Delta Blue

One

Above the canopy was utter blackness.

There was no moon, and the skies were overcast. Not even starshine for orientation.

A perfect night.

Below, on McKenna’s far left, was a smattering of lights. Bernburg, probably, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the peripheral towns. The lights of a few boats sketched the course of the Saale River.

Directly ahead of him, the red digital numerals of the Heads Up Display floated in space and registered in his mind. Altitude, 1,150 feet. Heading, 012 degrees. Speed, 650 knots. The tailpipe and skin temperatures were low. The bird was coasting.

The instrument panel below provided readouts in blue digital numerals and letters, many of them duplicates of what appeared on the HUD. Centered in the panel was the eight-inch cathode ray tube that repeated the imaging mode selected by the WSO, the weapons system operator in the back seat of the tandem cockpit. The screen had direct visual, map overlay, radar, infrared, and night-vision capability and currently was displaying the pale green images picked up by the night-sight lens mounted in the nose. The lens multiplied ambient light 40,000 times and provided them with a view of the ground that was almost as good as daylight.

At that altitude and speed, however, McKenna couldn’t see much more on the screen than a set of dark and light green, irregular checkerboard squares. The yard lights of farmhouses were bright dots flashing past. Thick mottled green forests were splashed about. The terrain features, less than 500 feet below, disappeared from the camera’s sight almost as soon as they appeared. Occasionally, forested hills seemed to close in on him, but he didn’t do anything about it.

The WSO was in control.

McKenna had flipped up the visor of his helmet and was enjoying every breath he took. The tangy taste of the oxygen/nitrogen mix of the life-support system got old after a while.

Tony Munoz’s voice came over the open intercom. “Got a one-five-hundred hill on your right, Snake Eyes. You wanna take her left a couple points or splash it?”

“Gotcha, Tiger.”

McKenna saw the hilltop coming up fast on the screen, and he nudged the hand controller to the left as he toed in some corresponding left rudder. When the heading on his HUD went to 010, he leveled out.

“Right on,” Munoz said.

The pilot’s seat in the MakoShark was a semi-reclining lounge with four-way adjustable armrests on which his forearms rested. Near his left hand were the short throttle levers, and above them, the switch panels related to engine, radio, and environmental control. On his right were the armaments, electronics, trim, flaps, and landing-gear control panels. Aft of the panels on both sides of the cockpit, more awkward to reach, were the less frequently used control panels and circuit breakers. Aircraft attitude was directed from the stubby, ergonomically designed handle that fit smoothly into the palm of his hand. If he released it, it stayed in the position in which he left it. To the right of the hand controller was a slanted keypad for entering numeric commands into the on-board computers. One of those commands was McKenna’s personal code adjusting the resistance and movement of the controller to his own taste. Learning to fly with the hand controller had taken McKenna a few months. He had not liked giving up the stick control of F-15s, F-104s, and the other supersonics he flew.

Not at first. Now, he couldn’t imagine going back to primitive methods.

The rearview screen — a four-inch CRT to the left of the main screen — came to life at Munoz’s command, showing a green landscape receding rapidly into verdant nothingness. The MakoShark’s configuration didn’t provide the pilot and backseater with much vision to the rear, and a camera lens with direct visual, infrared, and night-vision capability was mounted in the tail.

“IP in thirty seconds, Snake Eyes.”

“IP in thirty.”

The Initial Point was the landmark on which the bomb run was calculated.

“Arm ’em, amigo.”

McKenna raised his hand to the armaments panel, dialed in “BOMB LOAD” on the selector, raised the protective plastic flap, and flipped the switch up.

“Armed, Tiger. Your choice on number.”

“Roger. I need four-zero-zero airspeed and nine-five-zero altitude.”

“Roger, four-zero-zero and nine-five-zero.”

McKenna gripped the two in-board throttle levers for the turbo/ram jet engines and began to ease them back, watching the HUD readout. He deployed 20 percent speed brakes and tipped the nose downward. When he had Munoz’s speed and altitude, he pulled in the speed brakes.

The ground images accelerated their own speed on the screen as the MakoShark dropped to 400 feet above the earth.

“IP comin’ up.”

