Air Battle Force

“ ‘No factor,’ huh?” Rebecca retorted. “Aren’t those things capable of shooting down a bomber-size aircraft at treetop level?”

“Not this bomber, it won’t.” They were headed for the Pakistani coastline between the towns of Kapper and Gwadar, just fifty miles east of the Iranian border — well within range of the high- performance SA-10 antiaircraft missile system — but the threat-warning computers measured the signal strength of the search radar and determined that it was not strong enough to get a good reflection from the stealthy EB-1C Vampire. “Keep going.” He keyed his secure command satellite net’s mike button. “Control, Puppeteer.”

“We see it,” Patrick’s friend and deputy, Brigadier-General David Luger, replied. Luger, a fellow navigator and aeronautical engineer who had been partnered with Patrick since their early days in B-52 bombers, was watching the mission from the “virtual cockpit,” a system that displayed all of the EB-1C Vampire’s flight information on computer screens back home and allowed crews and technicians there to monitor and even partially control the actual flight mission. “I’ve issued recall instructions to the surveillance StealthHawk — it’ll ditch itself in the Arabian Sea, and the Navy will retrieve it for us. Still no contact with the strike StealthHawk — it’s still operating normally, still looking for targets but not responding to satellite steering commands.

“I’ve got a call in to the State Department,” Luger went on. “I strongly recommend not crossing the Pakistani border until you get permission. Do I need to remind you about your Russia mission?”

“You do not,” Patrick said. The last time he’d been in a bomber, an EB-52 Megafortress over southwestern Russia, he made a decision to violate orders to help a special-ops mission in trouble — and that decision had almost cost him his life. “Put in a call to Hal and Chris, too,” he said.

“They’re monitoring everything and are briefing up an insertion mission,” Luger said. Stationed in the Gulf of Oman on board a large civilian freighter was Patrick’s backup rescue team: Hal Briggs, Chris Wohl, and ten highly trained commandos, outfitted in Tin Man electronic battle armor. Hidden in the freighter’s cargo hold was an MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet aircraft, an MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft modified with jet engines to give it more range, speed, and load-carrying capability. With a range of over two thousand miles, air-refuelable, and with the capability of flying below radar, the Pave Dasher was the ideal way to insert rescue or attack troops deep inside hostile territory. “They’re working several problems: They’ll be right at the extreme range of the Pave Dasher — the farther the StealthHawk flies into Turkmenistan, the more problematic the situation becomes, and there’s some pretty bad weather closing in.”

“Let me know what they say,” Patrick said. “If there’s any way they can try it, I want it done.”

“Stand by,” Luger said.

Rebecca Furness rolled her eyes in exasperation. “We can’t ‘stand by,’ “ she said. “We’ll be feet-dry in”—she glanced at her navigation display and muttered—“now. We’re in violation of I don’t know how many international laws.”

“The SA-10 is down,” Patrick told her. “They lost us. No other threats detected, just search radars, all below detection levels.”

“Bad news, Muck,” Luger radioed a few minutes later. “The weather is getting worse down there in eastern Turkmenistan. Hal says it’s your call.”

“What do you think, Texas?”

“If it was to pick up any of our guys, no question,” Luger replied. “But to pick up a two-thousand-pound UCAV from across a hostile border in Turkmenistan, with the Pakistanis, Iranians, and maybe the Russians looking on? Sorry, Muck. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

“General?” Rebecca Furness asked. “You lost it. Let’s get back over the Arabian Sea, get our gas, and go home.”

“Just keep going,” Patrick said. “We’re clear of the Pakistani coastal-defense sites — take it up to Mach one point one, five-thousand-foot clearance plane.”

“This is not a good idea,” Rebecca said — but she found herself pushing up the throttles anyway.

“I’m running your range numbers,” Luger radioed, studying the fuel-flow data being transmitted to him via satellite from the Vampire. “At your current fuel consumption, and assuming you don’t take extra time retrieving the StealthHawks or dodging air defenses, you’ll be almost at emergency fuel state at the scheduled refueling control point. If you couldn’t tank, you might not have enough fuel to make it to Diego Garcia.”

