Authors: Jim DeFelice
And where the hell was the other Sukhoi?
Howe’s AMRAAMs struck the radar plane in quick succession. One of the warheads ignited fumes in the plane’s fuel tank, and the explosion broke the aircraft into several pieces, five of which were big enough for Howe’s radar to track as they disintegrated. Howe barely noticed, however, focusing on the northern Sukhoi as he tried to decide whether the Indian was running away or angling for an attack. He didn’t want to waste a missile on someone who was already out of the game.
The HUD’s rectangular piper jammed the Sukhoi into its sweet spot. Howe fired, figuring better safe than sorry; as the missile shot away he got a fresh warning on the SA-2s, one of which had managed to sniff out his airframe and was heading in his general direction. As Howe jinked left, the F/A-22V’s radar gave the AMRAAM a fresh update on the targeted Sukhoi, still flying a perfect intercept, apparently unaware that it had already been caught in the crosshairs.
The SA-2B was an ancient weapon; early versions had been targeted at B-52s over Vietnam, and it was an SA-2 that had taken out Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. That had all happened an awful long time ago, and while the missile—code-named Guideline by NATO—had been updated, it was thoroughly understood by the people who had put the Velociraptors’ ECM suite together. Even so, it had to be respected: With a warhead that weighed just under three hundred pounds and a velocity that could top Mach 3.5, its boom could definitely lengthen a pilot’s day.
Howe pushed back south as his aircraft’s electronic warfare suite played with the missile’s mind. It told the missile it was beautiful and sleek, the most powerful thing spinning through the universe. Then it pointed down the block, claiming that it had set up a date with the fattest, juiciest target it had ever seen, a veritable Daddy Warbucks that would make a perfect match. It slapped the missile in the rear end and told it to go have some fun; by the time the missile realized it had been had, it was at nearly sixty thousand feet and several miles from its intended target. It wailed in frustration, so distraught that it immolated itself, its remains trailing to the ground like the shreds of a funeral shroud.
Howe, meanwhile, struggled to sort the cacophony and chaos around him into a coherent map of the battle. The graphical representations of the battle on the HUD and tactical screen showed that Timmy had not only broken the enemy’s attack but was now launching his own; the cockpit pulsed with the shot warning. And here was the Sukhoi that had managed to hide earlier—five miles south of Howe, headed back east.
With the Indian taking himself out of the fight, Howe started to turn toward his wingman. Before he could tell him he was coming, a transmission from Cyclops interrupted him.
“Bird One, be advised missiles are in the air. We’re taking evasive action.”
Cyclops was under attack.
The launch indicator flashed. The Pakistanis had obviously mistaken the 767 for a Chinese spy plane and were determined to take it down.
Megan looked at the large tactical screen next to her, waiting for Cyclops Two to target and destroy the four missiles. They were early-model American HAWKS—easily handled.
So why the hell weren’t they firing at them?
They had to see it. They had to.
They had to fire quickly. The missile spread increased the difficulty of aiming, and at this short range they had a relatively short window of opportunity.
She could take it out herself. But she, too, had only a limited opportunity.
The plan was to wait until they couldn’t be intercepted, then to simply fire once. But they hadn’t foreseen this; they hadn’t thought the Indians and Pakistanis would go this far.
She should get into the mix now. This was exactly the situation Cyclops had been invented for, the sort of future she’d foreseen.
And yet, she’d be risking it all if she did.
Risking what? Only herself.
The ABM shield as well. Everything.
Was that more important than saving the lives of her friends?
They weren’t her friends anymore.
If it were Tom, would she hesitate?
Megan put her index finger on the touch screen, designating the rising missile. But just as she opened her mouth to give the verbal confirmation to fire, Cyclops Two obliterated the missile on its own.
“Thank God,” she said to herself.
Perhaps it was a premonition, or maybe his brain just worked out the logic on its own. But even as Cyclops took out the last of the HAWK missiles that had been aimed at it, Howe found himself putting the throttle out to the firewall and clicking in a warning to Cyclops without stopping to think exactly what he was doing.
“They’re going to launch ballistic missiles,” he said. “Stand by for ballistic missiles. Take out anything that’s flying.”
Howe slapped his radar out of dogfight mode and into the wide-range tactical feed for Cyclops.
“Timmy, we need to be north,” he said tersely.
“Roger that,” acknowledged his wingman.
