Flight of the Old Dog, page 33
“But I thought you said—”
“They’re too far away,” Wendy said. “They can’t be locked on. Their signal isn’t strong enough.” Confused by the sudden threat signals and the responding increase in thrust as Ormack pushed up the power, Wendy hurriedly rechecked her receivers and indicators. All self-tested normal.
“I don’t understand …” A red MISSILE LAUNCH indicator blinked on her panel. At the same time a repeater warning light blinked on the front instrument panel in the cockpit.
“Missile launch,” Ormack announced. “Clear for evasive maneuvers?”
“Clear left and right, ten miles,” Luger called out.
“C’mon, Tork, get with it,” Ormack said. “Which way?”
“It can’t be, they’re … they’re bluffing, wait … “
“Pereira.” Ormack was over the edge. “Find those damn fighters.” Before Wendy could answer, Angelina had turned her tail Scorpion tracking radar to RADIATE. Since there was no azimuth information from Wendy’s receiver Angelina began a complete rear-hemisphere sweep behind the Megafortress.
“Nothing,” Angelina reported after several sweeps. “No targets for thirty miles.”
“They’re bluffing,” Wendy repeated, sounding surer of herself now. She reached across the defensive compartment and grabbed Angelina’s denim jacket. Angelina was still searching her rectangular scope for the fighters.
“They wanted us to turn on our radars,” Wendy said. “They couldn’t find us down here so they’re faking a lock-on. Stop.”
“Angelina, shut down,” McLanahan said. “If you haven’t seen them by now, shut down.” Angelina put her radar to STANDBY.
“Damn …” Wendy whispered as she studied the video threat receiver. “Back to search radar … signal strength increasing—”
An inverted “V” airplane symbol appeared at the bottom of Wendy’s countermeasure receiver scope. “Fighter at six o’clock!” A second “V” appeared. “Second fighter, both at six o’clock.”
With Ormack having already throttled to military power, the roar of the eight turbofan engines was deafening … the sound was amplified as it vibrated off the mountains barely three hundred feet beneath them.
“He’s still at extreme detection range,” Wendy reported. “He can’t shoot at us down here.”
“Scorpions are ready,” Angelina said.
“How far until the computer can start driving the autopilot?” Ormack asked.
“Still a hundred miles,” McLanahan told him.
“We might not make it that long—”
“VHF transmissions,” Wendy called out.
“Shut them down,” Ormack told her. “They’ll report our position.” But Wendy was already adjusting her jammers, matching the frequency marker of the jammers with the wavy oscilloscope-like radio transmissions.
“Narrow-scan tracking signals,” she said. “Sweeping around us … his computer can’t find us so it looks like he’s searching manually …”
“High terrain, twelve o’clock, seven miles,” Luger reported.
“Pretty deep canyon on all sides,” McLanahan added quickly. “Better climb over this one. Slow climb.”
Ormack slowly pulled back on the yoke and began a gentle two hundred foot-per-minute climb.
“Clearing terrain on either side,” Luger said. “Five degrees left.” Ormack nudged the Old Dog to the left. “Looks like we’ll be clear of terrain for thirty miles after this last ridge. Level off. This is a good altitude, ridge crossing in ten seconds.”
“Signal strength decreasing,” Wendy said. “He’s still trying manual track but he’s falling behind.”
“Coming up on the ridge …”
“Looks like the fighter behind us lost us …”
“Cresting the ridge now … “
In the dim cockpit Ormack could just make out the snow-covered ridge line they had just crossed, the mountains dropping off sharply to a white-covered valley below. “Hey,” he said, “it looks pretty flat out—”
A thunderous explosion echoed just outside Elliott’s canopy. Ormack caught a glimpse of two dark streaks against the hazy stars. The shock wave hit the Old Dog’s nose like a giant invisible hand.
“We nearly had a mid-air with two of them,” Ormack said, and pushed the Old Dog’s nose down to the snow-covered plain below, watching the radar altimeter and canopy windows. He leveled the aircraft at two hundred feet. “Terrain-following autopilot reengaged, slaved to the radar altimeter. Set to two hundred feet.”
