Throttling back, he reduced his speed to 400 kilometers per hour and dove on the boat. On the first pass, he went by at thirty meters of altitude, the noise of his passage rocking the man standing on the bow. He grabbed for the bow rail and hung on for dear life. The boat slowed.
Metzenbaum dialed the international marine channel on his secondary Navigation/Communication radio.
He spoke in English. “Greenpeace boat, this is Major Metzenbaum of the German air force.”
There was no response.
“Greenpeace boat… ”
“What do you want, Major?” The voice was nasal, with just a twang of anxiety in it.
“You are cruising in restricted waters. You must turn back.”
“That’s damned nonsense, Major Whoever-you-are. We are in international waters, and we’ll go where we want to go.”
Metzenbaum circled wide to the south, climbing a few meters.
“Greenpeace boat, I inform you that you are in waters under control of the Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation. It is dangerous to go too close to the well. You must turn back immediately.”
“It’s a free sea,” the male voice told him.
Metzenbaum had only air-to-air missiles with him, but he was not going to hit anything, anyway, he hoped. With his rudder, he tightened his turn and lined up on the boat. Arming one of the Sky flashes, he dropped the nose of the Eurofighter until the cruiser appeared in the bottom left of the gun sight. He would not use the computer-targeting mode.
The fighter dove and closed rapidly on the boat, and Metzenbaum aimed fifty meters to the right of it, then pressed the commit button on the stick. The missile leapt from its guiding rail.
Flash of white-hot exhaust.
Plume of seawater.
Silent thump of explosion under the surface of the sea.
Another, taller plume erupted from the ocean.
“Jesus Christ! Hey, you son of a bitch! You’re shooting at us!”
“You must turn back now,” Metzenbaum said.
The cruiser went into a wide turn toward the south as Metzenbaum gained altitude and prepared for a long series of figure eights.
He called New Amsterdam on the squadron’s frequency. “Second Squadron, Panther Leader.”
“Go ahead, Panther Leader”
“Prepare to scramble Panthers Seven and Eight. They will need to relieve me in approximately forty minutes.”
Metzenbaum heard the klaxon sound over the open radio circuit.
It was eight o’clock at night, still very light over the Greenland Sea.
Delta Green had been circling at 40,000 feet, taking the high-altitude infrared shots that Pearson wanted, and waiting for the two fighters and the tanker to clear the area before making the pass at 5,000 feet. The WSO had picked them up much earlier on the 200-mile scan. He had then gone passive with the radar, and just now activated it for three sweeps.
“Well, shit!” Williams said. “The guy just fired a missile into the sea.”
Doing what we do to unsuspecting Super 18s, Dimatta thought. “No target?”
“None that I could see on the screen. I’ll go active in a minute for another sweep.”
A few minutes later, Williams told him, “The one on the deck is taking the lazy way back, Cancha. He’s flying figure eights, moving toward the south at around twenty knots. The tanker and the other fighter are now two-five-zero miles south of us.”
“Must be, he’s got a boat down there, Nitro.”
“We going to look?”
“Maybe just a quick peek.”
Dimatta pulled his throttles back and eased the hand controller forward. The nose of the MakoShark angled downward, and he put it in a wide left turn, spiraling downward.
Williams changed the range of the radar to the fifty-mile sweep, and the target appeared at the very edge of Dimatta’s CRT.
As they reached 8,000 feet, Dimatta began to level out and line up on the target. It was dead ahead on a heading of 188 degrees. It was forty-four miles away at 2,000 feet above the sea. The HUD readout showed his own speed at 600 knots.
The screen blanked out as Williams cut off the radar.
“We want to make the pass to our left,” Williams said. “That’ll put dark sky above us. We go in straight, he may get a visual.”
“Roger, Nitro.”
Dimatta made a shallow S-turn to the left.
“I’m staying passive,” Williams said, and the screen went to a direct visual. Dark seas, darkening skies.
Stealth aircraft, or no stealth aircraft, radar that actively sought targets — emitting signals — was detectable by opposing forces. The electronic countermeasures package aboard most military aircraft was capable of locating signals generated in most radar bands, from D to K. As they passed over the wells, they picked up a few chirps on the I-Band threat receiver from active radar operating from the wells. Williams squelched them out.
The threat receiver chattered.
“The German down there has a J-band,” Williams said. “May be a Foxhunter radar.”
“Tornado,” Dimatta said.
“Or Eurofighter. They’re supposed to have them, too.”
“Cancha do an IR check?”
“Coming up.”
Five miles away from the fighter, Williams did a quick infrared scan, picking up several heat sources. He fed them all to the computer.
“The airborne target has twin turbofans and a six-five percent chance of being a Eurofighter, Cancha. No read on the others. Behind us, we’re getting a couple of the wells. The small target to the south is probably a small boat.”
“He’s escorting it out of the area.”
“Good bet.”
“How badly do we want to know details, Nitro?”
“Amy’ll want to know all about it.”
“Okay,” Dimatta said. “I’m going to turn right onto the target. You go full mag on visual.”
“Roger. Go two-six-zero. Let’s take it down some.” Dimatta turned right until the HUD gave him 260 degrees. He bled off power and the MakoShark began to descend.
The cruiser had its running lights on, and Dimatta easily picked it out of the gloom that was magnified twenty-five times on the screen. Between the fore and aft lights, however, was a grayish white blob.
The HUD showed him at 3,000 feet.
“Where’s that German?” Dimatta asked.
“Damned if I know. I’ll put IR on the small screen… Okay, got him still at two thousand, six miles at bearing three-four-one.”
That put him on Dimatta’s right.
“Soon as we get an ID, Nitro, I’m climbing out of here to the left.”
“Chicken.”
The cruiser grew rapidly on the screen.
“Got it!” Williams said. “Hit it, Cancha!”
Dimatta advanced his throttles and started a climbing left turn.
“Greenpeace, was it?” Dimatta asked.
“Yeah. I’ve got it on tape.”
Dimatta pressed the transmit button on the hand controller. “Alpha One, Delta Green.”
“Delta Green, Alpha reading.” It was Overton’s voice. “Alpha, we had a visual on a Greenpeace boat being run out of the target area. We suspect that it was fired on by a Eurofighter.”
“Green, you have a description of the boat?”
Williams broke in. “Estimate forty feet, probably wood, white with large letters spelling Greenpeace along the hull. Current position seven-seven-degrees, nine-minutes north, four-degrees, three-minutes east.”
“Roger, Delta Green. Well see if someone from NATO or the CIA can’t run them down and talk to them. Alpha out.”
On the intercom, Dimatta said, “If that boat captain took a missile off the bow, he’s probably running damned scared.”