It was surprising that guardsmen had been selected for this mission. Nearly a thousand tactical aircraft were now mobilized on the East Coast, about a third of them reservists of one kind or another, and Richardson guessed that that was part of the message. A very difficult tactical operation was being run by second-line airmen, while the regular squadrons sat ready on the runways of Loring, and McGuire, and Dover, and Pease, and several other bases from Virginia to Maine, fueled, briefed, and ready. Nearly a thousand aircraft! Richardson smiled. There wouldn’t be enough targets to go around.
“Linebacker Lead, this is Sentry-Delta. Target bearing zero-four-eight, range fifty miles. Course is one-eight-five, speed twenty.”
Richardson did not acknowledge the transmission over the encrypted radio link. The flight was under EMCON. Any electronic noise might alert the Soviets. Even his targeting radar was switched off, and only passive infrared and low-light television sensors were operating. He look quickly left and right. Second-line flyers, hell! he said to himself. Every man in the flight had at least four thousand hours, more than most regular pilots would ever have, more than most of the astronauts, and their birds were maintained by people who tinkered with airplanes because they liked to. The fact of the matter was that his squadron had better aircraft-availability than any regular squadron and had had fewer accidents than the wet-nosed hotdogs who flew the warthogs in England and Korea. They’d show the Russkies that.
He smiled to himself. This sure beat flying his DC-9 from Washington to Providence and Hartford and back every day for U.S. Air! Richardson, who had been an air force fighter pilot, had left the service eight years earlier because he craved the higher pay and flashy lifestyle of a commercial airline pilot. He’d missed Vietnam, and commercial flying did not require anything like this degree of skill; it lacked die rush of skimming at treetop level.
So far as he knew, the Hog had never been used for maritime strike missions — another part of the message. It was no surprise that she’d be good at it. Her antitank munitions would be effective against ships. Her cannon slugs and Rockeye clusters were designed to shred armored battle tanks, and he had no doubts what they would do to thin-hulled warships. Too bad this wasn’t for real. It was about time somebody taught Ivan a lesson.
A radar sensor light blinked on his threat receiver; S-band radar, it was probably meant for surface search, and was not powerful enough for a return yet. The Soviets did not have any aerial radar platforms, and their ship-carried sets were limited by the earth’s curvature. The beam was just over his head; he was getting the fuzzy edge of it. They would have avoided detection better still by flying at fifty feet instead of a hundred, but orders were not to.
“Linebacker flight, this is Sentry-Delta. Scatter and head in,” the AWACS commanded.
The A-10s separated from their interval of only a few feet to an extended attack formation that left miles between aircraft. The orders were for them to scatter at thirty miles’ distance. About four minutes. Richardson checked his digital clock; the Linebacker flight was right on time. Behind them, the Phantoms and Corsairs in the alpha strike would be turning toward the Soviets, just to get their attention. He ought to be seeing them soon…
The HUD showed small bumps on the projected horizon — the outer screen of destroyers, the Udaloys and Sovremennys. The briefing officer had shown them silhouettes and photos of the warships.
Beep! his threat receiver chirped. An X-band missile guidance radar had just swept over his aircraft and lost it, and was now trying to regain contact. Richardson flipped on his ECM (electronic countermeasures) jamming systems. The destroyers were only five miles away now. Forty seconds. Stay dumb, comrades, he thought.
He began to maneuver his aircraft radically, jinking up, down, left, right, in no particular pattern. It was only a game, but there was no sense in giving Ivan an easy time. If this had been for real, his Hogs would be blazing in behind a swarm of antiradar missiles and would be accompanied by Wild Weasel aircraft trying to scramble and kill Soviet missile control systems. Things were moving very fast now. A screening destroyer loomed in his path, and he nudged his rudder to pass clear of her by a quarter mile. Two miles to the Kirov — eighteen seconds.
