He had disconnected the defensive AI and taken control of his aircraft back.
“What are you doing sir?” his co-pilot asked.
In answer he keyed his internal mike, “Weapons. I am going to brake to launch velocity. Prepare to lower the launcher and fire.”
The co-pilot looked like he wanted to protest, but whatever he was about to say, he bit it back. “Preparing for close-in decoy release,” he said, flicking some switches.
“The enemy sent two short-range missiles after Molotok 2,” Alekseyev told him. “Probably on optical guidance. Jamming was ineffective. The default countermeasure systems were ineffective.” He cut the bomber’s thrust and deployed the emergency air brakes — they were both thrown forward against the straps of their harnesses as the massive bomber began decelerating hard. “I want you to set the swarm for maximum spread and fire at the outside of the intercept envelope!”
“Setting swarm for max spread,” the co-pilot confirmed. He crossed himself. “God help us.”
“If we succeed in launching our Tsirkon,” Alekseyev told him cryptically. “It is not God you will need to reckon with.”
Bunny had been burning toward the huge flying wing at Mach 1.8. In a flat-out footrace, the Tupolev could have outrun her Fantom. But it had been dodging and weaving and had lost considerable airspeed before it decided to bug out, so her intercept calculator had put her on a track that should have given her a very short window in which she could attack the bomber before it reached the approaching Russian fighter flight that was clearly responding to its call for help.
She’d been gearing herself up for that engagement, so she’d been taken by surprise when the Tupolev suddenly swung east on a new heading and threw out its sea anchor. One moment, it had been a silver sliver on the horizon, the next, it was filling her forward camera like it had stopped in mid-air and decided to fly backward and attack the Fantom. She knew that was an optical illusion enhanced by the visual simulation system on the Fantom, and her threat screen told her the true story — it had just cut its airspeed dramatically and was falling from Mach 2 toward Mach 1 and below.
“Cudas tracking,” she said, her voice calm, even though her heart was pounding. “Optical lock. Firing one. Tracking. Firing two.”
She chopped her own airspeed back so that she didn’t overrun the bomber. It took what seemed like milliseconds for the missiles to close.
Rodriguez saw them as two small lines on the laptop’s tactical screen, reaching between Bunny’s Fantom and the Russian bomber. “Come on,” she urged. “Let’s get this done.”
“No!” Bunny suddenly exclaimed. She had been watching the contrails of her two missiles reach out toward the bomber. Just as she expected them to strike, two black clouds burst from the back of the Tupolev like two huge swarms of bees, filling the sky. Her missiles flew right into them.
The black clouds flashed brilliant white, and her missiles disappeared.
The radical new drone-swarm defense that had been fitted to the TU-162 bombers could indeed be compared to a swarm of bees. Dropped out of apertures lining the underside of the Tupolev, the swarm comprised two clouds of 1,000 miniature drones each, which could be programmed to take a set distance from each other once launched, forming either a dense or a loose cloud. Like tinfoil chaff, when concentrated, they reflected radar energy and could attract radar homing missiles — with the advantage that they stayed in formation, unlike chaff which quickly dispersed. But their real talent was that when they were dispersed, their eight gyro stabilized rotors coupled with autonomous range finding could keep each drone at a maximum holding distance of 50 feet from all of its neighbors, creating two separately positioned clouds that were two drones thick and a half mile wide.
Anything flying through them, if it had a proximity fuse, might be fooled into thinking it had struck its target. If it was allowed the luxury of thought. Because the last trick the swarm had up its sleeve was that each drone had its own proximity fuse. And if anything that wasn’t another drone or flashing a recognized IFF code came within 25 feet of it, it detonated, setting off a chain reaction among the other drones in the cloud that instantly vaporized anything inside or even near the cloud.
Like Bunny’s last two Cuda missiles.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” Rodriguez asked. “Tell me what you’re seeing!”
“The bomber just spat out two clouds of decoys, the missiles flew into them, and they got toasted,” Bunny said.
“Drone swarm, proximity detonations,” Bondarev told them. “I heard it was being developed, I did not know it had been deployed.”
“How many of those clouds can it spit out?” Bunny yelled.
“I don’t know. A TU-162 bomber can carry 40 tons of ordnance,” Bondarev said. “You should assume it can launch multiple swarms.”
Bunny cursed, “I’m down to guns. If I try to fly through a cloud of killer drones, I’ll be dead before I can put lead on target and nothing will stop it.”
Rodriguez turned and yelled at Bondarev, “How do we defeat this?!”
He was sitting with his back against a wall, and lifted his legs, indicating they were still tied. “I need to see a tactical screen.”
Rodriguez pulled a knife from her boot, ran back and cut Bondarev’s leg-ropes. With the knife in her hand, she gestured at Bunny in the virtual-reality rig and the tactical screen sitting on the box beside her.
“Hurry it up!” Bunny yelled. “Radar cross section just spiked. It’s got its weapon bay doors open!”
Private Zubkhov wasn’t in a hurry, but he wasn’t a patient man either. He wasn’t bleeding to death, though pushing himself too hard was out of the question for now; blood was still leaking around the tourniquet on his leg. And the American couldn’t shoot him through the wood and steel platform at the base of the water tank that was his new roof.
He didn’t really have any options. If he wasn’t wounded, he could outwait the American, move on him when he fell asleep or passed out. But to do that he would have to get up that damn ladder. He had one last try at luring the American, with his radio, out of the stupid tank.
“Hey, American, wake up in there!” he yelled. “We both need help. You shot me, I shot you. No bad feelings OK? I can get help for you.” There was no answer.
With a shrug, Zubkhov pointed his Makarov at the platform above his head. The American wouldn’t necessarily know he couldn’t penetrate it. For a moment he hesitated, thinking how dumb it would be if he miscalculated and put a bullet through the radio he’d come all this way for. He aimed obliquely, fired two shots into the wood, listening with satisfaction to the crash from his gun and the thud of the bullets into the base of the water tank.
“Wake up American!” he called out again. He put two more slugs into the base of the water tank. “Or I’m going to start aiming to kill.”
He heard no movement above him. The guy was either dead, or playing dead. It was time to find out.
Bondarev stood with his hands tied behind his back and looked over Rodriguez’s shoulder. “The only option is to get above and ahead of it. Make a frontal diving attack. The decoy swarms can’t be fired forward, only backward.”
“You sure?” Rodriguez asked.
“No,” Bondarev admitted.
“Do it O’Hare,” Rodriguez ordered.
“Ma’am.”
“No Russian drone could execute such a maneuver under autonomous control,” Bondarev remarked quietly, watching intently as Bunny worked her keyboard.
“No ordinary US drone either,” Rodriguez replied. “But ours are prototypes, personally coded by O’Hare. If she says she can do it, she can.”