Cassidy twiddled his computer cursor, told the magic box to attack the target he had programmed while still on the ground. The National Security Agency selected the targets by studying satellite reconnaissance photos. They converted latitude and longitude coordinates into code by use of map overlays, then passed the coded coordinates by scrambled satellite data link. The coded coordinates were plotted on maps brought from the States and reconverted to latitude and longitude; the resulting latstlong numbers were handed to the pilots to be programmed into the aircraft’s attack computer. The pilots were given only coordinates: They didn’t know what they were bombing. It was a curious disconnect — if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t feel guilty. I’m not responsible — the people in Washington told me to push the button and I pushed it.
Hanging in Cassidy’s small internal weapons bay were two one-thousand-pound green bombs. On the nose of each bomb was a GPS receiver, a computer, and a set of four small movable canards, or wings. The target coordinates were fed to the bomb’s computer by the aircraft’s computer, which also determined where the bomb should be dropped based on the known wind at altitude. As the unpowered bomb fell, the GPS receiver located the bomb in three-dimensional space and fed that data to the computer, which calculated a course to get the bomb where it was supposed to go and positioned the canards to steer it there. The accuracy of the system was phenomenal. Half the bombs dropped from above thirty thousand feet would hit within three meters — about ten feet — of the center of the programmed latstlong bull’s-eye. Today as Cassidy flew toward the Zeya airfield at 34,000 feet at Mach 1.3, the computer figured an attack solution and presented steering commands to the pilot. The plane’s autopilot followed the commands with no input from the pilot. Everything is automated, he thought. The machine does everything for you but die. Due to the fact that the weapons could steer themselves, at this altitude the window into which they must be dropped was a large oval, or basket. Any bomb put into the basket would have the energy to steer itself to the desired target, if, of course, the computer and GPS receiver in the nose functioned properly. Just in case, the approved procedure was to drop two bombs on each target. The symbology in the HUD was alive, moving predictably and gracefully as Bob Cassidy threaded his way between thunderstorms to make his supersonic bomb run five miles above the earth. When he was within the basket, he released the first weapon by pushing once on the pickle on the joystick. He felt just the slightest jolt as the first bomb was jettisoned from the weapons bay. Another push sent the second bomb after the first. Behind Cassidy, bombs were falling from the other planes, each of which was running its own attack.
The sonic booms arrived at the Zeya airfield before the bombs did. Four of them in less than a second, like an incoming artillery barrage. The bombs startled Jiro Kimura, who scanned the cloudy sky. He had been walking toward the headquarters building to report to the base commander, but upon hearing the booms, he spent two seconds looking for enemy airplanes. Then he remembered the Zeros he and his wingman had flown in just an hour ago from Khabarovsk, and he started running back toward the parking mat. Now he heard the roar of the engines, quite audible five miles under the speeding planes. Jiro looked up again. He was searching the cloud-studded sky when the first bomb hit the ammunition storage depot on the edge of the base, two miles away. The resulting explosion leveled trees in every direction for a thousand yards. The explosion was so large that the detonation of the second bomb in the middle of the mess went completely unnoticed. Jiro was facedown in the weed-studded dirt before the concussion of that explosion reached him. A nearby hangar being used to store rations took two bombs in two seconds, those dropped by Aaron Hudek. After the bombs detonated, the hanger roof rose fifty feet in the air before it began falling. The walls of the building collapsed outward. The pair of bombs dropped by Dixie Elitch fell on the fuel farm, two miles away from headquarters on the other side of the base. These bombs ignited two fuel fires, which quickly sent enormous columns of black smoke into the darkening evening clouds. The last set of bombs, those dropped by Clay Lacy, was targeted on the headquarters building behind Jiro. The first bomb hit the northwest corner of the building, causing a fourth of the building to collapse in a pile of rubble. The second missed the building on the east side by ten feet; the explosion fired the brick masonry of the wall like shrapnel through the remaining structure. The concussion of the two bombs pummeled Jiro Kimura as he lay facedown in the dirt a hundred feet away. Miraculously, the flying debris caused by the two bombs only dusted him with mortar and powdered brick. When the air cleared, he picked himself up, wiped the dust and dirt from his eyes, and brushed the worst of it from the front of his uniform. His thoughts began to clear. The people inside the building … Jiro jerked open the door of the headquarters building and rushed inside. The dust in the air was so thick he could barely see. The electric lights were off. He groped his way down the hall and into the war room. The air was opaque. Holding a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose so that he could breathe, Jiro groped his way into the room. Something hit his legs. He bent down, blinking furiously, trying to see. It was a body. Half a body — from the waist down.
