EndWar e-1 Page 11

  Inevitably, the small, five-story tower and adjacent command center took one, two, three direct hits from thousand-pound bombs and were lost in mushroom clouds that rose and collided with each other, throwing up a black wall of fire-filled smoke.

  Halverson was exhausted, overtired, her thoughts consumed by horror and disbelief.

  From her vantage point, the devastation below was silent and seemingly less significant.

  But she’d met nearly everyone at that base, and she realized now that there would be no survivors.

  “Oh, God, Siren, you see that?” asked Sapphire.

  She could barely answer. “Yeah.”

  They had one job left, one last sortie.

  There was nowhere to refuel. Nowhere to rearm. And the last orders they’d received from Igloo were to engage the enemy.

  So they would.

  She and Lisa Johansson were the only two left. Had their refueling gone a minute longer, they, of course, would already be dead.

  Dozens of Russian cargo ships soared through the sky, their escort fighters engaging the squadrons from Alaska.

  “Where are the Canadians?” Sapphire asked.

  “I don’t know, but I have a feeling they won’t watch this happen for very long.”

  “Roger that.”

  Halverson took a long breath to steady her nerves. “This is it, girl. You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Let’s go get ’em!” With that, she engaged the afterburner, accelerating with a force that was hard to describe to someone who’d never sat in a cockpit.

  Just as she hit Mach 1, the Prandtl-Glauert singularity occurred, a vapor cone caused by a sudden drop in air pressure that extended from the wings to her tail. She left the cone behind in her exhaust trail.

  They held their steady course, ascending over the enemy aircraft, bound for coordinates seventy-five kilometers northwest of Behchoko, where dozens of AN-130s had landed and were off-loading their BMP-3s.

  The five-hundred-pound JDAMs under Halverson’s wings were accurate to within thirteen meters, and she and Sapphire could launch those precision-guided bombs from up to twenty-four kilometers away during a low-altitude launch or up to sixty-four kilometers during a high-altitude launch. You plugged in the coordinates, delivered the munitions—

  Barring of course, angry swarms of Russian fighters whose pilots thought otherwise.

  The AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons in the F-35B’s internal bays were the “C” variant developed for the Navy. The weapon utilized a combination of an imaging infrared (IIR) terminal seeker and a two-way data link to achieve point accuracy and was designed to attack point targets. It was a thousand pounds of general purpose destruction.

  And it was most definitely time for her and Sapphire to flash their fangs and lighten their loads.

  “Two minutes,” Halverson warned her wingman.

  “Roger that. I have two targets on the ground on the east side of their staging area, over.”

  “I see them,” Halverson said, checking her own display. “I’ve got two more 130s on the west side. Christ, you see all those BMPs?”

  “I do. Two bad we weren’t packing more punch.”

  Sapphire was right. Thousand-pound JDAMs instead of five hundred would have really done the job.

  “One minute,” Halverson announced.

  That’s all we need is one minute, thought Halverson. She glanced up through the canopy, where the first streaks of dawn turned the sky a light purple on the horizon.

  Just thirty seconds now. Give me thirty seconds.

  Sapphire cursed into the radio. “Four bogeys at our eleven o’clock, closing in.”

  Halverson swore under her breath as she checked her own radar. “They ain’t ours.”

  “Nope. Got ID: Su-98s. Countermeasures seem ineffective. I think they have us. We better launch before they do!”

  The Sukhoi S-98 was Russia’s latest single-seat fighter, deemed by most JSF pilots as the most deadly in its arsenal and capable of carrying up to 18,000 pounds of ordnance.

  “Just keep course. Fifteen seconds.”

  “They’re going to get missile lock!”

  Halverson’s voice turned strangely calm as her years of training kicked in, like muscle memory. “Sapphire, let’s make it all worth it. We’re almost there.”

  “Oh my God,” gasped Sapphire. “We won’t make it!”

  “Hang on! Five, four, three, two… Bombs away! Flares, chaff, evade!” Halverson cried.

