Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (51 page)

 
          
“Okay.
That’s fine. I just want you to do your job—”

 
          
“I’m
going
to do my job, George.”

 
          
“Good.
I know you will. Just think of this as just another sim ride. We’re wringing
out a new weapon code, that’s all, nothing to it.”

 
          
But
as soon as Tanaka uttered those words, he knew they didn’t ring true.

 
          
“I’m
sorry, Greg,” Tanaka went on. “We’re not in the sim. We’re not wringing out a
new software program. This is the real thing. The missile that we fail to
defeat or we don’t see will kill us, not just crash the IPL or freeze the sim.
I know you didn’t sign up with the company to go to war. And I know you agreed
to do this mission on the ground—but now we’re in the air, and we’re surrounded
by about nine hostile SAM systems that will shoot us out of the sky the instant
they get a lock on us, and you’re having second thoughts.” He paused, looking
at Wickland, who said nothing. “Am I right?”

 
          
“Zero...”

 
          
“It’s
okay, Gonzo,” Tanaka said. “We use these call signs and dress up in cool flight
suits and pretend we’re Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards in
Top Gun
, but the truth is hammering us in die head right now—that we’re
in deep shit, that we could die any second up here; and if we do, no one will
know what the hell we’re doing up here. We’ll be dead, and that’s all.”
Wickland remained silent, but he turned to his aircraft commander, his chest
inflating and deflating as if he was having trouble breathing all of a sudden.

 
          
“Gonzo,
we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Tanaka said. “This is the
general’s fight, not ours. We’re the crew members aboard this plane, but we’re
not sworn to fight and die for whoever the company is doing all this for. We
signed a contract to fly planes for Sky Masters Inc., not get our asses shot at
by a thousand Libyan SAMs. So if you want to break out of here, we will.”

           
Wickland’s mouth opened in surprise.
“You will?”

           
“Damn straight,” Tanaka said. “I
realize we’re not in this to save our country. We’re doing this because we like
flying planes and building cool weapon systems and watching them work. So if
you say so, I’ll call the general right now and tell him we’re aborting the
mission.”

 
          
“You will?”
Wickland repeated, stunned.

 
          
“I
said I would,” Tanaka said. “We’ll climb out, avoid all the SAMs and intercept
radars, get out over open ocean away from all other air traffic, head toward
the
Scotland
refueling anchor, and call for gas to take
us home or land at our facility at Glasgow or Lossiemouth.”

 
          
“We’ll
catch hell for doing that. ...”

 
          
“The
company can’t do dick to us, Gonzo. They can’t fire us, they can’t dock our
pay, and they can’t sue us.”

           
“What about the guys on the
ground?”

           
“If they’re smart, they’ll bug out
shortly after we do,” Tanaka said. “I’ll let them know exactly what we’re
doing, and why.” That made Wickland swallow hard—he was scared of dying,
obviously, but also scared of being thought of as a coward by his cohorts.
“Like I said, Gonzo, this is the general’s fight, not ours. I’m flying this
mission because I happen to believe that we’re doing something good, something
right—and besides, I like flying this kick-ass plane into battle,
real
battle. But I respect your wishes,
too—we do this together. So what do you say?”

 
          
Wickland
looked at his supercockpit display, automatically entering commands or
adjusting settings. He turned to Tanaka, opened his mouth as if to say
something, then turned back to his console.

 
          
“Gonzo?
What’s it going to be?”

 
          
The
mission commander shrugged. He was called the “mission commander,” but
truthfully he didn’t feel like a commander of anything. All he wanted to do was
build and test cutting-edge neural network computer systems. He didn’t want to
go to war.

 
          
Still...

 
          
“Let’s
keep going,” he heard himself say. “I spent four hours getting the interface to
work between those hunks of junk in our bomb bay—now I want to see if they’ll
work.”

 
          
“Sounds
like a plan to me,” Tanaka said. “Let’s plot a course around as many of these
SAMs as we can, then make our way to the initial point on time.” He was pleased
to see Wickland immediately start punching the supercockpit display’s
touchscreen and speaking computer commands—he was back in the lab or in the
sim, where he really belonged. Whatever it took to get his head where it needed
to be ...

 
          
“We’ve
got two SA-l0s, one just nine miles east of the IP, the other forty miles
west-northwest,” Wickland reported. “Looks like they moved them since this
morning when those Libyans scouted them.”

 
          
“The
target run will put us just inside lethal range of the second SAM after we’re
DP inbound, and he’ll be alerted if we have to fire on the first site,” Tanaka
said. “What’s the computer say?”

 
          
“It
says let’s get the fuck out of here, go home, and have a beer,” Wickland
quipped. He turned to Tanaka, smiled, and corrected himself, saying, “Nah, that
was me—but I’ll do what the computer says: descend to computer-generated lowest
altitude, replot the DP to bypass the first SAM, and attack the second SAM with
one antiradar missile. It’ll take the first SAM at least thirty seconds to
acquire us, and by that time we’ll be just a few seconds out of detection range
and within a minute of flying out of lethal range. We save one antiradar
missile for later.” He punched up instructions on the touchscreen. “Center up
on the bug to the new DP. I’ve got COLA terrain-following mode selected,
minimum safe altitude is on the barber pole.”

