Phantom force the uss cu.., p.8
Phantom Force (The USS Cunningham Quintet Book 5), page 8
The command center’s battle management system had been detecting those returns for some time as they had traveled eastward along Highway 62 at seventy odd miles per hour and had categorized and filtered them as routine ground vehicle clutter.
The system continued to do so now, even as the “ground vehicles” veered off the highway to transit terrain unbroken by any road.
*
“Civil Aircraft Echo George Tango, this is California Air National Guard Butterball Two Five, do you copy? Over. Civil Aircraft Echo George Tango, this is California Air National Guard Butterball Two Five, do you copy? Over.”
Captain Brenda Zabreski, tonight known as Butterball Two Five, pulled her throttle back and flared her speed brakes, bleeding off the excess velocity built up by her descent. As the airspeed sank below three hundred knots, she dirtied up the airframe, dialing in fifteen degrees of flap and popping the speed brakes, her elderly F-16 shuddering in protest.
Over her left shoulder, the aircraft of Lieutenant Dennis Ramirez, Butterball Two Six, held station on her as the two fighters dropped from thirty-five thousand feet in a lazy pursuit curve, lining up on the blip in their cockpit intercept displays.
“Ah … lease repeat … can’t … system … position … Over.”
Zabreski sighed and toggled up to the command channel, “Two Five to Two Six. Did you get anything out of that, Denny? Over.”
“Negatory on that, Captain, just grass and garbage.”
“Roger, Denny, let’s come up on his port side, nice and easy at about a hundred-yard separation.”
“Acknowledged, ma’am. Wish we could rattle this dork’s doors with an afterburner run. We got better things to do out here tonight, Captain.”
“Stand easy, Denny. This guy could really be in trouble. Beyond that, the State of California doesn’t need a lawsuit from some civil aviation puke claiming we scared him into a permanent sexual dysfunction.”
Another voice intruded into Zabreski’s helmet phones. “Butterball Two Five, this is Twentynine Palms Traffic Control. We have the bogie at your one o’clock at five miles. Do you have a visual? Over.”
Zabreski thumbed the transmit button on the top of her side-stick controller. “We have strobes at our one o’clock. They appear to be the running lights of a civil aircraft. Do you wish us to continue the intercept? Over. ”
The pulsing strobe flares crept into the cartwheel sight of the F-16’s heads up display as the interceptors aligned with it.
“Affirmative, Butterball Two Five,” Twenty-nine Palms replied. “Close the range and make skin identification of the target.”
“Roger. Will comply.” Muttering to herself about pernickety jarheads, Zabreski juggled her flaps, throttle and flight angle. The F-16 was sluggish and sullen as it crept closer to its target, unhappy at this airspeed.
As their range closed, Zabreski reached up with her left hand and flipped down her low light vision visor, trying to see the aircraft behind the lights. The target’s strobes were set to bright rapid flash and it wasn’t easy.
The bogie wasn’t very big, whatever it was. Maybe a Turbo Mooney. But was that a tail boom? Could it be an old Cessna Skymaster flying flat out and balls to the wall?
Abruptly the strobe lights snapped off and Captain Zabreski got a single instant’s good look at the target.
It was like nothing she had ever seen before in her life.
In the Range Control Center, the strangled yelp of the interceptor leader sounded from the overhead speakers. On the main screen, the target hack of the unidentified aircraft suddenly and radically decelerated.
Out in the night, the “distressed civilian aircraft” halved its speed in a matter of seconds. Helplessly, the two interceptors overshot the mysterious intruder, the bogie weaving and striking at the trailing jet like an airborne cobra.
The bogie’s pilot spoke over the communications link, but this time both his voice and his transmission were clear and cool as he chanted, “Guns! Guns! Guns!”
A red death box snapped into existence around the trailing F-16. “Butterball Two Six has been terminated!” a marine controller yelled. “Twenty millimeter, air to air!”
The range computers had declared the Air Guard jet shredded by a storm of autocannon fire. Cassin crushed down the transmit key on his headset. He had only seconds. “Butterball Two Five! Call your target! What’s out there?”
“I don’t know!” The air guard pilot’s voice was frantic as she tried to clean up her aircraft and regain airspeed. “I’ve never seen …”
“Fox three! Fox three!” That cool, masculine voice overrode her words. Out over the range, hypothetical infrared homing missiles were screaming off their launching rails, targeting the exhaust plume of the Air Guard jet. The computers adjudicated and a second death box materialized around Butterball Two Five.
“Butterball Two Five has been destroyed by a Sidewinder X,” a controller reported. “Direct hit!”
In the shadowed corner of the command center, the nameless observer thumbed the timer button of his sports watch. One hundred seconds and counting.
In frustration, Cassin stared up at the overhead speaker. By the rules of the game, the interceptor pilots couldn’t even describe what had so suddenly killed them. They were dead. But by then the interceptor killer was the least of his problem.
Another trio of hostile aircraft symbols seemed to materialize magically within the radar sweep as the befuddled filtration system belatedly acknowledged that they weren’t ground clutter.