  The two JDAMs fell away from her wings as behind her, the chaff and flares ignited.

  Sapphire did likewise, and Halverson lost sight of her as they both rolled inverted and dove away in a split S, the oldest trick in the book, hoping the sudden maneuver would prevent those Su-98 pilots from getting missile lock.

  As she came upright, flying in the Russians’ direction about two thousand feet below, the bad news flashed: missiles locked.

  And her wingman confirmed the next inescapable fact: “Siren, they’ve fired!”

  Halverson longed for the days of good old dogfighting, when maybe she and Sapphire could’ve pulled out the old Thach Weave, one of them baiting an enemy pilot while the other waxed him from the side.

  Though they would occasionally get to tangle with the enemy, it was mostly distant and faceless now, missiles launched from kilometers away from jets you never saw—

  And those missiles you’d only glimpse for a second, your last.

  Halverson reacted out of pure instinct, jamming the stick forward and plunging straight down, even as she hit the afterburner.

  Her first thought was to outrun the incoming missiles, get her fighter up near Mach 2, practically melt off the wings. She imagined the missiles running out of fuel behind her and simply dropping away.

  But that was a fantasy.

  The Vympel R-84 had a range of at least one hundred kilometers, and everything Halverson knew about missiles and evading them told her that if these Vympels didn’t take the flares or chaff, then she was in their no-escape zone.

  She blasted through the clouds and checked her screens.

  Twelve seconds to impact.

  “Oh, God, Siren, I don’t think I can—”

  Sapphire’s transmission broke off, and her fighter vanished from Halverson’s display.

  Her wingman hadn’t even ejected.

  Halverson blinked hard. Is this how it’ll be, then? Give me more time. I’m not finished yet.

  No barrel roll, split S, break turn, chandelle, or wingover would save her now.

  No maneuver in the world.

  No amount of thrust from her engines.

  She cut the afterburner, hit the damned brakes. Hard.

  Below lay the haphazard rows of Russian cargo planes, and Halverson’s AGM-154s were locked on a pair of targets.

  So, with seven seconds left, she cut loose both bombs—

  Then tugged the black-and-yellow striped handle between her legs.

  The canopy blew off with a violent shudder.

  Nearly at the same time, the Martin-Baker Mk. 16 ejection seat rocketed her out and away, the straps and padded cuffs of the leg restraint system pinning her shins to the seat, even as the wind struck her squarely and sent her rushing back and away, long flames extending from her boots.

  An explosion lit in her helmet, but it turned into a streak as she continued back a second more.

  Then the seat’s drogue chute caught the wind, abruptly yanking her down, and she pendulummed toward the earth; the main chute, stowed behind her headrest, deployed while the seat dropped away, yanked up by its own chute.

  Just then she caught sight of the lines of AN-130s below, where her second two bombs had impacted. Fires raged everywhere, with massive wings lying detached from fuselages.

  At that moment, another AN-130 came in for a landing and crashed into debris lying in its path. The plane spun sideways, sliding wildly across the snow until it impacted with several others in a chain reaction that left Halv
erson wanting to cheer, but she felt too sick.

  She was glad she hadn’t had time to eat. She had practiced ejections before, but this one… she thought for a moment she might pass out.

  Her comm system had automatically switched over to the helmet’s transmitter, and while she knew her ejection had automatically been sent to every JSF command post in the world, she knew it was imperative that she confirm she was alive.

  Yes, her flight suit would also transmit her bio readings, but a voice on the end of an encrypted transmission carried a whole lot more weight.

  Protocol dictated that she get on the tactical channel to contact the nearest command post, but she said screw it and broadcast over the emergency channel reserved for strategic operations. Better to ring the louder bell.

  “This is JSF Fighter Siren out of Igloo Base, Northwest Territories. I’ve ejected north of Behchoko.” She rattled off the last coordinates she’d read on her display. “I’m descending toward a heavily wooded area, GPS coordinates to follow once I’m on the ground, over.”

