Minna and Lemon.-VIR DAY -26. Minna and Lemon were up at five o’ clock in the morning refueling from a reformist Russian Antonov An-124 Condor transport aircraft that had been specially retrofitted with German refueling gear and tanks. It still gave Minna the creeps, two aircraft mating in mid-air; she found it to be the most unnatural thing that she had ever witnessed. The fuel hissed into her plane from the other at a steady rate of five-thousand pounds per minute. “Almost done” said Gunns. “I hope so,” said Minna, trying hard not to look at the large tube extending into her aircraft’s nose,” How much longer?” “We should be topped off in three more minutes,” Gunns replied. Great… Lemon’s load out today was for interceptor duties 265th style. There were two fuel tanks, one suspended under each engine nacelle, and her two cannon. Her job today was to run as a distraction for the SAM sites to deal with while the main strike aircraft took out the command van, and distraction was the correct word for it, not interceptor. But Minna didn’t complain, and to make up for not doing any killing today she would be running with Colonel Wilhelm F. Kaiser, the leading Lightening Runner. He was the number two man with his kill record, and Minna liked him well enough. The tanker released Lemon’s nose and Minna banked sharply to the left to join the other aircraft at their IP altitude of fifteen-thousand feet. Minna slotted herself into a reserved place in the formation near the front of the five plane “V” next to her non-commissioned officer, Master Sergeant Stoops. The other planes waggled their wings at her, observing radio silence, and Minna brought the formation up to a speed of seven-hundred knots, raising her nose slightly to clear the mountains ahead. They flew deep into Russia for the better part of two hours in silence before looping around Kazan and heading in the general direction of Volgograd, but on a more southerly course towards Astrakhan. Minna lifted the order for radio science and handed command over to one Major Dennis Funk who was to announce the day’s mission. “Good morning Lightening Runners,” he began. “Good morning sir,” the flyers replied. “Our mission today is much like any other we have had to date,” he said,” with one exception. Today we are covering Colonel Kaiser so he may claim his two-hundredth kill against the enemy before he retires from front line duty. Our Cat’s Eye recons have spotted a known trouble maker who is testing his radar today and has all of his weapons on safe. We’re going to pay him a visit while his guard is down.” “Sounds good, sir,” said Minna. “Captain, brief them on standard operational procedure.” “Yes, sir,” said Minna,” any SAM site on stand down cannot fire its missiles unless the manual override on each missile is triggered, that’s one thing we can thank the Reds for. This site is facing the Caspian Sea, he won’t acquire us as targets for at least a few seconds, but when he does it only takes a few spoken words into a microphone for his loaders to override the safeties, which takes a few more seconds. We will have maybe seventeen seconds before they are capable of firing upon us; we need to make the best of those seventeen seconds, and get those missiles to look at us and not the Colonel.” There was a few seconds of silence, as there was supposed to be, and then maybe a feeling of discontent, but that was soon rid of. “Sounds simple enough, ma’am,” said Stoops. Minna smiled,” then the mission is a go. We’re ready, sir.” A different voice came over the headset in Minna’s helmet,” Thank you Captain,” it was the Colonel,” thank all of you. It’s been a pleasure serving with all of you in the 265th.” The flyers were all quiet again and Minna flicked her mouthpiece off. “Permission to speak freely, ma’am?” asked Gunns. “Go ahead.” “What the hell is in Astrakhan, Russia?” Minna tried her best to remember the brief,” A few bridges that need some ass kicking, and an airport that the Reds have turned into a temporary military base to harass our guys in Moscow and Kiev, and some rail lines I think. Other than that, I don’t know what’s so important about the place. Hell maybe the food there is great, I don’t really know.” “You think there’s a port there?” “Probably,” Minna said,” It’s on the Caspian Sea.” “Ten minutes out,” said Major Funk. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three-hundred-thousand-seven-hundred-twenty-five feet. That was the altitude that the two Reynard Rey-75F were flying at over the spot where Asian-Russia becomes European-Russia. The planes were so secret that even the representatives of the German Federated Democratic-Republic of Europe, not a single one of them in all of the thirty plus countries, knew about them. And questions tend to get asked when twenty-billion Marks go missing at any given time during peace or war. They were sleeker than the Rey-75D and Rey-75E they would now be fighting alongside. The newest additions to Reynard’s Tiger Class of fighter aircraft cost the equivalent of eight-billion dollars apiece, and were handmade down to the last ball-bearing in the main landing gear assembly. They were one-hundred-twenty-five feet in length with a wing span of seventy-five feet and stood thirty feet tall with landing gear extended, weighed in at two-hundred thousand pounds, and carried three of the biggest rotary cannons ever built for an airplane. Nestled close together in the nose were three seven-barreled apocalypses that had been