“Bird One, be advised we have missiles launched, Indian missiles launched,” warned the Cyclops Two pilot.
He didn’t have to say ballistic missiles.
“Take them out,” said Howe.
“Not in range.”
“Come south. This is it. Get everything you can get.” Howe told the F-15s to accompany the plane and pulled two more off the AWACS. Not only did he expect the Pakistanis to take another shot at Cyclops, he expected them to launch their ballistic missiles as well.
Good God, what suicidal idiots.
A flight of MiG-29s headed toward the Pakistani border to his north. They were low and hot, probably in fighter-bomber mode.
He fired two AMRAAMs at them, reserving his last one. The missiles sped toward the first and second aircraft in the formation, which were apparently unaware they’d been chalked up on his screen.
“North, Timmy, north,” he radioed, a basketball coach barking at a forward to get back and guard the basket. “The Indians are launching a nuclear attack, and the Paks are sure to retaliate. Cyclops has the missiles.”
“Two.”
The first AMRAAM hit the lead MiG, but the second missile missed its target. The planes kept coming.
No way in the world could Howe’s team prevent every aircraft from crossing the border. They were playing Russian roulette: If one got through with a nuke, what then?
The intelligence people had said confidently that most of the two countries’ nukes were in missiles. “Only one or at most two,” they felt, were likely to have been made into bombs, which were harder to deliver and easy to defend against.
What if they were wrong? Cyclops Two carried only enough laser fuel for roughly thirty shots, depending on the duration of the blasts.
The Pakistanis were most likely to use a bomb; he’d look for an F-16 flight.
The AWACS warned of one flying south out of Islamabad, a two-ship formation streaking due south. As Howe got it on the wide screen with its shared data, Cyclops started plucking Indian IRBMs out of the sky.
“North Two, get north.”
“I’m on your six.”
Atta looked down from the heads-up screen to the more detailed target list at the left side of his glass panel. There were six live targets, two of them SAMs and the rest ballistic missiles. The computer—with Sergeant Peters’s approval—ranked the SAMs first. But the ballistic missiles were higher and farther away, which meant they were much more complicated shots.
And more critical. Besides, the SAMs were ID’d as early-model Crotales, which had a maximum effective altitude about twenty thousand feet below where he was flying.
“Override one, override two,” he told the computer, punching the screen quickly to confirm the shots. “Acquire.”
The computer buzzed its acceptance. Atta could feel the laser turret whirling in the nose ahead of him, trying to lock on the new target. A second tone sounded and the triangle in his HUD blinked green, showing he had a lock.
“Fire,” he said, though this was superfluous: His finger had already pushed the button at the top of his grip, and in combat mode the computer accepted either command.
The laser shot was practically instantaneous. The beam tracked with the rising target for an infinitesimally small time, a highly focused blowtorch rubbing the skin of the missile. The beam heated part of the fuel tank in the second stage of the Indian Agni rocket, expanding it so quickly that it exploded in the space of half a second. The computer cycled up the target list, once more putting the SAMs on top; Atta quickly reprioritized them and took his shot at another ballistic missile. This was a harder shot; the laser caught the solid propellant first-stage motor but failed to destroy it immediately, sending the rocket off course but leaving it intact. Atta had to verbally order a fresh shot, since the computer was programmed to accept sending a missile off target as a hit.
“We’re locked and being tracked,” said the copilot. “Pak SA-2 battery.”
Unlike the Crotales, this missile was fully capable of reaching the Cyclops aircraft, especially since it had to fly a predictable path for the laser. But Atta held off ordering the ECMs, fearing that they would degrade the radars helping him target. By the time he fired and destroyed the third target—another Agni—the Pakistanis had fired two missiles at them.
They probably saw this as a holy war against the infidels.
Idiots.
The computer moved the missiles to the top of the list. Atta hesitated a second, then approved the selection of the first one.
“More Crotales—where the hell did the bastards get all these missiles?” the copilot asked.
The first SAM went down easy. The second SA-2, however, tracked off its expected course, and the computer seemed to take forever to get a lock. Atta felt his cheeks puffing out with his breaths as he finally fired and took it out.
More SAMS, various contacts; the adrenaline buzzing in Atta’s brain started to shake his concentration. He felt confused, fatigue overwhelming him.
The target list offered an SA-2 climbing through five hundred feet.
Another Agni had just launched.
Atta overrode, took out the ballistic missile.
