To avoid detection he had landed on the taxiway at Puerto Cabezas instead of the broad ten-thousand-foot runway, taxied to the semi-underground concrete shelter and waited with engines running for any sign of pursuit. None. He shut down but maintained the ANTARES interface and remained strapped in place, configured and ready to fire up DreamStar. But still no sign of pursuit. Exhaustion overtook him, so he shut down the interface and directed the ground crewmen to begin refueling his fighter. He had been off the ANTARES interface only fifteen minutes when the attack began.
DreamStar was ready for a fight. She carried two more Lluyka in-flight refueling tanks on the wing pylons plus two radar-guided missiles on wing pylons and, this time, two infrared-guided missiles on hardpoints on the underside of the fuselage. The two IR missiles were more of a hazard than a help — if DreamStar’s canards were down in their high-maneuverability position, the missiles could possibly hit the canards after launch — but for the long ferry mission, the extra weapons were considered necessary. The twenty-millimeter cannon was also fully reloaded — DreamStar was at its heaviest gross weight ever, well over one hundred-thousand pounds.
But Maraklov himself wasn’t as prepared for either a long flight or a fight with American fighters. This had been the first time he had made two flights in DreamStar within twenty-four hours and the physical and mental strain was immense — like running the Boston Marathon, getting twelve short hours of rest, then going out and running a few more Heartbreak Hills. His body had not recovered from the first mission, but the necessity was clear — DreamStar was in danger if it was left there at Sebaco. That had just been confirmed.
The whine of high-speed jet engines made Maraklov painfully turn to scan down the runway. Four MiG-23 fighters were taxiing to the end of the runway preparing for takeoff. The Soviet government had not been able to send any more MiG-29s or Russian pilots to Nicaragua on such short notice, so those four MiG-23s were manned by Nicaraguan pilots. The MiG-23s were twenty years old, the pilots young or ill trained in night intercepts. If whoever was attacking Nicaragua destroyed the search and ground-controlled intercept radars as well as the surface-to-air missile radars, the MiG pilots would be forced to hunt for the attackers blind, using their own look-down, shoot-down pulse-Doppler radars to scan thousands of square miles of territory for their quarry.
Maraklov took another drink. It didn’t matter, he thought — he’d be out of this backwater country in a few hours. And who knew … maybe one of the MiGs would get lucky. It happened…
A soldier came up to Maraklov’s revetment, showed an I.D. card to the guard, and ran to the platform set up beside DreamStar. He was hesitant to climb up the ladder, but Maraklov saw that he had a message in his hand, motioned him up, and asked for the paper.
He got an instant headache after reading the first word. Assuming he could read Russian, the Spanish-speaking radio operators had scrawled the message out in childlike Cyrillic characters. Maraklov had enough trouble reading Russian, but reading this gobbledygook would be next to impossible. He had to get the soldier’s attention away from the interior of Dream-Star’s cockpit by hammering his shoulder.
“Read this for me,” he said in English.
The soldier looked at him in surprise. “You speak English, mister?”
“Yes.”
The soldier looked at the message for a moment, then looked at Maraklov as if he was going to hit him. “I am sorry, I cannot read this. This is Russian, no?”
“This is garbage Russian, yes. Go back to the radio operator and tell him to write the message out in English.” Maraklov grabbed a pencil from the soldier’s shirt pocket just before he scrambled off the platform — at least while he was getting the message translated he could work on deciphering this junk.
The MiG-23s were still idling at the end of the runway — that probably meant that the GCI radar was being jammed or had been destroyed, and the pilots were being held until a heading to the intruder’s position could be established. Don’t bother launching, Maraklov thought. Let the MiGs at Sebaco handle the American attackers — Sebaco was obviously the American’s target — and leave the Puerto Cabezas MiGs in reserve for when the attackers try to withdraw. If they chase the attackers they could wind up getting shot down themselves or run out of fuel before engaging the stragglers … But a moment later the MiG-23s began their runup and minimum-interval takeoffs. So much for reserve interceptors. Maraklov guessed that none of these MiGs would return.
Maraklov had the scribbled Cyrillic characters deciphered now, but remembering the phonetic pronunciations for each character was tougher, and it took a few minutes to make the message intelligible — luckily, most of it was numbers. It was a satellite message from Moscow informing him that Soviet air forces would be in place in five hours, ready to escort him out of the Caribbean basin into the open Atlantic. The message gave last-minute backup or anti jam frequency changes and other useless information. If the Americans were broad-band jamming their primary communications frequencies, they were listening in as well and were probably vectoring fighters into the source of their transmissions. With such a large force of combat aircraft involved, everything relied on secrecy and radio silence, not secondary and tertiary frequencies.
The fighters were on the downwind side of the runway, the long, bright flames of their afterburners still visible. They had no tankers in Nicaragua (except the one that was lying on the bottom of the Caribbean), so if those guys in the MiG-23s didn’t come out of afterburner they’d flame out before getting a shot off at the intruders.
Maraklov asked himself, “Why am I ragging on those pilots? DreamStar is safe — if the Americans had pinpointed DreamStar here in Puerto Cabezas, this whole base would be a smoking hole.”
Was it because he itched to get into battle? No, even if he had enough energy to take DreamStar aloft, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t risk it. With the MiG-29s gone Nicaragua was wide open to attack — for all he knew there was an aircraft carrier sitting off the coast with fifty F-18 fighter-bombers ready to take him on. It would be suicide to try.
He took another drink of water, emptying the bottle. The real problem here was that he just wanted a future, and every step being taken just seemed to drive him farther and farther from it. DreamStar, he felt, was his life. His whole being was intermeshed with it, and the thought of its eventual dismantling or, worse, destruction was as obscene to him as the idea of a mother killing her newborn baby. But he was also a soldier, obliged to obey orders — and he had been ordered to deliver DreamStar to Russia. But could he obey those orders, knowing what they would do to his aircraft — and what they would probably do to him as well? He was already suspect, … too American …
All the dead-end thoughts he was having were giving him a headache even worse than before. He tossed the plastic water bottle at one of the Nicaraguan military guards at the mouth of the revetment. “Agua, por favor”—probably the only three words of Spanish he knew. The soldier began filling the bottle from one of his canteens — no doubt more of the brackish, parasite-ridden water of this country. The thought of getting diarrhea while in the metallic flight suit made him laugh and cry, but dying of thirst and trying to withstand these migraine headaches were even worse prospects.
Soon, it would be over, he thought. He’d be on his way out of this godforsaken country and back to … Russia. Rack to … what?
He was too tired to think any more about that. As the flickering lights of the fires in the SA-15 radome subsided, exhaustion overtook him, and he drifted off into a fitful sleep.