  After about ten seconds, a voice came over the radio: “JSF Fighter Siren, this is Hammer, Tampa Five Bravo. Received your transmission. We’ll see if we can get some help up to you. Send GPS coordinates once you’re on the ground.”

  “Roger that, Hammer. And here’s hoping our boys get to me before they do.”

  “We’ll do everything we can. And you do the same. Standing by…”

  All right, she’d survived the ejection.

  Would she survive the landing?

  The forest unfurled below for kilometer after kilometer, dense, snow-covered, a bone-breaking gauntlet.

  She imagined herself plunging through the heavy canopy and getting impaled by a limb.

  Wouldn’t that be her luck?

  Some training mission. The fighters were gone, the base was gone, her colleagues were dead.

  Jake, are you there?

  Yeah, why didn’t you say anything?

  Because it would’ve been too complicated.

  You’re wrong.

  I know. I’ve been lying to myself.

  Just don’t panic. It’ll be all right. I’ll be with you every step of the way. You know what to do now. Get your mind off of it. Calm down.

  Halverson took a deep breath.

  The ground came up faster.

  With a vengeance.

  TWENTY

  Commander Jonathan Andreas glanced down at his watch: 0513 hours.

  You would need a hell of a lot more than a knife to cut the tension in the Florida’s control room.

  A plasma torch might not even do it — because the moment had come, and Andreas and his crew were a pack of artic wolves, poised before their prey, still and silent in the dim red light.

  The AGM-84 Harpoon antishipping missiles were loaded in tubes one, two, and three.

  And presently, the Varyag, the converted aircraft carrier now serving as the Russian task force’s command and control ship, had the oiler Kalovsk tied up alongside, with lines fore and aft, separated by evenly spaced fenders between them to cushion any accidental impact between the ships. Now, with the first pale ribbons of dawn wandering along the horizon, refueling operations were well under way.

  This was it.

  Two ships. One missile.

  Andreas held his breath a moment more, and then turned his key, granting the weapons control console permission to launch. The reaction of three thousand psi jettisoning more than fifteen hundred pounds out the torpedo tube rumbled through the control room.

  The submarine variant of the AGM-84 Harpoon antishipping missile was housed in a blunt-nosed, torpedo-like capsule called an ENCAP, which had positive buoyancy and burst away from the Florida, while a lanyard caused fins to pop out as it glided to the surface without power.

  Once the ENCAP breached the surface, Andreas watched as it blew off its tail and cap, then fired the Harpoon on its solid-fuel booster.

  His pulse leapt as the glowing orb shot off.

  The missile was directed by an INS (inertial navigation system), where it conducted an autonomous search for a specific preprogrammed target image. A number of different search patterns could be programmed into the Harpoon, which not only increased its probability of detecting the target but made it harder to trace the missile’s flight path back to its launcher.

  Now the Harpoon dropped down to wave height as it homed in, skimming along the icy spray.

  Andreas checked his watch once more, then glanced up at the image on the flat panel.

  The Harpoon’s WDU-18/B — an innocuous description for a 488-pound, penetrating, blast-fragmentation warhead — pierced the Kalovsk’s port beam.

  A heartbeat… then 297,000 gallons of aviation and ship fuel ignited.

  The Kalovsk’s crew was vaporized before her aft superstructure fractured into five pieces and hurtled skyward. Her port side spewed molten, fragmented steel more than two miles out into Gray’s Bay.

  Then, in less than thirty milliseconds, molten fragmented steel — formerly the Kalovsk’s starboard side — bridged the twenty-five-foot gap separating the oiler from the port side of the Varyag.

  Andreas gasped as the Varyag’s partially filled fuel tanks immediately exploded, peeling back and curling 150 feet of her main deck like a sardine can.

  The enormous holes at the Varyag’s waterline brought icy arctic water in direct contact with the 1,200-psi superheated steam in both boiler rooms. The resulting explosions shattered Varyag’s keel in three separate locations.

  Andreas beat a fist into his palm, and the crew saw that as a sign to cut loose and cheer.

