Dale Brown - Dale Brown's Dreamland 04 - Piranha(and Jim DeFelice)(2003) (19 page)

 
          
“Missiles
in the air! Sukhois are firing—AGMs—ship missiles, I mean. Shit!”

 
          
Dreamland Command

 
          
August
22, 1997, 2358 local (August 23, 1997, 1458 Philippines)

 
          
“PACCOM
wants to talk, sir,” said the lieutenant just as Dog was going to take a quick
break. “Admiral Allen.”

 
          
“Don’t
they sleep out there?” asked the colonel, returning to his console.

 
          
“It’s
only about nine in Pearl.”

 
          
“Rhetorical
question,” said Dog. “Let ’
er
rip.”

 
          
The
screen at the front of the room blinked white, then transformed into a
high-resolution video feed showing a small office area filled with a half-dozen
frowning Navy commanders. The script at the bottom of the screen identified the
source as
CinCPacSIT
, a top-level secure facility for
Pacific Command. Admiral Allen, with his sleeves rolled up, stood in front of a
large map table, his face as red as the flag used to provoke the proverbial
bull.

 
          
“What
in hell are you doing out there?” Allen demanded.

 
          
“Excuse
me?” said Dog.

 
          
“Bullshit
on that.”

 
          
“With
all due respect—”

 
          
“Stow
it, Bastian. What is happening out there? Why are you picking a fight with the
Chinese?”

 
          
“I’m
not, sir.”

 
          
“Are
you trying to be the second coming of Brad Elliott?”

 
          
“Colonel
Bastian hadn’t expected Admiral Allen to be happy about the incident. But he
didn’t anticipate the personal attack. Nor did he appreciate the comment about
General Elliot. “Sir, I’m operating under strict orders,” he told the screen,
controlling his own rising anger.

 
          
“What
yahoo gave the order to start a war with China?” demanded Allen. “I want an
explanation, Bastian.”

 
          
Allen
made an obvious attempt to control his temper, his hands pulling down the sides
of his shirt.

 
          
“As
you can read on the Web net,” Dog said, pausing between nearly every word, “two
Sukhois Su-33’s took off from a Chinese carrier and approached our aircraft
while on routine patrol. They seemed to think the U/MFs were missiles, they
took evasive action, and one of the Chinese pilots put is plane into an
unrecoverable spin. His loss was regrettable.”

 
          
“I
don’t believe it happened that way,” said Allen. “You’re telling me the Chinese
pilots are that bad?”

 
          
“I’m
not critiquing the flying abilities of the Chinese, sir.”

 
          
“Why
wasn’t I notified immediately?”

 
          
“By?”

 
          
“Damn
straight. You didn’t even clear the mission with my people.”

 
          
“It’s
not my role to inform you.” Dog wasn’t exactly sure what had
happened—generally, the theater commander would be notified of an important
operation by Washington, and the Navy certainly had had input prior to the
Whiplash Order being issued. It was possible Allen had been bushwhacked by
Washington—but it was also possible he was trying to exert control over Colonel
Bastian and the operation.

 
          
Which
wasn’t going to fly.

 
          
“This
isn’t over, Colonel,” said Allen. The feed died with a pop that sounded very
much like an explosion.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t think we’d be that lucky,” Dog told the blank screen.

 
          
Aboard Quicksilver, above the South China
Sea

 
          
Breanna
steadied the plane at nine thousand feet as they sorted out the attack. The
Chinese planes had launched eight missiles and then immediately begun to turn
back north.

 
          
“I’ve
got a lock on one Sukhois,” reported Chris. “We can shoot him down.”

 
          
“Negative,”
said Breanna. “Let’s focus on the missiles.”

 
          
“Eight
in the air, skimming down in a pattern similar to
Exocets
,”
he told her. One of the standard Megafortress simulation routines used the
Scorpion AMRAAM-pluses to shoot down French-made
Exocet
antiship
missiles. Though slightly outside of the
Scorpion’s design parameters, properly handled, the execution was not
difficult. Except they only had four Scorpions, and ordinarily would use two
apiece on the target to assure a hit.

 
          
“What’s
their target?” Breanna asked.

 
          
“I’d
guess the sub,” said Chris.

 
          
Torbin
concurred. “There’s no way they’re going to come close to the sub, though,” he
added. “It’s going to take them another four minutes to get into the area. If
they’re
Exocets
, or something like them, they’ll run
on inertia guidance, pop up, and then hit whatever they can in the area.

 
          
“They’re
moving at just over five hundred knots,” said Chris. “We can get two.”

 
          
“Let’s
target them singly,” Breanna told him.

 
          
“Not
a high-percentage shot.”

 
          
“Target
them,” she told her copilot.

 
          
“Tracking.
They’re low.”

 
          
“Bay.”

 
          
“Bay
open. We’re locked.”

