It was one of the most difficult dances in all of aviation, made even more difficult because all the aircraft and the damned drogues were icing up. Someone once described this exercise as trying to stick your dick into a bull while running across a pasture — except now the pasture was slick with ice and snow.
Aviatskiy Kapitan Leytenant Josef Leborov was very, very good at plugging the bull, but even he was having a tough time of it.
This morning, in and out of clouds heavily laden with ice, a formation of twenty-four Tupolev-95MD Modifikatsirovanny Daplata aircraft led an even larger formation of thirty-six Tu-95MS-16 Modifikatsirovanny Snaryad strategic bombers on their mission. Spread out over several kilometers, the six formations of four tankers with their six bombers below and behind them made for a very impressive sight. What was not so impressive was watching each bomber trying to plug in to its tanker.
It was Leborov’s second try — and he was doing better than the others. The ten-meter-long refueling probe was fixed on the Tu-95’s nose, right on the centerline and in plain sight of both pilot and copilot; it had three small lights on the outside edge of the nozzle to illuminate the drogue as it got closer. Once the tanker was forty meters ahead and a few meters higher than the receiver, the tanker’s refueling observer in the tail compartment — formerly the tail gunner’s station — would slowly unreel the drogue. The drogue would swing around wildly for several meters until it got outside the tremendous prop wash behind the plane, but it would then stabilize and begin to drop slightly as the weight of the hose pulled on it. At maximum extension the observer would flash a green light, and the receiver could move forward and plug the drogue.
The drogue — a large, two-meter-diameter padded lighted steel basket at the end of the fuel hose — did not move around so much. The bomber, on the other hand, seemed never to be in one place long enough to get a good feel for positioning the boom. Unlike Western-style boom aerial refueling, here the tanker’s observer could not assist the hookup — it was the bomber pilot’s show all the way.
Leborov cruised slowly up to the drogue, trying to make small control and power corrections — but it was no use. The drogue whistled left just enough for the nozzle to hit the rim, which caused the drogue to skitter away. Leborov pulled off a smidgen of power and swore loudly as he backed away for another try. “This fucking pig! I have either not enough control authority or too damned much!”
“Just think of fucking that pretty little waitress you met a few months ago, Joey,” said Leborov’s copilot and friend, Aviatskiy Starshiy Leytenant Yuri Bodorev. “That’s what I do.”
“Shut the hell up, asshole,” Leborov said, as good-naturedly as he could.
“Refueling behind one of our own planes isn’t as easy as it sounded when they first came up with this idea,” Bodorev remarked. Without external stores, Tupolev-95 bombers had a maximum range in excess of twelve thousand kilometers — air refueling was usually not a necessity. But several months ago they started practicing air refueling again, using Tupolev-16 tankers. Then, just weeks ago, modified Tu-95 tankers had been brought in. No one understood the reason for all this innovation and experimentation — until now. “Want me to give it a try, Joey?”
“No, no, I’m just out of practice,” Leborov said, forcing himself to relax. “How are the gauges looking?”
“RPMs are matched, trims are within limits, power settings are within one or two percent of each other, and fuel tanks are balanced within two hundred kilos,” replied the flight engineer, sitting right behind the copilot.
“Just plug this whore and let’s go, Joey,” Bodorev said. “You’re the flight leader — show the other kids how it’s done.” That seemed to be all the encouragement he needed — along with the image of the long probe protruding from almost right between his legs aimed right for his girlfriend’s
It took three hours of formation flying with this huge armada to complete the refueling. Along the way five bombers and two tankers had to drop out, because they either couldn’t transfer fuel, couldn’t receive fuel, or because of some other major malfunction; one aircraft had a serious weapon problem that forced it to jettison two weapons on two different wing pylons. Fortunately, they were able to divvy up fuel from the remaining tankers to the remaining bombers, so all were able to get their scheduled onloads and continue the mission.
Since one plane had weapons problems, the formation leader decided that all the weapons had to be visually inspected, in addition to the routine safe connectivity-safe continuity checks. “Weapon safety checks complete, all weapons showing safe, no malfunctions,” the bombardier in the downstairs nose compartment reported. “Clearing off for visual check.”
“Navigator clearing off to assist.”
Leborov turned around and said, “Stay put, Arkadiy. I need a stretch. I’ll go. Pilot clearing off for visual weapons check.” Bodorev donned his oxygen mask — the pilot flying the aircraft was required to wear it while the other pilot was out of his seat — and gave his partner and friend his usual good-luck sign: thumb and forefinger forming a circle, meaning “asshole.”
With his parachute, walkaround oxygen bottle, gloves, heavyweight flight jacket, helmet, and oxygen mask on, Leborov stoop-walked past the engineer’s and electronic-warfare officer’s stations, patted the navigator on the shoulder in the very aft section of the cockpit, undogged the hatch to the lower compartment, climbed down the ladder to the lower deck, sealed the upper-deck pressure hatch, and followed the bombardier aft to the weapons bay’s pressurized bulkhead hatch. There were no ejection seats on the Tupolev-95, either upward or downward; the flight-deck crew slid down a pole that extended through the entry hatch that carried them out into the slipstream and away from the aircraft, while the bombardier and gunner simply rolled out through downward escape hatches in their compartments. Now the bombardier unsealed the aft bulkhead hatch, and he and Leborov crawled aft into the weapons bay.
The deck was slick with frozen condensation and leaking coolant from some of the electronics bays, but the men ignored it and continued aft. They could hear the loud
The left weapon pylon held one Kh-90 air-launched attack missile. These were experimental missiles, fielded for the first time when two missiles had been launched at a CIA base in Uzbekistan just recently during an operational test. Then the missiles had carried high-explosive warheads.
But now these missiles carried two one-kiloton thermonuclear devices.
Code-named Sat Loshka, or “Garden Hoe,” the warheads were actually copies of American nuclear “bunker- buster” bombs developed after Desert Storm to destroy deep underground bunkers, cave complexes, and biochem-weapon storage facilities without risking large numbers of civilian casualties. The warheads used rocket motors and armored nose caps to drive themselves down as much as thirty meters underground, even through layers of steel or Kevlar armor, before detonating. That meant that the fireballs would be relatively small and that blast and overpressure damage aboveground also would be small. Each cruise missile had its own inertial- navigation system — a system of electronic gyroscopes and pendulums that gave the navigation computers heading and velocity information — but the addition of GLONASS satellite navigation gave the missiles better than twenty- meter accuracy.
The bombardier walked down to another porthole to inspect the aft section of the huge Kh-90 missile. It was as if they were carrying a small jet fighter on their wings, Leborov thought. He saw a tiny bit of ice around the air inlet under the nose, but that would not be of any concern; less than a minute after launch, the exterior of the missile would heat up to several hundred degrees Centigrade as it approached its top speed of five times the speed of sound. He nodded to his bombardier, indicating they were done with their inspection, then shut off the inspection light and moved to look at the starboard missile. Everything having to do with nuclear weapons always had to be two-officer, even if it meant looking at the weapons from inside the plane.
Two thermonuclear bunker-buster missiles, faster than any antiaircraft missile — and Leborov’s sortie was only the leader of a thirty-one-plane gaggle of similarly armed Tupolev-95 bombers. Each missile had two independently targeted nuclear warheads designed to burrow underground and destroy even the best-protected bunker. The Americans would never know what hit them. Poor bastards.
