Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (78 page)

CENTRAL
LIBYA
 
A SHORT TIME LATER

           
Within a few minutes after receiving
the call from Tripoli, the crews aboard two dozen mobile SS-12 missiles, armed
with a variety of warheads—ranging from one-thousand- pound high-explosive to
chemical to subatomic neutron— prepared their missiles for launch. Within five
minutes of receiving the final launch order, one by one, the rockets lifted off
into the dawn sky on columns of fire.

 
         
“
Giant zero! Giant zero!
Rockets
detected!” the mission commander aboard the second AL-52 Dragon reported. After
refueling, the Dragon had gone on patrol over west-central
Egypt
, covering both the Salimah oil fields and
Cairo
from any rockets launched from
Libya
.

 
          
Long
before the mission commander even keyed the microphone, the most sophisticated
computer system ever placed aboard any aircraft was already prosecuting the attack.
The mission commander merely watched in fascination as the chemicals they
carried in the tail section of the plane mixed and created their magic, and the
Dragon came to life once again. The crew watched through the telescopic optics
as the SS-12 rocket was blown apart by the COIL laser.

 
          
“Yeah,
baby,
yeahl
” the mission commander
crowed. “We got it!” The LADAR warning system bleeped again as more SS-12
rockets were detected. But one by one, the AL-52 Dragon aircraft detected and
attacked every SS-12 that rose out of the desert.

 
          
As
it attacked each one, coordinates of the launch points were transmitted to U.S.
Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers orbiting over southern
Libya
and northern
Chad
. The coordinates of the launchers were
instantly programmed into satellite-guided AGM-158A standoff missiles, which
were launched from well over one hundred miles away within moments after the
rockets were launched. The missiles, called the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff
Missile, carried a one-thousand-pound high- explosive warhead and an infrared
terminal seeker. The missile flew toward the rocket’s launch point, detected
the red-hot launcher and support trucks with its heat-seeking terminal sensor,
and destroyed them with pinpoint accuracy.

 
          
OVER
SOUTHERN TRIPOLI
,
LIBYA
 
THAT SAME TIME

 
          
“Wait!”
Tanaka shouted, pulling Wickland’s hand carefully away from the ejection
handle. “That wasn’t the missile!” The fireball became a fat comet, arcing
across the night sky. Seconds later, a second fireball appeared, this one
spinning crazily across the horizon like a burning tumbleweed blown across a
prairie. “What the hell... ?”

 
          
“Yo,
Zero,” a voice came over the long-forgotten command radio channel. “Is that you
out there?”

 
          
“Bud?
Is that you?”

           
“Roger that,” John “Bud” Franken, at
the command of the second, improved AL-52 Dragon aircraft, replied. “Looks like
we got here right on time. What’s your status?”

           
“We’re short one engine and we have
a few more holes now than we did at takeoff,” Tanaka said, “but we’re still
flying. Can you clear our six for us so we can get the hell out of here?”

 
         
“Roger
that,” Bud Franken replied. He turned to Lindsey Reeves in the mission
commander’s seat. “You got them, Linds?”

 
          
Lindsey
Reeves, Franken’s mission commander, checked her supercockpit display. The
LADAR attack computer already highlighted the fighters for her—both of them
were converging on the crippled Megafortress bomber. “Got ’em!” she crowed. “
Nine o’clock
, sixty miles, heading northeast at six
hundred knots, one thousand feet a.g.l.”

           
“Let’s see what this baby can do,”
Franken said. “Light ’em up, Linds.”

 
          
Reeves
touched the MiGs’ icon on her display, then said, “Attack Dragon” into the
voice-command computer.

 
          
“Attack commit Dragon
,
stop attack
the attack computer
responded. A few moments later, capacitors in the rear fuselage started
receiving and storing power from the aircraft’s generators. At the same time,
the deformable mirror turret in the nose unstowed and pointed itself at the
Libyan fighters. When all of the capacitors reported full, the attack computer
reported,
“Laser ready”

 
          
“Laser
commit,” Lindsey said.

           
Franken flipped his consent switch.
“Go get ’em, kiddo.” Lindsey did the same on her side.

 
          
“Laser commit, stop attack ” the computer
reported.

           
The laser radar system tracked and
measured the target, then also sampled the atmosphere at the target and sent
corrective and focusing instructions to the deformable mirror. At the same
instant, the capacitors in the rear of the aircraft started pumping massive
waves of energy into the plasma generators. Four hundred diode lasers focused
laser light onto the center of a small aluminum chamber, burning a pellet of
deuterium-tritium fuel the size of a grain of sand, creating a ball of
deuterium-tritium-enhanced gas. Confined and heated by the lasers and now
weighing thousands of pounds, the superheated ball of gas quickly reached a
temperature of one hundred million degrees Celsius—ten times hotter than the
surface of the sun. At that temperature, the atoms of deuterium and tritium
were blasted apart, creating a mixture of free electrons and ions—also known as
plasma. The plasma field lasted for only a millionth of a second; three other
plasma generators acted in series to generate an almost continuous wave of
plasma energy.