“Clear of terrain for thirty miles,” Luger reported.
“The two fighters are turning,” Wendy said. “Infrared tracker has one of them … going high … stabilizing—”
A large red MLD light blinked rapidly on Ormack’s threat repeater lights.
“Missile launch detection, infrared missile launch,” Wendy broke in. “Break right …”
Ormack lurched the Old Dog into a furious dodge to the right, steered the huge bomber past the maximum thirty degrees of bank. The autopilot, slaved to the now failed radar altimeter, immediately commanded a two-G max climb. That climb command, with the Old Dog now in a forty degree bank to the right, increased the G load on the bomber and tightened the turn.
Simultaneously with the “break” call, Wendy popped two high-intensity flares from the Megafortress’ left ejectors. The flares were shot a hundred yards from the bomber and burned hotter and moved slower than the Old Dog. They lowered themselves slowly to the snow-packed ground with tiny streamers as the Megafortress turned hard in the opposite direction.
The fury of the turn shook up Elliott, but he had the presence of mind to watch the altimeters before reaching for the ejection trigger in each armrest. He was scanning the engine instruments, making sure the roar echoing in his confused head was coming from all eight turbofans. Out of the front cockpit window he spotted two fiery streaks of light flashing past the windscreen and exploding in the valley below.
“Engine instruments okay, John,” Elliott reported to Ormack who looked in amazement at the man, barely able to support his head upright, scanning the eight rows of instruments crowded on the forward panel.
“Fighters passing overhead,” Wendy said, her report confirmed by the roar of turbojets in full afterburner skimming over the jet-black bomber. But coming around for another pass.”
“Like hell,” McLanahan said, pressed the RADIATE button on his attack radar and slaved the azimuth-elevation controls to Wendy’s threat receiver. The attack-radar’s antenna immediately swung to the azimuth of the fighter and began a height-finding scan of the sky.
The radar reflection of the attacking fighter only a few miles away showed clear as a mountain on McLanahan’s radar. He typed “TRACK 1” on his keyboard and a small circle cursor centered itself on the return. The LED azimuth and elevation readouts flickered as the antennas raced to keep up with the retreating fighter.
“Locked on, Angelina,” McLanahan said. “Take over.”
Angelina was ready. With pilot consent already given, she pressed the COMMIT button on the forward Scorpion missile pylons. In one twenty-fifth of a second the fire-control computer selected a missile on the right pylon, gave it the initial elevation, azimuth and distance computations from the attack radar and ejected the air-to-air missile from the pylon down into the Old Dog’s slipstream.
The advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile’s gyros stabilized the ten-foot-long missile in the slipstream as if it were a sprinter feeling for a footing in the starting blocks. In the next three hundredths of a second static ports on the missile’s body sensed the slipstream around it and armed the Scorpion’s one-hundred-pound high explosive warhead. The same sensor set the Scorpion’s large thirty-G rear fin to the proper angle, took one last look-around self-test, and fired its solid propellant motor.
Elliott and Ormack saw a blinding flash of light race a few hundred yards ahead of the Old Dog, then suddenly change direction up and over their heads. An instant later a huge fireball erupted just behind Elliott’s side window, illuminating the entire upstairs crew compartment of the Old Dog with a red-yellow glare.
“A hit,” Elliott said, shielding his eyes from the glare.
“I’ve got the second low-altitude fighter,” Angelina said, confirming the fire-control computer’s radar lock on the target. She held the safety levers of the Stinger airmine rockets down and fired twice.
“Second fighter decelerating,” Angelina reported. “Sitting stable off our left rear quarter … slowing … we got him. I think we FODed him out.”
“What?” Wendy asked.
“FODed him out. He sucked in an engineful of scrap metal.”
Upstairs Wendy signaled a gloved okay to Angelina as the gunnery expert watched the range gate of the fighter rapidly increase as it fell behind. Wendy noted that her infrared tail-warning seeker had locked itself onto the disabled fighter, but she ignored the indication—Angelina had already tagged that one.
