“Good,” Wilk told him. “Then listen to me very closely. Poland has a debt of honor to the Iron Wolf soldiers and airmen aboard that aircraft. It is a debt I intend to pay. Is that clear?”
Reluctantly, Martindale nodded. “It is.”
“Very well, then,” Wilk said. “Then you will signal Major Rozek and Captain McLanahan to activate Passkey at the appropriate time.” He turned away from the American and picked up a secure phone. “Connect with me Colonel Kasperek at Ämari Air Base.”
When the Polish F-16 squadron commander came on the line, Wilk said, “Pawel, get your Vipers in the air at once! Wykonać Taran. Execute Battering Ram.”
“Time to effective engagement envelope for those S-300 and S-400 SAMs is now only sixty seconds,” Nadia reported, sounding frantic. Her fingers were a blur across her MFDs as she managed their defenses. “SPEAR is active, trying to engage and spoof the Russian radars. But there are too many of them! They are locking on too fast! And the systems I knock off-line are coming back on target very quickly — much more rapidly than they did last year when we bombed near Kaliningrad.”
“Understood,” Brad replied. Should he break left or right? he wondered. There sure as hell was no way he was going to fly straight down the throat of all those surface-to-air missile units.
“Warning, warning, enemy fighters at three o’clock through nine o’clock increasing speed and closing,” the Ranger said. “Multiple target-tracking radars detected.”
“Ah, hell.” Brad resisted the urge to just close his eyes and let the Ranger auger in. The Russians weren’t taking any chances. None at all. Between the Su-27s, Su-30s, and other fighters closing in from the flanks and rear and those SAMs out ahead, they were royally fucked.
Nadia’s left-hand MFD pinged, alerting them to the receipt of a satellite transmission. “Message reads: ‘Hold your course. Activate SPEAR Passkey subroutine,’” she said.
Puzzled, Brad asked, “Passkey? What the hell is that?”
“I do not know,” Nadia admitted. She leaned forward against her straps, rapidly paging through menus on the MFD she’d set to handle their primary defensive systems. She paused uncertainly, with her finger hovering over the screen. “Here it is. But there is no indication of what this subroutine does! Only an initiate button.”
“Warning, warning, multiple X-band Tombstone and Gravestone target tracking radars locked on,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “S-300 and S-400 missile launches imminent.”
“Just bring it up,” Brad said tightly. “Those Russian bastards are about to shoot. So whatever this Passkey thing does, it can’t make things any worse.”
Nadia tapped the button.
“New commands accepted. Transponders are set,” the computer said coolly. “Squawking Five-Zero-Five-Zero.”
“Jesus Christ!” Brad snarled, stunned. The Ranger’s transponders were part of its IFF, or identification, friend or foe, system. When interrogated by a radar, its transponder automatically sent back a code identifying the aircraft and reporting its current altitude. That was fine in friendly-controlled air space or when operating openly under civilian air-traffic control. But turning them on in enemy territory, in a combat situation, was just about as loco as painting the XCV-62 bright yellow and flying around in lazy, slow circles. What the hell was Martindale playing at? “Okay, scratch what I just said,” he growled. “Things just got worse.”
Major General Anatoliy Kaverin, commander of the 2nd Aerospace Defense Brigade, stood at ease in his command post. His eyes were fixed on the displays showing the developing engagement — images he knew were being simultaneously transmitted directly to President Gryzlov and his national security team. He felt confident. The radio chatter passing between his firing units and their associated radars was thoroughly calm and perfectly professional.
He smiled. This was a far cry from the clusterfuck that idiot Konrad Saratov had presided over last year in the Kaliningrad area. Whenever the fast-approaching Iron Wolf aircraft managed to blind or spoof one of his radars, the newly upgraded target identification and acquisition software provided by Dr. Obolensky’s lab at NNIIRT brought it back on line and on target within a few seconds. Besides that, the sheer number of systems he had radiating made it impossible for the mercenaries to deceive them all.
“Sir!” one of his staff officers said suddenly. “The enemy aircraft has turned on its transponders.”
Kaverin swung around toward him. “Is it using our IKS system?” he demanded. That was one possible trick he hadn’t considered. It wouldn’t matter in the end, since he could order their own fighters to back off and have his SAM units override the lockouts that would otherwise prevent them from firing on nominally friendly planes.
“Negative, General,” the younger man said, sounding puzzled. “It’s broadcasting an unassigned civilian code.”
“Maybe somebody aboard panicked,” Kaverin said with a shrug. He smiled coldly. “So now it’s that much easier to spot them, eh?”
Another staff officer interrupted. “Sir! Batteries Four through Eight report solid locks. The enemy is in range. They are ready to attack!”
“Commence firing,” Kaverin said calmly. This would be short and sweet.
What neither he nor anyone else in the 2nd Aerospace Defense Brigade knew was the “5050” code the Iron Wolf XCV-62 was squawking was the detonation trigger for a Scion-designed logic bomb buried inside their upgraded target identification and acquisition software. The difficult and dangerous covert work done by Samantha Kerr and her team in Nizhny Novgorod was about to pay off. Unseen by any of the humans who thought they were in control, lines of malicious code spooled through their battle-management systems… executing one simple identification change as each surface-to-air missile launched.
“Missile launch!” Nadia called out in a tight, strained tone. She tapped frantically at her displays, desperately trying to jam or spoof the missiles being fired at them. “I show multiple missile launches.”
Through the cockpit windows, Brad could see Russian surface-to-air missiles streaking aloft ahead of them, soaring skyward on pillars of fire and smoke. The incoming missiles curved toward them, closing fast as they accelerated toward Mach Six.
“Jesus,” he murmured. His hand froze on the stick. No combination of desperate maneuvers or chaff could dodge or decoy that many SAMs. He was basically out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas. There was time for only one thing. He turned toward Nadia. She stared back at him, with her beautiful blue-gray eyes full of unshed tears. “Kocham cię,” he said softly. “I love you.”
And then the first Russian missiles slashed right past them, still accelerating. The XCV-62 rocked wildly, buffeted by the wake of their passage.
“What the hell—” Brad blurted out. Miles behind them, explosions speckled the night sky. Those Russian SAMs were attacking their own fighters — knocking Su-27s, Su-30s, and Su-35s out of the air with contemptuous ease.
More smoke trails appeared along the western horizon, but these curved down toward the ground. Huge flashes rippled across the landscape, briefly turning night into day. Fires burned, glowing white-hot as they fed on missile propellant. In twos and threes, Russian radars and SAM launchers were destroyed — obliterated by the hundreds of bomblets packed inside each precision-guided AGM-154A Joint Standoff Weapon fired by Polish F-16s as they popped up off the deck.
Brad stared in amazement as icons filled his HUD, each indicating a Polish Viper squawking the same 5050 transponder code, a code that falsely identified them as friendly to the Scion-hacked Russian missile software. “Wolf Six-Two, this is Taran Lead,” he heard Colonel Pawel Kasperek say through his headset. “The gate is down. I repeat, the gate is down. Welcome home!”