“Copy,” Patrick responded.

They skirted along the Iran-Pakistan border and descended to three hundred feet terrain-following, giving an extremely wide berth to the Iranian border city of Zahedan, which had the largest fighter-interceptor wing in all of Central Asia. They detected more SA-10 surface-to-air units and several short-range, radar-guided antiaircraft artillery units situated along the border — they all had their search-and-acquisition radars on full power. Soon they also detected Iranian fighters — more than a dozen of them, a mixture of French, Russian, and even former American jets. “Damn, we’ve got the entire Iranian air force looking for us,” Rebecca said.

“The closest one is forty miles away,” Patrick said, “and he doesn’t have us. The Iranian jets aren’t crossing the border either.”

Just then one Iranian MiG-29 surprised them — he suddenly turned directly toward them, illuminating them with his radar, and headed quickly east, crossing the Pakistani border near the town of Saindak. “Caution, MiG-29 search mode, nine o’clock, thirty-three miles, high, below detection threshold,” the threat-warning computer reported.

“General…” But the Vampire bomber had already responded — it activated its radar trackbreakers and unreeled the ALE-55 fiber-optic towed decoy from a fairing in the tail. The ALE-55 was a small, bullet-shaped device that transmitted jamming and deception signals to hide the bomber and deflect any incoming threats away from it. It was a very effective but definitely last-ditch device to help the bomber escape if it was under direct attack. “We will never launch on a mission ever again without having defensive weapons on board, I promise you that,” Rebecca went on. The Vampire could carry a wide array of defensive air-to-air missiles, from short-range Stingers to extremely long-range Anaconda missiles — but this wasn’t supposed to be an attack mission.

“Pakistani search radar, three o’clock, forty miles,” Patrick reported. “Well below detection levels.”

“Warning, MiG-29 tracking mode, nine o’clock, twenty-five miles.”

“Trackbreakers active,” Patrick reported, punctuating the report with a curse. The trackbreakers could spoof and interfere with the fighter’s tracking radar but would also tell anyone around them that a warplane was in the area — and enemy fighters might be able to track the origin of the jamming signal or fire a missile with the ability to home in on the signal.

“Puppeteer, this is Control,” Luger radioed. “Step it on down to COLA and head northeast. He doesn’t have a solid lock on you yet.”

Patrick studied the large supercockpit display on his forward instrument panel. The terrain to the northeast near the Pakistan-Afghan border was completely flat, with several dry lake beds farther north. A bomber the size of a B-1, even as stealthy as it was, would be easy to track against a flat desert from a MiG-29 chasing it from above. The MiG-29 also had an advanced infrared sensor that could spot the B-1’s red-hot engines over twenty miles away — it wouldn’t need its radar to attack.

“Hard left ninety-degree turn,” Patrick said.

“What? You want me to turn toward Iran?”

“If we get caught in the open, we’ll be a sitting duck,” Patrick said. “We’ll stay in the higher terrain to the west.” Rebecca did not argue further but turned sharply left. The tactic worked. Once they turned ninety degrees from the MiG-29’s course, the MiG’s pulse-Doppler radar detected no relative speed difference and squelched out the radar return. “The MiG broke lock,” Patrick reported. “He’s moving to seven o’clock, twenty-five miles. We’re out of his radar cone.”

They weren’t out of the woods yet, but soon they left the fighters from Zahedan behind them. There were still several short- and long-range surface-to-air missile sites along the border, but as they flew along the Mighand Highlands northbound, they were actually flying behind them. As soon as they were clear of the dry lake beds, Patrick steered the EB-1C back across the Afghan border. They were able to climb up to fifteen thousand feet, high enough to escape visual detection and stay away from any antiaircraft artillery units that might pop up unexpectedly.

“Puppeteer, this is Control,” David Luger radioed. “I show you going across the Turkmen border. The