Sword of Allah

Indian Ocean, 25 000 feet

‘Boys, you are now the only show in town. Find it. Kill it.’

‘Roger, sir,’ said Corbet. Jesus, it was the defence forces commander himself, personally amending their orders. A Royal Australian Navy vessel had apparently reported a suspected sighting of the UAV. A few seconds of static in his ’phones told him the exchange with Canberra was done. ‘Shogun two. You get that?’

‘Loud and clear, sir,’ said the flying officer.

Corbet waited while Burns finished topping up his tanks and backed away from the KC-130. Someone would no doubt vector the tanker to their rendezvous with the navy ship. They peeled away from the flying bowser.

The power of the F/A-18’s General Electric F404-GE-400 turbofans pushed Flight Lieutenant Corbet back into his seat as the aircraft accelerated to.9 mach. Thirty miles out from the Arunta, they throttled back and began their descent. Within minutes, the frigate appeared suddenly out of the tropical mist like a ghost ship. They shot past it at five hundred feet then banked hard over to the north in a high g turn, condensation streaming from the wing roots, the massive drag bleeding off their speed.

Drummond and Briggs had been tracking the inbound fighters on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ said Drummond, screwing up his face as the howl from their shrieking turbofans suddenly penetrated the bridge and concentrated in a vibration behind his eyes. He stepped out onto the waist briefly and watched the aircraft turn and bank sharply, decelerating at a rapid rate. ‘Okay, operations, you can patch me through,’ he said, walking back onto the bridge and closing the steel door behind him to minimise the aircraft noise feeding back into his microphone.

‘Arunta, Shogun one,’ said Corbet through the bridge’s PA system.

‘Shogun one, Arunta. Go ahead,’ Drummond replied.

‘I understand you’ve had a suspected sighting of the UAV.’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Request a snap vector to the sighting.’

Drummond checked the monitor screen on the bench. It had been exactly twenty minutes since the UAV had possibly flown in and then out of his vision. ‘Fly heading one two zero. Estimate position nose twenty-three miles.’

Corbet repeated the instructions to ensure there was no confusion. The fighters flew directly overhead and the roar set up a buzz in one of the bridge’s thick glass panes overlooking the foredeck.

‘Good luck, Shogun one,’ said Drummond.

‘Thanks, Arunta, we’ll need it.’

Commander Drummond exhaled and leaned forward over the display screen on the desk. The F/A-18s were now outbound heading east south-east. He picked up the binoculars from the steel bench and stepped towards the waist.

‘Sir,’ said Briggs, failing to contain his excitement, catching the commander before he walked into the wind. ‘Take a look at this.’ He led the commander over to a monitor. ‘We had some of the deck cameras on lookout. Seems your eyes weren’t deceiving you.’ Briggs rewound the tape and played it. The camera was trained on a patch of sea and the water rolled up and down with the swell. And then the UAV flew into the top third of the frame, banked right and disappeared.

‘Well, I’ll be fucked,’ Drummond said under his breath. ‘Work out its track and let’s get it to those RAAF boys.’

Corbet glanced over his left shoulder at the aircraft off his wing. This was Flying Officer Robert Burns’ first posting following advanced training and conversion to high performance jets. He was twenty-three years old and a good pilot. No, he was better than good. Frankly, you had to be God’s gift to aviation just to make it through the training and get to an operational fighter squadron. The kid was cocky, without being cocksure. And anyway, a bit of additood was SOP for a fighter jock. So far, the kid was handling himself well, but things were about to get tricky. The word ‘suicidal’ popped into his brain. This kind of flying in an F/A-18 was something no one trained for and, while Corbet would have been far more comfortable with an experienced pilot off his wing, Burns did have something that partway made up for his lack of experience. He had the best eyes in the squadron, cool grey orbs behind sleepy eyelids that possessed phenomenal acuity. One of the questions in Corbet’s mind was how to best use those eyes.