  Her spine broken, Varyag took nine minutes to join Kalovsk at the bottom of Gray’s Bay. There were no survivors from either vessel.

  Two down, two to go. The Ulyanovsk and the Ivan Rogov…

  Half his company had been killed in the C-130 explosion, leaving Sergeant Nathan Vatz in a state of shock as he gathered his chute with the other operators who had managed to bail out before the missile had struck.

  He’d shut down the oxygen, popped off his helmet, and was panting in the frigid morning air, occasionally glancing across the broad, snow-covered field toward several buildings, lumber mills maybe, and the dense forests toward the east and west.

  With the chute gathered, he charged toward the embankment along a snow-covered road, probably dirt, where the rest of the operators were gathering and burying their chutes in the snow.

  There, Vatz crouched down with twenty-six other men, noting immediately that every operator of ODA- 888 had made it, along with most of the operators from ODA-887, though one guy was lying on his back, looking pale as two medics attended to him.

  “Everybody else, all right?” asked Detachment Commander Captain Mike Godfrey. He was Vatz’s CO, bearded and barely thirty, and wise enough to lean on Vatz for advice. “This mission is not over. Captain Rodriguez and I have decided we’re carrying on and have put in the request for another company to be sent up. Of course that’s going to take time. Meanwhile, we get to work.”

  Captain Manny Rodriguez, big eyes and a Fu Manchu mustache, nodded and added, “Me and my boys from Zodiac Team will hit the Chevy dealership and secure some SUVs, while you guys from Berserker hit the sporting goods store and pick up the gear in our crates. Same game plan. We all dress up like hunters. But it’ll be Captain Godfrey, Warrant Officer Samson, and Sergeant Vatz who’ll meet with the mayor and the RCMPs here.”

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police would be one of the keys in securing and preparing the town for the Russian invasion, but Vatz had a sneaking suspicion that their support wouldn’t be easily won. And with the area’s small population, Vatz figured if they found a dozen Mounties to help, that’d be a lot.

  “All right, gentlemen. We rally on the police station no later than oh-six-thirty hours,” said Godfrey. “The Russians are already on the ground and on the move. No time to waste!”

  “Okay, let’s move!” hollered Vatz.

  And
with that, all of them took off running across the field, shouldering their heavy packs.

  Vatz couldn’t wait to see the look on the Mounties’ faces when he, Godfrey, and Samson walked into the station.

  That would be an interesting conversation.

  Major Stephanie Halverson crashed through the tree limbs with a horrible cracking noise. She was jolted left, then right, her helmet scraping against the trees, then suddenly she—

  Stopped short.

  Her entire body tugged hard against the straps, and her neck snapped back as she lost her breath.

  It took a few seconds for her to get her bearings.

  The snow lay about twenty feet below. She glanced up, saw that the chute had tangled in the limbs and she now dangled in midair.

  After ditching the ejection seat, she’d done her best to steer herself into the widest gap between trees, and that had probably saved her life, but it had also left her hanging, literally, between the big pines.

  Detaching the chute line and jumping meant risking a fracture.

  She undid her helmet, let it drop to the snow, thud. No, she wasn’t jumping.

  “Oh,” she said aloud, breathing in the cold, crisp air. In the distance came the muffled drone of props, and she wondered how long it would take before they sent out a squad of Spetsnaz troops for her. They couldn’t have missed her chute.

  The thought sent her into motion, swinging from side to side, trying to get close to the nearest trunk, where she might grab on and attempt to secure herself.

  After five or six swings, she built up enough momentum to strike the trunk, bark flying as she wrapped an arm around and came to a sudden halt, her grip already faltering.

  She detached the chute, let the twenty-two-pound survival kit fall away to the ground, where it broke open, scattering its contents.

  Nice, Major.

  Then she threw herself forward, wrapped both arms around the tree, then both legs, as lines fell away.

  Repressing the morbid desire to look down, she slowly loosed arms, just a bit, and began to slide—

  Just as a shattered limb from above decided to drop, missing by only six inches.