Speedbird-Seven was talking again. “I have radar and aircraft coming into Poland,” he said. He was still on the verge of panic; his radar had to be seeing the first thrust of Russian aircraft into western Poland. There would be fighters and transports heading in everywhere now. The plan was coming together. “What is going on?”
“I think that there have been a few terrorist attacks,” Lapotev said. “I think that if we are patient, we will know what to do pretty soon.”
Aliyev smiled at him. That wasn't likely.
Lapotev unkeyed the radio and scowled. “I feel like just telling him the truth,” he sneered. “Commercial pilots; cut them off from their daddies and they go to pieces.”
Aliyev smiled. “How much longer?”
“Twenty minutes,” Lapotev said. “If they try to order us away, we’ll keep going anyway and claim communications failure.”
Aliyev nodded. “Twenty minutes,” he shouted back down the aircraft, to the commandos who were performing the final checks on their weapons. They were all ready to move; the aircraft crew would launch their supplies into the air after them before turning to flee back towards Russia, or a secured airfield in Poland. “Twenty minutes before we do or die!”
They cheered.
The MIG-41 appeared out of nowhere, almost before Staffelkapitän Mayer realised that it was there, a testament to the Russian Air Force’s improved skill at stealth aircraft. The MIG-41, known as the Flatpack to its NATO observers, fired a missile at Mayer’s aircraft and then swung into a long evasive pattern itself. Mayer fired a single ASRAAM missile from his Eurofighter Typhoon back at the enemy and evaded the Russian missile though a series of hair-raising manoeuvres, trying to avoid being shot down. The Russian pilot was less lucky; Mayer saw him trying to escape the missile, but failing.
The entire encounter had taken less than a minute.
Mayer stared down at his onboard display and silently cursed to himself. He was one of the lucky pilots who had managed to get off the ground, but he was starting to wonder if it had really been lucky at all. Jagdgeschwader 74, his fighter wing of the Luftwaffe, had been placed on alert status when someone had reported a terrorist waving a portable SAM missile launcher and threatening commercial traffic. As the first reports of SAM attacks on civilian aircraft came in, the QRA aircraft, including Mayer, were launched into the sky… and then all hell had broken loose. The base, in Southern Germany, in Bavaria, had been attacked by cruise missiles. Moments later, it had seemed that the entire command net had gone down.
Mayer and his three wingmen had consulted and decided that the Vaterland was under attack. Their onboard systems had reported the sudden spurt of cruise missiles that were flying over Germany, some of them heading towards towns and cities. The four fighters had engaged the cruise missiles, but then they had finally received orders from a different airbase; they were to attempt to determine what the hell was going on. Moments later, that airbase too had vanished off the net… and the Eurofighter’s sensors were reporting explosions on the ground, big explosions. Meyer had feared nuclear war, even as cold logic reminded him that there had been no EMP pulse; the Eurofighter would have fallen out of the sky if an EMP had struck it.
No, he had decided; they were under conventional attack.
Meyer had issued his subordinates with orders, each aircraft to a different region, and separated, heading over Poland. The Poles should have challenged him before he crossed the border, even at supersonic speed; they were paranoid about German aircraft. Meyer, who had had a grandfather who had served in the Luffwaffe, rather understood their concern, but something very bad had happened. The cruise missiles alone added up to only one answer. They were at war and only one power had the means and the motivation to hit Germany.
Russia.
As he’d flown north-eastwards, he had attempted to raise the Polish air traffic controllers, only to discover that most of them were off the air. His radar had picked up a massive flight of transport aircraft, heading out of Russia towards Poland, but he had refrained from engaging them; he still wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. He saw smoke and flames reaching up from targets right across Poland, which meant that the cruise missiles hadn’t just been aimed at Germany. The main Polish military airfields, Biała Podlaska, Cewice and Częstochowa-Rudniki, seemed to have been hit; there didn’t seem to be any Polish aircraft in the skies at all. Commercial traffic had to be panicking; they would be flying through suddenly very hostile skies… without the slightest idea of what was going on.
Meyer himself wasn’t sure that he knew what was going on.
“Jagdgeschwader 74-9, you will listen to the code words,” his radio crackled suddenly. Meyer’s heart leapt; he wasn’t alone! Someone knew where he was and what he was doing! The voice was young and dreadfully nervous, and he could hear a French accent underlying the German, but it was a contact. “Please respond; alpha-tango-theta-napoleon.”
The Eurofighter’s onboard database provided a match; a French AWACS aircraft that had been intended to take part in a small exercise with the British. It all seemed to belong to another world now, not the nightmare of fire and death that had crashed down upon Europe, when everything had seemed so safe and tranquil. He was more relieved than he could say to hear the voice… and then it dawned on him that the voice belonged to a kid, a very junior officer. Dear God… had the French been hit as well?
“This is Jagdgeschwader 74-9,” Meyer said, and gave his details. “Update me.”
“I… everything’s gone to hell,” the young Frenchman said. The voice made him think of the French cadets who had defended their academy back in 1940, years ago. “We were on patrol, then someone launched SAMs at us and our escort sacrificed himself to save us, but we can barely talk to anyone and the network is failing badly! There are civilian aircraft trapped in the sky and we can’t even talk them down because the bases are out of service and there are terrorists in the airports…”
“Not terrorists,” Meyer said. He remembered the brief deadly encounter with the Russian fighter. “Russians.”
The Frenchman didn’t argue. “Can you do a radar sweep?”
Meyer had thought about that; he needed intelligence, but lighting up the radar was one way to guarantee that every Russian in the area would know his location. He could pick up the sweeps of the French AWACS now — it struck him that it might be the only AWACS left in Europe — and knew that he didn’t dare refuse. That AWACS had just become the most vital aircraft in Europe.
“Operating,” he said. He smiled suddenly. “What’s your name?”
“Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg,” the Frenchman said. “It was meant to be my first command and…”
Meyer could fill in the details himself. The French would have given young Montebourg a chance to prove himself, unaware that he would have to deal with a real emergency. The radar sweep had been brief and powerful, but it depressed him; there were hundreds of aircraft in the air, some of them clearly warplanes. There was no sign of his former wingmen.
“I hope you got all that,” he said, grimly. “Do you have a place to land?”
“I don’t know,” Montebourg said. He sounded tired. “The base where we are normally stationed is in flames, and Paris is on fire; there are airliners nearby unable to land because of the terrorists. Sir… where the hell do we go?”
Mayer stared down at the data. There was a pattern there, aircraft that… were not panicking. They’d come out of Russia, he saw; they were heading towards Germany, and western Poland. There was something about them that worried him; he was sure, looking at it, that they were suspicious.