“Multiple airborne targets on the range!” the senior controller yelled. “Altitude, nape of the earth, airspeed one hundred and twenty knots and accelerating. Bearing zero degrees true. Convergent on primary target!”
“Gunny, call the incoming! What do we have coming in?”
“Gotta be helicopters, sir.”
Gunships, Cassin thought feverishly; it had to be a flight of AH-64 Apaches escorted by … something else. “Weapons free, all stations! Nape of the earth engagement envelope!”
The OPFORs still had a chance. According to the victory conditions of the scenario, the intruding blue force had to put fire on the villa within one hundred seconds of detection and the choppers had been detected a little too far out. They weren’t going to get within range in time.
“Wait! Delay that!” the master controller yelled, all rank protocols forgotten under the stress. “Target airspeed now over two hundred knots and still accelerating. Targets are not, I repeat, not, helos.”
“Then what the hell are they?”
“Beats the shit out of me, sir. The airspeed was too low for fixed wing aircraft. Now it’s too high for helicopters.”
“What about tilt-rotors? Could they be Ospreys?”
“The radar cross section is way too small! The radar signatures and flight profiles don’t match with anything in the book!”
It all came clear to Cassin now. The secrecy concerning their attacking force. The nameless observer in the Op Center. This wasn’t just another training exercise. He and his people were being used to field test some new, secret and radically different weapons system.
Video windows were snapping open around the perimeter of the main screen, low-light camera feeds from the air defense perimeter gun positions. The range controllers were trying to acquire the invaders visually – but all the cameras picked up were launch flashes in the darkness.
The video relay from the three air defense sites broke to static as the cameras disintegrated. The attackers had been authorized to use real weapons on the simulated ground targets. Death boxes outlined the gun positions guarding the southern approaches to the primary objective.
“Air Defense sites three, four and five destroyed. Hellfire air-to surface missiles.”
Hellfires, 20mm cannon and Sidewinders. At least whoever was kicking their ass was using American technology.
All eyes turned to the television image of the villa, save for those of the silent observer at the back of the room. He watched the luminous second hand of his watch sweep around the dial. Fifteen seconds … Twenty … Twenty-five …
In his mind’s eye, another sequence of events was unfolding. A wary, cunning, frightened man sleeps in a darkened room. A telephone rings. A warning is shouted over it.
Thirty … Thirty-five … Forty …
Boots hammer up a stairway. Frantic fists pound on a locked door.
Forty-five … Fifty … Fifty-five …
Bodyguards drag a sleeping man from his bed. Explanations and orders are screamed. A mad race back down the hall and stairway.
Sixty … Sixty-five … Seventy …
Limousine engines crank over. An escape convoy stands ready, doors open. Courtyard gates swing wide, making way for a race into the darkness.
Seventy-five … Eighty …
On the wall screen, a three-round Hellfire salvo slammed into the front face of the target house; a second salvo followed, a third, a fourth. Riding the beams of their guidance lasers, the missiles caved in and flattened the Conex container building blocks of the structure.
It was a focused rain of firepower, targeted not merely to damage or conventionally destroy the mock villa and its compound, but to obliterate it, to level every possible, survivable corner of the structure.
It succeeded.
Within thirty seconds, nothing remained save a charred and scattered fan of scrap metal sprayed across the desert.
The observer smiled and clicked the stop button.
Nothing remained on the main wall display as well. The position hacks of the three attackers had faded, ghostlike, from the screen at the moment of the last missile launch. The track of the fourth invader, the one that had ambushed the Combat Air Patrol, had disappeared as well, dissipating as it had spiraled down toward the desert.
All that remained in the sky over the A-GCC were the two humiliated Air Guard F-16s, returning to their base.
The observer pocketed his watch, left his corner and walked to where Cassin stared at the master screen. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “You and your staff have been most helpful. This exercise is concluded. ”
Then he turned and left the command center.
USS Bon Homme Richard, LHD-6
48 Miles off San Diego, California
0058 Hours; Zone Time, September 25, 2008
The first warning the steaming watch in the wheelhouse had was the appearance of the Marine sentry. Crossing to the portside bridge windows, the Marine tugged on the tapes that bound up the canvas dodger mounted over the windscreen. Unrolling the canvas to block out the view of the big amphib’s full length flight deck, he put his back to the windows and went to a watchful parade rest.
The helm and lee helmsman at the wheel and engine controls exchanged glances, but the Officer of the Watch murmured, “Eyes forward, gentlemen. You know the drill.”
A few moments later, a voice rolled from the ship’s MC-1 loudspeakers. “Stand by to recover aircraft. Stand by to recover aircraft. Set all special security protocols. Secure all topside video cameras. All unauthorized personnel proceed below decks immediately. I say again, all unauthorized personnel proceed below decks immediately.”
For the past week, the crew of the Bonne Homme Richard, affectionately referred to by all hands as “The Bonny Dick”, had been involved in some very deep mojo indeed.
