Satan’s Tail. Dale Brown
on a stretched version of the F-22 fighter. The slim body of the Fighting Falcon had been bulked up as well, so that the airplane looked more rectangular than round. This was partly to accommodate the larger engine, which was a Pratt & Whitney power plant originally proposed for the Joint Strike Fighter; the engine was capable of sustained cruising at Mach 1.2 while consuming a little less fuel than an F-16C would have at subsonic cruise. That there was much more room for fuel in the Dreamland version increased its operating range, giving it a typical combat radius well in excess of a thousand miles, depending on its mission and load.
The XF-16Z had been authorized shortly before Dog got to Dreamland. It originally had been intended as a test bed for a variety of technologies, including the wing construction (considered but rejected for the Joint Strike Fighter) and electronics suite (which would probably form the basis of the next generation of Wild Weasel upgrades). But it also showed how older airframes might be given new life; the Z could do for the F-16 what the Megafortress had done for the B-52 – remake a venerable, solidly designed twentieth century aircraft into a twenty-first century cutting-edge warplane. The Z was a cheaper-to-operate alternative to the strike version of the F-22; it could also be employed as a very capable Wild Weasel and – assuming the weapons people continued to make the progress they’d shown over the last twelve months – a likely platform for the lightweight attack version of the Razor antiair laser currently under development. The chemical laser was scheduled to be strapped to the belly of the Z for tests by early January.
Today’s test was rather prosaic – Dog was merely helping the techies shake out some bugs in the radar unit that helped the aircraft track other airplanes around it. A pair of UAV drones – early model Pioneers – would be launched as soon as he was airborne; Dog would fly a few circuits and wait for the radar to pick up the craft and track them.
An easy gig, if the techies would just clear out so he could spool up the engine. The engineer reappeared at the side of the cockpit with a small meter, apologizing for some sort of glitch in the circuitry.
‘How long is this going to take?’ asked Dog.
‘Uh, depends. I get a green here and you can go.’
Dog couldn’t help noticing that the needle on the engineer’s testing device swung into the red zone and stayed there. The engineer mumbled a curse under his breath, then looked up at the colonel and turned red.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve heard those words before,’ said Dog. ‘Is this going to scrub the mission or what?’
‘Um, maybe.’ The techie reached down and reseated his tester’s clips. This time when he turned the switch dial, the needle pegged the green post on the meter. ‘Eureka,’ said the engineer. ‘Good to go, sir.’
But as the technician disappeared down the side and the crew with the power cart got ready to ‘puff’ the XF-16Z’s engine to life, a black SUV with a blue flashing light raced toward the aircraft. A sergeant from the Whiplash ground action team, Lee Liu, got out and trotted toward the aircraft.
‘Urgent Eyes-Only communication for you, Colonel,’ shouted Liu.
Dog undid his restraints and climbed over the side. ‘Di-Tullo, you’re going to have to scratch unless you can find the backup pilot,’ he yelled. ‘Somedays you can never win.’
Forty minutes later Dog watched the tussled hair and tired face of Jed Barclay pop onto the screen at the front of the Dreamland Command Center.
‘Colonel, how are you?’ he asked. Jed was the National Security Council assistant for technology, and the Martindale administration’s de facto liaison with Dreamland.
‘I’m fine, Jed. You look a little tired.’
Jed smiled. ‘Stand by for Mr Freeman.’
The screen blinked. The feed indicated that the transmission was being made from the White House situation room, which had recently been upgraded, partly to accommodate secure communications with Dreamland.
‘Colonel Bastian, good evening,’ said Philip Freeman, the National Security Advisor. ‘The President has issued a Whiplash Order. Hopefully, this mission won’t be as intense as some of your others. I’m afraid I have an appointment upstairs. Before I go, I wanted to mention personally that I appreciate the effort you and your people made in Brunei. Good work, Colonel.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dog.
Freeman turned away from the screen.
Jed Barclay stepped back into view. ‘Roughly three weeks ago, one of Libya’s Russian-made submarines left its port on the Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘Ordinarily, they go out a few miles, dive, circle, and go home. This one didn’t. I have some graphics for you, but the illustrations are pretty, uh, basic.’
A blurry black and white photo of a submarine replaced Jed’s face. Dog listened as the NSC assistant described the submarine, an old but still potent diesel-powered member of the Project 641 class, code named ‘Foxtrots’ in the west. Roughly three hundred feet long, the Libyan submarine had a snorkel and improved batteries, which allowed it to travel for several days while submerged. Capable of carrying over twenty torpedoes and possibly submarine-launched cruise missiles, the vessel posed a serious enough threat to shipping that NATO had sent additional forces to track it down. An Italian destroyer succeeded in locating it west of Sicily and trailed it as it traveled toward Gibraltar. But the submarine eventually gave it the slip.
Two days later a British antisubmarine warfare group off the Moroccan coast in the Atlantic recorded sounds of a submarine under distress. It failed to surface, and all contact was lost. The boat had not been positively identified, but was thought to have been a Foxtrot. Given the Libyans’ dismal history with the Russian submarines, it seemed likely that the sub had broken up and sunk. An extensive search operation failed to turn up anything.
That closed the matter – until five days ago, when an American submarine in the Indian Ocean off the African coast reported a series of very distant contacts with a submarine it had never encountered before. The American sub was trailing a Russian cruiser at the time and couldn’t do much more than listen passively as the other submarine passed a good distance away. The crew had originally identified the craft as a Kilo Project 636, a very potent diesel-powered submarine manufactured and exported by Russia. Subsequent analysis, however, indicated that was wrong. The analysts were pegging it as a Foxtrot or perhaps a member of the somewhat more refined and larger Tango class.
‘The same sub?’ Dog asked Jed.
Jed said it certainly seemed to be. If so, it was a potentially ominous development. A loose association of pirates were currently operating in the Gulf of Aden. They had patrol boats of various sizes and configurations; they were using them to rob and extort money from ships headed from and toward the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. They were also running guns and ammunition to rebel movements in Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
The pirates had been active for several months, their status with the legitimate governments in the region unclear. The Arab League claimed that both Somalia, Yemen, and Ethiopia were working against the pirates, but none of the other countries would agree to work with the UN or NATO to combat them. This was no surprise in Somalia – the government wasn’t much more than a fiction. Sudan and Yemen had their own share of conflicts and troubles, but Ethiopia’s reluctance to cooperate was difficult to explain; they were inland and historically not allied with either country. The only possible explanation had to do with Islamic terror organizations and secret government alliances – a possibility that implied the Libyan submarine might be the first of many.
Things had gotten so bad that two weeks earlier a small contingent of U.S. ships had entered the Gulf of Aden and begun combating them. They were under orders to remain in international waters and attack only with ‘hard evidence’ or if called by a ship under direct attack. Thus far their successes had been limited.
‘A submarine would take the conflict to a whole different level,’ said Jed. ‘It’s a pretty bad time for us – most of the Pacific