17 – The Frisbees of Dreamland
GERMANY, FORWARD EDGE OF THE BATTLE AREA
The view would have been frightening to most men. There were solid clouds overhead at four thousand feet. He flew through showers that he more heard than saw on this black night, and the dark outlines of trees appeared to reach up and snatch at his speeding fighter. Only a madman would be so low on such a night-so much the better, he smiled inside his oxygen mask.
Colonel Douglas Ellington’s fingertips caressed the control stick of his F-19A Ghostrider attack fighter, while his other hand rested on the side-by-side throttle controls on the left-side cockpit wall. The head-up display projected on the windshield in front of him reported 625 knots Indicated Air Speed, a hundred six feet of altitude, a heading of 013, and around the numbers was a monocolor holographic image of the terrain before him. The image came from a forward-looking infrared camera in the fighter’s nose, augmented by an invisible laser that interrogated the ground eight times per second. For peripheral vision, his oversized helmet was fitted with low-light goggles.
“Raisin’ hell over our heads,” his back-seater reported. Major Don Eisly monitored the radio and radar signals, as well as their own instruments: “All systems continue nominal, range to target now ninety miles.”
“Right,” the Duke responded. It had been an automatic nickname for Ellington, who even looked vaguely like the jazz musician.
Ellington relished the mission. They were skimming north at perilously low level over the angular terrain of East Germany, and their Frisbee, never more than two hundred feet off the ground, jerked up and down to the pilot’s constant course adjustments.
Lockheed called her the Ghostrider. The pilots called her the Frisbee, the F-19A, the secretly developed Stealth attack fighter. She had no corners, no box shapes to allow radar signals to bounce cleanly off her. Her high-bypass turbofans were designed to emit a blurry infrared signature at most. From above, her wings appeared to mimic the shape of a cathedral bell. From in front, they curved oddly toward the ground, earning her the affectionate nickname of Frisbee. Though she was a masterpiece of electronic technology inside, she usually didn’t use her active systems. Radars and radios made electronic noise that an enemy might detect, and the whole idea of the Frisbee was that she didn’t seem to exist at all.
Far over their heads on both sides of the border, hundreds of fighter aircraft played a deadly game of bluff, racing toward the border and then turning away, both sides trying to goad the other into committing to battle. Each side had airborne radar aircraft with which to control such a battle and so gain the advantage in a war which, though few yet knew it, had already begun.
And we’re getting a quick one in, Ellington thought. We’re finally doing something smart! He’d had a hundred missions over Vietnam in the first production F-111A fighters. The Duke was the Air Force’s leading expert on covert low-level missions, and it was said that he could “bull’s-eye a chuckhole in a Kansas tornado at midnight.” That wasn’t quite true. The Frisbee could never handle a tornado. The sad truth was that the F-19 handled like a pig-a consequence of her ungainly design. But Ellington didn’t care. Being invisible was better than being agile, he judged, knowing that he was about to prove or disprove that proposition.
The Frisbee squadron was now penetrating the most concentrated SAM belt the world had ever known.
“Range to primary target is now sixty miles,” Eisly advised. “All onboard systems continue nominal. No radars are locked onto us. Lookin’ good, Duke.”
“Roger.” Ellington pushed the stick forward and dived as they passed over the crest of a small hill, then bottomed out at eighty feet over a wheatfield. The Duke was playing his game to the limit, drawing on years of experience in low-level attacks. Their primary target was a Soviet IL-76 Mainstay, an AWACS-type aircraft that was circling near Magdeburg, agreeably within ten miles of their secondary target, the E-8 highway bridges over the Elbe at Hohenroarthe. The mission was getting a lot hairier. The closer they got to the Mainstay the more radar signal hit their aircraft, its intensity growing at a square function. Sooner or later, enough signal would be reflected back to the Mainstay to be detectable, even by curved wings made of radar-transparent composites. All the Stealth technology did was to make radar detection harder, not impossible. Would they be seen by the Mainstay? If so, when, and how quickly would the Russians react?
Keep her on the deck, he told himself. Play the game by the rules you’ve practiced out. They had rehearsed this mission for nine days in “Dreamland,” the top-secret exercise area in the sprawl of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Even the E-3A Sentry could barely make them out at forty miles, and the Sentry was a far better radar platform than the Mainstay, wasn’t it?
