"There, I see it," Cheshire said. She pointed out the left windscreen. Just over the horizon was a short glowing line of fire spinning in a tight circle, growing larger and larger by the second.

Carter jerked the control stick hard left toward the missile.

"Chaff, flare." Atkins hit the ejector buttons, sending bundles of radar-decoying chaff and heat-decoy flares overboard.

Carter hit the voice-command stud. "Set clearance plane fifty feet.

"Clearance plane fifty feet, warning low altitude, clearance plane one hundred feet." Carter's turn was so tight that, had the computer set the lower clearance plane, the B-52s left wingtip would have dragged the water.

"It's still coming," Cheshire called out as Carter rolled out.

The B-52 dipped as the lower clearance plane setting kicked in.

"I can't find the uplink, something must be guiding it but I can't find it .

The glow was getting brighter-Carter would swear he heard the roar of the missile's rocket-motor as it sped closer and closer, jamming wasn't working ... what ... ?

"Stop jamming, EW," Carter suddenly called out. "It must be homing in on the jamming source. Go to standby. Fast."

The result was near-instantaneous. The fast-circling flight-path of the missile began to wobble, and the tail flame of the missile's engine began to elongate just as it burned out. Carter nudged his B-52 as low as he could safely go. It was too late to try to make a turn, too late even for more decoys . . .

They heard a thud against the fuselage, then silence. The B-52 shook as if a iant hammer had hit it.

"It missed," Cheshire shouted, "that was the supersonic shock wave, it missed .

"It must have been a SA-15 SAM," Atkins said. "SA-15s ...

they just started deploying SA-15s in the Soviet Union. Now they got them in Nicaragua?"

Carter forced calm into his own dry throat. "Be ready-our intelligence briefing was obviously missing a few details."

But Atkins was still rattled. "SA-15 . . . I'm sorry, I didn't recognize it . . . they're not supposed to have SA-15s in Nica- ragua . . . I could've gotten us all killed . . . "

"Snap out of it, Bob." But Carter understood what Atkins was going through. No one on this crew, including himself, had ever flown a combat mission-as a matter of fact, until Dog Zero TWo was ready to fly two months ago, none of his crew members had been aboard a military aircraft for several months. After months or years with their mostly deskbound duties at Dream- land they had become more like engineers than combat crew members. Now they were being -shot at by the Soviet Union's most advanced surface-to-air missile. He was sure the rest of the crew was steeling a panic-Atkins was just the first one to let loose.

398 .

"All of you, settle down and pay attention," Carter called over interphone. "They took a shot and missed. Fly this mission as briefed. But we've gotta pull together and back each other up - All of you know your stuff-now it's time to put it into action.

All right. Check your stations and minimize electronic emis- sions. Nancy, get another power-plant check."

The radar sky had turned back to yellow. Carter maintained his new heading for a few moments, then turned back to the right and let the autopilot take control.

" Do you think we should go back on the same course?" Scott asked. "It'll be easier to find us that way."

No use in doing that until we get over the mountains," Carter said. "The faster we get inland the better. Besides, I'll bet there's no big secret where we're heading. The entire Nicaraguan air force is probably waiting up there for us."

"Crossing the coast now," Kellerman announced. Carter checked out the cockpit window-when only fifty feet above the surface, the transition from water to land occurred very fast. He double-checked that the terrain-following system was working properly and set a two-hundred-foot clearance plane.

"Tracking radar up again," Atkins said shakily. The yellow sky was back for only a few moments when it completely blanked out again.

"They get another missile off?"

"I don't think so," Atkins said. "The Rainbow indicates im- pact-we got it."

Cheshire slapped her armrest. "All right."

"Celebration over, copilot," Carter said. "We've got a long long way to go."

In a matter of only a few minutes the Nicaraguan military air- base of Puerto Cabezas was in chaos. One moment it was quiet and peaceftil, a warm, lazy summer evening with a hint of an evening storm brewing. The next, air raid sirens were screaming into the night, Russian missiles raised from concrete canisters like demons rising from their crypts, and the roar of jet fighters began to fill the air with the pungent odor of kerosene.

The first SA-15 missile, installed on the coastal Nicaraguan base only a month earlier in the ongoing Russian fortification of Nicaragua, screamed off its launch rails less than twenty seconds later, filling the air with burning acidic exhaust gas. The missile crews, Nicaraguan with Russian commanding officers, stood and watched the missile disappear into the night sky until a Soviet officer yelled an order to prepare the launcher for reload. An- other SA-15 missile was completing its gyro-alignment-the Nicaraguan soldiers were skilled at aligning one missile at a time forlaunch . . .

It was this deficiency that had probably saved the crew of the Megafortress Plus. Just before the second missile was ready for launch a huge explosion lit up the small sandy hill where the SA-15 tracking and guidance radome was positioned. The golf- ball-like radome exploded like a burst balloon, scattering pieces of the antenna within for hundreds of meters.