Great vision or not, this type of flying was potentially lethal and required maximum concentration. It also required a delicate balancing of factors. They had to fly high enough not to hit the water, yet low enough and slow enough to see the UAV. And that’s when they came up against the F/A-18’s limitations for this mission. Sure, with no ordnance on the pods or centreline fuel tank the Hornet could fly at 100 knots standing on its tail with the angle of attack a massive thirty-five degrees, but that was a manoeuvre for air shows. The reality was that with less than 150 knots of air speed the Hornet felt like it was dragging its arse, especially with a full load of fuel, external tanks and heaters, AIM-9s, on the wingtip rails. Yet even flying at 150 knots was fast compared to the Prowler drone’s estimated speed of 70 knots, so they risked overshooting their quarry. But there was no alternative: 150 knots and 500 feet AMSL were the numbers. Not ideal for the job. The Hornet was a fighter designed to fight at 1.2 mach, not to crawl along at wave height sucking fish into the fans.

Corbet throttled back. Passing through 250 knots calculated air speed, the flight control computer automatically lowered the leading and trailing edge flaps. When the air speed reached 150KCAS, Corbet trimmed the aircraft so that it would fly ‘hands off’, maintaining 500 feet. He glanced out across the wing. Five hundred feet left plenty of air under the wings — the squadron regularly operated at 150 feet over water. Not, however, while searching, eyes outside the cockpit, Corbet reminded himself. This was going to be bloody dangerous. The separation between his aircraft and the wingman’s had increased. Flying in close formation was another manoeuvre for air shows. ‘Take it easy out there, Shogun two,’ said Corbet. ‘We won’t find the drone in Davey Jones’ locker.’

Corbet flicked back the sun visor on his helmet and tried to blink some focus into his eyes. His own advice was as much to himself as to Burns. Already he was starting to lose concentration. It was so goddam misty out here that it was easy to mistake the sea for the sky and vice versa. Shit, he said quietly to himself. It was a hell of a risky business. Lose the horizon for a few seconds at the wrong moment and his beautiful Hornet could become a submarine.

‘Roger. We could play waterpolo from this height.’

‘No thanks,’ said Corbet. ‘If I wanted to get wet, I’d have joined the navy.’

‘It was the natty white shorts that turned me off, sir.’

Chitchat like this wasn’t normal, but then neither was this sortie. The truth was, both men were nervous as hell.

A burst of static through the ’phones announced an incoming VHF transmission. The reception was poor. ‘Shogun one, Arunta.’

‘Shogun one,’ said Corbet.

‘Earlier sighting of UAV is now confirmed. Repeat, sighting confirmed. Nose position now one-two miles. Estimate UAV’s speed as approximately seven-zero knots. Revise heading one-two-five.’

‘Request INS coords for initial contact with bandit,’ said Corbet. A set of figures came through his headphones. He punched them into his inertial navigation system as they were received and verified them on screen as the Arunta repeated them. He knew Burns would be doing the same. This was a huge break. The UAV had been sighted by the Arunta and its position marked. Now, he and Burns had that position. That made their job of finding the drone a little easier, but it was still far from a done deal.

Corbet allowed himself a minute to put the tactical situation together in his head. They were now cutting the corner and heading directly to the ‘bullseye’, the confirmed spot where Arunta had sighted the bandit. And they had another factor that would help them find the Prowler — they had its track: one-two-five degrees. The bullseye would become the start point for their search. They were coming up on it fast, and when they did, the search pattern had to be established and understood. Corbet checked his fuel load: 8200 pounds. He thumbed the send button on his control stick. ‘Shogun one, eight point two.’

A moment later, Burns returned with, ‘Shogun two, seven point zero.’