That’s what you’re here to find out, boy . . .
There were five Mainstays on duty, all a hundred klicks east of the inter-German border. A nice safe distance, what with over three hundred fighters between them and the border.
“Twenty miles, Duke.”
“Right. Call it off, Don.”
“Roge. Still no fire-control emanations on us, and no search stuff is lingering our way. Lots of radio chatter, but mostly west of us. Very little VOX coming from the target.”
Ellington reached his left hand down to arm the four AIM-9M Sidewinder missiles hanging under his wings. The weapon-indicator light blinked a lethal, friendly green.
“Eighteen miles. Target appears to be circling normally, not taking evasive action.”
Ten miles to the minute, Ellington computed in his mind, one minute forty seconds.
“Sixteen miles.” Eisly read the numbers off a computer readout keyed to the NAVSTAR satellite navigation system.
The Mainstay would not have a chance. The Frisbee would not begin to climb until she was directly underneath the target. Fourteen miles. Twelve. Ten. Eight. Six miles to the converted air transport.
“The Mainstay just reversed her turn-yeah, she’s jinking. A Foxfire just swept over us,” Eisly said evenly. A MiG-25 interceptor, presumably acting on instructions from the IL-76, was now searching for them. With its high power and small arc, the Foxfire stood a good chance of acquiring them, Stealth technology or not. “The Mainstay might have us.”
“Anything locked on us?”
“Not yet.” Eisly’s eyes were glued to the threat-receiver instruments. No missile-control radars had centered on the Frisbee yet. “Coming under the target.”
“Right. Climbing now.” Ellington eased back on his stick and punched up full afterburners. The Frisbee’s engines could only give him Mach 1.3, but this was the place to use all the power he had. According to the weather people, these clouds topped out at twenty thousand feet, and the IL-76 would be about five thousand above that. Now the Frisbee was vulnerable. No longer lost in the ground clutter, her engines radiating their maximum signature, the Stealth aircraft was broadcasting her presence. Climb faster, baby . . .
“Tallyho!” Ellington said too loudly over the intercom as he burst through the clouds, and the night-vision systems instantly showed him the Mainstay, five miles away and diving for cover in front of him. Too late. The head-on closing speed was nearly a thousand miles per hour. The colonel centered his gunsight pipper on the target. A warbling tone came into his headset: the Sidewinders’ seekers had locked onto the target. His right thumb toggled the launch-enable switch, and his forefinger squeezed the trigger twice. The Sidewinders left the aircraft half a second apart. Their brilliant exhaust flames dazzled him, but he did not take his eyes off the missiles as they raced for the target. It took eight seconds. He looked them all the way in. Both missiles angled for the Mainstay’s starboard wing. Thirty feet away, laser proximity fuses detonated, filling the air with lethal fragments. It happened too fast. Both of the Mainstay’s right-side engines exploded, the wing came off, and the Soviet aircraft began cartwheeling violently downward, lost seconds later in the clouds.
Jesus! Ellington thought as he rolled and dived back to the ground and safety. Nothing like the movies. The target was hit and gone between blinks. Well, okay, that was easy enough. Primary target gone. Now for the hard part . . .
Aboard an E-3A Sentry circling over Strasbourg, the radar technicians noted with satisfaction that all five Soviet radar craft had been killed within two minutes: it all worked, the F-19 really did surprise them.
The brigadier general in command of Operation Dreamland leaned forward in his command chair and toggled his microphone.
“Trumpeter, Trumpeter, Trumpeter,” he said, then switched off. “Okay, boys,” he breathed. “Make it count.”
Amid the clouds of NATO tactical fighters hovering near the border, a hundred low-level attack fighters broke clear and dove for the ground. Half were F-111F Aardvarks, the other half “GR I ” Tornados, their wings heavy with fuel tanks and smart bombs. They followed the second wave of Frisbees, already sixty miles into East Germany, fanning out to their ground targets. Behind the strike aircraft, all-weather Eagle and Phantom interceptors, directed by the Sentries circling over the Rhein, began to launch their radar-guided missiles at Soviet fighters that had just lost their airborne controllers. Finally, a third team of NATO aircraft swooped in low, seeking out the ground radar sites that were coming on to replace the radar coverage of the dead Mainstays.