2340 Hours
T-20 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
"Definitely somethin'." Fredrich Weiss turned the gain down on his scope and watched the flickering shadows on the phosphor screen. He'd grown up hunting on the veldt that his family kept wild as a hunting ground in the Dominion's Abyssianian province, and this wasn't so very different when you got down to it. Radar beams traced across the sky like a ripple of wind through the high grass, and you looked for sign that something was out of the ordinary. "It's way the hell low, almost in the wave return, but it's there and it's fast. Range gate doesn't show mo' than fifty knots closure." And the Night Owl was running flat-out as they came up on the bogey from behind, the airspeed needle wavering as it touched 350 knots. "Bettah call it in."
Venners nodded and keyed her mic. "Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Confirming yo' contact, right where it's supposed to be. No ID yet, we're closing for a visual in a few more minutes. Recommend you scramble Peregrines." The new reaction jet fighters didn't have the endurance for more than about half an hour in the air, so doctrine was to patrol with Night Owls and hold the fast movers on runway alert until something was actually detected.
"Roger, Black Buck. Yo' cleared in." Venners nodded and bent her throttles forward. Time to go hunting.
"Give me a steer, Weiss."
Aboard Spirit of Rio
"Coming up on the turn…mark!" Fujita called the waypoint, and Rosemont carefully banked right, keeping his eyes fixed on the artificial horizon and not the clouds and water outside. The quickest way to their target was straight in over the water, but that route also left them almost totally exposed- nothing to block radar but the wave return, and no visual obstructions at all. When Walker had called out the Draka night fighter heading their way, the crew had switched to their alternate attack plan. Now they would make landfall on the French coast before jagging over the lobbing their bomb down onto Marseilles harbor.
"Bandit changing course with us." Walker's voice was starting to rise in pitch, and Rosemont could feel him vibrating a bit with tension through the back of his ejection seat. "They've got us for sure, Skipper. I'm switching on the tail-warning radar and charging guns." Rosemont clicked his mic. Another emission, but it was the gunner's call to make. A moment, while the scope warmed up, then another call. "There she is. Coming straight in at six high, ten thousand yards and a fifty knot closure. We'll have to see them off in a moment, I think. Keep level, we want them to think we're fat dumb and happy."
"What do you need?" The turn done, Rosemont could afford to ask that question. He felt the back of his neck itch. It was strange, knowing someone was on your tail and not taking evasive action. Stranger still to be getting reports about it from someone who wanted you to keep going straight in. Radar combat was looking to be a different school than he'd learned.
Walker thought about it. "Throttle back a bit…just a bit. Not so much that he'll notice, but maybe we can make him overshoot."
2345 Hours
T- 15 Minutes and Counting
Aboard Black Buck 32
"Okay, Weiss." They had their range under four thousand yards now, and Venners' hand was resting on her trigger. "Hit the light at three thousand. We going to take one shot at identifying this sumbitch, then we kill him. Still no sign he knows we here?
"Nope. Turned a couple minutes ago, but gradual like. Definitely not evasive."
"Klim-bim." Venners keyed her radio. "Manorhouse, this is Black Buck 32. Eyes on target in thirty seconds."
Aboard Spirit of Rio
"Okay." Walker's voice almost sounded strangled now, and Rosemont really hoped his gunner wasn't going to have a coronary in the middle of this engagement. Could be awkward. "Looks like they're coming for a visual pass. When they hit us with the light go evasive. I'll try to slap their wrists a bit for peeking."
Aboard Black Buck 32
Alicia Venners had a brief second to take in a dagger-slim, twin-engined black silhouette in her searchlight beam before it snap-rolled to the right, yanking into a climb. It was already closer than she'd expected it to be, and the Night Owl shot past as she tried to bring it back up and around. Orange tracer fire shot past her cockpit as she cursed under her breath.
"Black Buck, report. Identify the target." Alicia snarled and keyed her mic.
