Carter released his back pressure on his control stick, allowing the terrain-following autopilot to bring the B-52 back to one hundred feet above the Caribbean. The radar warning had changed to solid yellow, then changed briefly to red before being blotted out.
“Did they get a missile off, EW?” Cheshire called out.
“No uplink signal,” Atkins replied. “We’re at the extreme outer range of the SA-10. I don’t think they can …”
“There, I see it,” Cheshire said. She pointed out the left windscreen. Just over the horizon was a short glowing line of fire spinning in a tight circle, growing larger and larger by the second.
Carter jerked the control stick hard left toward the missile. “Chaff, flare.” Atkins hit the ejector buttons, sending bundles of radar-decoying chaff and heat-decoy flares overboard.
Carter hit the voice-command stud: “Set clearance plane fifty feet.”
“Clearance plane fifty feet; warning; low altitude; clearance plane one hundred feet.” Carter’s turn was so tight that, had the computer set the lower clearance plane, the B-52’s left wingtip would have dragged the water.
“It’s still coming,” Cheshire called out as Carter rolled out. The B-52 dipped as the lower clearance plane setting kicked in.
“I can’t find the uplink, something must be guiding it, but I can’t find it … “
The glow was getting brighter — Carter would swear he heard the roar of the missile’s rocket-motor as it sped closer and closer, jamming wasn’t working … what …?
“Stop jamming, EW,” Carter suddenly called out. “It must be homing in on the jamming source. Go to standby. Fast.”
The result was near-instantaneous. The fast-circling flight-path of the missile began to wobble, and the tail flame of the missile’s engine began to elongate just as it burned out. Carter nudged his B-52 as low as he could safely go. It was too late to try to make a turn, too late even for more decoys …
They heard a thud against the fuselage, then silence. The B-52 shook as if a giant hammer had hit it.
“It missed,” Cheshire shouted, “that was the supersonic shock wave; it missed … “
“It must have been a SA-15 SAM,” Atkins said. “SA-15s … they just started deploying SA-15s in the Soviet Union. Now they got them in Nicaragua?”
Carter forced calm into his own dry throat. “Be ready — our intelligence briefing was obviously missing a few details.”
But Atkins was still rattled. “SA-15 … I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize it … they’re not supposed to have SA-15s in Nicaragua … I could’ve gotten us all killed …”
“Snap out of it, Bob.” But Carter understood what Atkins was going through. No one on this crew, including himself, had ever flown a combat mission — as a matter of fact, until Dog Zero Two was ready to fly two months ago, none of his crew members had been aboard a military aircraft for several months. After months or years with their mostly deskbound duties at Dreamland they had become more like engineers than combat crew members. Now they were being shot at by the Soviet Union’s most advanced surface-to-air missile. He was sure the rest of the crew was steeling a panic — Atkins was just the first one to let loose.
“All of you, settle down and pay attention,” Carter called over interphone. “They took a shot and missed. Fly this mission as briefed. But we’ve gotta pull together and back each other up. All of you know your stuff — now it’s time to put it into action. All right. Check your stations and minimize electronic emissions. Nancy, get another power-plant check.”
The radar sky had turned back to yellow. Carter maintained his new heading for a few moments, then turned back to the right and let the autopilot take control.
“Do you think we should go back on the same course?” Scott asked. “It’ll be easier to find us that way.”
“No use in doing that until we get over the mountains,” Carter said. “The faster we get inland the better. Besides, I’ll bet there’s no big secret where we’re heading. The entire Nicaraguan air force is probably waiting up there for us.”
“Crossing the coast now,” Kellerman announced. Carter checked out the cockpit window — when only fifty feet above the surface, the transition from water to land occurred very fast. He double-checked that the terrain-following system was working properly and set a two-hundred-foot clearance plane.
“Tracking radar up again,” Atkins said shakily. The yellow sky was back for only a few moments when it completely blanked out again.
“They get another missile off?”
“I don’t think so,” Atkins said. “The Rainbow indicates impact — we got it.”
Cheshire slapped her armrest. “All right.”
“Celebration over, copilot,” Carter said. “We’ve got a long long way to go.”
In a matter of only a few minutes the Nicaraguan military air-base of Puerto Cabezas was in chaos. One moment it was quiet and peaceful, a warm, lazy summer evening with a hint of an evening storm brewing. The next, air raid sirens were screaming into the night, Russian missiles raised from concrete canisters like demons rising from their crypts, and the roar of jet fighters began to fill the air with the pungent odor of kerosene.
The first SA-15 missile, installed on the coastal Nicaraguan base only a month earlier in the ongoing Russian fortification of Nicaragua, screamed off its launch rails less than twenty seconds later, filling the air with burning, acidic exhaust gas. The missile crews, Nicaraguan with Russian commanding officers, stood and watched the missile disappear into the night sky until a Soviet officer yelled an order to prepare the launcher for reload. Another SA-15 missile was completing its gyro-alignment — the Nicaraguan soldiers were skilled at aligning one missile at a time for launch …
It was this deficiency that had probably saved the crew of the Megafortress Plus. Just before the second missile was ready for launch a huge explosion lit up the small sandy hill where the SA-15 tracking and guidance radome was positioned. The golf-ball-like radome exploded like a burst balloon, scattering pieces of the antenna within for hundreds of meters.
From his vantage point in a low-covered concrete revetment near the flight line, Maraklov saw the golf-ball radome split apart and explode; now it looked like a cracked egg in a boiled egg holder. Men were running toward the flight line, but he knew the attack on the SA-15 guidance radome was a prelude to the real assault. If it was a Tacit Rainbow cruise missile, the attack would not be for a few minutes because the AGM-136 had a range of almost a hundred miles; if it was an AGM-88 HARM missile the follow-on attack could be any second. Either way it was going to be an air raid — the attackers had obviously been waiting for the SA-15 to come up before blowing it up, and with the radar gone the whole north coast of Nicaragua was open to air attack.
Maraklov took a deep pull from a plastic jug of distilled water as he watched the radar control center begin to burn. Sebaco, he was sure, was next — except whoever was staging this attack wasn’t going to stop at a radar site.
But DreamStar — it was safe. He was sitting in DreamStar’s cockpit, still wearing his flight suit, his helmet resting on his lap in front of him. Less than one hour earlier he had landed at Puerto Cabezas after a low-altitude run from Sebaco. Because he knew that the American AWACS radar planes would be looking for a high-speed aircraft leaving Sebaco, he had made the flight under two hundred miles an hour and at the lowest altitude he could muster, flying deep within mountain valleys and jungle river beds to avoid detection. His gamble that his flight-profile would resemble anything but a jet fighter had apparently worked.