The IP was a small town called Köthen, a couple miles south of the Elbe River. At three in the morning in Germany, there were only a half-dozen lights showing as they shot overhead. Throttled back, the MakoShark’s noise level was minimal, and the inhabitants of the village probably would not even hear them.

Any villager standing outside his house, testing the weather, might hear a windy whoosh!, but he certainly wouldn’t see them.

“IP… mark!” Munoz chanted.

Five seconds later, the backseater said, “Bomb bay doors, Snake Eyes.”

Anticipating the instruction, McKenna had the flap raised and his thumb poised. He flipped the toggle and had a green LED a half-second later.

“Doors clear,” McKenna said.

“Come to zero-one-nine.”

McKenna rolled into the new heading.

He watched the CRT. A transparent orange bomb sight circle with a vertical cross in it had appeared at the top of the screen. Its movement on the screen was directed by either Munoz’s hand controller or the movement of his helmet, whichever mode he selected. In necessary situations, the weapons targeting could also be accomplished by the pilot in a similar fashion.

“Five seconds to target,” Munoz said.

Munoz increased the telephoto range of the camera lens and the river immediately came into view. The banks were heavily forested.

“Son of a bitch!” Munoz said. “Pearson was right.”

“She usually is,” McKenna told him.

Four long convoys of barges and towboats were moving northward on the Elbe, with no running lights showing.

The bomb circle on the screen jumped around until Munoz centered it on a copse of woods lining the southern bank. Orange letters suddenly appeared in the upper-right screen: “LOCK ON.”

Munoz had turned the control over to the computer, then committed the drop. No matter what McKenna did with the craft now, the computer would instantly recalculate the bomb release point.

The release came four seconds later.

McKenna did not feel much of a change in the MakoShark as the two canisters dropped out of the bay. He flicked his eyes to the rearview screen and saw the parachutes popping open before they disappeared from the screen. Each of the canisters appeared to be a thick juniper bush and would disappear nicely into the foliage. They would float toward the earth until, at 100 feet above the ground, small explosive bolts released the vaporous parachute and allowed them to drift downwind.

“Hard left, Snake Eyes. Come to three-four-five.”

“Roger.”

As they sailed over the river, and the darkened strings of barges, the MakoShark turned to follow the river, drifting over the northern bank. Against the lighter surface of the river, McKenna saw the dark shadows of men moving aboard the tugboats, but not one of them appeared to notice the MakoShark as it passed overhead.

The bomb sight picked out a cluster of trees on the far bank, the computer locked on, and seconds later, two more sensors ejected from the payload bay. Two of the ultrasensitive electronic listening posts were utilized at each site, just in case one malfunctioned. Pearson’s computers would accept the incoming signals, identify the sending sensor, define the direction of travel on the river, and compile a log of traffic. Additionally, the frequencies and resonances involved helped the computer to determine the approximate size of the watercraft.

“Can I have my airplane back, Tiger?”

“This hummer’s all yours, jefe.”

Feeling pretty good about himself, McKenna clicked his visor into place, automatically turning on the oxy/nitro feed. He retracted the bomb bay doors, then shoved the jet throttles forward to their stops and raised the nose with the hand controller. Ahead was about twenty miles of nearly deserted area, with few people to hear any increased output from the MakoShark’s twin turbo jets. The MakoShark responded with her typical agility. He took her up to 7,000 feet before she cracked the sound barrier. The sonic boom would echo through the forests and perhaps frighten a few folks out of their sleep.

Tough shit.

The HUD velocity readout had changed to Mach numbers and was displaying Mach 2.5 when they crossed the northern coast in clear skies at 50,000 feet over Rostock. The lights of shipping in the Baltic Sea winked merrily. Far to the east, the pale light of dawn was creeping toward them.

“Want to go north, Tiger?”

“Until we go south.”

“I’m switching over.”

“Do it to it.”