affectionately called “Reapers” at the factory where their first seven handmade barrels were locked into place. Each was of the forty-millimeter caliber, a prototype developed by the Bofors Company, and the winning contract to build a weapon suited to fire the round was awarded to the Alexander and Alana Weapons Manufacturing Bureau. And so they had tested it mercilessly, and now it was time for their first live-combat firing trials, to see how the weapons rated against others. It was also time to test their compatibility with the venerable AAD-1700 “Kitten” series of Advanced Long-Range Air-to-Air Missiles or ALRAAM, a very versatile weapons system that included conversions for cruise missile, air-to-ground roles, and nuclear warheads as well. They’re engines were a top secret reactor type that cost about the same as the airframe, and each aircraft had three of them producing a grand total of one-million-three-hundred-thirty-thousand pounds of thrust. The aircraft looked like a shark. It was long with off-center conical shapes at the front and back, the nose drooping and the tail rising, with a single large tailfin protruding high and proud into the air, and the long, thin wings swept-back and drooped below the level of the fuselage. The aircraft were predators and today they were going to get their first taste of an enemy’s bitter blood. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- They hit nine-hundred knots. The four target aircraft broke off from the boomer aircraft and began taking the focus off of said boomer. In this type of operation it was permissible for pilots to fly without a wingman, and Minna struck the button for her afterburners to put distance between herself and the other aircraft, accelerating to over one-thousand knots. Minna banked Lemon to the right to simulate a mock run on the SAM site command van, descending to just above the treeline and pulling up sharply, dropping her fuel tanks, spraying the area with jet-propellant No. 205. She rolled Lemon over at one-thousand feet and pulled back the stick, taking her down to five-hundred feet, where she rolled back upright and leveled her wings, hitting the afterburner again and regaining speed. “Gunns, what’s the status of the missiles?” Minna asked. “They haven’t moved an inch,” he said,” you think something’s weird?” “Very much weird,” she replied,” I figured no more than seventeen seconds for them to turn the safeties off, but it’s been well over twenty seconds.” “Think it’s a trap?” That was something that Minna didn’t like to hear, but it was never out of the question or the equation of the life and career of a military pilot; she had to take it into account. “That’s a possibility.” Minna turned her head around to look out the back at the SAM site command van. The area she had flown from was now misted over with grey and brown smoke. Colonel Wilhelm F. Kaiser had just scored his two-hundredth kill. But it was a bitter victory. Not a single missile had been launched. Not a single man had been in danger. Nothing had made the kill seem worthwhile. And while all of these factors had made for a successful mission with no fatalities on their end, the Lightening Runners couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that their enemy hadn’t stood a chance; hadn’t even bothered to fight back. “We just lost contact with our Cat’s Eye…” said Major Funk. Minna tried to establish contact with a local radar station that had been set up in the area during the opening of the war by the Reds, and had later been taken over by reformist Russian troops. “Little Mama’s not talking, sir” said Minna. “What about Big Mama?” asked Funk, referencing the air base in Kiev. “No sir, Big Mama’s not squawking either.” “Then we’re on our own, Runners,” said Funk,” Get ready for close range fighting. Guns, guns, guns.” Minna flicked the switch on her stick to “G”; she heard the bolts under her feet rack back and chamber a single round. The 25x205mm A&A Magnum was the most powerful round in its class, and it had a nasty reputation for shredding airplanes, tanks, trucks, buildings, and infantry to pieces within a few seconds of its famed revolving loader spinning up to maximum rate of fire. That had always bothered Minna a little. She was used to a gun firing at a constant rate of fire, like the fifty caliber Browning’s her training aircraft had used, not a gun that started firing at a slower rate that gradually got faster and faster as she held on to the trigger. But these weapons were more powerful than a Browning… The swing-wings on her fighter/interceptor moved back a little further as she increased her speed to fifteen-hundred knots, maximum speed in the thick air near the deck. She broke off of the formation to take a look at the airspace around her, Major Funk protesting loudly at the very idea. She pulled up to five-thousand feet. “What do you see, Gunns?” she asked. Gunns replied a few seconds later,” Sukhoi’s. Probably twenty-sevens. They’re coming from the northeast at low altitude. They out number us three to one.” “Then it is an even fight,” said Minna. “Sir, we have confirmed contact with fifteen Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker fighter jets coming in from the northeast at one-thousand feet. If anyone has any AESA missiles, I’d recommend using them while we’re out of range of their missiles.” Minna dived Lemon back down to five-hundred feet and slowed back down to nine-hundred knots, letting the rest of the pilots to catch up