discharged the fire extinguishers, isolated the hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, and fuel systems to that engine, and had reconfigured all of the aircraft systems to take up the load from the destroyed engine.
'The second MiG is breaking away,' Wickland said, checking the supercockpit display. 'I think we got-' He stopped when the computer issued a fresh warning: 'The first MiG is heading for us again. Nine o'clock, eight miles and closing fast.' A moment later: 'Another MiG inbound, six o'clock, twenty-five miles. Both are locked on.' With a shut-down and shattered number-four engine, the radar cross-section of the normally very stealthy Megafortress was multiplied a hundred times, making it an easy target.
Tanaka started a hard right turn. 'We're going to have to take them over the desert,' he said. 'No other way to do it.' He looked over at his partner. 'Make sure your straps are tight, Gonzo. Put your clear visor down and zip your jacket all the way up.' Wickland looked as if he was going to shrivel up and die as he hurriedly pulled his shoulder and lap belts as tight as he could stand, his hands shaking uncontrollably.
They had not quite finished their turn when the computer reported, 'Warning, radar lock MiG-23, two o'clock, fifteen miles… warning, missile launch, MiG?23 R-24… missile launch, MiG-23, R-24.'
'Jammers and countermeasures active,' Wickland said tonelessly. 'Active laser countermeasures firing… decoys out…' Everything had to work perfectly now-they were well outside their absconded Libyan air-to-air missile's range. Tanaka started up and down jinks, trying to get the radar-guided missiles to overcorrect and overshoot their target. For a moment Wickland thought he could see the missiles heading toward him, but he knew that was impossible-traveling at night over three times the speed of sound, the naked eye could never see them. His hands closed over the handles of his ejection seat.
'Don't wait for my order,' he heard Tanaka say. 'If the missiles hit, just go. Don't wait for me. Don't wait…' And just then, Wickland saw a tremendous burst of light and a huge fireball blossom directly in front of him. His fingers tightened on the lever and he began to rotate them upward, exposing the ejection initiation trigger….
Within a few minutes after receiving the call from Tripoli, the crews aboard two dozen mobile SS-12 missiles, armed with a variety of warheads-ranging from one-thousandpound high-explosive to chemical to subatomic neutronprepared their missiles for launch. Within five minutes of receiving the final launch order, one by one, the rockets lifted off into the dawn sky on columns of fire.
Giant zero! Giant zero! Rockets detected!' the mission commander aboard the second AL-52 Dragon reported. After refueling, the Dragon had gone on patrol over west-central Egypt, covering both the Salimah oil fields and Cairo from any rockets launched from Libya.
Long before the mission commander even keyed the microphone, the most sophisticated computer system ever placed aboard any aircraft was already prosecuting the at-
tack. The mission commander merely watched in fascination as the chemicals they carried in the tail section of the plane mixed and created their magic, and the Dragon came to life once again. The crew watched through the telescopic optics as the SS-12 rocket was blown apart by the COIL laser.
'Yeah, baby, yeah' the mission commander crowed. 'We got it!' The LADAR warning system bleeped again as more SS-12 rockets were detected. But one by one, the AL-52 Dragon aircraft detected and attacked every SS-12 that rose out of the desert.
As it attacked each one, coordinates of the launch points were transmitted to U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers orbiting over southern Libya and northern Chad. The coordinates of the launchers were instantly programmed into satellite-guided AGM-158A standoff missiles, which were launched from well over one hundred miles away within moments after the rockets were launched. The missiles, called the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, carried a one-thousand-pound highexplosive warhead and an infrared terminal seeker. The missile flew toward the rocket's launch point, detected the red-hot launcher and support trucks with its heat-seeking terminal sensor, and destroyed them with pinpoint accuracy.
'Wait!' Tanaka shouted, pulling Wickland's hand carefully away from the ejection handle. 'That wasn't the missile!' The fireball became a fat comet, arcing across the night sky. Seconds later, a second fireball appeared, this one spinning crazily across the horizon like a burning tumbleweed blown across a prairie. 'What the hell…?'
