His steering cues slid left and he gently banked the XCV-62 to the west. Off the port and starboard sides of their aircraft, the two MQ-55 Coyote drones followed suit. The EQ-55 Howler trailing them made the same wide, curving turn a few seconds later. Somewhere out ahead, still invisible even in the faint light cast by the still-rising quarter moon, loomed the mass of Sakhalin Island — stretching five hundred nautical miles from north to south, but only seventy-five miles from east to west. Beyond Sakhalin lay the Russian mainland. “Position check?” he asked.
Nadia tapped on a screen, opening a navigation display. “We are approximately fifty minutes out from the LZ.”
Vasey nodded tightly. “Right. Next stop Oldjikan Circus. All change to the Nevada line.” Then, aware that she was staring at him, he grinned wryly. “Never mind me, Major. Just a throwback to a misspent youth riding the Tube in London while skiving off school.”
Before she could comment, her left-hand multifunction display pinged, signaling the arrival of an encrypted satellite transmission. Her fingers rattled across the virtual keyboard. “SBIRS satellites report multiple launches from the vicinity of Khabarovsk,” she read off. “Launches evaluated as S-400 surface-to-air missiles.”
“Well, that opens the ball,” Vasey said quietly.
Thirty-Five
“Contact lost,” a radar operator reported in frustration over the command circuit. “Heavy jamming and possible terrain masking.”
“First salvos going ballistic,” another officer said. “Our missiles’ active homing seeker heads were never able to lock on independently.”
Colonel Vladimir Titov fought down the urge to swear out loud. It would do no good and it might further unnerve his subordinates. He’d known the odds were against scoring hits with such long-range shots, especially since the enemy attack force was coming at them across a wide band of rugged coastal hills and ridges. Staying low allowed the American strike aircraft to use this terrain to hide their approach. “Estimated range to the enemy formation at last solid contact?”
“Two hundred kilometers,” the radar operator said.
“Have you detected any new, smaller contacts?” Titov demanded.
“No, sir.”
He frowned. The twenty-plus F/A-18s headed his way were already near enough to fire any standoff air-to-ground missiles they were carrying. So why hadn’t they done so? Were they so confident they could evade his SAMs that they had decided to keep coming… hoping to overwhelm his defenses with a massed missile salvo at close range?
“Contact regained!” he heard the radar operator say suddenly. “Formation of high-speed aircraft bearing one-three-five. Direction of flight now three-one-five degrees.”
Those American strike fighters are barreling right down our throats, Titov thought grimly. What had happened to their fuel constraints? Were they treating this as a one-way mission, like the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War?
“Range one hundred and seventy kilometers. Speed eleven hundred kilometers per hour. Altitude one hundred and fifty meters!”
“Handoff to 92N2E missile-guidance radars complete!” one of Titov’s fire-control officers reported eagerly. “Twenty-six hostiles confirmed. Signatures correlated to F/A-18s. Solid lock on multiple targets. Ready to attack!”
“Release all batteries,” Titov ordered. “Commence firing.” Unable to resist seeing what was going on with his own eyes, he hurried over to the door of the mobile command center and peered out into the night.
Missile after missile thundered aloft from launchers deployed in the surrounding fields — slashing upward through the darkness on pillars of fire as they accelerated toward Mach 6. Within seconds, they arced high over and vanished downrange.
“New jamming!” the radar operator said suddenly. “Our radars are hopping frequencies to compensate. But we’ve lost the lock to some targets.”
Titov yanked his head back inside, angry with himself for playing tourist in the middle of a battle. “Do you have an evaluation of the source of this jamming?”
“My computer evaluates it as originating from two, or possibly three, American EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft.”
The colonel nodded. That was in line with what they’d observed so far. The Reagan must have committed half her strike fighters to this attack, so it was no real surprise to see so many airborne jammers assigned in support.
“We’ve scored hits!” a fire-control officer crowed suddenly. “I count three kills from the salvo.”
Titov refrained from pointing out that it left almost 90 percent of the attackers alive and closing fast. From the worried looks he could see on some of the faces around him in the command center, others were perfectly capable of drawing the same conclusions. Unless they got lucky and took out the American electronic warfare planes in the next couple of salvos, this engagement was going to get ugly fast.
“Damn,” his radar operator muttered. “Contact lost again, sir. The enemy formation has dropped into a river valley. Our radars cannot see them.”
Titov stared at the plot. If the Americans hugged that valley floor as far as they could, they would be less than one hundred and twenty kilometers away when his sensors regained contact… practically spitting distance for modern ground-attack weapons. His shoulders tightened involuntarily, almost as though he could already feel the searing heat of explosions and the hail of shrapnel. With an effort to stay calm, he turned to his communications officer. “What is the status of those Su-35 Super Flankers from Dzemgi?”
“Colonel Federov has twelve fighters en route to the air control point selected by Moscow,” the younger man said. “They should arrive west of our position in the next ten minutes.”
“Make sure they are tied into our target-tracking data uplink,” Titov ordered. Crazy as it seemed, maybe this American strike force planned to blow right past his SAM regiment — driving onward to launch extended-range AGM-158B joint air-to-surface standoff missiles directly at Vostochny’s launchpads, rocket assembly buildings, and cryogenic fuels storage tanks. If so, Federov’s fighters would come into play. And the ability to use tracking and targeting data supplied by ground radars, rather than their own easily detected onboard radars, could give them a crucial edge… the ability to ambush those oncoming F/A-18s with air-to-air missiles fired from out of a clear night sky.
Leonov sat enthralled at his station, listening to the increasingly tense chatter between Titov’s command post and his unit’s outlying radar vehicles and missile launchers. Tracking and engagement data relayed from the S-400 SAM regiment were displayed in graphical form on screens around the room. They showed the American formation — now whittled down to just twelve aircraft — as it pressed steadily onward. The eleven F/A-18E Super Hornets and a single surviving Growler jammer plane were only eighty kilometers from Knyaze-Volkonskoye… well out over the broad, flat Amur River valley. There was no higher ground they could hide behind to break radar contact.
He shook his head in amazement. Those U.S. Navy pilots were brave men and women. But they were also being incredibly stupid. This was no longer a battle they could win.
“Next salvo, fire!” he heard Titov order.
Two dozen missile icons streaked across the display. Moving at Mach 6, they closed the distance to the American planes in less than forty seconds. Aircraft winked off the screen as warheads found their targets and detonated. Leonov considered that an oddly antiseptic rendering for what was a supremely violent act. Out there, thousands of kilometers away in the real world, pilots were dying horribly — ripped apart by a lethal hail of fragments or burning to death in crippled aircraft spiraling down out of the sky.