The explosion twisted the bomber around like a corkscrew, nearly flipping it completely inverted. Without a rudder, Rebecca had no roll or yaw stability. They were at the mercy of fate. If the plane recovered, they were saved — if not, their only chance would be to eject.
Somehow, it corkscrewed back to level flight. They had lost two thousand feet of altitude — Patrick found themselves just a thousand feet above ground. “Get the nose up, Rebecca,” he warned. “One thousand AGL.”
“I got it,” Furness said. She had almost no roll control at all, and she found herself muscling in more and more left stick. “Elevons feel like they’re stuck in a right turn. I think it’ll trim out … no, I can only trim part of it out. I’ve got limited pitch control, too. Dammit, check my instruments.”
“Rudder servo, elevon servo A, autopilot roll channels A and B, pitch servo A, secondary hydraulics, tail radar, tail warning receiver, and towed countermeasures arrays out,” Patrick said. “Looks like we got hit in the tail. Engines, electrical, primary hydraulics, and computers are okay. Can you hold it?”
“I think so,” Rebecca cried. “Where in hell did he come from?”
“First priority — get him off our tail,” Patrick shouted. “LADAR on!”The laser radar immediately located the enemy aircraft less than three miles away. He touched the enemy aircraft symbol on his supercockpit display. “Attack target.”
“Warning, attack command received, stop attack … doors coming open …” The forward bomb bay doors opened, and a single AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAM missile was ejected into the slipstream. After stabilizing for a few seconds, its first-stage rocket motor ignited. It shot ahead of the Vampire bomber, then executed a wide, looping “over-the-shoulder” flight path toward the Metyor-179 stealth fighter.
Normally the missile relied on the Vampire’s tail radar for initial guidance to its quarry. But with the aft-facing radar gone, the AIM-120 missile had only the last known position, heading, altitude, and speed of the target for guidance. As it approached the spot in space where the enemy aircraft should be, it activated its own onboard radar and started to search.
“We got him!” Stoica shouted. The sudden POP! of the R-60’s warhead exploding and the brief trail of fire and burning metal were unmistakable. “Stand by, I’m going to let him have a couple more. Here goes …” Just then, he saw a brief flash of light in the distance, like a fireworks rocket flying sideways. “What the hell was that?”
“It’s a missile! “Yegorov shouted. “Break tight! Get out Of here!”
Stoica did not hesitate. He threw the Mt-179 stealth fighter into a hard-right ninety-degree bank turn, shoved in full afterburner power, and pulled the control stick back to his belly. At the same instant, Yegorov ejected decoy chaff and flare bundles. The emergency maneuver worked. Without a reliable target position, the Scorpion’s onboard radar locked onto the largest target it could find on its way down — the cloud of fine tinsel-like chaff — and blew up harmlessly several hundred yards from the stealth fighter.
“He launched a missile at us!” Stoica shouted in utter shock. “That bastard launched a missile at us!”
“That’s either the biggest fighter I’ve ever seen,” Yegorov said, “or American stealth bombers now carry air-to-air missiles.”
“That bastard is dead!” Stoica shouted. He rolled left and activated the attack radar. This time, the enemy aircraft appeared on the screen immediately. “Not so stealthy anymore, are we? We did hurt you. Missiles aw”— But before he could squeeze the trigger to launch two more R-60s, another missile flew into the sky and arced back toward them. Stoica swore and executed a hard-left break as Yegorov ejected chaff and flares from the right-side ejectors. The second missile missed, but not by as much this time.
“Ion, let’s get the hell out of here!” Yegorov shouted. This son of a bitch can shoot back at us!”
“I’m not letting him go!”
“Ion, stop it! You already nailed the guy. He’s bugging out. Let him go before he gets off a lucky shot and nails us.”
“Pizda tib a radila!” Stoica swore in Russian. But he knew Yegorov was right. This guy, whoever it was, definitely had some teeth. Besides, one glance at his fuel gauges told him the other story: going into afterburner twice, plus carrying two external wing pylons, really sucked away the gas. He had enough fuel for one more shot — but he elected not to take it. Reluctantly, angrily, he turned left and headed south toward Romania.
“He’s bugging out,” Patrick said, as he studied the God’s-eye view on his supercockpit display. “He’s heading south … into Ukraine.”
“Dammit, General, this is the last thing we need,” Furness swore. “We’re on an unauthorized and probably illegal mission — and now we have battle damage, serious battle damage! I’m not even sure if we’ll be able to air-refuel this thing without a rudder and with only partial elevon control.”
“Wonder where he’s going?” Patrick mused. “If he was a Russian fighter, shouldn’t he be headed the other way?”
“Are you listening to me, McLanahan? We almost got shot down. You almost got us shot down.”
“We were told by General Samson that the Russians agreed to let us go,” Patrick told Furness. “All the other Russian aircraft returned to base — all except one, a fighter with very low radar cross-section. Now he’s heading south into Ukraine. What’s up with that?”
“You’re lucky to be alive, our tail is shot to hell, and all you can think of is where the guy that almost killed us is headed?”
“LADAR coming on,” Patrick said. He tracked the unknown aircraft for just a few minutes longer until it disappeared from his screen, just fifteen miles away. Definitely a stealth fighter, Patrick thought — the laser radar had a range of over fifty miles. “He’s still heading south. No change in heading. Maybe we should follow him, try to reacquire.”
“Why the hell not?” Rebecca asked sarcastically, the anger thick in her voice. “Our ass is grass if we go home now anyway.” Rebecca continued on course back home, and Patrick did not argue any further.
SIX
Over the Baltic Sea
From the outside, it resembled a normal Boeing DC-10 Model 30F, with no windows and with big cargo doors instead of passenger doors. Customs inspectors in Aberdeen, Scotland, two days earlier had found only a cavernous empty cargo hold, with a few dozen passenger seats on rolling pallets bolted to the forward part of the compartment, along with portable lavatories. This particular DC-10 had some unusual cargo-handling equipment installed inside — some sort of outsized equipment in the back of the cargo compartment, along with large doors underneath — but its American FAA Form 337 airframe modification sheets and logbook entries were in perfect order.
After stopping in Scotland for two days, during which time workers began loading the plane with cargo, the crew had filed a flight plan direct to Al-Manamah, Bahrain, with sixty thousand four hundred and fifty pounds of oil drilling parts and equipment. Again, the forms were all in order, and the cargo carefully inspected by both United Kingdom Inland Revenue officials, as well as shipment supervisors representing the Bahraini company receiving the parts, and the German insurance company that had written the shipment insurance policy for the four thousand mile flight. It was now obvious why they needed this particular plane and its unusual gear — some of the parts, including oil well pipe, manifolds, and valves, were massive, far too large to fit through the side cargo door. The parts had simply been hoisted aboard the plane through the cargo doors on the bottom. After a three-hour weather delay and another hour coordinating a new international flight plan across the ten countries they would overfly on their nine-hour flight, they finally got under way shortly before sunset.