Plan of Attack

any longer,” he said. He put the airspeed needle right on the red line by dumping the nose even lower. “Our best chance is to try to duck under his radar cone before he comes around on his patrol orbit — we may be able to slip past him.”

Leborov unconsciously let the airspeed creep up past the red line in an attempt to get down faster, but soon he could feel Borodev pulling back on the control column. “Let’s not rip the wings off this old hog, Joey,” he said. “We’ve still got a long way to go.” He pulled the nose up to get the airspeed back down below the red line. Damn, Leborov thought, how many of his wingmen had started their descent? How many were still up high? He hoped everyone used proper crew discipline and was ready when that fighter appeared — or they’d be dead meat.

Aboard an F-16C Fighting Falcon Fighter,

Over the Beaufort Sea

That same time

Knifepoint, Knifepoint, Hunter Four, blue four.”

“Hunter, this is Knifepoint, strangle mode three and Charlie, go active, stand by for mickey check…. Hunter, acknowledge. Verify you’re single-ship this morning.”

“Knifepoint, Hunter checks, I’m single-ship. My wingman will join up later.”

“Copy that, Hunter. Negative contacts, cleared into track Gina-two, deploy, advise joker.”

“Hunter copies, wilco.”

To tell the truth, thought U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Forman, she preferred being up here by herself, without having to keep an eye out for a wingman or flight lead. The Alaska sky was an absolute delight to fly in — clear, crisp, and cold, with only the stars above and a very, very few lights below. She sometimes felt as if she were the only person in the sky right now….

Which was obviously not true, or else she would not have been sent up here on such short notice.

The twenty-six-year-old mother of two boys was a newly operational F-16C Fighting Falcon pilot in the Eighteenth Fighter Squadron “Blue Foxes” out of Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. Although the Blue Foxes were a ground-attack fighter unit, using the LANTIRN night-attack and low-level navigation system, they were often tasked with the air-defense mission as well, operating with the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron’s F-15 Eagle fighters and the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron’s E-3C AWACS radar planes out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. But tonight she was all by herself. Even after an hour, she was still by herself — her wingman was still broken, still on the ground. Another F-16 had just taken off a few minutes earlier, with one of the 168th Air Refueling Wing’s KC-135 tankers based at Eielson, and wouldn’t rejoin for another thirty minutes.

Forman was two hundred miles northwest of Point Barrow, Alaska, over the seemingly endless expanse of the Arctic Ocean. She had just entered her assigned patrol orbit, which was a narrow triangular course aligned northwest-southeast, at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. She was the “low CAP,” or combat air patrol, the altitude that allowed her APG-68 radar to see all the way down to the ocean’s surface, at her radar’s optimal range of eighty miles, and all the way up to thirty thousand feet, on its normal long-range-scan mode; once her wingman joined her, he would take the high CAP, twenty-four thousand feet, so he could see as high as fifty thousand feet.

As briefed, Forman reduced speed to save fuel and started her turn northwestbound in the triangle. “Hunter Four’s established in Gina-two,” she reported to Knifepoint. Knifepoint was the call sign of the Alaska NORAD Regional Surveillance Center, based at Elmendorf Air Force Base, which combined radar information from the North Warning System, Federal Aviation Administration, Transport Canada, and other military and civil radars into one regional control center. Knifepoint was different from an air-traffic-control center — unlike air-traffic controllers, who strived to keep aircraft safely separated, the Knifepoint controllers’ job was to maneuver fighters as close as possible to other aircraft.

“Roger, Hunter,” the controller responded. “No contacts.” Up here, at the top of the United States, Knifepoint relied on the North Warning System radars to see any intruders — the FAA radars in Fairbanks and Anchorage did not have the range to see this far north. The North Warning System, or NWS, in Alaska consisted of four long-range partly attended radars, nicknamed “Seek Igloo,” plus eight short-range unattended radars, called “Seek Frost,” which closed the gaps in the longer-range systems.

