ANTARES tried to tell him, but Maraklov wasn’t listening — tried to tell him that a left turn was precisely the wrong thing to do.
He barely had time to roll wings-level when the missile-launch warning hammered into his consciousness. This time it wasn’t a head-to-head engagement — the B-52 was in missile-launch position, behind and slightly to the left, the cutoff angle established, the missile already aiming ahead of its target’s flight path. Radar, infrared, laser — whatever he had, DreamStar was wide open. The Scorpion missile was even close enough to be picked up on radar …
But ANTARES, literally, did not comprehend the meaning of surrender — it would compute escape and attack options until it ran out of power to energize its circuitry. And Maraklov, feeling he had no hope of survival, had surrendered control of DreamStar to ANTARES.
The computer took over. Using its high-lift wings and full canard deflection, DreamStar executed a sharp ninety-degree pitch-up at max afterburner. The Scorpion missile overshot but turned precisely with DreamStar, arcing nearly up to twenty-thousand feet before following the guidance signals from the Old Dog and pitching over hard for the kill. The missile was now aimed straight down, passing Mach four, locked on, closing in again on DreamStar’s tail.
With its canards again in high-lift configuration, DreamStar continued its inverted roll, screaming below, then back up through the horizon. It was now clawing for altitude, skimming across the high desert floor by only a few feet. The Scorpion missile tracked every move, following DreamStar’s high-G loop. The missile broke Mach five as it closed in on its target …
Which suddenly stopped in mid-air, then climbed five hundred feet straight up. The missile could make a fourteen-G turn far greater than any fighter yet designed, but not even this high-tech missile could discontinue a Mach-five diving loop and then turn a ninety-degree corner. The Scorpion missile tracked perfectly, but at such close range, and moving at almost a mile per second, its turn radius was several hundred feet greater than its altitude above ground. The missile exploded into the Amargosa Desert, just a few yards from a truck stop northwest of Jackass Airport off highway 95.
The threat gone, the maneuver accomplished, ANTARES switched to offense in less time than it took for the last of the Old Dog’s missiles to disintegrate into the hard desert floor. With its attack-radar activated, it quickly searched for the enemy. At such close range even the Stealth fibersteel skin and radar energy-absorbing honeycomb arrays couldn’t diminish the huge radar cross-section of the Megafortress Plus. Lock-on, data transfer, active seeker lock-on, missile stabilization test, unlock, motor firing, launch.
The thing was done before Maraklov really knew it — missile flight time was barely four seconds …
“Missile launch,” Wendy called over interphone. “Break right.”
Ormack yanked the control stick hard right, all the way to the stops. Roll-control jets pushed the right wing down and pulled the left wing up, and nose and tail thrusters counteracted the adverse left yaw, which increased the roll rate even more. At fifty degrees of bank the B-52’s right wingtip was no more than two hundred feet above ground. Ormack pulled back on the stick, letting the Old Dog’s twin-tails pull the nose around even faster.
At the same time, Wendy released five rocket-powered decoys from the left ejector racks under the tail. The rockets spewed a huge globe of radar-reflecting tinsel a hundred yards from the B-52, followed by the blinding hot glare of phosphorous flares. Simultaneously Wendy activated her electronic jammers, present to the frequency of both DreamStar’s track-while-scan phased-array radars and the Scorpion missile’s seeker-radar, and pumped over a hundred thousand watts of energy across that frequency band.
The B-52’s decoys flew past the missile’s active radar seeker undetected — it had a solid lock on the B-52 itself. The seeker radar was blinded by the intense jamming, but in a millisecond it switched to the most accurate and reliable of its four backup modes: track on jam. The missile homed in on the center lobe of the jamming energy from the B-52, following the energy beam the way a hungry bat follows the echo of its hunting screech, straight to its prey. The missile flew under the B-52’s tail, past the ECM emitter and under the fuselage to the right wing, impacting on the number-three engine pod.
The right wing, made of composite materials far stronger than any metal, held fast, but the number five and six engines disintegrated in a cloud of flying metal and a huge fireball. The fireball lifted the right wing fifty feet into the air, then dropped it, stalling it out. The left four engines pulled the Old Dog around in a clockwise spin. None of its huge wings was generating lift now; the plane was being held aloft only by its forward momentum, like a chewed-up Frisbee tossed awkwardly into the air.
Engine-compressor blades from the number-five engine acted like huge, powerful swords, chopping through the crew compartment. Jeffrey Khan and Linda Evanston, sitting on the right side of the plane, were pierced by hundreds of shards of white-hot metal. Wendy Tork, thrown sideways in the blast, was hit by several pieces of metal.
Ormack pulled the control stick to the left and stomped hard on the left rudder pedal. Fibersteel screamed in protest. The flat spin slowed almost to a stop, but so did the Megafortress’ airspeed. Ormack knew he had pulled the plane out of its spin, but the sudden negative G’s told him that the Old Dog was never going to fly. Wendelstat was screaming, clawing at his lap belt, face distorted. Blood was coming from places all over his body, his helmeted head tattered from the impact of flying metal.
Ormack reached over to the center console, finding that the centrifugal forces were gone — it felt as if he was riding a gentle elevator down to the first floor. Lowering his head caused the cockpit to tilt violently, but he fought off the sudden vertigo and flipped the EJECT WARNING switch to EJECT.
Downward ejection for the two navigators in a B-52 bomber was a crap shoot in the best of circumstances, and Major Edward Frost knew it. Driven by years of experience, it took him only a few seconds to get his hands on the ejection ring, get his back straight, chin down, knees and legs braced, elbows tucked in. He pulled his ejection handle the instant he saw the red EJECT warning light illuminate. But even then it was too late. The zeropoint-two-second drogue-parachute ripped Frost’s ejection seat free, automatically pulling the zero-second ripcord, but his main parachute barely had time to deploy fully from its backpack before Frost hit the earth.
Angelina Pereira had pushed Wendy back upright in her seat when she saw the bright red EJECT light. Still holding Wendy in her seat with her left hand, she carefully rotated Wendy’s right ejection lever up and pulled the trigger. The fingers of her left hand broke as Wendy’s armrest smashed into them, but she didn’t notice the pain as she watched the seat blast skyward. Then she slammed herself back into her own seat, raised her arming levers, and pulled both triggers.