In the backseat he said into the walkie-talkie, “Red Man, this is Hotel. I want an investigation unit in Hangar Five and one on the Commando ACV on the ramp gate on the double. Break. Rover Nine, secure the V-100 that crashed into the gate. Recover any bodies from the wreckage for the investigation unit. I want an I.D. on the occupants ASAP.”
“Roger, Hotel,” the security controller replied. “Hotel, be advised, Lance One and Lance Two F-16Fs airborne from Nellis at five past the hour. Two F-14 units from China Lake also report airborne. CATTLECAR is their controller. You can meet them on channel one-one.”
“Roger, Red Man. Get all Dreamland air defense units on channel eleven and help coordinate an intercept with CATTLECAR. The last thing we need is for our guys to take shots at those F-14s or -16s.”
“Switching all units to eleven, sir,” the security controller said. “Simultaneous voice and data.” Briggs switched his walkie-talkie over as well.
“CATTLECAR, this is Hotel on channel one-one. Over.”
“Hotel, this is CATTLECAR,” the radar controller replied. “HAWC anti-air units are reporting in now, sir. All assets should be on-line in sixty seconds.”
“Any airborne radar platforms up?”
“Not yet, sir. Nellis’ 767 AWACS is not an alert bird. I’ve requested the tac fighter unit to recall the crew, but that may take some time.”
“We’ll lose him without an AWACS up there to dig him out of the terrain,” McLanahan said. “Ground radar won’t pick him up if he stays low.”
“Hotel, this is CATTLECAR. Radar contact on your hostile. I’m directing all HAWC anti-air artillery units to engage. Any further instructions?”
Briggs stopped and looked at Elliott. The general inwardly flinched but did not hesitate. “If they’ve got him, destroy him.”
Briggs nodded and raised his walkie-talkie. “CATTLECAR, message confirmed through Alpha. Engage at will and shoot to kill. Out.”
Maraklov was no more than two hundred feet above ground when ANTARES began to report the emitters all around him. As Maraklov scanned outside the cockpit, visual images were supplanted by ANTARES-generated images of catalogued terrain features around which multicolored arcs or bands undulated, disappeared and reappeared in kaleidoscopic waves. The colored bands were beams of radar energy — search radars, tracking radars, and data-links — all searching for him.
Most of the waves of color were above him, like curtains of fire stretching across a ceiling, but a few seemed to slice right through DreamStar. Maraklov had to avoid those bands. The green bands were search radars, not deadly in themselves, but they would give away his position to the searchers. The other bands of energy were yellow — tracking radars that would pinpoint his location and would begin to feed targeting information to surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles. If the yellow bands turned red, it meant that a missile had been launched. If he was inside the red band, he was within the missile’s lethal envelope and would probably die within seconds unless the missile could be outmaneuvered — DreamStar carried no jammers, no decoys. Maraklov had to outrun, outmaneuver, or kill his attackers, or it was over for him.
He was finally free of the dry bed of the Groom Lake area, heading south and almost into Papoose Canyon northwest of Emigrant Valley, when a single finger of green light snapped out between a narrow gap between two rocky buttes and hit DreamStar broadside. One of the search radars had found him. The band immediately turned to yellow, but one of the buttes blocked the energy and the band turned green once again as the beam continued its three hundred and sixty degree sweep. But they now knew where he was — and were closing in on him. Maraklov dodged further away from the butte, hoping to stay in the butte’s radar shadow as long as possible.
It wasn’t working. The terrain was forcing him to climb, but the beam of green energy above him wasn’t rising with him. He had no time to react. The green beam of energy, completing a full revolution every six seconds, hit him once again as DreamStar crested a rocky ridge line. This time, it turned yellow and stayed on him. DreamStar’s threat-warning receiver immediately reported the contact, and after a few seconds’ analysis concluded that a British-made Rapier surface-to-air-missile was locked on.
The computer suggested a heading, altitude and airspeed to escape the Rapier missile’s lethal radius, and Maraklov ordered the evasive maneuver just as the band of energy went from yellow to red — the Rapier had gone from search to missile-uplink in seconds. The missile was in the air. There was no time and no room to move. DreamStar was bracketed by hills and mountains.
Sensing Maraklov’s confusion, ANTARES canceled the first suggested maneuver, immediately deployed the canards into their high-lift configuration and ordered a hard, tight Immelmann — a fast inverted half-loop — directly into the short rocky butte they had just passed. ANTARES also activated the superconducting radar, which showed the butte only three-quarters of a mile directly ahead. They would impact in less than four seconds …
A flash of light erupted off the right wing, and suddenly DreamStar banked hard right, pulling nine G’s in the tight turn. The Rapier missile had missed by only a few short feet. Maraklov tried to search the sky for another missile, but the hard nine-G turn had blurred and tunneled his vision. Another explosion off to his right — there had, indeed, been a second Rapier missile launched at him, but that one had exploded on the butte not three hundred yards behind him.
As his ejection-seat back began to recline automatically, which would help blood to flow back into his brain while ANTARES completed evasive maneuvers, Maraklov watched as the colored bands surrounding him switched back to green. The older Rapier missile systems surrounding Dreamland carried only two missiles on each launch platform, and the system had switched back to search mode while the Rapier crew reloaded.
Maraklov watched, fascinated, as ANTARES automatically increased power to full thrust, and began to use short bursts of its multi-directional radar to scan the terrain around DreamStar and fly as close to earth as possible. His ejection seat slowly returned to its upright position as the G-forces subsided, and he actually could relax … he would be long gone from the range of that Rapier site by the time it was reloaded—
A warning beep sounded in the upper-center part of his cockpit, and with it a blue-triangle icon appeared, with a long green triangle protruding from the front end. Answering his mental query, ANTARES reported what it was: an F-16 Falcon fighter, sweeping the skies below with its new AEG-91 look-down radar. Although pushing age twenty-five, the F-16 had undergone so many modifications that it could hardly be considered the same aircraft as twenty-five years earlier. Not originally designed for look-down, shoot-down, low-altitude engagements, it now sported a multi-purpose “cranked arrow” effect, with huge delta wings, and was capable of attacking air or ground targets at any altitude. Its new capability was in evidence as its green triangle swept down from the sky and in moments DreamStar had once again been discovered.
Maraklov commanded an immediate hard bank and searched for terrain to hide in. He knew the F-l6s rarely worked alone; only one would activate its radar, while one or two others would take vectors from the leader and close in on their prey, activating their attack radars at the last possible moment …
Another mental command … and Maraklov’s heart sank. At its present low altitude, DreamStar was gulping fuel. He could not afford to get into a situation where he’d have to waste time and fuel dodging missiles from the F-16s, let alone any sort of protracted aerial battle with them. Reinforcements were surely on their way — very likely F-15s from the Air Force Reserve base at Davis-Monthan in Tucson. Maraklov’s options were running out. There was only one real choice left to him.