could be seen, forming a “basket” all along the southern and southwestern portions of Iran—and they were headed right for that basket. “Two AWACS radar planes practically side by side across the Gulf of Oman—that’s weird. Everybody’s clustered around each other. Not a very efficient use of their air defense assets.”
“Whoever gave the ragheads a lot of credit for smarts?” Jamieson said. “Just keep an eye out for yellow or red—we’re clean as long as the threats stay green, right?”
Something was still nagging at McLanahan’s head. This looked too strange. The Iranians had showed much better deployment of their forces before—even four hours earlier, as they were heading into the target area, they had set up their defenses very effectively.
Now they were bunching up, with many more fighters aimlessly buzzing around. Was it a bit of confusion following the attack on Beghin Airport? Were they a little disorganized, trying to catch a shadow and screwing their valuable assets up even further in the process? Maybe…
“And look,” he went on. “When the threat symbol comes up on the screen? It’s not one by one—it’s a flash. Look … barn, they all come up at once.”
“So?” “So, I’ve never seen that before,” McLanahan explained.
“We usually see one guy pop up, then another, then another, because their radars are different frequencies and different rpms and different timing and all that. Now, it’s like all their radars are coming up exactly the same.”
“That’s impossible,” Jamieson said. “You can’t match a ground radar and an airborne radar up so they match everything like that.
It’s just the way the signal processor is displaying the threats, that’s all. No big deal.”
Yeah, no big deal. Yes, it was impossible, or at least very highly unlikely, that all of the Iranians’ radars were synced up that tight …
… or maybe it wasn’t. “Let’s take a detour,” McLanahan said.
“Let’s overfly Pakistan on our way out of here.”
“Say what?”
“I know we’re supposed to take pictures of Chah Bahar and the Khomeini, to find out how many extra fighters and ground-based air defense systems they’ve deployed—but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. It’s like the Iranian air defenses are hanging around right in our flight path, daring us to drive through them. And their waves are all the same, they’re too … similar. I wonder what they’re up to.”
“Well, whatever it is, they’re doing it deaf, dumb, and blind,” Jamieson remarked, with a satisfied smile. “They can’t see us up here, MC-we’ve proven that without a doubt now. All they’re doing is just microwaving birds and bugs. Besides, we don’t have clearance to overfly Pakistan yet, and if Mr. Murphy kicks us in the butt and we’re forced down over the Paks, we’re really screwed. I say we follow the ‘blue line’ and see what happens.”
McLanahan triple-checked that they were in COMBAT mode and that all of their defensive systems were in full operation. Maybe he was being too cautious, too defensive, a little paranoid. Was it because Wendy was back on Guam, waiting for him? Probably … “Okay, we continue,” he said. But as they flew south into the midst of the cluster of Iranian radars, he ordered the defensive systems to perform a fast self-test—no problems, everything fully functional. McLanahan then began formulating an escape plan, just in case, a …
But things were looking worse and worse every second.
They had been within Chah Bahar’s long-range radar coverage for several minutes now, but there was absolutely no hint that they were an item of interest. As they neared the coast, flying at 50,000 feet fifty miles west of Chah Bahar, they entered the aircraft carrier Khomeini’s long-range radar coverage. There was still no sign of detection—both Chah Bahar and the Khomeini’s radars stayed in two dimensional search mode, blindly sweeping the skies in azimuth and range. The signal delta-threshold showed that the signal strength was not enough to create a return—the difference in the signal received by the threat-detection gear compared to the signal reflected back to the same source was too great. If they had been detected, one of those radars—probably the Khomeini’s —would switch to target-tracking mode, introducing a height-finder radar that would show up immediately. Nothing had changed … except …
“The fighters,” McLanahan muttered. “The fighters disappeared.”
“Say again?”
“Two fighters were right here, now they’re gone,” McLanahan said.
“They stopped transmitting their attack radars.”
“What was their range to us?”
“About sixty miles,” McLanahan said. “Too far away for a missile shot…”
“Damned right,” Jamieson said. “The AA-1 I can fly for over a hundred miles, but it homes on radar, and we’re not transmitting anything … are we …?”
“No,” McLanahan said—but they both quickly double-checked their switches. They were in COMBAT mode, all right—all radio transmitters were off, no synthetic aperture radars on, no Doppler radars on, no missile warning and tracking radars on, and the “cloaking device” was on—no electronic energy could leave the bomber with the electronic field activated. They were running silent. “Man, I still have a bad feeling.”
“Then let’s hurry up, take the SAR shot on the carrier, and let’s get the hell outta Dodge,” Jamieson said.
They were within SAR range of the carrier now, just sixty miles off the nose. “Okay, stand by, SAR coming on.”
But just before he activated the system, which would automatically control the radar exposure as necessary to get a good picture of the carrier, McLanahan also activated the AN/ALQ-199 HAVE GLANCE system—as soon as the BEADS “cloaking device” went down, HAVE GLANCE would scan the sky all around the bomber with radar to search for nearby threats. “What’s that for?”
“Precautionary,” McLanahan said. “SAR exposure routine active …
in five … four … three … two … one … SAR radiating …”
And at the same instant, they heard a high-pitched, fast Deedledeedledeedle! warning tone, and a “bat-wing” fighter symbol appeared on the threat scope, just a few miles off their right rear quadrant! “Fighter, four o’clock, four miles, same altitude!” McLanahan screamed. “Descend! Accelerate! SAR down!
Break, Tiger, break right!”
Thankfully, Jamieson didn’t hesitate. He immediately rolled the big B-2A stealth bomber to 90, then 100, then 120 degrees of bank—practically inverted!—pulled on the control stick until it was at the forward stop, and jammed the throttles to full military power. He held the bank in until they had almost flown a 180-degree turn, facing toward the fighter, turning their hot engine exhausts away from the fighter and presenting their smallest radar and thermal cross-section.
But he wasn’t fast enough. They heard a loud explosion off to the left, the big bomber shuddered, and the ENGINE FIRE warning light on the eyebrow panel came on. “Fire on number one!” McLanahan shouted. His supercockpit display had automatically switched over to the WCA and emergency-procedures displays so he could monitor the automatic engine shutdown, but the shaking was so rough that he couldn’t read the screen. He had to trust that the computers were still functioning and they would complete the emergency shutdown checklist before the fire destroyed the aircraft.
Jamieson kept the right bank in, but now they were no longer turning—they were spinning! With no smooth airflow over the wings to create lift, the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber had stopped flying—it was in a complete stall, and with one wing low, it transitioned immediately into a “death spiral” spin. The bomber’s nose was now pointed almost straight down at the ocean, and they were careening down toward the Gulf of Oman at 20,000 feet per minute.
“Recover!” McLanahan shouted. “Recover, Tiger!” McLanahan couldn’t focus anymore. He had the threat display up on his supercockpit screen, with the flight instruments hidden behind it, and it was completely dark outside the cockpit windows, so he had absolutely no sense of up or down, left or right. McLanahan immediately craned his neck over to the left so he could see the pilot’s artificial horizon, but moving his head like that caused the disorientation to increase a hundredfold. Jesus, they were completely out of control! They were going to hit the ocean any second!
McLanahan hit the BYPASs button on his control stick, then fumbled for the speed brake button on his throttle quadrant—normally they could not deploy speed brakes in comBAT mode because it spoiled the bomber’s stealth characteristics. He felt a rumbling in the airframe as the elevons on the bomber’s wing tips split, acting as speed