to her and form a “V” shaped formation. Leading in air-to-air victories allotted Minna certain privileges among the other flyers of the 265th, and being in front during air-to-air combat was just one of those things. Minna had seventy-three little red dashes under her canopy, each one indicating an air-to-air victory, which was by no means a large score when compared with scores from the 155th Fighter Gruppen or the 150th Fighter Gruppen which both had pilots who had scores in the thousands, but Minna’s score was the highest in the 265th, and so her rights were guaranteed. The Su-27, NATO reporting name Flanker, was designed as a twin-engine super-maneuverable jet fighter intended to be a direct competitor to the American forth-generation fighters, with a range of over one-thousand-six-hundred miles, heavy armament, sophisticated avionics, and high maneuverability. It was usually outfitted with four to eight medium-range air-to-air missiles, and if not eight than four short-range missiles in their place, and they featured a Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-301 thirty millimeter cannon in the starboard wing-root, a very powerful weapon, reported as being capable of destroying a target with as few as three to five rounds. A missile streaked away from Colonel Kaiser’s Thresher and began changing altitude and curvature to intercept the incoming Sukhoi fighters. The weapon was an AAD-1500 Raven ALRAAM, a Direct-Attack modification to the ADD-1700 Kitten, which was an Indirect-Attack missile. They both looked the same as an American Phoenix missile, but they were both larger, the Raven by three-thousand pounds and the Kitten by five-thousand pounds. The key difference between the two were the methods of taking an aircraft out of the sky, the AAD-1500 would track on to the aircraft it had been told to kill like a regular missile, but the AAD-1700 would ignore its target until it had gained fifty-thousand feet over the enemy’s head before it would cut its engines and dive down. Using gravity to carry it to the target, the Kitten couldn’t miss and if, no matter how unlikely, it did miss the weapon would deploy its Rearward-Expanding-Wing-Set to level out and fire its engines again to gain elevation and attack again. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- She detected the missile launch from seven-hundred miles away and eased open the throttle even further than normal, letting the aircraft clime to an even greater speed, and the engines began to shriek with the massive power they began to produce. The Tigershark II is what they called the sleek, new beast. SINCND Leona F. Hughes eased the stick forward and the plane began a gentle descent from three-hundred-thousand-seven-hundred-twenty-five feet at a rather slow Mach seven, her wingman trailing a mile behind. “Dana,” she said,” arm the Kittens and warm up the guns.” “Yes, ma’am.” Dana “Duke” Ellington was Leona’s trusted backseater, a veteran of older conflicts in which she had once flown the Reynard Rey-70E Tigershark I and Rey-71C Marauder high speed recon aircraft that were now outclassed by the newer, faster Rey-76D Cat’s Eye family of recon jets. Dana was still looking young despite her age, which she never truly disclosed at any length to anyone, and Leona liked to think of her as a mirrored image of herself if she had been grey like her counterpart. Dana was not actually related to the famed pianist of the same name, but with a last name like Ellington, the “Duke” part seemed perfect for her and the way she seemed to hit random keys on older aircraft and the brand new Liquid Crystal Display in front of her and made something beautiful happen. She was quite unlike most female Furs, she seemed very tall for how thin she was, and she did not have an ample bosom as her time for nursing young had come and gone many years ago, and she had short, spunky blonde hair rather than long, flowing hair hat other women had. Underneath the floor the three Gatling style guns rotated their barrels over warmers, each one for five minutes before another was rotated over the top of the unit. As they rotated around each barrel was loaded with a single round that was as long as a man’s fore-arm and hand put together, and weighed ten pounds apiece. The three guns themselves weighed seven-hundred pounds and the barrels added another eight-hundred pounds on top of that. The Kittens on the aircraft were mounted pylons of a ten foot length that were hi-profile and gave the plane enhanced stability at lower altitudes and slower speeds. The AAD-1700 Kitten was a highly classified weapon. They were twenty feet in length, four feet in diameter at their widest point, had four winglets that protruded two feet off of the body, and for their long range they could use two seven foot long rearward folding wings to carry them more than five-hundred miles to a target. The Kitten was mostly engines and fuel, using five small rockets that produced fifteen-thousand pounds of thrust each to reach a height of one-hundred-thousand feet in tests done on missiles launched from the ground, and it also reserved three small ram-jet engines to allow it to cruise at a constant altitude throughout its powered flight. At the very front of the weapon was its small, but powerful, self-contained radar, almost as secret as the new aircraft it was being toted around by, and behind that was the missiles one-thousand pound, interchangeable warhead and some other top secret systems relating to