McKenna activated the rocket control panel and checked the readouts. The two rocket motors operated on solid-fuel propellant and were considerably safer than liquid-fueled engines. The drawback to solid-fuel rocket motors had always been the lack of control. Typically, the solid fuel was encased in a cylinder, and once ignited, burned at a steady rate, raising pressures and exhausting through a nozzle, until the fuel was expended. For the MakoShark, the designers had developed a pelletized solid fuel which was stored internally in wing-mounted tanks. Under the pressure of compressed carbon dioxide, the pellets were forced into the combustion chambers at a rate determined by the opening of nonblow back valves. The valves were actually the throttle control, and McKenna could vary the thrust output from 55 to 100 percent, from 68,000 to 125,000 pounds of thrust on each of the two rocket motors.

Munoz double-checked him, following the checklist the WSO had put up on the rearview screens.

“Fuel supply?”

“Nine-point-five thousand pounds,” McKenna said. “Almost full up, and showing two-one time.”

“CO-two reserve?”

“Twelve thousand pounds PSI.”

“Igniter test?”

“Testing. Got one, got two… now three and four.”

“Activate igniters one and two.”

McKenna flipped the toggles for the primary igniters in each of the rocket motors. Three and four were backup systems.

“Igniters are live, Tiger.”

“Open CO-two valves.”

McKenna opened the valves, pressurizing the solid-fuel pellet tanks.

“Done.”

“Activate throttles, Snake Eyes.”

“Active.”

“Throttles at standby position.”

He pushed the outboard throttle levers to their first detents. Pulling them farther back killed the motors.

“Throttles in standby,” McKenna reported.

“Comp Control?”

“Punching in six-five percent.” McKenna touched the pad in the top row of buttons that read “RKT THRST,” keyed in the six and the five, stored the data, then tapped the “STDBY” pad.

“Go for it.”

Pushing the throttles to the next detent, McKenna started the fuel flow.

The response was immediate, and he felt himself pushed back in his seat. Green flashes on the HUD showed both motors had come to life.

“I have ignition,” McKenna said.

“Copy. Let’s cruise.”

McKenna keyed in the final command for the computer, hitting “RKT THRST” a second time, then watched as the throttles moved forward on their own. He could always override the computer manually, but the computer had the ability to keep the rocket motors generating the same amount of thrust, preventing the craft from slewing to one side or another. Moments later, the thrust readout showed 81,200 pounds on each motor, the velocity readout was climbing to Mach 4, and the altimeter was spinning upward through the numbers. Sixty thousand feet, 70,000 feet, 80,000.

McKenna was forced back into his seat as the gravitational force rose to 3.8.

He killed the turbo-ram jet engines at 110,000 feet. In either turbo or ram mode, the atmosphere was too thin for engine operation.

At 150,000 feet, McKenna leveled out and commanded the computer to reduce thrust to 60 percent. The MakoShark was cruising along at Mach 5.5. Almost 4,000 miles per hour.

The G-forces began to drop off.

Four minutes into the burn, he pulled the rocket throttles all the way back to kill the motors. The rockets used fuel at a prodigious rate, consuming the entire five-ton fuel load in twenty-four minutes at 90 percent thrust. When operating for long distances in suborbital altitudes, from 100,000 to 300,000 feet, the rocket motors were used intermittently. Since he had not used full thrust for this burn, the time available indicator for the rocket motors now read 17.4 minutes.

The sun was fully up at their altitude, but McKenna could see the line of darkness on his right. The curvature of the earth was discernible in the east. Above and on his left, the sky was a dark purple. At higher altitudes it would go black, a perfect carpet for the sharply lit starscape. Where there was no cloud cover in place, the lights of cities blinked like earthbound stars.

There was no sound, one of the delights McKenna found in high altitude, multisonic flight. He felt suspended.

“I don’t know about you, Kapitän, but I think my day’s already been made. I’m gonna sleep for the rest of it.”

“And miss the rest of the trip?”

“It’s a short one, anyway. Wake me when it’s over.”

McKenna had no doubt that Tony the Tiger would be in a coma within two minutes. He could sleep anywhere.

McKenna keyed in the coordinates for Peterson Air Force Base and let the computer work out the navigation, allowing for the parabolic downward curve of their glide. The navigational computer was in continual contact with three or more of the eighteen NavStar Global Positioning Satellites in orbit which triangulated the MakoShark’s location. The GPS helped the computer to establish their latitude, longitude, altitude above mean sea level, velocity, and ground speed. The accuracy level was correct to within a few feet of position and a half mile of speed.

