The clear sound from behind O'Brian was his Wizzo—the Weapons Officer in the rear seat—counting down the miles to target.

The canopy in front of O'Brian lit up with a new set of symbols and data.

“Ball's on target,” First Lieutenant Ramirez said from behind.

O'Brian saw the bright box he was looking for off to the left on the flat screen of the HUD, the Head Up Display. The HUD was invisible against the canopy, and the symbols on it were focused on infinity so that only when you looked through them and off into the distance did they become clear.

A line streaked from the center of the display to the center of
the box, indicating the course adjustment he needed to make. The box was the bomb release point, O'Brian knew, through which he must fly the aircraft, and it was growing larger, closer.

Ramirez, bent over at the waist with his head buried in “the feed bag,” the padded screen right in front of his chest where O'Brian's stick was, had acquired the landmarks demarking their route of ingress visually despite the lack of visibility over the storm-tossed ocean. The Pave Tack FLIR, or Forward-Looking Infra Red imager, produced a high resolution thermal image of the shoreline ahead, and Ramirez had simply rolled the trackball to move the cross hairs onto the landmark and then punched the bar beneath it to lock it on. The computer then calculated the position of the target relative to the landmark and generated the release point on O'Brian's display. O'Brian watched the computer's slight adjustments of the box's position and size as the Pave Tack's laser read the line-of-sight range to the landmark—the hypotenuse of the triangle—and the altimeter told the computer the triangle's base. The computer then came up with the critical third leg: the range along the ground to the landmark and, from there, to the target. With that range, together with readings of acceleration from the gyros of the aircraft's inertial navigation system and airspeed from the Pitot tube, the computer would release the bombs with incredible precision. All O'Brian had to do was fly through the box.

“Viper Two, come left twelve,” the voice of his flight leader said into O'Brian's left ear from just ahead.

“Two copy,” O'Brian said curtly as he rolled his stick gently to the left and applied slight pressure to the left rudder pedal to complete the coordinated turn. When the heading readout on the HUD ticked down from 272 degrees to 260 degrees he reversed stick and rudder to return to straight and level flight. O'Brian saw that the line danced only slightly off the center point in the box after the turn. As long as the end of the line stayed inside the box, the bombs could be released on target by the computer's jinking of the flight controls.
This is it,
O'Brian thought.
Viper One's found it too.

With only the minute movement of his right arm and left leg in manipulating the flight controls during the turn, O'Brian had felt the extreme tightness of his muscles. Two hours in the cockpit and thirty minutes at extremely low-level flight were having their effect.
Shit!
he thought.
Don't cramp now.

He wanted to stretch, to roll his shoulders and limber his arms and legs, but at only 150 feet above water in bad weather and about the same distance beneath the first fans of radar energy reaching out to find them, it would mean almost certain death for the two of them.
The thought did nothing to ease the tension in his muscles. O'Brian glanced down at the airspeed indicator on the HUD. It read 512 knots. At 150 feet the two massive aircraft would be leaving a wake in the water behind them. He swallowed the stricture that had swelled in his throat.

O'Brian had to fight against his natural inclination to “white knuckle” the controls, focusing on easing his grip to allow blood and therefore oxygen to the muscles of his extremities. He remembered well the exercise that the flight surgeon had put his jet school class through: gripping a broom handle tightly for a couple of minutes during his lecture on flight endurance. His hand had shaken as if palsied from oxygen starvation when he held it up afterward.

“Fifteen,” Ramirez said.

Off to the right out of the corner of his eye O'Brian could see a bright flame, then a second, and then half a dozen more light up the dark gray sky, piercing the rain and fog that completely obscured all lines separating sky and ocean and land. “HARMs on the way,” he said for the benefit of Ramirez, who remained head down.

O'Brian stole a short glance to the right but could no longer see the eight tiny points of light streaking off toward land. The 809-pound AGM-88A High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, HARMs, were tracking on the radar transmitters of the Russian air defense system, which would be shutting themselves off any second now. But it would be too late. The HARMs would track on the last known point of radiation and come smashing in at tremendous speed, blasting the transmitters out of existence. The transmitters that were left off until after the first wave of missiles and then turned on would be attacked by the aircraft that had fired the HARMs—F-16s configured as advanced “Wild Weasels.”

First in, last out, the Wild Weasels would douse all high-frequency radiation emitters more powerful than a microwave oven at close range with M61A-1 Vulcan 20-mm cannon. With a rate of fire of 100 explosive cannon shells per second, the rotating six-barreled Vulcan sounded like a buzz saw, and the target would be consumed quickly in the eruption of hundreds of tiny explosions.

“Twelve,” Ramirez said as the flashes of HARM explosions began to appear along what must be the shoreline ahead.

O'Brian was surprised that the next breath came into his lungs raggedly.
You're nervous, Patty,
he thought, and took a deep breath.
Get your shit together, sports fan.

“Leopard Flight, bogeys—two o'clock—Angels six!” The faint but clear call from above O'Brian's head announced the expected arrival of the Russian interceptors, interceptors whose sole target
would be O'Brian's flight of eight F-15Es.

“Combat spread. Switches hot. Tallyho!” came the distant voice of their top cover's commander.

“One's hot.”

“Two's hot.”

“I've got right!”

“Eleven,” Ramirez said, the tension coming through loud and clear in his voice.
He's listening too,
O'Brian thought.

“Sweet tone. Firing one,” a fighter pilot above said over the humming sound of a radar lock on his missile's prey. O'Brian could hear the familiar whoosh of the missile's rocket igniting in the background as the last words were spoken.

O'Brian checked his own load of air-to-air missiles: two short-range infrared-seeking Sidewinders and two medium-range radar-guided Sparrows. In looking down he suddenly remembered:
Instrument check! Shit!
He dropped his eyes from the canopy in the precisely prescribed pattern for the last precombat check, which he was late in starting at less than eleven miles to target. Down to his instruments and then back up to ensure the aircraft was straight and level and then back down, one instrument at a time.
Engine temp: right's still runnin' hot but okay. Back up—straight and level.