The HUD system painted an intensified image. The Kirov’s pyramidal mast-stack-radar structure was filling his windshield. He could see blinking signal lights all around the battle cruiser. Richardson gave more right rudder. They were supposed to pass within three hundred yards of the ship, no more, no less. His Hog would blaze past the bow, the others past the stern and either beam. He didn’t want to cut it too close. The major checked to be certain that his bomb and cannon controls were locked in the safe position. No sense getting carried away. About now in a real attack he’d trigger his cannon and a stream of solid slugs would lance the light armor of the Kirov’s forward missile magazines, exploding the SAM and cruise missiles in a huge fireball and slicing through the superstructure as if it were thin as newsprint.
At five hundred yards, the captain reached down to arm the flare pod, attached next to the LANTIRN.
Now! He flipped the switch, which deployed half a dozen high-intensity magnesium parachute flares. All four Linebacker aircraft acted within seconds. Suddenly the Kirov was inside a box of blue-white magnesium light. Richardson pulled back on his stick, banking into a climbing turn past the battle cruiser. The brilliant light dazzled him, but he could see the graceful lines of the Soviet warship as she was turning hard on the choppy seas, her men running along the deck like ants.
If we were serious, you’d all be dead now — get the message?
Richardson thumbed his radio switch. “Linebacker Lead to Sentry-Delta,” he said in the clear. “Robin Hood, repeat, Robin Hood. Linebacker flight, this is lead, form up on me. Let’s go home!”
“Linebacker flight, this is Sentry-Delta. Outstanding!” the controller responded. “Be advised that Kiev has a pair of Forgers in the air, thirty miles east, heading your way. They’ll have to hustle to catch up. Will advise. Out.”
Richardson did some fast arithmetic in his head. They probably could not catch up, and even if they did, twelve Phantoms from the 107th Fighter Interceptor Group were ready for it.
“Hot damn, lead!” Linebacker 4, the crop duster, moved gingerly into his slot. “Did you see those turkeys pointing up at us? God damn, did we rattle their cage!”
“Heads up for Forgers,” Richardson cautioned, grinning ear to ear inside his oxygen mask. Second-line flyers, hell!
“Let ‘em come,” Linebacker 4 replied. “Any of those bastards closes me and my thirty, it’ll be the last mistake he ever makes!” Four was a little too aggressive for Richardson’s liking, but the man did know how to drive his Hog.
“Linebacker flight, this is Sentry-Delta. The Forgers have turned back. You’re in the clear. Out.”
“Roger that, out. Okay, flight, let’s settle down and head home. I guess we’ve earned our pay for the month.” Richardson looked to make sure he was on an open frequency. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Barry Friendly,” he said, using the in-house U.S. Air public relations joke that had become a tradition in the 175th. “I hope you have enjoyed your flight, and thank you for flying Warthog Air.”
The Kirov
On the Kirov, Admiral Stralbo raced from the combat information center to the flag bridge, too late. They had acquired the low-level raiders only a minute from the outer screen. The box of flares was already behind the battle cruiser, several still burning in the water. The bridge crew, he saw, was rattled.
“Sixty to seventy seconds before they were on us, Comrade Admiral,” the flag captain reported, “we were tracking the orbiting attack force and these four — we think, four — racing in under our radar coverage. We had missile lock on two of them despite their jamming.”
Stralbo frowned. That performance was not nearly good enough. If the strike had been real, the Kirov would have been badly damaged at least. The Americans would gladly trade a pair of fighters for a nuclear powered cruiser. If all American aircraft attacked like this…
“The arrogance of the Americans is fantastic!” The fleet zampolit swore.
“It was foolish to provoke them,” Stralbo observed sourly. “I knew that something like that would happen, but I expected it from Kennedy.”
“That was a mistake, a pilot error,” the political officer replied.
“Indeed, Vasily. And this was no mistake! They just sent us a message, telling us that we are fifteen hundred kilometers from their shore without useful air cover, and that they have over five hundred fighters waiting to pounce on us from the west. In the meantime Kennedy is stalking us to the east like a rabid wolf. We are not in an attractive position.”