Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (86 page)

 
          
He
had just passed ten-thousand feet when the radio chatter began to increase
again and he felt safer. “Aladdin, this is Trap Two. I am RTB hot with nine
thousand pounds, fifty south of
Key West
, code one. Over . . .”

 
          
“Trap
Two, Trap Two, this is Aladdin. We’ve been trying to reach you. You have bogeys
now at your
six o’clock
,
nine miles.
Six o’clock
,
nine miles and closing. We read three bogeys, repeat, three bogeys

 
          
Suddenly
the hunter had become the hunted. The F-16 pilot selected full military power
and started a steep but controlled descent. As he did the threat-warning
receiver came to life, squawking and beeping the message that he already
knew—he was probably too late.

 
          
The
attackers were much smaller, much less capable, and much slower than the F-16
Fighting Falcon—the moment the F-16 pilot pushed his throttle up to military
power he was flying one-hundred knots faster than his pursuers—but the tiny
Albatros attack-trainers of Salazar’s Cuchillos had the element of surprise,
which meant disaster for the lone F-16. The Albatros jet trainers were airborne
to provide terminal air cover for the returning strike fighters; each carried
two 1800-liter external fuel tanks, a single underbelly GSh-23 cannon and two
Bofers RBS-70 heat-seeking missiles mounted in bulky single-missile pods on
each wing. Like the Hammerheads’ Sea Stinger missile, the RBS-70 was a modified
man-portable anti-aircraft missile, adapted for use on aircraft and capable
against air, sea and land targets.

 
          
One
by one each Albatros launched missiles at the fleeing F-16. The range between
the aircraft had decreased to five miles, just inside the lethal range of the
tiny RBS-70 missiles, but the F-16’s speed had jumped to nearly Mach one in
military power. The first missile missed the F-16 by only a few meters, causing
the pilot to begin a series of violent vertical and horizontal moves to break
the lock of any other missiles fired at him. The other two missiles never had a
chance to lock on—even at the missile’s top speed of Mach two, they could not
maneuver fast enough to keep up with the agile F-16 and quickly broke lock,
self-destructing after fifteen seconds of flight.

 
          
But
even without a kill, the Albatros attackers had done their job. The F-16
fighter, forced to waste more fuel escaping the surprise attack, did not have
the fuel to turn and counterattack, and was forced to head for home.

 
          
A
half-hour later the surviving Mirage fighter safely ejected just off the west
coast of
Haiti
, within a hundred yards of a boat waiting to pick up the pilot.

 
          
The
battle did not go as well for the Cuchillos attacking the Hammerhead Two
platform. With the matchup now two-on-two instead of two-on-one, a third F-16
on the way and with a much less cluttered air-traffic scene, the battles were
brief and decisive. The MiG carrying his load of cluster bombs and Kingfisher
missiles was forced to jettison them overwater when he found himself jumped by
the two F-16s—and even the added speed and maneuverability he gained by getting
rid of the clumsy bombs could not make up for the superiority of the F-16 over
the aged MiG-21. Both MiGs were destroyed by missiles—neither F-16 had to move
closer than six miles to his target to destroy
it.       .

 
          
But
the damage had already been done . . .

 
          
On
Board an Air Force C-20B Transport

 
          
Several Minutes Later

 
          
“Thank
God,” Elliott said on board the transport, a modified Gulf- stream III business
jet fitted with special communications facilities, speeding to south
Florida
from
Washington
. “NAPALM wasn’t touched?”

 
          
“They
didn’t get within twenty minutes of the platform this time,” Hardcastle
replied, speaking to him from the Border Security Force headquarters at
Aladdin
City
. “The F-16s got both planes trying to
attack Hammerhead Two, and we think we got one of the group that attacked
KEYSTONE. But that F-16 ran into three more planes flying up from
Cuba
and was forced to turn back.”

 
          
“Cuban
planes?”

 
          
“Negative.
The RAZORBACK ROTH unit tracked them flying out of central
Haiti
. We don’t have an exact base of origin, but
except for
Port-Au-Prince
the only other hard-surface runway in
Haiti
that could have handled jets big enough to
carry air-to-air missiles is Verrettes. Salazar staged an attack on the
Hammerheads’ radar units. I
still
don’t believe it.”

 
          
“Stand
by,” Elliott said, and stared out one of the tiny round windows in the back of
the C-20 . . . The Border Security Force was in serious trouble. The
overwhelming attack on Hammerhead One and CARABAL had wiped out half the
Force’s precision long-range detection capability, and the personnel loss on
the Hammerhead One platform was devastating. The entire
Caribbean
basin would be newly open to air and sea
smugglers unless an interim radar platform was set up ... “I’ll get the
contingency plan in effect as fast as I can,” Elliott radioed to Hardcastle. “I
think we can get the
Oriskany
in
position within the week. The President’s already authorized the Navy to assist
in the
Caribbean
region. We might have F-14’s flying chase
missions with our Sea Lions.” Hardcastle’s original proposal for a forward air
base for the V-22 tilt-rotor interdiction plane included using aged, retired
aircraft carriers as air-operations platforms. A Navy training or reserve
aircraft carrier would be positioned in critical drug-trafficking routes; they
already had several vessels lined up for possible use, most likely the retired
U.S.S.
Coral Sea
or the research and
training Essex-class
Oriskany,
which
had been repeatedly rescued from the scrapyards by various government agencies
wanting a carrier to play with.

