follow it, dropping lower. By doglegging north along the valley, he planned to avoid the enemy troop concentrations deployed across the A4 Motorway. Frontline troops were never easy targets. Dug in, concealed, and ready for trouble, the odds were against him. His primary target for this mission was further back, one half hour’s flying time from Wroclaw — most of it spent on this detour down the Oder.
He hugged the water, now silvered as the sun rose, constantly moving his head as he scanned his instruments and the sky. EurCon aircraft did not have complete air superiority, but the numbers were usually on the wrong side for the Poles, and the last thing Tad wanted now was a dogfight. Not only would he have to jettison his air-to-ground ordnance and abort the mission, but he might lose, and Poland needed every plane it had. Standing orders repeated by Broz this morning, were that he was to “preserve” his aircraft, and coincidentally himself, so that they would both survive to fight tomorrow, and the day after that.
The river started to curve around to the west, as it approached Brzeg Dolny, a sleepy river town that was still in Polish hands. The waypoint cue on his HUD shifted, and Tad carefully nudged the throttles forward a little.
Banking left and climbing out of the valley, he turned southwest, skimming over alternating patches of forest and farms with freshly planted crops. The land was all thickly settled, and he could see the invasion’s impact on the roads. Orderly groups of military vehicles, presumably Polish, since they weren’t shooting at him, moved to the west. Refugees, dark, ragged shapes on foot or packed into heavily loaded cars, fled to the east.
He thought of his grandparents, and wondered if they had looked like that in those first terrible days of World War II, trying to flee a merciless enemy. His hand tightened on the F-15’s stick. Now his mother and father faced the same dangerous, heart-wrenching trek.
His parents lived, or had lived anyway, in Wroclaw. His last communication with them had been a hurried phone call three days before. Life in the city was difficult, his father had said, but not as hard as what you are doing. Tad knew that wasn’t true. Doing one’s duty was easy. Especially when it meant fighting Germans.
Then they asked him if they should stay or go, a sensitive question to ask one of the city’s defenders. With his mind full of bleak situation briefings, Tad had told them to go — erring on the side of caution. Now they were somewhere on the road, heading to the east and uncertain safety in Warsaw.
Anger built up, but he tried to channel it, turning it into concentration on the job at hand. Maybe he could buy his mother and father a little more time to reach a safe haven, if any place in Poland could truly be said to be safe. He only wished his parents had kept their American citizenship so he could have wangled them a place on one of the evacuation flights back to the States.
The halfway point on his southwest leg was the road from Sroda Slaska and Wroclaw. According to this morning’s intelligence summary, the city was still in Polish hands, so he’d planned to pass west of the town.
The summary was out of date.
As his Eagle sped past the outskirts of town, the right side of his cockpit came alive. The radar track, and launch warning lights all lit up at virtually the same moment. The enemy radar signal showed dead ahead.
Tad looked up from the panel and saw two dark shapes arrowing toward him, rising on billowing white columns. Radar-guided SAMs!
Reflexively he turned hard left — almost too hard. The F-15’s nose dipped toward the ground, and he hurriedly corrected, adding more throttle. At the same time, one thumb punched both the chaff and flare buttons. He wanted chaff in the air to confuse the enemy launcher’s radar, and he wanted flares spewing out behind him in case the SAMs had a backup IR tracker.
The F-15’s nose spun to port, and Tad put the missiles on his right rear, about five o’clock. He couldn’t outrun them, but the Eagle had a smaller radar signature from that angle, and if he could just get beyond the horizon of the ground-based radar guiding them, the missiles should lose him.
He pushed the throttles forward to full military power, and even lowered the jet’s nose a little — diving lower still. Flying so low was hazardous in this built-up maze of power lines and buildings, but it beat getting his tail blown off. He fought the urge to crane his head back and see where the missiles were. At this altitude, taking his eyes off his flight path for that long would be suicide.
