anyone outside this airframe, and your life will turn into an endless maze of courtrooms, lawyers, investigators, and maximum security cells. Do you all understand?”
“Fine, fine, General,” Rinc said. “Now tell us: What do you have in mind? What’s the mod? Is this what Block G is going to do? You gotta tell—”
“Hey!” Ollie shouted as the crew heard a slow-paced
“Not quite yet,” Patrick said. “Max range of an SA-4 is fifty miles, but lethal range is about twenty miles, so we should be safe — they’ll wait until we get well within lethal range. They can see us up here, but they won’t attack yet. Let’s make the SA-4 our next target. Ollie, keep on feeding us position data.”
“Okay,” Warren said. “Rodeo, right ninety degrees, target at thirty miles.” Rinc made a tight turn and rolled out precisely on heading.
“Right five degrees, twenty-nine miles… okay, dead ahead, twenty-eight miles.”
“Stand by.” Long moved his cursor control out the proper amount, then adjusted the gain and brightness controls to tune out the terrain features on the radar-scope. He then moved his cross hairs onto the largest radar return still on the radar image. “I’m going to take a patch. Left fifty, pilot,” he ordered. Rinc made the turn. With the target offset the proper amount, Long was able to take a high-resolution “patch” of it, then examine the magnified image. “There it is. Pretty good look at an SA-4 Ganef SAM.”
“Cool!” Warren exclaimed, straining over to look. It didn’t actually look like much — just a group of boxes — but on one box, the upraised missiles could clearly be seen. “Hey, that’s pretty neat.”
“I’ve got the coordinates loaded… bombing computers are programming JDAM… programming complete,” Long announced. “Okay, pilot, steering is good to the release point. Give me Mach point nine, right turn to the release point, stand by for countermeasures and evasive action.”
No sooner had Rinc shoved in the throttles to full military power and finished the turn than the threat-warning receiver issued another alert tone, this one a faster-paced
Seaver reacted instantly, yanking the control stick hard right and pulling, waiting until their speed had slowed to cornering velocity, then rolling out and shoving in full afterburner again to regain their speed.
“Should we go low?” Rinc shouted on interphone.
“Uplink down… height finder down… SA-4 back in search,” Warren said.
“If we descend, we’ll have to fly closer to the target,” Long said. “Stay up here. Center up, steering is good. Twenty seconds to release. If we get another launch, pilot, we have to stay wings-level until bomb’s away. Don’t turn until I tell you. Fifteen sec—”
Another warning tone. “Missile alert! Height finder up!” Warren shouted.
“Hold heading! Ten… doors coming open.” The rumble of the doors was not as loud as before, since with a JDAM bomb release from the rotary launcher, the bomb doors needed to open only halfway.
Another warning tone. “Missile launch!” Warren shouted, reading the blinking alert message on his multifunction display. “Chaff! Chaff!”
“Hold heading!” Long shouted. Ollie swore and hit the CHAFF EJECT button as fast as he could. Chaff bundles shot out of the ejectors atop the forward part of the fuselage, creating a larger cloud of radar-decoying metal slivers that ballooned the radar cross section of the B-1 several hundred times. “Bomb away! Doors closed!
Rinc immediately started a hard turn and hit the TERFLW button on his autopilot control — but he didn’t wait for the computer to point the nose earthward, he rolled the B-1 nearly inverted. The terrain-following fail-safe fly-up system immediately pulled the B-1’s nose downward, and the Bone plummeted to earth.
Seaver jammed the throttles to idle and popped the spoilers to try to slow down while descending at the same time. He kept the bomber nearly inverted until the nose was over forty degrees below the horizon, then pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to temporarily disconnect the autopilot. But when he tried to roll upright, nothing happened. He shook the stick, pulled it in every direction — the nose stayed down, airspeed kept on decreasing, and the earth was rushing up to meet them in a hurry.
“Five thousand to level, pilot,” Patrick warned. “Check your attitude.”
Rinc pulled the pitch interrupt trigger all the way to disconnect the autopilot, then tried the controls again. Nothing. He shoved in full military power and tried to roll wings-level — nothing. He swept the wings forward right to the airspeed limit “barber pole”—still nothing. No stick control at all.
#x201C;Four thousand!” Patrick shouted. “Pilot,
“Can’t!” Rinc said. “I got no roll response!”
“Three thousand!”
Patrick tried his own control stick — still no response. “We’re mushing… no response… we’re in a full stall, dammit… we got the nose down and mil power and we’re in a full damned stall… What in hell’s happened?”
“Two thousand!” Long shouted. “Seaver, you motherfucker, you got it?
Rinc reached over with his left hand and hit the PREPARE TO EJECT switch. A yellow warning light illuminated over every crew station.
“Hey, what the hell?” Ollie asked.
“
Patrick frantically scanned the instrument panel, then reached down, not to his ejection handles, but to the center console, and flipped the four SPOILER OVERRIDE switches back to NORMAL. The airspeed immediately began to build. Seaver shoved the stick to the right, and the bomber responded. Barely five hundred feet above the ground, the B-1 bomber rolled upright, easily nosed skyward, and started a rapid climb. The abrupt pull-up from the steep dive squished them all into their seats, but the Bone settled into a fast two-thousand-foot-per-minute climb.
“Hol-ee shit!” Warren exclaimed. “What happened? Did we stall? Did we lose an engine?”
Rinc looked at Patrick. In order to start a rapid descent with the wings swept back, he had had to raise the spoilers — and to do that with the wings swept back, he had to override the flight control computers. But when he raised all four spoilers after rolling nearly inverted, he didn’t have the flight control authority or the airspeed to roll upright again.
“My fault,” Rinc said. Patrick shut off the PREPARE TO EJECT light. “I had switches out of position for TERFLW. I fucked up. The general found my spoiler switches out of position. He saved our asses.”
“Good going, sir,” Ollie said.
“Everybody relax,” Patrick said. “Climb back to the new patrol anchor. I’m clearing off to SATCOM. Everyone else toggle off.” He switched his interphone panel, then keyed the mike: “Firebird, this is Two-One, requesting scores.” No conversation this time: Patrick copied down a string of numbers and letters, cleared off SATCOM, then used a decoder document to decode the message.
“TOSS bomb score on the SA-4 site, guys: two-nine-five degrees, sixty-seven feet. Not too shabby. With a two-thousand-pound bomb, I’d call that a kill.” No one celebrated this time — they were still too stunned by the near-crash. “Now for the bad news: first SA-4 missed by three hundred eighty feet. We might have survived that one. Second SA-4…”
“Second?”
“SA-4s always fire in salvos of two, like a Patriot system,” Patrick said, “and each SA-4 battery has three launchers. Second SA-4 estimated miss distance was only one hundred twenty feet. With a two-to-three-hundred- pound warhead, I think we would’ve taken a major hit.”
“Well, it’s bullshit going after something like an SA-4 with a JDAM,” Ollie said. “We still gotta fly within its lethal range, even if we drop from high altitude — which exposes us even more.”
“Damn right,” Rinc said. “Give us a HARM or a Maverick or SLAM, and we can take it out without getting shot down.”
“Let’s wrap this up, folks — I think we’ve had enough for the day,” Patrick said. “Let’s head back to the first patrol anchor and pick up our wingman. Then I’ll give you vectors for our new destination.”