Okay, thought Corbet. The flying officer was burning fuel at a higher rate than himself, probably riding the throttle a little to stay on station. He’d had wingmen who were far worse. They’d left their tanker with 12 000 pounds of fuel, roughly two hours of flying time. But the run to the Arunta had been unexpectedly expensive. They had a bit under seventy minutes’ flying time in their tanks in total, including thirty minutes to get back to the tanker with some safety margin. The bingo fuel alarm would sound when there was 3000 pounds of fuel left. Hopefully, they had more than enough to get the job done because there probably wouldn’t be time for a top-up. But no doubt Arunta would also vector the KC-130 to their vicinity anyway. Fuel, or lack of it, was the fighter pilot’s constant concern.

The INS told Corbet that the bullseye was two minutes’ flight time away. He scanned the sea all around him and took a deep breath of the cooled air in his mask. This was going to be a very tricky business indeed, as the sweat pouring from his armpits and staining the Nomex flightsuit black reminded him. ‘Let’s get this shit on the road,’ he said aloud to himself before thumbing the send button. ‘Shogun two, counter-rotating cap, bullseye start. Track one-two-five degrees, twenty-mile legs. Shogun one at 500 AGL searching track and north. Shogun two at 1000 AGL searching track and south. Hot leg one-five zero knots, cold leg two-five-zero knots. Set radar alt at 500 feet.’

Burns kept an eye on the INS, another eye on the sea, flicked both of them up at the boss in his two o’clock, and then cycled through the positions again. He wanted to pull over somewhere and have a nervous dump quietly in a toilet. He’d never experienced this much tension. Indeed, he believed that this moment was the very fulcrum of his existence, and the pressure of it was almost unbearable. At 1000 feet AGL, he had to fly his Hornet more accurately than he’d previously thought humanly possible. It was that or crash. Earlier, and for the briefest moment, the horizon had disappeared and he’d mistaken the sea for the sky. It was all he could do to resist the impulse to roll inverted and pull back on the stick. The two things that had prevented him doing exactly that were instruments that told him the manoeuvre would be fatal, and the fact that he trusted the flight leader in his two o’clock.

The INS informed Burns that the bullseye, now displayed on the HUD, was nearly upon them when the flight leader’s instructions came through his headphones. Those instructions were clear and unequivocal. They were to search for the UAV independently of each other. Burns had been absolved of the wingman’s responsibility of keeping his attention focused on his leader’s six o’clock. The flight lieutenant had told him to climb to 1000 feet, maintain 150 knots, fly down the UAV’s track of one-two-five degrees and concentrate on looking south. The boss would be doing the same thing, only at 500 feet and he would be concentrating his eyeballs on the north of the bandit’s track. Burns dialled 800 feet into the radar altimeter. If he drifted below that altitude, ‘Trailerpark Tammy’, the southern belle living inside his flight control computer, would warn him to check the air under his wings.

Burns thought Shogun one sounded cool and in control, and he hoped his radio work didn’t betray the truth niggling away at his insides that he wasn’t sure he was up to the task at hand. The flying officer throttled back when he reached 1000 feet as instructed.

‘Shogun two, you are cleared off,’ said Corbet. With that instruction, Burns had become his own master. Below him, Corbet banked left and took up the first leg of their search pattern tracking one-two-five degrees.

Corbet cycled his eyes from the smudge that indicated the general position of the horizon to the information on his HUD to the rolling swell off his left wing’s leading edge. He allowed his eyes fifteen seconds out of the cockpit, scanning the sea, before bringing them back to the reassurance of the hard numbers and figures presented by his instruments. The lines of swell were mesmerising, and there was a vast patch of ocean to search framed by the wing’s leading edge and the nose of the Hornet. Even though they had the bandit’s speed and track, finding it against the moving backdrop below was just plain remote. He could be looking straight at the damn thing and not see it. Although Burns had more altitude, the flying officer would have a better chance of spotting the UAV with those eyes of his, picking up its shadow against the sea.

