“We’re going in Nap-Of-The-Earth — sorry Wordly,” she said in an aside that produced general chuckles. “Set your terrain-following gear to hard. And we’ll go in one at a time. When the point bird is lost the next in line will follow. Hopefully they will be able to avoid whatever took him out. The alternative, throwing everyone in en masse, is suicide. None of the data we have indicates that we can overwhelm the Posleen systems.”
Augusta was getting distracted by Kerman. Whatever the origami was that he was working on, the sound of the folding was interspersed across her words. And she was trying in the back of her mind to remember what the song was that he was whistling. She thought she recognized it, but she couldn’t figure out from where.
“Eventually we are going to get a complete look at the Posleen-controlled area or we’ll run out of planes, take your pick. We’ll be continuously uplinking the take from all of our sensors, but we are going in black otherwise. We’ll have to depend on our low-light gear and IR lidar for terrain avoidance and data. I realize how badly the Army needs intel, but the only way to get it is if we can survive the penetration.” There was a snort of disbelief at this last suggestion. She thought it was Kerman, who seemed to have almost completed his complicated origami.
Augusta agreed that surviving this mission would be unlikely. However, they had all signed on the dotted line and raised their hands to swear. She still intended to give them a chance to back out.
“Once we are in the basket, into the actual Fredericksburg area, I intend to go full active so we can get the max information possible.” There had been some fidgeting and quiet conversation before she said that. When the words were said, the room dropped to total silence.
“Because of the threat and the fact that we are forced to go active on sensors, I personally do not expect to come back. Given that fact, anyone who wants to bow out can do so.” She paused and waited for someone to get to their feet. Surprisingly, nobody did. She looked pointedly at Kerman but the older pilot just smiled quietly and kept whistling.
“Okay, with the exception of the first run, we’ll draw lots for the order. Oh, and we’re going in loaded for ground attack. If you find a juicy target, there’s no reason not to pickle the bastard.”
“So, who takes the first run?” asked Kerman, slipping on a set of jet-black aviator’s shades and popping the origami to full size with a flick of the wrist. He obviously felt that as the aviator with the most experience at this sort of flying it should be him.
“Who do you think, Captain Kerman?”
When the last lingering pilot had quit the room, the origami of a mushroom cloud was left to flutter in the breeze from the air-conditioning.
At over twelve-hundred knots the darkened trees to either side of the river were a blur of gray, even when she was fully conscious. With a setting of hard on the terrain-following gear, the plane was no longer adjusting itself for human physiology. The only thing that mattered to it was the plane’s survivability. Between thrust-vector technology, super-cruise ability and the craft’s robust airframe design Colonel Sherman was taking regular hits of over sixteen Gs.
Between her gray- and red-outs she could see bars of silver and red flashing by on either side. At first she put it down to optical illusions from the pounding she was taking, but then she realized what it really was.
“Base, this is Tigershark 1,” she gasped. “Are you copying this fire, over?”
“Roger, Tigershark 1. You hanging in there?”
“Negative, Base, I’m fading in and oooooooh shiiit.” She broke off.
“Sorry, Base,” she continued after a moment. “There was a lift by Rufin’s Pond.”
“Hang in there, Tigershark. You’re beyond where the Kiowas took it in the ass.”
“Roger, Base. Fire picking up now, there’s… damn.” She tapped a command into the low-light TV camera. “There’s Posleen packed onto 17 headed into town. Fredericksburg must still be holding out.”
The TV revealed masses of the centaurs headed north on U.S. 17 in brief flashes through the trees. The God King’s systems were thwarted by the same trees; the plasma, flechettes and lasers attenuated just enough that the Peregrine continued its remarkable survival.
“Coming up on Fredericksburg, now,” she continued, pointing the camera forward again. “Got some tracers, they must still be fighting in there. I’m gonna give them a little room. Don’t want to kill anybody with the sonic boom.” She touched a series of controls and the plane made a hard bank across the Posleen mass on 17. To survive the moment, the bank took her to over twenty Gs and she blacked out despite crunching as hard as she could. The blackout was only momentary, nor did she succumb to the complete loss of blood to the brain that pilots call the “funky chicken.” She was back in action in moments. In that time, however, she had flashed across over three miles and was coming up on Concord Heights too fast to target the next likely attack point.
“They’re solid on U.S. 1, too,” she continued as she recovered. “I guess they’re pressing them back into town. Heading for the I-95 interchange and going active now.”
It was one of the few required tasks laid on the mission, and one she was certain was going to be her last. Once she crossed into the interchange of I-95 and VA 3 she would be in the open, radiating in multiple spectrums, and that was a deathtrap. She finally understood how the Japanese kamikazes felt. She made a series of adjustments to the weapons controls.
The F-22E Peregrine variant hosted a number of instruments the original F-22 designers would never expect would someday be standard equipment. The plane was originally conceived and designed, in the days of the Global Positioning System, as an air superiority fighter. If there was a ground autotargeting system to be installed, it would naturally be based on the GPS.
However, since the designers modifying the F-22 into a ground-attack variant recognized that there were not going to be any satellites, period, they had to come up with other measures. Eventually they fell back on three old but proven technologies.
First, the Peregrine could fix its position fairly well on the basis of inertial guidance. Given that it knew where it took off from, sensitive devices measured every direction vector on the craft and, on the basis of calculating all of those various vectors, could determine its current location with fair accuracy. It was ’60s technology, but with more sophisticated computers, software and sensors, its degree of accuracy far exceeded any previous system. However, the farther the plane went from its starting point, called an IP, the larger the degree of inaccuracy. This was especially true when the plane was performing excessive maneuvers such as max thrusters on a hard terrain setting.
Second, the plane could “look” at the terrain and match it to a computerized map in its memory. A system originally developed for the much slower Tomahawk cruise missile, with modern computers, radar and software it was more than capable of taking terrain reads at twelve hundred knots. The terrain reads were primarily used to adjust the data from the inertial guidance system, correcting it as it got farther and farther off baseline. Thus, if the terrain was good the inertial guidance became much more accurate.
Last, the plane could fix its position in two dimensions quite well off LORAN radio direction finding.
So when Colonel Sherman programmed all of her cluster bombs to land just east of the 95/3 interchange, she could be fairly certain that that was where they were going to land. All she had to do was live long enough to give the drop command. She had to ensure that the CBU-58s would land on Posleen and not human defenders.