Hey, boss, why don’t we go down there and do something?” Rinc Seaver asked. The Americans had been watching the air battle unfold below them on their supercockpit displays, amazed at the waste of men and equipment in such an incredibly short period of time. “Let’s lob a few Wolverines in there — that’ll stop that Chinese armor cold.”
“I agree, Major,” Patrick said. “Genesis, this is Fortress Zero, how do you read?”
“Loud and clear, Fortress,” Lieutenant General Terrill Samson responded. Samson was listening and watching the patrol on his own office-sized version of the virtual cockpit system from back at Dreamland. “Just about to call you guys. You got the green light, repeat, green light. Stand by.” As they watched, one by one small triangle target symbols appeared on their supercockpit displays and on the virtual cockpit displays at Adak. Each target symbol represented a column of vehicles within the kill pattern of a Wolverine cruise missile. The computer quickly calculated the proper attack axis of each target so the warheads in each Wolverine had maximum effect, and then the target list was divided by aircraft. All of this flight planning was done in a matter of moments, then presented to the crews.
“Looks like we’re putting rocket-killing on hold for a while,” Rebecca said.
“Just remember, you need to high-tail it out to air cover as soon as you release,” Patrick told them over the virtual cockpit communications net. “You guys are fairly undetectable, even with your bomb doors open, but Wolverines are not, and it’ll take over half a minute to pump out your missiles. The bad guys will be on you like stink on shit.”
The Wolverine runs were all done from high altitude. Seaver and Long had to fly north to catch up with the others, and Furness and Scott had to fly eastbound, then back around to the west, to coordinate their release as well; but all three EB-1 Megafortress bombers reached their release points within ten seconds of each other. They unreeled their towed emitter arrays from each Megafortress’s tail just before reaching the lethal range of the mobile surface-to-air missiles below them.At the optimal range for the attack profile, the bomb doors opened, and they started raining Wolverine cruise missiles down on the Chinese armored columns rolling across southern Chagang Do province. Each Megafor-tress released six Wolverine missiles every nine seconds from a rotary launcher in the aft bomb bay, leaving two Wolverines each for reattacks or for rocket-hunting.
Each AGM-177 Wolverine cruise missile steered itself slightly away from the target as it descended and started its small turbofan engine. As it got closer to its first target, it leveled off less than a hundred feet above the terrain, guided by a satellite navigation computer, a terrain-comparison computer, and a millimeter-wave radar. Thirty seconds before impact, the missile’s radar took a snapshot of the target area, refined its steering, then began transmitting pictures of the target back by satellite to McLanahan and two other Megafortress bombardiers in the virtual cockpit at Adak Naval Air Station. This way, the flight crews would not have to divert attention between helping to fly the aircraft and finding targets. If the missiles needed a slight aiming tweak, the techs could do it right from their control consoles at Adak.
The Wolverine missiles each had three bomb bays. Each bomb bay was loaded with the same weapon — ten BLU-108/B “Shredder” sensor-fused weapon submunitions. Each Shredder had four projectiles that, once released, would search out their own target and shoot a slug of molten copper into it with enough force to pierce even heavy armor.
As the Wolverine approached each column of ground vehicles, it made a slight climb, then ejected the sub- munitions one by one from about three hundred feet above the column before descending back to treetop altitude. The ten submunitions would spin as they were ejected, extending four skeets with tiny heat-seeking sensors, which would lock onto a vehicle below. At the right moment, the skeets would detonate, sending the molten copper slug at the target at twice the speed of sound.
The effect was devastating. Each slug had a range of one-half mile, so the submunitions did not have to be directly over a target to hit it. Any vehicle smaller than a tank within a half mile of the projectiles was destroyed. The molten copper slug easily penetrated metal up to an inch thick, but after it cut through the metal, it had cooled enough so that, once inside the vehicle, it couldn’t act as a penetrator again. When the still-molten copper slug hit the next piece of metal — usually the floorboards — the molten copper spattered into a thousand tiny hot copper bullets traveling at the speed of sound. Anything inside the vehicle would be cut apart in the blink of an eye. Tanks fared a little better. Unless a slug hit the very top of the tank, which is usually made of thinner metal and is more vulnerable, the copper slug simply bored through the outer armor plating and stopped — usually causing fuel tanks to explode, setting off ammunition magazines, or turning transmissions into twisted blobs.
