“For a secret bomber base, this place looks like shit,” Tony Jamieson muttered. He and Patrick McLanahan had been orbiting over the base for twenty minutes now, “shooting” the base with the synthetic aperture radar every few minutes and comparing the SAR images with past images, trying to piece together enough information to verify that the deadly Backfire bombers were really here. They had looked at every crack in the concrete, every skid mark, every vehicle on the airport grounds—nothing. No sign of one of the world’s most advanced bombers. “We’ve only got twenty minutes left in our orbit.”
“Something will show,” McLanahan said. “Jon Masters’s NIRT-Sats never let us down before … well, maybe once before …”
“Great,” Jamieson groused. “And I’m getting tired of always carrying these so-called non-lethal weapons on board my plane, too, McLanahan. The ragheads want to fight—let’s start carrying some weapons that have a little punch. At least a couple JSOWs with high-explosive warheads would be useful—that’s not too much to ask …”
“SAR coming on,” McLanahan announced. “SAR shot, ready, ready …
now … SAR in standby, antenna secure.”
“Well, hot damn, there they are—a regular ‘baby elephant walk,’ “Jamieson exclaimed as he studied the SAR image on McLanahan’s supercockpit monitor. As clear as a black-and-white photograph, the long, thin body of a Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber had appeared from one of the hangars on the south side of the airport. Another bomber was exiting the same hangar, behind and slightly to one side of the first, while a third bomber had just poked its nose outside the doors of the middle hangar, obviously waiting its turn to taxi.
By using cursor commands, McLanahan was able to electronically “twist” the SAR image until they were actually looking inside the hangars, as if they were standing right on the ramp, and they found all three large hangar doors open, with two Tu-22M bombers in each hangar. The rear of the hangar was open so the bombers could run their engines while inside, safely under cover.
“Bingo,” Jamieson said. “Shit, they are there!”
“And it looks like they’re going hunting again,” McLanahan said.
“We can take care of that.” And just a few moments later six AGM-154 JSOW missiles were on their way toward Beghin Airport, their autopilots programmed to fly an attack course just fifty feet over the runway.
As the JSOW missile flew toward the runway, an electronic low-light TV camera activated, sending real-time TV images back to McLanahan in the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber flying 45,000 feet overhead. McLanahan used his cursor to lock an aiming reticle on one of the bombers, and the JSOW’s autopilot flew the missile to its quarry. As it passed overhead, two of its four bomb bays opened, and it ejected a sixty-pound blob of a thick, gooey substance that landed on the upper surface of the bomber. As the JSOW missile flew away, McLanahan programmed the missile to fly to a secondary target—in the first case, the airport’s power-transformer substation—and drop the last two globs on that.
The missile then automatically flew itself thirty miles farther west, where it crashed in the middle of the Bahlamabad Reservoir and sank quickly out of sight. One by one, each JSOW missile dropped one-half of its unidentifiable load on top of a Tu-22M bomber, then on top of another target somewhere else on the south side of the base—the regional air-traffic-control radar dome, a communications antenna farm, another power transformer farm, and three JSOWs dropped their gooey mass ion the south base’s POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricant) tank farm.
“Well, that was exciting,” Jamieson muttered as McLanahan programmed the last of the JSOW missiles. He steered the B-2A bomber south along the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders and out over the Gulf of Oman once again.
The air-traffic-control radar was the first to feel the effect.
The two large blobs hit the thin reinforced Fiberglas radar dome and immediately burned through, then scattered on the rotating antenna and control cabin inside. Within minutes, the thin metal antenna began to twist out of shape because of the fast twelve-revolutions-per-minute speed, and the antenna quickly failed and collapsed.
The metal-eating blobs of acid that struck the first Tu-22M bomber hit squarely on the upper fuselage and on the non-swiveling outboard portion of the left wing glove; on the second bomber, they hit on the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows and on the very upper lip of the right engine intake, spattering across the guidance and warhead sections of the AS-4 cruise missile mounted under the right wing glove. As the first two bombers taxied out onto the active runway and picked up speed for takeoff, the globs spread across the airframe, eating away inside the left wing pivot section and spreading across the fuselage fuel tanks, the upper engine compartments, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, and the rudder.
