HIGH TERRAIN, HIGH TERRAIN! Sharon cried into the intercom. Mauer yanked back on the stick to crest a sharply rising razorback ridgeline directly ahead. Jesus, this was nuts—trying to concentrate on the pursuit while dodging hills and ridges was going to get him killed. But as soon as he lowered the nose again, the bandit was dead in his sights, straight ahead.
“Arm Sidewinder,” Mauer ordered. “Open weapon doors.”
ROGER, AIM-9 ARMED, WARNING, MISSILE ARMED… WARNING, WEAPON DOORS OPENING. As soon as the door opened, the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile’s seeker head slaved to the attack computer’s steering signal, saw the hot dot from the bandit’s exhaust, and locked onto it, matching its seeker azimuth exactly with the attack computer’s target bearing, AIM-9 LOCKED ON, Sharon reported.
“AIM-9 shoot,” Mauer ordered.
AIM-9 SHOOT, AIM-9 SHOOT, AIM-9 AWAY. The smaller, faster Sidewinder fired from the weapons bay in a flash, wobbled a bit as it stabilized itself in the air, then homed straight and true…
Flares! Mauer saw them immediately — a line of white dots hanging in the sky, hot and very bright even over six miles away. The radar-lock square jutted sharply left as the bandit made its customary first left break, but the decoy flares hung in the sky straight ahead for several seconds before winking out. The Sidewinder wobbled as if it were trying to decide between locking onto the decoys or turning to chase the bomber. It decided on the decoys, then changed its mind as the decoys began to extinguish. But just as it made a sharp left turn to pursue, the bomber ejected more flares and jinked right, and the Sidewinder locked solidly on the new, brighter, closer decoys and would not let go. The Sidewinder exploded harmlessly a full five miles behind the bomber.
One missile to go, Mauer reminded himself, as he turned to pursue. He had closed to within four miles of the bandit, and now he was straining hard to see what in hell it was. The virtual display made it easy to focus on where the target was, no matter which way it jinked. It was small, probably an F-16, judging by its size and its maneuverability, or maybe some experimental job…
A cruise missile! Mauer got a good look at it as it made another hard right turn, heading right for the airfield — a goddamn cruise missile! No wonder it was so maneuverable — there was no pilot on board to get knocked unconscious by hard G turns. It was the first cruise missile he had ever heard of that ejected decoy flares, could obviously detect enemy fighters’ and missiles’ radars, and could attack multiple targets and even reattack targets it missed the first time around! It was a little bit bigger than a Tomahawk or standard Air-Launched Cruise Missile, but it had no wings — it was almost like a big fat flying surfboard. When it was straight and level, it was almost impossible to see.
“One-One, bogeydope,” Mills radioed.
“One-One has a single cruise missile, and it’s haulin’ ass,” Mauer said, grunting against the G-forces as he turned hard left again to stay behind the missile. “I got one heater left. C’mon in and nail this bastard if my last shot misses.” The time for being macho was over, Mauer thought— this cruise missile had beat him pretty good, and it looked as if it was going to take both of the F-22s working together to nail it.
“One-Two has a judy.”
“Take the shot,” Mauer said. “I’ll try to nail it in the ass while you shoot it in the face.”
Mills didn’t reply — she let her AMRAAMs do the talking. The JTIDS datalink showed Mills launching her first AIM-120, followed by her second AMRAAM five seconds later. The cruise missile made its usual left break — Mauer was close enough now to see that it was ejecting chaff decoys, trying to get the radar-guided missile to lock onto the tinsel-like chaff! But Mauer anticipated that left break, and at the exact right moment, Mauer launched his last Sidewinder, then began a right turning climb to clear the area. The Sidewinder would get a good, solid look at the missile’s entire profile, and it couldn’t miss.
But as he turned, he looked to the west and saw three bright explosions and another cloud of smoke — the airfield was hit, this time with some kind of binary weapon, a fuel-air explosive or a chemical weapon. No one was going to be landing or taking off from that airfield for a long, long time.
Mauer got visual contact on Mills’s F-22 high and heading in the opposite direction. Just as he began his climbing left turn to join up, he heard Mills report, “Splash one bandit — but I think he got the Patriot site and the airfield first.”
Good job, Scottie, Mauer told himself angrily — the F-22 Lightning, the best fighter ever to leave the ground, beat out by a robot plane. Shit, shit, shit!
He saw Mills wag her F-22’s tail back and forth, clearing him into right fingertip formation. Might as well let Andrea lead for a while until he got his composure back, he was too angry right now to make any decisions as flight lead.
Just then, Mauer’s heads-down display blinked — another inbound bandit had been detected by the AWACS. Mills rocked her wings up and down, the signal to move out to combat spread formation to get set up for the intercept, then started a thirty-degree bank turn to the left toward the new bandit. She was the only one with missiles now, Mauer thought forlornly, so he slid out to wide-line-abreast formation and got ready to back up his leader on this intercept. He was backup now, he thought, just backup. The bad guys were three for fucking three…
“Three for three, General,” Patrick McLanahan said matter-of- factly. “The Wolverine autonomously located four preprogrammed targets, attacked three, reattacked one, and was on its way to nail the fourth one before the F-22s got it. Pretty good hunting, I’d say.”
“Unbelievable,” Samson finally muttered. “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Even in the EB-52B Megafortress bombers wide cockpit, Lieutenant General Terrill Samson’s big frame barely seemed to fit — his shoulders were slightly slumped, his knees high up on the instrument panel. Terrill “Earthmover” Samson, a former B-52 and B-1B bomber pilot and wing commander, was commander of U.S. Air Force’s Eighth Air Force, in charge of training and equipping all of the Air Force’s heavy and medium bomber units. The Air Force general was in the modified B-52 s left seat, piloting the experimental bomber. Copiloting the EB-52 Megafortress was Air Force Colonel Kelvin Carter, a veteran bomber pilot and a former EB-52 test pilot at HAWC, the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center. Retired Air Force Colonel Patrick McLanahan was seated behind and to the right of Samson in the aft section of the upper crew compartment in the OSO, or offensive systems officer’s, console, and to McLanahan’s left in the DSO’s, or defensive systems officers, seat was Dr. Jon Masters, president of a small high-tech satellite and weapons contractor from Arkansas.
The EB-52B Megafortress was a radically modified B-52 bomber, changed so extensively from tip to tail that now its size was the only sure point of comparison. It had a long, pointed, streamlined nose that smoothly melded into sharply raked cockpit windows and a thin, glass- smooth fuselage. Unlike a line B-52, the Megafortress’s wingtips did not curl upward while in flight — the plane’s all-composite fibersteel skeleton and skin, as strong as steel but many times lighter, maintained an aerodynamically perfect airfoil no matter how heavily it was loaded or what flight condition it was in. A long, low, canoe-shaped fairing sat atop the fuselage, housing long-range surveillance radars for scanning the sea, land, or skies for enemy targets in all directions, as well as active laser anti-missile countermeasures equipment and communications antennae. The large vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the tail were replaced by low, curving V-shaped ruddervators. A large aft-facing radar mounted between the ruddervators searched and tracked enemy targets in the rear quadrant; and instead of a 20-millimeter Gatling tail gun, the Megafortress had a single long cannon muzzle that looked far more sinister, far more deadly, than any machine gun. The cannon fired small guided missiles, called “airmines,” that would fly toward an oncoming enemy fighter, then explode and scatter thousands of BB-like titanium projectiles directly in the fighter’s flight path, shelling jet engines and piercing thin aircraft skin or cockpit canopies.