“Damn, I’ll say,” Rebecca breathed as she watched the last moments of the StealthHawk’s bomb-damage assessment on Patrick’s multifunction display. She had a lot of experience with the thermium-nitrate explosives and knew that that same mini-Mav missile could take out a main battle tank—“overkill” was a gross understatement when describing a thermium-nitrate warhead hitting a little Toyota pickup. “Pretty awesome weapon.”
“StealthHawk engaging the second pickup,” Patrick said. “Missile two away….”
The StealthHawk leveled off two thousand feet above the ground and headed for its second target, a column of two Toyota pickups filled with guerrilla soldiers. This time the occupants saw it coming. “Split up! Split up!” Zarazi screamed. He raised his AK-74 rifle and opened fire, and the other five men in the back of the pickup opened fire as well.
It was like looking down the barrel of a gun just before the trigger was pulled — and then realizing the barrel was pulled away right at the very last second. Moments after Zarazi’s truck veered away, the first truck disappeared under a tremendous explosion. Zarazi and the guerrillas in the second pickup saw the other pickup emerge from the cloud of flame and smoke looking as if the truck had been blasted apart by a giant shotgun, set afire, and then tossed across the ground. “Allah, have mercy,” Zarazi muttered. “Allah, get us out of this, and I promise I will avenge myself on the infidels that send these demon robot planes to kill your faithful servants — I swear it!”
“Oh, baby!” Patrick exclaimed. The mini-Mav’s infrared sensor clearly showed the second pickup truck and its terrified occupants as the missile homed in. At least six automatic rifles were firing at both the mini-Mav and the second StealthHawk, but it was too late. He switched to the first StealthHawk’s imaging-infrared camera as the mini-Mav missile hit, and its picture disappeared. Tires, engine, fuel tank, ammunition, and bodies exploded in perfect unison, and the truck cartwheeled in a cloud of fire across the wasteland. “Got the sucker!”
“Got one more truck trying to get away!” Furness exclaimed. “He knows we’re on his tail, and he’s hauling ass.”
“Don’t worry, the StealthHawk has lots of ammo and fuel,” Patrick said. “That third truck is toast.” Patrick entered commands to launch a third mini-Maverick…
But instead of the missile’s releasing and gliding to its target, the StealthHawk UCAV itself started to descend. “Check altitude… altitude two thousand… check altitude, altitude two thousand… Shit, I think I lost contact with the UCAV.”
“Well, at least we get a ringside seat for the impact,” Rebecca said. But the unmanned air vehicle didn’t make impact — instead it leveled out at two hundred feet aboveground, clearly in view of the Taliban fighters below, and began flying westward. “Okay, General, where in hell is it going?” Rebecca asked.
“Damned if I know,” Patrick replied. “But it’ll run out of fuel in forty minutes.”
“Another one bites the dust.”
“But it might not bite the dust. It might make a nice soft landing in the desert,” Patrick said worriedly. “And if it does…”
“Then those Taliban goons or anyone else who gets their hands on it will have themselves the latest in American UCAV technology,” Rebecca said. “In forty minutes it’ll be halfway to the Persian Gulf. Can’t you self-destruct it?”
“I have no control over it at all,” Patrick said. He thought for a moment; then: “Follow it.”
“What?”
“Maybe if we can get closer to it, it’ll respond to our direct datalink signals.” He spoke commands into the computer, and the heading bug on Rebecca’s multifunction display swung westward. “There’s your heading bug. Center up.”
“No way, General,” Rebecca said. “That’ll take us over… hell, General, that heading takes us over Iran!”
“We’ll stay in the mountains — fly some terrain-avoidance altitudes,” Patrick said. “We’ve got to cut off that UCAV before we lose it.”
“We’re not authorized to fly over Pakistan, and we’re sure as hell not going to overfly Iran,” Furness repeated. Because the United States had had to take the “war on terror” into its former ally, Pakistan, to hunt down the last remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorist cells, a rift had developed between the two nations. Pakistan now prohibited overflights by any military aircraft, and it regarded any military combat aircraft flying over Afghanistan as hostile.
Despite this ban, President Thomas Thorn had authorized McLanahan to launch a StealthHawk unmanned aircraft to patrol Afghanistan, even though it obviously had to overfly Pakistan to reach its patrol area. One or two unmanned aircraft flying over a remote part of Pakistan were not a threat — at least that would be the Americans’ argument, if the stealthy UCAVs were ever discovered.
But a high-tech B-1 bomber was a completely different story.
“General, we can’t remain hidden long enough,” Rebecca argued. “We stay in the mountains a short time, but eventually we get over the desert, and there’s nowhere to hide….”
“Rebecca, it’s now or never,” Patrick insisted. “If we fly over the Mach above the unpopulated areas and slow down near the populated areas, we’ll catch up to the StealthHawk in about twenty minutes. We’ll have just enough time to get it turned around before we have to bingo and refuel.”
“Get approval from the Pentagon first.”
“There’s no time,” Patrick said. “Center up on the bug, push it up to Mach zero point nine, and descend to COLA to penetrate the coastline. I’ll get a new intel satellite dump, and we’ll pick the best course.”
“Oh, God, here we go again,” Rebecca muttered as she commanded the bomber to accelerate and descend to COLA, or Computer-generated Lowest Altitude. The flight-control system commanded a twenty-degree nose-down pitch, automatically sweeping the EB-1’s wings all the way back and altering the curvature of the fuselage to gain as much speed as possible.
As soon as they headed northward, the threat-warning receiver blared, “Caution, SA-10 search mode, ten o’clock, one hundred ten miles, not in detection threshold.”
“The Iranian coastal-defense site at Char Bahar,” Patrick said. “No factor.”
“ ‘No factor,’ huh?” Rebecca retorted. “Aren’t those things capable of shooting down a bomber-size aircraft at treetop level?”
“Not this bomber, it won’t.” They were headed for the Pakistani coastline between the towns of Kapper and Gwadar, just fifty miles east of the Iranian border — well within range of the high-performance SA-10 antiaircraft missile system — but the threat-warning computers measured the signal strength of the search radar and determined that it was not strong enough to get a good reflection from the stealthy EB-1C Vampire. “Keep going.” He keyed his secure command satellite net’s mike button. “Control, Puppeteer.”
“We see it,” Patrick’s friend and deputy, Brigadier-General David Luger, replied. Luger, a fellow navigator and aeronautical engineer who had been partnered with Patrick since their early days in B-52 bombers, was watching the mission from the “virtual cockpit,” a system that displayed all of the EB-1C Vampire’s flight information on computer screens back home and allowed crews and technicians there to monitor and even partially control the actual flight mission. “I’ve issued recall instructions to the surveillance StealthHawk — it’ll ditch itself in the Arabian Sea, and the Navy will retrieve it for us. Still no contact with the strike StealthHawk — it’s still operating normally, still looking for targets but not responding to satellite steering commands.