Thanks to CajunBear73, DrBlazer, OechsnerC, and everyone else for their reviews, input, and commentary.
=O=
Chapter 28: Barely Nuclear War
"Diamond 23, this is Mordor. You're heading through busy airspace. Climb to 65,000 and turn radar on, over."
"Acknowledged, Mordor. Diamond 23 out." Hiccup yawned as he gazed out his window. Unbroken white smears of cloud cowed beneath a deep blue sky. For two long weeks, they had flown seemingly endless combat air patrols from the Himalayas to as far away as Sri Lanka, shooting at anything the Indians tried to fly into the fight up north – anything the Indians tried to fly at all.
Hiccup took a sip of water from his helmet straw, and turned on his radar.
Dots swarmed above, around, and below Toothless as they passed over West Bengal. Hiccup raised an eyebrow as he counted trios of slow B-52s, pairs of supersonic Hustlers, and even a few Blackbirds at high altitude. Far below them, clouds of TAC fighter-bombers and fighters buzzed hither and dither as they pounded the invading People's Army of Bengal in a never-ending stream of airpower. Just above treetop level, Hiccup could just barely make out columns of Air Cav and Airborne helicopters as they rushed from spearhead to enemy spearhead, desperately trying to stem the West Bengali advance.
"Wow. They weren't kidding when they said 'busy'." Hiccup turned off his radar. "Oh, go up to 65,000. Hustlers are using 55,000 for some sort of sweep."
Astrid shrugged as she brought Toothless into a shallow climb. "West Bengalis are invading East Pakistan en masse. Someone's gotta back up the Pakistani Army."
Horizontal escalation. Hiccup chuckled. "Ten bucks says the Indians are sending in 'Volunteers'."
Astrid smirked. "Ten bucks says the Indians deny all involvement."
Toothless warbled in alarm. "Relax, Astrid. It's all medium-range stuff. Harmless. Down boy." He gave his threat board a reassuring pat.
They crossed into the Bay of Bengal, and Hiccup began to pick up the shrill warbles of the Navy's big air-defense cruisers as they scanned the skies for inbound Indian strike aircraft. Pairs of fleet interceptors buzzed leisurely about, covering slow patrol and antisubmarine aircraft from Indian fighters.
The Indian Navy had lost two carriers in the first five days of the war, and their third had been destroyed pierside. With India's fleet of ex-British surface ships barred from the waves by Pacifican naval aviation, the Indian submarine arm had taken up the task of forcing the Pacifican blockade.
"Diamond 23, this is Tiara. We have you on radar. Airspace looks clear today. The Navy sends its regards."
"Tiara, this is Diamond 23. Solid copy. How's the weather down there?"
"A little stormy, Diamond 23."
"Stay safe, Tiara. Diamond 23 out."
Hiccup winced. "Stormy. Good weather for submarines. Bad weather for sub-hunting."
Astrid's face grew grim. Good luck, you boating bastards.
The Indian Navy was not going down without a fight, and Navy losses had been all over the news. The worst loss had been one of the Navy's shiny new nuclear-powered air defense escorts, which had the bad luck (or so the press reported) to run right over a slow Indian diesel sub, getting torpedoed and sunk in the process. Over a dozen other ships had been reported sunk or heavily damaged, and rumors abonded of a carrier being secretly towed back to a dry dock in Myanmar under cover of darkness.
They made a turn, went feet dry, and blasted across the Ganges floodplain.
"Diamond 23, this is Diamond 24. Radar on." Snotlout – having again taken over the radio from his backseater – reported. "I hope we get to shoot some of the buggers today."
"Diamond 24, keep a lookout for enemy surface-to-air. And remember; BVR shots are off-limits. Don't get trigger-happy." Hiccup frowned. "Astrid, I don't like this one bit."
"What, flying with Snotlout? Being in charge of someone else?" Astrid smiled flippantly.
"Our mission. We've only got two air-to-air shots each. We're stretched too thin." Hiccup fretted. One of the four Falcons had been replaced with an anti-radar missile.
"Three air-to-air shots." Astrid corrected.
"The last one is nuclear. It doesn't count. There's no way in hell we're going to be shooting it off."
"Bogies 12 o'clock! Coming in at Mach 3!" Snotlout exclaimed. His backseater groaned into the radio.