The Soviet pilot aboard the Mikoyan-Gureyvich E-266M “Foxbat-E” interceptor was preparing to abandon his aircraft. He was watching two hydraulic system failure-warning lights and two engine overspeed-warning lights, aware that although the flash of light was far behind him he had flown through a cloud of something … he could almost hear the flak rattling around in his engine’s turbines, tearing through the hydraulic lines, ripping the compressor blades apart. The intruder, whatever it was, was invisible through the glare of the warning lights on his canopy.
But he did notice one more set of lights—the lock-on indication of two of his K-13A Atoll missiles tracking the intruder. Seconds before power drained from his interceptor, the pilot selected every last one of his remaining missiles, and with his other hand on his ejection ring, pressed the missile-launch trigger.
Ormack was checking his switches and asking General Elliott cross-cockpit how he was feeling. McLanahan had just put his attack radar to STANDBY and was leaning over to help Luger with terrain calls. Angelina had completed a quick scan of the rear hemisphere of the Old Dog before putting her radar to STANDBY. Wendy was readjusting a twisted parachute strap, trying to unwind a bit from her first real fighter engagement.
But the supercooled eye of the infrared seeker mounted on top of the short curved V-tail of the Old Dog wasn’t relaxing. It was tracking the dimming heat signature of the fighter far behind them when it noticed the sudden increase in the heat-signature of the target as two heat-seeking missiles streaked toward the Old Dog’s eight Pratt and Whitney TF33 turbofan engines. The increase quickly surpassed the delta-pK thermal threshold programmed into it months earlier by Wendy herself, and an MLD indicator flashed at both Tork’s and Ormack’s position. Simultaneously with the warning light, the decoy system ejected one bundle of chaff and one phosphorous flare from both left and right ejectors.
The automatic response to the infrared missile attack would have been successful—had anyone noticed the MLD warning indicators and initiated evasive action. The warning tone sounded in everyone’s headsets at the same time the light illuminated, but both Ormack and Tork had to be watching for the target on the threat display and expecting the attack to escape the heat-seeking missiles. By the time Wendy noticed the blinking red Missile Launch Detection light, the Atoll missiles had accelerated to nearly Mach 2 and had closed the short distance between them in the blink of an eye.
Even so, the automatic system had its saving effect. The flares, shot two hundred yards away from the bomber’s belly, caught the Atoll missiles’ attention, providing a momentary distraction. But at less than a mile away the missiles could not ignore the huge globes of heat emanating from the Old Dog’s turbofan engines.
One missile locked momentarily onto the right flare, then back onto the right engines. The sudden swing of the IR seeker head from one hot target to another—a sign that the seeker had picked up a decoy—triggered a proximity detonation signal to the sixty-pound warheads—the missile exploded less than twenty yards from the Old Dog’s V-tail vertical stabilizer, blowing off the top nine feet of the Old Dog’s right stabilator tail and leaving a short jagged stub of metal where the stabilator used to be.
The other missile took a sideways glance at the decoy flare and swung a few precious feet to the left toward the flare, but it wasn’t enough to divert it. Driven by the solid propellant engine just approaching full thrust, it plunged into the exhaust port of the number one engine and detonated. That explosion immediately turned the number one engine into a blob of molten metal and blew what remained of the already damaged left wingtip into a shower of fire.
The Old Dog, pushed by an exploding missile on one side and pulled by one lost engine, skidded violently to the left. Ormack was able to keep the bomber a few knots above the stall only because all eight engines were already at maximum thrust. Stomping on the right rudder, he turned the control wheel full to the right. The lights flickered in the crew compartment and the interphone began to squeal.
“We’re hit,” Ormack reported, and pushed the right rudder hard all the way to the floor. The Old Dog slowly, slowly began to straighten its sideways slide. As it did, Ormack scanned the caution lights and engine instruments, but it was Elliott who noticed the engine instruments while Ormack fought for aircraft control.
“Fire on number one,” he called out. Ormack glanced quickly at number one’s engine instruments to confirm the call, then pulled the number one throttle CLOSED. Elliott, his hand on the fire-shutoff switch, pulled the T handle when he saw Ormack’s hand reaching for it. He then began reciting the emergency checklist: “Starter switch off.”