The floor was covered with thousands of pieces of bricks.
The air was clearing.
More bodies, and pieces of bodies, arms at odd angles, severed heads … He looked up. As the swirling dust cleared, he could see patches of dark clouds through the gaping hole where the northwest corner of the building had stood. And he could hear the roar of jet engines.
The Americans had just released their bombs when Zero fighters surprised them. Suddenly, the ECM was wailing and the displays showed yellow fighter symbols, Zeros, out to the left and closing rapidly. Then one of the Zeros put a missile into the air and all hell broke loose.
The Americans slammed their throttles into full afterburner and broke hard to avoid the oncoming missile. Cassidy turned into the missile at eight G’s, the massive titanium nozzle behind the afterburners tilting the fire cones up to help the jet turn faster. His full-body G suit automatically inflated to keep him from passing out.
The HUD showed targets everywhere. Unfortunately, the computer displayed the targets” positions in real time, not where they would be after Cassidy pointed his plane so that the targets were within the missile’s performance envelope when he managed to get a firing solution. Solving that four-dimensional problem by looking at the computer displays while in danger of losing your life was the art of the supersonic dogfight. Some pilots could do it; others flew transports and helicopters.
Cassidy flipped the weapons selector to “Missiles” while in an eighty-degree bank pulling four Go’s. A Zero was almost head-on when the aircraft vector dot came rapidly into the missile-capable circle, so he pulled the trigger. An AMRAAM missile roared away in a gout of fire.
The AMP, AAM didn’t guidest Of course not, stupid! It can’t see the Athena-protected Zero.
Cassidy didn’t have time to fret his mistake. Another missile streaked across his nose, not a hundred feet away, from left to right.
He had a target down and to his right, so he rolled hard and pulled toward it. The plane was turning away, so if he could outturn it, he could get a high-percentage stern shot. The G’s pressed down on him and he felt the G suit squeezing viciously. He fought to inhale against the massive weight on his chest.
Now he had Sidewinders selected on the MFD. The enemy fighter was close, almost too close, but when he got a locked-on tone from the missile, Cassidy fired. Two seconds later he saw an explosion out of the corner of his eye. Did I get him?
He was diving now toward the earth, pulling three Go’s. He relaxed the G, leveled his wings, reapplied G. Nose coming up, more G, lower the left wing because a Zero was behind and left and high and the missile light on the instrument panel was flashing as the ECM wailed … Pull, pull, pull!
Another explosion off to the right.
A plane flashed in front, a Zero, and Cassidy slammed the wing down to follow.
Clay Lacy saw the missile that killed him. It was fired by a Zero just two miles away at his four o’clock low, and tracked toward him straight as a laser. Lacy’s computer was displaying two possible targets in front of him, recommending the one to the right, when out of the corner of his eye he saw the missile coming. To his surprise, he now realized the Missile warning light was flashing and the aural warning tone wailing at full cry. The missile was less that a second from impact when he saw it, and Clay Lacy knew he had had the stroke.
“Shit,” he said, and pulled into a nine-G grunt.
It wasn’t enough. The missile went off just under the belly of the aircraft, blasting shrapnel into the wing fuel tanks and shredding the airplane’s belly. Shrapnel coming through the floor of the cockpit killed Clay Lacy less than a second before the aircraft blew up. As the fireball expanded, fed by the aircraft’s fuel, two long cylinders— the aircraft’s engines — shot out of the explosion and fell in a ballistic trajectory toward the earth five miles below.
The disappearance of one of the three other friendly green fighter symbols from his tac display registered on Bob Cassidy. He was too busy to wonder who had been hit.
He was solidly in the clouds, flying as if he were in the simulator back in Germany.