"Calm down, Snotlout. Those are our birds. We're practically the only ones with Mach 3 aircraft, and that's a four-ship formation." Hiccup said. With three kills already under his belt, Snotlout was getting dangerously reckless.
Oh, who was he kidding. Snotlout had probably been dangerously reckless since the day he was born.
Sure enough, Mordor identified the bogies as a flight of SAC supersonic bombers.
Hiccup whistled as Toothless caught a blast of microwaves from the Valkyrie's payload. In the cavernous bomb bay of the sleek supersonic bomber, engineers had installed one of most powerful sensor payloads ever to fly in an aircraft. Huge cameras, a gargantuan side-looking radar, and a top-secret laser-spectrometry system were only the biggest of the big-ticket items on the Valkyrie. If that didn't sniff out hidden Indian missiles, Hiccup doubted much else would.
They passed over the Deccan. Out of anti-radar missile range – radar range, actually, radars chattered briefly before going silent, irritating Toothless to no end.
An SA-2 radar chattered to life ahead of them, apparently unaware of their presence. "We've got an emitter, eleven o'clock. Magnum! Missile away!"
Astrid watched as an anti-radar missile streaked earthward, and was swallowed up by the vast expanse of land below.
"Come on, come on… don't turn off just yet." The Indian nuisance tactics were reasonably effective, forcing evasive maneuvers, keeping pilots on their toes, and increasing escort and support requirements.
Hiccup swore as the radar turned itself off. Without the radar, the antiradar missile would most certainly miss. "Darnit."
No Indian aircraft made an appearance to challenge Pacifican air superiority, and no more SAM radars lit up to engage. Doubtless, the Indians were biding their time, holding their remaining SAMs and interceptors back for future operations – but in doing so, they had ceded the skies to the JGAF.
They completed their patrol, and headed back towards Pacifican airspace.
"We're coming up on West Bengal again. We might want to go to 70,000 – just to get out of the way." Hiccup flipped his visor open, and gave his eyes a rub. "Holy mackerel, these flights are exhausting."
Hiccup's voice weakened. "Astrid… do you ever wonder whether the Administration knows what it's doing?"
Astrid grimaced. "Who knows? They have more analysts than I do, that's for sure." A lot of people were asking that these days.
Hiccup shrugged. "Yeah… but what the heck are we doing just sitting here? I mean, enemy air defense is down, we've blockaded the country, and we're just… killing time and burning fuel up here? And we're not touching the missiles?"
"Well, we did call for a ceasefire and ask for negotiations. Blowing up the missiles would kinda moot the point of negotiations, right?" Astrid said.
Hiccup sighed. "It sounds bad… but why negotiate when we can just blow them up? We're risking a lot of lives here to score brownie points. And they've been talking for more than a week since we wiped out their high-tier air defenses – the Indians haven't budged an inch. We all know they're putting a counterattack together."
Astrid squirmed uncomfortably. "Well, the Soviets could retaliate with nukes if we started popping their missiles in India…" She paused. "My parents are asking me the same thing, you know. I just told them to stand by our leaders, and give them a free hand to negotiate properly."
Hiccup rubbed his chin. "Where do your folks live?"
Astrid smiled. "Wuhan. Mom still works at the Ford plant. They've got a nice house in the suburbs. She paused. "My brother lives in Shanghai with his wife and kids. My sister Kara's still in Wuhan. Our New Year dinners aren't the biggest, but they're pretty good. Mom makes a mean stuffed fish." She looked thoughtful. "Where does your dad live?"
Hiccup waved it off. "Probably somewhere dark and gross. No New Year dinners at my folks' place, no siree."
"Aunts, uncles, that sort of thing?" Astrid probed.
Hiccup sighed. "Somewhere in North America. Nobody really kept in touch, so we're… on our own."
"Well, maybe you could come over…" Astrid held her tongue. Stupid, stupid. This war's not over yet. "Nevermind. Sorry."
"Huh? I'd love to come over for a family dinner…"
Astrid gritted her teeth. Her mother always bugged her about her love life, always with an eye on getting grandchildren as soon as possible. It was mostly done in good spirits, of course, but it was embarrassing as heck. And questions would most certainly be asked – eagerly and effusively - if she brought a young man back home for dinner.
But then again, by the time that became a concern, the war would be over – and the mess resolved - one way or another.
