Plan of Attack

“No contact on IRSTS yet, sir, but if he did make a heading change, the sensor might not pick up his engine exhausts until closer in. The interceptor should be picking up his heat trail soon, and he’ll be in radar contact soon afterward. He can’t simply have disappeared, sir — we’ll get him.”

“How long until Two-one gets into firing position?”

“About five minutes, sir.”

“Call me when the fighter has radar contact,” the regional commander ordered, and he abruptly disconnected the line.

Crap, the sector commander thought, the old man is really pissed now. He switched to the brigadewide radio network, which connected him to all of the different regiments under his command. “Attention all units, this is Brigade. We have lost radar contact with an unidentified aircraft, last seen two hundred and thirty-five kilometers west of Petropavlovsk. All units, stay alert. Immediately report any outages or jamming to Brigade. That is all.”

He knew it was a lame message. His men were already on a hair-trigger alert and had been ever since the attack on the United States — they didn’t need to be told to stay alert. But this was serious…he knew it, he felt it. Something was happening out there.

* * *

Not even the old guys ever blew lunch in their helmets, Breaker,” Hal Briggs said. He didn’t need to turn around in his seat to know what had happened — even through the filtration system in the Tin Man electronic battle armor’s helmet, he could smell that unmistakable smell.

“Damn it, I’m sorry, sir,” First Lieutenant Mark “Breaker” Bastian said. Bastian, a former Air Force combat air controller, was a nephew of Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, the former commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and originator of the special-ops team code-named “Whiplash” that was the progenitor of the Battle Force ground-operations team. He was a big, muscular guy, with incredible speed and stamina for someone his size. He had excellent eyesight, was an expert marksman, and had made over two dozen combat jumps in his short military career.

He also had an extraordinarily queasy stomach. The poor guy got airsick even before boarding an aircraft. Fortunately, his vasovagal episodes occurred only after or just before he was about to do something dangerous, not during, so his jumpy stomach didn’t usually interfere with his performance.

“It’s okay, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Major Chris Wohl said. He had loosened his restraints and turned to help Bastian remove his battle-armor helmet. “Just make sure you clean out the inside of the helmet carefully — the thing is filled with electronics, and you don’t want crap interfering with any of it. If you can’t clean it well enough, use the spare helmet.”

“Take your time,” Hal said. “We have a long way to go.”

“Someone open a window,” Marines Corps Staff Sergeant Emily Angel said after Bastian began cleaning his gear. Emily had no call sign because everyone called her by her very apropos last name: Angel. With short dark hair, glittering dark eyes, and a body honed by five years in some of the toughest infantry units in the U.S. Marines Corps, Angel had been handpicked by Chris Wohl to join the Battle Force ground team after he’d watched her compete in an urban-warfare search-and-destroy course competition at Quantico. The reason for recruiting new members there was simple: The Battle Force stressed small-unit tactics, speed, and maneuverability over strength and endurance. It was no surprise to Chris Wohl that the winner was a woman.

“Bite me, Angel,” Bastian said, but he gratefully accepted her help as he began cleaning. They all helped because they knew that, but for the grace of God, they could’ve been the ones who’d thrown up in their helmets.

The four members of the Battle Force team were aboard an MQ-35 Condor special-ops infiltration/exfiltration aircraft. They had just been dropped about eighty miles east of the Kamchatka Peninsula over the Bering Sea from an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet from inside an unmanned EB-52 Megafortress bomber. Briggs, who flew on the first Condor flight over Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, was ready for the gut-wrenching descent after dropping from the bomb bay, but no one else on board had ever had that experience before — and no amount of briefing could prepare someone for it.

“Condor, Control, you are at best glide speed,” Major Matthew “Wildman” Whitley, the remote piloting technician controlling the Condor from Battle Mountain, reported. Matt Whitley of the Fifty-second Bomb Squadron was one of the first technicians, or “game boys” as they were called, trained at Battle Mountain to fly the Megafortresses, Condors, and the other experimental aircraft without first being a pilot — his background was in computer-simulation programming. He was proud of his accomplishment, and he was looked up to by all of the other nonrated fliers in the unit as a junior god.

“How’s everybody doing?” asked Brigadier General David Luger, commanding the Air Battle Force from the Battle Management Center at Battle Mountain.

“Except for one smelly helmet, fine,” Briggs reported.

“They let us get an extra sixty miles closer to the coast than we figured,” Wilde said. “We can use every mile we can get.”

“How are we looking, Matt?” Briggs asked.

“Stand by.” He checked the computer’s flight plan, which updated their flight profile constantly, based on glide performance, winds, air temperature, and routing. “Right now we’re looking at a six-one glide ratio — six miles for every thousand feet. That means if we descend you down to ten thousand feet, you can glide for about one hundred and fifty miles, or one hour flight time, before we have to fire up the engine. That will put you roughly over the Central Kamchatka Highway just west of Mil’kovo. Then it’s a thousand-mile cruise into Yakutsk on the turbojet, or about three hours.

“You’ll have less than ten minutes of fuel remaining — if everything goes to plan. Any shift in the winds, ice buildup, or malfunctions can put you on the wrong side of the fuel curve fast. We’ll keep you up as high as we can, but as soon as you leave Magadan’s radar coverage you’ll be in Yakutsk’s, so we’ll have to contend with that. At ten thousand feet, you can glide for another sixty miles once the engine quits, so that’s probably all the reserve you’ll have.”

“Sounds lovely,” Briggs said wryly. “What are the bad guys up to?”

“The threat situation looks about the same as before,” Luger responded. “Numerous fighter patrols all around you. The Russians have set up a picket of patrol and warships every fifty to seventy miles across the Sea of Okhotsk. We’ll reroute you around the ones we detect, but be prepared to do some more gliding down to lower altitudes if necessary. They’re being very careful and not radiating with anything but normal surface-and air-search radars. Long-range surveillance radars at Petropavlovsk, Yakutsk, Komsomol’sk, and Magadan are active, but all of the previously known SA-10 and SA-12 sites along the coast are silent. They’re not exposing any of their air-defense stuff, which will make it harder for us to target them.”

“Was this supposed to cheer us up, Dave?”

They proceeded in silence for the next hour, but the tension built up quickly and precipitously as they cleared the coastline of the central Kamchatka Peninsula and approached the engine-start point. “Okay, crew, listen up,” Briggs said. “The emergency-egress procedures are as briefed: If the engine fails to start, we’ll turn south and continue our glide to the planned emergency landing zone along the Central Kamchatka Highway. We then make our way to Petropavlovsk and wreak as much havoc there as we can from the ground. There are no plans at this time for anyone to rescue us, so we’re on our own. Our mission will be to disrupt air-defense and surveillance operations on the Kamchatka Peninsula in order to offer follow-on forces an easier ingress path. Questions?”

“Has the engine ever not started, sir?” Angel asked.

Briggs turned to glance behind him, then replied by saying, “Are there any other questions?” Not surprisingly, there were none.

“Coming up on engine start,” Whitley reported. “Stand by…. Engine inlet coming open…inlet deicers on… starter engaged…fifteen percent RPMs, igniters on, here comes the fuel…. Stand by…. Ignition, engine RPMs to thirty…thirty-five…” Suddenly the engine’s whirring sound stopped. “Igniters off, fuel off. We got a hot start, guys. The engine inlet might be blocked with ice.”

The crew felt the Condor turn, and shoulders slumped. “Okay, guys, here’s the plan,” Dave Luger said. “We’ve turned you southbound on the planned emergency routing. We’ve got to wait three minutes before we can attempt another start. You’ll lose about two thousand feet altitude and go about twenty miles. We’ll keep the inlet