The jet aircrafts engine pitch altered and it began its take-off run. Limanova was reduced to shouting at the shadows to fire several aircraft lengths in front of it if they did actually see it.
Lt Col Limanova was on the track, kneeling and peering up into the rain, his AKM at the ready but he saw only a tail flame that suddenly appeared in mid-air, accelerating around in a great sweeping turn to dive into the ground at the same spot as his mortar and radioman. The blast deposited him several feet from where he had been standing to land in one of the many clusters of wheel ruts that had now formed large puddles on the logging trail. Earth, gravel and even parts of the radio operator and mortarmen were landing around him with a splash, a final mission critique on a now dazed Limanova’s first mission as a sub district commander.
Patricia’s death had demanded some kind of response, some action to mark her violent passing and the Maverick’s destroying the mortar and anyone nearby would have to suffice.
The Green Berets abandoned their positions and slipped away into the night, taking with them Patricia’s body to be buried in the forest at a traceable spot where she could be exhumed for proper burial by her family at some time in the future.
The shock and the grieving must wait though. They flew on, climbing to ten thousand feet to keep away from opportunists with Strela launchers, and turning due west with enough fuel, in theory, to reach NATO lines in Germany, but they had a head wind, the same one carrying the weather front from Western Europe to cover both Central and Eastern Europe.
Svetlana had been in her escape kit, camouflage coveralls over her civilian clothes and her face cammed to hide the shine for when the time came for her to evade away into the forest with the Green Berets. Her own ‘G’ suit had been buried after they arrived weeks before as she would not be using it again, at least that had been the thinking back then. She had retained only the thermals that Caroline called her ‘pornstar suit’ worn beneath jeans and sweater. So there she was, with a green and brown grease painted face and soil grubby G-suit in the back seat, wishing she had paid more attention when Patricia had once run through what her board could do.
She switched between ‘Nav’ and ‘Attack’ with a subsequent near cold sweat breaking out when she could not switch back. The ‘Help’ icon had saved the day, and that was now being employed as a tutor tool. Several hundred hours would be required for her to approach Patricia’s level of skill, but she had to start somewhere. After a half hour though she was smart enough to know she wasn’t smart enough.
“I am pretty much dead weight back here.” She told her pilot. “I don’t know if I’ll be competent to do more than identify an attacker for you, Caroline?”
“Don’t sweat it too much. The second seat was put in for the purpose of seeing how a command and control function would work. I could still fight the aircraft as normal, just a little slower.”
Svetlana found the loadout screen. A single offensive weapon remained, and the defensive ordnance had become seriously depleted on the bombing mission too.
“One AMRAAM, that is… Ahueyet!…did I just touch the wrong button?” Svetlana’s accent had switched from plummy Oxford English, to back alley Muscovite, and back again.
The plasma screens suddenly lost information for the second time that night. The RORSAT that had been launched out of Vandenberg airbase had apparently ducked when it should have dodged, or vice versa. The plasma screens de-populated as icons vanished.
“No, we just lost another multi-million dollar guardian angel, is all.” Caroline said. “All that radar energy makes them easier to find than comsats…have you got a satellite icon on the top right of the toolbar?”
“Yes.”
“Is it amber, red or green?”
“Flashing amber.”
“Touch the screen and it will ask you to input an authentication code…”
“Got it.”
The screens came alive once more.
“So tell me ‘lana, is the war over soon?”
“As soon as a lot of gold gets paid to someone’s secret bank account, and that was supposed to be following signals traffic intercepts indicating the Premier is dead after the site was nuked.” Svetlana said. “You did get it, didn’t you?”
“Sure did, but I can’t confirm if he was there or not.”
They flew on in silence, crossing the border into Belarus, then Lithuania, Poland and at last into Germany just north of a blacked out Berlin. Not quite home-free, the land below them was in enemy hands. Tentatively Svetlana typed out a request for a current situation report. The mission controllers knew where they were to an inch and she let them work out for themselves what was required.
From the air activity now becoming apparent, the war was showing no sign at all of stopping. CAP and close air support aircraft were landing and taking off, going to and from the approaching 4 Corps.
“Okay”, Svetlana said, reading off a response to her situation update request. “The Elbe line fell two days ago and so did the Saale so the current defence if centred on a hill called the Vormundberg, west of Magdeburg, and our nearest safe airfield is Gutersloh.”
“Forget it; we’ll be flaming out before we get there.” Caroline said. The headwind had been too much to cope with. “Still and all, we should be west of the Elbe when that happens so only about ten or fifteen miles to hike, by my reckoning.”
Fifteen miles of enemy infested territory to reach the Vormundberg, always assuming that they had not been rolled even further west and the long hill was a new real estate acquisition of the Soviets, by the time they reached it.
Only twenty two miles to the south, an A-50 Mainstay had lifted off from Schönefeld, south east of Berlin. Its icon had it typed as soon as the RORSAT identified it and Patricia Dudley would have immediately picked up on the potential danger.
Cottbus airbase had provided the combat air patrol protection for the Schönefeld Mainstays, but the Belgian airborne brigade had put the base out of action for the foreseeable future. Consequently, the runway of the old WWII Luftwaffe base at Fürstenwalde to the east of Berlin had been hastily adopted for use by the MiG-29s.
The left side screens flared red as soon as the aircraft began radiating as it climbed through 10,000’ on the way to its operational height of 38,000’.
It had them; the faint but definite return was a signature of the F-117s when caught in profile, close up.
The pair of MiG-29s were at 7 o-clock in respect of the Petticoat Express’s position, aiming to intercept their charge. On receipt of the A-50s targeting feed the pair banked right and then left, putting themselves slightly below and a half mile behind the F-117X. Both MiGs put their radars to standby, which kind of confirmed for the Petticoat crew that the A-50 had them locked up.
“What do I do?” Svetlana asked.
“Nothing, just try not to barf in your mask.”
Caroline selected their sole remaining ordnance from her position and when the Vega confirmed it had a solid downlink the rotating bomb bay doors cycled it out into a dark and very wet night.
The missile was under complete control of the Italian communications satellite, its sensors where also in standby mode but although it was cloaked electronically, its tail flame was still visible to the human eye.
“KURIT' V VOZDUKHE!” the flight leader shouted the missile launch warning into his radio. “Smoke in the air!”
The AIM-120 steered left and the Russian pilot lost sight of its tail flame. Their threat receivers were silent but both aircraft broke hard, discharging chaff and flares. They had not survived this long by taking anything for granted. Having completed a radical missile evasion manoeuvre the leader loosed off a pair of AA-8 Aphids under control of the A-50 so the super cooled IR threat sensor in the Nighthawk’s tail did not trigger an alarm, it would bring them in from outside the sensors detection envelope.