“Fuck,” Cobb muttered. On this trip, that seemed to be the veteran pilot’s favorite reply.
“Fifty miles to Talaud,” McLanahan said. With the reconnaissance pods stowed, the radar dome belonging to the vessel to the northeast no longer reached them, but they could still watch it as it changed modes. It had changed from target acquisition mode, to air search, and now back to rapid-scan air search, which was displayed as a yellow- striped dome now. “Fast PRF scan on that Charlie-band radar,” McLanahan reported. “They might be vectoring a fighter in.”
“Fuck…”
The miles seemed to crawl by. More ships had their search radars on to the west, well inside Indonesian waters but still broadcasting Chinese radar signals. A few vessels even activated fire-control radars — Patrick guessed they might have been mistakenly fired on by their own fighter! “Twenty miles. Nenusa Archipelago is on the left, Talaud is right of—”
Suddenly a yellow radar dome appeared right in front of the B-2 icon on the SMFD. The dome instantly turned red, and the two crewmen could see gunfire popping on the horizon directly in front of them. “Break right!” Patrick shouted as he hammered the “Chaff” button for the left ejector racks; the electronic countermeasures jammers activated automatically. “Descend!” Cobb threw the big bomber into a 45- degree bank turn, letting the sudden loss of lift over the wings pull the nose down. He rolled wings-level at one hundred feet above the sea — just one wingspan above the dark waters below. Patrick could see tracers lashing out into the darkness, firing at the chaff blob that he had just released. “Where the hell did
“Fuck…”
The terrain-following computer began to command a climb to clear the tall, spirelike mountains ahead, and the two crewmen could start to see the island on the forwardlooking infrared scanner. The largest island in the Talaud archipelago, Karakelong Island, was a lush green island with gently rolling hills through the middle, but the central hills were studded with two tall rock spires, one that towered seven hundred feet above the forest and the other that rose an incredible twelve hundred feet above the ridge.
The tracers swung farther to the west as the chaff blob cleared and the Chinese patrol boat reacquired the B-2. “Can’t go too much farther west,” Patrick said. “There’s another group of ships just forty miles west of this island.”
“They were waiting for someone to try to sneak in over these hills,” Cobb said. “They knew we’d try it, even though these islands are in Indonesia. That means—”
“Shit. That means we don’t want to fly over these islands…!’·’
As if someone on Karakelong Island heard him, just then on the infrared scanner they could see a sharp flare of light, and a missile arced skyward, then heeled over and headed straight for them. “I see it!” Cobb cried out. “Stand by on flares right!” They had a little room to try a hard break, so Cobb began pushing and pulling the control stick, beginning a fifty-to-one-hundred-foot vertical oscillation. The closer the missile got, the more they could see it mimicking that oscillation.
As soon as the motor on the missile winked out, Cobb yelled,
The missile passed directly over the cockpit, missing the Black Knight by just a few scant yards. Luckily, there was no explosion — either the missile failed to fuze or was still locked on the flare decoys.
“Altitude!” Patrick shouted. “Climb!” The bomber had entered initial buffet to a stall in the steep turn and had lost precious altitude — the radar altimeter, which measured exact distance below the bomber’s belly, was faulted because the distance was less than fifty feet. Cobb rolled wings-level, let the airspeed build up, then gently pulled back on the sidestick controller, careful not to throw the bomber into a full stall by pulling back too fast.
“Screw this,” Cobb muttered. As soon as he had his airspeed back, he pulled back on the controller, starting a steep climb. “I’m getting out of here.”
The Super Multi Function Display was alive with radar domes — one was right ahead of them, a Sea Eagle search radar was highlighting them from the right, and far to the north another Sea Eagle radar was about to envelop them. “Descend, Henry, we’ve got radars all around us…
“Let ’em try to get us,” Cobb said.
Tracers lit up the sky ahead of them as they drove through the red-colored radar dome ahead of them. Cobb kept the bomber climbing at full military power — the nose was higher than Patrick could ever remember it as Cobb traded every knot of available airspeed for altitude. He made a few hard turns, no more than 20 degrees at a time. Antiaircraft artillery shells began exploding all around them, and several were close enough to pummel the B-2. “Airspeed, Henry!” Patrick shouted. “Watch the stall…!”
