William H. Lovejoy
Delta Blue
As always, for Jane, Jodi, and David,
and for Miss Ethel Turpin, stern high school English teacher who taught the first, most difficult rule of writing: Apply butt to chair.
One
Above the canopy was utter blackness.
There was no moon, and the skies were overcast. Not even starshine for orientation.
A perfect night.
Below, on McKenna’s far left, was a smattering of lights. Bernburg, probably, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the peripheral towns. The lights of a few boats sketched the course of the Saale River.
Directly ahead of him, the red digital numerals of the Heads Up Display floated in space and registered in his mind. Altitude, 1,150 feet. Heading, 012 degrees. Speed, 650 knots. The tailpipe and skin temperatures were low. The bird was coasting.
The instrument panel below provided readouts in blue digital numerals and letters, many of them duplicates of what appeared on the HUD. Centered in the panel was the eight-inch cathode ray tube that repeated the imaging mode selected by the WSO, the weapons system operator in the back seat of the tandem cockpit. The screen had direct visual, map overlay, radar, infrared, and night-vision capability and currently was displaying the pale green images picked up by the night-sight lens mounted in the nose. The lens multiplied ambient light 40,000 times and provided them with a view of the ground that was almost as good as daylight.
At that altitude and speed, however, McKenna couldn’t see much more on the screen than a set of dark and light green, irregular checkerboard squares. The yard lights of farmhouses were bright dots flashing past. Thick mottled green forests were splashed about. The terrain features, less than 500 feet below, disappeared from the camera’s sight almost as soon as they appeared. Occasionally, forested hills seemed to close in on him, but he didn’t do anything about it.
The WSO was in control.
McKenna had flipped up the visor of his helmet and was enjoying every breath he took. The tangy taste of the oxygen/nitrogen mix of the life-support system got old after a while.
Tony Munoz’s voice came over the open intercom. “Got a one-five-hundred hill on your right, Snake Eyes. You wanna take her left a couple points or splash it?”
“Gotcha, Tiger.”
McKenna saw the hilltop coming up fast on the screen, and he nudged the hand controller to the left as he toed in some corresponding left rudder. When the heading on his HUD went to 010, he leveled out.
“Right on,” Munoz said.
The pilot’s seat in the MakoShark was a semi-reclining lounge with four-way adjustable armrests on which his forearms rested. Near his left hand were the short throttle levers, and above them, the switch panels related to engine, radio, and environmental control. On his right were the armaments, electronics, trim, flaps, and landing-gear control panels. Aft of the panels on both sides of the cockpit, more awkward to reach, were the less frequently used control panels and circuit breakers. Aircraft attitude was directed from the stubby, ergonomically designed handle that fit smoothly into the palm of his hand. If he released it, it stayed in the position in which he left it. To the right of the hand controller was a slanted keypad for entering numeric commands into the on-board computers. One of those commands was McKenna’s personal code adjusting the resistance and movement of the controller to his own taste. Learning to fly with the hand controller had taken McKenna a few months. He had not liked giving up the stick control of F-15s, F-104s, and the other supersonics he flew.
Not at first. Now, he couldn’t imagine going back to primitive methods.
The rearview screen — a four-inch CRT to the left of the main screen — came to life at Munoz’s command, showing a green landscape receding rapidly into verdant nothingness. The MakoShark’s configuration didn’t provide the pilot and backseater with much vision to the rear, and a camera lens with direct visual, infrared, and night-vision capability was mounted in the tail.
“IP in thirty seconds, Snake Eyes.”
“IP in thirty.”
The Initial Point was the landmark on which the bomb run was calculated.
“Arm ’em, amigo.”
McKenna raised his hand to the armaments panel, dialed in “BOMB LOAD” on the selector, raised the protective plastic flap, and flipped the switch up.
“Armed, Tiger. Your choice on number.”
“Roger. I need four-zero-zero airspeed and nine-five-zero altitude.”
“Roger, four-zero-zero and nine-five-zero.”
McKenna gripped the two in-board throttle levers for the turbo/ram jet engines and began to ease them back, watching the HUD readout. He deployed 20 percent speed brakes and tipped the nose downward. When he had Munoz’s speed and altitude, he pulled in the speed brakes.
The ground images accelerated their own speed on the screen as the MakoShark dropped to 400 feet above the earth.
“IP comin’ up.”
The IP was a small town called Köthen, a couple miles south of the Elbe River. At three in the morning in Germany, there were only a half-dozen lights showing as they shot overhead. Throttled back, the MakoShark’s noise level was minimal, and the inhabitants of the village probably would not even hear them.
Any villager standing outside his house, testing the weather, might hear a windy whoosh!, but he certainly wouldn’t see them.
“IP… mark!” Munoz chanted.
Five seconds later, the backseater said, “Bomb bay doors, Snake Eyes.”
Anticipating the instruction, McKenna had the flap raised and his thumb poised. He flipped the toggle and had a green LED a half-second later.
“Doors clear,” McKenna said.
“Come to zero-one-nine.”
McKenna rolled into the new heading.
He watched the CRT. A transparent orange bomb sight circle with a vertical cross in it had appeared at the top of the screen. Its movement on the screen was directed by either Munoz’s hand controller or the movement of his helmet, whichever mode he selected. In necessary situations, the weapons targeting could also be accomplished by the pilot in a similar fashion.
“Five seconds to target,” Munoz said.
Munoz increased the telephoto range of the camera lens and the river immediately came into view. The banks were heavily forested.
“Son of a bitch!” Munoz said. “Pearson was right.”
“She usually is,” McKenna told him.
Four long convoys of barges and towboats were moving northward on the Elbe, with no running lights showing.
The bomb circle on the screen jumped around until Munoz centered it on a copse of woods lining the southern bank. Orange letters suddenly appeared in the upper-right screen: “LOCK ON.”
Munoz had turned the control over to the computer, then committed the drop. No matter what McKenna did with the craft now, the computer would instantly recalculate the bomb release point.
The release came four seconds later.
McKenna did not feel much of a change in the MakoShark as the two canisters dropped out of the bay. He flicked his eyes to the rearview screen and saw the parachutes popping open before they disappeared from the screen. Each of the canisters appeared to be a thick juniper bush and would disappear nicely into the foliage. They would float toward the earth until, at 100 feet above the ground, small explosive bolts released the vaporous parachute and allowed them to drift downwind.
“Hard left, Snake Eyes. Come to three-four-five.”
“Roger.”
As they sailed over the river, and the darkened strings of barges, the MakoShark turned to follow the river, drifting over the northern bank. Against the lighter surface of the river, McKenna saw the dark shadows of men moving aboard the tugboats, but not one of them appeared to notice the MakoShark as it passed overhead.