In a direct line of flight over the top of the world — actually passing 800 miles south of the north pole, over Greenland, their target in Germany was located slightly over 5,000 miles from their destination in the middle of Colorado. With two rocket boosts en route and an average speed of Mach 5, the computer estimated that Peterson was now ninety-one minutes away. The computer made pretty accurate guesses.

Dialing one of the backup radios into a satellite relay channel, McKenna found an oldies rock station and “Sleepwalk” filled the earphones built into his helmet.

The Arctic ice pack was eerily beautiful, not totally white, but streaked with blue-shadowed crevices. From this altitude, it looked inviting, smooth and receptive. Deceptive, too, McKenna knew.

They crossed the U.S. border a few miles east of Grand Forks, North Dakota, at 80,000 feet.

Unchallenged.

The North American Aerospace Defense command, headquartered deep in Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs, allowed them to slip unnoticed in and out of the country simply because the Mako and MakoShark craft of McKenna’s 1st Aerospace Squadron belonged to NORAD.

Besides which, unless Kevin McKenna activated his modified IFF — Identify Friend or Foe — transponder, the radar sites lining the American borders never saw him.

The MakoShark utilized every facet of stealth technology in her construction. Internal ribs were cast of honeycombed carbon-impregnated fiberglass that reflected radar probes at odd angles, and not back to the radar transmitter. The skin of the craft was also carbon-impregnated plastic and coated in a midnight-blue paint containing microscopic iron balls which conducted electricity and deterred radar reflection. Radar signals slithered around on the surface of the MakoShark, instead of bouncing back. The radar cross-section (RCS) was so slim that the craft had to be within five miles of a powerful conventional radar before she returned a signal, and that signal was weak enough to go unnoticed.

When the lights of Pierre, South Dakota, appeared below his nose, McKenna prepared to start his jet engines. The Pratt and Whitney J-101s were an advanced design of the JT11D engines used in the retired SR-71 Blackbird. Normally turbofan engines with 39,000 pounds of thrust each, flexible cones in the air intakes enabled the engines to operate in a ram-jet mode. The elongated, triangular cones were segmented for expansion and contraction, and when pulsing, they controlled the air flow into the intakes, ramming compressed air into the engines. The ram-jets, which almost doubled the output thrust, were used at high altitude, up to around 110,000 feet.

Airstarts were not possible in the ram-jet mode, and McKenna had learned that the denser air at 45,000 feet was best for restarting the turbofans.

Sunset was streaking orange on his western horizon when he went through 45,000 feet at a negative twenty degree angle of attack. The speed was down to Mach 1.2. He opened the turbojet throttles far enough to contract the engine intake cones for normal air flow, then stabbed the ignition switches with a forefinger.

The HUD indicators immediately showed power on both engines, and the RPMs came up quickly.

“Shit, Snake Eyes. You woke me up early.”

“Won’t hurt you a bit, Tiger. You’re the only guy I know who sleeps twenty hours a day.”

“Preparin’ myself for those days when I can’t sleep at all.”

“When did that happen last?” McKenna asked.

“‘Eighty-three or ‘Eighty-four. One or the other.”

Kevin McKenna and Anthony Munoz had been flying the MakoShark together for over three years, but before that, they had flown together in USAF F4-D Panthers and other aircraft. They were well aware of each other’s habits and idiosyncrasies. Without McKenna’s asking for it, Munoz put the GPS signal on the CRT, then overlaid it with a local map.

On his screen, McKenna saw the borders of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado as well as a piece of northwest Kansas. Major highways and cities were shown, as were the prominent peaks to the southwest. The blinking orange dot in the middle of the screen was the MakoShark, and the map scrolled downward as they followed the computer’s imposed heading of 189 degrees.

By the time they passed over the Nebraska panhandle, McKenna had the speed subsonic at 600 knots to erase their shock wave, and Peterson Air Force Base was an orange dot at the top of the screen. A fair amount of conditioning was required in order to become accustomed to the map overlays. North was not always at the top of the screen. Rather, the top was always their direction of travel. Map “North,” in this instance, was 189 degrees, just to the right of true south.

