Cyclops One - Страница 26

Atta felt his vertebrae crack as he leaned backward, all of the muscles stretching. The flight decks on the Cyclops warplanes were more spacious than their civilian counterparts, thanks to the modifications necessary to carry the weapon. Originally designed for a three-person crew, the two-man cockpit in production 767s was a comfortable executive office; in Cyclops it was a veritable suite. Behind the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs were four crew stations for the laser, two apiece facing consoles along the wall. The configuration allowed for decent walking space to the back galley. The walking space covered the access points and one of the wire tunnels for the laser gear, but these were covered by a carpet, and the crew joked that there was enough room for a regulation bowling alley, an exaggeration that nonetheless hinted at its spaciousness. The galley included a rest room and a small kitchen area complete with a microwave and a thermos coffeemaker supposedly rated to stay inside its fitting at negative 10 g’s. Future versions of the aircraft would probably include a second crew compartment, where a reserve team could catch a snooze on a long mission.

The Boeing people hadn’t planned on making a revolutionary warplane when they drew up the 767; they were looking for an economical way of moving people around the globe. But just as they had done with the venerable 707, their fundamental engineering values had created a versatile airframe capable of going far beyond even the visionary’s dreams. The engineers and contractors working for NADT had a good basis to work on, and credited the original designers for most of their success. Habib had taken this airframe through a stress test — ostensibly for the laser nose — that included a barrel roll and an air-show loop. Granted, it wasn’t a sleek F/A-22V or a teen-series fighter, but the big jet was surprisingly nimble and extremely well behaved, even at the far edge of its advertised design limitations. Habib felt confident it would perform today.

He thought the same of his crew. The four of them together had over fifty years in the service and had spent the last year on the Cyclops project.

The same things could have been said of everyone on Cyclops One.

Atta paused behind the designating station. While the pilot actually made the shot, the designating specialist — Technical Sergeant May Peters, in this case — guided the computer as it worked with the various inputs and prioritized potential hits.

Had she been male, Atta would have given her a good-natured slap on the side or back. But he worried about doing that with a woman — worried it might be misinterpreted or, worse, that he might actually hurt her. Even though he knew Peters rather well — had met her husband and even had dinner with them once or twice — he remained formal.

“Good work, Sergeant,” he told her.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, her tone not quite as rigid as his but still well shaded toward formality.

Atta went over to the other station, which was manned by another tech sergeant, Joe Fernandez. Feeling he had to treat Fernandez the same as Peters, he repeated the same words and received precisely the same response. Satisfied, he looked over his domain one more time, pausing before returning. He had thought of making a little speech as a morale booster. Colonel Howe had given one on the tarmac earlier and he’d been impressed. But Atta wasn’t that good a speaker in front of crowds, even tiny ones; he felt something growing in his throat and decided not to chance it.

He thought of saying a prayer but worried that might be taken the wrong way: He was a Muslim, and maybe Christians would think he was imposing his beliefs on them. So instead he stretched one more time and went back to his seat.

“We’re looking good,” he told them over the interphone after he slipped his helmet back on. “Looking real good.”

Chapter 6

Airborne and on course, Howe worked his eyes across the dimming purple sky, scanning for enemies. The integrated sensors in his aircraft would surely alert him to another plane well before he could see it, but there was no way in the world he would feel secure, no way he could fly, without using his eyes. Part of him believed, truly believed, that they’d see something the radar and infrared would miss; part of him was convinced that even the powerful radars in the AWACS and Cyclops Two were no replacement for his own Mark One eyeballs. Howe was not so superstitious — or foolish — about this that he wouldn’t trust the display on his gee-whiz tactical screen, much less forgo the very real benefits of technology. Both of his kills had come from beyond visual distance; he hadn’t seen either target before launching. But still, his eyes hunted the darkening space around him, a miner’s pan sifting for danger.

