Display Indicator as he concentrated on keeping his heading and his altitude precise. At an altitude of 100 feet and at a speed of 550 knots, there was no margin for error.
He still felt uncomfortable with Sunshine at his side. Damn it, if she screwed the pooch on this one…
Not that she'd screwed up so far. But there was always a first time, and this was when a mistake would get them both killed. Glancing up, he caught the blur of a gray shoreline coming up fast, half-glimpsed through the swish-swish of the wiper. His VDI showed the coast, painted in radar. An instant later, the land exploded around them, replacing the featureless blue-gray blur of the sea.
At his side, Sunshine keyed her radio mike with her left foot.
'Terminator 1.504, feet dry, feet dry.' They were over land now. Over Russia.
'That's Point Yellow-Delta, mark number two,' she said. 'Come left to zero-nine-three.'
He saw the radar profile of a promontory on his screen. 'I got it.
Zero-nine-three it is.' He nudged the stick to the left. Each Intruder had its own precisely calculated, zigzag path to its target, a path through space and time designed to keep it clear of active enemy SAM and gun batteries, as well as letting it avoid occupying the same airspace at the same time as some other American aircraft.
'Terminator 2.500' sounded over his headset. 'We're feet dry, feet dry.'
That was the voice of Commander John 'Thumper' Hargraves, the Death Dealers' squadron leader, coming in a few miles behind 504, and a bit to the east.
'This is 3.505. Feet dry.'
'Jammer 4.703.' That was the EA-6B Prowler accompanying the Terminator flight, providing electronic countermeasures for the three Intruders as they made their run. 'Feet dry, feet dry.'
Antiaircraft fire appeared to his left, tracers rising from the ground, like gently drifting specks of orange light. They were past so quickly he didn't even have a chance to see where the fire was coming from.
'We're coming up on mark three,' Sunshine said over the ICS. Her helmeted head was still pressed up against the rubber shield of her radar scope. 'Point Red-Sierra.'
'Okay, boys and girls,' Terminator 500 told them over the tactical channel. 'That's Red-Sierra, on the money. Time to break. Terminator Five-oh-four, you have the honors.'
Red-Sierra was the southern tip of a long island in the mouth of a ragged-edged inlet. There was a fishing village there, Port Vladimir. Willis and Sunshine's flight plan called for a sharp dogleg to the south now, as each aircraft maneuvered independently to come at their objective from a different direction, breaking up the enemy's defensive fire and keeping him guessing about where the next strike was coming from.
Willis brought his stick to the left, veering clear of Port Vladimir and heading sharply south away from the coast. He started climbing too, rising to his attack altitude of six hundred feet.
'Roger that,' Sunshine said over the tactical channel. 'We're climbing to attack altitude. See you boys over the target.'
'Yeah,' Willis added. 'You guys can eat our dust.'
'Launch! Launch!' sounded over his headset. 'This is Terminator Five-oh-five! I've got a SAM launch at zero- eight-five!'
'Copy, Five-oh-five,' Thumper called. 'I see it.'
Willis saw it too, a pillar, like a telephone pole painted white, balancing skyward on smoke and flame a mile to the east.
'Looks like they're finally waking up down there,' Willis told Sunshine.
A threat warning lit up on his console. They were being tracked. 'It's about damn time, huh? I was beginning to think they didn't care.'
'Three miles to the last turn,' Sunshine said, ignoring his banter. Her voice was cold, all business. The Intruder jolted once, turbulence from a near-miss. 'Weapons armed. Safe off. Pickle's hot.'
The miles flashed by. 'Okay,' Sunshine said. 'Mark. Come right to one-seven-two.'
'Rog.' The aircraft's wing seemed to skim the blurred earth as the Intruder swung to the right.
'We're in the groove for our approach. Range twelve miles.' More seconds dragged past. Willis's hands were wet beneath his gloves. 'C'mon, c'mon. You see 'em yet?'
'Negative. Ten miles.'
'Christ, we'll be on top of-'
'Got it! Lots of static from jamming, but I've got a solid lock. Come right a bit. See it?'
'Yeah,' he said. 'Yeah, I've got it. Going to attack.' His VDI changed to attack mode, the graphics now more complex, feeding him more data. He scanned it all: time to target, drift angle, steering point. Where was that missile headed? Damn, he'd lost it when they'd made that second course change, and it was behind them somewhere. Okay. The threat warning was off.
The Prowler piggy-backing on the Intruder flight must have jammed the thing or seduced it out of the way.
'Not all that much in the way of anti-air defenses,' he said. Tracers continued to flash and flicker across the ground below them, and the puffy, deceptively peaceful-looking cotton balls of triple-A were scattered across the sky. 'Not as bad as I thought it would be this close in, anyway.'
'Looks to me like their air defense is pretty much off the air,' Sunshine replied. 'Thank the Sharks for that.'
The Sharks, the EA-6Bs of VAQ-143, had delivered the first blow that afternoon. Their stand-off HARM and Tacit Rainbow missiles homed on enemy radars, even targeting radar sources that were switched on briefly, then turned off. Of course, the enemy was sure to have kept a lot of his radars off the air completely, as a combat reserve.
The A-6 gave another hard jolt, slamming Willis against Sunshine's leg.
'Hang on!' He keyed the tactical frequency. 'Terminator Five-oh-oh, this is Five-oh-four. I've got my primary. Going in hot.'
'Terminator Five-oh-four, Terminator Five-double-oh. Copy that. We'll be right behind you. Good luck!'
'Roger that, Five-oh-four,' a different voice said. It sounded like Lucas, in Five-oh-five. 'Don't get greedy now. Save some for us poor tag-alongs.'
'Copy.' Willis pushed the stick over, picking up speed as the Intruder's nose dropped below the horizon line.
'Picking up some heavy triple-A here,' someone said. Willis didn't catch who it was. 'Aw, shit! Shit! I'm hit!'
'Abort your run, Five-oh-five! You're on fire.'
'I see it. Engine light. I'm losing my starboard engine. Shit! Fire in the aircraft! Fire-'
The hiss of static chopped the transmission off in mid-sentence. Willis felt cold. Mike Daniels and his B/N, Frank Lucas, had been good friends.
Somehow, he managed to keep his concentration locked on his VDI. The Intruder was sometimes described as possessing a heads-down display, for the aircraft could be flown by an aviator who never needed to look up through his canopy. When Willis did look up, it was into nightmare. Puffs of smoke were scattered thickly across the sky ahead, mingled with the rising, twisting white threads of SAM contrails. His missile-threat warning was flashing again, coupled with a plaintive, chirping warble in his headset.
'Steady,' Sunshine warned him. 'Steady! You're drifting left!'
On his VDI, his targeting pipper was climbing steadily up the screen toward the release point. Something hit them, a loud thump aft like someone kicking the fuselage.
'I'm taking it in on manual,' he said, flipping the selector. If the A-6 had been hit by gunfire, he didn't want to risk going in on auto-release, flying over the target, then finding out they'd failed to release.
The release pipper crawled relentlessly toward the bottom of the display.
When it winked out, Willis slammed his thumb down on the pickle switch. In the same instant, the brown and gray ground outside gave way to pavement, runways, dozens of tightly clustered buildings, parked vehicles, and aircraft resting in high-walled revetments. He thought he even glimpsed men down there, dashing wildly for cover.
Then the Intruder lurched heavily upward in a series of thumping jolts.
Its warload consisted of thirty five-hundred-pound retarded bombs, four groups of three clamped to A/A 37B-6 multiple eject racks beneath each wing, and two groups more mounted one in front of the other on his