From his vantage point in a low-covered concrete revetment near the flight line, Maraklov saw the golf-ball radome split apart and explode; now it looked like a cracked egg in a boiled egg holder. Men were running toward the flight line, but he knew the attack on the SA-15 guidance radome was a prelude to the real assault. If it was a Tacit Rainbow cruise missile the attack would not be for a few minutes because the AGM-136 had a range of almost a hundred miles; if it was an AGM-88 HARM missile the follow-on attack could be any second. Either way it was going to be an air raid-the attackers had obviously been waiting for the SA-15 to come up before blowing it up, and with the radar gone the whole north coast of Nicaragua was open to air attack.

Maraklov took a deep pull from a plastic jug of distilled water as he watched the radar control center begin to bum. Sebaco, he was sure, was next-except whoever was staging this attack wasn't going to stop at a radar site.

But DrearnStar-it was safe. He was sitting in DreamStar's cockpit, still wearing his flight suit, his helmet resting on his lap in front of him. Less than one hour earlier he had landed at Puerto Cabezas after a low-altitude run from Sebaco. Becau e he knew that the American AWACS radar planes would be look- ing for a high-speed aircraft leaving Sebaco, he had made the flight under two hundred miles an hour and at the lowest altitude he could muster, flying deep within mountain valleys and jungle river beds to avoid detection. His gamble that his flight-profile would resemble anything but a jet fighter had apparently worked.

To avoid detection he had landed on the taxiway at Puerto Cabezas instead of the broad ten-thousand-foot runway, taxied 400 .

to the semi-underground concrete shelter and waited with en- gines running for any sign of pursuit. None. He shut down but maintained the ANTARES interface and remained strapped in place, configured and ready to fire up DreimStar. But still no sign of pursuit. Exhaustion overtook him, so he shut down the interface and directed the ground crewmen to begin refueling his fighter. He had been off the ANTARES interface only fifteen minutes when the attack began.

DreamStar was ready for a fight. She carried two more Lluyka in-flight refueling tanks on the wing pylons plus two radar-guided missiles on wing pylons and, this time, two infrared-guided mis- siles on hardpoints on the underside of the fuselage. The two IR missiles were more of a hazard than a help-if DrearnStar's ca- nards were down in their high-maneuverability position, the mis- siles could possibly hit the canards after launch-but for the long ferry mission, the extra weapons were considered necessary. The twenty-millimeter cannon was also fully reloaded-DreamStar was at its heaviest gross weight ever, well over one hundred- thousand pounds.

But Maraklov himself wasn't as prepared for either a long flight or a fight with American fighters. This had been the first time he had made two flights in DreamStar within twenty-four hours and the physical and mental strain was immense-like run- ning the Boston Marathon, getting twelve short hours of rest, then going out and running a few more Heartbreak Hills. His body had not recovered from the first mission, but the necessity was clear-DrearnStar was in danger if it was left there at Se- baco. That had just been confirmed.

The whine of high-speed jet engines made Maraklov painfully turn to scan down the runway. Four MiG-23 fighters were taxiing to the end of the runway preparing for takeoff. The Soviet gov- ernment had not been able to send any more MiG-29s or Russian pilots to Nicaragua on such short notice, so those four MiG-23s were manned by Nicaraguan pilots. The Mig-23s were twenty years old, the pilots young or ill trained in night intercepts. If whoever was attacking Nicaragua destroyed the search and ground-controlled intercept radars as well as the surface-to-air missile radars, the MiG pilots would be forced to hunt for the attackers blind, using their own look-down, shoot-down pulse- Doppler radars to scan thousands of square miles of territory for their quarry.

Maraklov took another drink. It didn't matter, he thought- he'd be out of this backwater country in a few hours. And who knew ... maybe one of the MiGs would get lucky. It hap- pened ...

A soldier came up to Maraklov's revetment, showed an I.

card to the guard, and ran to the platform set up beside DreamStar. He was hesitant to climb up the ladder, but Mar- aklov saw that he had a message in his hand, motioned him up, and asked for the paper.

He got an instant headache after reading the first word. As- suming he could read Russian, the Spanish-speaking radio op- erators had scrawled the message out in childlike Cyrillic characters. Maraklov had enough trouble reading Russian, but reading this gobbledygook would be next to impossible. He had to get the soldier's attention away from the interior of Drearn- Star's cockpit by hammering his shoulder.

"Read this for me," he said in English.

The soldier looked at him in surprise. "You speak English, mister?

"Yes.

The soldier looked at the message for a moment, then looked at Maraklov as if he was going to hit him. "I am sorry, I cannot read this. This is Russian, no?"

