“I didn’t say I had it all figured out. Maybe he was turned or recruited after he got here, or he’s being blackmailed. Maybe I’m all wrong. But one thing’s for sure — if the F-15s out of Davis-Monthan don’t get him, we will. I just hope I get a chance to ask him why the hell he did it”—Patrick glanced at the AIM-120 missiles being raised into position on Cheetah’s wings—”before we put one up his tailpipe.”
Over southwest Arizona
There were eight other pilots who wanted to put one up Ken James’ tailpipe, but he wasn’t going to give them the opportunity.
Ken James — that name now discarded by DreamStar’s pilot, Andrei Maraklov — could see waves of radars all around him, but they were all search radars. He was deep within the Colorado River valley just south of Parker Dam, following the rugged mountain ridges as closely as he could to avoid detection. Two longer-range F-16L cranked-arrow fighters were behind him, their radars probing deep within the valley, but they never got a solid lock-on and they were staying up high to try to scan as much ground as possible. With their present tactics they were never going to get a shot at him.
But they were no longer the main threats — they were the pushers, the drivers, there only to keep DreamStar headed south toward the real danger. Maraklov had caught bits and pieces of scrambled radio conversations between the F-16s and another aircraft. It was not hard to guess which: a Boeing 707 or 767 AWACS radar plane, stationed, Maraklov reasoned, between Gila Bend and Yuma over Sentinel Plain. From there the older 707 AWACS could scan over one hundred twenty thousand cubic miles of airspace, from San Diego to El Paso, and most of the way down the Gulf of California into Mexico. The radar aboard the improved 767 was even better. No doubt the AWACS would be accompanied by at least two F-15 fighters out of Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson for protective escort, plus at least two more F-15s to hunt down DreamStar.
The fuel situation was critical. Less than an hour’s worth of fuel, less than an hour from the hastily arranged landing site in Mexico. Staying at low altitude was badly sucking up fuel, but he had no choice — the AWACS could have picked him up as far north as Las Vegas if he was any higher.
Of course the maneuvering he did during the B-52 attack pushed him under the fuel curve. Especially that last maneuver, going from Mach one to one hundred knots one hundred feet off the ground, thereby putting DreamStar in a virtual hover. That took care of any reserve he’d had hopes of building up …
Well, the B-52 Megafortress was dead. They certainly nicknamed it right. It almost escaped, almost dodged away in time, almost managed to decoy the AIM-120 away. The Scorpion missile had to switch to home-on-jam guidance to finish the attack. Ironically the massive jamming power of the B-52 was probably what did it in — it must have been easy for the Scorpion missile to follow jamming power like that.
Who was on that plane? Ormack — good officer, better pilot, Elliott’s natural successor for the command of Dreamland. Khan — a desk jockey. Had no business in the cockpit. Maraklov didn’t know Frost. He had dated Evanston once but that was no more than an experiment that neither wanted to continue. Besides, nays had no information of any value to anybody.
Angelina Pereira was almost old enough to be his mother, but she liked to use men and she liked men to use her. No age limits. She was never a target for any information or recruitment, although the KGB’s standard profiles fitted her. She probably would have laughed at him, just before shooting him in the balls. She was an unexpected job bonus, nothing else.
He would miss Wendy Tork most of all. Or rather miss never having had a chance to try to fulfill his fantasies about her … take her away from McLanahan … Too bad he hadn’t tried to latch onto her sooner. If nothing else she had some highly useful information on electronic countermeasures research …
He made a slight altitude and course correction to avoid overflying a group of white-water rafters less than a hundred feet below. As he banked away to avoid them he could see several put hands over ears against the noise, but a few bikini-clad ladies waved. He had made that trip down the Colorado River several times, spending a weekend shooting the rapids, getting dumped into the swirling waters, laughing at a roaring campfire with a beer in one hand and a pretty young lieutenant from Nellis in the other.
Did they have rapids in Russia? Were the women pretty? Maraklov had forgotten more than remembered.
Things had, people said, changed over the years. Glasnost … the place was more open. But he doubted it would be to him.
Andrei Maraklov might truly be the deepest deep-cover agent ever produced by the KGB, but that didn’t mean he could go back to the USSR and enjoy the gratitude of his country. Would he ever be promoted to a leadership position in the KGB or the Mikoyan-Gureyvich Aircraft Design Bureau, the agency that designed and built the greatest fighter aircraft? No. He had been in the U.S. for nine years. Before that he had spent three years in a school that spoke more English and acted more American than parts of San Francisco and Chicago or L.A. They’d have to reteach him Russian, for God’s sake. If they ever trusted him after his return he’d probably be given some know-nothing job or a pension and watched for the rest of his life. He might be allowed to emigrate, but he’d be safer from the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency in Russia. Which didn’t say much. If they didn’t trust him they’d pick his mind clean of every scrap of information he had, then discard him. Either way, would his life be better in his homeland? What he really felt attached to, more than anything or anyone, was this plane that he had become part of, that was part of him …
Up ahead, it seemed like the entire sky had turned green. Search radar — a big one. There was definitely an AWACS radar plane up there. He was in the radar shadow right now, but in only a few miles the Colorado River valley would flatten out into the Sonora Desert basin, and then he’d be trapped. The last hundred fifty miles to the border was going to turn into a gauntlet — an unknown number of F-15 fighters in front of him, waiting for him to emerge from the valley. He was also going toward Yuma Marine Corps Air Station just ahead on the border, a base for two squadrons of F/A-18 fighter bombers, and F-16 fighters from Luke AFB in Phoenix could join in. So he could be facing six squadrons of fighters from four military bases on this last hundred-mile leg.
Then, he saw it: the AWACS radar plane. DreamStar’s threat receiver pinpointed the aircraft about a hundred fifty miles away, orbiting over the center of the Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson at twenty-five thousand feet. And if DreamStar could see the AWACS plane, he could see DreamStar. At a quick mental inquiry, Maraklov had the threat-warning computer analyze the radar transmissions from the plane and learned it was the older E-3B Sentry AWACS, almost twenty-five years old but still a formidable radar platform; it was probably a drug-interdiction aircraft based out of Davis-Monthan AFB.
Suddenly, like some eerie Martian fog, green sky descended and engulfed him, and then the sky turned yellow. The AWACS had found him, started to track him. Maraklov tried to dodge closer to the river-valley edges to hide in any available radar shadow. No use. Once he was spotted and identified — an aircraft at two hundred feet above ground traveling at six hundred miles an hour could hardly be mistaken for a civilian plane — the AWACS would change position farther west to maintain a solid track on him in the valley …
“Unidentified aircraft ten miles north of Blythe, altitude twelve hundred feet MSL, airspeed five hundred forty knots. This is the United States Air Force air intercept controller on GUARD.” The radio message was being broadcast “in the blind” on GUARD, the international emergency frequency, to prove to him that he had indeed been spotted. “You are ordered to climb to ten thousand feet MSL, reduce.speed and lower your landing gear immediately.” Military aircraft being intercepted were ordered to lower their landing gear because as a safety device the weapon systems on most fighters were automatically deactivated when the landing gear was down. “Contact me on two-three-three point zero immediately; repeat, contact me on frequency two-three-three point zero.”