Battle Born

“You don’t need to know that right now,” Patrick said. “Just play along, and we’ll see how you do. We’ll be in the anchor in five minutes.”

“What kind of threats are there in the area?” Oliver Warren asked.

“Good question — glad someone thought to ask,” Patrick said. “Most mobile ballistic missile launchers are protected by short-range mobile antiaircraft systems. You’ll get anything from triple-A to SA-4s to Rapiers to Hawks to Patriots — anything the bad guys might possibly have. Do whatever you think you need to do to get away from the threats. Any more questions?” There were none. The action started just a few moments later.

They received several warnings about entering restricted area R-4808, including one on the emergency GUARD frequency from Los Angeles Center and one from Avalanche, the Air Force AWACS radar plane that was helping the fighters hunt down the B-1s. After all the urgent warnings, Seaver and his crew — except for Patrick McLanahan — couldn’t help but hold their breath as the miles-to-go indicator clicked down to zero. The radios got very quiet as Rinc started his holding pattern — it was as if no one at Los Angeles Center or any other civilian air traffic control agency wanted to talk to them anymore. The interphone got extremely quiet too. They, like the air traffic controllers, knew they were doing something profoundly special.

Patrick had been listening on the secure SATCOM channel. He clicked the interphone mike button: “Missile launch. Behind us, fifteen miles.”

“I didn’t see anything on the screen!” Ollie protested.

“You may see something, you may not,” Patrick repeated. “Sometimes if there are bombers in the area close by, launch crews won’t use the radar and just launch using forecasts or old data. It makes for a less accurate missile, but if you’re launching nukes or bio-chem weapons, you don’t have to be that accurate.”

“Well, hell,” Long protested. “What good is this goatfuck if it’s that easy to pop one off? You put a Bone and a tanker crew in harm’s way, and the bad guys can still launch? Why not just lay waste to the whole battle area and be done with it?”

“You flew in Desert Storm, Colonel,” Patrick said. “The coalition forces were laying waste to Iraq — two thousand sorties a day — and the Iraqis were still launching Scuds. The answer is, it’s not so easy to find these mobile launchers. Joint STARS can track every vehicle from a hundred miles away, unless it’s hidden under an overpass or in someone’s barn or in an underground bunker. But we still have to try to stop the missile launches.”

“I guess you may need to have two planes in the orbit,” Rinc offered. “That way, you got the whole horizon covered.”

“I don’t get it, General,” Long pressed. “What good is it to wait for a missile launch? Sure, you take out the launcher, but the missile’s still on its way. I don’t—”

“I got one!” Warren suddenly called out. “No, it’s gone…”

“Where, Ollie? Where did you see it?”

“Four o’clock, thirty miles.”

Rinc immediately slammed the Bone into a tight right turn and rolled out after approximately 120 degrees. “You see anything on radar, Long Dong?”

“Stand by,” Long responded. After a moment of tuning and searching: “I’ve got several hard targets between thirty and forty-five miles, between eleven and one o’clock.”

“Try a patch on the largest ones first,” Rinc suggested. “You might be able to patch on all of them — wait! I see smoke! Eleven-thirty position, range… shit, range… hell, use thirty miles! I could use a laser range finder here — it’s tough estimating distance.”

“Got it,” Long said. “Three targets right around in that same area, within a few miles of each other.”

“Target all of them!” Rinc said. “Load all the targets. We make one pass with JDAM.”

“Sure would be a waste of a lot of bombs,” Patrick interjected, trying to make them think like a Lancelot attack crew.

“Then we try to see a launch from one of them and target that one,” Rinc said. “If we can’t get a bead on the right one, we’ll take ’em all out.”

“Sound good to you, Colonel?” Patrick asked.

“Affirmative,” Long said. “It’s the best we got until someone gives us a sensor made for this kind of mission.” Long quickly had the Offensive Radar System compute the GPS satellite-derived coordinates of the three objects on his radar screen, then fed the data into the Joint Direct Attack Munitions navigation computers. The bombing computers calculated the release zone for each target, computed a release track based on the time the internal bomb bay rotary launcher moved a new weapon into drop position, then fed the navigation information to the Bone’s autopilot.

“Steering is good to the release track,” he said a few moments later. “Stand by for weapon release in ninety seconds. Give me point nine Mach, pilot.”

Just as Rinc began pushing the throttles forward, Warren shouted, “Hey, I’ve got a search radar up… and it’s staying up too. Ten degrees right, twenty-five miles.”

“Drop on all three targets,” Rinc said. “We have no way of knowing which…” Suddenly, he pointed out the window and shouted, “Look! There’s a rocket lifting off, right in front of us! I can see it! Holy shit, I’ve never seen a rocket launch before.”

“Pilot, I want max afterburners now!” Patrick shouted. “I want you to aim the nose right at that missile until you can’t hold it any longer!”

“What? You want what?”

“I said, max AB now, and keep us pointed right at that rocket for as long as you can! Go!”

Rinc shoved the throttles all the way to the stops and swept the wings back to full. The Bone leaped forward like a meteor. The rapid acceleration and gradual but unrelenting pressure of increasing G-forces pressing Patrick into his seat felt great, like the power and exhilaration of a race car or speedboat. Rinc kept on raising the nose, and the G-forces kept right on coming. It was easy to think he was an astronaut, riding a column of fire into space.

But unlike a spaceship, the Bone couldn’t keep on raising its nose and accelerating at the same time. Patrick had started a timer when Rinc began the maneuver, and after only twenty seconds and twenty degrees above the horizon, the speed was already dropping off. In full blower, they might have to hit a tanker if they kept this up much longer. But about then, Rinc said, “Hey! The rocket is nosing over — it’s starting to descend.”

“That was just a test rocket — it burned out just to make sure it didn’t fly outside the range,” Patrick said. “Good job, Major.”

“What do you mean, good job?” Seaver asked as he leveled off and pulled the throttles to normal power settings. “What did I do?”

“Later,” Patrick said. “Okay, crew, let’s go back and get those launchers back there.”

“What? Now you want us to bomb those targets? Why didn’t we do that be—” But Rinc stopped his protests as the lightbulb finally popped on in his brain, and he turned back to the first target. At 32,000 feet, the altitude he had climbed to when he stopped the chase on the test rocket, the JDAM satellite-guided bombs could glide over fifteen miles. As fast as the rotary launcher could spit them out, the JDAMs dropped into space.

A few minutes later, after clearing off to the voice SATCOM channel, Patrick reported, “Good work, everyone. Three good hits, all within thirty feet, which is pretty good for JDAM. One bomb hit within ten feet — a shack. Only one was the launcher, but the other three were simulated maintenance and crew vehicles — legitimate targets in anybody’s book. Let’s head back to the orbit area.”

“Okay, General, what was that climb for?” Rinc asked as he started a turn back for the patrol anchor. “We gonna chase rockets now?”

“Just wanted to distract you a little.”

“If I can speak freely, General sir — bullshit,” he said. “You don’t just want to go after launchers — you want to go after missiles too! Tell us, General — do we have a weapon that can take down a ballistic missile? You got a weapon you can put on a Bone that’ll take down a ballistic missile?”

“No comment.”

“So you don’t work for the Air Force chief of staff, do you, sir?” Long asked. “You work for some R and D unit — maybe even for the supersecret squirrels down there at Dreamland, huh?”

“Time out, all of you. That’s the last we talk about any of this,” Patrick warned. “You say a word about this to