Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (52 page)

 
          
“Twenty
seconds to impact.” Three seconds later, they heard a second loud blast from
outside—the second 5V55K missile had popped out of its launch tube and was
following the first on its way to the target. “Second missile away ... fifteen
seconds to impact.”

 
          
“Stand
by to switch to narrow-beam mode ... now.”

 
          
The
engagement officer switched radar modes. ‘Target acquired in narrow-scan mode
... target locked, sir! Ten seconds to—”

 
          
Suddenly
the entire command vehicle violently rocked on its eight wheels. The
India/Juliett-band radar of the S-300 was carried aboard the same semi-trailer
truck as the command unit. The lights flickered, then went out completely.
Moments later, a second object struck the vehicle, harder than the first. A
burst of fire erupted from the control console. “Evacuate! Now!” the lieutenant
shouted. The crew members ran outside just as thick black smoke began billowing
out of the command cab.

 
          
As
the command crew assembled outside, the lieutenant quickly determined the cause
of the double explosion—a Mil Mi-24 attack helicopter, just a few kilometers
away, was firing guided antitank missiles at the S-300 battery. He realized
then that the Mi-24 hadn’t crashed—it had just ducked down below the S-300’s
radar coverage, cruised in, and attacked. It was flying perhaps ten meters
above the desert, flying at just thirty or forty kilometers an hour, slowly and
carefully picking its targets. Occasionally a blast of machine-gun fire erupted
from its nose cannon, followed by a streak of fire as its laser-guided missiles
sped off their launch rails and hit home.

 
          
In
seconds, it was over—and the entire S-300 battery, eight launchers and a
control/radar vehicle, had been destroyed, and the Mi-24 helicopter simply
disappeared into the night sky. Soon, only the sounds of burning vehicles and
screaming men could be heard.

 
         
King
Sayyid Muhammad ibn al-Hasan as-Sanusi, on board die Mi-24 helicopter in the
flight engineer’s station, patted the pilot on the shoulders, then turned to
the radio console at the engineer’s station behind the cockpit. “Headbanger,
Headbanger, this is Lion,” he radioed. “Target Alpha is down, repeat, Alpha is
down. Commence your run.” At that moment, he saw a long trail of fire coming
from the direction of Zillah Air Base. The bombers were on their way.

 
          
He
hoped to hell the Megafortress could stop them.

 
 
         
“LADAR
coming on.. . now,” Greg Wickland reported.

           
Seconds later: “LADAR standby” The
image frozen in his wide-screen supercockpit display was almost as clear as a
sixteen-color photograph. What he saw horrified him: “The bombers—they’re gone.”

 
          
“Oh,
shit,” George “Zero” Tanaka muttered. He strained to take a look at the
supercockpit display. “Looks like two planes still on the base, getting ready
for takeoff.”

 
          
“Fighters,”
Wickland said. “MiG-23s. Must be the last of the bombers’ air cover.” He
flashed the LADAR on and off several times so he could keep watch on the
fighters, taking a laser snapshot and then rolling and turning the
three-dimensional image to pick up as much detail as possible. Soon he could
see them rolling down the runway— the LADAR even detected their afterburner
plumes. “Looks like they’re heading north—not toward us.” He turned to his
aircraft commander. “Our mission was to try to destroy the bombers or crater
the runway so the bombers couldn’t launch. We missed them. What do we do now?
There’s no use attacking the base if the bombers are gone.” His eyes grew wide
with fear as he started to guess what Tanaka had in mind: “You’re not thinking
of
going after the bombers
, are you?”

 
          
“It’s
our only chance of stopping them.”

 
          
“We’ve
only got eight air-to-air missiles,” Wickland reminded his AC—not just for
Tanaka’s benefit, but also to assure himself of how dangerous this plan really
was. The EB-52 Megafortress carried eight radar-guided AIM-120 Scorpion
missiles in stealthy external weapon pods, along with four AGM-88 HARMs
(high-speed antiradar missiles). Internally, the EB-52 carried a rotary
launcher with eight AGM-154 JSOW (joint standoff weapons), which were
satellite- and imaging-infrared-guided thousand- pound glide bombs that could
be targeted by the laser radar and attack computers; plus another rotary
launcher with eight Wolverine powered “brilliant” cruise missiles, which could
locate and attack their own targets. “It’s crazy. I think we ought to—”

 
          
“Listen,
Wickland,” Tanaka interrupted angrily, “right now, I don’t care what you
think.” He dropped his oxygen mask and looked at his mission commander with
pure anger. “I asked you before we entered hostile airspace if you wanted to do
this, and you said ‘press on.’ Now we’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest, we’ve
got friendlies on the ground directly in harm’s way, and we are
not
going to back down now.”

 
          
“But
you said—”

 
          
“I
know what I said, and I was right—this wasn’t our fight, and this is not our
country,” Tanaka said. “But we’re committed. Do you understand that, Wickland?
The time to back out was twenty minutes ago before Sanusi’s forces entered
defended airspace, or even five minutes ago before we started jamming the
Libyan SAM sites. Now we’re in the middle of the shit, and I’m not just turning
around and going home. So you’d better do your job and do it damn well, or I
won’t wait to be blown up by a SAM—
I’ll
put a bullet up your ass myself. Now give me a heading to those planes.”

 
          
Wickland
silently did what he was ordered to do. The MiG-23 fighters turned
east-northeast, and Tanaka rolled in about thirty miles behind them to follow.
Less than fifteen minutes later, they detected another flight of aircraft:
three Tupolev-22 supersonic bombers, heading northeast toward the
Gulf of Sidra
. “There they are,” Tanaka said. He began to
push the throttles up until they were in full military power.

