"Oh, pul-leese." Briggs plugged in the data cable to his belt, charged the weapon, raised it, and followed the cues in his helmet-mounted electronic visor. His visor gave him a complete status readout-Wohl was right, only two projectiles remaining. "Never bagged a bomber beforethis'll be fun."
"Fifteen seconds."
"I see it!" Briggs shouted. The Tupolev-22 bomber was coming in straight and level, about a thousand feet above ground, at six hundred knots on the dot-the target was small, fast, and low. The aiming system in the battle armor wasn't a lead-computing sight-this was going to be a thousand-in-one shot. Briggs fired at two miles out, just as he saw a stick of bombs drop from the bomb bay. "Take cover!" he shouted. "Bombs away!"
The streak of burning air from the projectile passed in front of the bomber's nose by several hundred feet-he had led the target too much.
The bomber dropped a stick of six five-thousand-pound napalm canisters that created a tremendous wall of fire and a wave of heat that nearly pushed both of them over. The intent was obvious-he was marking the target area for the second bomber.
Briggs whirled around and aimed. The first bomber was in a steep climbing right turn in full afterburner-a perfect profile. This time, the streak of superheated air passed right through the forward section of the Tupolev-22's fuselage. Just when Briggs thought he might have missed it again, a tongue of flame spat out from the left engine compartment. The Tu-22 twisted unnaturally to the left, its nose moving higher into the sky. Both afterburners winked out-Briggs could now see it through only the rail gun's electronic sights. The bomber seemed to hang in midair, like a big graceful eagle climbing on a thermal-then there were four puffs of light and smoke as all four crew members ejected, and the bomber did a tail-side straight down and crashed into the desert just north of the minefield.
Meanwhile, Chris Wohl had finally loaded the dual antiaircraft cannon. He held the gun up in his left hand by its mounting pedestal, held the ammunition can in his right hand, then swiveled to the west and scanned the sky, looking for the oncoming bombers. Suddenly, Wohl started firing into the sky. The big antiaircraft gun bucked and shook, but thanks to Wohl's exoskeleton, he was able to keep the weapon fairly steady. Every twelfth shell from the can was a tracer round, and as he swept the sky to the west, he created a snakelike wave of light in the sky. The ammunition was gone in a few seconds; Wohl dropped the gun and the ammo can, and both he and Briggs jet-jumped away from that spot-they knew what was going to happen next….
The second Tu-22 bomber veered hard to the south, away from the tracers-but the third bomber came in hard and fast and laid down a stick of thirty or forty fivehundred-pound high-explosive bombs, right on the spot where Briggs and Wohl had been positioned. The incredible pounding from the bombs knocked both men off their feet, and it seemed like dirt, dust, sand, and all sorts of debris rained down on them for at least the next ten minutes. Their battle armor's power was almost depleted by that time-but they survived the attack.
The third bomber stayed low and accelerated straight ahead without using afterburners, as it was supposed to do in a defended area, so it was able to escape. But the second Tu-22 that did the hard bank turned away from the airfield-right into the waiting missile range of the Megafortress's AIM-120 missiles. Wickland dispatched it quickly with one Scorpion missile.
"You guys all right back there?" Tanaka asked.
"Everyone's in one piece," Briggs said, "and they didn't hit the airfield, so I think we're still in business. Where did that third bomber go?"
"He's bugging out-probably wondering where his two wingmen went," Tanaka said. "We're going to head back and finish the job on Zillah, then see if there's anything we can hit at Al-Jawf. Keep your heads down. Headbanger clear."
Wickland pressed the attack at Zillah Air Base thirty minutes later by first firing one antiradar missile at the airfield surveillance radar at Zillah Air Base, then at another unexpected SA-10 mobile surface-to-air missile site that had just activated its radar, both from high altitude. After defending themselves from the SAM sites, Wickland used the laser radar and took second-long snapshots of the base, magnifying and enhancing the images until he could identify them as precisely as possible, then designated specific targets and loaded their coordinates into the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons. Once the target coordinates were entered, the attack computer loaded a released track into the autopilot.
The attack computer automatically opened the bomb doors and started releasing weapons when the bomber reached the release track. The AGM-154 JSOW did not need to be at a precise weapon-release point-at high altitude, they could glide unpowered for up to forty miles and flew to their targets with uncanny accuracy. Four of the six JSOWs were programmed for Zillah's main runway, cratering it enough so no heavy or high-performance aircraft could use it. For the other four targets, Wickland switched on an imaging-infrared sensor in the weapon's nose as it got closer to its target, and if the weapon was off-course he could lock it onto their exact impact points-a building they suspected as the base command post and communications center, the fuel farm, a power plant, and the surveillance radar facility at the base of the control tower. The one-thousand-pound high-explosive warheads made short work of all targets-Zillah Air Base was effectively shut down with just eight well-placed hits.
The EB-52 then headed toward Al-Jawf, three hundred miles to the southeast. Attack procedures for the Wolverine cruise missiles were much different from those of the other precision-guided weapons: They didn't need any procedures. Each missile was programmed with a large set of targets in memory, and the missiles were simply released when about fifty miles from the target area. Wickland used the laser radar to try to spot targets and designate final impact points for the missiles, but the Wolverines liked it best when they were on their own. They used millimeter-wave radars to search for targets; then they would fly over the targets and drop either anti-armor CBU-97 Sensor-Fuzed Weapons or CBU-87 Combined Effects Munitions on light armor or other vehicles. The missiles would continue their search for targets, even turning around and reattacking if they found they missed a target. Then, before the missile's jet fuel ran out, the missile would either find a building or use a designated target sent to it from the Megafortress and fly into it, destroying the target with a two-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead.
With no air defenses detected, Tanaka and Wickland were able to orbit the area, taking LADAR snapshots of the base, looking for targets to direct the Wolverines, releasing the cruise missiles one every three to five minutes so each had plenty of time to find new targets that might present themselves. Aircraft parking areas, helipads, large vehicle parking areas, fuel storage areas, and weapon storage bunkers were favorite targets for the Wolverines' cluster munitions and sensor-fuzed weapons.
Wickland picked out buildings that looked like headquarters buildings, barracks, security buildings, and hangars for the terminal targets-but what he was really looking for were the rocket storage sheds, or even some surface-to-surface rockets themselves. According to the soldiers who joined Sanusi's Sandstorm warriors, the rockets at Al-Jawf were housed in long half-underground sheds. When it was time for deployment, trucks would hook up to the rocket transporter-erector-launchers and tow them to presurveyed launch points. They could be moved in a matter of minutes, and readied for launch in about a half hour after arriving at the launch point.
But twenty minutes after starting the attack, Wickland was disappointed. "Not one rocket anywhere," he said. "I didn't even see the storage sheds. Maybe they were one of the other buildings I attacked, but I didn't see anything that looked like it housed a Scud-sized rocket."