"Wotan damn it, I don't know what it is, Manorhouse. Two engines, slim fuselage, slightly swept wing, no markings, and a hell of a stinger in the tail. That's all I have, and next time I'm shootin', not lookin'"
"Black Buck, we need identi-"
"Gods curse you, Manorhouse, does yo' want me to pull out Janes' Fuckin' All The World's Aircraft up here and go lookin' this thing over? I say again, target unknown but it has fired on us. I'm blowin' it out of the sky and we can sort this out at the debrief." She snapped the Night Owl up into a climbing turn of its own, spotting the intruder and pulling up onto its tail. Her first burst of tracers went wild, then a spraying fountain of tracers that seemed to reach right for her. A whistling sound. A dim bang. Heat, pain, a scream from Weiss' side of the cockpit.
Nothingness.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
James Walker drew in a deep breath as the Draka interceptor fell away in flames, instinctively tracking it with his ring sight until it splashed into the dark ocean below. Fujita laughed exultantly into the intercom.
"Way to go, Gunner! Should have known they'd never stop us." Walker let that go for a minute, letting his breathing return to normal. He'd flown combat for five years now, ever since France when he'd been a turret gunner for the ill-fated Bouton-Paul Defiant, and every kill was still like this. Always the slamming realization that there were one or two very dedicated, motivated, and highly trained people focused solely on killing him, unless he could stop them.
Some men he knew had gotten used to it, worn their hardening like a badge of honor. Walker had noticed that those men made up a disproportionate number of his proverbial absent friends, and so he carefully preserved his combat nerves. Fear kept him careful, and being careful kept him alive.
"Not so fast, Fuji." Now that he had his breath, Walker keyed the mic. "That Watchtower set's still got us for sure, and the Snakes will be scrambling jets. It'll be a near run thing."
"Keep an eye out." The Skipper's voice was calm, but clearly intended to cut off this line of discussion as they skimmed low over the beach. "Fifteen miles inland, then we start the run. Walker, light 'em up." Walker swallowed again, then started moving his hands across the jammer panels in front of him. By the third switch he flipped, his hands were as steady as a marble statue's.
2349 Hours
T- Eleven Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
"Thor God of Thunder!" Squadron Leader Robert Douglas blinked his eyes once, twice to clear the purple and green blotches from them. He'd been watching over a serf operator's shoulder as the man tried to keep a track on Black Buck 32 and the target she was tracking. The scope's gain had been turned almost all the way up, which meant that the strobes which had suddenly erupted all over the plot position indicator had been eye-hurtingly bright. The Janissary was hunched over his controls, switching on filters even as he blinked his own eyes, and Douglas watched some of the clutter fade away from the scope- into a nightmare of false targets and odd blobs. Whatever was out there, it was putting out a lot of juice.
"Suh." Pilot Officer Anson turned from the adjacent console. "No contact with Black Buck 32."
"P.O., I don't imagine we'll be hearing from Black Buck 32 this side of Valhalla. Get over here and start vectoring the jets in, order them to shoot that sumbitch down." The Peregrine jet fighters were built for pure speed, and had only a short-range radar set. He spun around to another seated figure. "Einarsson, get on the party line to all the gun emplacements. Tell 'em barrage fire, right now, low altitude burst in their assigned sectors until we say otherwise. Anyone stops shootin' before that, it better be because they rounds are cooking off in the chambers, because I do not want any other excuses. Clear?" The Tech Warrant nodded and reached for her field phone.
Douglas felt his lips peeling back into a feral snarl. An air raid on Marseilles was what he'd do if he was in the Euros' position, but he wasn't sure whether or not they'd have the balls to do it. One question answered at least.
"All right, you bastards, let's see how well you fly through lead."
Aboard Spirit of Rio
Lieutenant Kenichi Fujita bent over his radar scope and peered into the radar scope with all the concentration of a fortune teller reading out palm lines. He'd spent hours before the flight in Reprisal's intelligence center, studying maps of Marseilles and sketching predictions of what the radar approach might look like from almost every angle. His job would have been easier coming in over the water, of course, with almost nothing to block his radar beam between them and the harbor. Now there was clutter all over the scope- from the ground, buildings, even bits of chaff and jamming from Spirit of Rio's own defensive measures, no matter how carefully Walker tried to leave an electronic window for the bombardier to work through.