The Eagle built up speed quickly, although the drag and weight of the bombs prevented him from going supersonic. Hopefully it was enough. Wojcik counted the seconds, trying to figure ranges and speeds. And the threat display went dark, just as quickly as it had lit up. Pulling up a little and throttling back, he risked a glance behind him.
The Eagle’s bubble canopy gave him an excellent view to the rear, and he could see the two smoke trails, curving smoothly upward, angling off to the left. He was clear. Some bastards on the ground had tried to kill him and they’d failed.
Tad let out his breath and turned back toward his target, following the steering cues on the HUD in front of him. He made a mental note to warn intelligence that EurCon’s forward units were now past Sroda Slaska.
A small village loomed ahead — surrounded by fields and small orchards.
It was time. He changed his weapons settings, selecting the cluster bombs instead of the Sidewinder he always had prepped in transit. As he double-checked his settings, the cockpit threat receiver lit up again, this time warning him about a search radar probing somewhere up ahead. He knew the signal’s source, the SAMs guarding the Cicha Woda River crossing.
Retreating Polish troops had dropped the highway bridge as EurCon forces approached, but enemy engineers had quickly rigged a replacement across the narrow river. But that wasn’t his target. Pontoon spans were easily replaced.
Instead, Wojcik was going to hit the traffic waiting to cross that pontoon bridge. No temporary bridge could be as efficient as the original span, so the area’s already-crowded roads were backed up with every type of enemy vehicle. The military term for the traffic jam was “chokepoint.” The drivers stuck in it probably had their own, considerably more profane terms.
Tad pushed the nose down once again, taking his plane from a hundred meters high to twenty. The radar warning signal went away. Whether they’d shut down or simply lost him, he didn’t know. He was now masked by the surrounding terrain, which was the only reason any sane pilot would want to fly this low. He stayed low, holding his breath but glad to have it.
Skimming over plowed fields, he shot through a gap in the treeline praying that there weren’t any power lines strung in front of him. Still, he’d risk running into wires rather than exposing his plane to SAMs or flak. Now Tad ignored the landscape in front of the Eagle. Even throttled back, all he could see was a streaked blur. Instead, he gauged his height by looking out to the side, where his eyes could fix on objects in the near and middle distance.
Trees, houses, and fields flashed past and vanished astern. Flying this low was somehow exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Not even the wildest roller-coaster ride could compare. Although he tried to look at the steering cues on his HUD occasionally, he dared not risk a look at the map display. Instead, he relied on memorized landmarks and mental calculations to plan ahead. Things were going to start happening very quickly.
Suddenly a cluster of buildings at a crossroads passed underneath and he was at the IP — the initial point for his bomb run. Gladly shedding the hair-raising safety of nap-of-the-earth flight, he throttled to full military and climbed, turning slightly to line up with the road ahead. He set the chaff and flare dispenser to automatic.
His F-15’s nose had barely come up when the warning receiver lit up again, every light and warning buzzer sounding one right after the other. The EurCon air defenses were ready and waiting for him. He ignored the sounds, instead concentrating on the motion of the aircraft and his carefully planned attack maneuver.
As the fighter’s nose popped up, it blocked his view of the target area. Tad gently pressed the stick to the right and rolled his airplane inverted, so that the terrain was laid out in front of and over him.
He easily spotted the Cicha Woda River and the A4 Motorway running east to west, crossing it. The wreckage of a concrete span lay to one side, and he could see the gray-green pontoon bridge next to it, with raw cuts in the earth embankment on either end where heavy engineering vehicles had bulldozed and scraped ramps down to the river.
The bridge and the road west were lined with trucks, personnel carriers, tanks, and every kind of military transportation. Tad could see soldiers jumping from truck cabs and scattering in all directions, but tracers were still rising from all along the road. Every vehicle with a machine gun was firing at him.
More tracers floated toward him from a flak battery deployed on the south side of the highway. Oddly enough, the enemy ground fire didn’t seem to be bothering him too much, either. Combat had taught him to spend more time worrying about the dangers he could control, evade, or defeat. Flak was too random. If one of those
