“Doctor, to my knowledge, no one in Kazakov’s employ has ever been killed without good reason — they were killed either for disloyalty or incompetence,” Yegorov said. “Kazakov is generous and loyal to those who are loyal to him. I told you before, Ion was unstable, unreliable, and taking unnecessary risks. He was a danger to Kazakov’s organization, and he had to be eliminated. Ion was my friend and longtime colleague, but under the circumstances, I agree with Comrade Kazakov — he had to be eliminated. And if there was any other way Ion could have been retired without blabbing his drunken mouth off to the world about what we’d done, I’d be angry about how he died. But he brought it on himself.
“I will not let that happen to us,” Yegorov said, impaling Fursenko with a stem gaze through the rearview mirror. “We are going to accomplish this mission successfully, and then return home, and get ready to fly and fight again. If we did any less, we’d deserve to die ourselves.”
There was simply no arguing with Gennadi Yegorov. Fursenko was stunned. This intelligent, soft-spoken pilot and engineer had turned into some kind of mindless killing machine. Was it the money? The power? The thrill of the hunt and the kill? Whatever it was, Yegorov was not going to be deterred.
There was no more time to think about it, because the last target complex was coming up. Yegorov had Fursenko configure the release switches and pre-arm the last two remaining Kh-73 laser-guided bombs several minutes before the bomb-run initial point. His trigger was hot. Once IP inbound, Fursenko extended the imaging infrared scanner and laser designator and began searching for the last set of targets.
It was easy to find — because the Metyorgaz oil tanker Ustinov was one of the world’s largest vessels. Surrounded by Turkish military vessels and a second tanker, to which the last five hundred thousand barrels of oil left in its holds was being transferred, the cluster of ships made a very inviting target.
“There’s the Ustinov, “Yegorov said, as he looked carefully into his targeting monitor. “The navigation system is dead on, just like over Tirane. Remember, we release on the Ustinov first. We’ll probably lose it in the fireball, but we have to keep aiming as long as we can. If we miss the Ustinov, we’ll drop the second Kh-73 on it. If we hit the first time, we’ll shift aim to either the Turkish tanker or that big Turkish frigate nearby.” He actually laughed. “This’ll teach the Turks to take something that doesn’t belong to them! Get ready, Doctor.”
The bomb run was short and quick. There were enemy aircraft nearby, but they were patrolling farther north and east, probably to protect against any attack aircraft coming from Russia. The Turkish frigate was scanning the skies with its air search radar, but with the external pylons jettisoned long ago, the Mt-179 was too stealthy to be picked up by it. By the time it flew close enough to be detected, the bombs would already be in the air. One bomb would certainly be enough to send the Ustinov to the bottom, and the explosion would probably destroy the Turkish tanker and severely damage any nearby vessels, too — the second bomb would ensure complete and total devastation. Half the oil from the Ustinov was already offloaded, but spilling half a million barrels of crude oil into the Black Sea would certainly qualify as the world’s biggest oil spill, more than double the size of the enormous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
The white computer targeting square was dead on the tanker. Yegorov had Fursenko move the pipper slightly so it centered on the very center of the middle hold, the structurally weakest point on the upper deck and also one of the empty holds. The bomb detonating inside an empty hold would ignite the petroleum vapors and quadruple the size of the blast, which would certainly rip the tanker into pieces and create the enormous spill they wanted. Yegorov had already had Fursenko set up the secondary target pipper on the Turkish frigate, although he wouldn’t switch targeting away from the Ustinov until they were sure it was holed.
Switches configured, final release checks accomplished, Fursenko opened the inwardly-opening bomb doors, and the first Kh-73 bomb dropped into space. “Bomb doors closed! Laser on!” Yegorov commanded. Fursenko activated the laser designator and received a good steering signal from the weapon. “Data good, laser off.” They only needed to turn the laser on for a few seconds after release to give the bomb its initial course, then for ten seconds before impact to give it its terminal steering. The pipper stayed locked on target. Everything was going perfectly, just like Tirane. Everything was—
DEEDLE DEEDLE DEEDLE! they heard from the threat warning receiver — an enemy radar had just locked on to them. It was the Turkish frigate’s air search radar. Yegorov started a shallow turn away from the ship, careful not to turn too suddenly so as to break the laser’s aim. Yegorov wondered about the warning, but soon dismissed it. The frigate might be trying to lock on to the bomb, he thought — the Kh-73 one-thousand kilogram bomb probably had ten times the radar cross-section of the Metyor-179 stealth fighter ‘right now. No problem. The bomb was tracking perfectly.
Ten seconds to impact. “Laser on!” Yegorov shouted. He immediately received another “data good” signal from the bomb. Nothing could stop it now….
“Contact!” Duane Deverill shouted. “Annie, come thirty left now!” He keyed the voice command button on his target tracking joystick and ordered, “Attack target two with two Anacondas!”
“Attack command two Anacondas, stop attack … bomb doors open, missile one away … launcher rotating, stop attack … missile two away … doors closed, launcher rotating,” the computer replied, and it fired two AIM-152 Anaconda long-range air-to-air missiles from twenty-three miles away. The missile’s first-stage motors accelerated the big weapon to twice the speed of sound, and then the missile’s scramjet engine kicked in, accelerating it well past five times the speed of sound in seconds. Traveling at a speed of over a mile per second, the Anaconda missile closed the gap in moments.
Steered by its own onboard radar, the missile arrived at a point in space just two hundred feet above the tanker Ustinov, then detonated — at the exact moment the Kh-73 laser-guided bomb arrived at the exact spot. There was a massive fireball above the tanker, like a gigantic flashbulb popping in the night, that froze everything within a mile in the strobelike glare. The Anaconda missile’s sixty-three-pound warhead split the big Kh-73 into several pieces before it exploded, so the size of the fireball wasn’t enough to do much damage to the tanker except cook some paint and blow out every window not already destroyed on its superstructure.
“Any aircraft on this frequency, any aircraft on this frequency, this is Aces One-Niner,” Deverill radioed on 243.0 megahertz, the international UHF emergency frequency, as he studied his supercockpit display, “I have an unidentified aircraft one-seven miles northwest of Eregli at thirty-one thousand feet, heading south in a slow right turn.” He was aboard an EB-1C Megafortress Two bomber, flying high over the Black Sea about thirty miles north of the Turkish naval base at Eregli. He had been scanning the area with the Megafortress’s laser radar all evening, but had detected nothing until seconds before the bomb came hurtling down from the sky toward the Russian tanker. “Just a friendly advisory. Thought someone would like to know.”
“Aces One-Niner, this is Stalker One-Zero, we read you loud and clear,” David Luger replied. Luger was aboard the Sky Masters Inc.’s DC-10 launch-and-control aircraft, orbiting not far from the EB-1C Megafortress at a different altitude. He, too, had been scanning the skies with a laser radar mounted aboard the DC-10, and he had detected the unidentified aircraft and the falling bomb at the same instant. “You might want to contact Eregli approach on two-seven-five-point-three. Thanks, guys.”