Cobb turned to look, then nodded his agreement. “Checks.”
McLanahan relocked all weapons, then unlocked the SLAM rocket bomb only. “Left bay SLAM selected,” he told Cobb.
Another quick glance from Cobb, then he resumed his seemingly petrified position. “Checks. Left bay weapon unlocked. All others locked.” McLanahan thought Cobb looked a little like the Lincoln Memorial, sitting erect and unmoving in his seat, hands on either side of him, staring straight ahead.
McLanahan selected a special symbol in the upper-right comer of the SMFD with his head-pointing system. He spoke “Active” and it began to blink, indicating that it was active and preparing to send data. “I’m calling up satellitetargeting data from the latest NIRTSat surveillance scan,” he told Ormack. “In a few minutes I should have an updated radar image of the target area, and with the composite infrared and visual data, I should be able to program the SLAM missile for a direct hit. We got this bomb run wired.”
The F-23 pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Mirisch and Captain Ed Milo, felt as if they were chasing a ghost ship — there was an attacker out there, but he barely registered on any of their sensors. If they didn’t find him within the next five minutes or less, they would lose max points for any intercepts done outside the MOA.
Well, Mirisch thought, this mystery plane couldn’t escape the Mark One attack sensor system — their eyeballs. Jarrel’s
Air Force Battle had B-l and B-2 bombers in it now, so just maybe this attacker was one of those stealthy beasts. Mirisch noted the direction of the shadows on the ground and began to search not for the airplanes themselves, but for big, dark shadows — a bomber’s shadow was always many times larger than the plane itself, and there was no camouflaging a shadow…
Got it!
“Tally ho!” Mirisch shouted. He was so excited that he forgot his radio discipline: “Jesus Christ, I got a B-2 bomber, one o’clock low! It’s a fucking B-2 bomber!” That’s why their attack radars wouldn’t lock on or the infrared scanners wouldn’t work — the B-2 was supposed to have the radar cross-section of a bird, and birds don’t paint too well on radar. Mirisch was expecting a black aircraft, but this batwinged monstrosity was painted tan and green camouflage, blending in perfectly with the surrounding terrain. It was flying very low, but the late afternoon’s shadows were long and it was a dead giveaway. At night, Mirisch thought, it would be next to impossible to find this bastard. “Raider flight, this is Raider Two-Zero flight, we got a Bravo Two bomber, repeat, Bravo Two, at low altitude. Closing to…”
Suddenly there was the worst squealing and chirping on the UHF radio frequency that Mirisch had ever heard. It completely blotted out not only the UHF channel, but the scrambled FM HAVE QUICK channel as well. Except for the Godawful screeching, the jamming was no big deal — they had a visual on the bomber, and no B-2 was going to outrun, outmaneuver, or outgun an F-23. This guy is toast. The newcomer, whoever he was, was too far out to matter now. He would deal with the B-2, then go back and take care of the newcomer with the big jammer.
Mirisch had a solid visual on the B-2, so he took the lead back from Milo and began his run. The B-2 had begun a series of S-turas, flying lower and lower until his shadow really
The throttles were at full military thrust, and Cobb had the three-hundred-thousand-pound bomber right at three hundred feet above the ground, and occasionally he cheated and nudged it even lower. He knew the wild S-tums ate up speed and allowed the fighters to move closer, but one advantage of the water-based custom camouflage job on the B-2 that had been applied specifically for this mission was that it degraded the one attack option that no B-2 bomber could defend against — a visual gun attack.
