“I’ll be all right,” she muttered. Patrick examined her eyes carefully and found no apparent damage. “I’m just flash-blinded, that’s all. It’s coming back. Give me a couple aspirins out of the medical kit and see if there’s any eyewash or salve in there.” She stared out her windscreen. “Hey, there’s something wrong here. I can’t see out my windscreen. Is it me or something else?”
Patrick looked, too. “The windscreen is all blackened and crazed — the blast from the SA-4 might have instantly delaminated it.” He shone his flashlight outside toward the nose. “I think we might have some problems out there. Do a check of the refueling system, Dave.”
“Stand by.” It took only a few seconds. “Yep, looks like we got a problem — self-test of the refueling system failed. Looks like your slipway doors are damaged.”
Patrick got out the high-power floodlight and looked. “I see all kinds of sheet metal loose out there,” he reported. “Looks like the slipway doors might have been blown loose and are jammed or hanging halfway inside the slipway.”
“We’re in deep shit if we can’t refuel, guys,” Rebecca said.
With the help of the technicians back at Battle Mountain, Patrick began reading the flight-manual checklist for the refueling system. The checklist eventually directed him to pull the circuit breaker that actuated the slipway doors. “Last item — manual slipway door-retract handle, pull,” he read.
“Give it a try, Muck,” Luger said. “You got nothing else you can do.”
Patrick firmly and positively pulled the small T-handle on the upper instrument console, then shone the big spotlight outside again. “Well?” Rebecca asked.
“Still looks the same. Looks like the slipway door ripped off its supports and is jammed inside the slipway. Dave…”
“We’re running the best range numbers now,” Luger responded.
Patrick switched seats with Rebecca — she couldn’t see quite clearly yet, so it was better for her not to be in the pilot’s seat — then immediately set the Vampire’s flight-control system to max-range profile. The Vampire used mission-adaptive technology, tiny actuators in the fuselage that subtly changed almost the entire surface of the bomber’s fuselage and wings to optimize the aerodynamics. The system could be set to increase airspeed, improve slow-flight characteristics, help land in crosswinds, or reduce the effects of turbulence.
Patrick told the flight-control system to conserve as much fuel as possible. When he did so, the airspeed dropped off considerably, and they started a very slow climb. The mission-adaptive technology flattened out the flight controls as much as possible, reducing drag — they could barely maneuver, but they would be saving as much fuel as possible. As they climbed, their airspeed increased in the thinner air, so they traveled farther on the same amount of fuel. But their four-hour return flight became five, then soon settled into a five-and-a-half-hour endurance run.
And they still had the gauntlet of the Pakistani air defenses, now on full alert, to run.
“We’ve worked the numbers as best we could, Muck,” David Luger said, “and the best we can figure is, it’ll be close. The winds aren’t helping you — you have a twenty-minute deficit. But if you can make it up to at least thirty-nine thousand feet and then do a very shallow idle-power descent, we think you’ll make up the deficit. How’s that slipway looking? Anything fly off yet?”
“Still looks like someone left a wad of scrap metal in there. Seems like we might lose part of the left side of the radome, too.”
“Roger. If the slipway still looks blocked, we’ll have to send the tanker home. He doesn’t have enough fuel to wait for you.”
“Send him home,” Patrick said. “Have him gas up and then launch after us. Maybe we’ll move into precontact in the descent and have the boom operator take a close look.”
The Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier was a jumble of search radars and frantic radio messages in several different languages. “We may have lucked out,” Patrick said. “Sounds to me like everyone’s running out of fuel and heading home. The Iranian SA-10s are still active, but they’re intermittent. They might be afraid of shooting down their own aircraft or firing on a Pakistani jet over the border.”
“Great,” Rebecca said, putting more saline drops in her stinging eyes. “Maybe we’ll avoid getting caught in the crossfire long enough to splash down in the Indian Ocean.”
“Wait, they’re not going home — they’re chasing another target!” Patrick exclaimed, studying the datalinked composite tactical display. He switched to his own laser-radar display and took a two-second snapshot. “There’s a big target at our one o’clock position, eighty-three miles, low. It’s huge — it looks as big as a 747, and it’s radiating on several VHF, UHF, and some navigation search frequencies.” He switched radio frequencies. “Tin Man, this is Puppeteer.”
“Hi, boss,” Hal Briggs responded. Air Force Colonel Hal Briggs was an Army- and Air Force — trained commando and security expert, a longtime partner of Patrick’s, and a close friend. He was now assigned as the commander of a secret unit at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base called the Battle Force, comprising highly trained and heavily armed commandos that supported special-operations missions all over the world.
“What do you guys think you’re doing?” Patrick asked.
“Just trying to clear a path for you,” Hal replied. He had launched in the MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet aircraft off the deck of their covert-operations freighter as soon as he saw Patrick’s turn inland to pursue the errant StealthHawk. Loaded with extra fuel as well as electronic warfare jammers, Hal and his crew sped inland and established an orbit right along the Pakistan-Iran frontier, then activated their jammers and decoy transmitters. The decoy transmitters made the MV-32 appear a hundred times larger than its actual size on the Iranian and Pakistani radarscopes — too inviting a target to be ignored.
“We appreciate it, Tin Man,” Patrick said, “but we see at least a half dozen Iranian and Pakistani fighters within thirty miles of your location and one less than twenty miles that might have detected you. Get as low as you can and bug out to the southeast.”
“We’re outta here, Puppeteer, but not to the southeast,” Hal responded. “You head southeast. We’ll draw the bad guys away until you’re clear. Save your fuel.”
“Are you armed?”
“Negative,” Hal replied. Normally the MV-32 carried two retractable pods that held laser-guided Hellfire missiles, Maverick TV-guided attack missiles, Stinger heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, Sidearm antiradar missiles, or twenty-millimeter gun pods — but they also held three-hundred-gallon fuel tanks, and that’s what this mission required. The MV-32 had a chin-mounted twenty-millimeter Gatling gun — that was its only defensive armament, almost completely ineffective against high-speed aircraft. “I need you to give us a heads-up on where the bad guys are, Puppeteer — and remember the third dimension.”
“I hear you, Tin Man,” Patrick replied. He switched his display to one that accentuated terrain even more — the laser-radar view was so detailed and precise that it looked like a daylight photograph. “Head south and stay as low as you can. Nearest bandit is at your four o’clock, moving in to fifteen miles, high. He’s painting you with his radar. You have your jammers on?”
“Roger that.”
“There’s a pretty deep crevasse at your one o’clock, eight miles. See it yet?”
“Negative.”
“He’s counterjamming you — looks like he’s got a solid lock on you,” Patrick said. “Turn right twenty degrees, hard.” Patrick knew that the MV-32 was fitted with infrared suppressors on the exhaust end of its fanjet engines, but they would still create very hot dots against the night sky that made easy targets for heat-seeking missiles. The first important task was to turn those hot exhausts away from the Iranian fighter’s infrared sensors. “He’s descending and slowing. He’s trying to line up a shot.”