 
          
“Roger,
MC,” Tanaka said. Yep, he thought happily, he’s back. “Here we go.”

 
         
Grumble,
this is Lion Seven,” the Mi-24 pilot radioed. “I copy you have declared an air
defense emergency. Do you need us to reverse course and reenter the security approach?
We are five minutes from bingo fuel, and we have wounded on board. We must land
immediately. Over.”

           
The S-300 battery commander had a
decision to make. The proper procedure was to kick all aircraft out of the
airspace and have them reenter the restricted area, usually on a different
ingress route to be sure they were familiar with all the routes, not just the
one they filed for. But this guy was bingo fuel, and he obviously saw some kind
of action.

 
          
Well,
the lieutenant thought, all that wasn’t his fault. That hot prickly sensation
was still hammering away on the back of his neck—no time to ignore it now.
“Lion Seven, reverse course and reenter through checkpoint one-one-nine at
three hundred meters.”

 
          
He
heard the pilot radio a muttered
“Insha’allah”
which in this case probably more closely meant “Who do you think you are,
God?” rather than “If God wills it.” But the pilot responded curtly, “Roger,
Grumble Twelve. Reversing course.”

 
          
“He
sounded pretty mad, sir,” the radar operator observed.

 
          
“If
he runs out of fuel and crashes, I’ll take the blame for it,” the lieutenant
said. “But as long as we follow procedures, we can’t be faulted too badly.
Clear your screens and report.”

 
          
The
radar operators switched their radar briefly from short-range tracking and
identification to long-range search. The short-range tracking gave altitude
information and more precise tracking information, but sacrificed range, so the
radar had to be manually reset for longer- range scans on occasion. The Mi-24
helicopter briefly disappeared from the radar display when the mode was
changed. “Radar is clear, sir.”

 
          
“Very
well. Continue tracking Seven to the ingress point.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir.”

 
          
“Comm,
ask him his fuel state again. If we need to, we’ll have to coordinate an
off-base refueling.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir.” He turned to his radios; the lieutenant lit a cigarette while they
worked. But moments later: “Sir, no reply from Lion Seven!”

           
The creepy-crawling sensation on the
back of the lieutenant’s neck was raging now; he crushed the cigarette out with
a stamp of a foot. “Radar . .. ?”

 
          
“He
just disappeared off the scope, sir,” the radar operator reported. “I had his
transponder signal and primary target just a moment ago—now it’s gone.”

 
          
“Any
ELTs?”

 
          
The
radio operator switched his intercom panel—and sure enough, they heard a
pingpingpingping!
signal on the
international emergency frequency. The ELT, or emergency locator transmitter,
activated automatically upon impact if the helicopter crashed.

 
          
“Shit,”
the lieutenant cursed, “he crashed. I thought he said he was bingo fuel—he should’ve
had at least a thirty-minute reserve. Those hot dog helo pilots would rather
kill themselves than admit they screwed up and stretched their fuel past safe
tolerances. Give me a bearing to the signal, notify Units Ten and Nine and have
them triangulate his position, then send it to Brigade to organize an immediate
rescue.” He picked up the command phone. “Brigade, Twelve.”

 
          
“Go
ahead.”

 
          
“Sir,
we have lost contact with Lion Seven. We are picking up an ELT; he may have
crashed. He reported he was low on fuel, but he first reported that he . ..”

 
          
“Sir, unidentified fast-moving aircraft
inbound, range thirty-five kilometers and closing!”

           
“Release
all batteries!
” the lieutenant shouted, still with his finger on the
phone’s call switch. He threw the phone into its cradle. “Release batteries and
fire!” He looked at the radar screen—it was a hopeless jumble of streaks, dots,
swirls, and radiating electrical noise.

 
          
“We
are being jammed, sir! Heavy jamming, all frequencies!”

 
          
“Switch
to optronic control, search along the last known bearing. Switch the radar to
short-scan multifrequency to simulate missile guidance uplink—let’s see if he
switches his jammers to counter the uplink. Where’s the optronic crew? Report,
dammit!”

 
          
“Optronics
crew searching along predicted flight path ... Sir, optronic crew has detected
a fast-moving target!”

 
          
“Match
bearings and reacquire in medium-scan mode!”

 
          
“Target
reacquired... target locked in medium-scan mode.”

 
          
It
was a crapshoot after this: time for the missile to fly to its target minus ten
seconds, the minimum amount of time it took to lock on with the more precise
short-range scan, then transmit the uplink data to guide the missile to its
target. No time for guessing now .. . “Release batteries and launch two.”

 
          
The
deputy commander hit the “LAUNCH” alarm, flipped a switch guard, and then
reached down inside the switch to a covered button underneath. Moving the
switch set off another alarm in the command cab; the lieutenant silenced the horn
with a commander’s “pickle switch” that he held in his left hand, which issued
a consent command to the launch controller.

 
          
Outside,
at a launcher two hundred meters away, a three-thousand-pound missile popped
out of its launch tube from a slug of compressed nitrogen. The missile flew
straight up for about seventy feet before the solid-rocket booster ignited,
quickly accelerating the missile to well over five times the speed of sound.