“Any hostile air activity?”
“Negative Mike, we picked up a few airborne bogies far inland but they’re keeping well away from us.”
“Sensible people.”
“Yeah, didn’t think the Caffs had it.... RED, RED we have a missile launch. Surface-to-air, coming our way ... coming up on us fast. It’s definitely targeted on us”
“Xav jam the son-of-a-bitch’s guidance system. Ed, locate the guidance radar and take it out. Screw the ‘Rules of Engagement’.” Kozlowski slammed Marisol’s throttles forward and felt the familiar thump in his spine as the reheat cut in and the engines surged to full power. He pulled the nose back and swept the aircraft into a climbing turn. As Marisol swung at 90 degrees to the original course, he did an abrupt wingover, pulling the nose in and under so Marisol virtually reversed course in mid-air. At that instant, Dravar punched the release and a cloud of chaff spread from its launchers in the wings. The missile that had been on his forward port quarter was now port and aft and there was a spreading chaff cloud between Marisol and the inbound missile.
“Mike, I can’t find a tracking signal to jam. There’s nothing there. But that thing is coming for us, it followed our turn perfectly. I’m hitting flares, it may be coming in on infra-red.”
Missile Base Sirius, South of Gaza, Palestine Province, The Caliphate
The crew were good, Engstrom noted. They’d picked up the launch almost immediately and the violent turn and wingover had almost caused him to lose their picture. He’d just held it though and he’d seen the cloud of chaff spreading around the aircraft. The sunlight reflecting off it had almost - almost - made him lose the target again but he’d held her. Now the aircraft was surrounded by white smoke and brilliant orange-white lights. Decoy flares, they were assuming the missile had a heat-seeking backup system. Nearly right but near wasn’t good enough.
A few second to impact now. Engstrom flipped another switch on his console. This activated the fire control radar on the ground that illuminated the target for the radar guidance system in the missile. The electro-optical system wasn’t accurate enough for the final intercept but the target wouldn’t have time to jam its signals in the fraction of a second it would be on.
RB-58C “Marisol”, over the Palestine coast, just south of Gaza.
Speed was life. Kozlowski put Marisol’s nose down in an attempt to pick up as much forward speed as possible. He felt her punch through the sound barrier, if he could get her up to maximum and pick up enough altitude to get where the air was thin and she could run the way she was designed to, then they could duck this thing coming at them then take out the people who had launched it. And damn the ‘Rules of Engagement’.
“Radar, we have fire control radar tracking signal.
Jamming now...”
It was too late. The Hiryu missile had three warheads, spaced equally down the airframe of the missile. The design was intended to put up a wall of fragments through which the target had to fly. That assumed the missile exploded in front of the target. However, Marisol’s evasive action had put the missile behind her, now it exploded directly underneath and about 150 feet below her. The wall of fragments slashed along her belly like a buzz-saw.
The crew heard Marisol’s scream of agony as the displays in all three cockpits erupted into a sea of red warning signals. The screens in the Bear’s Den blacked out with a terrible finality, in the cockpit Kozlowski felt the controls freeze solid in his hands. Around him the sky was starting to rotate. He fought the frozen joystick trying to bring the aircraft back under control but there was no movement, none at all..
“Get out Mike, get out now. While you can.” Marisol’s voice was weak but insistent.
“We told you, we don’t bail on you. We’ll get out of this. There’s a divert airfield in Libya the Italians said we can use.”
“Too late, I’m all smashed up inside. Get out now, it’s all over.”
“I told you we won’t b..”
“Get out, GET OUT GET OUT.” At Marisol’s last scream, Kozlowski felt the ejection capsule fold around him and the rocket of the escape system throw him clear of the cockpit. Eddie or Xav must have banged all three of them out, he thought. The three ejection capsules were in a tight group, falling together, with luck that meant they wouldn’t have to waste time finding each other on the ground.
As the ejection screen fell away, Kozlowski saw Marisol. Her belly had been ripped open by the missile, the under-fuselage pod smashed and disintegrating. Both inboard engines were on fire, leaving two parallel streaks of black smoke across the sky. Between them a sheet of white, streaming from Marisol’s shattered fuselage filled the air. She was in a flat spin, dropping from the sky like a stone. Her last words had been right, if her crew had waited a second longer, the G-forces would have stopped them escaping.
Even as he watched Marisol started to break up. The port wing went first, fracturing at the inboard engine mount, the detached portion fluttering clear. Then the tail broke off just aft of the wing trailing edge, there was a known weak point there, where the fuselage had been extended from the original B-58A design. Suddenly, Marisol was simply falling out of the sky, tumbling end-over-end, shedding wreckage as she went. A split second before impact, she jerked her nose up. Then, her head still held high, she hit the desert and exploded.
White House Cabinet Office. Washington D.C.
Veteran Washington hands do not rely on press statements or contacts inside the Pentagon for advance notice of international crises. Instead, they cultivate the managers of fast food joints around the Pentagon and the White House for the first sign of international disaster is a sudden spate of delivery orders from those buildings. Now, in McDonalds, Dominos and a dozen others, the cooks were working overtime. Which wasn’t surprising, emergency cabinet meetings were rare and deadly serious.
“Security Advisor, can you brief us on what has happened.”
“Mister President, less than an hour ago, one of our RB-58Cs, Marisol crashed. Almost certainly she was shot down by forces belonging to the Caliphate. Information from Tiger Lily indicates Marisol was hit by a surface-to-air missile. There are a lot of things about the incident that we do not yet fully understand and we urgently need explanations.”
lnanna entered the room and gave a note to Secretary Rusk. He read it quickly. “I am sorry to interrupt Seer. Mister President, the Italian Government has just issued a statement that their radar tracking station in Libya saw the incident. Their statement says the lost aircraft was flying much lower and slower than usual and their initial assumption is that it was suffering severe technical problems. There is a classified note from Senor Mussolini attached Mister President, he says his government will act as independent witnesses to confirm whatever it is that we decide is the truth.”
“Nice of him. What does he want? More importantly what happened can wait. I want to know what happened to the crew. Are they alive? Have they been captured? What are we doing to get them out. Seer?”