Fujita didn't complain. That would have been useless, and unworthy of him. Instead he kept his eyes fixed on the bright phosphor traces until one pattern of reflections caught his eye. There. It had to be the steeple of the Abbaye St. Victor, built when the Roman Empire was still in living memory. Fujita centered the bright cursor over it with his tracking handle and squeezed the trigger, grunting in satisfaction when a red light confirmed that the track radar was working and locked on the target. He looked up from his scope, and took in a world on fire.
Spirit of Rio was winging towards Marseilles now, and the sky was filled with bright yellow tracers ahead of them. Fat, slow heavy shells reaching up for higher altitudes, and brilliant fountain-sprays of machine gun fire whipped up at them, seeming to bend past them as the Revenant sped on towards its target. If one didn't…well. Fujita shrugged. If it didn't, then it didn't, and there was no good thinking about it. Service in the Imperial Japanese Navy did not produce men who worried excessively about their own mortality.
Working deliberately, Fujita sorted through a horizontal rack of flat black metal rectangles, using his penlight to read the kanji labels attached to each. The Revenant's bombing system was state of the art, and these objects were the very latest thing to come out of the Alliance for Democracy's research labs- prerecorded compinsets, allowing a program to actually be loaded into the bombing system's control brain without having to be manually entered step by step. Fujita found the one for their approach path and slid it into the slot next to the radar scope, seating it firmly with the heel of his hand before flipping the read lever. An amber light went on, and Fujita used the small keypad next to the instruction slot to type in the code number for the offset point he'd used. A short pause, and then the amber light winked a lethal, friendly green as a mechanical timer automatically set itself. Fujita let a feral grin settle over his face as he bent over his other scope, this one linked to the optical bombsight. The tracers were hellishly close through its magnification, but below Fujita could see the cluster of buildings he was looking for. One hand keyed his intercom, the other reaching over to start the timer.
"Pilot, initial point in sight. Track radar- working! Bombcomp- working! Ikouze!"
Up in the cockpit, Rosemont was alive. It was cliché to say that in moments like this he was one with his aircraft, but in decades of flying he hadn't found a better way to describe it either. He could feel the vibration of the turboprops as they snarled with power. He could see concentrations of flak up ahead, and his hands and feet guided Spirit of Rio around them as though she was responding to his thoughts.
"Initial point." He heard himself echoing Fujita's words, then reached down to onto his panel without looking away from his flying. He flipped a metal guard out of the way, then threw the switch underneath. The pilot's nuclear consent switch, making sure at least two crewmen had to agree to drop the bomb. "You're hot, Bombs."
"Watch it, Skip. I'm picking up Crosshair-type radars. Draka jets coming in." Walker's voice was going up again, but he sounded like he was keeping it together. Rosemont hauled the Spirit around onto her bomb run and fixed his eye on the plane's artificial horizon. When the bombcomp cut in, two hair-fine needles had snapped out, one showing the desired heading and the other the desired G-force for the toss-bombing run. Keep those centered, and the Mark Four would go right over Marseilles harbor before bursting- screw it up, and they might not do all the damage they needed to. Still, he managed to get out,
"How close, Guns?"
"Not sure, Skip, I-" The rest of Walker's sentence was drowned out as a pair of orange streaks shot past them at an impossibly fast speed, howling like Banshees as they passed overhead. In the rear cockpit, Walker watched the reaction jet fighters swing around, coming in to overtake the Spirit from behind.
"Ah, pretty close Sir. Coming up on our tail now."
"Keep 'em off the tail, then." They could try to duck and run, but that was a losing proposition against the jets. No. Better to finish it now. "Bombs, we stay on the run."
"Hai!" Japanese was a wonderfully deep language. Tone and context made a word that movie subtitles would have rendered as "Yes" serve as a wonderful blend of Yessir, All right!, and Let's stick it to the bastards! Rosemont weaved a bit as the miles wore down to the release point, but mostly he concentrated on keeping the needle centered. Walker would keep the Snakes off, or he wouldn't.