Ormack checked the switch. “Off.”
“Electrical panel.”
“Checking,” Ormack said, scanning the a-c and d-c electrical panel on his right instrument panel. “Crew, we’ve shut down number one engine. Shut off all unnecessary equipment or we’ll lose another generator.” He checked the generator panel and confirmed total loss number-one generator. “All other generators are on high load but they’re okay so far.”
“Bleed selector switch, normal left hand inboard,” Elliott continued, now reading from the emergency checklist displayed on the cockpit computer monitor.
“Normal.”
Elliott painfully hauled himself forward out of his seat and strained to look out the cockpit window.
“Can’t see the nacelle, don’t see any fire out there … “
“Fire light has gone out,” Ormack confirmed, then began a check of the fuel panel. “I think we have a leak in the number one wing tank, but it doesn’t look too serious.” He reached down to a large knob on the center aisle control stand and cranked in full right-rudder trim. “General, check the rudder hydraulics. We might have a problem with the rudder now.”
Elliott checked the warning lights on his left instrument panel. “All the lights are out.”
“Well, we got rudder problems, too,” Ormack said. “I’m retarding engines seven and eight to help keep straight. Number two engine has to stay in military.”
Ormack started a slow climb to four thousand feet and carefully engaged the low-level autopilot. He waited a few moments to be sure that the autopilot could hold the Megafortress straight and level. “All right, we’ve got control of the aircraft. Pereira, McLanahan, check for fighters before we get too involved in damage assessment.”
Angelina and Patrick went to RADIATE on their radars and took careful but fast full hemisphere sweeps of the sky. With both radars operating, they could scan almost three thousand cubic miles of airspace in a few seconds.
“Clear,” McLanahan reported.
“No pursuit,” Angelina said.
“Scope’s clear,” from Wendy. “A few extremely low-powered search signals. The power fluctuation put some of my jammers into STANDBY but they should reset in a few minutes.”
“Clear of terrain for thirty miles,” Luger said.
“All right.” Ormack relaxed his grip on the control yoke. “We’re level at four thousand feet. We’ve lost number one engine and its generator. We can’t visually confirm it but I think we lost the rest of the left wingtip. There’s a slight leak in the number one wing tank supplying the number two engine but I don’t think it’s fatal. Something’s also gone haywire with the rudder, it’s hard to keep her straight … “
“I feel a pretty good shudder in the airmine turret-controls,” Angelina said. “Need to check out the cannon steering.” She activated the Stinger airmine rocket cannon controls and began a self-test of her system.
“The navigation system went to STANDBY for a few seconds,” Luger reported, “but the battery kept everything from dumping. We’re reloading the mission data now from the ‘game’ cartridge.”
In a few moments Angelina was back on the interphone. “Colonel Ormack, I think we lost the whole damn tail. My infrared scanner is dead. Everything’s faulted. We won’t have any more automatic IR detection from the tail anymore.”
“Well,” Luger said, “can’t the threat-receiver—”
“The threat-receiver only detects fighters when they use their radar,” Angelina told him. “If they get a visual or infrared lock-on they can launch missiles at us all day and we can’t see them. They can drive in as close as they want and get a point-blank kill.”
“The Scorpions,” Ormack said. “What about them?”
“I’m getting a flickering low-pressure warning light on the rotary launcher,” Angelina said, checking a set of gauges on her right control panel. “Still in the green, but that last attack might have done some missile damage.”
“High terrain, thirty miles,” Luger reported.
“Any way around it?” Ormack asked.
“Solid ridge line. No other way.”
Ormack cursed and nudged the Old Dog skyward. They were almost back at their pre-established five thousand foot safe-clearance altitude before Luger finally reported clear of terrain.
“Goddamn,” Ormack said, “over four thousand feet above the ground—”
“But we may belly-flop that ridge line when we cross it,” McLanahan reminded him. “We should be able to engage the auto terrain-following computer any second—”