"This is garbage Russian, yes. Go back to the radio operator and tell him to write the message out in English Maraklov grabbed a pencil from the soldier's shirt pocket just before he scrambled off the platform-at least while he was getting the message translated he could work on deciphering this junk.

The MiG-23s were still idling at the end of the runway-that probably meant that the GCI radar was being jammed or had been destroyed, and the pilots were being held until a heading to the intruder's position could be established. Don't bother launching, Maraklov thought. Let the MiGs at Sebaco handle the American attackers-Sebaco was obviously the American's target-and leave the Puerto Cabezas MiGs in reserve for when the attackers try to withdraw. If they chase the attackers they could wind up getting shot down themselves or run out of fuel before engaging the stragglers . . . But a moment later the MiG-23s began their runup and minimum-interval takeoffs. So much for reserve interceptors. Maraklov guessed that none of these MiGs would return.

402 .

Maraklov had the scribbled Cyrillic characters deciphered now, but remembering the phonetic pronunciations for each character was tougher, and it took a few minutes to make the message intelligible-luckily, most of it was numbers. It was a satellite message from Moscow informing him that Soviet air forces would be in place in five hours, ready to escort him out of the Caribbean basin into the open Atlantic. The message gave last-minute backup or anti-jam frequency changes and other use- less infon-nation. If the Americans were broad-band jamming their primary communications frequencies, they were listening in as well and were probably vectoring fighters into the source of their transmissions. With such a large force of combat aircraft involved, everything relied on secrecy and radio silence, not secondary and tertiary frequencies.

The fighters were on the downwind side of the runway, the long, bright flames of their afterburners still visible. They had no tankers in Nicaragua (except the one that was lying on the bottom of the Caribbean), so if those guys in the MiG-23s didn't come out of afterburner they'd flame out before getting a shot off at the intruders.

Maraklov asked himself, "Why am I ragging on those pilots?

DreamStar is safe-if the Americans had pinpointed DreamStar here in Puerto Cabezas this whole base would be a smoking hole.

Was it because he itched to get into battle? No, even if he had enough energy to take DreamStar aloft, which he didn't, he wouldn't risk it. With the MiG-29s gone Nicaragua was wide open to attack-for all he knew there was an aircraft carrier sitting off the coast with fifty F-18 fighter-bombers ready to take him on. It would be suicide to try.

He took another drink of water, emptying the bottle. The real problem here was that he just wanted a future, and every step being taken just seemed to drive him farther and farther from it.

DreamStar, he felt, was his life. His whole being was inter- meshed with it, and the thought of its eventual dismantling or, worse, destruction was as obscene to him as the idea of a mother killing her newborn baby. But he was also a soldier, obliged to obey orders-and he had been ordered to deliver DreamStar to Russia. But could he obey those orders, knowing what they would do to his aircraft-and what they would probably do to him as well? He was already suspect . . . too American . . .

All the dead-end thoughts he was having were. giving him a headache even worse than before. He tossed the plastic water bottle at one of the Nicaraguan military guards at the mouth of the revetment. "Agua, por favor"-probably the only three words of Spanish he knew. The soldier began filling the bottle from one of his canteens-no doubt more of the brackish, parasite-ridden water of this country. The thought of getting di- arrhea while in the metallic flight suit made him laugh and cry, but dying of thirst and trying to withstand these migraine head- aches were even worse prospects.

Soon, it would be over, he thought. He'd be on his way out of this godforsaken country and back to . . . Russia. Back to . . . what?

He was too tired to think any more about that. As the flick- ering lights of the fires in the SA-15 radome subsided, exhaus- tion overtook him, and he drifted off into a fitful sleep.

"Rainbow two showing impact," Atkins reported. The green search radar indication on Carter's laser-projection cockpit dis- play had disappeared-the Tacit Rainbow missile had destroyed the Cuyali radar site, the last large-scale search radar system before Sebaco.

"Coming up on the initial point, crew," Alicia Kellerman announced. They were deep within the Rio Tbma river valley, which snaked out of the Cordillera Dariense mountains north of Managua and fed Managua Lake. Their initial point was, of all places, the town of Los Angeles thirty miles upriver from Se- baco.

"Bomb run briefing, crew," Paul Scott, the radar navigator, began, "we'll be approaching Sebaco from the northeast on the military crest of the river valley. There's one SA-10 site on the top of linotega Mountain at our one o'clock position, but ac- cording to Powell and McLanahan in Cheetah it's a mobile site. "

"The system can use infrared to acquire its targets," Atkins chimed in. "Even though it needs radar for guidance they can launch on IR azimuth commands and then go to guidance uplink once the missile is in flight. We could see a snap-launch profile, where all we get on the threat-warning receivers is a missiLE LAUNCH warning-we won't get a symbol or missi LE WARNING."