The overall plan was laid out almost exactly as the exercise dubbed Bosnia 2 had been over a year ago, allowing for differences in geography. As the Velociraptors worked over the Pakistani border near Indian Kashmir, they would feed data back to Cyclops Two, which would remain in Afghan airspace. Their low-probability-of-intercept radars could not be detected by the gear believed to be aboard the helicopters or the front-line Indian aircraft that the planners thought would be nearby; at the same time, the F/A-22Vs would be able to slide through the rough terrain, overcoming the clutter that shadowed part of the likely approach. The laser aboard Cyclops Two would make the hit, but the two Velociraptors would be close enough to strike the helicopters if it missed.

The radar in the F/A-22Vs had been developed from the original APG-77 perfected by Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, the first active-array antenna radar fitted into a fighter aircraft, but the Velociraptor version was nearly as far from its ancestor as the APG-77 had been from its own predecessors. Unlike old-fashioned radar “dishes,” the radar signals were sent and received through nearly two thousand short antennas carefully arranged around the aircraft’s hull. The embedded array allowed the radar to operate in a variety of modes at once, essentially giving complete and instantaneous coverage while still employing low-probability-of-intercept tactics. In an older radar the sweep of the beam and spikes in the energy levels provided easy detection points for a careful enemy. The F/A-22V — and even the “stock” F/A-22—could use its active radar and still not be detected by most interceptors until it had already fired air-to-air missiles — in other words, until it was far, far too late. The aircraft’s eighteen different modes were capable of working together so that a long-range target might be found, identified, and targeted seemingly instantaneously. The targets were passed along immediately through the intraflight data link (IFDL) to Cyclops, which would then use the information to nail them.

The tough thing, the almost impossible thing, was the length of the mission. The planners were convinced the attack would go off as soon as it was completely dark, which would be roughly an hour from now. But there were no guarantees, and even the long-legged F/A-22Vs would eventually get thirsty. Howe and Timmy had worked out a plan to swap off on refuels several hours into the flight; the complicated fuel matrixes were stored in the Velociraptors’ computers, and the flight computer had a preset panel that would show their fuel profiles throughout the mission.

Maybe it wouldn’t come off at all. The diplomats were supposedly burning their own dinosaurs on the ground, trying to cool things down.

“Bird Two to One,” snapped Timmy. “Hey, boss man, how’s it looking?”

“We’re clean,” Howe told his wingman. “Eight minutes to border.”

“Roger that.”

Timmy was flying at a five thousand feet offset a mile off his right wing at 38,000 feet. Once over the border, they were going to run one circuit through the mountainous area together to get their bearings, then split up to cover more territory, in case the analysts’ guesses were off the mark. The automatic ground modes on their radars would hunt for any hidden bases, allowing the Cyclops Two operators to rule out — or in — possible surprises.

The AWACS checked in, relaying a report from one of the Navy surveillance craft helping to monitor the peninsula that the Indians were launching one of their Russian Beriev A-50 “Mainstay” radar aircraft from a base to the southeast, near the coast. The Mainstay was more than five hundred miles from their patrol area, and its radar range was less than two hundred miles. Unless it got considerably closer, it was unlikely to pinpoint the stealthy F/A-22Vs, and still less likely to be able to vector anything toward them.

Even so, Howe felt himself leaning forward on the seat. He edged his thumb along the top of the sidestick, watching the computer count down the time to the border in the course module above his left multiuse display. Howe checked the aircraft data, took a slow breath, and flexed fingers on the throttle. It was getting fairly dark now, and so he push-buttoned the HUD into synthetic view, the hologram rendering the outside world at a one-on-one scale/first person. The fishbowl before him duplicated what he would have seen if it were a perfectly clear day. He stared at it a second, mentally orienting his eyes and brain to accept the synthetic data, then flicked into one-on-ten, which felt a little like watching an O-scale train layout instantly downsize to HO. He enabled verbal commands, then had the Velociraptor’s computer pencil in some geography and flight plan data. He could see the border etched out on the virtual ground ahead.