how the weapon steered itself. One of Leona’s LCDs displayed a constant image of her plane and how systems were operating within it. A small, red warning told her that engine No. 2, the center-line and the least powerful engine, was running hotter than normal; she backed its throttle to only ten percent of its operating potential. This also cooled the exhaust of the other two engines. The top engine did not have its own nozzle to focus its thrust trough due to its close proximity to the already hot tail and other surfaces that were being heated by the massive air friction, so it vented into the other two engines and produced thrust through their nozzles instead. Leona nudged the main throttles forward to make up for the lost engine power, and the aircraft lurched forward with the two units producing seventy-five percent of their maximum power. In the dive the aircraft picked up speed rapidly, shattering the hyper-sonic barrier at Mach eight, and Leona deployed her airbrakes to provide minimal air-resistance and slow the plane down to a more manageable speed. That was one of Leona’s concerns with the aircraft. If caught in a fight and the aircraft suffered damage to its hydraulic systems it was too sleek for the pilot to just reduce engine power and expect it to slow down. If the ability to deploy braking surfaces was lost the pilot only had one choice; to eject and spend the rest of their life paying for the ten billion Mark aircraft. Leona’s Tigershark II had been painted to her specification to match the several other planes she had flown. Spark was the new plane’s name. As on Leona’s other planes, Spark had a bright red nose cone, ventral fins, leading and trailing edge surfaces, and a red-white-red band around the wings and fuselage encompassing the German Bundeswher cross. The upper surfaces of the plane were painted dark grey and the lower surfaces were painted a light grey that was so light that, under most conditions, it looked white. Up on the tail were her aircraft code, gruppen, and division, scripted as:155155KRG-155DIV-12ND Across the main engine nacelles was KREIGSMARINE, CV-00 S.M.S. BERLIN indicating which branch she worked in and her future base of operations, the uncompleted Mega-Aircraft-Carrier Berlin, which was still waiting in dry-dock for her reactor power plants to arrive from the Reynard Reactor Works in Frankfurt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Major Funk and Colonel Kaiser had both just scored two kills each with their Raven missiles, but there were still eleven Flankers out there and they weren’t happy about the loss of four of their comrades. That’s the way it worked with the Raven, even though they weren’t as big as a Kitten, they were big enough to completely destroy anything they happened to hit in the air, so weather or not they impacted the target’s center mass or a wing, there was nothing left but fragments. A lot of fragments. All four Sukhois that had been shot down were blips on a radar one second and then non-existent the next, as if they hadn’t been there in the first place. Minna pushed Lemon to nine-hundred knots, wings sweeping back further as she accelerated, and closed the distance between the Threshers and the Flankers as to render their Vympel R-77 advanced medium-range missiles useless in combat. Two of the Sukhoi jets broke off from the main group to chase her, as planned, and she increased her speed to one-thousand knots to draw them away even further. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leona got a firm missile lock on two Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker aircraft two-hundred-fifty miles out. She flicked the switch on her stick off of the safe position and pulled the trigger. Outside, the clamps holding the Kitten to the pylon let go of the weapon and the bolts opened and the rocket motors fired. In the time it took for Leona to blink, the Kitten launched itself off the rail and was a mile away; the only thing left being the large plume of a condensation trail. A second missile launched afterwards and began to climb after the first. “Weapons are tracking?” “Weapons are tracking, ma’am,” replied Dana. And indeed they were, in fact they would both hit their targets within the next thirty-six and a half seconds. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minna rolled Lemon on her back and dived toward the deck. Lemon’s wing were in the full aft position to reduce drag, afterburners engaged, speed approaching two-thousand knots; there was no way the Sukhois could keep up, but it didn’t keep them from trying to getting off a few rounds at her. The rounds passed around her at Mach three, some of them looked close enough to touch, they reminded her of golf balls. Minna kept a constant pressure on the stick and got Lemon all the way flipped over so that she was upright and heading in the direction from whence she had come. The Sukhois passed over her two-thousand feet above, unable to turn as well as Minna’s Thresher in the thick air of the deck, and they began to make a long loop behind her trying to get into an attack position. “How much longer?” she asked Gunns. “About twelve seconds,” he replied. She turned her head down to check her afterburners temperature and adjust them accordingly. She lifted her head a second too late to ward off an attack by a Sukhoi that had snuck up behind her and had launched a missile, her missile warning claxon screamed at her. The only thing she could do was jam the throttle