He suddenly turned to the communications operator. “Clear that ramp immediately; shut off the lights.”
“But, sir, the firefighters—”
“That bomber is coming back. It did not withdraw — it only found more targets. Order the gun sites to—”
Too late. An explosion erupted in the northern fifty-seven-millimeter gun-emplacement bunker — Tret’yak didn’t need his binoculars to know that the north gun had just been destroyed. “Tell the south gun to open fire. Forget the radar guidance — just fire the gun to the north; bracket the area. Quickly.”
But the radio operator froze, gaping out the windows to the north across the runway. Tret’yak grabbed the microphone and was about to push the man out of the way when he too looked up and followed the man’s stare.
The dark shape roared out of the jungle surrounding Sebaco like some sort of prehistoric bird, swooping so low over the trees that it appeared to be skimming the tops, the wing vortices and engine thrust snapping branches and parting the forest. When it cleared the trees it dropped even lower, not more than twenty or thirty meters above ground. It was headed right for the control tower, aiming its pointed nose at a spot, it seemed, right between Tret’yak’s eyes.
In rapid succession four dark streaks arced away from the bomber’s belly. The first headed straight ahead, plowing into the center of Sebaco’s two-kilometer runway. The explosion obscured the bomber for several seconds until the behemoth crashed through the column of smoke, bearing down on the control tower.
A second missile missed the control tower by a few meters, flew by and hit a building somewhere behind the tower — Tret’yak immediately thought of his headquarters building a few hundred meters directly in that weapon’s path. The missiles seemed to be massive bombs with wings, more flying whales than missiles. A third and forth explosion rocked the hangars off to Tret’yak’s left, blowing out the hangar doors, collapsing both buildings and scattering pieces of steel and concrete in all directions. Secondary explosions blew the roofs off another hangar, adding more fuel to the fires now burning out of control all along the flight line.
The massive aircraft then executed an impossibly tight left turn toward the southeast. The roar of the bomber’s engines was so great that it threatened to collapse the control tower. As it banked away, its broad jet-black fuselage missing the tower by only a dozen meters, the remaining glass panels exploded as if grenades had been set off inside the room. Tret’yak was thrown off his feet, blinded and deafened by the hurricane-like aftermath. Tables, books, chairs and pieces of equipment flew everywhere.
Tret’yak could not move for several moments, and even though he was awake and alert he felt as if he had been dismembered. Finally he shook off the piles of debris on his back and struggled to his feet. The control tower was beginning to fill with smoke as the fires in the nearby hangars intensified; the underground fuel pits, containing over forty thousand-decaliters of jet fuel, were in danger unless the fires could be contained.
He helped his men to their feet and toward the exits as he surveyed what he could see of his airbase. The runway had one huge crater in the center, leaving about nine hundred meters usable on either side of the crater — not enough to recover the MiG-23s. It would take a day to repair it; the fighters would have to land at Sandino International, Bluefields or Puerto Cabezas. The taxiway was destroyed and the parking ramp was unusable. Two fifty-seven-millimeter guns and one SA-8 missile site out of commission — the SA-10 site in the Rio Tuma valley had apparently been destroyed as well. Not to mention the one MiG-23 fighter destroyed right after takeoff. Tret’yak checked the area behind the tower and found the second American glide-bomb had hit the roof of the underground headquarters building, but caused no apparent serious damage or fire.
One aircraft had done all this. He had planned on taking on the combined might of an American carrier air group, and one bomber had wiped out all his defenses in less than ten minutes.
He needed to transmit a report as soon as possible back to Moscow. The stolen American fighter was safe, but the Americans had just raised the price of keeping it to an all-time high.
The flight out of Nicaragua was no cakewalk for the Megafortress and her crew, but the loss of all ground-controlled intercept capability over Nicaragua and the loss of contact with Sebaco seemed to take the fight out of the Nicaraguan MiG pilots. One had been destroyed by Stinger fire from the Megafortress as it tried to tail-chase the bomber at low altitude, and another was damaged by a near-miss from one of Cheetah’s dogfighting AIM-132 missiles; the rest turned around and headed for Sandino International Airport. Powell and McLanahan followed the B-52 out over the Caribbean until it was picked up by the E-5 AWACS radar plan orbiting over the Cayman Islands.
“First things first,” Bradley Elliott said when secure communications with the strike formation had been established. “Patrick, Wendy’s out of surgery. She’s still officially in critical condition. I can’t get any other information out of the hospital staff. We could airlift you from Georgetown and have you in San Antonio in four hours—”
“No … as long as she’s being taken care of. I’m where I need to be right now.”
“We’ve got other back-seaters for Powell—”
“I am Powell’s back-seater. Maraklov’s gotta break out sooner or later, and I have to be there when he does. Oh hell; of course I’d like to go to her, but I also know I can’t do her any good. Not now. And I’ve got more hours in Cheetah than anyone else. I’m the only one familiar enough with her systems to take her into combat. If DreamStar got away while I was in Texas, it would be a disaster for us all. And if I know Wendy, she’d kill me if I sat around her bedside while … well, you know what I mean.”
Aboard the E-5 AWACS, Elliott still considered pulling McLanahan, but not because of Wendy. His near-fixation on evening it up with Maraklov had come perilously close to personal, and soldiers on a vendetta made poor fighters. Still, he was right; he was the best-qualified crewman for Cheetah, and only Cheetah could hope to take on DreamStar in air-to-air combat. The time to have the first team on the line was right now, when the chances of DreamStar leaving Nicaragua were most likely…
“All right, Patrick,” Elliott said. “Agreed, at least for now. Break. Kelvin, job well done to you and your crew. Radar shows your tail is clear. Climb to flight level two-six-zero. Your tanker is orbiting over Grand Cayman at two-seven-zero. Everyone okay?”
“Affirmative,” Carter replied on the scrambled UHF channel. “We’re beat but unhurt. We might have picked up some blast damage from the last run we did — we were a little close to the explosion when we dropped a Striker on the runway, and with our bay doors open we might have picked up some fuel leaks — but we should be able to recover in Dreamland. I’d like to have a tanker meet us over the CONUS in case we have a leaking aft body tank.”
“We’ll work on that for you right away,” Elliott said.
“While you’re at it,” Cheshire cut in, “maybe you can get us clearance to land in Georgetown for a few days.”
“I thought of that, Nancy,” Elliott replied, “but we had a little trouble convincing the government to let the F-16s, the KC-10s and the AWACS in — a Buff would have been out of the question. Besides, technically the Megafortress Plus is still classified. But we can arrange a short TDY for a debriefing, I think. Break. J.C., Patrick, any problems with Cheetah?”