“Captain!” His copilot’s voice went up an octave.
The pipper was yellow: no shot.
“ECMs,” said Atta. He took the yoke from the computer and swung around much tighter than the automated pilot would have allowed, pulling 6 g’s to get back in the firing track. Stabilizing, he went back into firing mode, allowing the electronic brain to hold the plane steady. The piper went red and he fired—a good hit on the first blast. The missile imploded.
Atta heard a popping sound that seemed to come from behind him. At the same time the left engine whined and the plane seemed to fall into his hands.
“We’re hit—shrapnel in the left engine,” said the copilot.
Unlike before, his voice was extremely calm. Atta interpreted that as a bad sign.
Timmy angled westward, following Howe back toward the border. The AWACS operator screamed out contacts, Cyclops Two chopped down missiles, the radio crackled with talk from the F-15s. The chaotic jumble was music to Timmy’s ears.
Howe had sorted through the confusion and come up with a coherent plan. A pair of F-16s were charging toward the Indian border well to the west.
“We’re going to take those planes out,” the lead pilot told him. “They’re the only aircraft on the board that may have nukes. I have the plane on the right.”
“Two.”
The F-16s were just over two hundred miles away, streaking perhaps fifty feet off the ground as they approached the Thar or Great Indian Desert in the center of the border area. The gear aboard the Velociraptor not only allowed the aircraft to “see” them—incredible in itself—but gave hints on how to best counter them.
Not that Timmy thought he needed the hints.
The F-16s were moving at over six hundred knots, and the gap between them closed at something over thirty-three miles a minute. But they might just as well have been moving backward as far as he was concerned.
“Your man is turning,” warned Howe as the Falcon cut to the east.
“On him.”
Timmy nudged his stick, pushing to his right to stay with the F-16. It wasn’t clear whether the Pakistani was merely changing his position behind his leader or striking out on his own course. The planes were now roughly a hundred miles ahead, a bit over a minute and a half from firing range, depending on what happened in the next thirty seconds.
The HUD painted in its holographic display, a yellow dagger at about eight o’clock, relative to his position. The tactics section shaded an intercept attack point at his request, helpfully plotting a turn that would bring him onto the bandit’s tailpipe.
And then the F-16 disappeared.
Was it lost in the ground clutter, simply obscured by irregular terrain or jumbled returns or some anomaly in the coverage area, which was being cobbled together from three different inputs? Or had the pilot flown a bit too low and bought it in the darkness?
Timmy stayed on the course the computer had plotted, figuring it was by far his best option. Two Indian MiGs were in the vicinity, but he did his best to ignore them. Howe said something over the radio that he didn’t quite catch; Timmy leaned forward and started to rock gently, willing the F-16 back into the sky.
When it finally appeared, they were separated by less than twenty miles. The Pakistani pilot had managed to get down below ten feet, a mark of either superior flying ability or tremendous stupidity—maybe both. The piper’s boxed fist closed around the Pakistani plane and held it there as the AMRAAM popped out from the Velociraptor’s belly and flashed toward its target.
Timmy was only vaguely aware of the Velociraptor’s applause when the missile rammed home. He was too busy ducking two Indian MiGs that had been vectored into the area to find the F-16 but found him instead. The MiGs launched homers; he countered with tinsel and laid on the revs, spooling the turbos to max power and escaping north.
Howe, meanwhile, had taken out his F-16 and was running back toward Cyclops. As they crossed the Pakistani border, a pair of Mirages turned out of the northwest, coming to meet them. They were at twenty-seven and thirty thousand feet, below Howe but above Timmy; their turn took them between the two aircraft—and right into Timmy’s screen.
“I got ’em,” he told his leader. The computer had already brought up the weapons bar indicating the AIM-9M all-aspect Sidewinders were ready to fire. The audible indicator growled, telling him it was ready to fire; Timmy push-buttoned the first Mirage to death, the missile slapping out of the F/A-22V’s side. The second Mirage slid to the right as the first one blew apart; Timmy couldn’t find it and decided to leave it be; he was low enough on fuel to dial up the bingo matrix on the variable-use screen. As he started to look down toward his dash, his eyes caught the glow from several fires on the ground.
“Looks like World War III down there,” said Timmy, laughing a little.
“Hopefully not. Cyclops is hit.”
Howe’s voice sobered him. He found his leader’s wing and scanned for bogeys.