The Wasp class LHD had been designed and intended to carry the bulk of a Marine Expeditionary Unit and its supporting air elements. On this cruise however, someone else had come aboard and had taken over. Just who was a matter of some conjecture.
The Air One Flight Control Center at the aft end of the LHD’s island was manned by a complement of the mysterious strangers. Likewise, the aircraft handling details and fire and crash crews standing to on the flight deck were also numbered among the nameless.
The ship’s aviation service spaces had also been declared off limits with the after half of the hangar bay walled off by a tarpaulin barricade, guarded by prowling, pistol packing Marine sentries.
Nor was this security contingent made up of commonplace leathernecks. These were Fleet Marine Force, the same hand-picked unit that stood guard over the navy’s nuclear weapons arsenals.
Shipboard scuttlebutt had naturally run wild, but no concrete conclusions had yet been reached.
The watch officer tilted his head, listening to the voice in his command headset.
“Helmsman, come left to zero nine eight true. Put her across the wind.”
“Helm coming left to zero nine eight true, sir.”
They were swinging across the wind to recover the VTOL aircraft.
A trilling roar began to filter down from the night. The crew of the Bonny Dick had become very well-acquainted with that sound over these past two weeks. It was very similar to the sound of the conventional helicopters they were accustomed to handling, but not quite the same. Not quite.
Whatever they were, they only flew after dark, launching after sunset and returning before dawn. Daylight would find the flight deck empty.
The shipboard speculators had one more clue to mull over. The airdales and aviators who had come aboard to maintain and fly this mystery air group all wore the same odd little unit patch on their flight and service gear. There was no unit name, number or motto on the simple circular black device, just the horizontal slash of a silver lightning bolt morphing into a red-eyed striking Cobra, its fangs bared.
*
Still wearing his life jacket and survival gear harness over a camo-pattern flight suit, the wiry naval aviator with the movie star’s face came to a relaxed parade rest before Captain DeVille’s desk.
“How did it go tonight, CAG?” The Bon Homme Richard’s commander inquired, using the anachronistic but traditional acronym for ‘Commander Air Group.’ As the one man of the LHD’s compliment authorized to know the nature and intent of the black squadron carried by his vessel, he had the privilege of asking.
“Pretty good, sir,” the aviator smiled. “In fact, it couldn’t have gone better. I’m damn pleased with how this outfit is dialing in, especially with all of the developmental work we still have to do with the technology. I’d say we’re damn near deployable as we stand.”
The LHD’s skipper replied with an ironic smile of his own. “I’m pleased to hear that, Vince. After you launched this evening, we received a flash red from NAVSPECFORCE headquarters at Pearl.”
DeVille unlocked a desk drawer and removed a message flimsy, passing it to the younger officer. “We’ve been ordered to abort your training cruise two days early. The SPEED Cobras are to be flown off to Edwards Air Force Base tomorrow night and we’ll land your support personnel and equipment at Coronado the following morning. I am authorized to inform you that your squadron is to be airlifted out of Edwards to an undisclosed forward staging base within the next seventy-two hours.”
Deville handed a second flimsy across the desk. “There was a second communication designated specifically for you.”
Commander Vincent Arkady’s expression went from amiable enthusiasm to thoughtful neutrality as he considered the flimsy. Its sender was Admiral Elliot MacIntyre and its message was succinct in the extreme.
One word:
NOW.
Arkady looked up from the message. “It says all it needs to, Captain.”
CNN Television
1920 Hours; Zone Time, September 30, 2008
“Senator Donovan, you’ve been a player in our current controversial involvement in the Indonesian crisis from the beginning. Now it appears to be evolving into the Amanda Garrett crisis. Do you have any input for us in this recent turn of events?”
“Firstly, Larry, I’d like to make it clear that both I and my party have stood firmly against the Childress administration’s reckless brand of cowboy interventionism, not only in Indonesia but around the world. Having said that, I must also say that a loose cannon spawns loose cannons.”
“How do you mean, Senator?”
“I think it’s fairly obvious that the President’s aggressive foreign policies and blank check treatment of the Armed Forces has spawned a dangerous ‘Rambo’ attitude among our military leadership. Hyper-aggressive risk-takers such as the Garrett woman are allowed to come to the fore, individuals willing to subvert the will of Congress and the American people in their hunt for personal glory.”
“I must point out, Senator, that Captain Garrett is a two-time winner of the Navy Cross and the recipient of a Special United Nations Medal for Peacekeeping.”
“I don’t mean to belittle this young woman’s legitimate accomplishments – but it is also obvious she has now exceeded even the loose mandates of the Childress administration. Justifiably, she must be brought to book.”
“The press statement issued by US Naval Special Forces still only mentions a nonspecific Board of Inquiry.”
“We are clearly being stonewalled by Admiral Elliot MacIntyre, the NAVSPECFORCE commander. He’s using the old bugaboo of National Security in a flagrant attempt to shield Garrett, but I can promise you, Larry, the truth will come out …”
Diego Garcia
The Central Indian Ocean
2323 Hours; Zone Time, Oct 2, 2008
