Sword of Allah

S11°05′50″ E126°18′42″, Timor Sea

Leading Seaman Mark Wallage was watching the display on the Vectronics master display in the operations room of the Arunta when the IFF code denoting Shogun one suddenly disappeared. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath, hoping it was some kind of malfunction but knowing otherwise. He’d been buzzing, full of self-confidence, because he’d just managed to unequivocally identify the UAV’s return signal as that of a school of flying fish, only one flying impossibly between thirty and fifty feet above the water. The F/A-18 orbiting over the drone, positively marking its position, had helped him enormously. He was thinking that now, no matter what happened, he’d be able to nail the UAV’s whereabouts because its return signature was programmed into the Vectronics’ memory, not that losing it again seemed likely when the RAAF were about to shoot the crap out of it. He’d watched the screen as Shogun one executed a tight turn to rendezvous with his wingman when the return on his screen just disappeared.

‘Commander Drummond? Leading Seaman Wallage. I’m afraid th—’

‘I’m watching the screen now, Mark,’ said Drummond. He knew full well what had just happened. Christ!

And then, through the speakers and crackling with static: ‘Arunta. Shogun two. Have lost contact with lead.’

Drummond said, ‘Shogun two, Arunta…’ After a pause, he continued: ‘Despatching search and rescue.’

Silence.

There was no time for speeches or sentimentality. This was not Hollywood. Options were reducing by the minute. He said, ‘Shogun two, don’t let us down.’

Silence, then: ‘Yes, sir,’ said the voice through the speakers.

Static overwhelmed any further communications. Briggs gave Drummond a nod. The Bayu-Unadan gas and oil fields were getting awfully close. If Canberra was right, that was the target, and if the Prowler got through with its load of VX, the people there would die.

Burns told himself to get a grip. He checked the radar display and discovered that, in the tragedy of the moment, he had wandered off track. There was no panic. He altered his course, readjusted his radar altimeter to 300 feet AGL and descended to 800 feet. Burns picked the Prowler up almost straight away. Its track had not changed. It was sitting just off his right wing’s leading edge, crawling along, guided by some invisible hand on its deadly mission. Burns marked the coords on his INS in case he lost it again.

It was a bloody ugly critter, he thought to himself as he circled. There were many who thought such aircraft were the future of military aviation. They were cheap to make and operate. Pilots, on the other hand, cost millions to train, had to be rescued when they were shot down behind enemy lines, got married, or went off to fly commercial jets. Burns wondered how long it would be before military planners and strategists worked out that a human at the controls was more of a liability than an asset. One more generation of fighter pilots? Maybe two? At that moment, Burns realised he had come face to face with the air force of tomorrow and he was damned if was going to be beaten by it. Not here. Not today.

As he watched the drone, Burns revised the tactical situation. What would happen now was totally up to him. He hadn’t trained for this kind of fight and there was no one around who could tell him how to splash the UAV. He was going to have to think through the options himself. It was flying so close to the water, it appeared to hop across the wave crests like some kind of avian kangaroo. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t ploughed under. Like the boss. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath. Concentrate.

Burns took a glimpse inside the cockpit at his radar. The rolling map on screen told him he was getting close to the Timor Gap and that almost certainly several gas tankers and drilling platforms were getting too close for comfort. And the drone was closing, the safety margin reducing with each passing second. Training told him to do a quick ops check. The last thing he needed was to run out of fuel. Fine for the moment, he saw, but the combined tanks were down to a bit less than a quarter full. Four point seven. Four thousand seven hundred pounds. Fifty minutes’ flying time, give or take. Getting back to Darwin was fast disappearing as an option. Jesus, there was not a lot of time to muck around. These slow orbits were soaking up a lot of juice. His radar also told him the KC-130 was on station, but he had to deal with the bandit first. He could not let it out of his sight.

The UAV was flying seemingly at a walking pace, and very low. It had a small petrol engine, which, it was believed, wouldn’t produce enough of a heat signature to excite the AIM-9s sitting out on the end of his wings. That theory would have to be put to the test. The GE turbofans roared as he dialled in more thrust, banked into the turn and unloaded the stick. Doing this pushed out the diameter of his orbits. The missile had a minimum range. If he shot it off inside this range, the missile wouldn’t fuse. The complication was that the minimum range was about half a mile, at the very limit of his ability to eyeball the Prowler. The damn thing was so low it seemed to get lost amongst the swell lines. Burns extended his orbit still further, and began a run towards the Prowler. The missile’s IR heads began to actively seek for heat sources. Burns could assist that search by guiding a small green circle displayed on his HUD, placing it on the drone. Only, Burns had lost the drone. After a moment’s frantic anxiety, he picked it up again, and then lost it against the water. His eyes began to stream with tears of stress. He spotted it again, just as he overran the missile’s minimum range, swore aloud, and then went round again. Concentrate, concentrate, he said to himself. A headache was starting to build in one temple, pounding away. All the while he kept his eyes totally glued on the bandit.