Chapter Fourteen
Rearmed and refueled, Lieutenant Colonel Gaz Membrane streaked down the runway, engine roaring, her gear just leaving the ground as dozens of Irken plasma shells finally hit Igloo Base.
She pulled up and away, banked left, and came around to witness a chilling sight.
The snow covered Quonset huts housing the enlisted soldiers bunks, the offices, and the officers quarters burst apart, ragged pieces of metal flying everywhere as chutes of plasma swept through them and ignited the stands of lodgepole lines behind the base.
Barely two seconds later, the refueling trucks went up like dominoes, their crew trying to evacuate in the HMMWVs but were caught in the blast. Those explosions triggered several more among the smaller vehicles parked nearby, just outside the two hangar facilities that stood only a moment more before two bombs suddenly obliterated them.
Inevitably, the small, five story tower and adjacent command center took one, two, three direct hits from thousand pound plasma reactors that acted as bombs and were lost in blinding eruptions of blue plasma that incinerated anything in its blast, the balls of super heated material rose and collided with each other, throwing up a black wall of fire filled smoke.
Gaz was exhausted, overtired, her thoughts consumed by horror and disbelief. From her vantage point, the devastation below was silent and seemingly less significant. But she'd met nearly everyone at the base, and she realized now that there would be no survivors.
"Oh, God. Siren, you see that?" Asked Sapphire.
She could barely answer. "Yeah."
They had one job left, one last sortie.
There was nowhere to refuel. No where to rearm. And last orders they'd received from Igloo were to engage the enemy.
So they would.
She and Lisa Nantz were the only two left. Had their refueling gone a minute longer, they, of course, would already be dead.
Dozens of Irken transports soared through the sky, their escort fighters engaging the squadrons from Alaska.
"Where are the Canadians?" Sapphire asked.
"Rearming and refueling."
"Roger that."
Gaz took a long breath to study her nerves. "This is it. You ready?"
"Ready."
"Let's go get em'!" With that, she engaged the afterburner, accelerating with a force that was hard to describe to someone who'd never sat in a cockpit. Just as she hit Mach 1, the Prandt-Glauret singularity occurred, a vapor cone caused by a sudden drop on air pressure that extended from the wings to her tail. She left the cone behind in her exhaust trail.
They held their steady course, ascending over the enemy aircraft, bound for coordinates seventy five kilometers northwest of Bechoko, where dozens of transports had landed and were off loading their DMOV-3s.
The five hundred pound JDAMs under Gaz's wings were accurate to within thirteen meters, and she and Sapphire could launch those precision guided bombs from up to twenty four kilometers away during a low altitude launch. You plugged in the coordinates, delivered the munitions-
Barring of course, angry swarms of Irken fighters whose pilots thought otherwise. The AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons in the F-35B's internal bays were the "C" variant developed for the Navy. The weapons utilized a combination of an imaging infrared (IR) terminal seeker and two way data link to achieve point accuracy and was designed to attack point targets. It was a thousand pounds general purpose destruction. And it was most definitely time for her and Sapphire to flash their fangs and lighten their loads.
"Two minutes," Gaz warned her wingman.
"Roger that. I have two targets on the ground on the easy side of their staging area, over."
"I see them," Gaz said, checking her own display. "I've got two more transports on the west side. Christ, you see all those DMOVs?"
"I do. Too bad we weren't packing more punch."
Sapphire was right. Thousand pound JDAMs instead of five hundred would have really done the job.
"One minute." Gaz announced.
That's all we need is one minute, thought Gaz. She glanced up through the canopy, where the first streaks of dawn turned the sky a light purple on the horizon.
Just thirty seconds now. Give me thirty seconds.
Sapphire cursed into the radio. "Four bogeys at our eleven o'clock, closing in, fast."
Gaz swore under her breath as she checked her own radar. "They ain't ours."
"Nope. Got ID: Irken Air Reapers. Countermeasures seem ineffective. I think they have us. We better launch before they do!"
The Air Reaper was the Irkens latest single seat fighter, created in the third and current Earth invasion, deemed by most USAF pilots as the most deadly in it's arsenal and capable of carrying up to 18,000 pounds of ordnance.
"Just keep course. Fifteen seconds."
"They're going to get missile lock!"
Gaz's voice turned strangely calm as her years of training kicked in, like muscle memory. "Sapphire, let's make it all worth it. We're almost there."
"Oh my god," gasped Sapphire. "We won't make it!"
"Hang on! Five, four, three, two... Bombs away! Flares, chaff, evade!" Gaz cried.