The death dance was repeated over and over again as the Wolverine missiles flew down the long columns of tanks and infantry support vehicles. Little escaped their detection: Jeep-sized four-wheel vehicles were hit, along with mobile antiaircraft weapons, supply trucks, and troop transports. A Shredder skeet hitting a diesel-powered vehicle’s engine compartment instantly turned the engine and its fuel supply into a gigantic white-hot fireball, engulfing it and its occupants within seconds.
When the last bomb bay was empty, each Wolverine missile located one last large target using its millimeter-wave radar. The techs back in the virtual cockpit got a last look through the imaging infrared camera, made minor course adjustments if necessary, then flew the missile into the last target. Even empty and without an exploding warhead except for a small amount of unexpended jet fuel, a nine-hundred-pound Wolverine missile traveling at over three hundred miles an hour packs a devastating punch.
The Megafortress bombers all performed a semi-”scram” maneuver after launching the last Wolverine missile — power back to idle, a hard turn away from the concentration of Chinese ground vehicles, decelerate to cornering velocity, then gradually push the power back in to maintain cornering velocity until the turn was completed.
The flight crews couldn’t see the Shredder sensor-fused weapon effects on the supercockpit display — all they could see was the Wolverine’s final impact. “Looks like those things work pretty well,” John Long commented. “How come we don’t have them in the inventory now?”
“Because we can buy four conventional air-launched cruise missiles or seven SLAMs for what it costs to buy one Wolverine,” Paul Scott replied. “I’ve got a pop-up threat, combined Golf-India-Hotel-band tracking radar, four o’clock, twenty miles, looks like an SA-6… Shit, Hotel-band height finder up… trackbreakers active, let’s get the power back in and start a descent, Rebecca, and get the hell—”
At that moment, they heard a high-pitched
They felt a shudder run the length of the Megafortress, then quiet. “Shit, that was close,” Paul said. “They got the towed emitter. I’m reeling out number two.”
Suddenly, just as the cockpit got quiet again when the SA-6’s radars went down, it seemed as if the ground all around them illuminated in pinpricks of light. “Triple-A!” Paul shouted. “Climb! Any way out to the left?”
“More triple-A out this way!” Rebecca shouted. There was no way to turn to get around them — everywhere they looked, another stream of lights arced up to meet them. The only way to go was straight up. Rebecca paddled off the terrain-following system, shoved the throttles to max afterburner, swept the wings forward to thirty-six degrees, and pulled the nose skyward. “Fortress One is defensive, climbing to get away from triple-A around us!”
Just then it felt as if they hit a stretch of gravel road racing down the freeway at eighty miles an hour. For a brief instant, the vibration was so bad that Rebecca couldn’t see the instrument panel. She leveled off at fifteen thousand feet. The rumbling subsided but didn’t stop. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” Rebecca radioed. “I’m not accelerating… Shit, I just lost my number one engine! Fire lights on! Shutting number one down!”
“Fly the airplane, Rebecca, just fly the airplane,” she heard Nancy Cheshire’s voice say. “I’m on your gauges. Get your nose up… there you go. Let me check your systems. Scottie, back me up.” After a few moments, Nancy said, “Okay, it looks like you got hit in the left wing. You’ve still got a hot exhaust, so you still might have a fire back there. You’re losing fuel from your left wing, and I think that flutter might be from some damaged flaps, so it looks like you’re stuck with thirty-four-degree wing sweep for now. I’ve initiated fuel transfer out of the left wing to the forward intermediate and forward fuselage tanks; you’re going to have to use manual CG management, but we’ll help you watch the center of gravity. We will…” There was another radar warning, another SA-6 at their three