Trailerpark Tammy suddenly cautioned, ‘Warning! Warning!’ Jesus H. Christ. The radar altimeter. Corbet glanced at the HUD. He was heading down through 300 feet at 300 knots and accelerating. That kind of speed would eat up a couple of hundred feet in a few seconds. Corbet felt the sweat trickle down his forehead as he eased the stick back and the aircraft climbed gently. The alarm stopped sounding at 300 feet. In a couple of minutes he would be completing the first twenty-mile hot leg.

A little behind and above Corbet, Burns wasn’t faring much better. His radar altimeter had sounded on two occasions. He’d somehow managed to just float below the minimum altitude. That could happen when you flew low and slow with your head outside the cockpit, he told himself. Burns was thankful for the alarm but, on both occasions, hearing it had almost given him a heart attack. At least he had additional air to play with, and was pleased he wasn’t sitting on 500 feet. He wondered how the boss was doing.

‘Shogun one, turning cold,’ said Corbet as he banked left carefully, staying visual with the ocean off his wingtip. No sign of the bandit. He reminded himself that the Prowler drone was no ordinary target. The thing could wipe out a whole city. He and Burns were the last line of defence. ‘Jesus…’ he said quietly into his oxygen mask. Somehow, the fact that he and Burns were ‘it’ was suddenly driven home, perhaps because the drone was near and yet invisible. This was a mission he’d never trained for, and certainly had never imagined having to perform.

‘Shogun two, turning cold,’ Burns said. He rolled thirty-five degrees to the right and pulled gently on the stick. He goosed the throttle slightly and felt the Hornet accelerate. The added speed gave the aircraft more manoeuvring authority. He kept slight back pressure fed into the stick until two-nine-five degrees came around on the HUD. He levelled out at three-zero-five on the UAV’s reciprocal track.

It wasn’t long before Burns heard the boss say, ‘Shogun one, turning hot.’ Burns’ radar had Corbet’s IFF code painted on his screen. He watched the flight lieutenant alter course. A few moments later, he would be doing the same. Burns looked out to his right, into the mist. He couldn’t see Corbet, but he knew he was there. He shook his head. How in God’s name were they going to find something designed to be invisible?

Corbet heard Burns call his turn onto the hot leg. He told himself to try to think positive. They had a definitive patch of sea to look at, didn’t they? That was a better situation than the one they’d left Tindal with, wasn’t it? Maybe, just maybe, they’d get lucky and –

‘Tally bandit! Repeat, tally bandit! Bullseye one-two-eight thirty-two. I am padlocked!’

Christ! ‘Shogun two, you have the lead,’ Corbet said, keeping his voice as flat and professional as possible. ‘I’ll join in on you.’ He wanted to shout, ‘Go, you good thing!’ such was the relief that swept over him. ‘Padlocked’ meant Burns had eyeballed the Prowler and was orbiting it. No matter what happened, the flying officer wouldn’t let the sucker out of his sight. Shit! He knew the boy’s eyes would come in handy, goddam it! Corbet rolled to eighty degrees and pulled hard on the stick as he pushed the throttle to military power. The Hornet responded, leaping forward with a roar. Warning! Warning! ‘Yes!’ said Corbet aloud. He throttled back as the fighter completed the 220-degree turn that would put him on a heading to intercept his wingman and the drone. Warning! There was an annoying sound in his ’phones. What is that? He glanced at the HUD. Warning! And suddenly, he knew what it was, but Trailerpark Tammy was too la–

As Burns completed an orbit of the drone, he expected to see the flight leader’s return register on his HUD, but it wasn’t there. ‘Shogun one, are you there? Boss…where are you?’ he said, wondering where the flight lieutenant had disappeared to. He continued to circle the Prowler, prepared to look away from it but only for a second or two at a time. ‘Shogun one, I can’t hear your transmission,’ he said, fighting off the realisation that there was a damn good reason why he couldn’t hear the flight leader. Burns swallowed, his heart racing, the perspiration pouring from him.