Powerful electromagnetic waves gathered rapidly above the battlefield, at last becoming a mighty typhoon. After the war, people would reminisce: In the mountain villages far from the front line, they saw the animals fidget and stir, agitated; in the city with its enforced blackout, they saw induction trigger tiny sparks along the telephone wires.
As part of the Twelfth Army transferring from the eastern front to the west, the armored-car corps was advancing urgently. Their lieutenant general stood by his jeep parked at the roadside, watching his troops hasten through the snow and dust with satisfaction. The enemy’s air raids had been far less intense than predicted, allowing his forces to travel by day.
Three Tomahawk missiles tore overhead, the low buzz of their jet engines crisp in the air. A moment later, three explosions sounded in the distance. The correspondent by the lieutenant general’s side, his static-filled earpiece useless, turned to look in the direction of the explosion. He cried out in surprise. The general told him not to make a big deal out of nothing, but then a battalion commander beside him urged him to look, too. So he looked, and shook his head in confusion. Tomahawks weren’t 100 percent accurate, but for three to land in an empty field, more than a kilometer from each other, really was a rare sight.
Two Su-27s flew five kilometers above the battlefield in an empty sky. They had belonged to a larger fighter squadron, but it had run into a skirmish with a NATO F-22 squadron above the sea, and the planes lost contact with the others in the turmoil of battle. Normally, regrouping would have been easy, but now the radio was down. The airspace that had seemed so small as to be cramped to a high-speed fighter plane now seemed as vast as outer space. Regrouping would be like finding a needle in a haystack. The lead pilot and his wingman were forced to fly wingtip-to-wingtip like stunt fliers to hear each other’s wireless messages.
“Suspicious object to the upper left, azimuth 220, altitude 30!” the wingman reported. The lead pilot looked in that direction. The earlier snow had washed the winter sky clean and blue, and the visibility was excellent. The two planes ascended toward the target to investigate. It was flying in the same direction as them, but much slower, and it didn’t take long to catch up.
Their first good look at the target was a bolt out of the blue.
That was a NATO E-4A early-warning aircraft. For a fighter-plane pilot to encounter one was like seeing the back of their own head. An E-4A could monitor up to one million square kilometers, completing a full sweep in just five seconds. It could locate targets two thousand kilometers from the defensive area, providing more than forty minutes of advance notice. It could separate out up to a thousand EM signals within one thousand to two thousand kilometers, and each scan could query and identify two thousand targets of any kind, land, sky, or sea. An early-warning aircraft didn’t need the protection of escorts when its all-seeing eyes allowed it to easily avoid any threats.
That was why the lead pilot naturally assumed it was a trap. He and the wingman searched the surrounding sky carefully, but there was nothing in the cold, clear sky. The lead pilot decided to take a risk.
“Ball lightning, ball lightning, I’m going to attack. Guard azimuth 317, but be careful not to leave range of sight!”
Once his wingman flew in the direction he thought most likely for an ambush, he activated the afterburner and yanked at the controllers. Trailing black exhaust, the Su-27 lunged toward the early-warning aircraft above like a striking cobra. Now the E-4A discovered the approaching threat and turned to rush southeast in an escape maneuver. Magnesium heat pellets popped from its tail one after another to disrupt heat-seeking missiles, the trail of little fireballs looking like bits of its soul startled out of its mortal shell. An early-warning aircraft before a fighter plane was as helpless as a bicycle trying to outrun a motorbike. In that moment, the lead pilot decided that the order he’d given the wingman had turned out to be terribly selfish.
He followed the E-4A from above at a distance, admiring the prey he’d caught. The pale blue radar dome atop the E-4A was lovely in its curves, charming as a Christmas ornament; its broad white chassis was like a fat roast duck on its platter: so tempting, yet too lovely to violate with knife and fork. But instinct warned him not to drag this on any longer. He first fired a burst with the 20 mm cannon, shattering the radome, and watched scraps of the Westinghouse-made AN/ZPY-3 radar antenna scatter across the sky like silver Christmas confetti. He next severed a wing with the cannon, then at last lashed down the fatal blow with the 6,000 rpm double-barreled cannon, cutting the already tumbling and falling E-4A in two.
The Su-27 wheeled downward to follow the halves in their plunging descent. The pilot watched crew and equipment fall from the hold like chocolates from a box, a few parachutes blooming against the sky. He remembered the battle earlier, the sight of his comrade escaping from his hit plane: an F-22 had purposely flown low over the parachute, swooping past, three times, to knock it over. He’d watched as his comrade dropped like a stone, disappearing against the white backdrop of the ground.
He forced back the impulse to do something similar. Once he regrouped with his wingman, the pair abandoned the area at top speed.
They still suspected a trap.
The two weren’t the only aircraft separated from their unit. A Comanche armed attack helicopter from the US Army First Cavalry Division flew with no target in sight, but its pilot, Lieutenant Walker, felt a rush of adrenaline all the same. He’d transferred from an Apache to the Comanche recently, and had yet to adjust to this sort of attack helicopter with troop-carrying capabilities, an innovation from the end of the previous century. He was unaccustomed to the Comanche’s lack of foot pedals, and he thought the headset with its binocular helmet-mounted display wasn’t as comfortable to use as the Apache’s single sight. But most of all, he wasn’t used to Captain Haney, the forward director sitting in front of him.
“You need to know your place, Lieutenant,” Haney had told him the first time they met. “I’m the brain controlling this helicopter. You’re a cogwheel in its machinery, and you’re going to act like one!” And Walker hated nothing more than that.
He remembered the retired navy pilot who’d toured their base, a WWII vet pushing a hundred years old. He had shaken his head when he saw the Comanche’s cockpit. “Oh, you kids. My P-51 Mustang back in the day had a simpler control panel than a microwave today, and that was the finest control panel I ever used!” He patted Walker’s ass. “The difference between our generations of pilots is the difference between knights of the sky and computer operators.”
Walker had wanted to be a knight of the sky. Here was his opportunity. Under the Russians’ berserk jamming, the helicopter’s combat mission integration system, the target analysis system, the auxiliary target examination and classification system, the RealSight situation imager, the resource burst system, whatever, they were all fucking fried! All that was left was the two 1,000-horsepower T800 engines, still loyally churning away. Haney normally earned his spot with his electronic gewgaws, but now his incessant orders had gone silent with them.