When the acid ate through the Backfire’s thin aluminum skin, the first bomber was already 3,000 feet above ground and passing through 300 miles per hour. Just as the pilot began sweeping the wings of his Backfire bomber from the twenty-degree takeoff setting to the thirty-degree cruise setting, the wing pivot mechanism failed, and the left wing uncontrollably folded all the way back to its aft-most sixty-degree setting. The bomber immediately snap- rolled to the left, quickly losing altitude.
The pilot applied hard right rudder to keep the bomber upright, and with the copilot’s help he was able to keep the bomber level at 500 feet above ground and accelerate to a safe emergency cruise speed—until the acid blob finally ate through the thicker, stronger titanium lining the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer. The bomber began an uncontrolled left roll, immediately lost all lift, and plowed into the Iranian countryside just south of the city of Kerman.
The second Backfire bomber’s fate was decided much quicker. The Tu-22M had just rotated and its main landing gear had just left the runway when the entire cockpit canopy failed, ripping a thirty-foot section of the fuselage directly over the crew compartment off the fuselage like an orange peel. At the same time, the electronics section of the right AS-4 Kitchen anti-ship missile sparked, ignited the acid, and detonated the missile’s 2,200- pound warhead, blowing the 300,000-pound warplane into bits with a spectacular cloud of fire that illuminated the entire airport.
Luckily for the third and fourth Backfire bomber’s crews, they had not yet left the runway, and the damage to their planes was localized and not so dramatic. Blobs of caustic acid burned through into fuselage fuel tanks and fright controls, starting fuselage and engine fires. Both four-man crews safely evacuated their planes and watched helplessly as their $200 million bombers burned. Soon, the lights of burning Backfire bombers were the only ones on the entire airport, for the JSOWs’ deadly cargos had destroyed the main power grids … but those lights were soon followed by the brilliant mushroom of fire that erupted as the POL farm exploded, sending sheets of flame a thousand feet into the sky.
In minutes, one entire squadron of Iranian heavy bombers had been effectively destroyed, and their base rendered heavily damaged and unusable.
As they got closer and closer to the Gulf of Oman, the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber’s threat scope became littered with dozens of Iranian threats, mostly MiG-29 and F-14 fighters—McLanahan was so concerned that he enlarged the threat display to cover almost the entire supercockpit display. The threat scope graphically depicted the position of each fighter and estimated range of each fighter’s search radar; green, yellow, or red colors showed whether or not the radar was in a search, target-tracking, or missile-guidance mode. A few of the Iranian fighters’ radar beams swept across the B-2A bomber, depicted in the center of the threat display, but the color of the radar cone never changed, indicating that the radar never locked on. Along with the extensive fighter patrols, there were two Iranian A-10 Mainstay airborne warning radar aircraft in the area, plus the normal array of ground-based radars and radar-guided antiaircraft sites.
“Jesus, there’s got to be a half dozen flights of fighters up tonight, just over this one section of Iran,” McLanahan said.
“Guess they’re pretty upset about what we did to Chah Bahar the other night, huh?”
“Hey, they deserved to get their asses kicked,” Jamieson said, “and I was glad that it was us who helped ‘em. How long till feet-wet?”
“Fifteen minutes,” McLanahan replied uneasily.
He fell silent again; Jamieson could tell that something was bugging McLanahan. “Problem, MC?”
“Nah … well, it’s just the arrangement of these Iranian aircraft … it’s changed since we went feet-dry on the bomb run,” McLanahan said, pointing at the supercockpit screen. He expanded the ratio on the threat display until the entire region, from Bandar Abbas to the extreme eastern part of the Gulf of Oman, could be seen. The radar range circles from Chah Bahar, from the carrier Khomeini, and from the two Iranian A-10 airborne radar planes