It was after eight o’clock in the Mountain Daylight Time zone. As dusk settled over Denver, the lights in her downtown high rises and the sprawling suburbs flickered into life. McKenna keyed a few changes into the computer, to give Denver and the new international airport in Adams County a wide berth.

Sixty miles out of Colorado Springs at 30,000 feet, McKenna punched in the frequency numbers on the UHF for Peterson Air Control, then keyed the transmit mode with the finger button on the hand controller.

“Peterson Control, Delta Blue.”

“Go, Delta Blue.”

“ETA in nine.”

“Geez, Delta Blue. How about giving me a little warning someday? Squawk me.”

McKenna initiated his IFF transponder, creating an artificial, and identified, blip on Peterson radar screens.

“Delta Blue, Peterson Air Control. We’ve got you. Wind two knots, out of zero-zero-nine. Temperature four-six degrees. If you care about it, and if it were light out, the visibility would be great.”

“I don’t care about it.”

“I thought not. Okay, you’re cleared straight-in on Nine.”

“Copy straight-in on Nine. Delta Blue, gone.”

Despite its stealth on radar, the MakoShark was visible to the naked eye, of course. And while there had been pictures of it published in newspapers and Aviation Week, the Defense Department preferred to keep the craft an arm’s length away from the media and the casual observer. Consequently, takeoffs and landings during daylight hours were rare occurrences. Night landings of the MakoShark were now second nature to McKenna. MakoShark arrivals and departures took precedence over other aircraft.

McKenna heard the air controller suspending other operations.

Far to the west, the main east-west runway went dark.

In the darkness, and despite the lights of nearby Colorado Springs and the Air Force Academy, McKenna could not see it. The skies were clear, not even a cloud bank to blot out the stars. The mountain peaks to the west were dead spots, barely discernible against the stars. He backed off the throttles, deployed the speed brakes, and lost altitude to 12,000 feet as he circled in from the east.

Five minutes out, Munoz asked, “You ready, Snake Eyes?”

“Go over.”

The screen changed to infrared imaging, and McKenna switched his attention to it. At the top edge of the screen, the hot lights surrounding the base provided a red-orange, splayed signal, otherwise there was nothing.

Two minutes later, he had the landing strip. It was lit along both sides with infrared lights, and on the screen, was as visible as Dulles International. Had he looked through his windscreen, he would have seen only darkness.

The long parallel row of lights got longer as the craft descended. McKenna deployed full flaps and landing gear, pulled the throttles full back, and felt the MakoShark sag a trifle. It wasn’t very adept at slow speeds.

Above the instrument panel screen, the graphic readouts for the Instrument Landing System showed his angle-of-descent right on the money, but he was slightly below the glide path. That was a result of coming in heavy, with a greater than normal solid fuel load.

He advanced the throttles a fraction and watched the blip rise up into the glide path tolerance.

On the screen, the infrared lights started to spread.

A glance at the airspeed readout showed 285 miles per hour.

“Right on, amigo.”

The tires squeaked when they touched down.

McKenna used his left hand to pull both throttle levers inboard and back, neutralizing the turbine blades, then easing them into reverse thrust.

The nose dipped as the powerful engines revved up, attempting to slow the craft, which with its fuel loads, weighed close to 180,000 pounds.

The turbofans screamed on either side of him, overcoming the insulation and sound-deadening foam lining the cockpit. McKenna loved that scream.

Halfway down the strip, he began to toe in brakes, and the MakoShark slowed to a creep a hundred yards short of the end of the concrete. McKenna idled the engines as Munoz cut off the infrared cameras and the screen went blank.

Activating the nose wheel steering and connecting it to the hand controller, McKenna turned the craft to the right and saw a shaded blue flashlight blinking at him. He eased the controller back to center to follow it.

Releasing the catch, he flipped his helmet visor up, which automatically closed off the oxygen/nitrogen supply.

With his left hand, he found the switch to depressurize the cockpit, then raised the canopy. He heard the hydraulic whoosh! as Munoz raised his own canopy. The cool air rushed in, coated with the aroma of pine and JP-4 jet fuel. It smelled good to him after so many hours in artificial environments.

Ahead, the flashlight blinked again, and McKenna guided the MakoShark directly into her hangar.