Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,117

away, their robin's-egg-blue paint blending them in perfectly with the clear morning sky.

Buns selected her cannon for the first pass and triggered two hundred rounds into the cockpit of a Badger. The twin-engine bomber went instantly out of control and rolled over like a dead whale. One. The major howled with delight, pulled the Eagle up into a five-g loop, then over to dive on the next target. The Soviets were alerted now, and the second Badger attempted to dive away. It had not the slightest chance. Nakamura fired her Sidewinder from a range of less than a mile and watched the missile trace all the way into the Badger's left-side engine, and blast the wing right off the airplane. Two. Another Badger was three miles ahead. Patience, she told herself. You have a big speed advantage. She nearly forgot that the Russian bomber had tail guns. A Soviet sergeant reminded her of it, missing, but scaring the hell out of her. The Eagle jerked in a six-g turn to the left and closed on a parallel course before turning in. The next burst from her cannon exploded the Badger in midair, and she had to dive to avoid the wreckage. The engagement lasted all of ninety seconds, and she was wringing wet with perspiration.

"Butch, where are you?"

"I got one! Buns, I got one!" The Eagle pulled up alongside.

Nakamura looked around. Suddenly the sky was clear. Where had they all gone?

"Navy Hawk-One, this is Golf, do you read, over?"

"Roger, Golf."

"Okay, Navy. We just smoked four, repeat four, Badgers for you."

"Make that five, Buns!" the other element leader called in.

"Something's wrong, sir." The radar operator on Hawk-One motioned to his scope. "We have these buggers just popped through, and they say they bagged some, gotta be three, four hundred miles away."

"Clipper Base, this is Hawk-One, we just had contact with an Air Force ferry flight eastbound. They claim they just splashed five Badgers northbound several hundred miles north of us. Say again northbound."

Toland's eyebrows went up.

"Probably some had to abort," Baker observed. "This is close to their fuel limit, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," replied Air/Ops. He didn't look happy with his own answer.

"Burn-through," announced the radar operator. "We have reacquired the targets."

The Kelts had flown on, oblivious to the furor around them. Their radar transponders made them look like hundred-ten-foot Badgers. Their own white-noise jammers came on, somewhat obscuring them yet again on the radar scopes, and autopilot controls began to jerk them up, down, left, right, in hundred-meter leaps as an aircraft might do when trying to avoid a missile. The Kelts had been real missiles once, but on retirement from front-line service six years earlier, their warheads had been replaced with additional fuel tankage, and they had been relegated to a role as target drones, a purpose they were serving admirably now.

"Tallyho!" The first squadron of twelve Tomcats was now a hundred fifty miles away. The Kelts showed up perfectly on radar, and the intercept officers in the back seat of each fighter quickly established target tracks. The Kelts were approaching what would have been nominal missile-launch distance--if they were the bombers everyone thought they were.

The Tomcats launched a volley of million-dollar AIM-54C Phoenix missiles at a range of a hundred forty miles. The missiles blazed in on their targets at Mach-5, directed by the fighters' targeting radars. In under a minute the forty-eight missiles had killed thirty-nine targets. The first squadron broke clear as the second came into launch position.

USS NIMITZ

"Admiral, something is wrong here," Toland said quietly.

"What might that be?" Baker liked the way things were going. Enemy bomber tracks were being wiped off his screen just as the war games had predicted they would.

"The Russians are coming in dumb, sir."

"So?"

"So this far the Soviets have not been very dumb! Admiral, why aren't the Backfires going supersonic? Why one attack group? Why one direction?"

"Fuel constraints," Baker answered. "The Badgers are at the limit of their fuel, they have to come in direct."

"But not the Backfires!"

"The course is right, the raid count is right." Baker shook his head and concentrated on the tactical plot.

The second squadron of fighters had just launched. Unable to get a head-on shot, their missile accuracy suffered somewhat. They killed thirty-four targets with forty-eight missiles. There had been a hundred fifty-seven targets plotted.

The third and fourth Tomcat squadrons arrived together and launched as a group. When their Phoenixes had been fully expended, nineteen targets were left. The two fighter squadrons moved in to engage the