forward and smash the afterburners to engage though they were overheated, throwing the stick into her lap, climbing into the sun. But it wasn’t just one missile. No, not one. There were three of them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leona was in visual range of her helmet mounted display when several missiles were launched simultaneously at one particular aircraft, but she was still over one-hundred miles away, watching her missiles and their new warhead to make sure that they worked the way they were intended to. She just needed a few more seconds. Finally, the Kittens came down into the screen at more than twelve times the speed of sound, though they were still over ten miles above their targets. Like they were supposed to do, the warhead section blasted clear of the missile body and began to steer towards a target. Then at five miles to go the warhead blew apart and five small “missilettes” broke free and began to search for targets of their own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At first, Minna didn’t realize what had happened. She had been pulling evasive maneuvers to avoid the missiles that were following her and dodging other planes in the sky, then there were no missiles following her, then three Sukhois disappeared, then six more. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- They arrived at his mother’s house at about noon, the car bumped up into the driveway and Dominique killed the motor. The house was a very plain piece of architecture, basically two boxes of the same size stacked on top of each other, fastened, and then painted white. The front yard was much the same, plain, a green yard, a single large oak next to the driveway, and a long cement walkway. “Is she expecting us?” asked Dominique. “No.” Johan and Dominique got out of the car, closed the doors, and began to walk around the back of the house. He knew from experience that his mother would be in her garden out back, watering her whozits, or planting her whatzits, with her butt high in the air, stringing together a tomato vine to a bamboo shoot. The cat would probably be curled up on a pumpkin or next to a watermelon, bating at a lady-bug or other similar insect-like creatures. Johan threaded his way between the spot where the faucet jutted out and threatened to smash his shins from under him. His heavy work-boots made it hard for him to approach undetected, but he was light-footed, and was capable of stealthy operations. He crouched by the corner of the house peering at her, making sure she couldn’t see him, watching her, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce on his prey. Dominique crowded in behind him and took a similar crouching position. Johan put his hand up, all of his fingers extended, and he began to count down, flipping a finger back down into his palm. When he reached zero they moved out to a tree and ducked behind it, being careful not to disturb the tomatoes and Rosie as she worked. Johan tapped Dominique’s shoulder and pointed her to another tree, further back in the lush garden. Dominique checked around the tree at Rosie and began to make her move. Johan had always wished he was a fox, and Dominique’s perfect, silent flanking maneuver reminded him of the fact that he wasn’t. The way she moved, low to the ground, tail extended behind her, ears tucked back, body rocking side to side with her legs balancing her perfectly so that she glided over the ground… it made him jealous. Wish I could move like that. She got to her position without being discovered. She made a frantic hand signal to him to move his ass over to her and in a hurry. He ran the distance silently, and in such a hurry that he almost ran Dom over. Jesus! Johan shrugged his shoulders. Sorry. She pointed him in the direction of a scrub of bushes located a few feet from their target. I like your thinking… He crouched low, his whole upper body practically parallel with the ground, and then he ran the short distance when their quarry turned her back to take a drink of a distinctly pink liquid. He was now only seven feet from the target, watching from behind the green bush, which, he had just remembered, had at least a thousand thorns per linear foot of vine. But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that he was now in a position to attack, and the prey hadn’t even noticed him, hadn’t picked up his scent, and hadn’t really seemed all too alert to begin with. Dominique snuck in behind him. Just like old times… Johan and Dominique had played this game many times when they were young; still in grammar school when it began. They had shared dreams of being in the military, driving ice cream trucks, flying like birds, and even a few crazy notions about becoming captain of the star-ship Enterprise… but the military dream had been the longest lived, and had become the reality. They had always been army commandos in need of food who had run out of all hope of resupply, or rangers going in to snuff a VIP in the jungles of South America, and on more than one occasion they had just been a couple of grunts who had spotted a downed enemy ace, and went after him. Of course without Rosie none of this would have been possible and little Dominique’s life might have been a little less fun and Johan’s life just a little less happy. They had a deep respect for her and loved her dearly. Johan crept up from behind the bush, extended his arms like those of a mantis… and brought them around Rosie’s waist. “Hello mother…”