Sky Masters полностью

Damned sparse fighter coverage, Kaifeng’s commander thought to himself. Because that bomber was a “ferret,” running away at the first sign of trouble, they were not giving it as much fighter attention as they should. Well, that was going to stop right here and now.

“CIC, bridge, chase that damned plane out of here,” Kaifeng’s commander ordered. At this point chasing “Old Gas” out of antiship-missile range was more important than revealing radar frequencies. “Hit them with the fire-control radar.” That was usually plenty to make the B-52 turn and run.

“Yes, sir,” the combat information officer responded. “Shall I recall Liang-Two flight to provide air cover?”

“Get a fuel state from them. If they have not reached bingo fuel yet, have them engage. If they have reached bingo, engage with the HQ-91 system. Then vector in Sichuan-Ten flight and have them chase that B-52 out past two hundred kilometers.”

The warning tone over the interphone system for a missile acquisition radar was different from a search radar — in general, the more serious a threat, the faster and more insistent the tone. The appearance of a “Search” radar gave a rather leisurely “Deeedle… Deeedle… Deeedle. ” When the Chinese Golf-band air-search radar changed to an India- band missile acquisition radar, the tone was a fast, loud “Deeedledeeedledeeedledeeedle!” At the same time, “Missile Warning” lights illuminated at every station of the EB-52C Megafortress bomber orbiting at thirty thousand feet over the Philippine Sea.

“Missile warning, twelve o’clock,” the electronic warfare officer, First Lieutenant Robert Atkins, announced. “India- band radar… ‘Fog Lamp’ SAM director for an HQ-91 missile. This’ll change to missile launch at any second.” Atkins’ voice became squeakier with every passing moment — he was an engineer, not a crew dog, and he never thought he’d be taking these behemoth modified B-52s into battle.

“Don’t sweat it,” Major Kelvin Carter, the Megafortress’s pilot, said, trying to project the most confident voice he could. “They’re just trying to scare us out. Easy on the jammers until the shit starts rollin’.”

Carter’s words did little to calm young Atkins down, so he turned back to the peace and security he usually got from the one thing that he knew he could trust in this screwed-up world — his equipment. Designed at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center several years ago by a nearmythical engineer named Wendy Tork, Atkins had improved on Tork’s groundbreaking designs and produced what was probably the best electronic warfare suite ever to leave the ground.

Atkins was sitting before a complex of multi-function displays on the Megafortress Plus’s upper deck, scanning the skies for enemy radars and programming the bomber’s array of jammers against each one. His ECM system automatically processed the electronic signals, analyzed them, identified them, pointed out their range and bearing from the Megafortress, and selected the appropriate jamming packages to use against them. It could do the same with a hundred other signals from very long ranges. The system would also automatically dispense decoys against radar or heatseeking missiles to protect them from missile attacks.

A B-52G or — H Stratofortress bomber had performed all the other “ferret” flights from Guam in the past few days, but tonight it was an EB-52 Megafortress pulling the unenviable task of drawing the attention of the Chinese Navy and assessing the threats present around eastern Mindanao — a regular B-52 was hardly qualified to take such a risk.

All in all, the system relegated Atkins to a “verbal squawk box” role — what the others called “crew coordination” was still a foreign concept to him, since everything on the Megafortress was so automated — as it should be, of course. Why risk an extra human life on board, when a computer could do the job faster, better, and cheaper anyway?

His directed defensive weapons were designed to operate automatically as well. The Megafortress had eight AGM- 136A TACIT RAINBOW antiradar cruise missiles in clip-in racks in the forward part of the bomb bay, plus a rotary launcher with eight AGM-88B HARM High-Speed AntiRadar Missiles in the aft bomb bay. The electronic countermeasures system would automatically program both the HARM and TACIT RAINBOW missiles for a particular enemy radar system they encountered. In case that particular radar was shut down during a TACIT RAINBOW attack, the missile would stay aloft for several minutes, search for just that radar, home in on it, and destroy it after reactivation. If another ship tried to shoot down the subsonic

TACIT RAINBOW cruise missile with radar-controlled guns, Atkins could launch supersonic HARM missiles at the radar and destroy it.

The bottom line: he had designed all this to be totally automatic, and it was obvious that he didn’t fit in with this crew. Why in hell then was he here?