In the nose, Fujita was bent over his scope, searching for one last visual reference to lock the system down and tell him to start the pullup. He hadn't worked with a sight like this in years- in fact, he realized, the last for-real horizontal bombing run he'd done had been on a December day four years ago, searching for the outline of an American battleship through the smoke shrouding Pearl Harbor. His scope came down on the outline of an apartment building, memorized from countless hours spent studying photographs of the target. Fujita mashed his thumb down on the trigger, looked over to watch the timer count down the last ten seconds. Without looking, he slapped the open button for the bomb doors.
"Ready…steady…"
The two Draka fighters blazed in from behind Spirit of Rio, their tracers reaching out towards Walker across the night. They were too fast for him to hold the ring sight onto- instead he held the triggers down and swept it like a garden hose, hoping to at least make them abort their run. He felt a dull wham as a Draka shell struck home, and a hornet-sharp whine as other shells hit near their aircraft and perforated the metal skin. The Snake jets shot past, and Walker could almost see them coming around in neat hammerhead turns. Coming to finish the job.
"Go!" Rosemont saw the g-needle shoot upward even as Fujita yelled the cue. He yanked the yoke back, watching the needle slide downwards even as a heavy boulder rolled onto his chest, the Allisons shrieking protest as Spirit of Rio looped upwards into the night sky. His thumb hit the wheel-mounted button for the fuel boost, then his hands pulled back even further as he felt the surge of power come on. He could feel their airspeed falling away, even as he gritted his teeth and forced himself to breathe. Any second now…needles centered….come on…
Fujita held onto the manual release handle like a lifeline as the Spirit swept in her arc across the sky like a bow over violin strings. Just as he decided the bombcomp had packed it in and jerked the manual handle, he felt the distinctive bang-jump, as though the plane had run over a speed bump in midair. The release mechanism, and Kenichi Fujita realized that to the end of his life, he would never know whether or not he'd actually pulled the trigger on an atomic bomb.
"Away!"
Rosemont had felt the lurch of release, and the surge of acceleration as his craft suddenly shed four tons of weight. He pulled over to the top of the loop, hanging suspended from his straps for a moment at the top of it, flying inverted and looking down at the doomed city below. Then he snap-rolled upright and pushed the yoke forward, willing the airspeed indicator to spiral upwards.
2358 Hours
T- Two Minutes and Counting
Air Defense Operations Room, Marseilles Area Command
"That's odd." Pilot Officer Anson leaned forward and wiped his sleeve over the screen. "Horizontal velocity went to almost zero, vertical off the charts, and now the range is increasin'. Suh, malfunction?"
Douglas frowned as he walked over to stare at the scope. It was hard to see anything at first, but then that Freya-damned jamming started to clear. The contact looked good. But what- alarms started to sound in his head, bits from a doctrine paper that had been circulating around the Forces in the past weeks. Twin-engined aircraft. Looping up, then away. Bomb delivery, but what-" Douglas spun around.
"Duty Officer! Get on the horn to GHQ. Tell them we are under attack by atomic-"
Douglas never finished that sentence.
Aboard Spirit of Rio
The Revenant charged onward, her engines screaming as her pilot pushed them to their limits. In the rear cockpit, Walker had pulled the flash shield down across his canopy and was frantically pulling circuit breakers from his panel, trying to isolate his electronics. Before he snapped off the radar receivers, he could see the impulses of the Crosshairs coming in again. He laughed, a bit of hysteria underpinning it. Shot down right after they dropped off a nuke…that would be a hell of a way to go.
Somewhere fifteen miles behind them, a black metal object fell through 5,000 feet. Its onboard radar altimeter and backup pressure unit both agreed on this, and sent signals to the simple-minded control unit on board. Thousands of a second later, precisely machined explosive charges went off inside the atom bomb, squeezing together a sphere of plutonium in its heart.
Then a brilliant, deadly flash bloomed over Marseilles, and a wind like the hammer of God rushed out to spend its fury on the righteous and unrighteous alike.