Astrid shrugged. "Okay. But…"
The radio crackled to life. "Flight, this is Mordor. This is an alert. Be advised, enemy surface to air installations may begin to employ nuclear weapons. Repeat, enemy surface to air installations may begin to employ nuclear weapons. Nuclear release against ground targets is not authorized. Repeat, nuclear release against ground targets is not authorized."
Hiccup frowned. "Oh, boy. What happened this time?"
Astrid squinted as she eyed the horizon ahead of her. A glowing dot broke the horizon, and began to ascend into the stratosphere. Two glowing dots. Then three. Her eyes went wide.
"Hiccup, missile launch!"
Hiccup slewed his radar skyward. "Mordor, this is Diamond 23! We have four missiles, Bullseye 90/50, rising fast!"
Astrid moved her hand to her throttle.
As if reading her mind, Hiccup shook his head. "Astrid, we're too far off. They're out of range. They're the Army's problem now."
=O=
The control trailer for the Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missile was crammed with men and machines. The forward base had been placed on high alert – and that meant the only fresh air coming into the trailer was coming in through filter vents. The cramped space was filled with suffocating waste heat, the dim red glow of night-vision preserving lights, and the frenzied terror of men working for their lives. The task before them had only ever been performed from start to finish on the sterile fields of desert proving grounds, and for the operators within, it had only ever been simulated.
The simulations had been convincing enough, because they were mostly doing their jobs correctly.
Two hundred kilometers above, four SS-1 Scud ballistic missiles fell noiselessly towards Combat Base Bravo, the fuel tanks making up most of their bulk completely empty. Capable of being fitted with cluster bombs, chemical payloads, or nuclear warheads, the Scuds were versatile weapons – useful across the full spectrum of conflict from counter-insurgency to global thermonuclear war.
Across the Himalayas, two dozen more Scuds arced across the sky, aimed at targets in the rear of the forces occupying the sacred soil of India.
As the Scuds plunged to earth, they were illuminated by a powerful truck-mounted radar, which tracked their position down to the meter.
Outside CB Bravo, four Nike-Hercules missiles, each four stories tall and crowned by massive fins, roared off their erect launch rails towards the Scuds, ascending heavenward atop plumes of smoke and thunder – an impressive sight that was rather wasted on the prospective spectators, who, decked out in rubberized suits, dove for bunkers, foxholes and slit trenches, pulling dirt-covered sheets of metal overhead and donning gas masks as they went. The agglomeration of tents, shipping containers, fuel and ammunition dumps, and perforated metal runways that formed Combat Base Bravo grew unusually quiet, as men braced for nuclear and chemical attack prayed for shrapnel-spewing bomblets instead.
The Scuds plunged downward at six times the speed of sound, and three functioning Nike-Hercules missiles (the fourth having corkscrewed off to crash into a mountaintop) rose to meet them, steered by remote control from the trailer on the ground as they accelerated to four times the speed of sound. Equations that would have taken expert mathematicians hours to solve on many meters of graph paper were solved in seconds by bundles of wire and arrangements of switches, allowing the Nike-Hercules missile to be steered to where the computer predicted the Scud would be. And these predictions, guided by the laws of the spheres and up-to-date position data from the powerful radar set, were exceedingly accurate.
The missiles barreled towards each other at a relative velocity of nearly ten times the speed of sound. Bullets seeking bullets – but over twice as fast.
The Nike strained against its great velocity to make last-millisecond adjustments to its trajectory as, in the blink of an eye, the Scud grew from an invisible dot to an olive-green pencil covered in Cyrillic markings.
The two missiles passed each other less than a hundred meters apart – a mere football field's length in an endless sky.
The miss distance was immaterial. On command, the Nike blossomed into a twenty-five kiloton nuclear fireball, obliterating itself and the Scud and sending a gentle flash across the Himalayas.
Two Scuds emerged from the skies above CB Bravo and disintegrated into hundreds of grenade-sized bomblets, raining across the CB and the wasteland beyond. As the Scuds had accuracies in the half-kilometer range, perhaps a quarter of the bomblets landed inside the base's confines.
When the smoke cleared at CB Bravo and bases like it, dozens of helicopters and cargo aircraft lay wrecked and burning. Further forward, at the Pacifican claim line, an Indian artillery barrage pounded Pacifican positions as Indian infantry and tank brigades – the vanguard of an Indian counterattack - emerged from hide positions.
And for the first time since World War II, nuclear weapons had been used in anger once again.