It was like nothing she had ever seen before in her life.
In the Range Control Center, the strangled yelp of the interceptor leader sounded from the overhead speakers. On the main screen, the target hack of the unidentified aircraft suddenly and radically decelerated.
Out in the night, the “distressed civilian aircraft” halved its speed in a matter of seconds. Helplessly, the two interceptors overshot the mysterious intruder, the bogie weaving and striking at the trailing jet like an airborne cobra.
The bogie’s pilot spoke over the communications link, but this time both his voice and his
transmission were clear and cool as he chanted, “Guns! Guns! Guns!”
A red death box snapped into existence around the trailing F-16. “Butterball Two Six has been terminated!” a marine controller yelled. “Twenty millimeter, air to air!”
The range computers had declared the Air Guard jet shredded by a storm of
autocannon fire. Cassin crushed down the transmit key on his headset. He had
only seconds. “Butterball Two Five! Call your target! What’s out there?”
“I don’t know!” The air guard pilot’s voice was frantic as she tried to clean up her aircraft and regain airspeed. “I’ve never seen …”
“Fox three! Fox three!” That cool, masculine voice overrode her words. Out over the range, hypothetical infrared homing missiles were screaming off their launching rails, targeting the exhaust plume of the Air Guard jet. The computers adjudicated and a second death box materialized around Butterball Two Five.
“Butterball Two Five has been destroyed by a Sidewinder X,” a controller reported. “Direct hit!”
In the shadowed corner of the command center, the nameless observer thumbed the timer button of his sports watch. One hundred seconds and counting.
In frustration, Cassin stared up at the overhead speaker. By the rules of the game, the interceptor pilots couldn’t even describe what had so suddenly killed them. They were dead. But by then the interceptor killer was the least of his problem.
Another trio of hostile aircraft symbols seemed to materialize magically within the radar sweep as the befuddled filtration system belatedly acknowledged that they weren’t ground clutter.
“Multiple airborne targets on the range!” the senior controller yelled. “Altitude, nape of the earth, airspeed one hundred and twenty knots and
accelerating. Bearing zero degrees true. Convergent on primary target!”
“Gunny, call the incoming! What do we have coming in?”
“Gotta be helicopters, sir.”
Gunships, Cassin thought feverishly; it had to be a flight of AH-64 Apaches
escorted by … something else. “Weapons free, all stations! Nape of the earth engagement envelope!”
The OPFORs still had a chance. According to the victory conditions of the scenario, the intruding blue force had to put fire on the villa within one hundred seconds of detection and the choppers had been detected a little too far out. They weren’t going to get within range in time.
“Wait! Delay that!” the master controller yelled, all rank protocols forgotten under the stress. “Target airspeed now over two hundred knots and still accelerating. Targets are
not, I repeat, not, helos.”
“Then what the hell are they?”
“Beats the shit out of me, sir. The airspeed was too low for fixed wing aircraft.
Now it’s too high for helicopters.”
“What about tilt-rotors? Could they be Ospreys?”
“The radar cross section is way too small! The radar signatures and flight
profiles don’t match with anything in the book!”
It all came clear to Cassin now. The secrecy concerning their attacking force. The nameless observer in the Op Center. This wasn’t just another training exercise. He and his people were being used to field test some new, secret and radically different weapons system.
Video windows were snapping open around the perimeter of the main screen, low-light camera feeds from the air defense perimeter gun positions. The range controllers were trying to acquire the invaders visually – but all the cameras picked up were launch flashes in the darkness.
The video relay from the three air defense sites broke to static as the cameras disintegrated. The attackers had been authorized to use real weapons on the simulated ground targets. Death boxes outlined the gun positions guarding the southern approaches to the primary objective.
“Air Defense sites three, four and five destroyed. Hellfire air-to surface
missiles.”
Hellfires, 20mm cannon and Sidewinders. At least whoever was kicking their ass was using American technology.
All eyes turned to the television image of the villa, save for those of the
silent observer at the back of the room. He watched the luminous second hand of
his watch sweep around the dial. Fifteen seconds … Twenty … Twenty-five …
In his mind’s eye, another sequence of events was unfolding. A wary, cunning, frightened man sleeps in a darkened room. A telephone rings. A warning is shouted over it.
Thirty … Thirty-five … Forty …
Boots hammer up a stairway. Frantic fists pound on a locked door.
Forty-five … Fifty … Fifty-five …
Bodyguards drag a sleeping man from his bed. Explanations and orders are screamed. A mad race back down the hall and stairway.
Sixty … Sixty-five … Seventy …
Limousine engines crank over. An escape convoy stands ready, doors open. Courtyard gates swing wide, making way for a race into the darkness.
Seventy-five … Eighty …
On the wall screen, a three-round Hellfire salvo slammed into the front face of the target house; a second salvo followed, a third, a fourth. Riding the beams of their guidance lasers, the missiles caved in and flattened the Conex container building blocks of the structure.
It was a focused rain of firepower, targeted not merely to damage or conventionally destroy the mock villa and its compound, but to obliterate it, to level every possible, survivable corner of the structure.
It succeeded.
Within thirty seconds, nothing remained save a charred and scattered fan of scrap metal sprayed across the desert.