 
          
“What
are you doing?” Wickland asked.

 
          
“We’ve
got to nail those guys before the fighters join- up,” Tanaka said. “Those are
Tupolev-22s—they’re just as fast as the MiGs. Once they join up, they’ll
accelerate to attack speed, and we’ll never catch them.”

           
Wickland was silent, but Tanaka
could sense the fear in his body as they quickly closed in. “Eight miles to go
... seven miles, coming up on max missile range,” he said. “Six miles . .. five
... the bombers will still get away. . . .”

 
          
“At
this point, we’ll just have to hope we take the tail- end Charlie fighters
out—maybe the bombers will break up once they find out their fighters are
gone,” Tanaka said.

           
“We’re in max range.” Wickland
quickly touched the supercockpit display and spoke: “Attack target.”

 
          
“Attack MiG-23 Scorpion, stop attack ,"
the computer responded. Moments later, the first AIM-120 air-to-air missile
shot out of the starboard external weapon pod and streaked off into the
darkness.

 
          
But
the MiGs must have sensed something was wrong, or maybe one of the pilots was
checking his six, because the MiG-23 fighters suddenly peeled away from the
formation, dropped decoy flares, climbed rapidly, then reversed direction.
Seconds later, they heard a high-pitched
DEEDLE
DEEDLE DEEDLE!
warning and a female computerized voice announcing, “
Warning, fighter search radar, MiG-23,
eleven o'clock
,
sixteen miles,"
followed immediately by a fast-paced DEEDLEDEEDLEDEEDLE! and
“Warning, fighter radar lock, MiG-23,
eleven o'clock
,
high, fifteen miles."

 
          
“The
Scorpion broke lock,” Wickland said. At that moment the second MiG-23 turned
sharply right, and the two Tu-22 bombers accelerated and rapidly descended.
“The second fighter is coming at us, and the bombers are getting away!”
Wickland cried.

 
          
Tanaka
hit his voice command button: “Evasive action! Configure for terrain
following!” he spoke. Immediately the flight computer responded to the voice
command, nosing the EB-52 bomber over in a hard twenty-degree nose- down dive.
Tanaka kept the power in, diving right to max airspeed—the throttles
automatically pulled themselves back to keep from exceeding the airframe’s
design speed. “Where are those fighters, dammit?”

 
          
“Got
’em!” Wickland shouted. “Closest one is coming around to our
nine o’clock
. The nearest bomber is at our
one o’clock
, thirty-two miles.” He touched the icon for
the Tu-22 bomber, then hit his voice command stud: “Attack priority,” Wickland
told the attack computer.

 
          
“Target out of range,"
the computer
responded.

 
          
“We
know the bomber’s heading for Jaghbub,” Tanaka said. “We’ll head over that way
and bushwhack him.” He turned the bomber farther to the northeast, cutting off
the corner of the route to try to head the Libyan bombers off.

           
“Warning,
MiG-23,
seven o’clock
,
eleven miles, high.”

           
The Megafortress was now down at
three hundred feet above the desert, flying at nearly full military power at
four hundred and twenty knots airspeed. “I think we’re losing the MiGs,”
Wickland said. “They’re trying to get a shot off from up high.”

 
          
“Warning, MiG-23,
six o’clock
,
eight miles, high.”

           
“If he stays high, he’ll try a radar
shot any second,” Tanaka guessed. “If he follows us down, he’ll try a heater
next.”

 
          
“Then
let’s see if we can make him stay up high,” Wickland said. To the attack
computer, he said, “Deploy towed array.”

 
          
From
a fairing in the tail of the bomber, a small aerodynamic cylindrical object
extended out in the bomber’s slipstream on an armored fiber-optic cable,
quickly going out three hundred feet from the tail. The object was a
transmitter that could broadcast a variety of signals—radar jamming, spoofing,
noise, heat, or laser signals. When the array was extended, Wickland called up
a program on the defensive system and activated it.

 
          
On
board the Libyan MiG-23, the pilot’s radar warning receivers started to go
crazy—it was as if an entire squadron of American F-15 fighters was closing in
on him. As he was wondering why he didn’t see them coming, suddenly the radar
warning receiver told him every one of the F-15s was launching missiles at him!

 
          
He
knew
it couldn’t be true—there were
no F-15s in the middle of
Libya
. But he could not ignore the warnings. The pilot
immediately dropped radar and missile-decoying chaff and flares and executed a
tight left break to escape what he believed were a dozen AIM-7 Sparrow missiles
heading toward him.

 
          
The
second MiG-23 did the same, breaking in the opposite direction—but not before
he fired an R-60 heatseeking missile from less than six miles away.

 
          
“Warning, missile launch, MiG-23,
five o’clock
,
six miles ”
the computer’s
female voice calmly reported. But as it reported the attack, it was already
responding. The towed array instantly began transmitting infrared energy
signals, making the heat-seeking missiles think they were pursuing a huge heat
source the size of a house. Seconds later, the computer ejected decoy devices
that emitted hot points of infrared energy that drifted down and away from the
Megafortress, then shut off the infrared energy signal from the towed array.
When the R-60 missile was able to pick up a target again, after being dazzled
by the huge heat source, all it saw was the tiny, hot, slow-moving dot of the
high-tech decoy—too inviting a target to ignore. The first R-60 missiles plowed
into the decoy two miles behind the Megafortress, safely out of range.