During the two-hour flight to their initial point, Stoica and Yegorov busied themselves with checklists and updating their intelligence information. The Mt-179 did not have a datalink system that automatically updated their attack computers, as many American and some Western attack aircraft did. Instead, ground technicians sent simple coded messages on a discreet, scrambled satellite communications channel. The ground controllers received information from commercial photoreconnaissance satellites, military communications taps from Zhukovsky and other military sources that they could access, and even news reports on television and on the Internet, then encoded the information and transmitted it to the crew. The two crew members decoded the messages, then made notes and symbols on their strip charts.
Near Cluj, Romania, the flight control computer commanded Stoica to pull the throttles nearly all the way back to flight idle to save fuel, and the Mt-179 Shadow started a shallow descent from about thirty-six thousand feet. In idle power, the cockpit was very quiet. The two crew members finished their checklists, took one last nervous pee into piddle packs, tightened their restraining harnesses and lap belts, and refastened oxygen masks and donned fireproof gloves. The action was about to begin.
The last item on the checklist: Stoica reached back over his right shoulder as far as he could, and Yegorov reached forward and clasped his hand. No words were necessary. That was a tradition they’d started from the first day working together on the Metyor-179 stealth aircraft.
But then, they’d done it before every test flight; now, it was to say “good luck” on their first strike mission.
As they crossed western Bulgaria and into Macedonia, the radar warning receiver in the cockpit of the Metyor-179 bleeped — but instead of the usual ground-radar S symbol, they saw a “bat-wing” symbol with a circle inside it. “NATO AWACS radar plane, eleven o’clock, range forty miles,” Yegorov reported. “We’re coming into extreme detection range now.”
“Here we go,” Stoica said. “Prepare for attack.” From its vantage point thirty miles east of Skopje, Macedonia, at thirty thousand feet, the NATO E-3A Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) radar aircraft, using its powerful AN/APY-2 radar mounted within the thirty-foot rotodome atop its fuselage, could see any normal aircraft flying inside Yugoslavia at any altitude and airspeed, as well as monitor aircraft flying in most of western Bulgaria, Bosnia, parts of Croatia, most of northern Greece, and parts of northern Italy.
Although the Mt-179 was not a normal aircraft, Russian stealth technology such as was employed on the Metyor-179 Shadow was not perfect, and the closer they got to central Macedonia, the closer they got to the E-3 AWACS radar plane. Soon, the radar warning receiver was bleeping almost continuously. They did not want to waste fuel trying to circumnavigate the radar craft, and they would waste even more fuel trying to duck down to low altitude too soon.
But they were carrying the solution — the R-60 defensive heat-seeking air-to-air missiles.
“Acknowledged. R-60s ready for launch,” Yegorov reported. Stoica pushed the power up until the Mt-179 had broken the sound barrier. Two minutes later, Yegorov said, “Coming in to extreme launch range. Ready to uncage.”
“Uncage missiles,” Stoica ordered. Yegorov hit a switch, which opened up a tiny titanium shutter in the wing leading edge, uncovering the R-60’s heat-seeking sensor. His mouth and throat were dry and his forehead damp from the anticipation. In all his years flying for the Russian and Romanian Air Forces, he had never fired an air-to-air missile in anger — now, as a civilian, he was about to shoot down one of the biggest, most important support aircraft in the NATO arsenal. A few moments later, they received a SHOOT warning light. “Clear for launch,” Stoica said.
“Ready, ready, now.” Yegorov hit the launch command button, and an R-60 missile leaped out of the left-wing launch chamber. Seconds later, Yegorov fired a second missile from the right. “Two missiles away. Bye-bye, Mr. AWACS plane.”
“O-1, this is C-1,” the senior controller called on the ship’s intercom. “We’ve got an intermittent unknown target bearing zero-two-zero, range twenty miles, no altitude. Request permission for beam-sharpening mode.”
The operations crew commander of the sixteen-person NATO AWACS crew, a British Royal Air Force colonel, called up the senior controller’s display on his own station. The radar sometimes couldn’t see small or weak targets very well until they switched from long-range scan to short-range but high-intensity beam-sharpening mode, which concentrated more energy on weaker targets. “Clear,” the commander radioed back. “Crew, radar in narrow BIM, reconfigure.” The rest of the crew needed to know when the radar was going to be switching modes because they could be flooded with targets in seconds — everything from birds to clouds to balloons could show on radar now, until the computer “squelched” out slow-moving targets.
The unknown target immediately popped into clear view. “Contact, bearing zero-one-five, range nineteen miles, descending through angels twenty, airspeed six-five-zero knots, negative IFF, designate as Hostile One. Hostile contact, crew.”
“Can we get some patrol aircraft up here to take a look?” the deputy commander, seated beside the commander on the first console, asked.
“Patrol aircraft? What patrol aircraft?” the commander said. “Our patrols packed up their kits and departed. Thanks to the Americans, we have no air patrols over KFOR anymore.”
It was true. A month earlier, President Thorn of the United States had announced that the United States was pulling its ground and air forces out of KFOR and sending them home. The only American forces in southern Europe right now were Air Force E-3C AWACS radar planes, E-8A Joint STARS (Joint Surveillance, Targeting, and Reconnaissance System) radar planes, and a Navy-Marine Corps task force off the coast of Croatia in the Adriatic Ocean, plus the Sixth Fleet still operating in the Mediterranean Sea. All other air and ground forces, including almost ten thousand troops in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro, along with five thousand troops in Bosnia, were gone …
… and not just out of the Balkans, and not just back in the United States, but gone: the units had been disbanded, and the soldiers reassigned, offered early retirements, or involuntarily separated from military service.
The United States was in the midst of a massive demilitarization never seen before. Troops were being pulled out of Europe and Asia in staggering numbers. Billions of dollars in military equipment was being sold, given to allied forces, or simply left in place. Virtually overnight, American military bases in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway were empty. Military and civilian cargo vessels were lined up in harbors all throughout Europe, ready to transport thousands of troops and millions of tons of supplies and belongings back to North America.