Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

Howe turned his attention to his wingman, who was drawing a lot of interest to the southwest. One of the two fighters Timmy had engaged had dodged his missiles and was sweeping around from the north, angling for a rear-quarter attack. The RWR lit with fresh contacts, this time from ground-based radars; the Indians were throwing everything into this one, launching SA-2As, their best long-range anti-aircraft missiles. Timmy danced in the right corner of Howe’s screen, another Su-27 behind him.

“Two, your six!” warned Howe. “Break!”

“Yeah, I see the asshole,” replied Timmy. “Fucker’s dead meat.”

Howe wasn’t too sure of that, but he was too far away to help his wingman with that pursuer. Instead he went for the throttle, aiming to keep the northern Sukhoi off. With his momentum down he didn’t quite have a shot; he had to build more closure or momentum toward the enemy or his arrow would be shrugged off at long range.

And where the hell was the other Sukhoi?

Howe’s AMRAAMs struck the radar plane in quick succession. One of the warheads ignited fumes in the plane’s fuel tank, and the explosion broke the aircraft into several pieces, five of which were big enough for Howe’s radar to track as they disintegrated. Howe barely noticed, however, focusing on the northern Sukhoi as he tried to decide whether the Indian was running away or angling for an attack. He didn’t want to waste a missile on someone who was already out of the game.

The HUD’s rectangular piper jammed the Sukhoi into its sweet spot. Howe fired, figuring better safe than sorry; as the missile shot away he got a fresh warning on the SA-2s, one of which had managed to sniff out his airframe and was heading in his general direction. As Howe jinked left, the F/A-22V’s radar gave the AMRAAM a fresh update on the targeted Sukhoi, still flying a perfect intercept, apparently unaware that it had already been caught in the crosshairs.

The SA-2B was an ancient weapon; early versions had been targeted at B-52s over Vietnam, and it was an SA-2 that had taken out Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. That had all happened an awful long time ago, and while the missile — code-named Guideline by NATO — had been updated, it was thoroughly understood by the people who had put the Velociraptors’ ECM suite together. Even so, it had to be respected: With a warhead that weighed just under three hundred pounds and a velocity that could top Mach 3.5, its boom could definitely lengthen a pilot’s day.

Howe pushed back south as his aircraft’s electronic warfare suite played with the missile’s mind. It told the missile it was beautiful and sleek, the most powerful thing spinning through the universe. Then it pointed down the block, claiming that it had set up a date with the fattest, juiciest target it had ever seen, a veritable Daddy Warbucks that would make a perfect match. It slapped the missile in the rear end and told it to go have some fun; by the time the missile realized it had been had, it was at nearly sixty thousand feet and several miles from its intended target. It wailed in frustration, so distraught that it immolated itself, its remains trailing to the ground like the shreds of a funeral shroud.

Howe, meanwhile, struggled to sort the cacophony and chaos around him into a coherent map of the battle. The graphical representations of the battle on the HUD and tactical screen showed that Timmy had not only broken the enemy’s attack but was now launching his own; the cockpit pulsed with the shot warning. And here was the Sukhoi that had managed to hide earlier — five miles south of Howe, headed back east.

With the Indian taking himself out of the fight, Howe started to turn toward his wingman. Before he could tell him he was coming, a transmission from Cyclops interrupted him.

“Bird One, be advised missiles are in the air. We’re taking evasive action.”

Cyclops was under attack.

The launch indicator flashed. The Pakistanis had obviously mistaken the 767 for a Chinese spy plane and were determined to take it down.

Megan looked at the large tactical screen next to her, waiting for Cyclops Two to target and destroy the four missiles. They were early-model American HAWKS — easily handled.

So why the hell weren’t they firing at them?

They had to see it. They had to.

They had to fire quickly. The missile spread increased the difficulty of aiming, and at this short range they had a relatively short window of opportunity.

She could take it out herself. But she, too, had only a limited opportunity.

The plan was to wait until they couldn’t be intercepted, then to simply fire once. But they hadn’t foreseen this; they hadn’t thought the Indians and Pakistanis would go this far.

She should get into the mix now. This was exactly the situation Cyclops had been invented for, the sort of future she’d foreseen.

And yet, she’d be risking it all if she did.

Risking what? Only herself.

The ABM shield as well. Everything.

Was that more important than saving the lives of her friends?

They weren’t her friends anymore.

If it were Tom, would she hesitate?

Megan put her index finger on the touch screen, designating the rising missile. But just as she opened her mouth to give the verbal confirmation to fire, Cyclops Two obliterated the missile on its own.

“Thank God,” she said to herself.

Perhaps it was a premonition, or maybe his brain just worked out the logic on its own. But even as Cyclops took out the last of the HAWK missiles that had been aimed at it, Howe found himself putting the throttle out to the firewall and clicking in a warning to Cyclops without stopping to think exactly what he was doing.

“They’re going to launch ballistic missiles,” he said. “Stand by for ballistic missiles. Take out anything that’s flying.”

Howe slapped his radar out of dogfight mode and into the wide-range tactical feed for Cyclops.

“Timmy, we need to be north,” he said tersely.

“Roger that,” acknowledged his wingman.

“Bird One, be advised we have missiles launched, Indian missiles launched,” warned the Cyclops Two pilot.

He didn’t have to say ballistic missiles.

“Take them out,” said Howe.

“Not in range.”

“Come south. This is it. Get everything you can get.” Howe told the F-15s to accompany the plane and pulled two more off the AWACS. Not only did he expect the Pakistanis to take another shot at Cyclops, he expected them to launch their ballistic missiles as well.

Good God, what suicidal idiots.

A flight of MiG-29s headed toward the Pakistani border to his north. They were low and hot, probably in fighter-bomber mode.

He fired two AMRAAMs at them, reserving his last one. The missiles sped toward the first and second aircraft in the formation, which were apparently unaware they’d been chalked up on his screen.

“North, Timmy, north,” he radioed, a basketball coach barking at a forward to get back and guard the basket. “The Indians are launching a nuclear attack, and the Paks are sure to retaliate. Cyclops has the missiles.”

“Two.”

The first AMRAAM hit the lead MiG, but the second missile missed its target. The planes kept coming.

No way in the world could Howe’s team prevent every aircraft from crossing the border. They were playing Russian roulette: If one got through with a nuke, what then?

The intelligence people had said confidently that most of the two countries’ nukes were in missiles. “Only one or at most two,” they felt, were likely to have been made into bombs, which were harder to deliver and easy to defend against.

What if they were wrong? Cyclops Two carried only enough laser fuel for roughly thirty shots, depending on the duration of the blasts.