 
          
“Go.”

 
          
“Fire
Fox One,” he said, indicating that a radar missile was being launched. The
Scorpions rolled off the launcher as soon as it rotated into position.

 
          
“ECMs,”
said Breanna after the last air-to-air missile had left.

 
          
“Working,”
said Torbin. “Not going to have much of an impact until they pop up and look
for a target. May not work even then, I’m not sure what we’re looking at.”

 
          
“Do
your best,” said Breanna. “Chris, see if you can plot out a course to have us
sweep in front of them and dish out Stinger air mines. Maybe we can out enough
shrapnel in the air to knock them down.”

 
          
“I
was just playing with that. I think we can get a shot at two, but there are two
on outside patterns sweeping around in an arc,” he told her.

 
          
“Missiles
are tentatively
ID’d
as VJ-2’s, back-engineered
Exocets
,” said Torbin. “But I don’t know. They were
launched from sixty miles, which ought to be beyond their range.”

 
          
“Let’s
not get too hung up on their exact specifications,” said Breanna. “Are they
communicating with the Sukhois for guidance?”

 
          
“Negative,”
said Collins.

 
          
“Alert
civilians,” she added. “Though I’m not sure what good that’s going to do.”

 
          
Chris
hit a button that popped a flight path onto
Bree’s
navigation screen. “Here’s the course, Captain. Kind of a stutter step with a V
in it. I don’t know.”

 
          
“Doable,”
said Breanna as the three-dimension overlay swirled around on the lower-right
screen area. Her mind and body translated the sweeping arcs into a succession
of forces; her muscles rehearsed the pulls.

 
          
“Two
minutes to pop-up,” said Torbin.

 
          
“Hawk
Leader, this is Quicksilver,” said Bree. She could feel her tongue and cheeks
tightening, a clipped precision taking over her brain. “We’re going to try and
take out two of those remaining missiles. It doesn’t look like we can reach
numbers three and eight on that targeting screen Chris downloaded to you.”

 
          
“They’re
mine,” said Zen.

 
          
“Missile
one is a home run!” interrupted Chris as their first AMRAAM hit its target.

 
          
“Thanks,
Jeff,” Bree told her husband. “Hang on. This is going to be a bit of a ride.”

 
          
She
took a breath, then put her hand on the throttle slide, goosing the engines as
she tucked her wings, pirouetting the big plane in the sky. The massive
Megafortress responded as nimbly as an F/A-18, turning with the grace of a
veteran ballerina. Bree felt the impact all across her body, the cells in her
speed suit inflating as they pulled over seven Gs.

 
          
She’d
never feel that flying the B-5. She’d be sitting in a bunker at Dreamland,
commanding the plane through a series of dedicated satellites. Gravity would be
just another formula on the screen.

 
          
“Chinese
sub is diving,” said Collins.

 
          
“Smart
man,” said Torbin.

 
          
“Missile
Two missed. Suck,” said Ferris.

 
          
“All
right. Full suite of ECMs.” She told Torbin.

 
          
“We’re
singing every songs we know, backwards and forwards,” he answered, working his
gear.

 
          
“Chris,
give us chaff as we start the sweep. Anything we can do to confuse them.”

 
          
“Okay.
We can get that number-two missile in the sweep.”

 
          
“Hang
on.”

 
          
The
Megafortress’s flight computer projected the intercept course on her HUD
display as an orange dash along a crosshair at the center of the screen.
Breanna moved her hand on the stick gently, holding the plane precisely onto
the line. The approaching missiles were not yet visible to the naked eye, but
the radar handed their positions to the computer, which obligingly painted them
as red arrow-heads on the screen. Truth be told, this was almost as
fly-by-numbers as anything she did in the UMB. Breanna didn’t have to be in the
plane at all—and, in fact, didn’t really have to do anything more than tell the
computer to follow the dotted line.

 
          
She
loved the pull of this plane around here, the feel and idea of it as it swayed
in the air, the long, swept wings and their variable leading and trailing edges
tilting Quicksilver at a thirty-degree angle as the chaff canisters popped out
in the air, spreading a metallic curtain above the ocean. She loved the hard
hit of gravity as she cranked the plane 180 degrees, holding her turn so tight
the computer complained, dishing up a stall warning. She snickered—she knew
this aircraft better than any computer program, and it was nowhere near its
performance envelope and was miles away—miles—from stalling or even losing more
momentum than she wanted.

 
          
“Thirty
seconds to intercept!” said Chris, his voice rising like the high soprano of a
boy in a children’’ choir, the excitement overwhelming him.

 
          
What
computer could do that?

 
          
“Here
comes the
zags
,” Bree told her crew. She slammed the
plane hard south, dipping her wing momentarily and then gliding into a banking
climb. The plane’s tailbone jutted down, tracking the targets.