Air patrols were a combination of monitoring the instruments, keeping track of the aircraft in its patrol track, twisting the heading bugs at the corners to head down the next leg, watching the radar and radar-warning receivers for signs of aircraft — and staying awake. Forman enjoyed air-defense exercises because she knew there was going to be an intruder, and it was her job to find it. In the real world, she had to assume there was an intruder out here in all this darkness. Many times air- defense fighters would be launched after being detected by the FAA or North Warning System, and she would be vectored into position while radar-silent and intercept the intruder from behind to attempt an identification. Those were damned exciting.

Not so this time. She didn’t know the exact reason she’d been launched and sent to this patrol, but so far there was no sign of intruders. Often fighters were sent into air patrols because the Russians had spy planes nearby, or because NORAD, the Air Force, or the Canadians wanted to test or observe something. It was impossible to know, so she assumed there was a bad guy out here that needed to be discovered.

But she’d been launched right at the end of her duty day, after studying for a pre-check-ride written exam while doing her normal training duties. An eight-hour duty day followed by several hours’ flying in the wee hours of the morning…swell. This could turn into a very, very long morning.

She had just turned eastbound after completing her initial fifty-mile northwest patrol leg when she heard, “Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight, blue four.” It was Forman’s wingman, finally checking on with the NORAD controller.

“Hunter Four, Knifepoint, your company is on freq.”

“Roger that, Knifepoint. Hunter Four checking off to talk with company aircraft. I’ll monitor your frequency and report back up.”

“Roger, Hunter, cleared as requested.”

Forman switched over to her secondary radio: “Eight, this is Four on tactical. ’Bout time someone showed. Girls don’t like being stood up, you know.”

“Sorry about the delay — nothing’s working right on the ramp this morning. Must be a full moon. We’re about two hundred miles out. How’s everything going?”

“Nice and quiet. Established in the low CAP. The bird is doing okay.” She punched instructions into her navigation computer, checking her fuel reserves. “Joker plus one on board.” The “joker” fuel level was the point at which she had to leave the patrol area and head for home; she had one hour left on patrol before she had to head back in order to arrive with normal fuel reserves, which in Alaska were substantial. Because weather and airfield conditions changed rapidly here, and because suitable alternate airfields were very, very few and far between in this big state, every fighter flying in Alaska took as much fuel as possible with it on patrol; Kelly’s F-16 had two 370- gallon drop tanks on board, along with four AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles, two AIM-9L “Sidewinder” heat-seeking missiles, and ammunition for the twenty-millimeter cannon. Aerial-refueling tankers were precious commodities.

“Roger that. I brought the gas can with me. Any sign of Roadkill?” “Roadkill” was the Blue Foxes’ name for their brethren in the Nineteenth Fighter Squadron — their squadron emblem, a stylized gamecock, looked to many folks like a squished critter on the road. The F-15Cs of the Nineteenth, coming with their E-3C AWACS radar plane, were the air-defense specialists; the F-15s had much longer legs, two-engine reliability, and a better look-down, shoot-down radar to find any bad guys that might be up here. They would undoubtedly take over the air-patrol mission once they arrived, although the F-16s liked to play with them as much as possible, too.

“Negative.” There was a lot of static on the channel all of a sudden, which was fairly common at the higher latitudes, usually because of sunspot activity. The northern lights were beautiful up here, but the solar flares that caused the sky to light up with waves and waves of shimmering light played havoc with the radios.

“Rog. I’ll give you a call if I hear from them. See you in a few.” Despite the growing static, Kelly instantly felt much better. Although she enjoyed flying by herself, it sure was comforting to hear a friendly voice on the airwaves, to know that friendly forces were on the way — especially the tanker.

Forman was a couple minutes from her turn to the southeast when the radar target box winked on, at the extreme center-left edge of her heads-up display. Got a nibble, she told herself as she made a hard left turn to center up on the newcomer. It was high enough so it probably wasn’t an ice floe or some other—