'Yo, Zero,' a voice came over the long-forgotten command radio channel. 'Is that you out there?' -
'Bud? Is that you?'
'Roger that,' John 'Bud' Franken, at the command of the second, improved AL-52 Dragon aircraft, replied. 'Looks like we got here right on time. What's your status?'
'We're short one engine and we have a few more holes now than we did at takeoff,' Tanaka said, 'but we're still flying. Can you clear our six for us so we can get the hell out of here?'
Roger that,' Bud Franken replied. He turned to Lindsey Reeves in the mission commander's seat. 'You got them, Linds?'
Lindsey Reeves, Franken's mission commander, checked her supercockpit display. The LADAR attack computer already highlighted the fighters for her-both of them were converging on the crippled Megafortress bomber. 'Got 'em!' she crowed. 'Nine o'clock, sixty miles, heading northeast at six hundred knots, one thousand feet a.g.l.'
'Let's see what this baby can do,' Franken said. 'Light 'em up, Linds.'
Reeves touched the MiGs' icon on her display, then said, 'Attack Dragon' into the voice-command computer.
'Attack commit Dragon, stop attack,' the attack computer responded. A few moments later, capacitors in the rear fuselage started receiving and storing power from the aircraft's generators. At the same time, the deformable mirror turret in the nose unstowed and pointed itself at the Libyan fighters. When all of the capacitors reported full, the attack computer reported, 'Laser ready.'
'Laser commit,' Lindsey said.
Franken flipped his consent switch. 'Go get 'em, kiddo.' Lindsey did the same on her side.
'Laser commit, stop attack,' the computer reported.
The laser radar system tracked and measured the target, then also sampled the atmosphere at the target and sent corrective and focusing instructions to the deformable mirror. At the same instant, the capacitors in the rear of the aircraft started pumping massive waves of energy into the plasma generators. Four hundred diode lasers focused laser light onto the center of a small aluminum chamber, burning a pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel the size of a grain of sand, creating a ball of deuterium-tritium-enhanced gas. Confined and heated by the lasers and now weighing thousands of pounds, the superheated ball of gas quickly reached a temperature of one hundred million degrees Celsius-ten times hotter than the surface of the sun. At that temperature, the atoms of deuterium and tritium were blasted apart, creating a mixture of free electrons and ions-also known as plasma. The plasma field lasted for only a millionth of a second; three other plasma generators acted in series to generate an almost continuous wave of plasma energy.
Corralled and steered by a magnetic waveguide chamber, the plasma field, more powerful than all the nuclear explosions ever created but existing for only a few trillionths of a second, pounded into the laser generator chamber, where the massive pulse of energy excited thousands of glass disks containing neodymium, a rare earth element. The plasma energy stripped the neodymium atoms off the glass, creating an immensely powerful pulse of light. The light was reflected into the Faraday oscillator, which bounced the light back and forth between cooled mirrors until the light was in perfect synchronization, then fired it out into the laser waveguide. An amplifier intensified the beam even more, and spatial filters focused the beam down to a tiny spot, then expanded the beam to three feet in diameter, where it was projected onto the deformable mirror, then reflected into space.
In the cockpit, it was anticlimactic-there was no loud hum, no recoil, and no sound at all except for the faint vibration of the turret moving as it tracked the target. Lindsey did receive some warning indications dealing with the plasma generators. The plasma generators were in effect plasma-yield weapon warheads, capable of destroying all matter around it for hundreds of feet in all directions-the explosion was simply controlled and shortened into pulses contained by magnetic fields. They were setting ofr thousands of plasma-yield explosions every second in the back of the AL-52 aircraft-not exactly a safe or secure situation. The technology was very new, virtually untested, and in rough design stage only-they had few safety devices installed simply because they did not have enough information on what the really dangerous subsystems were. The whole system was a hazard.
But despite the warning messages, Lindsey let the laser sequence go-and in the next few seconds, history was made.
