My god, he thought, they’ve developed passive IR tracking. They’ve got us nailed, and we don’t even know it. Or maybe it was the super-secret ultra-wide-bandwidth radar. He had read the Foreign Technology Division reports on how it could weed an incredibly weak radar signature from the typical background clutter. That technology was claimed to be the future nemesis of the stealthy B-2, whose BB-sized radar return clearly outdid the bird-sized B-1B. The experts discounted it to a man. But maybe the Russians had once again fooled the clever analysts. He cursed the wing’s smug intelligence officers who laughed off futuristic sounding threats, citing technological hurdles insurmountable by the moribund Russian R&D community. The entire intelligence apparatus had completely flip-flopped from the dark days of the early eighties when the Soviets were supermen, capable of wizardry beyond comprehension. Now the former Soviets were technological invalids, incapable of turning out even the simplest consumer goods, let alone advanced military hardware.
His mental turmoil triggered another concern—targets of opportunity. “Ledermeyer, anything from Lacrosse?”
Lacrosse was the code word for the top-secret synthetic aperture radars that cruised hundreds of miles over hostile territory, penetrating clouds and darkness, plucking minute mobile targets from difficult geographic backgrounds. The newest birds had a real-time data link that dumped high-priority targets directly to the bombers in flight. It was the only hope for tracking down the dreaded SS-25 and SS-24 mobile ICBMs featured in the Russians’ arsenal.
The Russians obviously knew about Lacrosse. Their bag of tricks contained counters and decoys, anything to trip up a bomber crew. For the Russians, fake launcher trains and dummy mobile missile launchers, inflatable SAM sites, and armored vehicles were standard fare. Not to mention the thousands of surreptitious transponders and signal generators bombarding the airwaves with a symphony of bogus electronic emissions designed to overload US ESM gear. But today those airwaves were silent.
Ledermeyer drew a blank. “Negative, Buck. They won’t transmit until the first bombers make landfall. No sense giving the ASATs a frequency to home in on.”
Joe looked up from a crumpled navigational chart, worried. He had been mentally rehearsing alternate mission routes, measuring the total flight distance to Turkey, and then calculating fuel consumption. The answer always came back the same—a slim chance of making the distance. He looked over at the boss.
“Maybe the Mainstays were caught on the ground, Buck. We could come up in altitude for a couple hundred miles and save a hell of a lot of fuel. The interceptors are blind without the Mainstays.”
Buck frowned. The same idea had momentarily crossed his mind.
“We’ll stick to the plan,” he said curtly. He felt like a fat duck flying straight toward a well-concealed hunting blind.
The Obskaya Guba or Gulf of Ob suddenly sprang into view, the bright sunlight masking the long, flat shoreline. The plane was grossly out of position, screaming over the flat earth toward SAM sites protecting the Russian homeland from the twin shores. At over six hundred knots, Buck had only an instant to override the autopilot, pop up, and veer sharply to port to line up on the channel centerline. He eased back to one hundred feet after the hasty maneuver.
“You jackass,” he scolded himself. “We could have flown over some damn air-defense radar.”
“Shit, I could have sworn we were dead on track,” answered Joe.
“Take a GPS fix and update the autopilot. I don’t want that to happen again.” Buck settled back in his ejection seat, shaken and embarrassed. Hopefully, flying over the water would give them another half an hour of peace from radars blinded by excessive sea return. Problem was, there weren’t any radars, at least according to the ESM gear. Their state-of-the art avionics would carry them only so far. Buck knew that. Human skill and instinct, and the human emotions that came with the package, would make or break the mission. Since the days of the first air combat in World War I, it had always been the same; brave men with unflagging determination had won the day.
The time ticked by, the water becoming less green and choppy in this protective finger. The featureless shores in the distance continued to sparkle and gleam in the afternoon sun.
Twenty-five minutes down the chute, Jefferson screamed into the intercom.
“Mainstays! Two of ’em! Bearing 030 and 270. Signal strength strong. Shit, they’ve got to be right on top of us.”
“God dammit,” shouted Buck, fumbling at the controls. “The bastards were lying in the weeds.” His mind raced for an answer. Sure as shit, they’d been detected, and within minutes, the interceptors would swoop down from above to blow them out of the sky. He cursed himself for being so stupid, so predictable. Ivan now had the upper hand. Well, he wouldn’t make it easy, not by a long shot.