Carter was relieved to hear Atkins back on top of his game-he was pretty shook after their first encounter with the SA-15.

404 .

"Our last hazard on the run is the town of Matagalpa, where some Soviet troops could be garrisoned. Watch out for triple-A radars. SA- 14 or SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles may also be a factor but if we stay low and fast we should be able to beat an SA- 14.

"We'll approach Sebaco from the southeast side of the base.

Powell and McLanahan saw one antiaircraft artillery battery on each end of the runway-it'll be worth lobbing a HARM or even a Striker in there if it engages us. They also saw helicopter gun- ships on the base. These can carry air-to-air heat-seeking mis- siles too. Our targets are the three hangars on the southwest side of the base and the underground headquarters building three hundred yards southeast from the hangars. The hangars are pri- mary. We'll also drop the CBU cluster-bomb units on the run- way and the taxiway-parking ramp area, with emphasis on destroying any aircraft. If the defenses are minimal we can make a circle to the north or northeast and come around for another pass. After the attack, we beat feet to the northeast, terrain- follow in the Cordillera Isabella mountains, and exit along the Honduran border. If we're drowned and each module crew gets separated, evade north or northwest toward Honduras and get a ride to Tegucigalpa. We've all been briefed on the pick-up points in Nicaragua where we can maybe get assistance from Contadora sympathizers. We're using channel Charlie on the survival ra- dios. "

They had time to prebrief the details of the mission and talk about their recommended actions in case they were shot down or somehow separated, but it was much different this time-they were actually over hostile territory, surrounded by the military forces of two nations. It had suddenly all become very real.

" -band search radar at six o'clock," Atkins called out.

Batwing symbol-there's a fighter up there looking for us."

"I. inbound, crew," Kellerman said. The Megafortress made a slight left turn, hugging the side of the rugged, tree- covered mountains.

Suddenly a green mushroom-shaped dome appeared briefly on Carter's windscreen. "Warning, search radar, twelve o'clock. " "We've got something out ahead of us," Carter called out.

"Looks like triple-A," Atkins Uid, studying his threat re- ceiver. The computer confirmed it seconds later by drawing a tiny gun-icon underneath the green mushroom. "I've got a HARM aligning against it. " Just then, the mushroom turned yellow.

"Warning, threat radar tracking, twelve o'clock.

"Should we go around it?" Carter asked.

"No room," Cheshire said. "We'd have to climb five thou- sand feet to clear these mountains."

"Descend and accelerate," Atkins said. "Stand by for missile launch . . . now. "

The yellow BAY DOORS OPEN light came on. "Caution, bomb doors open..... warning, HARM missile launch command . . .

missile launch..... bomb doors closed."

"Missile away." The one-thousand-pound HARM missile was a yellow streak as it roared away into the darkness. Seconds later there was a splash of fire on the horizon and the glow of flames.

The yellow mushroom was gone.

"Warning, airborne threat radar, sU o'clock.

Karbayjal activated his fire-control radar and slaved it to the threat receiver so the beam from the tail-mounted tracking radar would look in the exact direction of the threat. The readout he got made him yell into his oxygen visor. "Fighter at six o'clock, five miles, descending rapidly." He hit the voice-command but- ton on his armrest. "Radar lock. Airmine launch one. Launch two. Launch three."

A warning tone sounded on interphone, followed by the hard, short thuds of the Stinger airmine rockets being shot away. "Ra- dar lock automatic . . . warning, launch command issued . . .

airmine launch . . . launch two . . . launch three."

But moments later the fighter was still coming-all three air- mine rockets had missed. "He's still coming. Prepare for infra- red missile attack," Karbayjal called out. "TWo miles . . . one mile . . . -break le now."

Carter yanked the Megafortress into a hard left turn. The terrain-following computer immediately commanded a climb to allow for terrain clearance. At the same time Karbayjal punched two flares and chaff out the right side ejectors.

"One mile . . . half mile . . . he's still coming." Nothing was decoying this guy-chaff, flares, jammers, even airmine rockets . . .

The fire-control radar tracked the fighter as it flew closer and closer, but a few seconds later the reason for its daringly close .

406.

pass became obvious as Karbayjal watched the fighter's altitude wind down lower and lower until it finally read zero.

"He crashed," Karbayjal called out. "He-"

Suddenly they heard on the scrambled discrete strike fre- quency, "Dog Two, this is Storm Two. Your tail's clear."

"Powell. McLanahan." Cheshire shouted the names. "Way to go."

Carter let out his breath. He tasted blood and found he had bit his lower lip almost all the way through. As he steered the Megafortress back on course he opened the radio channel.- "Thanks, guys. "

raised Cheetah's nose until he was level with the tops of the tree-covered mountains, making several tight turns left and right to clear behind them, searching for a second fighter.