The two JDAMs fell away from her wings as behind her, the chaff and flares ignited. Sapphire did likewise, and Gaz lost sight of her as they both rolled inverted and dove away in a split S, the oldest trick in the book, hoping the sudden maneuver would prevent those Air Reaper pilots from getting missile lock. And he came upright, flying in the Irkens direction about two thousand feet below, the bad news flashed: enemy missiles locked.
And her wingman confirmed the next inescapable fact: "Siren, they've fired!"
Gaz longed for the days of a good old dogfighting, when maybe she and Sapphire could've pulled out the old Thach Weave, one of them baiting an enemy pilot while the other waxed him from the side. Though they would occasionally get to tangle with the enemy, it was mostly distant and faceless now, missiles launched from kilometers away from jets you never saw- and those missiles you'd only glimpse for a second, your last.
Gaz reacted out of pure instinct, jamming the stick forward and plunging straight down, even as she hit the afterburner.
Her first thought was to outrun the incoming missiles, get her fighter near Mach 2, practically melt off the wings. She imagined the missiles running out of fuel behind her and simply dropping away.
But that was a fantasy.
The Hedgehog missiles had a range of at least one hundred kilometers, as everything Gaz knew about missiles and evading them told her if these Hedgehogs didn't take the flares of chaff, then she was in their no escape zone.
She blasted through the clouds and checked her screens.
Twelve seconds to impact.
"Oh, God. Siren, I don't think I can-"
Sapphire's transmission broke off, and her fighter vanished from Gaz's display. Her wingman hadn't even ejected.
Gaz blinked hard. Is this how it'll be, then? Give me more time. I'm not finished yet.
No barrel roll, split S, break turn, chandelle, or wingover would save her now.
No maneuver in the world.
No amount of thrust from her engines.
She cut the afterburner, hit the damned breaks. Hard. Below lay the haphazard rows of Irken transport ships, and Gaz's AGM-154s were locked on a pair of targets.
So, with seven seconds left, she cut loose both bombs- then rugged the black and yellow striped handle between her legs.
The canopy blew off with a violent shudder. Nearly at the same time, the Martin Baker Mk. 16 ejection seat rocketed her out and away, the straps and padded cuffs of the leg restraint system pinning her shins to the seat, even as the wind struck her squarely and sent her rushing back and away, long flames extending from her boots.
An explosion lit in her helmet, but it turned into a streak as she continued back a second more. Then the seats drogue chute caught the wind, abruptly yanking her down, and she plummeted toward the earth; the main chute, stowed behind her headrest, deployed while the seat dropped away, yanked up by it's own chute.
Just then she caught sight of the lines of transport ships below, where her second two bombs had impacted. Fires raged everywhere, with massive pieces of steal detaching from the fuselages. At that moment, another transport came in for a landing and crashed into the debris lying in it's path. The ship spun sideways, sliding wildly across the snow until it impacted with several others in a chain reaction that left Gaz wanting to cheer, but she felt too sick.
She was glad she hadn't had time to eat. She had practiced ejections before, but this one... She thought for a moment she might pass out. Her comm system had automatically switched over to the helmets transmitter, and while she knew her ejection had automatically sent to every USAF command post in the world, she knew it was imperative that she confirm she was alive.
Yes, her flight suit would also transmit her bio readings, but voice on the end of the encrypted transmission carried a whole lot more weight.
Protocol dictated that she got on the tactical channel to contact the nearest command post, but she said screw it and broadcast over the emergency channel reserved for strategic operations. Better to ring the louder bell.
"This is USAF fighter Siren out of Igloo Base, Northwest Territories. I've ejected north of Bechoko." She rattled off the last coordinates she'd read on her display. "I'm descending toward a heavily wooded area, GPS coordinates to follow once I'm on the ground, over."
After about ten seconds, a voice came over the radio: "USAF fighter Siren, this is Hammer, Tampa Five Bravo. Received your transmission. We'll see if we can get some help to you. Send GPS coordinates once you're on the ground."
"Roger that, Hammer. And here's hoping our boys get to me before they do."
"We'll do everything we can. And you do the same. Stand by..."
All right, she'd survived the ejection.
Would she survive the landing?
The forest unfurled below for kilometer after kilometer, dense, snow covered, a bone breaking gauntlet.
She imagined herself plunging though the heavy canopy and getting impaled by a limb.
Wouldn't that be her luck?
Some training mission. The fighters were gone, the base was gone, her colleagues were dead.
Jake, are you there?
Yeah, why didn't you say anything?
Because it would've been too complicated.
You're wrong.
I know. I've been lying to myself.
Just don't panic. It'll be all right. I'll be with you every step of the way. You know what to do now. Get your mind off of it. Calm down.
Gaz took a deep breath.
The ground came up faster.
With a vengeance.
(End chapter)