 
          
Corralled
and steered by a magnetic waveguide chamber, the plasma field, more powerful
than all the nuclear explosions ever created but existing for only a few trillionths
of a second, pounded into the laser generator chamber, where the massive pulse
of energy excited thousands of glass disks containing neodymium, a rare earth
element. The plasma energy stripped the neodymium atoms off the glass, creating
an immensely powerful pulse of light. The light was reflected into the Faraday
oscillator, which bounced the light back and forth between cooled mirrors until
the light was in perfect synchronization, then fired it out into the laser
waveguide. An amplifier intensified the beam even more, and spatial filters
focused the beam down to a tiny spot, then expanded the beam to three feet in
diameter, where it was projected onto the deformable mirror, then reflected
into space.

 
          
In
the cockpit, it was anticlimactic—there was no loud hum, no recoil, and no
sound at all except for the faint vibration of the turret moving as it tracked
the target. Lindsey did receive some warning indications dealing with the
plasma generators. The plasma generators were in effect plasma-yield weapon
warheads, capable of destroying all matter around it for hundreds of feet in
all directions—the explosion was simply controlled and shortened into pulses
contained by magnetic fields. They were setting off thousands of plasma-yield
explosions every second in the back of the AL-52 aircraft—not exactly a safe or
secure situation. The technology was very new, virtually untested, and in rough
design stage only—they had few safety devices installed simply because they did
not have enough information on what the really dangerous subsystems were. The
whole system was a hazard.

 
          
But
despite the warning messages, Lindsey let the laser sequence go—and in the next
few seconds, history was made.

 
          
The
laser beam that hit the first Libyan MiG-23 fighter was akin to a blowtorch
against a stick of butter—the fighter’s fuselage was not merely melted, but
vaporized at the same instant. The beam focused on the fattest section of the
aircraft—the fuselage between the wings, containing the midbody fuel tank, the
fighter’s largest fuel tank. The superheated metal ignited the three thousand
gallons of vaporized jet fuel in the blink of an eye, creating a fireball over
a mile in diameter that swallowed the fighter and sent burning clouds of fire
spreading across the night sky like a man-made aurora borealis. The explosion
was plainly visible from over one hundred and fifty miles away.

 
          
“Lost
contact,” Lindsey said matter-of-factly, still monitoring the laser engagement
on her supercockpit display.

 
          
“My
God,” Bud Franken gasped, dropping his mask in surprise. “We did it. We nailed
it.” He had to pull himself back into the present—he was astonished, thinking
of the power of this incredible weapon. They were over sixty miles away from
the target. In one instant, the image of the MiG-23 fighter, magnified by the
laser’s telescope and deformable mirror, was sharp and clear—the next instant
it was gone, lost in a ball of superheated gas. There was almost no
debris—nothing except a wave of fire quickly dissipating in the sky. “Let’s tag
that last fighter.”

 
          
“Attack
target Dragon,” Lindsey repeated, touching the screen again. Seconds later the
second MiG disappeared from their screens as well.

 
          
“Zero,
this is Bud, splash two fighters,” Franken said. “Your tail is clear. Clear to
head to the rendezvous point. We can cover you almost until you reach Israeli
airspace.”

           
As they watched the EB-52 retreat to
the northeast, to rendezvous with the DC-10 tanker for its refueling anchor, Reeves
also monitored another aircraft—this one a small, slow one, flying at barely
treetop level, across the sands toward southeast Tripoli. This aircraft was
datalinking its threat receiver information to the AL-52 Dragon, and now a
pop-up threat displayed itself on Lindsey’s supercockpit display. “The MV-22
has got an SA-10 at his
twelve o’clock
, thirty miles,” Franken said. “His signal
is pretty strong—he’ll get within detection threshold in less than five miles.”
On the command channel, he radioed, “Motorboat, this is Dragon, you’ve got a
threat ahead that’s locking on you. Reverse course.”

 
          
“Can
you tag him, Dragon?” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft
asked.

 
          
“Stand
by,” Franken replied. He turned to his young mission commander. “Can you get
him, Linds?”

 
          
“I’m
slaving on him now,” Reeves said. She slaved the laser’s telescope to the
threat location datalinked from the MV-22. “I got the command vehicle,” she
said happily. She moved the target cursor from the radar dish itself to the
command cab, located on the back of the same vehicle. “Let’s see what happens—

 
          
But
before she could commit, their threat receiver changed from a “SEARCH” warning
to a “LOCK” warning and instantly to a “MISSILE LAUNCH” warning. “SA-10 in the
air!” Reeves shouted.

 
          
“Reverse
course, Motorboat,” Franken said. “Full countermeasures.” To Reeves he said,
“Nab that sucker, Linds!” Lindsey Reeves had already switched from slaving mode
to the laser radar, and the system instantly picked up the two incoming SA-10 missiles.
“Got the SAMs,” she said. “Attack SA-10 missiles Dragon.”

           
“Warning,
plasma generator number three not ready ” the computer spoke.

           
“What does that mean, ‘not ready’?”
Franken asked. “We’ve gotten several warning messages from about a dozen different
components of the laser,” Reeves said, “but I’ve bypassed them all. I think the
plasma generator vessels are becoming too hot, both from the heat of the fusion
reaction and the stray radiation leakage impregnating the aluminum. The
magnetic fields can’t contain all the particles, and it weakens the reactor
vessel.”

 
          
Franken
checked the supercockpit display. “We’ve got no choice now, Linds,” he said.
“If a reactor fails, we jettison it and we’re done for the day.”