 
          
“I’m
not interested in what we’re going to do about sealing off the borders right
now, Brad,” Hardcastle said. “I want to know what we’re going to do about
Salazar and his outfit.”

 
          
“Well,
if we want to get Salazar and his terrorists we’ve got to do it now. By this
time tomorrow they could be long gone—”

 
          
“Then,
damn it, get your F-lll back and bomb the hell out of Verrettes,” Hardcastle
said. “Or ask the President to send in the Rapid Deployment Force, or Delta
Force, or the Special Forces. Brad, they killed over
forty
people on Hammerhead One. Michael Becker was on that
platform—”

 
          
“I
know, I know.” Hardcastle had rattled off options that Elliott was already
considering, and he thought of some others too—his strike aircraft at Dreamland
topping the list. Ever since organizing the Sukhoi-27 flight into
Haiti
, Elliott had put his second-in-command,
John Ormack, and his staff to planning other reconnaissance and strike options
against Verrettes, including aircraft not in any active Air Force operational
squadron.

 
          
As
if he could read Elliott’s thoughts, Hardcastle asked, “How long would it take
the Air Force to come up with a plan to strike Verrettes, Brad?”

 
          
“All
tactical fighter and Special Operations units have contingency plans for
various regions of the world, prepackaged and ready to be implemented—but I
don’t think Haiti is one of them. With computerized flight planning combined
with the intelligence data we received from our own mission we could assemble a
package in, say, four hours, brief it, get the aircraft and crews together and
be airborne in six hours.”

 
          
“Then
let’s
do
it . . .”

 
          
“All
that presumes we get a White House okay for a strike against Verrettes,”
Elliott added quickly. “Ian, you know as well as I do that the main bottleneck
in any operation like this is getting the authorization. Most Air Force units
can’t load one bomb on a plane without permission from
someone
at least at the Secretary of the Air Force’s level, and to
execute a mission like this ... it would probably need the President. He’s been
notified of the attack, of course, but he won’t convene the Cabinet and the
Joint Chiefs until morning—at least six hours from now.”

 
          
"But
we can
start
to get the ball rolling
before authorization.”

 
          
“We
can draw up all the charts we want, gather intelligence, formulate options—but
no wing commander is going to authorize the use of one of his crews, a plane or
even one lousy iron bomb until he has permission from his boss. Air division
won’t approve it without permission from numbered air force. They won’t approve
it without permission from the major command. It goes up higher and higher and
takes longer and longer—

 
          
“Then
we’re going to lose Salazar. We’re going to just let the guy go. Is that it?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” he muttered as he let his finger off the TALK button and cursed
into the air. He had to do something to protect his force. If he didn’t act
others might move in and take charge, or decide for him that they should
disband. If there was one thing he had learned in ten years as a general
officer it was that
everyone
expected
the commander to take charge and
do
something. If he didn’t do it someone else would.

 
          
His
facts were still right—no military commander would authorize the use of his
assets for a strike mission without approval from higher headquarters. But
Elliott was a commander—he could order his own troops to go anywhere within
their capability. He was also the past commander of another flying
organization—Dreamland, the
High
Technology
Aerospace
Weapon
Center
. He had weapons there, all highly classified,
weapons that few in the world had even imagined let alone used in battle. John
Ormack and the senior staff at Dreamland still consulted him on a regular
basis—in effect he was still running things there too, although Ormack, now an
Air Force one- star general, was in command.

 
          
Elliott
went through his briefcase on the seat beside him, to Hardcastle’s earlier
facsimile transmission—the plan he and Patrick McLanahan had drawn up for an
attack on Verrettes. He had had a chance to read it only briefly after it was
received, and again briefly while being taken from Andrews to the White House
earlier that day. “Ian, this plan you and McLanahan drew up . . . you want to
use the Seagull drones to draw out Salazar’s air defenses—I read that much.
Then what?”

 
          
“
Use
Sea
Lions and Seagulls armed with rockets to
take out the buildings and any targets of opportunity. After that. . . we’d
have to land troops on Verrettes and capture Salazar and as many of his men as
we could, but—”

 
          
“How
many drones and Sea Lions are available right now?”

 
          
“Stand
by, I’ll check.” It took only a few moments for Hardcastle to call up the
operational status of every air-breathing vehicle in the Hammerheads’
inventory. As Elliott suspected, most of the available rotor-driven air machines
were involved in search-and-rescue operations: “We have twenty Seagulls, twelve
Sky Lions and one Sea Lion here in
Aladdin
City
. Five Sky Lyons and four of our Sea Lions
are involved in rescue operations. NAPALM has four Seagulls, five Sky Lions and
one Sea Lion on board. Two of their Sea Lions are involved in rescue
operations. We have six other Sea Lions deployed in the
Caribbean
,
Key West
and along the Gulf, including two involved
with recovery operations on
Grand Bahama
Island
and two at the Cudjoe Key aerostat site—”